shade meditation

The maple sparkles everything with sap who stay beneath it's canopy.
If I stay here long enough would I be glazed?
Long past are the days baking on the beach for an even tan.
Face and hands are all I care to leave exposed.
Content watching grass grow.
Waiting for a maple sheen...

Diabetes Monitor Article

http://www.diabetesmonitor.com/education-center/erik-bendl-walks-for-diabetes-awareness.htm

A message on the Wind.

I'd been feeling an odd calm lately, different from all the other times I had returned from the long walks. The precious memories and fine acquaintances left behind had me lonely. I would not trade the friends and sights for the mixed emotions that troubled me. This time I feel no sadness for loss but a calm joy at recalling the richness of the path, the people, the fleeting sunsets.
A wind blew a piece of paper along the sidewalk in front of me. It was a free flier that had blown from a restaurant up-wind, covered with advertisements surrounding a column of local events with a few stories one paragraph in length. As I was about to crumble it and toss it in the trash I noticed a quote. Upon reading it I noticed it was from the Author of "Walden Pond". It seemed to compliment the warm feelings I have begun to realize... " I am no more lonely than a single mullein or dandelion in a pasture,
or a bean leaf, or sorrel, or a horse-fly, or a bumble-bee.
I am no more lonely than the Mill Brook, or a weathercock, or the north star,
or the south wind,
or an April shower,
or a January thaw,
or the first spider in a new house.
Henry David Thoreau

Silence

Now Spring has sprung, the seeds must have time to sprout. Amid the winds there is calm, a pause between the roar. My son needs time to do his work, and I will be here to watch him grow. From behind clouds the light will soon glow and help the roots take hold. For now I am staying close to home. For awhile my job is to be here, be calm, be silent. I am forming a plan for the next walk in the West, repairing the world, tending my nest, watering the seeds. I am walking everyday. I talk about loving yourself, about the Movement-movement. For awhile I will love myself, move myself and watch the seed grow in silence.

Earth Day

I have spent most of the day enjoying the outside on this cool spring day. I took the dog for a run with the bike. I spent time with my son. I ate something green. Everyday, for me, is Earth Day.

since I've been back home...from The Grassy Knoll

I sit in the shade by a Knoll of grass aside from the spot where our former mayor was run down while walking his aged mother across the road. They were both killed. A wide stripped crosswalk is painted on that spot. In hopes it will never happen again. Of all the places to stop and, "out of the blue', decide I need to post something after being home over a week. I will just save this, and continue walking the dog...


Continued... Since I have been back I have began eating less, a life long habit I have, I eat like I am twenty, I don't burn it of like I used to. Since I have walked all these miles I don't crave sweet things and when I eat them I can now notice the drain it puts on me. Nice (the dog) and I have walked into the heart of The Highlands, He is shading in a small knoll of ivy beside a bowl of iced water left by the restaurant for the dogs who walk by. He decided we would stop here... The neighborhood I grew up in is as open and diverse as any I have wondered through so far. Since I have been away I have come to notice how pretty Louisville is, especially around "the Kentucky Derby". Since I have been home I have been very calm. It must have been all the walking... He has gotten up time to move on.

Since I have returned I found my first four leaf clover. After fifty years of looking... Moving along...

Since I began writing this the neighborhood auto repair shop has fixed my brakes, again. Off to pick it up.

