Years ago, I was taught about one important spiritual law of karmic balance.  This law is always true in my experience.

“To experience joy and satisfaction in any area of my life, I must have integrity in that area.”

Applying The Law of Karmic Balance

So, if you want to derive satisfaction from money and your finances, have integrity in all-things related to money.

• Pay all bills on-time or make arrangements with debtors on a payment plan and stick to it.
• File and remit taxes accurately and on-time
• Keep checkbook balanced
• Count change and correct any mistakes (either to your advantage or not)

If you want joy in your relationships, have integrity in all things related to the people you love.

• Be rigorously honest and as kind as possible
• Participate fully and never consider yourself adding one-half of yourself
• Be open about who you are to everyone

And this karmic law applies to all areas of my life.  Health, knitting, career, pet-care, home ownership.  Nothing is excluded.

When there is out-integrity in an area of my life, it causes anxiety, worry, and lack of deserving.  I mean honestly, how could I derive joy from money I cheated someone out of? I’ll never truly believe I deserved that money. And so, Karma won’t allow me to derive joy.

There is a corollary to this principle.  Clean up those areas where you don’t have integrity.  Once you do, joy and satisfaction will show up.

While I have much work to do in many areas of my life, I feel as though I have always been blessed when it comes to many areas of my life.

I worked hard all my life.  Thaddeus often used to brag that “Joe is really good at making a living.” I tried to bring as much honesty and integrity to everything related to work as I could.  I attribute the joy I find in retirement to how I acted during my active employment.

There are areas where my integrity wasn’t as high, or even downright sucked. I work to fix as much of that as I can, knowing there is a worthwhile payoff at the end.

Anyone have any examples where this law didn’t apply to them?  Or good examples where it did?

Current Knitting

After discussing stacked increases recently, I decided I needed a bigger project.  So I went with Xandy Peters’ Fox Paws design.

Holy shit this design is challenging. Challenging in three ways.

1. A couple of the row sequences requires a lot of attention (it’s also difficult to unknit these difficult rows, so I don’t want to make a mistake)
2. There are some physically demanding stitches…K5tog?!?!  Who does that?!?!
3. Deciding on the five colors in this pattern can be hard.

I’ve only just completed one 16-row repeat so far, but I love the colors I’ve chosen.

I’m doing the pattern as written except substituting fingering weight yarn and US3 (3.5 mm) needles. These are the five yarns I’m using for my Fox Paws:

• One Ewe Fingering yarn by MJYarns in colorway Cat’s Eye
• Cascade Heritage Silk Sock yarn in colorway Forest Glenn
• Buttercream Sock yarn by A Good Day for a Cupcake in colorway Cambridge Cherry
• Showcase Superwash Merino by Leading Men Fiber Arts in colorway Superior (custom color)
• Bettie Sock yarn by Skeindalous in colorway Call of the Wild