Diane’s Newsletter February 2018
Seven
is analytical, intelligent and enjoys spending time on its own. It has an active imagination, but it never accepts things at face value. It is intuitive and has an understanding of many hidden truths and facts. It always seeks to get to the bottom of things, be it a discussion topic, a project, religious thought or the ‘meaning of life’. It can be reserved and selective, often showing little emotion. Seven usually ope
rates on another wavelength and is spiritually aware – an awareness that may manifest itself through religion, philosophy, and/or sciences such as astrology, numerology and the like. 
It is a prime number and one of the most important numbers in the Bible, occurring more than 700 times. For example, Job had seven sons, Solomon took seven years to build his temple, and Israel captured Jericho after marching seven times around that city. The flood arrived seven days after Noah had finished populating his ark, and in Egypt seven years of plenty were followed by seven years of drought. Moreover, there are seven virtues and seven deadly sins.
Both the Talmud and the Koran mention seven heavens (and quite apart from religious implications, when we say that we are in the ‘seventh heaven’ we are alluding to something extremely positive). Hinduism talks about seven underworlds and seven over or higher worlds, and, in a Hindu wedding, the bride and groom walk around a holy fire seven times. In Vedic literature we can read about the seven chakras and that the sun god’s chariot was pulled by seven horses.
According to Irish folk lore, the seventh son of the seventh son is supposed to have special powers, while in Romanian folk lore he is a vampire. On a more mundane level, there are seven days in a week, seven colours in a rainbow, seven continents, seven stars in the Big Dipper, seven notes in a musical scale, seve
n letters in the Roman numeral system, and seven pieces in a tangram puzzle. Finally, the numbers on opposite sides of a dice always equal seven when added.
Do you have an affinity with the number seven? Is it your ‘lucky number’? Perhaps you are born on the 7th day or in the seventh month? Perhaps your name starts with a G, P or Y? Also, if you accept numerology, it could be your Path number (what you have to learn) or your Expression number (what you are like) or your Motivation number (what you want).
To find your Path number add the day of your birth, the month of your birth and the year of your birth. To find your Expression and Motivation numbers first translate all the letters to numbers (A=1, B=2. . . J=10 (1), K=11 (2) and so on. In Swedish, Å=9 Ä=1 Ö=2). The Expression number is the sum of ALL the letters in your name at birth (make sure that you include all given names); the Motivation number is the sum of the vowels in your name as it was at birth.
Images Dice from flickr.com; Map/colours from wikipedia/wikimedia; Cards from the Vizaĝo deck
What do you see as you stand on a train platform and watch a train speeding towards the station? Perhaps you see the train, the platform and the people as clear-cut images, or perhaps you see a combination of all these things as a conglomeration of lines and colours. You may even focus in on one particular object or one particular person. Whenever we look at something, the forms and the colours, often related to people and structures, take on new interpretations. Intellectually, we know what is in front of us, but if we are able to remove what we know from what we see, the experience can easily throw us into a virtual dimension.
Do we really ‘see’ what we see? And, what DO we actually see? Do we all see the same thing, at the same time, or are our powers of perception regulated by other experiences or ‘the sum of our experiences’?
As the train, the people and the platform merge into new shapes and even new awarenesses, they must always be our shapes and our awarenesses. In the same way that we cannot know how others experience the incident at the train station, we can never know, for example, if what someone else calls ‘blue’ is exactly the same as our own experience of ‘blue’.
Whenever we look at something: an object, a train station, a seascape, another person. . . we visually assess the reality of that something both on the basis of acquired knowledge and from the perspective of who we are. What we think we see may not necessarily always comply with the reality of the thing being viewed.
All impressions, visual and otherwise, must be filtered through the mirror of our experience, our individuality and our psyche. For one person the train speeding towards the platform may simply be a collection of blurred shapes, for another it could be a complexity of colours, while for a third it is a conglomeration of images from the actual railway station as well as other railway stations, both experienced and imagined.
Even our own image that looks back at us from mirrors and reflective surfaces never exactly equates with how others see us, but it is the image we associate with ourselves. While our own mirror image is a reversal, or a distortion, of how we appear to others, what we see must always be distorted or changed by our own individual mirrors.
Sushi
Cristina has kindly submitted her recipe for vegetarian sushi. It is easy to make, colourful and, I believe, extremely tasty. It can also be varied, depending on the vegetables used. Sushi is a dish made with rice that has been treated with vinegar; it is not, as many believe, raw fish. It works well as finger food or, with vegetables, as a main meal.
