My Festive Tree

This year my tree is made from a book I bought at the local thrift store. "The Macabre" is a 1987 collection of classic scary short stories. I read a couple before cutting the pages out of the book. I designed the reused cardboard skeleton made of 8 thin supports. An old bicycle tire holds the bottom together with a little weight. Then, I simply taped each curled page to the skeleton. Assembly started from the bottom with the last page of book. I circled the tree 8 times and ended at the top by covering a reused paper coffee cup. All 173 pages of the book were used perfectly. I tied a couple extra pieces of ribbon on the coffee cup for a little color. It only took about 3-4 hours total.

This wasn't really my idea. I saw a very creative display at the Chicago Anthropologie store which had something similar. I loved the way it looked and realized it could be done in a sustainable way at home. What a great holiday replacement for the ol' chopped down Christmas tree people tend to put up!

lego my ego yo

I recently wrote the below excerpt to my brother Ted as a reply to an email he sent to me regarding contemplating the ego. He sent me an interesting link to Spiritual Teachings Glossary of Terms.

"What is powerful for me is to "believe" in what is real. Since the ego is a construction, even if it has been constructed for survival purposes, it is real only as a construction; it is real and not real at the same time. That is an example of a realistic belief. Aligning the mind with realistic understandings brings happiness due to less suffering from unrealistic beliefs. Unrealistic beliefs are confusing, cause struggle, and place great amounts of stress in our minds and lives. So, through developing pure mind consciousness, the thinking/feeling/ego mind (that we usually use) has the ability to change from the contingencies of enculturation toward realistic living in the now. This is what I embrace, cultivate, practice, and enjoy. Life, reality, experience, happiness, action, effort."