Saturday, September 27, 2014

Shower the People You Love With Love

"Shower the people you love with love" is but one of the many lyrical pearls brought forth by the fabulous James Taylor. If I could have but one artist's music on a desert island, he would win hands down.

How many of us spend our lives busy with work or other mundane chores, lost in our maudlin emotional stories of "what happened," and missing the opportunity to shower the people we love with love.

Actually, for those saintly people in tune with life in all its forms, there is not one place where love does not exist, or cannot be shared. So as we pour forth our love on people, mother earth, her creatures and plants, a wonderful inner cleansing takes place as well.

A fountain of love can pour through us to quench the thirst of the lost, as well as the found. And in this win-win situation, all is well with the world.

Tuesday, September 23, 2014

Kinetic Action a.k.a Bombing

A coalition of the willing has begun "kinetic action" in Syria. This horrifically abstract term "kinetic action" means in fact "bombing" someone or something on the ground, thousands of feet below those sleek supersonic predators.

This sanitizing of hell on earth with the term "kinetic action" is calculated to numb our minds and distract us from the suffering it causes. It is the evil spin of power brokers who will us to pay our taxes to pay for their super toys.

We now find ourselves in a trap of immense proportions. The chessboard of political missteps has lead to the cancerous grownth of an insane and powerful group that is as dangerous to Islam and the Arab states as to Western powers of the Christian bent. 

The fallout of WWI was extreme poverty and brutal mistreatment and it lead to the rise of an Adolph Hitler. The fire and brimstone of our policies over the past century in the Middle East now give rise to a group whose flag is black. The only other black flag I recall is a skull and crossbones on a pirate ship and is also the signature of the Grim Reaper.

Chilling. A quagmire. Falling into a quicksand. Sawing the branch you're sitting on. This chess game has become deadly.

Sunday, September 21, 2014

Unconditional Loving

Children can be the most comforting and the most challenging beings to enter your life. The reason for such extreme possibilities lies in the fact that sane parental love stretches to the outer limits of human emotion - so large and all encompassing, nearly unconditional.

Buddhist texts say that the closest thing to Buddha Love is that which a mother has for her only son. (That ditty was written in the age of the patriarch; we must amend it to "only child.") Despite the anachronistic reference to male dominance, this saying still holds water in the modern era.

So on this sunny Sunday, with the sweet sound of the neighborhood children calling out their playful bliss, and a brother and sister sitting in my living room talking music, life takes on the tranquility of the middle way.
 

Saturday, September 20, 2014

Wavelets

My moods change like little wavelets blowing across a pond in response to a sudden gust of wind. Sometimes leaves also come tumbling off the trees and little tornedos of dust sting my eyes. In those moments, panic - a certain defensiveness - overtake me.

But as things are wont to do, the wind dies down, the trees manage to hold onto most of their green garments, and the dirt morphs back into a path through the woods. And what ressembles normalcy returns...until the next gust.

As a mentor of mine once said when faced with the unfaceable, "Ah so. This too we must accept."

.

Thursday, September 18, 2014

The Advantage of Body Cues

With 20-20 hindsight, it has been observed that decisions made out of fear always turn sour, and the ones born of enthusiasm, joy and keen insight reap golden fruits. This karmic law may not hold true for everyone, but the byways and highways of my journey have proven thus.

Being an Aries and loaded with Aries in many of the 12 Houses, this gives me the impetus to rush headlong into ideas, projects, people, and other intricacies of life when a little patience might serve. On the other hand, if a good opportunity presents itself, this character trait turns into an advantage.

The only measure by which I determine my decisions now is by how I FEEL in the heart-abdomen area. The inevitable wisdom of the body will either give me a joy jolt, a numb and impossible to decipher sensation, or pure dread and anxiety.

Then I get to look into the context. Is the body wisdom tapping into the essence of the situation? Are the bad body vibes really indicative of a "stay away" situation or just my stuff that hasn't been cleared by the pure Light? Or those happy feelings sometimes just wishful thinking overriding reality?

Thus I ponder this morning as I write this blog and avoid facing all sorts of bureaucratic paper pushing.




Tuesday, September 16, 2014

Dear President

Dear President,

Do you know something we don't know? Because your mind seems to have been captured by the generals who are itching to do their job - to make war, not love.

We thought you were a humanely smart man but it seems that the quicksand of politics and world domination thoughts have occulded your brain and blinded your eyes.

Go ahead and follow the commands of the marionette generals who dance on the strings of billionaire arms merchants. Lost in the stream of red, white and blue mercilessness, you squander our resources on those with concealed plots and plans.

You have turned out to be only one cut above the wacko team that ran the world into a ditch from 2000 to 2008. We love you but you have lost your way.

May the All-That-Is have mercy on our planet of people.

Sunday, September 14, 2014

The Bearable Lightness of Being

A paradox, at least in my own experience, is that the great living presence of light and love is always ready to be powered up and used for the greater good. Implicitly, this means that one's inherent, inborn happiness and equanimity remain a nanosecond away from being realized.

