Sunday sadhana

To me, sadhana is a daily spiritual practice allowing time and space for an individual to turn inward.

As Yogi Bhajan (of the Kundalini yoga tradition) says, "Sadhana is self-enrichment. It is not something which is done to please somebody or to gain something. Sadhana is a personal process in which you bring out your best."

Sadhana could be taking a walk in nature, doing breath work or yoga asanas on a mat, spending time meditating or chanting, reading and reflecting on a poem, or simply watching the sun rise.

Please accept this post as a possible starting point for your own practice today.

"Luke," from Dog Songs by Mary Oliver

I had a dog who loved flowers. Briskly she went through the fields,

yet paused for the honeysuckle or the rose, her dark head

and her wet nose touching the face of every one

with its petals of silk, with its fragrance rising

into the air where the bees, their bodies heavy with pollen,

hovered— and easily she adored every blossom,

not in the serious, careful way that we choose this blossom or that blossom—

the way we praise or don’t praise— the way we love or don’t love— but the way

we long to be— that happy in the heaven of earth— that wild, that loving.

What's LeVar Burton reading these days? I've got the scoop

As a fan, I'm thrilled to learn that I share something in common with actor/author/director/producer/all-around-cool-guy LeVar Burton: We're both Neil Gaiman fans.

I know this because when I interviewed him for a story for the Colorado Springs Independent that ran in yesterday's issue — he'll be speaking in the Springs on April 27 — we not only talked about his acting (from Roots to Star Trek: The Next Generation), Reading Rainbow and how he became a literacy advocate, but we also talked about what we were both reading.

Top of his list? Gaiman's newest, Trigger Warning.

And it is a list he runs through. Because also, like me, he reads more than one title at a time.

"I picked up that habit from my mother," LeVar says. "I blame her."

So what else is he reading then?

"Wild Child, by T.C. Boyle. He and I are both being honored by the L.A. Times Book Awards this year, and so I want to make sure that I've boned up on T.C. When I meet him, I want to be able to talk T.C. Boyle with T.C. Boyle."

Also on the list: The Essential Martin Luther King Jr., and works by Octavia Butler (his favorite sci-fi author) and Joyce Carol Oates. He also says that science fiction is "the one that is my genre" and so The Year's Best Science Fiction, an anthology edited by Gardner Dozois, is something else he's always got going — for both the sci-fi and the short fiction elements.

"I like reading short fiction at night before I go to sleep," he explains. "In one or two nights I can get through a story, and sometimes, depending on their length, two in a night before I drop off to sleep.

"Short fiction for me is, like, wow. You've really got to be a master of the craft to write short fiction well because there are no wasted words. You really have to be relevant and concisely precise. In any genre."

If you've been following LeVar's career (and/or have kids), you'll know that he just published his first children's book in the fall, The Rhino Who Swallowed a Storm. Between that and his Reading Rainbow work, I asked him if he could recommend any books for kids.

"There are two that I tend to recommend in terms of picture book, which is the literature that we promote ... on the show because we are all about reaching the entry-level reader. Turning that child into a reader for life. Encouraging them to make that decision, self-select if you will, as a reader for life," he says.

"One is Derek Munson’s Enemy Pie. It's a story about a young boy who has an enemy move into the neighborhood, and his father vows to help him resolve it by making enemy pie for the boy and it has a surprise twist ending. I won't spoil it for you if you haven't read it. ... And then I also love Mary Hoffman's Amazing Grace. I recommend that book liberally. It's about a young girl Grace who wants to play Peter Pan in her school play but she gets resistance from her classmates because she is neither a boy and she is black as well. And it is Grace's journey of awakening as to the power of her imagination, and why she is uniquely suited in the end to play the character of Peter Pan."

I don't know about you, but I've just added, oh, five or six books to my to-reads. Thanks LeVar!

(Note: Book links in this piece lead to an affiliate program, from which I may make a commission.)

I made my own ginger beer. You can too.

I love all things ginger, but I'm a particular sucker for ginger beer. As a part of my "40 before 41" journey, I wanted to learn to make what seemed to be a fairly easy non-alcoholic drink.

