100209 06:54
Gazing Balls & Lawn Ornaments: a visual metaphor for our inability to receive love that is real, since we don't believe we are worth it. {Please click the link below for a visual reference}
Gazing Balls were a common item decorating the homes of people to whom I delivered newspapers in my youth; along with bird baths. Later on I came to intuit that my parents were like Gazing Balls and my love fell upon their indifference to me, like rain uselessly running off.
Imagine my stunning horror when I realized that I was describing myself as well. But that occurred too late in my life to do me any good with those who, in fact and deed, did love me to the best of their capacities and ability.
My feeling was rejection and abandonment.
I do not celebrate my intransigence and self-loathing so much as note, and move forward through, the many, signs, myths and omens of my life towards a goal I cannot now fully know.
Think synchronistic events.
Healing others was suggested to me by a friend, who in fact had saved my life from suicide. . . . essentially making available a reason not to internally--within myself. The suggestion then became a bewildering challenge to understand how, and by what mode, that might happen. It was later defined as being a resource hidden within my empathy and intuition; perhaps equally though my hyper-vision developed into a near malady in childhood and a peculiar ability to witness in others their denial and indifference to themselves . . .
“The neurotic is nailed to the cross of his fiction.” --Alfred Adler
Admittedly I was neurotic until recently, in the following sense: I was constantly filled with apprehension and anxiety for all the messages I’d lived by given to me by authority beginning with my parents. These then expanding outward into society, government, religion and finally the world-at-large. In a gross generalization it was simply being told that I cannot be worth anything: “You can’t do it!”
The “YOU!” messages were deafening, and became the historical “tape” I replayed everyday.
I had no foundation of personal value to process any conflict and so retreated from everyone and everything. The experience was a kind of death and I don’t want to go there ever again. There is no need to since I have, as Carl Jung stated it;
'Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart . . . Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.'
If you inter your feelings and experiences holding you in bondage, you can find peace. To know and respect yourself is to be respected by others. And in the end you will accept and love yourself as you are and are becoming. In loving ourselves we become love for others; a source of healing; no longer part of the problems and chaos of the world.
. . . oddly I often lose my way but in being lost am found.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_Gate
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Who we are internally . . .
100208 06:20
I am not what I do, and have never been that, but something more like what I am now; stripped of my professional identity and join a growing population in poverty regardless of age. Some days I awake from dreams that inform me of what I might write about. In writing up my dreams, and other issues of interest/concern, I find myself self-defined and discover a new joy for life, photography and writing .
I experience, with sadness, the idleness of those who were once-upon-a-time defined by a vocation, now retired. In a profound sense many are now retired prematurely since the economy, as it was formerly defined, is now undergoing adjustment to new realities.
To pretend otherwise is impossible except for those who caused the alteration of our daily reality. Towards them I could, but refuse, to be angry even though our bankruptcy may mean that we may need the herding goats and living in found material shelters similar to those in Haiti.
The absence of anger and fear is a better measure of my wealth than my bank account. Anger and fear can own us if we allow it to, and by those reactions are we manipulated and controlled personally and collectively.
I am not what I do, and have never been that, but something more like what I am now; stripped of my professional identity and join a growing population in poverty regardless of age. Some days I awake from dreams that inform me of what I might write about. In writing up my dreams, and other issues of interest/concern, I find myself self-defined and discover a new joy for life, photography and writing .
I experience, with sadness, the idleness of those who were once-upon-a-time defined by a vocation, now retired. In a profound sense many are now retired prematurely since the economy, as it was formerly defined, is now undergoing adjustment to new realities.
To pretend otherwise is impossible except for those who caused the alteration of our daily reality. Towards them I could, but refuse, to be angry even though our bankruptcy may mean that we may need the herding goats and living in found material shelters similar to those in Haiti.
The absence of anger and fear is a better measure of my wealth than my bank account. Anger and fear can own us if we allow it to, and by those reactions are we manipulated and controlled personally and collectively.
Change is the only absolute of life.
100207 06:08
Change is the only absolute of life.
However there is a place of safety and stability for us within ourselves. A place from which we can flow into the course of our times and not be destroyed through rigidity. It is immeasurable by standards institutionalized “for us” by those who purport to lead.
I live and speak from experience hard won through failure, chaos and pain. All three of which we are lead to ideally avoid.
By-and-large everything is packaged as ideal yet is, in fact and experience, delusional; all smoke & mirrors. By which we attempt to live our lives through and for. We are the State & Church not the other way around.
The days of our lives fall away and the end draws near. I have no interest in “The End Times” so much as I have concerns for our qualities ignored now. And I ask what will we leave our children? At that, I must then ask who would want to live in such a world? After all we have means and motives to render mankind extinct and have set about doing that with a vengeance.
We all have a vested interest in the present and future, yet refuse to take responsibility for it. I would have you take ownership of your inherent dignity; a wealth that cannot be worn, or displayed through any costume of badge rank or symbol. But through interaction with life and others. Your life, like mine, is mortal played out upon the stage of eternity.
Change is the only absolute of life.
However there is a place of safety and stability for us within ourselves. A place from which we can flow into the course of our times and not be destroyed through rigidity. It is immeasurable by standards institutionalized “for us” by those who purport to lead.
I live and speak from experience hard won through failure, chaos and pain. All three of which we are lead to ideally avoid.
By-and-large everything is packaged as ideal yet is, in fact and experience, delusional; all smoke & mirrors. By which we attempt to live our lives through and for. We are the State & Church not the other way around.
The days of our lives fall away and the end draws near. I have no interest in “The End Times” so much as I have concerns for our qualities ignored now. And I ask what will we leave our children? At that, I must then ask who would want to live in such a world? After all we have means and motives to render mankind extinct and have set about doing that with a vengeance.
We all have a vested interest in the present and future, yet refuse to take responsibility for it. I would have you take ownership of your inherent dignity; a wealth that cannot be worn, or displayed through any costume of badge rank or symbol. But through interaction with life and others. Your life, like mine, is mortal played out upon the stage of eternity.
Friday, February 5, 2010
the energy of love and depression as a mass
100205 05:15
{I have posted nothing for the past seven days--of course I wrote, but what I wrote seemed to go nowhere until now . . . if I stop writing I will die.}
I am in trouble. Having been depressed all my life I recognize it’s onset.
And my dreams are driving me out of sleep in confusion, not ecstasy.The worst are conflicts without resolution, I’ve had many, and taken years to understand and integrate them into my real life: the daily, ordinary of why I don’t give a fig, or one red cent, for my life.
The first dream was of my paternal father confessing to me adultery with a barely legal girl whom he described in graphic detail; and their assignation in minute, salacious minutia.
Dad arrived in the dark of night of a cold winter's night. It had been raining a long time and despite the fact that he was driving, he was soaking wet, calling out to me not to bother with the front door light or to help him unload his vehicle; we were alone. I was astonished ro realize he was ninety-two at the time. Mother long dead and I, as usual, was alone in reality.
I awoke to void; it is a technique I learned long ago: drink lots of water before retiring to capture my dreams. Some are episodic while others have continuity and are roughly short-story length.
The second dream was devastating; detailing my complicity in, or actual murder of, a exceptionally beautiful girl, blonde, young (as in somewhere between infancy and eighteen.) The scenario was historical, a revelation of evidence in a file. Portraits of her, news reports, police files, evaporated one-by-one in front of my startled eyes.
In panic I pled for them not to be destroyed since their destruction eliminated any hope of a viable defense. I did not do the crime and was guilty only by innuendo, inference and implication by an authority unseen. . . . I now suspect it something like the Lindbergh’s child being murdered.
In each case (or dream) it was my paternal father who seemed the adversary. After all, from beginning to end, he seemed jealous of my, as he called them, “many women.”
The first was a little girl who would ride standing on the back of my tricycle returning home sans panties. While he bemoaned requisite defense of my innocence, and hers, to her mother; he laughed about that until nearly the day he died. And then the Lindbergh’s bought a flute for their daughter from him. We were too young but he seemed to hold the ideal of marriage from that moment forward.
Mother was savage in her rage and aggression. Dad was equally so but passive.
I think my depression’s origin is rooted in the simple fact that I have moved from a candid record of everything to a idealized reality of my current life in these pages; my personal journal. There are only two historical figures I am aware of who attempted, and succeeded, this enterprise of writing themselves into sanity (to go as far as IT--their lives--go): Carl Jung and Rene Descartes. And I think, but have yet to investigate, Anais Nin is one also, whose two poems:
"He does not need opium. He has the gift of reverie"
"And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom." have become nearly equal to 1 Corinthian’s 13 in personal relevance.
I write to save myself and those, who like me, have/had no loving attachment point in life.
In my case it was the instance of being left in the care of my maternal grandmother for one year at the age of five. And then each summer thereafter until I became my father’s minimum wage slave at thirteen. To say that I love my father and have forgiven him, and myself, now is to speak of a love beyond description. But, perhaps, best described in that there is no mortal authority that I trust to speak my truth; since to give such power is to be a victim and slave to them, or it. If I love my enemy I do so in full knowledge of what I was as an enemy to myself.
I have been up to my armpits in quicksand all my life until now. Attempting to find a reason to live by climbing a vertical glacier without finger holds--such is the nature of my depression.
. . . my grandmother was the only constant love I ever knew and I was taken away from that repeatedly; small wonder I've been crazy all these years.
{I have posted nothing for the past seven days--of course I wrote, but what I wrote seemed to go nowhere until now . . . if I stop writing I will die.}
I am in trouble. Having been depressed all my life I recognize it’s onset.
And my dreams are driving me out of sleep in confusion, not ecstasy.The worst are conflicts without resolution, I’ve had many, and taken years to understand and integrate them into my real life: the daily, ordinary of why I don’t give a fig, or one red cent, for my life.
The first dream was of my paternal father confessing to me adultery with a barely legal girl whom he described in graphic detail; and their assignation in minute, salacious minutia.
Dad arrived in the dark of night of a cold winter's night. It had been raining a long time and despite the fact that he was driving, he was soaking wet, calling out to me not to bother with the front door light or to help him unload his vehicle; we were alone. I was astonished ro realize he was ninety-two at the time. Mother long dead and I, as usual, was alone in reality.
I awoke to void; it is a technique I learned long ago: drink lots of water before retiring to capture my dreams. Some are episodic while others have continuity and are roughly short-story length.
The second dream was devastating; detailing my complicity in, or actual murder of, a exceptionally beautiful girl, blonde, young (as in somewhere between infancy and eighteen.) The scenario was historical, a revelation of evidence in a file. Portraits of her, news reports, police files, evaporated one-by-one in front of my startled eyes.
In panic I pled for them not to be destroyed since their destruction eliminated any hope of a viable defense. I did not do the crime and was guilty only by innuendo, inference and implication by an authority unseen. . . . I now suspect it something like the Lindbergh’s child being murdered.
In each case (or dream) it was my paternal father who seemed the adversary. After all, from beginning to end, he seemed jealous of my, as he called them, “many women.”
The first was a little girl who would ride standing on the back of my tricycle returning home sans panties. While he bemoaned requisite defense of my innocence, and hers, to her mother; he laughed about that until nearly the day he died. And then the Lindbergh’s bought a flute for their daughter from him. We were too young but he seemed to hold the ideal of marriage from that moment forward.
Mother was savage in her rage and aggression. Dad was equally so but passive.
I think my depression’s origin is rooted in the simple fact that I have moved from a candid record of everything to a idealized reality of my current life in these pages; my personal journal. There are only two historical figures I am aware of who attempted, and succeeded, this enterprise of writing themselves into sanity (to go as far as IT--their lives--go): Carl Jung and Rene Descartes. And I think, but have yet to investigate, Anais Nin is one also, whose two poems:
"He does not need opium. He has the gift of reverie"
"And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom." have become nearly equal to 1 Corinthian’s 13 in personal relevance.
I write to save myself and those, who like me, have/had no loving attachment point in life.
In my case it was the instance of being left in the care of my maternal grandmother for one year at the age of five. And then each summer thereafter until I became my father’s minimum wage slave at thirteen. To say that I love my father and have forgiven him, and myself, now is to speak of a love beyond description. But, perhaps, best described in that there is no mortal authority that I trust to speak my truth; since to give such power is to be a victim and slave to them, or it. If I love my enemy I do so in full knowledge of what I was as an enemy to myself.
I have been up to my armpits in quicksand all my life until now. Attempting to find a reason to live by climbing a vertical glacier without finger holds--such is the nature of my depression.
. . . my grandmother was the only constant love I ever knew and I was taken away from that repeatedly; small wonder I've been crazy all these years.
. . . the nature of my/our addiction to love
100204 06:43
Before I die, I’d like to leave a sense of the nature of my addiction, obsession and compulsion. I was informed by trustworthy resources that I was Obsessive/Compulsive. To be perfectly honest with myself, and you, I am not entirely convinced that I’m “out the woods” yet. . . . and it is for your peace that this, my prayer, is written.
In a way it is okay to be obsessed with “God.” But I think there is a sincere need to define our individual relationship with God as being one of interaction and not dependence. To not ask God to do for us what we must do for ourselves.
Prayer, meditation, attendance to group celebrations is wonderful but for me it has been writing myself into validation; alone.
Yesterday was a difficult example of processing information about myself. The significance is personally affirming since in all my days that day will remain affirmation that I am on the right path.
I have two mentors, neither of which did I call. I could have but I have a growing sense that they will leave me behind soon. And if not “soon” anytime in the future will be more than I now believe I can bear.
I can only change myself. They have been a part of that process and there have been times of all consuming dependence yet at each and every turn their encouragement has indicated a will that I do for myself that which God does not provide. God loves and accepts us unconditionally but I’ve not been able to do that for myself. Hadn’t a clue until now.
Good teaching and leadership does that; replaces itself in order that all succeeding generations might do so equally, or nearly so, since God remains always Other; as in I/Thou.
There is enough pain, sorrow and fear in the world. I need to give, or make, peace possible in your life as it has been incarnated in mine. And in the process: do no harm.
. . . "Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none." -- Wm. Shakespeare
When in times of trouble, or doubt, I seek the wisdom of others--all others, including my enemies. To love one’s ‘enemy’ is to accept their right to exist on their own terms without responding in an eye-for-an-eye judgement . . . we learn nothing from killing our ‘enemy’ since in most cases our real adversary is ourselves.
We love our addictions until they fail us, or teach that they are unworthy of pursuit. There is information about God, but the experience of God, is best found in the silence of our hearts individually.
To prove my point I have only to read current headlines and acknowledge that the issue is not “win-lose-or-draw/good, better, best.” Nothing will be possible after the exercise of our power to destroy our enemy since to do so is to destroy ourselves and the world. In a sense we must be part of the solution and not the problem. We are free to wrestle ourselves free of “The sins of the parents . . . “ being our only legacy and/or alternative to that which disturbs our status quo.
To be addicted to anything is to give ownership of yourself to that. Slavery is the dominant position of ignorance and fear. Addiction is rigid while self-knowledge is fluid.
"Sanity may be madness but the maddest of all is to see life as it is and not as it should be"
--Don Quixote:
Before I die, I’d like to leave a sense of the nature of my addiction, obsession and compulsion. I was informed by trustworthy resources that I was Obsessive/Compulsive. To be perfectly honest with myself, and you, I am not entirely convinced that I’m “out the woods” yet. . . . and it is for your peace that this, my prayer, is written.
In a way it is okay to be obsessed with “God.” But I think there is a sincere need to define our individual relationship with God as being one of interaction and not dependence. To not ask God to do for us what we must do for ourselves.
Prayer, meditation, attendance to group celebrations is wonderful but for me it has been writing myself into validation; alone.
Yesterday was a difficult example of processing information about myself. The significance is personally affirming since in all my days that day will remain affirmation that I am on the right path.
I have two mentors, neither of which did I call. I could have but I have a growing sense that they will leave me behind soon. And if not “soon” anytime in the future will be more than I now believe I can bear.
I can only change myself. They have been a part of that process and there have been times of all consuming dependence yet at each and every turn their encouragement has indicated a will that I do for myself that which God does not provide. God loves and accepts us unconditionally but I’ve not been able to do that for myself. Hadn’t a clue until now.
Good teaching and leadership does that; replaces itself in order that all succeeding generations might do so equally, or nearly so, since God remains always Other; as in I/Thou.
There is enough pain, sorrow and fear in the world. I need to give, or make, peace possible in your life as it has been incarnated in mine. And in the process: do no harm.
. . . "Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none." -- Wm. Shakespeare
When in times of trouble, or doubt, I seek the wisdom of others--all others, including my enemies. To love one’s ‘enemy’ is to accept their right to exist on their own terms without responding in an eye-for-an-eye judgement . . . we learn nothing from killing our ‘enemy’ since in most cases our real adversary is ourselves.
We love our addictions until they fail us, or teach that they are unworthy of pursuit. There is information about God, but the experience of God, is best found in the silence of our hearts individually.
To prove my point I have only to read current headlines and acknowledge that the issue is not “win-lose-or-draw/good, better, best.” Nothing will be possible after the exercise of our power to destroy our enemy since to do so is to destroy ourselves and the world. In a sense we must be part of the solution and not the problem. We are free to wrestle ourselves free of “The sins of the parents . . . “ being our only legacy and/or alternative to that which disturbs our status quo.
To be addicted to anything is to give ownership of yourself to that. Slavery is the dominant position of ignorance and fear. Addiction is rigid while self-knowledge is fluid.
