My Journey To Mindfulness

Monday, July 8, 2013

Returning

Yesterday, my Jamie delivered my repaired computer. Have missed being online, being in constant touch with my children, grandchildren, interaction with special friends, downloading images and researching special information.

During this time I realized even more how undisciplined my involvement with the computer was escalating. So it was missed but as the days went by it was kind of nice having more hours
for reading, being outside, yoga, prayer, meditation and trying very hard to "find balance" in
these remaining years. During this time I also continued to learn more about myself and those close
to me.

Rain almost daily for a week, cooler and my garden and surroundings could not be more beautiful.
Going off of prednisone slowly is causing the same discomfort as in the past and will not go
into all that is happening. I truly like my new rheum...., she is so compassionate and next time
a inflammatory flareup arises she is suggesting a new medication which is not a steroid.
Of course with my beliefs I am thinking positive and maybe this will never happen again.

All the emails, phone calls, cards and even a special book received in the mail from "Balisha"
made me feel cared for, loved and aware of the special thoughts sent my way.

A few images I will share
and before I sign off
please continue sending me your special words - they are the wings beneath my feet...

my early morning visitor

All
have a wonderful day
and I will be checking your entries over the last few weeks....

Saturday, June 22, 2013

THANK YOU

I am at the local library
checking my email and comments.

Overwhelmed is this One Women
at all the comments from special ones
that I have only met online.

Thank you everyone for reaching out
and what would I do without you.

You make me truly feel special and loved.

My home computer may not be running for several weeks
as it seems what attacked my system is going to take a while
to repair.

I will return....

Love, Ernestine

Thursday, June 20, 2013

Temporarily Offline

Hi everyone! It's Ernestine's daughter, Jamie.

She wanted me to log into her blog and update everyone. Her computer has a virus and she hopes to be up and running by tomorrow. She'll be uploading her beautiful photographs and posts soon.

Monday, June 17, 2013

Trying To Heal

A number of my special friends have inquired about me
since I write almost daily.
I think when we share our life often as we write
from our hearts
that those who have never met us
may know us very well.

I have Inflammatory Colitis
surfaces several times a year
treated with strong prednisone.
Which I do not like to take but seems to
be the only thing that helps me.
This began about 5 years ago.

I tried treating myself for weeks
hoping that what I was experiencing would go away naturally
and guess was not doing to good and
had to call 9ll on Saturday morning at 5:00.
I crashed...

Also have a kidney and bladder infection
along with autoimmune issues.

Depleted and put on Iv plus a strong anti-biotic
I will share about in the future and do not like
750 milligrams of this.

I truly do not like sharing this
and it angers me as this One Woman
does everything she things correct.

I do not like medication.
Going to doctors and hospitals
this unsettles me greatly.

So I am healing and trying to rest
and it is difficult for me to sit still.
Eating healthy
every several hours.

I am so thankful this is not cancer, diabetes
heart - but do not like this
and aware that it could escalate.

I will be back
I have gone through this before.
But never this severe.

Want quality life for time that remains for me.
If come to mind
please pray for me to have wisdom of how to handle this
and healing.

I feel having this going on and not being able to handle myself
makes me a weak person
and I have always been strong
and have to handled much in my life.

You are all so special to me
Just family and everyone is so far away.

Yesterday had to ask a neighbor to pick up some
items from grocery and she brought me a meal from a local eating place.
I hated so to call and ask...

All of you know me well and many have sensed something going on.
Do not like sharing this
with you.

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Time Moving Faster Then I Realized

Just wrote
and will post tonight
busyness
continues in the morning

This cottage was being built a little over 3 years ago.
So much thought I gave to it.
I sat with my pad and placed what I was going to keep.
Downscaled, smaller garden and yard
(did not plan on the success of all that has been
planted) gravel drive
and so much thought and planning so I would have less work
and less expense as times goes by.

This morning made the veggie and flower garden smaller.
A young helper helped and I was on the mower for about
45 minutes.

The heat was horrible or probably humidity and I did too much.

Soon after I stopped, the truck pulled in. It was to do something
that there again I thought was going to be a few hour process.