A friend of mine who concocts the ginger beer (of which I'm quite fond) for a local bar agreed to show me the ropes (and pass along his basic recipe), and so last fall I spent a morning helping him with a fresh batch — which mostly meant chopping and squeezing a whole lotta citrus, and watching him stir a humongous vat of the stuff.

A few weeks ago I finally got around to making a gallon of my own. It was an easy process and so I'm here to share the details of what I did with those of you who might also be aspiring ginger-beer-makers.

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Ginger Beer

Basic Ingredients

• 325 grams of ginger juice, or 1.5 lbs whole ginger
• 1 lb. raw or white cane sugar
• 1/4 lb. of honey
• 3 limes
• Champagne yeast (I used Red Star Pasteur Champagne Active Dry Wine Yeast, purchased at a local homebrew shop for about $1.50)

Bottles: Reusable flip-top cap style — I used four 34 oz. ones from IKEA, but eight 16 oz. ones would work too

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Instructions

1. Juice your ginger, or peel and chop the whole pieces.

2. Boil ginger, sugar, honey and lime with a 1/2 gallon of water (for an hour if ginger pieces, 5 minutes if ginger juice).

3. Fine strain liquid, add water up to 1 gallon and shake to mix.

4. Fill each bottle, making sure to leave some room at the top. For each 16 oz. of liquid, add about 25 granules of champagne yeast.

5. Seal securely, shake well, and store in a warm, dark place for 48 hours.

6. After 48 hours have passed, refrigerate immediately to stop the carbonation process.

Drink, and smile. Or mix 4 ounces of ginger beer with 1.5 ounces of rum, pour over some ice, garnish with lime, and smile even more through your first housemade Dark 'N' Stormy.

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A few additional notes:

• I used a juice extractor to juice my ginger. I'm not sure whether the bother of the machine was more or less work than peeling, chopping and then using cheesecloth to fine strain would have been, but I'd probably stick with the juicing process if I did it again.

• My bottles did not explode, but I hear that they can, so store your bottles carefully with this potential in mind.

• My ginger beer had quite the kick to it. At times, so much so, it made me cough. There are all sorts of possible reasons for that — from the ginger itself, to the type of honey, to things I'm sure I know nothing about. Next time, I'll probably try lowering the amount of ginger just a wee bit, and maybe play with limes and lemons, but it is a bit of a crapshoot.

Sunday sadhana

To me, sadhana is a daily spiritual practice allowing time and space for an individual to turn inward.

As Yogi Bhajan (of the Kundalini yoga tradition) says, "Sadhana is self-enrichment. It is not something which is done to please somebody or to gain something. Sadhana is a personal process in which you bring out your best."

Sadhana could be taking a walk in nature, doing breath work or yoga asanas on a mat, spending time meditating or chanting, reading and reflecting on a poem, or simply watching the sun rise.

Please accept this post as a possible starting point for your own practice today.

Trilliums, by Mary Oliver

Every spring among the ambiguities of childhood

the hillsides grew white with the wild trilliums. I believed in the world. Oh, I wanted

to be easy in the peopled kingdoms, to take my place there, but there was none

that I could find shaped like me. So I entered through the tender buds,

I crossed the cold creek, my backbone and my thin white shoulders unfolding and stretching.

From the time of snow-melt, when the creek roared and the mud slid and the seeds cracked,

I listened to the earth-talk. the root-wrangle, the arguments of energy, the dreams lying

just under the surface, the rising, becoming at the last moment

flaring and luminous — the patient parable of every spring and hillside year after difficult year.

Sunday sadhana

To me, sadhana is a daily spiritual practice allowing time and space for an individual to turn inward.

As Yogi Bhajan (of the Kundalini yoga tradition) says, "Sadhana is self-enrichment. It is not something which is done to please somebody or to gain something. Sadhana is a personal process in which you bring out your best."

Sadhana could be taking a walk in nature, doing breath work or yoga asanas on a mat, spending time meditating or chanting, reading and reflecting on a poem, or simply watching the sun rise.

Please accept this post as a possible starting point for your own practice today.

Courage doesn’t always roar.

Sometimes courage is the little voice at the end of the day that says ‘I’ll try again tomorrow.’

Quote by Mary Anne Radmacher, of which I was reminded by Jill at A Thousand Shades of Gray in a post for Marianne Elliott.