"Sanity may be madness but the maddest of all is to see life as it is and not as it should be"
--Don Quixote:
Gratitude for difficulty
100203 19:01
“A man (person) who has not passed through the inferno of his (their) passions has never overcome them.” --Carl Jung
If I have no honesty with myself I am lost; have no love and no value.
I fled from a dream this morning at 02:30 and read, for hours, to finish “THE LAKE THE RIVER & THE OTHER LAKE” by Steve Amick--in order to escape my dream. And avoid the consequential implications. I attempted to resolve an intuition that my dream had originated in a clergy person--there are no ‘minor’ characters in the novel. Eventually, as the day wore on, my depression turned to despair; finally desolation settled in. The Minister and I share/shared an addiction to pornography available on the Internet. Amick wrote a wonderful sermon for the Minister who . . . well that would spoil it!
Pornography, literally writing about prostitutes, is a business of astonishing profitability. It is like the drug trade in that it requires patrons to thrive. Legislation against, or censorship, will never address the need for the product.
Although I drew, painted and sculpted from nude models, starting at the age of fourteen, nudity was uncommon in my generation.
As a photographer I have avoided opportunities for photographing nude women, for the simple reason that I was terrified of falling in lust/love with them. There was little or no kindness between myself and those I would attach to in childhood. My longing for intimacy was misguided by the ideal of sexual gratification instead of sincere intimacy and mutual vulnerability; what I now know as friendship.
I am no longer surprised at what is now called “sexting,” or the commonplace of sexual intimacy implied by professional and amateur people photographically or in videos.
If I had minimum wage for all the hours lost surfing porn on the Internet I would not, now, have to recycle aluminum cans to eat. Worse. I would not shutter at the arrival of my utility bills or have to avoid general medical care.
Typical of me, I discover myself with too much to write and too little space, or time, to fully develop my thoughts, intentions, goals and objectives.
As a nation we seem obsessed with sex. Rather than moralize in general terms I am compelled to enter/alter my attitudes upwelling from within my psyche. The need for trust, an ability to negotiate both the pleasure and obligations involved with another person. I am very conscious, at the moment, how wonderfully Amick incarnates the ‘urge to merge’ with real love and in a very sincere sense makes both possible through fiction. And, at that, how poorly I’ve done limping through failed relationships; one-after-another.
I recognize how fraught with peril the issue was between myself and mom. How her attitudes regarding sex and our general relationship distorted my ability to be fully honest and fearless in my relationships with women. Add to which at my age most of the women I encounter are irrevocably damaged from abuse imposed upon them by former relationships . . . exactly as I was.
If there is any benefit to my confession it is that by example I might help those, like my former self, to enter into friendships with women, or love of your choice, to discover intimacy is not exclusively sexual.
In the news this evening, the issue of homosexuality was prevalent. I laughed when I thought, what if the accusation was made “You are heterosexual!” and therefor untrustworthy.
Sex, religion, politics, death and taxes are all too difficult for us to accept without fear. Or are they?
In love there is no fear--at least that is my summary of a difficult day. At issue is what do we cling to by way of truth? Does it work in current time? My metaphor: myself in the middle of the Pacific clinging to a slowly deflating rubber life vest. No government or religion can re-inflate the support I once depended upon.
I am grateful for this difficult day now resolved in peace.
“A man (person) who has not passed through the inferno of his (their) passions has never overcome them.” --Carl Jung
If I have no honesty with myself I am lost; have no love and no value.
I fled from a dream this morning at 02:30 and read, for hours, to finish “THE LAKE THE RIVER & THE OTHER LAKE” by Steve Amick--in order to escape my dream. And avoid the consequential implications. I attempted to resolve an intuition that my dream had originated in a clergy person--there are no ‘minor’ characters in the novel. Eventually, as the day wore on, my depression turned to despair; finally desolation settled in. The Minister and I share/shared an addiction to pornography available on the Internet. Amick wrote a wonderful sermon for the Minister who . . . well that would spoil it!
Pornography, literally writing about prostitutes, is a business of astonishing profitability. It is like the drug trade in that it requires patrons to thrive. Legislation against, or censorship, will never address the need for the product.
Although I drew, painted and sculpted from nude models, starting at the age of fourteen, nudity was uncommon in my generation.
As a photographer I have avoided opportunities for photographing nude women, for the simple reason that I was terrified of falling in lust/love with them. There was little or no kindness between myself and those I would attach to in childhood. My longing for intimacy was misguided by the ideal of sexual gratification instead of sincere intimacy and mutual vulnerability; what I now know as friendship.
I am no longer surprised at what is now called “sexting,” or the commonplace of sexual intimacy implied by professional and amateur people photographically or in videos.
If I had minimum wage for all the hours lost surfing porn on the Internet I would not, now, have to recycle aluminum cans to eat. Worse. I would not shutter at the arrival of my utility bills or have to avoid general medical care.
Typical of me, I discover myself with too much to write and too little space, or time, to fully develop my thoughts, intentions, goals and objectives.
As a nation we seem obsessed with sex. Rather than moralize in general terms I am compelled to enter/alter my attitudes upwelling from within my psyche. The need for trust, an ability to negotiate both the pleasure and obligations involved with another person. I am very conscious, at the moment, how wonderfully Amick incarnates the ‘urge to merge’ with real love and in a very sincere sense makes both possible through fiction. And, at that, how poorly I’ve done limping through failed relationships; one-after-another.
I recognize how fraught with peril the issue was between myself and mom. How her attitudes regarding sex and our general relationship distorted my ability to be fully honest and fearless in my relationships with women. Add to which at my age most of the women I encounter are irrevocably damaged from abuse imposed upon them by former relationships . . . exactly as I was.
If there is any benefit to my confession it is that by example I might help those, like my former self, to enter into friendships with women, or love of your choice, to discover intimacy is not exclusively sexual.
In the news this evening, the issue of homosexuality was prevalent. I laughed when I thought, what if the accusation was made “You are heterosexual!” and therefor untrustworthy.
Sex, religion, politics, death and taxes are all too difficult for us to accept without fear. Or are they?
In love there is no fear--at least that is my summary of a difficult day. At issue is what do we cling to by way of truth? Does it work in current time? My metaphor: myself in the middle of the Pacific clinging to a slowly deflating rubber life vest. No government or religion can re-inflate the support I once depended upon.
I am grateful for this difficult day now resolved in peace.
. . . to dream, perchance to see and be known by God
100202 06:50
I am not all goodness and light, and my dreams reveal this to me.
I encountered the experience of being dishonest, venal and culpable in an entire dream scenario. The situation was resolved and I was chastened by my own judgment. In this way I know myself, and the Other, who is my “higher power.”
The first fiction I’ve read in six months was written by Steve Amick whose: “THE LAKE THE RIVER & THE OTHER LAKE” and “NOTHING BUT A SMILE” have given me much joy and sorrow for us; our generation, and that of my parents. I cannot recommend your attention to both novels too highly.
Lao Tzu; Chinese taoist Philosopher, founder of Taoism, wrote "Tao Te Ching" (also "The Book of the Way"). 600 BC-531 BC was discovered @ Wikiquote and explored @ http://en.thinkexist.com/quotes/Lao_Tzu/ and I give credit to these author’s as the yeast of my dream. Discovering them is significant to my process of becoming what I long to be and I will give you only one quote from Lao Tzu; “The way to do is to be.”
At the beginning of my dream I protested the injustice of my situation and in the end recognized my complicity in it.
For me creativity is a solitary process and to enter it takes a passionate desire . . . and disregard for all else. There are communal arts which I have participated in. With musicians, singers, actors, and were I not so large I would have been a dancer--to me the greatest mode of prayer. I am especially aware of film making. I avoided participation since I presumed I would be revealed as the village idiot through two mechanisms: no authority and the folly of my conceits. Now I realize that we are all moving in the creation of life with all our failures and successes. Art incarnates salvation; opening doors for the rest of us.
I remember the epithets bequeathed to me by my parents while we lived together. And I am stunned to realize that I have shifted my perception and experience from that which was given, into my own. Sadly I now conclude that they were consumers of life rather than being producers, but then, they “produced” me.
Nothing is merely anything, all life has significance, and I mourn for the assissinated wolves, as I do the earth we pollute. Yet I still long to know the name and the soul of that which cannot be know personally in life.
“The name that can be named is not the eternal Name.” --Lao Tzu
I am not all goodness and light, and my dreams reveal this to me.
I encountered the experience of being dishonest, venal and culpable in an entire dream scenario. The situation was resolved and I was chastened by my own judgment. In this way I know myself, and the Other, who is my “higher power.”
The first fiction I’ve read in six months was written by Steve Amick whose: “THE LAKE THE RIVER & THE OTHER LAKE” and “NOTHING BUT A SMILE” have given me much joy and sorrow for us; our generation, and that of my parents. I cannot recommend your attention to both novels too highly.
Lao Tzu; Chinese taoist Philosopher, founder of Taoism, wrote "Tao Te Ching" (also "The Book of the Way"). 600 BC-531 BC was discovered @ Wikiquote and explored @ http://en.thinkexist.com/quotes/Lao_Tzu/ and I give credit to these author’s as the yeast of my dream. Discovering them is significant to my process of becoming what I long to be and I will give you only one quote from Lao Tzu; “The way to do is to be.”
At the beginning of my dream I protested the injustice of my situation and in the end recognized my complicity in it.
For me creativity is a solitary process and to enter it takes a passionate desire . . . and disregard for all else. There are communal arts which I have participated in. With musicians, singers, actors, and were I not so large I would have been a dancer--to me the greatest mode of prayer. I am especially aware of film making. I avoided participation since I presumed I would be revealed as the village idiot through two mechanisms: no authority and the folly of my conceits. Now I realize that we are all moving in the creation of life with all our failures and successes. Art incarnates salvation; opening doors for the rest of us.
I remember the epithets bequeathed to me by my parents while we lived together. And I am stunned to realize that I have shifted my perception and experience from that which was given, into my own. Sadly I now conclude that they were consumers of life rather than being producers, but then, they “produced” me.
Nothing is merely anything, all life has significance, and I mourn for the assissinated wolves, as I do the earth we pollute. Yet I still long to know the name and the soul of that which cannot be know personally in life.
“The name that can be named is not the eternal Name.” --Lao Tzu
Are should & ought your reflex?
100201 06:33
Am I a Dreamcatcher? I don’t know and have no tribe to interpret for. But in the privacy of my soul I more often sense shamanism than what I once longed to be; a priest. Once we’ve crept from beneath the monoliths of should & ought we can become antenna’s for good, and in sharing that good, make room for more wealth than is conceivable.
I have heard and read, and then confirmed, through the agency of my life experience, that we devote most of our energy to defending our self concept. In the abstract we use only ten percent of our actual self and ignore, deny or avoid the other ninety percent . . . metaphorically stealing from ourselves. Then in death we make room for the next generation to go through it all over again.
I am at peace with myself and happily so. I don’t envy anyone: good, bad or indifferent.
I watch people. I’ve been doing it all my life and the nature of my observation tells me what I need to move towards and away from in the tribe of the human species. I am a journalist and better understand the nature and origin of the motive now . . . what motivates us was there before and will remain long after ‘WE’ are gone. It is not what we have and give but what we receive in the flow of Creation. My sense is that we are all equal in our creation but define ourselves differently in the constructs of fear. Our history is written by the victors and that of the victims destroyed.
In science we have discovered ourselves 51% of one gender and 49% of the opposite. I apply this principal definition as moving towards integration both personally and collectively . . . oddly I fell to pondering the phrase “be born again.” In pragmatic terms it would seem, experientially, that to be so, is to see everything differently. For me it has taken several ‘rebirths’ to get where I am. In the first instance I was overwhelmed by an instant expansion of faculties I had not previously experienced; the duration of which lasted for, approximately thirty six hours. I now conclude that my greatest personal anguish and addictions were clung to in order to avoid the energy implied by ‘rebirth.’
At the dawn of this day I realized that I am woven into a sea of synchronicity so profound that I often am filled with wonder and joy; but confused as to what to do with the experience. Although I realize myself as I actually am: age, gender, race etc. I am more conscious now of my infancy in what is to come. It is not my role to do anything but convince you that this is potential in knowing and loving yourself: accepting yourself exactly as you are: unique, precious, loved, forgiven and within the foretaste of salvation.
We are in eternity. Our consciousness is merely being dipped into it. The delusion is that we are going to be dry sooner or later . . . everything is an I and Thou . . . “"I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand." --Confucius
. . . are we there yet?
Am I a Dreamcatcher? I don’t know and have no tribe to interpret for. But in the privacy of my soul I more often sense shamanism than what I once longed to be; a priest. Once we’ve crept from beneath the monoliths of should & ought we can become antenna’s for good, and in sharing that good, make room for more wealth than is conceivable.
I have heard and read, and then confirmed, through the agency of my life experience, that we devote most of our energy to defending our self concept. In the abstract we use only ten percent of our actual self and ignore, deny or avoid the other ninety percent . . . metaphorically stealing from ourselves. Then in death we make room for the next generation to go through it all over again.
I am at peace with myself and happily so. I don’t envy anyone: good, bad or indifferent.
I watch people. I’ve been doing it all my life and the nature of my observation tells me what I need to move towards and away from in the tribe of the human species. I am a journalist and better understand the nature and origin of the motive now . . . what motivates us was there before and will remain long after ‘WE’ are gone. It is not what we have and give but what we receive in the flow of Creation. My sense is that we are all equal in our creation but define ourselves differently in the constructs of fear. Our history is written by the victors and that of the victims destroyed.
In science we have discovered ourselves 51% of one gender and 49% of the opposite. I apply this principal definition as moving towards integration both personally and collectively . . . oddly I fell to pondering the phrase “be born again.” In pragmatic terms it would seem, experientially, that to be so, is to see everything differently. For me it has taken several ‘rebirths’ to get where I am. In the first instance I was overwhelmed by an instant expansion of faculties I had not previously experienced; the duration of which lasted for, approximately thirty six hours. I now conclude that my greatest personal anguish and addictions were clung to in order to avoid the energy implied by ‘rebirth.’
At the dawn of this day I realized that I am woven into a sea of synchronicity so profound that I often am filled with wonder and joy; but confused as to what to do with the experience. Although I realize myself as I actually am: age, gender, race etc. I am more conscious now of my infancy in what is to come. It is not my role to do anything but convince you that this is potential in knowing and loving yourself: accepting yourself exactly as you are: unique, precious, loved, forgiven and within the foretaste of salvation.
We are in eternity. Our consciousness is merely being dipped into it. The delusion is that we are going to be dry sooner or later . . . everything is an I and Thou . . . “"I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand." --Confucius
. . . are we there yet?
Is Heaven for everyone?
100131 08:16
I am saved.
And the truth of my salvation is what I write to suggest as available to all people.
Yet there is a special dedication, of mine, to those, who like me, were schooled in agony, rejected, abandoned, despised and lived alone in desolation.
We do not live, we survive in a barrenness of subsistence. To presume because we are not dead--yet--that we live, have being, value and long to be loved is false. What I have come to sense is the evil of waste.
The more I acknowledge and accept my addictions, the greater becomes my empathy and acceptance of that choice in others to adorn their lives with sex, money, power, celebrity, rape and violence.
In a sincere sense we are all criminals against Humanity; as I once was against myself. Empathy is endless; in order to have validity/truth in me I must be both victim and victimizer.
If Jesus and Dietrich Bonhoeffer forgave those who persecuted and assassinated them then I must forgive myself for doing the same to all my Self. For me it is to forget the pain and remember only the joy now that was given me by those against whom I railed, was enraged with, and imagined destroying. So dependent was I upon their definitions of me as unworthy of life or love I could not conceive of simply stepping back or forward in any issue of conflict and saying “Thank You!” As elastic as I have become, I know God to be infinitely more so.
If I am unwilling, unable or not allowed to question the choices of authority, including the validity of God, then I am equally disabled from accepting them. I am a victim of no one; and less so of myself.
In this moment I wonder how I came to be myself as I am now. The first image was of a nest of baby birds, probably pigeons, at my four-year-old feet. Their beaks a yawing rictus of hunger their eyes sealed in death. If ET rode home on a bicycle with a newspaper delivery persons basket in front, then I began my journey upon a red tricycle then. I had a life alone and I loved it, but lost it in the house(s) of others who I attempted to attach with who did not nor ever could, in this lifetime, love themselves. When I said, thought or asked for love it was merely a request to fill the yawing abyss of my self then. My sins of commission or omission have been reconciled and my love is my truth given without expectation of reward. I suggest that such salvation is yours for the asking but there is one caveat you can only give it away.
. . . I wept when my children died and begrudged the wisdom of “Suffer the little children to come unto me.” Only in my dotage can accept that I too am a child to all that is whole, true and love.
There are two other requests made by me of the Universe at Large: “every falling leaf is significant” and the ideal “we/I must grow large enough to receive love” . . . I am well aware of the subtext: “God.”
What we are, or can be, is a before, during and after, what we call life.
What I recommend cannot be found in any form, or construct, of divination--all, to me--are merely about and not Truth as Love.
To know and love yourself, as you are, is to enter the only thing we can change in life, ourselves. And change is the only true constant in all the universe. . . . so call me the suicide bomber of love. . . .my only salvation is found here and now through the choice to do no harm. Tell that to the banana I had for breakfast!?
Yeah. I do talk to plants and have gratitude for their sacrifice that I remain vertical for another day.
I am saved.
And the truth of my salvation is what I write to suggest as available to all people.
Yet there is a special dedication, of mine, to those, who like me, were schooled in agony, rejected, abandoned, despised and lived alone in desolation.