Wood deck, screen porch and small front porch were power washed
and then again with bleach, also small terrace and walks.
Mold covered all this wood and had
to be removed before sealer goes on tomorrow or the next day.
Turning out to be more then a day project and much more costly.

I love my surroundings but the downside is the damp woods and
more rain then normal this year. This will probably have to be done
again in the future. Right at the moment there is so much going on
will see what the future brings.

In the meantime all the outdoor furniture from deck, screen porch and
front porch, plants, rugs, pillows are
sitting on the lawn - which is almost past mowing because of rain and
grass cutter cut his tire.
Another thought - to think I always cut my grass up to a few years ago.

It really does not matter but I have always done my work, loved doing it
and very neat and organized. I can remember living at the old
farmhouse in my 40, 50's and part of 60's and every Spring would wash the siding
on a ladder with ammonia, wash my windows on a ladder, take old shutters
down every Spring and clean, even would spread sealer on
concrete drive, brick walk and spread truckloads of mulch.

Sharing a lot with my son lately
and his comments are probably right.

I have become increasingly aware that I can no longer do what I have in the past
and especially since I am suppose to be healing from eye surgery.
Probably have had expectations of myself beyond what I can accomplish.
Just seems this happened all of a sudden and then maybe it has not
It has been progressing slowly and I have not recognized it.
Many have noticed and made remarks to me
but I did not hear or did not want to hear.

One of his comments....

"if you want to stay in this home by the woods
you may have to lower your standards."

That is what I planned to do
sit with my camera, watch nature, be lazy
and let the dishes sit in the sink.

As time has gone by
I wonder
what happened ?

Another June Birthday And A Memory

My first born
weighed in at 8 lbs
Her young mom was so proud of this beautiful dark haired baby.

Years ago when she would visit her mom
we would sit
on the porch of the old farm house
always in the swing.
My Laurie and my grandson Gavin.
It seems like yesterday....

Time continues
and there are so many wonderful memories
of another time and place...

Happy Birthday
My Special Daughter.

Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Freedom Of Privilege

" He was repulsed by the freedom of privilege"

and was looking for a real life

and he found it....

Found this article from the New York Times

on my son's face book page

and for some reason

it spoke volumes to me.

The thought
47 is so young...

By WILLIAM YARDLEY

Published: June 9, 2013

Mott Green, who emerged from a hermitlike existence in a bamboo hut in the jungle of Grenada to produce a coveted Caribbean delicacy — rich, dark chocolate bars that he exported around the world with the help of sailboats, bicycles and solar-powered refrigeration — died on June 1 in Grenada. He was 47.

Enlarge This Image

Karen Kirchhoff

Mott Green’s Grenada Chocolate Company was the subject of a documentary released in 2012.

He was electrocuted while working on solar-powered machinery for cooling chocolate during overseas transport, said his mother, Dr. Judith Friedman.

Mr. Green was born David Friedman, and grew up on Staten Island. He became Mott over the course of many years of visiting and eventually living in Grenada, where residents had a distinctive way of pronouncing his nickname, Moth. He later took Green as his surname to reflect his environmental interests.

Mr. Green tended to flit about as a child, but with focus: he built go-karts using lawn mower engines; he ran the New York City Marathon when he was 16; he dropped out of the University of Pennsylvania just months before graduation — accepting a degree, he felt, would be capitulating to a corrupt social structure — and he spent much of his 20s squatting with a community of anarchists in abandoned homes in west Philadelphia, where he “rescued” food that restaurants had planned to throw away and distributed it to homeless people.

He was eventually drawn permanently to Grenada. When Mr. Green was a boy, his father, Dr. Sandor Friedman, the director of medical services at Coney Island Hospital, taught there each winter, often bringing his family along.

Mr. Green founded the Grenada Chocolate Company in 1999. Its slogan was “tree to bar,” but that did not capture the breadth of the endeavor. Working with small cocoa farmers in Grenada and as many as 50 factory employees during peak operations, all of whom earned the same salary — and probably more than he did — Mr. Green dried cocoa beans in the sun; built, maintained and powered the machinery to make chocolate; packaged the finished product; and cobbled together an international network of distributors, including volunteer cargo cyclists in the Netherlands.