Now, over to Cristina. . .
You will need:
1100ml of water (for boiling the rice)
500g special rice for sushi or any kind of sticky rice
4-5 tbsp of rice vinegar
8 sheets of sushi nori
Different kinds of vegetables cut into long sticks.
(Although avocado is my favourite, you can use cucumber, tomato, carrot, capsicum. . . basically any kind of vegetable that you like. It even works with gherkins and olives).
Pinch of salt.
Bring the water to the boil together with the salt. Add the rice and let it boil until the water disappears and the rice becomes sticky. Let the rice cool and then add the vinegar and mix.
Some recipes for sushi include sugar, but I left the sugar out because I personally didn’t like it in the sushi. I tried a few times, putting less sugar each time, but in the end I decided to leave it out completely.
Put a sheet of cling wrap on a smooth surface (I use a glass cutting board). This will be your “rolling aid”. Most people use bamboo mats, but I don’t own one so I had to improvise. Put a nori sheet on the cling wrap, and spread it with a thin layer of rice (the thicker the layer of rice the bigger the sushi, which is not what you want, because sushi is meant to be bite-size).
Put some sticks of vegetables (a combination or just one kind of vegetable) at the end where you will start rolling from, and then roll using the cling wrap. Then slice the roll into 2.5-3 cm pieces, and, voilà, you have your sushi that you can serve with soy sauce, wasabi, pickled ginger or any other Japanese food. For slicing, you will need a sharp knife.
Guest post by Suzi (U.S.A.)
I am so excited! We are in the car driving into our new neighborhood and entering the driveway to our brand new home! We get out and I run into the room I have claimed. I am 9 years old and just elated. We have a brand new house, a park with redwood trees across the street and my new elementary school which is a five minute walk. One of the first things I wonder is if there are any kids in the neighborhood my age.
Within days I meet Wendi, my age and grade. We immediately become best friends. Her parents are from England and she has two sisters. I have one older brother. Within the month, Marta moves in next door to Wendi. She is our age and grade also! We become thick as thieves and spend the rest of our summer playing in the park, making forts and shooting hoops at our school.
Fifty five years have now passed and we are still close friends. We added a few more to our group along the way: Kathy who moved in down the street and Cheri whom we all met in Junior High. We have gone to our High School reunions together, all staying at the same hotel. Our husbands all get along which makes it wonderful for us. They sit at a table at the reunions while we run around squealing each time we find one of our classmates we knew. These people were all friends also but not in our small core group that grew up together. I feel the same about my uncles, aunts & cousins. Since Facebook, I am able to keep in contact with them and keep in contact with them and their lives.
Since graduation, we have all moved to different cities except Marta. We all have remained close though, watching our families grow with children, now grandchildren, pets and seeing each others parents also. We do the usual things like always send birthday cards, always make a birthday phone call, send Christmas cards and share exciting news by telephone. Every five years we all go to the class reunions then visit each other for a few days.
Between these times we plan girls’ trips. We have gone on cruises, rented a house next to the beach for a week, rented condos in large cities going to plays and other memorable events, flown to each others houses to stay and explore that city’s fun spots. They are planning a trip now to South America which I will miss as my husband (of 43 years) and I are going on another trip. We have so much fun deciding where to go, what to do, what to eat, etc. Then we stay up until the wee hours howling at all our old worn out stories we know so well but they still make us cry from laughing so hard! Our last trip had a fire pit. We spend every night around the fire playing word games and telling stories. My sides actually hurt from laughing so much. This trip also included a boat ride, paddle boarding, hiking to a lake, tourist shopping and lunch on the pier where they have glass under the table so you can see the ocean!
This past December 2016, we lost Kathy to a heart attack. She was healthy, spent their summers at a lake and hiked & did sports daily. We were all just devastated. We now have a “Celebration of Kathy” event at all of our get togethers.
My main message to this writing follows the poem (I don’t know it verbatim):
Some friends are new, some friends are old, one is silver, the other gold.
If you are blessed as I was with wonderful lifelong friends, reach out and keep the flame going. Don’t wait for them to call you; you make the call. Share your life & news with these pseudo sisters. Check on them, they may be having a bad day and your call just may cheer them up. These women are sisters to me and I treasure each one and the time we spend together.
So who would you like to surprise today with an “out of the Blue” phone call to say hi, I love you, and touch base? Hold these women close, they are our support system, therapists, and a million other things. Oh, gotta go. My phone is ringing. I wonder if ……..