We do not live, we survive in a barrenness of subsistence. To presume because we are not dead--yet--that we live, have being, value and long to be loved is false. What I have come to sense is the evil of waste.
The more I acknowledge and accept my addictions, the greater becomes my empathy and acceptance of that choice in others to adorn their lives with sex, money, power, celebrity, rape and violence.
In a sincere sense we are all criminals against Humanity; as I once was against myself. Empathy is endless; in order to have validity/truth in me I must be both victim and victimizer.
If Jesus and Dietrich Bonhoeffer forgave those who persecuted and assassinated them then I must forgive myself for doing the same to all my Self. For me it is to forget the pain and remember only the joy now that was given me by those against whom I railed, was enraged with, and imagined destroying. So dependent was I upon their definitions of me as unworthy of life or love I could not conceive of simply stepping back or forward in any issue of conflict and saying “Thank You!” As elastic as I have become, I know God to be infinitely more so.
If I am unwilling, unable or not allowed to question the choices of authority, including the validity of God, then I am equally disabled from accepting them. I am a victim of no one; and less so of myself.
In this moment I wonder how I came to be myself as I am now. The first image was of a nest of baby birds, probably pigeons, at my four-year-old feet. Their beaks a yawing rictus of hunger their eyes sealed in death. If ET rode home on a bicycle with a newspaper delivery persons basket in front, then I began my journey upon a red tricycle then. I had a life alone and I loved it, but lost it in the house(s) of others who I attempted to attach with who did not nor ever could, in this lifetime, love themselves. When I said, thought or asked for love it was merely a request to fill the yawing abyss of my self then. My sins of commission or omission have been reconciled and my love is my truth given without expectation of reward. I suggest that such salvation is yours for the asking but there is one caveat you can only give it away.
. . . I wept when my children died and begrudged the wisdom of “Suffer the little children to come unto me.” Only in my dotage can accept that I too am a child to all that is whole, true and love.
There are two other requests made by me of the Universe at Large: “every falling leaf is significant” and the ideal “we/I must grow large enough to receive love” . . . I am well aware of the subtext: “God.”
What we are, or can be, is a before, during and after, what we call life.
What I recommend cannot be found in any form, or construct, of divination--all, to me--are merely about and not Truth as Love.
To know and love yourself, as you are, is to enter the only thing we can change in life, ourselves. And change is the only true constant in all the universe. . . . so call me the suicide bomber of love. . . .my only salvation is found here and now through the choice to do no harm. Tell that to the banana I had for breakfast!?
Yeah. I do talk to plants and have gratitude for their sacrifice that I remain vertical for another day.
Defining Heaven and salvation
100130 06:23
Salvation is defined differently across the world, and by origin, through religions based upon the prophets whose theologies they were founded in. For me the issue was never really important until I was approximately forty-years-of-age. Having said that, it occurs to me there were other times and concerns forming my thoughts and experiences in this moment starting in childhood.
It is a difficult topic about which I am fluid having found nothing within any religion to fully put my weight upon. Or large enough to contain my heart.
My conscience is my property, responsibility and what I act upon in the ordinary of my life. If I advocate a personal salvation it is available for all life--yet I am not judge, jury, or executioner of anyone or anything.
Those who advocate historically for individual rights and responsibilities are few and less attended than the institutions of governance, religion or philosophy who initiate crimes against all others who do not believe, or blindly obey their dictates.
It is not what we say, but what we do, that will be the measure of our value to life, truth, love and peace.
In a sense we walk upon the graves of all lives that preceded ours, as we will be walked upon by all those who replace us.
I write for those of us, who like me, were crippled by their biological parentage, the society, culture and civilization in which we have life. The dysfunctions an disabilities I have limped through life with have been reconciled into a whole entity. A Self growing daily conscious of a simple thought announced in the privacy of my heart. That I/we must grow large enough to receive the love of--whatever you want/need to call God.
Salvation is defined differently across the world, and by origin, through religions based upon the prophets whose theologies they were founded in. For me the issue was never really important until I was approximately forty-years-of-age. Having said that, it occurs to me there were other times and concerns forming my thoughts and experiences in this moment starting in childhood.
It is a difficult topic about which I am fluid having found nothing within any religion to fully put my weight upon. Or large enough to contain my heart.
My conscience is my property, responsibility and what I act upon in the ordinary of my life. If I advocate a personal salvation it is available for all life--yet I am not judge, jury, or executioner of anyone or anything.
Those who advocate historically for individual rights and responsibilities are few and less attended than the institutions of governance, religion or philosophy who initiate crimes against all others who do not believe, or blindly obey their dictates.
It is not what we say, but what we do, that will be the measure of our value to life, truth, love and peace.
In a sense we walk upon the graves of all lives that preceded ours, as we will be walked upon by all those who replace us.
I write for those of us, who like me, were crippled by their biological parentage, the society, culture and civilization in which we have life. The dysfunctions an disabilities I have limped through life with have been reconciled into a whole entity. A Self growing daily conscious of a simple thought announced in the privacy of my heart. That I/we must grow large enough to receive the love of--whatever you want/need to call God.
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Friday, January 29, 2010
"Be like a postage stamp. Stick to one thing until you get there." --Josh Billings
100129 04:57
{Today is a demarcation between yesterday and today’s dedication towards a new direction/definition.}
“Jack Spratt’s 69 cent Guide to Salvation”
©2010 by Jack Spratt All Rights Reserved
. . . well guys I never asked to be born and obviously had nothing to with the name on my birth certificate so here goes . . .
I was “sawing wood.” What we, in my soon to disappear generation, called sleeping. And I had a vision in my dreams. It was a miniature scenario, sort of like a geode, something you could hold in one hand. Fascinating but too small and intricate to really see. So small it was sorta, kind of, like the City of Chicago in miniature. So I looked closer, then closer yet, and suddenly in the very center I saw two people on a handcar crossing a bridge on an elevated railroad track; what we Windy City dudes call the ‘El’.
Well folks I started laughing in my sleep and my smile lit up the darkness like the end brought to you by nuclear fusion and all my questions were answered.
My dad always seemed to need to be remembered as special. He was. Between us we had this madly rude, salacious and ribald humor about everything. God included. So at first I thought the other person, opposite me, pumping wildly away was dad, Jesus, or, maybe God Him/Herself. And then, low and behold I imagined Osama bin Laden and Mohammad . . . you get the picture. Don’t you!?
Railroad tracks always go someplace and they are always parallel; we are born, we live and then we die.
Right?!
What we do in life is, sorta, kinda, the energy we apply to moving towards the inevitable. And knowing myself--well--I know I’ve just been along for the ride for most of it.
. . . which reminds me of bridges I’ve crossed at 100mph + on my way to high school in daddies green Ford Station Wagon with the Thunderbird engine. It wasn’t that I was anxious to get there. I didn’t want to go there. No Sir! Didn’t want to live either. Oddly his best friend, and a guy I liked a lot, was killed there in a rear-end traffic accident: Route 95, bridge over the Mianus River Bridge, Cos Cob, Connecticut. The bridge later fell apart and killed three people in the river below. And now, come to think of it, I remember several other kids speeding away from the police, State or Local, who went in the drink as well before the defective bridge was installed.
I don’t know who is the greatest comedian, God or Life.
Long time ago I fell in love with a young woman who treated me with kindness. Nice looking girl, but not a ravisher like those you see in Playboy or the movies. We met in Haiti on a religious retreat. I was growing a beard at the time and it came in white; like I had stuck my face into a bag of powdered sugar donuts, I shaved it off. After all I was old enough to be her father but did not want to look like her grandfather.. Women, to me, are like a Greyhound Bus moving through the night and I’m a moth attracted to light winding up a greasy smear on their headlights. Whatever you want to call what you love, the other is more-or-less like that; Bang! Smash! Everything changes.. . . Disintegration.
I began a journal after my encounter. The primary motive was given to me by a cleric whose attention I sought to figure out why my life didn’t work. He said that there was a person who’d made himself sane by keeping one and so I began to write. . . .Some days as many as eighteen pages single space. I was taught, at any early age, that I was “too stupid to get in out of the rain” and other wonderful epitaphs like “you have diarrhea of the mouth” so most of what I wrote--along with everything else I ever created--is resting in a sanitary landfill in Naperville Illinois. Maybe dad was correct; I’m still writing.
--Josh Billings
"Be like a postage stamp. Stick to one thing until you get there."
{Today is a demarcation between yesterday and today’s dedication towards a new direction/definition.}
“Jack Spratt’s 69 cent Guide to Salvation”
©2010 by Jack Spratt All Rights Reserved
. . . well guys I never asked to be born and obviously had nothing to with the name on my birth certificate so here goes . . .
I was “sawing wood.” What we, in my soon to disappear generation, called sleeping. And I had a vision in my dreams. It was a miniature scenario, sort of like a geode, something you could hold in one hand. Fascinating but too small and intricate to really see. So small it was sorta, kind of, like the City of Chicago in miniature. So I looked closer, then closer yet, and suddenly in the very center I saw two people on a handcar crossing a bridge on an elevated railroad track; what we Windy City dudes call the ‘El’.
Well folks I started laughing in my sleep and my smile lit up the darkness like the end brought to you by nuclear fusion and all my questions were answered.
My dad always seemed to need to be remembered as special. He was. Between us we had this madly rude, salacious and ribald humor about everything. God included. So at first I thought the other person, opposite me, pumping wildly away was dad, Jesus, or, maybe God Him/Herself. And then, low and behold I imagined Osama bin Laden and Mohammad . . . you get the picture. Don’t you!?
Railroad tracks always go someplace and they are always parallel; we are born, we live and then we die.
Right?!
What we do in life is, sorta, kinda, the energy we apply to moving towards the inevitable. And knowing myself--well--I know I’ve just been along for the ride for most of it.
. . . which reminds me of bridges I’ve crossed at 100mph + on my way to high school in daddies green Ford Station Wagon with the Thunderbird engine. It wasn’t that I was anxious to get there. I didn’t want to go there. No Sir! Didn’t want to live either. Oddly his best friend, and a guy I liked a lot, was killed there in a rear-end traffic accident: Route 95, bridge over the Mianus River Bridge, Cos Cob, Connecticut. The bridge later fell apart and killed three people in the river below. And now, come to think of it, I remember several other kids speeding away from the police, State or Local, who went in the drink as well before the defective bridge was installed.
I don’t know who is the greatest comedian, God or Life.
Long time ago I fell in love with a young woman who treated me with kindness. Nice looking girl, but not a ravisher like those you see in Playboy or the movies. We met in Haiti on a religious retreat. I was growing a beard at the time and it came in white; like I had stuck my face into a bag of powdered sugar donuts, I shaved it off. After all I was old enough to be her father but did not want to look like her grandfather.. Women, to me, are like a Greyhound Bus moving through the night and I’m a moth attracted to light winding up a greasy smear on their headlights. Whatever you want to call what you love, the other is more-or-less like that; Bang! Smash! Everything changes.. . . Disintegration.
I began a journal after my encounter. The primary motive was given to me by a cleric whose attention I sought to figure out why my life didn’t work. He said that there was a person who’d made himself sane by keeping one and so I began to write. . . .Some days as many as eighteen pages single space. I was taught, at any early age, that I was “too stupid to get in out of the rain” and other wonderful epitaphs like “you have diarrhea of the mouth” so most of what I wrote--along with everything else I ever created--is resting in a sanitary landfill in Naperville Illinois. Maybe dad was correct; I’m still writing.
--Josh Billings
"Be like a postage stamp. Stick to one thing until you get there."
. . . soars amongst the stars . . .
100128 05:41
Soar like an eagle
live like a dove
be love four squared
when you love give yourself
To know this in my dreams, what awakens and writes, still soars amongst the stars
. . . if I weep for joy it is no shame, for a person who knows death, knows life better. Your time will come sooner than you know it now, for you are held in the highest regard by the Author of Love;
We all are.
I do not write for you, or for me, but the source of light seeking us in the darkest, coldest frozen night. And I am but a paper match struck in the infinite mirror night sea covered with stars soon extinguished.
Regarding love, I was and remain, will always be, a Wild Child. Whose reverence for the Other/others is profoundly silent. Night en-kindled and burned luminescent. My love rejected, or welcomed, remains constant, since it is mine to give. We are love. Suffused in Love. Yet long for it from others until we love ourselves enough to know it now and definitively our own--given/received.
Attempting to understand the warp and woof, the spinning clay of this day, or iron of those in harms way disintegrated, I listened to the State of The Nation and following commentaries. What remains were a few comments, rude and salacious, regarding the mockery of us. We who voted and thought we were moving forward now slipped back into the mire of loss.
Everything is either political, theological or philosophical. Our value is ours to give and can never be measured by those who send us, or take our gifts, to their own power or profit.
Spiritually I stand in line for the showers/ovens of Auschwitz, in the night’s snow upon the mountain passes of Afghanistan; skull cap, helmet, or Swastika I become all persons enslaved to the agenda’s of those who purport to administer life and it’s meaning.
In my self I become love for others and through them The Other who created us equally.
Soar like an eagle
live like a dove
be love four squared
when you love give yourself
To know this in my dreams, what awakens and writes, still soars amongst the stars
. . . if I weep for joy it is no shame, for a person who knows death, knows life better. Your time will come sooner than you know it now, for you are held in the highest regard by the Author of Love;
We all are.
I do not write for you, or for me, but the source of light seeking us in the darkest, coldest frozen night. And I am but a paper match struck in the infinite mirror night sea covered with stars soon extinguished.
Regarding love, I was and remain, will always be, a Wild Child. Whose reverence for the Other/others is profoundly silent. Night en-kindled and burned luminescent. My love rejected, or welcomed, remains constant, since it is mine to give. We are love. Suffused in Love. Yet long for it from others until we love ourselves enough to know it now and definitively our own--given/received.
Attempting to understand the warp and woof, the spinning clay of this day, or iron of those in harms way disintegrated, I listened to the State of The Nation and following commentaries. What remains were a few comments, rude and salacious, regarding the mockery of us. We who voted and thought we were moving forward now slipped back into the mire of loss.
Everything is either political, theological or philosophical. Our value is ours to give and can never be measured by those who send us, or take our gifts, to their own power or profit.
Spiritually I stand in line for the showers/ovens of Auschwitz, in the night’s snow upon the mountain passes of Afghanistan; skull cap, helmet, or Swastika I become all persons enslaved to the agenda’s of those who purport to administer life and it’s meaning.
In my self I become love for others and through them The Other who created us equally.
Pollyanna I am not.
100127 06:09
“Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” --Carl Jung
In conversation with random strangers I discover we live in a world community having a love affair with all life. Rippling outward our concerns lave all others equally. If there is a difference it is not measured, or weighed, by age, race, creed or gender. Merely expressed differently--exclusive, or inclusively--by degree, not kind.
Every experience, thought and dream, reconciles us through the prism of our attention. Perhaps it is a luxury of maturity; I ‘think therefore I am’ . . . what I am--from childhood until now is fully realized and growing. We are all related to one another and none should be sunned.
There are some I meet, &/or am aware of, that I would place personal limits on, those who take instead of give. Not to banish so much as know better than to follow them into their conceits or agendas blindly.
We all have an awareness of life, and love ours, yet remain unsure of all others who share this planet. My curiosity is reconciled to a model person of empathy for those who killed Him. And through my thoughts/conclusions now I know you and myself better.
To reconcile all the diversity of experience I encounter is pointless since I would not tamper with one character in the book of you--think letter, symbol or personality.
I play with my curiosity regarding the issue of “Original Sin” and conclude, with growing conviction, that it was, and remains, a perversion of consciousness to respond in fear and flight. The alternative--fight, is of no interest since I prefer the word engage. I feel as though I am simply a shuttle cock wending my way through the tapestry of life weaving a new image of potential for consciousness and conscience. Where once I would name the weaver I can no longer do so since the Name is various, even multitudinous; expressed, experienced and seen differently by others.
None choose to be born and the choice to die, by few, is seized upon, by choice or chance. All else, the in between is, in truth, our choice. Though we costume our lives with identities, badge, rank, symbols of power yet we will join in death equally.
“ 11:09
Pollyanna I am not. I am too conscious of our conflicts on every front. Yet I persist in seeing the good instead of the waste made of life, liberty and peace. My experience and vision/version of the future is informed by various, historical and contemporary resources that all affirm our choice to become what we want the world to be. Again I return to “The Serenity Prayer” and am compelled to acknowledge that while it WORKS! it took a long time to take root in me. My thoughts and prayers have become a bridge from our true self to truth, love and peace. I offer this to you who are willing to take the first simple step towards that self inherent in your life. Every soul is precious, period.
“Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” --Carl Jung
In conversation with random strangers I discover we live in a world community having a love affair with all life. Rippling outward our concerns lave all others equally. If there is a difference it is not measured, or weighed, by age, race, creed or gender. Merely expressed differently--exclusive, or inclusively--by degree, not kind.
Every experience, thought and dream, reconciles us through the prism of our attention. Perhaps it is a luxury of maturity; I ‘think therefore I am’ . . . what I am--from childhood until now is fully realized and growing. We are all related to one another and none should be sunned.
There are some I meet, &/or am aware of, that I would place personal limits on, those who take instead of give. Not to banish so much as know better than to follow them into their conceits or agendas blindly.
We all have an awareness of life, and love ours, yet remain unsure of all others who share this planet. My curiosity is reconciled to a model person of empathy for those who killed Him. And through my thoughts/conclusions now I know you and myself better.
To reconcile all the diversity of experience I encounter is pointless since I would not tamper with one character in the book of you--think letter, symbol or personality.
