Editor's Page

Cover Card

The Osho Zen card on the cover entitled “Adventure” is the Page of Rainbows. This image is the archetype of the adventurous spirit. When we are truly in a spirit of adventure, we are moving just like this child. Full of trust, out of the darkness of the forest and into the rainbow of the light, we go step by step, drawn by our sense of wonder into the unknown.

The Page of Rainbows represents a quality that can come to us anywhere---at home or in the office, in the wilderness or in the city, during a creative project or in our relationships with others.

When you draw this card you are moving into the new and unknown with the trusting spirit of a child, innocent and open and vulnerable. Where the smallest things of life become great adventures.

The nurse who draws this card has embarked upon a journey where not much is certain. She is on a personal search for her own spiritual experiences. There may be many dangers with every possibility of going astray and never reaching the goal. One thing is for certain: this very search will help her mature into someone she respects.

“When your heart is full of gratitude any door that appears closed can be an opening for an even greater blessing." "Life is immense and each moment comes with a thousand and one gifts for you. But you are so engaged, preoccupied with your desiring mind, you are so full of your thoughts [that] you refuse all those gifts. God comes, you go on refusing. A person becomes a Buddha the moment all that life brings is accepted with gratitude." -- Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (Osho)

Dear Editor

Notes from Mary Amdall Thompson:

Hi Toni,

I really enjoyed the excerpt from Live a Little, Laugh a Lot. If I did, others will too. Some of it may be bawdy, but is also funny and has some interesting facts - just enough nursing/health care to be appropriate for the journal. I think it is OK to publish "fun", even a bit risqué content. If the journal gets feed back from readers about this article, we will know what nurses think as well as what kind of readers are attracted to the journal. AND you won't see "fun" stuff like this in AJN!

My belief about Ken Wilber’s article The War in Iraq is the same as for the article Social Activism as Spiritual Expression in the last issue. It was not "nursing focused." It was an editorial and was probably appropriate for the Ideas and Opinions section. The benefits to our journal are that it is meant to be an "alternative" journal, which means that it should not be another mainstream nursing journal. Its' appeal speaks to and about a larger human consciousness than just nursing practice issues. I also believe we should be open to what folks want to contribute during the infancy of this journal, as long as the contribution has a clear link to holism and the human condition.

MAT