Soothing the Throat

This evening my throat was feeling a little raw, so I knew that I needed to do few things to address it. First was the old standby, gargling with warm salt water. Then there were cough drops, cough syrup and then a few mugs of hot tea.

A hot bath with Epsom salts, eucalyptus oil and hyssop oil really felt good as well. Then I felt like something a bit more gentle for the spirit would help as well, so I chose a biography of the author and Trappist monk Thomas Merton to watch, and kept getting these little surprises throughout when they featured comments by Buddhist monks he had dialogue with, Thich Nhat Hanh and the Dalai Lama.

There was also a sequence that made me smile when Merton's publishers said that they were not sure that his books would sell, and they were amazed at how well they sold. That shows a difference in the way commercial publishing works these days. Then, if the publisher thought that the author had something worthwhile to say, they would publish it even if they were not sure it would be popular. Today, the trend in publishing is to try and only print what is popular. But that does not always prove to be a winner either, because the public's taste can be fickle and ephemeral.

It was also interesting that some people who knew Merton commented that people were not always happy with what he wrote when he spoke out about subjects like peace. He had the clarity of mind to point out that his church had no problem taking a hard line stance on abortion, because they see it as the death of a person, yet they took no stand against using nuclear weapons which could kill millions of people at a time.

There, of course, were also people who had to stretch themselves to understand how or why a Christian monk could find such common ground with Buddhist monks.

In some way, the peaceful spirit emanating from this story helped calm my throat as well. I finished off the evening with some classical music which was very soothing, and then it started to rain, which is always a healing sound for me.

There are a lot of ways to help soothe physical discomforts, using resources from within and without. Healing often works in mysterious ways.

It is important to do more treatments of this sort tomorrow as well, since I will be talking a lot Friday, Saturday and Sunday, doing readings and giving a talk. My voice is important in my work.

So this is a time of charging up the batteries for a large amount of activity, so that I am ready when I need to be.