I play with my curiosity regarding the issue of “Original Sin” and conclude, with growing conviction, that it was, and remains, a perversion of consciousness to respond in fear and flight. The alternative--fight, is of no interest since I prefer the word engage. I feel as though I am simply a shuttle cock wending my way through the tapestry of life weaving a new image of potential for consciousness and conscience. Where once I would name the weaver I can no longer do so since the Name is various, even multitudinous; expressed, experienced and seen differently by others.
None choose to be born and the choice to die, by few, is seized upon, by choice or chance. All else, the in between is, in truth, our choice. Though we costume our lives with identities, badge, rank, symbols of power yet we will join in death equally.
“ 11:09
Pollyanna I am not. I am too conscious of our conflicts on every front. Yet I persist in seeing the good instead of the waste made of life, liberty and peace. My experience and vision/version of the future is informed by various, historical and contemporary resources that all affirm our choice to become what we want the world to be. Again I return to “The Serenity Prayer” and am compelled to acknowledge that while it WORKS! it took a long time to take root in me. My thoughts and prayers have become a bridge from our true self to truth, love and peace. I offer this to you who are willing to take the first simple step towards that self inherent in your life. Every soul is precious, period.
Time will erase . . .
100126 07:20
Time will erase the vanity of our era. To be conscious of this one must know our own conceits and delusions. We stand both in the moment and eternity. Let no one, and nothing, define you or the value of your life as poor; too impoverished for their attention or yours.
As a child I sought, and did not receive, the attention of those from whom one would normally presume kindness and I learned to live alone by my own lights. Yet it is true of me that I sought validation from those unable to give it to themselves. And in consequence prostituted my life in service to their poverty. If I love them more now it is merely that I love myself adequately and celebrate their many gifts as sufficient. Enough love was received and that I remember and pray for their healing assured the result.
Time will erase the vanity of our era. To be conscious of this one must know our own conceits and delusions. We stand both in the moment and eternity. Let no one, and nothing, define you or the value of your life as poor; too impoverished for their attention or yours.
As a child I sought, and did not receive, the attention of those from whom one would normally presume kindness and I learned to live alone by my own lights. Yet it is true of me that I sought validation from those unable to give it to themselves. And in consequence prostituted my life in service to their poverty. If I love them more now it is merely that I love myself adequately and celebrate their many gifts as sufficient. Enough love was received and that I remember and pray for their healing assured the result.
“Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous.” -- Albert Einstein
100125 08:43
--Albert Einstein
“All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree.”
“Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous.”
“Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.”
The most starling aspect of my joy--collecting quotes--is that many affirm my intentions and previously annotated thoughts/conclusions. I am reminded of what Albert Schweitzer called the “Brotherhood of Pain.” I reject the sexist aspect now and do translate “Brotherhood” into the “Family of Humankind.” His point was that once we pass beyond the sense and experience that everything is okay we tend to stay in consciousness that to return is impossible and undesirable. Judging by my life, we all go by different paths towards our truth, and those of us who do not, become addicted to one form or another of avoidance and denial. We are all people but few, it seems, are willing to become discrete and unique personalities. By experience, personal and collective, I sense this the origin of most, if not all, dysfunctions. Our unwillingness to take responsibility for, and participate in, our own lives. But then I am well aware of those twists and turns you and I are forced to take and the paths taken by choice.
It is often tempting to say “The Devil Made Me Do It!” The obverse is equally true in that some, perhaps too many, say the same thing about God. To be self-righteous is equally false since it leads to control, dominance and manipulation of others to the extreme of killing them for disagreement. The world does not belong to any one race, creed, gender or age. The power to destroy moves from one sane become lunatic civilization or epoch to another and the folly of the former revealed and reviled.
Moving into society, at large, I seek not affirmation of my conclusions but a sincere sense of what people want and need.
I am better informed by my failures in life than by my successes. Such success I have experienced were once jealously proclaimed yet experientially hollow. Upon close examination I came to question my motives and understand that I was seeking my truth from others who could only respond with theirs and none seemed adequate when taken to a logical conclusion imply exclusion of all life, others less worthy or adequate.
The wonderful part of being self-educated, and derived, is to recognize that all life seeks the same freedom from tyranny and fear. My sense and conviction of the numinous is inclusive of all life and not exclusive to a few forms or individuals. My normal inquiry swiftly reveals motives of taking rather than giving; to take is self-impoverishment and to give is to know a greater wealth. After a lifetime of shame I have begun to choose my truths as passed through the prism of what had former been a mirror; ala 1 Corinthians 13. If our minds are prisms then we come to wonder what is the source of the light?
Everyone has a talent for love and life, but few recognize that the greed for either, or both, disables our inherent genius to have abundance defined by our true self as created. Life will teach us everything we need to know . . . in a sense we are in The Presence all the time . . . and the numinous is far more kind and forgiving than all the previous constructs of belief and knowing allow, and so we judge ourselves unworthy of life or love, and the future hopeless. What we are and have are adequate to the intention that life is worthy of continuance.
Thinking of Haiti now, it seems an appropriate simile for my experience of being buried under the rubble of other’s conceits and conclusions. How I survived is all that I wish to share.
--Albert Einstein
“All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree.”
“Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous.”
“Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.”
The most starling aspect of my joy--collecting quotes--is that many affirm my intentions and previously annotated thoughts/conclusions. I am reminded of what Albert Schweitzer called the “Brotherhood of Pain.” I reject the sexist aspect now and do translate “Brotherhood” into the “Family of Humankind.” His point was that once we pass beyond the sense and experience that everything is okay we tend to stay in consciousness that to return is impossible and undesirable. Judging by my life, we all go by different paths towards our truth, and those of us who do not, become addicted to one form or another of avoidance and denial. We are all people but few, it seems, are willing to become discrete and unique personalities. By experience, personal and collective, I sense this the origin of most, if not all, dysfunctions. Our unwillingness to take responsibility for, and participate in, our own lives. But then I am well aware of those twists and turns you and I are forced to take and the paths taken by choice.
It is often tempting to say “The Devil Made Me Do It!” The obverse is equally true in that some, perhaps too many, say the same thing about God. To be self-righteous is equally false since it leads to control, dominance and manipulation of others to the extreme of killing them for disagreement. The world does not belong to any one race, creed, gender or age. The power to destroy moves from one sane become lunatic civilization or epoch to another and the folly of the former revealed and reviled.
Moving into society, at large, I seek not affirmation of my conclusions but a sincere sense of what people want and need.
I am better informed by my failures in life than by my successes. Such success I have experienced were once jealously proclaimed yet experientially hollow. Upon close examination I came to question my motives and understand that I was seeking my truth from others who could only respond with theirs and none seemed adequate when taken to a logical conclusion imply exclusion of all life, others less worthy or adequate.
The wonderful part of being self-educated, and derived, is to recognize that all life seeks the same freedom from tyranny and fear. My sense and conviction of the numinous is inclusive of all life and not exclusive to a few forms or individuals. My normal inquiry swiftly reveals motives of taking rather than giving; to take is self-impoverishment and to give is to know a greater wealth. After a lifetime of shame I have begun to choose my truths as passed through the prism of what had former been a mirror; ala 1 Corinthians 13. If our minds are prisms then we come to wonder what is the source of the light?
Everyone has a talent for love and life, but few recognize that the greed for either, or both, disables our inherent genius to have abundance defined by our true self as created. Life will teach us everything we need to know . . . in a sense we are in The Presence all the time . . . and the numinous is far more kind and forgiving than all the previous constructs of belief and knowing allow, and so we judge ourselves unworthy of life or love, and the future hopeless. What we are and have are adequate to the intention that life is worthy of continuance.
Thinking of Haiti now, it seems an appropriate simile for my experience of being buried under the rubble of other’s conceits and conclusions. How I survived is all that I wish to share.
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Love is not what you have but what you give.
100124 07:13
Nothing that I can report, or make sense of, this morning, regarding last night’s dreams. Yet they were dominated by the event of a friend and nephew’s birthdays. Cause enough for me to ponder the impulse behind my penchant for affirming their births. Which I do with all my friends and family.
I discovered, while processing my dream, an unconscious impulse to tell others how special they are and nurture our community and through this the world at large. I should not be, but remain surprised at the growing list of friends no longer with us. Perhaps this is a mode of prayer which surprises me since it has taken me so long to get a clear sense of what I want to be and have in this life and world. I remember my maternal grandmother’s greeting cards with endorsements eradicated and resent.
These precious days, so near the end of my life, are celebrated daily through affirmations gleaned by a collection of quotes on my iGoogle page. I did not begin the practice until after I had begun the work of establishing boundaries between what is mine and that which is yours. Of course not having a television made it simpler and at this point I no longer want one. You might assume that I am a fan of ‘religious’ radio or some such thing. No. I am offended by anyone shouting anything at me and find that my experience of God is not religious and thus I am not addicted to crutches. If I respect myself respect for all others flows naturally into my consciousness. Then my current and former addictions are clearly drawn. It would stupid of me to say, for instance, that “at least I am not an alcoholic” since both parents were dependent upon at least one quart of their favorite poison daily. I have come to honor them nonetheless and forgive all the fear inculcated in me by them, finding that I love them more than I could understand in all my previous life.
We need no permission to live but that truth was hard won by me. The balance is between respect for our love given freely though denied or otherwise defined as inadequate. Love is a verb, not a noun.
Regardless of what all civilization and culture tells us, by way of entertainment, in retrospect I continue to wonder why, where and when it became apparent to me that I was the origin of my love for all others. And at that my love is given without expectation of return.
I do sense how ridiculous this may seem to others and know it better by how foolish it seemed to me once.
Journal keeping has allowed me to establish a sense of what I am and what I am not. In the privacy of my soul it is possible to accept my folly and sincerity of intent. Equally it is possible for me to weep with gratitude that I have life and live meaningfully, at least to myself. As for you it is my intention to offer the honor of my prayer that you become whole, self knowing and beloved of the truth . . . which, obviously, is God, true and loving.
“ 22:51
This has been an surprising day and I fell exhausted after dinner. I am beset with computer problems: three crashes in the past six months, the last fatal, my old friend expired from old age. When everything else fails I no longer become enraged, or feel victimized by this, or similar events which I am not ashamed to confess motivated hysterical reactions to in former times. Exhaustion can do odd things to our judgement and we never really know what will happen now or in the future. It is not that I do not care it is simply that I am willing to know and accept that which I cannot change and accept my helplessness.
Yet in closing this entry I am revitalized by signs of hope and find within myself expanding boarders of potential in response. I fully accept my follies and failures and forgive myself for being imperfect to the needs we all have to become fully alive and persons becoming healed and whole. I am now at peace with not being a diamond in the rough, or an imperfect pearl. The metaphor of being a “rock polisher” has been transformed into myself as a river stone polished by the abrasions of time. Think of water as the wine of life and its moving me over and over what makes me myself. Replace the word “me” with us or you and accept that all life is love when you give up fear. Love is not what you have but what you give.
Nothing that I can report, or make sense of, this morning, regarding last night’s dreams. Yet they were dominated by the event of a friend and nephew’s birthdays. Cause enough for me to ponder the impulse behind my penchant for affirming their births. Which I do with all my friends and family.
I discovered, while processing my dream, an unconscious impulse to tell others how special they are and nurture our community and through this the world at large. I should not be, but remain surprised at the growing list of friends no longer with us. Perhaps this is a mode of prayer which surprises me since it has taken me so long to get a clear sense of what I want to be and have in this life and world. I remember my maternal grandmother’s greeting cards with endorsements eradicated and resent.
These precious days, so near the end of my life, are celebrated daily through affirmations gleaned by a collection of quotes on my iGoogle page. I did not begin the practice until after I had begun the work of establishing boundaries between what is mine and that which is yours. Of course not having a television made it simpler and at this point I no longer want one. You might assume that I am a fan of ‘religious’ radio or some such thing. No. I am offended by anyone shouting anything at me and find that my experience of God is not religious and thus I am not addicted to crutches. If I respect myself respect for all others flows naturally into my consciousness. Then my current and former addictions are clearly drawn. It would stupid of me to say, for instance, that “at least I am not an alcoholic” since both parents were dependent upon at least one quart of their favorite poison daily. I have come to honor them nonetheless and forgive all the fear inculcated in me by them, finding that I love them more than I could understand in all my previous life.
We need no permission to live but that truth was hard won by me. The balance is between respect for our love given freely though denied or otherwise defined as inadequate. Love is a verb, not a noun.
Regardless of what all civilization and culture tells us, by way of entertainment, in retrospect I continue to wonder why, where and when it became apparent to me that I was the origin of my love for all others. And at that my love is given without expectation of return.
I do sense how ridiculous this may seem to others and know it better by how foolish it seemed to me once.
Journal keeping has allowed me to establish a sense of what I am and what I am not. In the privacy of my soul it is possible to accept my folly and sincerity of intent. Equally it is possible for me to weep with gratitude that I have life and live meaningfully, at least to myself. As for you it is my intention to offer the honor of my prayer that you become whole, self knowing and beloved of the truth . . . which, obviously, is God, true and loving.
“ 22:51
This has been an surprising day and I fell exhausted after dinner. I am beset with computer problems: three crashes in the past six months, the last fatal, my old friend expired from old age. When everything else fails I no longer become enraged, or feel victimized by this, or similar events which I am not ashamed to confess motivated hysterical reactions to in former times. Exhaustion can do odd things to our judgement and we never really know what will happen now or in the future. It is not that I do not care it is simply that I am willing to know and accept that which I cannot change and accept my helplessness.
Yet in closing this entry I am revitalized by signs of hope and find within myself expanding boarders of potential in response. I fully accept my follies and failures and forgive myself for being imperfect to the needs we all have to become fully alive and persons becoming healed and whole. I am now at peace with not being a diamond in the rough, or an imperfect pearl. The metaphor of being a “rock polisher” has been transformed into myself as a river stone polished by the abrasions of time. Think of water as the wine of life and its moving me over and over what makes me myself. Replace the word “me” with us or you and accept that all life is love when you give up fear. Love is not what you have but what you give.
“Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.” --C. S. Lewis
100123 02:46
“Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.” --C. S. Lewis
Some days I’m Toto, and others, I’m Dorothy, twirling in the cyclone of chaos we’re in. We’re not in Kansas any more. In truth I am a man in love with a woman who I, in faith, believe loves me as a friend and our friendship is the greatest love I’ll ever know on this mortal coil. I am as loyal to her as nothing I can understand beyond using the Sufi metaphor for the love of the ‘Devil’ for God. In the myth God says “Be Gone!” and the ‘Devil’ took that as his greatest love and left Heaven behind.
My understanding of grace began long ago with Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea” and is now reconciled with his “To Have, and Have Not.” Perhaps it is inappropriate for me to use/abuse, works that others would understand differently . . . but in life and death I’ll stick with mine, as I do the sense that The Bible is my Handbook, or Owners Manual, for life.
Again, and yet again, I use Confucius’s rendering of the Golden Rule; "How about 'shu' [reciprocity]: never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself(?)"
We are collectively and individually caught in two dimensions: a Tsunami and enveloped in a gossamer web of love with our Creator and all life. In advance I ask you to forgive this simpleton’s conclusion that it is the work of love to accept the beloved as having a equal voice; and through that come to understand the meaning of Jesus’ “Love your enemy.” God will not do for us what we must agree to do amongst ourselves now. Regardless of the power to destroy, there is a greater power capable of making love and life possible.
“The Golden Rule” has a special meaning since it was introduced, conceptually, to me by Bert Bigelow, a onetime neighbor of my parents. He and is wife sailed into the Atomic Test site mid-Pacific ocean to protest the weapon.
Courage to love and act is a talent/genius we all possess, yet it is too often avoided or ignored. The beloved friend did not announce to me that she was a psychologist until after she had saved me from suicide. Our relationship informs my opinions and choices in regard to all things. It is my prayer for all of us that we find such a level of cooperation and move forward making sense of the chaos we are now in. Regardless of resources we have a communal family to reconcile with the future.
“Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.” --C. S. Lewis
Some days I’m Toto, and others, I’m Dorothy, twirling in the cyclone of chaos we’re in. We’re not in Kansas any more. In truth I am a man in love with a woman who I, in faith, believe loves me as a friend and our friendship is the greatest love I’ll ever know on this mortal coil. I am as loyal to her as nothing I can understand beyond using the Sufi metaphor for the love of the ‘Devil’ for God. In the myth God says “Be Gone!” and the ‘Devil’ took that as his greatest love and left Heaven behind.
My understanding of grace began long ago with Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea” and is now reconciled with his “To Have, and Have Not.” Perhaps it is inappropriate for me to use/abuse, works that others would understand differently . . . but in life and death I’ll stick with mine, as I do the sense that The Bible is my Handbook, or Owners Manual, for life.
Again, and yet again, I use Confucius’s rendering of the Golden Rule; "How about 'shu' [reciprocity]: never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself(?)"
We are collectively and individually caught in two dimensions: a Tsunami and enveloped in a gossamer web of love with our Creator and all life. In advance I ask you to forgive this simpleton’s conclusion that it is the work of love to accept the beloved as having a equal voice; and through that come to understand the meaning of Jesus’ “Love your enemy.” God will not do for us what we must agree to do amongst ourselves now. Regardless of the power to destroy, there is a greater power capable of making love and life possible.
“The Golden Rule” has a special meaning since it was introduced, conceptually, to me by Bert Bigelow, a onetime neighbor of my parents. He and is wife sailed into the Atomic Test site mid-Pacific ocean to protest the weapon.
