10% Happier

...I had read the research showing that regular churchgoers tended to be happier, in part because having a sense that the world is infused with meaning and that suffering happens for a reason helped them deal more successfully with life's inevitable humiliations.  p. 49

While I had never really thought about it before, I suppose I'd always assumed that the voice in my head was me: my ghostly internal anchorman, hosting the coverage of my life, engaged in an unslicited stream of insensitive questions and obnoxious color commentary.
Per Tolle, even though the voice is the ridgepole of our interior lives, most of us take it completely for granted.  He argued that the failure to recognize thoughts for what they are--quantum bursts of psychic energy that exist solely in your head--is the primordial human error.
...The ego is never satisfied.  No matter how much stuff we buy, no matter how many arguments we win or delicious meals we consume, the ego never feels complete... p. 57

The route to true happiness, he [Buddha] argued, was to achieve a visceral understanding of impermanence, which would take you off the emotional roller coaster and allow you to see your dramas and desires througha  wider lens.  p. 90

The whole game [meditation] is to catch your mind wandering and then come back to the breath, over and over again.  p. 100

To apply mindfulness to acute situations:
R: recognize the feelings
A: allow--lean into the feelings
I: investigate--check to see how they're affecting your body
N: non-identification--see that just because you're feeling ____ does not make you ____

"The Way of the Warrior"
1.  Don't be a jerk
2.  When necessary, hide the zen
3.  Meditate
4.  The price of security is insecurity
5.  Equanimity is not the enemy of creativity
6.  Don't force it
7. Humility prevents humiliation
8.  Go easy with the internal cattle prod
9.  Nonattachment to results
10. What matters most?

To clean hummingbird feeder

Here is a trick for cleaning your feeder. Put about 3 Tbls. of white vinegar mixed with two cups of water in the feeder. Add about 1/2 cup of white uncooked rice. (I use a funnel) and shake. The friction from the rice will clean even the dark mold off of the inside. Rinse well before filling.

Ordinay Grace by William Kent Krueger

In your dark night, I urge you to hold to your faith, to embrace hope, and to bear your love before you like a burning candle, for I promise that it will light your way.
And whether you believe in miracles or not, I can guarantee that you will experience one.  It may not be the miracle you've prayed for.  God probably won't undo what's been done.  The miracle is this: that you will rise in the morning adn be able to see again the startling beauty of the day.
Jesus suffered through the dark night and death and on the third day he rose again through the grace of his loving father.  For each of us, the sun sets and the sun also rises and through the grace of our Lord we can endure our own dark night and rise to the dawning of a new day and rejoice.  p 195

I'd hoped for a kind of miracle that day, hoped for something like the joy that had filled me on the Sunday before when my father had stood and delivered his brief, miraculous sermon.  And if not joy then peace at last.  But as we entered the gate of the cemetery I felt only grief knifing deep into my spirit.  p. 267

I know from my studies and from my life that there is no such things as a true event.  We know dates and times and locations and participants but accounts of waht happened depend upon the perspective from which the event is viewed.... p. 306