Echo Bazaar?

This strange little game that's a Twitter craze has just reached Facebook. All my IRL friends were playing on Twitter, which I so far refuse to join. Now I'm toying with it on Facebook. Is anyone else playing? What do you think?

I'm soooooo tired! How about you?

I was up last night I was up till 2:30 AM packing books to ship out this morning at 7 AM. Four and a half hours of sleep. I have been a leeeetle weird all day as a result. Last time you stayed up way too late, why did you do it, and how late were you up?

PITN

I've been sewing for three days straight (yay!), but my neck is really starting to ache (boo!). What's your favorite aches & pains remedy? Are you more the 'push through it' type, the 'treat it' type or the 'coddle it' type?

A question of faith

This might be a little risky, but I trust we're able to handle it. No proselytizing; we're not here to convince each other, and if you feel the need to to so, please refrain from answering. Please be respectful; what works for me will not work for you, and vis versa. If you hold a religious faith, what lead you to it? Broaden that as far as you like; if you are agnostic, humanist, Jain, or anything, I'm curious.

Why? Because I'm going through a real blossoming of my own spiritual / religious life. I was raised with lots of world mythology, and then the Unitartian Universalist church, which I still attend. When I was 7, the church I attended started hosting the Dances of Universal Peace, a Sufi tradition that is filled with love and praise and dance and song. I danced at least twice a month between age 7 and age 18. For the past dozen years, I've been feeling more and more pull toward the dance, but it's only in the past two years that I've found Sufi community again. Six months ago, I came across a poster for a dance in Amherst that was a shadow of what I remembered, and a hint of what was available. I continued to go to Sufi prayers (zikr) once a month, and trusted that the way would open if it was to be. Last June, the prayer leader told me, after zikr, about a dance retreat only an hour from my house!!! I went, it was amazing, and I described it as feeling like the path was rising under my feet, like I'd found something I had misplaced (not lost - I was never lost, but this had to take a back seat to the rest of life). So now I'm getting ready to go to another dance retreat - this time 6 hours from home! - and it's clearly something that's coming into importance in my life.

What led me to it - love. I have had deeply meaningful, transcendent experiences during the dance (which I can go into if anyone's interested). Sufi dancing and prayer is utterly filled with love, recognition of the divine as present in every single thing in the universe. Sufism is nature-oriented enough for my pagan parts, deist enough for my deist parts, feminist enough for my feminist parts, and ritualistic enough for my ritualistic parts. The singing and dancing in community fills me and spills over into greater gentleness and compassion with my family and friends, which spreads love and peace in the world. Yep.

So, that's it. What about you?

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