Courage to love and act is a talent/genius we all possess, yet it is too often avoided or ignored. The beloved friend did not announce to me that she was a psychologist until after she had saved me from suicide. Our relationship informs my opinions and choices in regard to all things. It is my prayer for all of us that we find such a level of cooperation and move forward making sense of the chaos we are now in. Regardless of resources we have a communal family to reconcile with the future.
Coincidence or synchronicity?
100122 13:07
Coincidence or synchronicity?
Carl Jung, one of the fathers of contemporary psychology, defined the word ‘synchronicity’ as an “outward manifestation of an inward thought.” We all have moments of revelation when someone else, or another source, is addressing the same issue simultaneous with our thoughts overtly. In my life and times this has happened frequently yet I dismissed the experience as merely coincidence. The consequence was that I muddled along with the ‘best that I could do’ by my own discernment. Or, worse, I fell in love with the source misapprehending the author.
Experience with my own addictions lead me to conclude that I paid too much attention to the person, place or thing I was “addicted “ to.
Everyone, by lose definition, processes life experience through experiential filters: thinking, sensing, feeling or intuition with minor combinations of a secondary influence. I have begun to balance the four instead of the two I normally used inherently.
Retrospectively I should have said “am attempting to integrate” the four kinds of perception. We learn more by our failures than our successes. It is not an ideal of wearing rose colored glasses all the time but of really paying attention to the source of our information. Most of the time we are seeking affirmation of our convictions, “magical thinking”, instead of what we can learn. It follows that when I consume information I am now attempting to parse the meaning of everything I allow into the rock polisher of my mind. More often than not I find myself attempting to understand the motives involved through a filter of prophesy versus profit.
I have nothing against wealth and profit but when it costs me too much I begin to bridle. The consequence is that I vote with my wallet, feet or attention. At the same time I take umbrage at those who use psychology to manipulate me into their ideal behavior and so my response is considered and conscious, not reactionary.
In this regard I sense I’ve painted myself into a corner and find myself addressing, yet again, “Love your enemy.” And flowing into that consideration is a host of other sayings/parables of Jesus that inform me that I am moving in the right direction. “Innocent as a dove and wily as a fox.” Neither are stupid as some would presume.
I was once addicted to dysfunctional relationships, unconscious of my motives to heal them so I could have a life. Despite my many failings I am still moving forward toward a self-derived understanding. No longer worshiping resources that would otherwise use and abuse me to their ends or agendas.
Attention to synchronicity is near constant now. I am often humbled by grace especially that given by strangers and those who actually love/loved me when I could not love or accept myself.
In a sincere sense it was I who failed to respond to all the opportunities freely given in life to live better than I did previously. The primary source of my self-loathing originated in my parents anxiety that I become better able to survive economically--they were both young adults during the Great Depression--so I better understand and forgive their vehemence defining me as “too stupid to get in out of the rain.” If I have empathy for my ‘enemy’ now it is because I was once an enemy to myself.
Coincidence or synchronicity?
Carl Jung, one of the fathers of contemporary psychology, defined the word ‘synchronicity’ as an “outward manifestation of an inward thought.” We all have moments of revelation when someone else, or another source, is addressing the same issue simultaneous with our thoughts overtly. In my life and times this has happened frequently yet I dismissed the experience as merely coincidence. The consequence was that I muddled along with the ‘best that I could do’ by my own discernment. Or, worse, I fell in love with the source misapprehending the author.
Experience with my own addictions lead me to conclude that I paid too much attention to the person, place or thing I was “addicted “ to.
Everyone, by lose definition, processes life experience through experiential filters: thinking, sensing, feeling or intuition with minor combinations of a secondary influence. I have begun to balance the four instead of the two I normally used inherently.
Retrospectively I should have said “am attempting to integrate” the four kinds of perception. We learn more by our failures than our successes. It is not an ideal of wearing rose colored glasses all the time but of really paying attention to the source of our information. Most of the time we are seeking affirmation of our convictions, “magical thinking”, instead of what we can learn. It follows that when I consume information I am now attempting to parse the meaning of everything I allow into the rock polisher of my mind. More often than not I find myself attempting to understand the motives involved through a filter of prophesy versus profit.
I have nothing against wealth and profit but when it costs me too much I begin to bridle. The consequence is that I vote with my wallet, feet or attention. At the same time I take umbrage at those who use psychology to manipulate me into their ideal behavior and so my response is considered and conscious, not reactionary.
In this regard I sense I’ve painted myself into a corner and find myself addressing, yet again, “Love your enemy.” And flowing into that consideration is a host of other sayings/parables of Jesus that inform me that I am moving in the right direction. “Innocent as a dove and wily as a fox.” Neither are stupid as some would presume.
I was once addicted to dysfunctional relationships, unconscious of my motives to heal them so I could have a life. Despite my many failings I am still moving forward toward a self-derived understanding. No longer worshiping resources that would otherwise use and abuse me to their ends or agendas.
Attention to synchronicity is near constant now. I am often humbled by grace especially that given by strangers and those who actually love/loved me when I could not love or accept myself.
In a sincere sense it was I who failed to respond to all the opportunities freely given in life to live better than I did previously. The primary source of my self-loathing originated in my parents anxiety that I become better able to survive economically--they were both young adults during the Great Depression--so I better understand and forgive their vehemence defining me as “too stupid to get in out of the rain.” If I have empathy for my ‘enemy’ now it is because I was once an enemy to myself.
Thursday, January 21, 2010
"One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar."
100121 05:38
We are all artist. Our masterpiece is the creation of our Self. To be known and loved for being our self is asking a bit much of life and others. Since it is apparent, the so few of, the many of us, love or ever really know and accept ourselves. We are in process and waste a great deal of our lives in jealousy and admiration of the lives of those who are esteemed historically.
Sadly it is the criminal who steals life, most often remembered, and in a perverse way celebrated. It is too easy to kill instead of love. An artist of death is feared and fear becomes our ideal polarity.
Yesterday I arrived at a nodal point in my life’s process; a place of choice between going forward or simply destroying not only what I write but what I am. But as an old man I’ve learned patience with myself and am willing to suffer pain. Since I know my end is inevitably near and each moment of life dear.
I am tempted to deconstruct the moments of consequence and the agents of my knowing God’s intervention and what now results in this moment celebrated. We sense, think, intuit or feel God as either an idea or real.
--R. Buckminster Fuller
“Faith is much better than belief. Belief is when someone else does the thinking.”
Love is the catalyst of life. As I wander through the museum of all Creation, including pre-history and the future, I am caught by those few who, as artist, annotate their lives that we better understand and appreciate ours. Artifacts can be worshiped but should become instead portals passed through and into what they tell us about ourselves. God is obviously the greatest artist, and my list of life’s artist surrounds God in a constellation of stars ever expanding. We all have a talent and genius but in general avoid responsibility for that. Instead we become addicted to things, activities, drugs or dances of avoidance proclaiming ourselves as Indian Chiefs, Bakers, Candle Stick Makers, Bankers or consumers. In a profound sense longing for the attention of others to affirm our value and right to live and be loved when we love not ourselves.
I have a vision/version of our collective future, either terminal or infinite, depending upon choices made by, or for, ourselves. I am not impressed by what you say you are but what you do. It is not for me to judge you since that is God’s role and you will know it in the end of your days. Since I love Jesus I wonder what I do on a daily basis to make love possible in an impossible world filled with fear, hatred and greed measuring everything in “Good, Better, Best” ways. Worse; I win, you lose.
Keep it simple stupid. Yes I will admit to my stupidity and longing for simple separation between Church and State. The secular should, in my opinion, always be separate from the sacred. My choice to participate or boycott either, or both, is my responsibility and belongs to no one else; not even God.
I will continue to advocate that you take responsibility for yourself; change what you can, accept what you cannot and discover the wisdom in yourself to accept the difference. Be the best You can be, in that choice you will soon discover that change is welcome and that what you give or take in life defines your faith. My prayers are inclusive and include my “enemies.”
--Helen Keller
"One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar."
We are all artist. Our masterpiece is the creation of our Self. To be known and loved for being our self is asking a bit much of life and others. Since it is apparent, the so few of, the many of us, love or ever really know and accept ourselves. We are in process and waste a great deal of our lives in jealousy and admiration of the lives of those who are esteemed historically.
Sadly it is the criminal who steals life, most often remembered, and in a perverse way celebrated. It is too easy to kill instead of love. An artist of death is feared and fear becomes our ideal polarity.
Yesterday I arrived at a nodal point in my life’s process; a place of choice between going forward or simply destroying not only what I write but what I am. But as an old man I’ve learned patience with myself and am willing to suffer pain. Since I know my end is inevitably near and each moment of life dear.
I am tempted to deconstruct the moments of consequence and the agents of my knowing God’s intervention and what now results in this moment celebrated. We sense, think, intuit or feel God as either an idea or real.
--R. Buckminster Fuller
“Faith is much better than belief. Belief is when someone else does the thinking.”
Love is the catalyst of life. As I wander through the museum of all Creation, including pre-history and the future, I am caught by those few who, as artist, annotate their lives that we better understand and appreciate ours. Artifacts can be worshiped but should become instead portals passed through and into what they tell us about ourselves. God is obviously the greatest artist, and my list of life’s artist surrounds God in a constellation of stars ever expanding. We all have a talent and genius but in general avoid responsibility for that. Instead we become addicted to things, activities, drugs or dances of avoidance proclaiming ourselves as Indian Chiefs, Bakers, Candle Stick Makers, Bankers or consumers. In a profound sense longing for the attention of others to affirm our value and right to live and be loved when we love not ourselves.
I have a vision/version of our collective future, either terminal or infinite, depending upon choices made by, or for, ourselves. I am not impressed by what you say you are but what you do. It is not for me to judge you since that is God’s role and you will know it in the end of your days. Since I love Jesus I wonder what I do on a daily basis to make love possible in an impossible world filled with fear, hatred and greed measuring everything in “Good, Better, Best” ways. Worse; I win, you lose.
Keep it simple stupid. Yes I will admit to my stupidity and longing for simple separation between Church and State. The secular should, in my opinion, always be separate from the sacred. My choice to participate or boycott either, or both, is my responsibility and belongs to no one else; not even God.
I will continue to advocate that you take responsibility for yourself; change what you can, accept what you cannot and discover the wisdom in yourself to accept the difference. Be the best You can be, in that choice you will soon discover that change is welcome and that what you give or take in life defines your faith. My prayers are inclusive and include my “enemies.”
--Helen Keller
"One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar."
Seek the Truth in all things especially yourself
100120 05:02
This dawn I will greet with sadness and departure the life and beliefs I will now leave behind. Sincerely I accept and welcome even the most difficult dreams and do not resent being hurled from my sleep by them. I once thought it grand to sail forth from the safe harbor of my childhood to sail the world, mostly water. Now I anticipate sailing the far vaster stars above the ordinary of earthly life.
The peace within me is a conviction derived from my current awareness the dream compelling me from slumber; God is the ultimate servant hidden within all of us. The avoidance of this simple stunning reality has been costly beyond measure to me and I suspect all others.
As I write I am ever more conscious of attitudes of jealousy regarding the power of others to pursue and persecute me as well as all others they would make victims of . . . at the moment I am thinking of the Black population abandoned after Katrina and now Haiti . . . and I have a special empathy for the AIDS orphans of Africa . . . which in turn reminds me of the widows and orphans on both sides of the conflicts bleeding America dry financially, morally and ethically.
I mean no disrespect for the choices made by either side. And am happily no longer identified by face in association with what I now write. Since to be so is to invite assassination by self-righteous bigotry, punditry and bigotry--merely what has become our National sport of choice.
I am a journalist, not simply in the sense of annotating my feelings and thoughts here and on the Internet. But professionally. I mourn the passing of “Freedom of the Press” and the venues I once enjoyed working for . . . ‘kill the messengers’ is another world-wide sport. Least I digress into a political fulmination, I am reminded that few prophets of the Judeo-Christian tradition died in their sleep and in time all the apostles crucified. A great many have died to defend our national freedoms as have many individuals who also died to keep the dignity of being truly yourself available. That is my ambition and goal, to be your servant, or handmaiden to the birth of your real self, free from fear, self-loathing, tyranny and slavery.
“ 06:10
I will quote you no quotes since it seems I must either use my own words or transliterate into contemporary language something more accessible to our times. We become what we love or nearly so and equally become, essentially what we consume. Seek the truth in all things especially yourself.
This dawn I will greet with sadness and departure the life and beliefs I will now leave behind. Sincerely I accept and welcome even the most difficult dreams and do not resent being hurled from my sleep by them. I once thought it grand to sail forth from the safe harbor of my childhood to sail the world, mostly water. Now I anticipate sailing the far vaster stars above the ordinary of earthly life.
The peace within me is a conviction derived from my current awareness the dream compelling me from slumber; God is the ultimate servant hidden within all of us. The avoidance of this simple stunning reality has been costly beyond measure to me and I suspect all others.
As I write I am ever more conscious of attitudes of jealousy regarding the power of others to pursue and persecute me as well as all others they would make victims of . . . at the moment I am thinking of the Black population abandoned after Katrina and now Haiti . . . and I have a special empathy for the AIDS orphans of Africa . . . which in turn reminds me of the widows and orphans on both sides of the conflicts bleeding America dry financially, morally and ethically.
I mean no disrespect for the choices made by either side. And am happily no longer identified by face in association with what I now write. Since to be so is to invite assassination by self-righteous bigotry, punditry and bigotry--merely what has become our National sport of choice.
I am a journalist, not simply in the sense of annotating my feelings and thoughts here and on the Internet. But professionally. I mourn the passing of “Freedom of the Press” and the venues I once enjoyed working for . . . ‘kill the messengers’ is another world-wide sport. Least I digress into a political fulmination, I am reminded that few prophets of the Judeo-Christian tradition died in their sleep and in time all the apostles crucified. A great many have died to defend our national freedoms as have many individuals who also died to keep the dignity of being truly yourself available. That is my ambition and goal, to be your servant, or handmaiden to the birth of your real self, free from fear, self-loathing, tyranny and slavery.
“ 06:10
I will quote you no quotes since it seems I must either use my own words or transliterate into contemporary language something more accessible to our times. We become what we love or nearly so and equally become, essentially what we consume. Seek the truth in all things especially yourself.
Power is Love
100119 07:18
It is a very wonderful thing that God loves us as we are. I awoke from a dream regarding an important personal failure to achieve a long sought ideal. The recognition of which left me bereft and better described as being humiliated by my choices/behaviors. At issue was salvation. There were three principal characters: myself and two women--described better as two female spirits, souls or entities of importance to me. I am reminded that I am 49% female and have been prone to projecting that reality upon other women to my chagrin; only now recognized.
I remember Dunkirk in reference to my failure. I first read about the event in childhood and imagined God very busy with all the souls who died there. In truth I do so equally now regarding the Middle East and Haiti. And then too are the many genocides within my lifetime.
If I seem overly empathetic regarding others filtered through religious/spiritual contexts, I now accept that I have always been so. Yet in childhood, and until very recently, my preoccupation was impermissible since I gave all authority to others to tell me what God/All Truth/Everything was about. I was ripped, torn, spindled and mutilated by myself in conflict between an innate sense of God’s presence and the need of others to tell me otherwise. I know what it means to be ‘crazy’ and so terrified with anxiety that my life was put into a state of shutdown to survive.
If I have no fear of life, death or dying it is because in a virtual sense I have died so often to myself that death is no stranger--but then neither is the resurrection--now.
Regarding the failure experienced in my dream I have become conscious of several Biblical ‘heroes’ Noah chief among them. My failure was to take that final, step the one assuring me of salvation.
No longer paranoid I sense we are a people in flood tide of chaos and the narrow gate will only accept one soul at a time. If our soul is a lamp there is no profit in sharing the fuel with others who fail to recognize their responsibility to enter. I no longer cringe acknowledging the darkness in others being so well acquainted with my own. I know God as kind, loving and all the things St. Paul described in 1 Corinthian’s 13. Yet in my dream I was a failure, fatally so. The Bible as an owners manual for life, and God as the best and greatest teacher/healer, is by-and-large, held in the hands of people who know about, but do not experience, God as actual. I base my discernment upon a simple standard; God is inclusive and we are exclusive to our own desires and intentions.
Jesus is my root in The Tree of Life. Though I do not think myself exclusively Christian, unwittingly and unwillingly, I have been moved by experience from the root to leaf fallen and recycled. No religion is my enemy since we all seek ascension through life and in death. No one asks to be born and the issue is what do we do in life; what values and meanings apply?
Of late I have taken time to reflect, in the ordinary of my daily life, upon what I have written, sometimes in a frenzy of passion regarding a dream or a resolved conflict. I often become bewildered by the vigor of my statements and attempt to see them with the eyes of others who may not be aware of “God” as anything other than someone/something they call when helpless. Heresy and sedition are issues that I am conscious the definitions of but they seldom factor in to the equation of what I publish or simply table for another day.
My sense and experience of God is very participatory and at the same time something I could be judged as being insane for admitting. I would argue in this case that what we acknowledge as “Power” is too often egos gone awry. It is not for me to decide or define your life but you must by your own lights examine and live it. If Jesus died for us, can I die for you? What is the meaning of life or death?
--R. Buckminster Fuller
“Faith is much better than belief. Belief is when someone else does the thinking.”
It is a very wonderful thing that God loves us as we are. I awoke from a dream regarding an important personal failure to achieve a long sought ideal. The recognition of which left me bereft and better described as being humiliated by my choices/behaviors. At issue was salvation. There were three principal characters: myself and two women--described better as two female spirits, souls or entities of importance to me. I am reminded that I am 49% female and have been prone to projecting that reality upon other women to my chagrin; only now recognized.
