onehouse

January 5: 100 Pushups begins.

Ned Flanders: Hi-didilyho, shookin-boots!
Homer: Aaah! Flanders?!? That suit's a little revealing isn't it?
Ned Flanders: Well, it allows for maximum mobility, feels like I'm wearing nothing at all!
Homer: Daah! Quit it! Must wash eyes! Stupid sexy Flanders!

There's a bunch of folks on twitter who have decided to start the 100 Pushups challenge.

Everyone is at different levels. Some have done this before and are doing it again. Some are modifying the regime and joining in the schedule anyway.

As someone with a chronic pain condition, I am supposed to avoid high impact exercise and stick with things like Tai Chi, yoga, and walking. But I find that the benefits of light weights and things like pushups make a huge difference to battling the many mental lows that can come with chronic pain conditions. I know others will be doing it for their own reasons. 

 The fun of it will be talking about it on twitter together, the pain of it will be the actual pushups, and the beauty of it will be clearer heads, sculpted biceps, and more power behind the snow shovel. And there should be uniforms. We like the idea of uniforms. (Maybe not skin tight Flander-y uniforms...)

So if you are so inclined, join us or follow us on twitter. This is the list of folks and their general geographic locations so far. And rather than use hashtags (this annoying little thing - # - before a word), I think we'll just use "100 Pushups" or "100PU" in our twitters and we can do a Twitter search to see who is on board.

This is the list of folks and their general geographic locations so far. If you email/direct message/leave something in the comments, I'll update the list. And if you're not on twitter, email me and we'll keep you updated on the fun right here.   Whoo and hoo!

Elle_Ann - Vancouver, BC

Glowsheep - Calgary, AB

JenLemen - Silver Spring, Maryland

MagpieGirl - Copenhagen, Denmark via Seattle

msla - Vancouver, BC (the "s" stands for super...)

Onehouse - Calgary, AB

Patl - North Bend, WA

WendyCooper - Saskatoon, SK

The hills are alive...

This is where I chose to do hill training today. I used google's distance measurement tool and tried to find a 400 metre hill a little closer to home and then proceeded to walk up and down it six times -one orange mark to the other. I stayed off the sidewalk and walked on the grass, past the tennis courts where people wondered who the crazy lady was, past the ever expanding cemetery where no one wondered anything, and up to the corner of the dog park where everyone was too busy running around and barking to care about me at all.

Concrete sidewalks are the worst things for your bones. I usually walk that path past the baseball diamond and on into Confederation Park which is off the lower left corner of this photo. It has nice asphalt walking paths which are much easier on the body and I don't have to watch for or listen to traffic. The little pink mark is a set of trees that I enjoy. There are many, many trees in the park ahead but these ones always catch my eye and I've always meant to photograph or draw them.

Today I listened to a Tapestry podcast with Laurence Freeman on Christian Meditation. I liked the part where he quotes John Cassian saying that the two dangers of the spiritual life are "the lethal sleep" and "the pernicious peace" referring to the temptation to create a foggy alternate reality or escape - the three scotch feeling I believe he called it - and to only be peaceful when separated from the world and its needs. Those who do not use their practices as escape will experience conversion and transformation that keeps them doing real inner and outer work.  A good warning.

Podcast of the Day

I've been listening to podcasts during my training walks. My short walks take around 45-55 minutes and longer ones can take up to 3 hours. Yesterday I listened to Sustaining Meaning: An Ojibwe Story - a beautiful rolling journey with author David Treuer.

Oneof my favorite parts:

Tippett: The world's 6 billion people speak between 6,000 and 7,000 languages. But experts predict that as many as 90 percent of those languages may cease to be in use by the end of this century. Endangered languages are just one ripple effect of ever more accessible means of travel, communication, and entertainment. But there is a growing field of awareness that something more than speech, more than words, perishes when a language dies. "When we lose a language," says David Harrison of the Living Tongues Institute in Oregon, "we lose centuries of human thinking about time, seasons, sea creatures, reindeer, edible flowers, mathematics, landscapes, myths, music, the unknown, and the everyday."

Treuer also mentions how the move towards one language has led to more conflict and less understanding. It is important to have difference, to enhance the ability to see the world through various lenses is a healthy thing.

We should think of this every time someone or crowds of someones tries to get us to use just one word or one phrase - and it is usually their preferred word or phrase -  to describe unending mysteries. This would be like thinking (and then preaching) that the dissected frog on your Grade 8 biology table is actually the whole of the universe.

Picture Blogging: Day 22: Three sets of Hands

My new niece Ava came to visit this week. Three sets of hands - Grandma at 73, Mom at 41, Ava at 4 months.

