The Solace Project #29
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Dear Friends,<br/><br/>Greetings again from Bentonville, Arkansas, at <a href="https://crystalbridges.org/">Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art</a>, where I am immersed in the <a href="https://crystalbridges.org/reports-and-research/tyson-scholars/tyson-think-tank/">Tyson Think Tank</a>. And also enjoying the fruits of warm summer in the heartland, which means hen of the woods mushrooms, peaches, tomatoes, corn, art, nature, and healing.  Maybe it’s the abundant crystals in the earth, maybe it’s the generosity of spirit in the community here, and maybe it’s the deer grazing in the backyard of my house, a simple and pleasant abode with no stuff.  I kneel at the altar of George Carlin’s routine on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvgN5gCuLac">stuff</a>, all the more true for me as I have, in the past year, moved from a house in New York City with all of the stuff to live a city life, to a cottage in Putnam Valley to live with less stuff during the pandemic, to South Bend Indiana to serve a fine museum with even less of my stuff, to Bentonville, Arkansas, with a fraction of that stuff. Here, my stuff is minimal, just essentials and even so feeling like I have too much stuff.  For goodness sake, I’m typing on a Macbook, looking at notes on an iPad and a notebook because I like keyboard and pens and paper.  <br/><br/>I would say I digress, but I’m right on target. While here, focused on one work of art, Copley’s portrait of Frances Deering Atkinson, my mind wanders constantly, bringing my emotional and intellectual stuff to a place where I actually need no stuff.  I first heard the term continuous partial attention in a meditation led by <a href="https://www.sharonsalzberg.com/">Sharon Salzberg at the Tibet Institute in New York</a>. I came to find that the <a href="https://lindastone.net/2009/11/30/beyond-simple-multi-tasking-continuous-partial-attention/">term was coined by Linda Stone,</a> a former big tech executive (Microsoft and A
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serenaM
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