I remember Dunkirk in reference to my failure. I first read about the event in childhood and imagined God very busy with all the souls who died there. In truth I do so equally now regarding the Middle East and Haiti. And then too are the many genocides within my lifetime.
If I seem overly empathetic regarding others filtered through religious/spiritual contexts, I now accept that I have always been so. Yet in childhood, and until very recently, my preoccupation was impermissible since I gave all authority to others to tell me what God/All Truth/Everything was about. I was ripped, torn, spindled and mutilated by myself in conflict between an innate sense of God’s presence and the need of others to tell me otherwise. I know what it means to be ‘crazy’ and so terrified with anxiety that my life was put into a state of shutdown to survive.
If I have no fear of life, death or dying it is because in a virtual sense I have died so often to myself that death is no stranger--but then neither is the resurrection--now.
Regarding the failure experienced in my dream I have become conscious of several Biblical ‘heroes’ Noah chief among them. My failure was to take that final, step the one assuring me of salvation.
No longer paranoid I sense we are a people in flood tide of chaos and the narrow gate will only accept one soul at a time. If our soul is a lamp there is no profit in sharing the fuel with others who fail to recognize their responsibility to enter. I no longer cringe acknowledging the darkness in others being so well acquainted with my own. I know God as kind, loving and all the things St. Paul described in 1 Corinthian’s 13. Yet in my dream I was a failure, fatally so. The Bible as an owners manual for life, and God as the best and greatest teacher/healer, is by-and-large, held in the hands of people who know about, but do not experience, God as actual. I base my discernment upon a simple standard; God is inclusive and we are exclusive to our own desires and intentions.
Jesus is my root in The Tree of Life. Though I do not think myself exclusively Christian, unwittingly and unwillingly, I have been moved by experience from the root to leaf fallen and recycled. No religion is my enemy since we all seek ascension through life and in death. No one asks to be born and the issue is what do we do in life; what values and meanings apply?
Of late I have taken time to reflect, in the ordinary of my daily life, upon what I have written, sometimes in a frenzy of passion regarding a dream or a resolved conflict. I often become bewildered by the vigor of my statements and attempt to see them with the eyes of others who may not be aware of “God” as anything other than someone/something they call when helpless. Heresy and sedition are issues that I am conscious the definitions of but they seldom factor in to the equation of what I publish or simply table for another day.
My sense and experience of God is very participatory and at the same time something I could be judged as being insane for admitting. I would argue in this case that what we acknowledge as “Power” is too often egos gone awry. It is not for me to decide or define your life but you must by your own lights examine and live it. If Jesus died for us, can I die for you? What is the meaning of life or death?
--R. Buckminster Fuller
“Faith is much better than belief. Belief is when someone else does the thinking.”
Heaven being torn apart.!?
100118 06:09
I have a vision of Heaven being torn apart. Oddly it was the size of an average roadside billboard which had never been cleaned of all the preceding promises torn from it. For me it was as though I had seen the soul of my daughter raped and then rend limb from limb and I helpless to intervene. This is an image that has been forming in my vision/version of life and its value and directions for a very long time.
Slowly I have come to accept that I gave up my ambition to be something better than I was and remain to serve my son in his final years, then days and terminal hour. His sister’s death preceded Randy’s by years and I bore complicity for leaving her to die in custodial care feeling a rage and agony for that, unspeakable choice, especially with their mother.
I divorced her many years ago yet there is no divorce in my heart. I had to divorce from myself the child I was who knew love as dysfunctional--being addicted to that--what I now call co-dependence.
Many of the images, metaphors and omens are being wiped from my consciousness as I write. Justifiably so since they are history and this is now; reality versus ideals.
If we become what we love then I become something like God. Who as Parent is dispassionate and loves with ferocity stunning to behold . . . what some call, and or imply to be, ‘fear’, I call joy.
To me the reality of God is best expressed as a landlord who is unable to tend the flocks and vineyards we inhabit. It is our responsibility to be good stewards of not only the land and lives created but of ourselves as well. If we don’t do it who will and when?
I am fiercely political and theological yet refuse to debate my issues with others knowing I will lose my self in the process of attempting to compete with their perceptions or constructs of long standing traditions expressed as power. Historically everyone, and thing, is destroyed for being inconvenient to the authorities. I am especially conscious of the songs sung by the mountains around me by the natives who lived here long before me. Now desecrated and largely expunged . . . in a sense I long to join them since they knew God better than I. Issues of lineage and DNA are irrelevant to the soul and its vocations and or amusements.
I was once considered to be a ‘good’ photographer with a promising future. These estimates were welcome but pale compared to the joy I knew in my experience of being one at that time. Yet I fell blind to myself at the advent of my son’s demise. And here I am conscious of the indignities he suffered as well as those being suffered by the poor of the world now. We are not expendable feral dogs licking the masters hands who send us a crumb of attention, or off to fight their obscene wars. My point is simply that I never failed as witness and now sense my silence the brew of what writes now.
I seek no celebrity or profit from what I do in expectation of demise now, or tomorrow or later on by any means or measure. Given that, I do celebrate every moment including the normal depredations of age; the pain of an unusually cold winter, the stiffness of arthritis, et cetera, et al, since they remind me that I am alive and fully so.
I think it not odd to conclude leadership best seeks to replace itself with succession despite all the stories used to entertain we the victims of our civilization and culture. If I would serve you it is my intention that you take responsibility for your sense of what is worthy of love and nurture. If we do not then there will be no future and no witness save God.
All life is holy to me.
I have a vision of Heaven being torn apart. Oddly it was the size of an average roadside billboard which had never been cleaned of all the preceding promises torn from it. For me it was as though I had seen the soul of my daughter raped and then rend limb from limb and I helpless to intervene. This is an image that has been forming in my vision/version of life and its value and directions for a very long time.
Slowly I have come to accept that I gave up my ambition to be something better than I was and remain to serve my son in his final years, then days and terminal hour. His sister’s death preceded Randy’s by years and I bore complicity for leaving her to die in custodial care feeling a rage and agony for that, unspeakable choice, especially with their mother.
I divorced her many years ago yet there is no divorce in my heart. I had to divorce from myself the child I was who knew love as dysfunctional--being addicted to that--what I now call co-dependence.
Many of the images, metaphors and omens are being wiped from my consciousness as I write. Justifiably so since they are history and this is now; reality versus ideals.
If we become what we love then I become something like God. Who as Parent is dispassionate and loves with ferocity stunning to behold . . . what some call, and or imply to be, ‘fear’, I call joy.
To me the reality of God is best expressed as a landlord who is unable to tend the flocks and vineyards we inhabit. It is our responsibility to be good stewards of not only the land and lives created but of ourselves as well. If we don’t do it who will and when?
I am fiercely political and theological yet refuse to debate my issues with others knowing I will lose my self in the process of attempting to compete with their perceptions or constructs of long standing traditions expressed as power. Historically everyone, and thing, is destroyed for being inconvenient to the authorities. I am especially conscious of the songs sung by the mountains around me by the natives who lived here long before me. Now desecrated and largely expunged . . . in a sense I long to join them since they knew God better than I. Issues of lineage and DNA are irrelevant to the soul and its vocations and or amusements.
I was once considered to be a ‘good’ photographer with a promising future. These estimates were welcome but pale compared to the joy I knew in my experience of being one at that time. Yet I fell blind to myself at the advent of my son’s demise. And here I am conscious of the indignities he suffered as well as those being suffered by the poor of the world now. We are not expendable feral dogs licking the masters hands who send us a crumb of attention, or off to fight their obscene wars. My point is simply that I never failed as witness and now sense my silence the brew of what writes now.
I seek no celebrity or profit from what I do in expectation of demise now, or tomorrow or later on by any means or measure. Given that, I do celebrate every moment including the normal depredations of age; the pain of an unusually cold winter, the stiffness of arthritis, et cetera, et al, since they remind me that I am alive and fully so.
I think it not odd to conclude leadership best seeks to replace itself with succession despite all the stories used to entertain we the victims of our civilization and culture. If I would serve you it is my intention that you take responsibility for your sense of what is worthy of love and nurture. If we do not then there will be no future and no witness save God.
All life is holy to me.
"There is no way to peace peace is the way" --Thich Nhat Hanh
100117 05:53
Obvious to me is that I do not prize my life, I was taught not to. Yet for you, dear reader, I would go to any length that you love yourself. You, to me, are holy, and never intended to fail life as created unique, precious, specific and explicit in you.
The subtext in this is the question-postulation poised by Jesus: “Love your enemy . . . “ At first hearing I was overwhelmed by their number and I reacted with fear and rage wanting to destroy not only them but myself in violence. I gave to them the privilege of choice, the time, place and ground, the issues and intentions theirs not mine. it appears I’ve backed into a foundation of knowing myself as worthy of love and existence no longer self-loathing or confused by “YOU” messages. I now sense that few would attempt the folly now since I no longer cringe and blink but evaluate their need, greed and intention in telling me what they are fearful of in themselves.
In my estimate fear is the primary dysfunction, and waste the greatest evil of all mankind. Power at its greatest example--God--empowers and destroys nothing.
In a certain sense I see us in the Garden of Eden making a dung heap of it. We are killing ourselves wholesale with numbers increasing daily and soon to be defeated by our own vanity.
Despite the many sorrows and agonies, my life has been good and getting better, yet I recognize that what I leave behind has little to offer the generations to follow and they will bear the sin/waste of my choice in this time.
The “powers” in this world have a poverty of moral and ethical values that would destroy everything in greed to assure continuance of the status quo: we win, you lose.
"There is no way to peace peace is the way" --Thich Nhat Hanh
Between the ideal and real is the difference between making peace with yourself. To love yourself begins with acceptance, the forgiveness of all who for whatever reason mislead you, and then to forgive yourself for accepting it as justice.
. . . after thought 100121: Of the greatest and most wealthy in any field of endeavor I have know extreme poverty in them and myself.
Obvious to me is that I do not prize my life, I was taught not to. Yet for you, dear reader, I would go to any length that you love yourself. You, to me, are holy, and never intended to fail life as created unique, precious, specific and explicit in you.
The subtext in this is the question-postulation poised by Jesus: “Love your enemy . . . “ At first hearing I was overwhelmed by their number and I reacted with fear and rage wanting to destroy not only them but myself in violence. I gave to them the privilege of choice, the time, place and ground, the issues and intentions theirs not mine. it appears I’ve backed into a foundation of knowing myself as worthy of love and existence no longer self-loathing or confused by “YOU” messages. I now sense that few would attempt the folly now since I no longer cringe and blink but evaluate their need, greed and intention in telling me what they are fearful of in themselves.
In my estimate fear is the primary dysfunction, and waste the greatest evil of all mankind. Power at its greatest example--God--empowers and destroys nothing.
In a certain sense I see us in the Garden of Eden making a dung heap of it. We are killing ourselves wholesale with numbers increasing daily and soon to be defeated by our own vanity.
Despite the many sorrows and agonies, my life has been good and getting better, yet I recognize that what I leave behind has little to offer the generations to follow and they will bear the sin/waste of my choice in this time.
The “powers” in this world have a poverty of moral and ethical values that would destroy everything in greed to assure continuance of the status quo: we win, you lose.
"There is no way to peace peace is the way" --Thich Nhat Hanh
Between the ideal and real is the difference between making peace with yourself. To love yourself begins with acceptance, the forgiveness of all who for whatever reason mislead you, and then to forgive yourself for accepting it as justice.
. . . after thought 100121: Of the greatest and most wealthy in any field of endeavor I have know extreme poverty in them and myself.
Omnivorous consciousness . . .
100116 07:39
Our consciousness is omnivorous, and once unfettered from the clutter of noise, it is able to parse and triage importance from irrelevance. Dreams, and other resources, suggest elements of our lives significant requesting attention.
This morning the events in Haiti crossed the screen of my attention. Immediately I recalled my sense that my son’s behavior demanded attention. He had previously simply sat down on the floor and then arose at the age of four years-of-age. This event happened at least once in my experience and the second time he looked at me and said, “Daddy I can’t get up.”
The sequence of events from that moment on remain sharply etched in my memory, and my intuition that he would die became apparent and tragically correct. Having had a lifetime of rationalizations attempting to process the events of peril preemptively incorrectly presuming myself the cause I now know the difference between what I can heal and what I cannot. My thinking at the moment leads me to the “Serenity Prayer”, my theme song.
Among the many furnishings of my mind lost, abandoned, or destroyed is St. Francis’s “Make me an instrument of thy peace . . . “ I used to have it framed and now remember it left behind during my flight from Illinois and presumed lost. Yet I remember the spirit and gist of it, in some sense, now using my own words inspired to ‘modernize’ it for this time, culture and failing civilization.
Isolation from others is impossible and ignorance of one’s self is inexcusable.
I am a solitary who failed at all my attempts to be “normal”; married, with family and a future. Each loss defined what I now sense as being self-derived and centered. Retroactively I consider the meaning, value and implications of many different constructs generally defined as political or theological and none seem adequate to the task of living these days in sanity. To me they now seems a rehearsal of “should’s and ought's” costumed as ‘wisdom’ derived from another time, addressed to other persons in tribes isolated from one another.
Intrinsically we have the power to heal ourselves of many tragedies, diseases and difficulties so long as we no longer presume that someone, or God, will do it for us. For me it is definition of what is mine and what belongs to creation and make choices based upon responsibility instead of reaction. I think of tithes in reverse; ten percent is physics and ninety percent is choice. Regarding economics and ecology there is an apparent imbalance, an injustice justified by lies promulgated by the power to take lives and use them to selfish ends. I do not believe, or experience, God as being anything like that. Absolute power is given to no one else yet our power, if directed to giving instead of taking, is an ability to heal turning others from fear and waste to peace and productivity.
Our consciousness is omnivorous, and once unfettered from the clutter of noise, it is able to parse and triage importance from irrelevance. Dreams, and other resources, suggest elements of our lives significant requesting attention.
This morning the events in Haiti crossed the screen of my attention. Immediately I recalled my sense that my son’s behavior demanded attention. He had previously simply sat down on the floor and then arose at the age of four years-of-age. This event happened at least once in my experience and the second time he looked at me and said, “Daddy I can’t get up.”
The sequence of events from that moment on remain sharply etched in my memory, and my intuition that he would die became apparent and tragically correct. Having had a lifetime of rationalizations attempting to process the events of peril preemptively incorrectly presuming myself the cause I now know the difference between what I can heal and what I cannot. My thinking at the moment leads me to the “Serenity Prayer”, my theme song.
Among the many furnishings of my mind lost, abandoned, or destroyed is St. Francis’s “Make me an instrument of thy peace . . . “ I used to have it framed and now remember it left behind during my flight from Illinois and presumed lost. Yet I remember the spirit and gist of it, in some sense, now using my own words inspired to ‘modernize’ it for this time, culture and failing civilization.
Isolation from others is impossible and ignorance of one’s self is inexcusable.
I am a solitary who failed at all my attempts to be “normal”; married, with family and a future. Each loss defined what I now sense as being self-derived and centered. Retroactively I consider the meaning, value and implications of many different constructs generally defined as political or theological and none seem adequate to the task of living these days in sanity. To me they now seems a rehearsal of “should’s and ought's” costumed as ‘wisdom’ derived from another time, addressed to other persons in tribes isolated from one another.
Intrinsically we have the power to heal ourselves of many tragedies, diseases and difficulties so long as we no longer presume that someone, or God, will do it for us. For me it is definition of what is mine and what belongs to creation and make choices based upon responsibility instead of reaction. I think of tithes in reverse; ten percent is physics and ninety percent is choice. Regarding economics and ecology there is an apparent imbalance, an injustice justified by lies promulgated by the power to take lives and use them to selfish ends. I do not believe, or experience, God as being anything like that. Absolute power is given to no one else yet our power, if directed to giving instead of taking, is an ability to heal turning others from fear and waste to peace and productivity.
Friday, January 15, 2010
Source, origin, destination . . .
100115 03:33
Source, origin, destination . . .
it is something like falling in love or ?seeing God? for the first time, abashed to be so fortunate and ecstatic. Better yet, knowing in the marrow of your soul you are not insane.
City of the Sun, Port-au-Prince, Haiti 1984
I had broken away from the agenda of others and was standing in the in-between walls of shacks in an open sewer photographing a child in full flight towards . . . what? Home, food, school, God? I?ll never really know but know only the ecstasy of recording his head-long-flight with a camera. Later, I was told, that the images, from that oft recalled child?s enthusiasm, had been used to glean food sufficient to feed 35,000 of them for three months. And should I die at this moment I will know that I lived for something and someone other than myself.
I am a ravening beast with a camera in my hands, knowing no fear of anything, and for that I am filled with gratitude even now in retirement. And it keeps happening when I wander the desert of city streets behind buildings. And continue to be surprised and fearless the slings and arrows of those without who become my friends continuing into the ordinary of my life luminescent with grace. And now such grace as I?ve seen and been touched by is all I have left to give to you that you awaken to yourself headlong in pursuit of Love.
?To be born again? is an ongoing process, as in ?My Father?s House has many mansions . . . ? The vision, version and experience is that of residing in one of them for a time and then moving on to ever expanding horizons. It is being what I feel I was created to be. If that seems egotistical and foolish then perhaps I am to you. But to myself and God it is part of the journey towards all Truth & Love.