In 2011, the company received recognition from the State Department for its “contribution to the sustainable growth of rural economies by establishing Grenadian products in international markets; pioneering agrotourism; outstanding environmental conservation efforts; and promotion of organic farming.”

In 2008, 2011 and 2013, the Academy of Chocolate in London awarded silver medals to Grenada’s dark chocolate bars. A documentary film about the company, “Nothing Like Chocolate,” directed by Kum-Kum Bhavnani, was released last year and has been shown at film festivals.

Human rights advocates have long criticized the treatment of small cocoa farmers, and, particularly in Africa, the exploitation of child workers by buyers and exporters who sell cocoa to big chocolate companies. Despite international protections put in place in 2001, a 2009 survey by Tulane University found that nearly a fourth of all children ages 5 and 17 in cocoa-growing regions of Ivory Coast had worked on a cocoa farm in the previous year.

Mr. Green set out to address such issues by dealing directly with small growers and by keeping the processing and packaging of chocolate within Grenada. In the process, he appears to have created the only chocolate-making company in a cocoa-producing country.

“My progression,” he told D magazine in Dallas for a 2012 blog post, “was activist, love Grenada, love cocoa, love machines and tinkering, making chocolate, and doing it all without hurting the land.”

David Lawrence Friedman was born on April 15, 1966, in Washington. His family moved to Staten Island shortly before he turned 2.

He was the valedictorian of his class at Curtis High School. He was accepted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but chose Pennsylvania instead. He dropped out in the spring of 1988, his senior year.

“He was repulsed by the prison of privilege,” Tim Dunn, a friend, said in an interview. “He was looking for real life. And he found it.”

Mr. Green spent several years after college as a kind of master tinkerer, forager and activist among homeless anarchists in Philadelphia. He helped route electricity into abandoned houses for squatters, and he converted a Volkswagen bus to run on electricity. He helped develop a free lunch program that is still in place. He later moved to the East Village in Manhattan and made solar-powered hot-water showers for a group of squatters there.

By the mid-1990s he had moved to Grenada, where he initially lived in a remote hut he had built himself. It, too, relied on solar energy, in part to power Mr. Green’s passion for music.

“You’d hear Ella Fitzgerald coming out of this bamboo house in the rain forest,” his mother recalled.

Mr. Green developed a taste for cocoa tea, a local favorite, and that helped draw him out of the jungle and into the concerns of cocoa farmers and workers. Joining with a friend from Eugene, Ore., Doug Brown, he studied chocolate production in San Francisco. Working in Eugene, the men restored old machines from Europe and built new ones themselves. By the late ’90s they had shipped everything to Grenada. Mr. Brown died of cancer several years ago.

The company struggled for many years even as it won recognition. Mr. Green lived at the factory the whole time, sleeping in a workroom.

It moved into profitability just a few months ago, thanks in part to its recent opening of a shop in Grenada that sells treats made from its chocolate. Grenada’s chocolate bars are also sold online and at stores in various countries. In the United States, they are sold at Whole Foods stores in Manhattan and other retailers scattered across several states.

Last year the company delivered tens of thousands of chocolate bars to Europe on a sail-powered Dutch ship, the Brigantine Tres Hombres, operated by a company called Fairtransport. A team of volunteer cyclists in Amsterdam helped handle distribution on the ground.

Mr. Green called it “the first carbon-neutral trans-Atlantic mass chocolate delivery.”

In addition to his mother, a clinical psychologist in New York, Mr. Green is survived by a brother, Peter. Sandor Friedman died in 2004.

Dr. Friedman said she and several other people involved with the company were meeting this month in Grenada to develop a plan for keeping it operating.

“A lot of people now talk about paying for the actual cost of food or fair food and stuff like that,” said Alexis Buss, a friend from Mr. Green’s days as a squatter. “He wasn’t doing it to be trendy. He’s always been that way. He was just doing it because it made sense.”

ltimgsrcsvcnytimesgif