The Back Yard to the Grassy Knoll

Fourteen years ago when I pulled the world out of storage to play in our tiny back yard with my seven year old son on his birthday who could have predicted how many miles, storms, mountains and divides this ball of rubber and thread will now have seen? Now, after walking in, through or to thirty four states, rolling more than five thousand miles outside of my own back yard, I finished this seventh walk in downtown Dallas to bring awareness to diabetes. There a secret, known to a small group of men, was revealed to me; the neon green lighted building scheme was a picture slipped in as joke in the final plan submition and the owners liked it. A joke where some prankster taped glow sticks to the scale mock up just before the photographer came to shoot the last pictures. The Dallas Texas skyline secret. When the world outside my fence tempted my son and I like a trillion dollar playground how was I to know how that simple-minded choice to jump the fence and go for a walk would alter my universe from that day on. From my back yard across the Ohio river, the Missouri, Mississippi, Shebogan, Red and countless creeks and rivers through wind and, clouds and sunshine I have walked. From my backyard to Wall Street in New York City to the grain elevators of Beemer Nebraska, The Alabama Bayous to the Presidential Mountain Range in New Hampshire, we have walked under the Archway to the West in St, Louis, across the continental divides of Minnesota and South Dakota. To Walden Pond and Cripple Creek I have walked. Fourteen more states, how many more inside stories will I learn, who knows?
Walk for your health. Be your own Movement-movement.

"X" marks the spot

A friend was reviewing World events during his life. Events which, from that day forward, shifted how things are with whole nations both emotionally and physically for generations. One was the killing of President Kennedy in downtown Dallas. Though I was a baby when he was shot I have grown up and grown old effected and affected by the event. My friend is almost ten years older than I, he remembered his pre-adolescent emotion and saw how it changed the country, the world, as he watched from innocent young eyes. A man half my age walked with me into downtown Dallas who had studied the assassination and led me along the motorcade route to the spot where the president was hit. There on the street in Dallas, where the coarse of generations changed fortune, is painted an "X".

midnight at the grassy knoll

At the Dallas county line...

Underpass post

I nearly began walking at 2-AM from the bugs biting but managed to get enough sleep to walk somewhat rested. I am a couple days from where I will stop walking. Here comes a visitor...

Mundo ramble...

Walking toward Kaufman from Kemp I didn't notice the time fly by as I talked with people who stopped. Some were curious and had not seen or heard what I was doing. Some had followed my progress for days or longer, finally finding me and excitedly getting a picture with the World. A man who stopped with his family turned out to be a local police chief and emailed the officer on duty to get his supply bag and bring me a patch. He couldn't find one but came out to get a picture and read the message from his smart phone. He said he wondered what his boss had meant when he said "World Guy" but it wad obvious when he saw us on the road. He did have a department business card. I often ask for a patch when I speak to law enforcement. The thing is that I hadn't asked. I didn't know the man with his beautiful pink dressed girls and lovely wife was a cop or a king. He certainly had two little princesses. Not long after the visit from the officer a county sheriff stopped me, asked for my drivers license, quizzed me about the exact location of my van, it's color, model and year before pointing to the spot I was already stand on and asked me to wait "right here" while he ran my I.D.. Nice (he dog) stared longingly at the cool puddle just feet away, then at me, then at the puddle. I didn't bother to ask him for a patch when he returned my identification with a caution to keep the World out of the roadway. Where was he when I had to run those narrow bridges? A woman later stopped with one of her "many" daughters and two of her "many" granddaughters. She said as she labored to walk from her car "only for you" would she walk that far. As I explained my Movement-movement and message that walking can help to control diabetes her daughter pointed to her mother and egged me on to keep talking, I pressed that I had lost my mother and that being alive for your grand-kids is important. Her daughter beamed with smiles as I tossed out line after line that bounced off her mothers armor. A man stopped to see what I was doing, we talked for a long time as several other came and went before he revealed he had recently lost weight and gotten off of diabetes medications by going on-line and strictly following the diet of Edgar Cayce. No fried food, no refined sugar, high fructose corn syrup, white flour etc. He said the pounds fell away. By the time the clouds rolled in and I slipped under a steel carport for sale between a car lot and a church the day was spent. I had traveled just nine miles in eight hours. I received a text from the woman who had invited me to dinner the previous day. She was able to get through to that church and get permission for me to bring my van up and stay for the night. If not for the many people who stopped all day I would have been out in the rain. With the wind, gravity, barometric pressure, people, dogs, mud puddles and varied terrain I cannot really know how much time it may take to move the world. Everyday I find inspiration and hope to keep stepping out.

Join the Movement-movement, Bring a friend...