I destroyed and or abandoned all my life, the evidence of my wonder, wandering and evidence save for this what I now write. In each and every incidence just a hairs breath away from doing it to myself for the shame of never being that which I so admired, revered and longed to be in the lives and works of others.
There is no shame in being a great audience for the works and lives of others. Nor is it a shame to have audience with God and see the Works of Creation in process manifest in so many things; the flight of birds, the rise and set of sun, the state of another?s being in transition ignored. In this I know the Resurrection true and seek it for myself everyday. All days are holy to me. Precious without measure the treasure of them.
I am 69 miles of hard road traversed and still walking towards the ?Good night? I?ve seen in others dying in my witness, helpless was I to do otherwise. Yet their lives were never in vain since they are with the Parents of Us blest and at rest in eternity. I left parts of myself I never knew I had in Haiti and good friends too. It seems silly to make love with a camera and words now while holding that final fateful cup to the lips of Jesus dying there. Again and again we crucify our beloved God in all God?s manifestations. Incarnated in the poor. ?The poor will always be with you . . . ? I thought He meant those whose lives I witnessed until I inhabited my own poverty and embraced the leper found within.
God is a gentle lover and friend who remains patiently within all of us to be welcomed as our twin ignored. I know this now and death has no fear. No waste has been my many trashing's of self, or works, but of those I?ve left behind standing, I apologize for my leave taking, no offense was intended. Nor response required.
God?s blessing upon all of us in this our time of trials. Amen.
Source, origin, destination . . .
it is something like falling in love or ?seeing God? for the first time, abashed to be so fortunate and ecstatic. Better yet, knowing in the marrow of your soul you are not insane.
City of the Sun, Port-au-Prince, Haiti 1984
I had broken away from the agenda of others and was standing in the in-between walls of shacks in an open sewer photographing a child in full flight towards . . . what? Home, food, school, God? I?ll never really know but know only the ecstasy of recording his head-long-flight with a camera. Later, I was told, that the images, from that oft recalled child?s enthusiasm, had been used to glean food sufficient to feed 35,000 of them for three months. And should I die at this moment I will know that I lived for something and someone other than myself.
I am a ravening beast with a camera in my hands, knowing no fear of anything, and for that I am filled with gratitude even now in retirement. And it keeps happening when I wander the desert of city streets behind buildings. And continue to be surprised and fearless the slings and arrows of those without who become my friends continuing into the ordinary of my life luminescent with grace. And now such grace as I?ve seen and been touched by is all I have left to give to you that you awaken to yourself headlong in pursuit of Love.
?To be born again? is an ongoing process, as in ?My Father?s House has many mansions . . . ? The vision, version and experience is that of residing in one of them for a time and then moving on to ever expanding horizons. It is being what I feel I was created to be. If that seems egotistical and foolish then perhaps I am to you. But to myself and God it is part of the journey towards all Truth & Love.
I destroyed and or abandoned all my life, the evidence of my wonder, wandering and evidence save for this what I now write. In each and every incidence just a hairs breath away from doing it to myself for the shame of never being that which I so admired, revered and longed to be in the lives and works of others.
There is no shame in being a great audience for the works and lives of others. Nor is it a shame to have audience with God and see the Works of Creation in process manifest in so many things; the flight of birds, the rise and set of sun, the state of another?s being in transition ignored. In this I know the Resurrection true and seek it for myself everyday. All days are holy to me. Precious without measure the treasure of them.
I am 69 miles of hard road traversed and still walking towards the ?Good night? I?ve seen in others dying in my witness, helpless was I to do otherwise. Yet their lives were never in vain since they are with the Parents of Us blest and at rest in eternity. I left parts of myself I never knew I had in Haiti and good friends too. It seems silly to make love with a camera and words now while holding that final fateful cup to the lips of Jesus dying there. Again and again we crucify our beloved God in all God?s manifestations. Incarnated in the poor. ?The poor will always be with you . . . ? I thought He meant those whose lives I witnessed until I inhabited my own poverty and embraced the leper found within.
God is a gentle lover and friend who remains patiently within all of us to be welcomed as our twin ignored. I know this now and death has no fear. No waste has been my many trashing's of self, or works, but of those I?ve left behind standing, I apologize for my leave taking, no offense was intended. Nor response required.
God?s blessing upon all of us in this our time of trials. Amen.
Thursday, January 14, 2010
Memorial for Haiti
100114 09:50
I have been unfaithful to myself, wallowing in the pain of arthritis, ignoring the ongoing process/progress of ordinary life.
In all things we can celebrate sorrow and joy, each a part of ourselves becoming whole revealed as we are becoming complete.
In silence I approach the ideal-idea of what I want to write, the page a blank page describing eternity, vastly different from the frame of a photographic lens through which I first discovered the nearness of God in Haiti; so long ago and never forgotten.
I ask your prayers for them--and yourselves--since their poverty, long standing, is so like mine when last there and even now embraced; and ours without work, our world in flux. How else could Jesus enter in and be for me a friend walking the streets of Haiti then and now that so many are lifeless and hopeless--helpless?
The interval between the ideal and real is actually very small, more nearly a membrane, a sort of blindness--an illusion.
Live, love, dance and sing as though life is eternal while holding the truth of death in each day potential.
Well do I remember my helpless rage against the deaths of both children. Now reprised in the silence of the child of my heart adopted, now become an adult and a parent herself.
I feared, eventually, that my rage against God would be like that against all else, everything that I would destroy in revenge until I became fully aware that the reason could have been exclusively attributed to myself; the source of their disease and death. Humiliated with my rage, I could then no longer exorcise it against anyone or anything and in that helplessness were the seeds of what I am now sown.
In crisis, as inevitable change, I am at peace. But also filled with empathy for those who suffer so obviously in their experience of pain, death, disability and hopelessness. I give such as I can--and more so--but most of all I listen for clues given me, what they want and need.
We can be for them a small part the heart, eyes, sense and will of God for them and with grace for ourselves in this day--now where eternity begins anew. The gift of our prayers is this; we learn the wisdom of knowing what we can change, that which we cannot. And the serenity of knowing what is physics indwelling from the beginning of creation. What we can generously be, do and give towards healing the world and ourselves.
We learn to respond to reality and no longer be victims of fate or life; reactionary. Faith, hope and charity as love given defines our sense of being real.
Note--Please continue . . .
. . . I have been derelict during the past few days. Add to which I tend to post “from top down.” There is more below in chronological sequence, if you are interested, starting at the 8th of January this year.
I have been unfaithful to myself, wallowing in the pain of arthritis, ignoring the ongoing process/progress of ordinary life.
In all things we can celebrate sorrow and joy, each a part of ourselves becoming whole revealed as we are becoming complete.
In silence I approach the ideal-idea of what I want to write, the page a blank page describing eternity, vastly different from the frame of a photographic lens through which I first discovered the nearness of God in Haiti; so long ago and never forgotten.
I ask your prayers for them--and yourselves--since their poverty, long standing, is so like mine when last there and even now embraced; and ours without work, our world in flux. How else could Jesus enter in and be for me a friend walking the streets of Haiti then and now that so many are lifeless and hopeless--helpless?
The interval between the ideal and real is actually very small, more nearly a membrane, a sort of blindness--an illusion.
Live, love, dance and sing as though life is eternal while holding the truth of death in each day potential.
Well do I remember my helpless rage against the deaths of both children. Now reprised in the silence of the child of my heart adopted, now become an adult and a parent herself.
I feared, eventually, that my rage against God would be like that against all else, everything that I would destroy in revenge until I became fully aware that the reason could have been exclusively attributed to myself; the source of their disease and death. Humiliated with my rage, I could then no longer exorcise it against anyone or anything and in that helplessness were the seeds of what I am now sown.
In crisis, as inevitable change, I am at peace. But also filled with empathy for those who suffer so obviously in their experience of pain, death, disability and hopelessness. I give such as I can--and more so--but most of all I listen for clues given me, what they want and need.
We can be for them a small part the heart, eyes, sense and will of God for them and with grace for ourselves in this day--now where eternity begins anew. The gift of our prayers is this; we learn the wisdom of knowing what we can change, that which we cannot. And the serenity of knowing what is physics indwelling from the beginning of creation. What we can generously be, do and give towards healing the world and ourselves.
We learn to respond to reality and no longer be victims of fate or life; reactionary. Faith, hope and charity as love given defines our sense of being real.
Note--Please continue . . .
. . . I have been derelict during the past few days. Add to which I tend to post “from top down.” There is more below in chronological sequence, if you are interested, starting at the 8th of January this year.
Self-Knowledge for everyone incuding the dummy writing this
100112 05:14
Journal keeping has been a primary healing commitment for many. A few have become famous for the effort but the purpose is to become whole and in process towards the full potential of your self--whatever that self wants to be.
It is now obvious that I personally need to go-as-far-as-it(I)-goes. Furthermore that my motives, once thought insanely excessive, was considered personally important for C. G. Jung as well.
Recent activities have lead me to realize that I not only edit whatever I read but additionally analyze everything in process; experiencing difficulty staying “on message” and usually writing my own novel in process, if in fact I am reading one at the time. My analogy is witnessing the process of making movies thus I am generally unable to enter the flow without deconstructing the process technically. That said I now realize a new dimension; being hyper-vigilant, I tend to give all weight to the author of any experience; intent, message, body language et cetera. In a sense I am deconstructing my psyche both in this journal-ling process and in the ordinary of my life experience.
It is now much easier for me to see a feasible transition/departure point between fact and fiction or poetry.
My ‘problem’ is common to all people, yet what is uncommon in me is my growing self-respect and that to whatever end is implied or suggested--in addition to a longing to help/heal others like myself who are/were taught they had no brains and no life worthy of love or attention.
“17:28
Gravid with light the days grow distended with organic promise, the longest tumid night of depression fled. My spirit soars towards the next longest day another annual to live. My soul doth magnify life lifting all with me towards the future confident the sun burning away the tears of mankind; the indwelling spirit magnificent.
Journal keeping has been a primary healing commitment for many. A few have become famous for the effort but the purpose is to become whole and in process towards the full potential of your self--whatever that self wants to be.
It is now obvious that I personally need to go-as-far-as-it(I)-goes. Furthermore that my motives, once thought insanely excessive, was considered personally important for C. G. Jung as well.
Recent activities have lead me to realize that I not only edit whatever I read but additionally analyze everything in process; experiencing difficulty staying “on message” and usually writing my own novel in process, if in fact I am reading one at the time. My analogy is witnessing the process of making movies thus I am generally unable to enter the flow without deconstructing the process technically. That said I now realize a new dimension; being hyper-vigilant, I tend to give all weight to the author of any experience; intent, message, body language et cetera. In a sense I am deconstructing my psyche both in this journal-ling process and in the ordinary of my life experience.
It is now much easier for me to see a feasible transition/departure point between fact and fiction or poetry.
My ‘problem’ is common to all people, yet what is uncommon in me is my growing self-respect and that to whatever end is implied or suggested--in addition to a longing to help/heal others like myself who are/were taught they had no brains and no life worthy of love or attention.
“17:28
Gravid with light the days grow distended with organic promise, the longest tumid night of depression fled. My spirit soars towards the next longest day another annual to live. My soul doth magnify life lifting all with me towards the future confident the sun burning away the tears of mankind; the indwelling spirit magnificent.
recommended for your consumption
100110 05:08
When a friend recommends a book or film unequivocally, which in turn had been recommended to them with equal, if not greater vigorous praise, I feel compelled to attend. So my friend Dave, a fellow run-a-way form the middle-class environs of Connecticut, found ourselves with last available seats, front row, in a 3D version viewing of “AVATAR.”
I have no regrets, forced to lay upon my back, sans 3D glasses, too narrow to view the wide screen so close to our noses.
I found myself in tears of praise and joy. Indifferent the choices of others viewing in silence, while I laughed, solo, at the plot progress of another run-a-way becoming a real person.
Hope is difficult to find, then cling to in times of crisis. There will be a future after all. And it will exist despite the depredations of greed manifest in this iconic and mythological film.
Least I fall further in love with the film and my ‘deathless-prose’ regarding it, I hasten to add that it appeals to all generations reaching from our time forward and backward to the voiceless, will to adapt, improvise and prevail in the human spirit. Rather I should emphasize the spirit of Life it self to see truth and light in spite of those who would otherwise enslave and or kill it.
Of particular interest is the joining of male and female principal’s courage to move into and engage the right to exist on one’s own terms. Though heroic and epic in nature I sense that every individual witnessing the process will long remember it as applicable to their individual lives in the here and eternal now.
For a few moments I wandered the splendor of Wikipedia seeking reference points to develop my celebration of this singular film further. The issue of ‘sin’ became my departure point since I believe it better referenced in the film than I can forge in this limited space. There are many references critical to current choices to deal with issues dangerous to our collective future within the film that are more than adequate to the task laying in our laps.
“Only the dead know the end of war” --Plato
1001114 --afterthoughts
Dave also recommended to my attention: “NOTHING BUT A SMILE” by Steve Amick. It is a novel of impressive iconic dimensions worthy of reading again and again. I was moved to realize within its pages a penchant for analysis that had previously fractured my attention in reading anything including the Bible. I make reference this since unlike most mediums, which I have professionally viewed the making of, I was drawn ineluctably into the novels flow. This novel drew me into a conspiracy with all former concerns, and or conceits/conclusions, regarding my parent’s generation and ours. I often found myself in tears of joy over the love affair described within and will for ever more rejoice the sincerity of lovers become friends more profound than most “Chick Flicks”, a genre that this obviously is not. I have no defense for my ignorance all the wonderful new communications of hope. It seems I am impelled to make up works and constructs of my own to describe what I hope the future will be. I will confess that I was, from beginning to end, tempted to simply abandon all attempts at communication from then forward. Feeling totally eclipsed by the mastery of both recommendations.
When a friend recommends a book or film unequivocally, which in turn had been recommended to them with equal, if not greater vigorous praise, I feel compelled to attend. So my friend Dave, a fellow run-a-way form the middle-class environs of Connecticut, found ourselves with last available seats, front row, in a 3D version viewing of “AVATAR.”
I have no regrets, forced to lay upon my back, sans 3D glasses, too narrow to view the wide screen so close to our noses.
I found myself in tears of praise and joy. Indifferent the choices of others viewing in silence, while I laughed, solo, at the plot progress of another run-a-way becoming a real person.
Hope is difficult to find, then cling to in times of crisis. There will be a future after all. And it will exist despite the depredations of greed manifest in this iconic and mythological film.
Least I fall further in love with the film and my ‘deathless-prose’ regarding it, I hasten to add that it appeals to all generations reaching from our time forward and backward to the voiceless, will to adapt, improvise and prevail in the human spirit. Rather I should emphasize the spirit of Life it self to see truth and light in spite of those who would otherwise enslave and or kill it.
Of particular interest is the joining of male and female principal’s courage to move into and engage the right to exist on one’s own terms. Though heroic and epic in nature I sense that every individual witnessing the process will long remember it as applicable to their individual lives in the here and eternal now.
For a few moments I wandered the splendor of Wikipedia seeking reference points to develop my celebration of this singular film further. The issue of ‘sin’ became my departure point since I believe it better referenced in the film than I can forge in this limited space. There are many references critical to current choices to deal with issues dangerous to our collective future within the film that are more than adequate to the task laying in our laps.
“Only the dead know the end of war” --Plato
1001114 --afterthoughts
Dave also recommended to my attention: “NOTHING BUT A SMILE” by Steve Amick. It is a novel of impressive iconic dimensions worthy of reading again and again. I was moved to realize within its pages a penchant for analysis that had previously fractured my attention in reading anything including the Bible. I make reference this since unlike most mediums, which I have professionally viewed the making of, I was drawn ineluctably into the novels flow. This novel drew me into a conspiracy with all former concerns, and or conceits/conclusions, regarding my parent’s generation and ours. I often found myself in tears of joy over the love affair described within and will for ever more rejoice the sincerity of lovers become friends more profound than most “Chick Flicks”, a genre that this obviously is not. I have no defense for my ignorance all the wonderful new communications of hope. It seems I am impelled to make up works and constructs of my own to describe what I hope the future will be. I will confess that I was, from beginning to end, tempted to simply abandon all attempts at communication from then forward. Feeling totally eclipsed by the mastery of both recommendations.
A lifetime lost outgrowing being white, middle-class and from Greenwich Connecticut.
100108 01:34
Life is defined by elementary factors: race, creed, gender, education, age, and so on. These identifying elements are accepted, taken for granted, seem fixed, immutable and life a seamless continuity. Yet as life is consumed these roles become blurred, worn, with experience, and birthdays no longer celebrated. We move past our vocational definition either accepting or rejecting retirement. Our enhanced or diminished capacities integrated into the ordinary of daily life.
I think myself increasingly odd growing younger, and more vital, daily. Eccentric perhaps but I find joy merging into the flow of other generations to follow and those that preceded mine. It helps to ignore the bruises and contusions normal to we fortunate enough to live long aspiring to become wise, sages, to ourselves and others?
Questions from youth are answered, dreams realized and lost, expectations become more modest; simple. Food, shelter and clothing no longer sought as remarkable status symbols--whatever/whichever--is adequate the long cold night to come at winter's advent.
Decades it has taken me to outlive the curse cast in adolescence. A lifetime lost outgrowing being white, middle-class and from Greenwich Connecticut.
Depending upon which side of the railroad tracks you are from, it is one of the three wealthiest communities in the world. Rich, wealth sought for its own sake, means many things.
And to my family it was, I believe, never fully acquired. Remembered best was the quest, the longing hunger and thirst for wealth as safety. The pretense and delusions of grandeur, choices made at savage cost, loss of moral and ethical norms, now lost as the democracy of death closes/closed upon the past generation, a culture ruptured and civilization in collapse.