On the other hand, the neurotic egocentric mind is filled with all sorts of murky emotions ranging from high to low - also ready in a nanosecond to mug one's experience of life and create the false belief that life sucks.

These two states lie in wait for us all. The lucky ones have a distinct and direct experience of the indwelling peace and have also developed the muscle to access that state more easily than a person with an untrained mind.

The events of my life in the past five years have given me a taste of the paradox in spades: the death of my parents, the deaths of beloved canine and cat family members, my brush with death thanks to cancer and the actual death of my husband thanks to cancer. To feel the grace, the joy, the appreciation of every breath in one moment - and then be thrown into a dark prison the next - is something to behold.

But as choice is one of the great privileges of the human mind, I continue to chose to turn to the inborn Greatness and pray for the highest and greatest good. Afterall, there must be some reason we were all born on this godforsaken/god-filled planet.


Saturday, September 13, 2014

Real Time Redux

As an addendum to Real Time?!, one of the blog readers reacted with a thought so profound that I feel obliged to immortalize it in this post.

From BH:

My favorite quote about time is, "Time is what keeps everything from happening at once." I'm not sure if that's true anymore (or if it ever was) b/c it feels like everything's happening at once. Maybe only memory captures real time and preserves it.

Don't you love it when someone says something that makes a lightbulb go on in the old noggen? 

Real Time?!

The phrase, "happening in real time" lends itself to a philosophical debate if you can find someone willing to contemplate his or her navel along with you.

Example. Death of beloved husband and companion of 30 years. In "real time," he died on June 26, 2014 and as he drew his last breath, the man I knew ceased to be a live human being and became a corpse. Even then, a series of "real time" moments would transform the corpse into a decomposing composite of flesh and blood, soon to become ashes at another point in "real time."

Given that inevitable flux of change in the time-pace continuum, just when does "real time" exist? The minute we exerience the now, which would presumable be called "real time," it has become the past. In fact, if one really ponders this enigma, there is no such thing as the present or "real time" because it changes too quickly to be quantified. Perhaps a atomic scientist could break it down into quarks but no matter how much minutia you apply to the problem, it can't be solved.

Conclusion? There is no such animal as "real time." Dream time perhaps, or interdimensional warps in space, but in fact we are just a stream of past and future memories. The now, or "real time" is simply a construct of our human minds to make us feel as if we are a solid, living entity with a purpose.

Thanks to this illusion, we do get out of bed every morning if we are lucky, brush our teeth if there is water, toothpaste and a brush, and proceed with our daily business. 

So for the navel contemplatives, put that in your pipe and smoke it!

Saturday, September 6, 2014

Teresa's Tale

Many moons ago a dignified middle-aged, middle-class woman from Mexico fled her abusive husband, who had pistol whipped her beautiful face until she went nearly deaf.

She sought refuge with relatives in Los Angeles. As the hardworking mother of nine grown children, she had no use for lying around someone's house in the bowels of a foreign land. She could cook, sew elegant clothes and had a heart that contained enough love for the entire world's population of children.

She came into our lives just as my 18 month old daughter needed someone to distract her for the mornings so that her artist mother could scratch the itch of the painting muse. And it worked so beautifully that I almost lost my daughter's primary allegiance to the supremely benevolent Teresa.

After about a year into this expanded family, Teresa mumbled that she had a cold but that it was nothing. She continued to care for Lara with her usual enthusiasm so I took little notice. Then one day, her son showed up at the door and took her away for what I thought was the usual Sunday outing. He called later that night to say that she had double pneumonia, was in an oxygen tent, and inferred that some monstrous Gringo employer had almost worked his mother to death. The long suffering abused wife had apparently learned to hide her pain quite efficiently.

Teresa returned two weeks later, pale but better. Her birthday was in a few days. She had made friends with other caregivers in the local park and they were known to me. So I decided to throw Teresa a birthday lunch with her neighborhood friends.

These ladies, who mostly knew endless hard work caring for other people's houses and children, were seated at my large dining room table while I served them the meal I had made. A pathetic attempt at Mexican cuisine but a gesture nonetheless. They looked a little stunned at first but then relaxed into friendly chatter in their native tongue.

Fast forward  a month. Teresa, now well and back to her usual self, told me thus: "I was going to quit and go back home but after you gave me that birthday lunch I decided to stay."

My gesture had nothing to do with bribery, nothing to do with false compassion. It was simply a mea culpa for not penetrating the defenses Teresa had put up to see her underlying needs. A gesture of the birthday lunch was simply an apology and a sign that in fact I did know she was a human being with the same needs for love and kindness as anyone else in the white upper-middle class neighborhood in which I lived.

That bumpersticker "pratice random kindness" has some infinite wisdom in it. One never knows when the good karma will boomerang back to you in spades.


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