Picture Blogging: Day 19: Moon rise

I spend a lot of time staring out my bedroom window watching the light change. My chronic pain condition means that there are weeks of my life when I need daily breaks. It also means I will have long stretches of insomnia. One night I sat with a camera balanced on the window ledge taking pictures through the screen as the moon slowly rose behind the neighbor's trees. I like how the images came out  lined and blurry like a fuzzy TV broadcast.  That is how my mind feels, worn and mottled, as it deals with trying to relax against the physical pain. For many years, I battled these pain spells frustrated that I was lying there without accomplishing anything. But now, as much as I can, I try to relax into the moment and imagine the pain lifting from my body like steam. I send it out over the rooftops and, on a night like this one, into the air with the rising moon.

Dying and living

I need to try something different. I've been walking through sludge for a while now and I need to get a different perspective. I'm going to blog something visual here for the 30 days of April. It doesn't mean Onehouse will be wordless - type and typography are vital and visual parts of storytelling - but I'm going to highlight a few things that speak to me.

Benedict's Rule tells us to keep death before us daily, a healthy reminder of who we are in a society that either avoids speaking of death or engages it in sadistic or morbid fashion. Take a look at these photos - "series of portraits taken of people before and after they had died is a challenging and poignant study. The work by German photographer Walter Schels and his partner Beate Lakotta, who recorded interviews with the subjects in their final days, reveals much about dying - and living."

Old skaters never die...

They just break bones, she says rubbing the remaining bump from her once fractured collarbone.

I know this youtube is roaring around the internet but the skateboarder in me from eons past cannot let it go. As an old school skater, I never did anything near as amazing as this but the part of me that still has the body memory of rushing up an 8 foot concrete skate park wall only to turn around and do it again and again for hours...that part of me really loves this.

World Without Tears

I've got this song on a loop for some reason. I'm not sure why.

If we lived in a world without tears
How would bruises find
The face to lie upon
How would scars find skin
To etch themselves into
How would broken find the bones

How would broken find the bones
How would broken find the bones

Trigger points and sea water.

I have started spending a little time with a trigger point book that a friend (Hello friend...) lent to me over the weekend. I have a chronic pain condition and am pretty willing to try all sorts of suggestions from folks who have had success with nutritional and physical routines. It can get overwhelming if you try too many things at once but if you pick and choose, sometimes you will notice where there is or isn't a difference.

I always find referred pain interesting. The idea that noticeable origin of pain is not necessarily where the problem actually exists. When you use trigger points, you actually inflict pain on a certain spot to provide longer term relief to another area.

When dealing with relationship or community problems, we often go straight for what we think is the problem, rooting around for the truffle straight under our noses. We shout a great "Ah hah!" at ourselves or others when we think we have found THE source of the problem. In my thinking on the personal, I have noticed that when discussing certain things - politics, faith, lifestyle - people will often shoot back a "I am personally offended..." by someone else's personal opinion. The implied suggestion is that personally offending someone else is the worst thing that you can do. The often-miffed usually go into some long explanation about how wrong you are but the whole thing is supposed to be legitimized by personal offense. I don't take that very seriously anymore. The trigger point is that we think we OWN what is around us. This is our faith, our Bible, our Pope, our version of church, and our way of viewing the world. God himself is unable to defend against a wayward personal opinion and others are supposed to be very upset that you are personally offended. If you are offended, God himself is probably sulking in some corner too.

Some people call this love of their own opinion faithfulness.The ability to take things so personally and stick by them no matter what happens. But this is entrenchment and ownership and it is most often rooted in the fear of something new rather than the love of something old.  If you find yourself stuck on one point, it usually means you have some kind of pain, bias or downright blindness somewhere else.

In the stories of the Bible, God usually sends a big fish, a talking donkey, or just a plain old  prophet to people hiding behind their self-involvement and self-righteousness. This would be handy. It would do away with a lot of arguments if mid-discussion there was an interruption - "Uh, just a minute. There's someone at the door." and then a return,  pale and covered in sea water to say, "Sorry, yeah. Guess what...I'm a dork."

Walk.

As faithful readers of this blog may know, last year I trained for and completed a 10K without any joy or runner's high whatsoever. I then moved to using a bike trainer for the winter months. I twisted my knee running (See? Evil, evil running...) up the stairs in January and although I can walk quite easily, I feel strain when I move my knee in certain directions. I'd like to still use the bike trainer as cross training/rainy days for the summer but I need to get this knee checked out.

I've decided that this year I will train to walk a half and then a full marathon. Now I am a fine stroller. I love to put my hands in my pockets, lean back, and just pad down the street at a good "I could read a book while doing this." pace. So it's good that I am trying this after a season of running. I always feel so lucky and I walk a bit faster. "Hey, "I say to myself with a joyful grin, "Self, you could be running right now and you are not." And when I don't feel like going for a walk, I remember I don't have to run and feel much more enthusiastic. I really didn't like running.

But I do recommend the program I used for anyone who thinks they could never run. I'm glad I did it even though no actual gladness occurred during the training. I could barely run 1 minute when I began and I learned a lot about being attentive to the small and the daily.

In the end, I think this will be much better for my bones and my mind. I still have to make a training program so I have some goals and put it all in my schedule.  For a play by play from last year, just hit the Body index and relive the agony without any ecstasy.