Now poor I merge into my neighbors, a community of the elderly, without hope of reprise. Yet I celebrate my estate reflected through their infrequently visiting children, grandchildren, younger siblings, a reason to praise the advent of each new day with thanksgiving the gift of life now. Each day become a season and generation of wealth precious, unique and explicit the value sought and prized.
It has been unusually cold here, where I live fled to escape the dreary winter of my youth, lately past. Passing into a new dawn surprised in the peasant dead celebrated by succeeding generations of their kith and kin in New & Old Mexico. I am now one of, and with, them gladly so. Since now I know the meaning of three steps forward and two backward in my skipping journey into whatever lays ahead knowing life and love will go on if only in prayer.
Life is defined by elementary factors: race, creed, gender, education, age, and so on. These identifying elements are accepted, taken for granted, seem fixed, immutable and life a seamless continuity. Yet as life is consumed these roles become blurred, worn, with experience, and birthdays no longer celebrated. We move past our vocational definition either accepting or rejecting retirement. Our enhanced or diminished capacities integrated into the ordinary of daily life.
I think myself increasingly odd growing younger, and more vital, daily. Eccentric perhaps but I find joy merging into the flow of other generations to follow and those that preceded mine. It helps to ignore the bruises and contusions normal to we fortunate enough to live long aspiring to become wise, sages, to ourselves and others?
Questions from youth are answered, dreams realized and lost, expectations become more modest; simple. Food, shelter and clothing no longer sought as remarkable status symbols--whatever/whichever--is adequate the long cold night to come at winter's advent.
Decades it has taken me to outlive the curse cast in adolescence. A lifetime lost outgrowing being white, middle-class and from Greenwich Connecticut.
Depending upon which side of the railroad tracks you are from, it is one of the three wealthiest communities in the world. Rich, wealth sought for its own sake, means many things.
And to my family it was, I believe, never fully acquired. Remembered best was the quest, the longing hunger and thirst for wealth as safety. The pretense and delusions of grandeur, choices made at savage cost, loss of moral and ethical norms, now lost as the democracy of death closes/closed upon the past generation, a culture ruptured and civilization in collapse.
Now poor I merge into my neighbors, a community of the elderly, without hope of reprise. Yet I celebrate my estate reflected through their infrequently visiting children, grandchildren, younger siblings, a reason to praise the advent of each new day with thanksgiving the gift of life now. Each day become a season and generation of wealth precious, unique and explicit the value sought and prized.
It has been unusually cold here, where I live fled to escape the dreary winter of my youth, lately past. Passing into a new dawn surprised in the peasant dead celebrated by succeeding generations of their kith and kin in New & Old Mexico. I am now one of, and with, them gladly so. Since now I know the meaning of three steps forward and two backward in my skipping journey into whatever lays ahead knowing life and love will go on if only in prayer.
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
“never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself” --Confucius
100106 10:31
‘Power -- Meditations & Random thoughts’
I no longer wonder why Epiphany signaled the end of my desolation. Or the labor required to crawl beneath the monolith of Christmas. What I have now I would not trade for any amount, or places with anyone, including God. Impossible as that is, actually inconceivable, yet the thought demonstrates power best.
As real as God is to me, I have become real to myself, and that is not an exercise of ego but reaching above my terror and finding the ceiling of life and love manifest and total.
Of political process, and that of religion, I am sad to say that I find no power above pretence. Do No Harm Period.
Power is for you alone to give empowering others their opportunity to amplify--like the Sun--growth and the will to live life at all.
I am right for me, and need not be right for you. I only suggest that you look within yourself and accept the grace and power inherent in the brief or long moments allotted your consciousness. The perfect teacher and school is within you and no one can gainsay that.
I am a rebel with a cause. Aware that there are those of us who have fallen into the darkness of our terror manifest in ways that possess us. Expressed and published in the destruction of specific victims, victimizing ourselves, to slake our thirst for truth. Apparent to me is Jesus and all else falls away.
The finger I pointed, shouting “YOU” messages, is no longer outward, but equally inward. I conclude myself disabled to judge or destroy anyone or thing.
I am not attempting to publish a “mail-order-course,” for profit, on how to heal yourself. I am merely using “I” messages to communicate the potential of magnificence in you. There is no “good, better, best” but in the final measure, in each second, there is an I/Thou involved. Rigid attitudes and conclusions are easily destroyed by those who hold them dear as ideals fixed and immutable. The energy required downs out all the potentials of seeing “normal” differently.
After 69 miles of hard road, I am unwilling to rest, pensioned off, basking in the sunset of my life. Should the system of my subsistence fail I will learn to live in and upon the land, or gladly expire the effort.
It is wise, or so I believe, to remember Jesus was not a Christian. And that God is not either. Confucius expressed the Golden Rule best, or so I think: “never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself”
. . . please continue
‘Power -- Meditations & Random thoughts’
I no longer wonder why Epiphany signaled the end of my desolation. Or the labor required to crawl beneath the monolith of Christmas. What I have now I would not trade for any amount, or places with anyone, including God. Impossible as that is, actually inconceivable, yet the thought demonstrates power best.
As real as God is to me, I have become real to myself, and that is not an exercise of ego but reaching above my terror and finding the ceiling of life and love manifest and total.
Of political process, and that of religion, I am sad to say that I find no power above pretence. Do No Harm Period.
Power is for you alone to give empowering others their opportunity to amplify--like the Sun--growth and the will to live life at all.
I am right for me, and need not be right for you. I only suggest that you look within yourself and accept the grace and power inherent in the brief or long moments allotted your consciousness. The perfect teacher and school is within you and no one can gainsay that.
I am a rebel with a cause. Aware that there are those of us who have fallen into the darkness of our terror manifest in ways that possess us. Expressed and published in the destruction of specific victims, victimizing ourselves, to slake our thirst for truth. Apparent to me is Jesus and all else falls away.
The finger I pointed, shouting “YOU” messages, is no longer outward, but equally inward. I conclude myself disabled to judge or destroy anyone or thing.
I am not attempting to publish a “mail-order-course,” for profit, on how to heal yourself. I am merely using “I” messages to communicate the potential of magnificence in you. There is no “good, better, best” but in the final measure, in each second, there is an I/Thou involved. Rigid attitudes and conclusions are easily destroyed by those who hold them dear as ideals fixed and immutable. The energy required downs out all the potentials of seeing “normal” differently.
After 69 miles of hard road, I am unwilling to rest, pensioned off, basking in the sunset of my life. Should the system of my subsistence fail I will learn to live in and upon the land, or gladly expire the effort.
It is wise, or so I believe, to remember Jesus was not a Christian. And that God is not either. Confucius expressed the Golden Rule best, or so I think: “never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself”
. . . please continue
"I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand." --Confucius
100106 11:37
‘Power -- Meditations & Random thoughts -- continued. . . .’
I experience my time as beginning in chaos and desolation ending in peace and balance. Despite the reek and premature death of paranoia enveloping the earth, then for me, now for everyone else.
Well aquatinted with my bigotry and hypocrisy I question everything; all motives and intentions, conclusive or otherwise. Metaphorically I am an intellectual trapeze artist moving from one secure ideal to a more mobile support that might serve others as well as myself. Sans safety net or nuclear bombs.
It there is a future, obviously it is in doubt to me.
Perhaps even a foolish consideration given my age and self-published desire to get off the Merry-go-Round; riotous in erratic elliptical gyrations. Nevertheless there is the issue of what might I leave behind? An apple seed growing into a fruit bearing tree, giving nurture long after I have left the stage. Ignore the mythology of an apple &/or a serpent giving it as evil. Actually I am far fonder of Kokopelli, then Johnny Apple Seed or Jack The Giant Killer. Consciousness implies no evil in and of itself. Death measures the value of life.
Choice is everything and a responsibility for those aware of it as an issue. Everything else seems to be “kill or be killed” . . . who assassinated Jesus and why? Least you get on your high horse and say, “obviously the Jews!” Beware your/our ability to project upon others issues we refuse to question, or the potential of acting upon, without serious consideration the consequence of. . . . I’ve made a fool of myself too often before. Apparently the potential has never left me. But then laughter and music calms the most savage beasts--myself included.
I too act on partial information with the caveat that I do not want to lead anyone astray from the book written upon their soul and life.
We have an instrument of education for everyone on the World Wide Web. Efforts to censure it for various reasons seem to abound along with the eclectic nature of our curiosity about everything; burgeoning, given the paucity of interest in all other mediums commercially governed or property at issue.
On Wikipedia---for whose continuance I donated an obscene--for me amount--never to be replaced except by eating pet food in perpetuity---we can find threads leading us, if not into TRUTH at the very least contemplation of what truth means to us individually--then collectively.
God does not speak any one language exclusively.
Before I close, as close I must given, your fruit fly attention span--not merely to me but yourself equally avoided: I am aware that my identity is compromised every time I log on. Further that my choice of donation is an indication read by people, at least some, as subversive to their choices.
Whenever I call for assistance regarding issues, I hear, “This dialog will be recorded for training purposes.” Depending upon my patience, or impatience, I sometimes see myself being beaten to death with telephone books and/or rubber hoses by those who think me a dissident threat to the status quo. And at that it is I who is being trained/constrained into obedience to their agenda/intentions: They win, I lose.
Politics was never intended to become a professional vocation. Instead, or so I believe, it was to be a civic obligation temporarily exercised. Frankly I am not impressed by the current state of civil war manifest in Congress and know of no politician I would entrust to carry my shoes to the cobbler for renewal. Instead I do trust in God and all of you to find a way for the world and life to have a future. Need I mention supervisory professional clergy?
Nothing is hidden from God and all are accountable.
. . . my ideal economy/ecology is win/win.
"I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand." --Confucius
‘Power -- Meditations & Random thoughts -- continued. . . .’
I experience my time as beginning in chaos and desolation ending in peace and balance. Despite the reek and premature death of paranoia enveloping the earth, then for me, now for everyone else.
Well aquatinted with my bigotry and hypocrisy I question everything; all motives and intentions, conclusive or otherwise. Metaphorically I am an intellectual trapeze artist moving from one secure ideal to a more mobile support that might serve others as well as myself. Sans safety net or nuclear bombs.
It there is a future, obviously it is in doubt to me.
Perhaps even a foolish consideration given my age and self-published desire to get off the Merry-go-Round; riotous in erratic elliptical gyrations. Nevertheless there is the issue of what might I leave behind? An apple seed growing into a fruit bearing tree, giving nurture long after I have left the stage. Ignore the mythology of an apple &/or a serpent giving it as evil. Actually I am far fonder of Kokopelli, then Johnny Apple Seed or Jack The Giant Killer. Consciousness implies no evil in and of itself. Death measures the value of life.
Choice is everything and a responsibility for those aware of it as an issue. Everything else seems to be “kill or be killed” . . . who assassinated Jesus and why? Least you get on your high horse and say, “obviously the Jews!” Beware your/our ability to project upon others issues we refuse to question, or the potential of acting upon, without serious consideration the consequence of. . . . I’ve made a fool of myself too often before. Apparently the potential has never left me. But then laughter and music calms the most savage beasts--myself included.
I too act on partial information with the caveat that I do not want to lead anyone astray from the book written upon their soul and life.
We have an instrument of education for everyone on the World Wide Web. Efforts to censure it for various reasons seem to abound along with the eclectic nature of our curiosity about everything; burgeoning, given the paucity of interest in all other mediums commercially governed or property at issue.
On Wikipedia---for whose continuance I donated an obscene--for me amount--never to be replaced except by eating pet food in perpetuity---we can find threads leading us, if not into TRUTH at the very least contemplation of what truth means to us individually--then collectively.
God does not speak any one language exclusively.
Before I close, as close I must given, your fruit fly attention span--not merely to me but yourself equally avoided: I am aware that my identity is compromised every time I log on. Further that my choice of donation is an indication read by people, at least some, as subversive to their choices.
Whenever I call for assistance regarding issues, I hear, “This dialog will be recorded for training purposes.” Depending upon my patience, or impatience, I sometimes see myself being beaten to death with telephone books and/or rubber hoses by those who think me a dissident threat to the status quo. And at that it is I who is being trained/constrained into obedience to their agenda/intentions: They win, I lose.
Politics was never intended to become a professional vocation. Instead, or so I believe, it was to be a civic obligation temporarily exercised. Frankly I am not impressed by the current state of civil war manifest in Congress and know of no politician I would entrust to carry my shoes to the cobbler for renewal. Instead I do trust in God and all of you to find a way for the world and life to have a future. Need I mention supervisory professional clergy?
Nothing is hidden from God and all are accountable.
. . . my ideal economy/ecology is win/win.
"I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand." --Confucius
Few of us realize that we have a God given right to be ourselves
100106 12:06
The Hurdy Gurdy is being played faster these days. Solo, it calls the dance for life and liberty at a frenzied pace. I know few as blessed as myself born, raised and sooner-or-later to die suffused in music: frantic and slow, laconic sighs, blues to minuets. Never forget Stravinsky!
If you want to live--dancing--you must pay the ‘fiddler’ or hurdy gurdy musician.
Few are allowed to stand aside as audience since all are required to leap and shout about everything under the sun. The riotous din is, staggering, drunk with chaos.
Sadly I must invoke memories of my father’s intentions for me. It is merely that our parents are our first and primary teachers; by word and demonstration. A poor, gimp and lame imitation of our real Mother/Father/God.
In recognition that I could have been burned at the stake, then--and perhaps now, I stand and deliver my experience for whatever it is worth should anyone attend me.
Life is a participatory event and it may well be that I am both pagan and heretical; I’ll take the change. In empathy and with, or so I now believe, kindness--believe me it wasn’t my fault--I never asked to be born. He gave up his quest for fame and fortune and burdened me with a musical vocation; selling the instruments, and ink defaced flesh of dead trees.
Vaulting the walls surrounding culture and civilization, I am impaled upon my pike/petard. Knowing that trees sing, in fall, winter, spring and summer, I am stunned, actually knocked unconscious by my metaphor and simile, remembering the ‘forbidden fruit’ and the tree upon which Jesus was hung sighing His last breath. Trees actually sing in birth, life and death. Perhaps I am a Druid?
Think the Amazon River basin denuded.
. . . for the lowing of cows.
Oh well.
Few of us realize that we have a God given right to be ourselves; as painful as that may be to the administrators of the kindling and match to immolate me before I finish this sentence. Peace is not seditious. Now doesn’t that sentiment open doors of iron, steel or stone?
Wisdom is a woman I court daily and constantly fail her embrace. However amongst us she remains a scullery maid in the basement of our institutions. At the loss of a shy brief half smile she awaits our attention flirting with her role as mother, wife, sister, cousin, lover. Or whatever role we assign her in our oblivion. At what cost? The loss of everything we cherish: peace, love and the meaning of life.
The Shepard’s Crook will soon drag me from this brief stage, into the night preceding & following my dance--in no lime light, lurching--into the endless night again.
I hear no applause, one-handed, or otherwise, I tap-dance for myself pleasure.
In closing my ‘act’ I can only say that I celebrate both sets of parents tossing roses to them off stage.
The Hurdy Gurdy is being played faster these days. Solo, it calls the dance for life and liberty at a frenzied pace. I know few as blessed as myself born, raised and sooner-or-later to die suffused in music: frantic and slow, laconic sighs, blues to minuets. Never forget Stravinsky!
If you want to live--dancing--you must pay the ‘fiddler’ or hurdy gurdy musician.
Few are allowed to stand aside as audience since all are required to leap and shout about everything under the sun. The riotous din is, staggering, drunk with chaos.
Sadly I must invoke memories of my father’s intentions for me. It is merely that our parents are our first and primary teachers; by word and demonstration. A poor, gimp and lame imitation of our real Mother/Father/God.
In recognition that I could have been burned at the stake, then--and perhaps now, I stand and deliver my experience for whatever it is worth should anyone attend me.
Life is a participatory event and it may well be that I am both pagan and heretical; I’ll take the change. In empathy and with, or so I now believe, kindness--believe me it wasn’t my fault--I never asked to be born. He gave up his quest for fame and fortune and burdened me with a musical vocation; selling the instruments, and ink defaced flesh of dead trees.
Vaulting the walls surrounding culture and civilization, I am impaled upon my pike/petard. Knowing that trees sing, in fall, winter, spring and summer, I am stunned, actually knocked unconscious by my metaphor and simile, remembering the ‘forbidden fruit’ and the tree upon which Jesus was hung sighing His last breath. Trees actually sing in birth, life and death. Perhaps I am a Druid?
Think the Amazon River basin denuded.
. . . for the lowing of cows.
Oh well.
Few of us realize that we have a God given right to be ourselves; as painful as that may be to the administrators of the kindling and match to immolate me before I finish this sentence. Peace is not seditious. Now doesn’t that sentiment open doors of iron, steel or stone?
Wisdom is a woman I court daily and constantly fail her embrace. However amongst us she remains a scullery maid in the basement of our institutions. At the loss of a shy brief half smile she awaits our attention flirting with her role as mother, wife, sister, cousin, lover. Or whatever role we assign her in our oblivion. At what cost? The loss of everything we cherish: peace, love and the meaning of life.
The Shepard’s Crook will soon drag me from this brief stage, into the night preceding & following my dance--in no lime light, lurching--into the endless night again.
I hear no applause, one-handed, or otherwise, I tap-dance for myself pleasure.
In closing my ‘act’ I can only say that I celebrate both sets of parents tossing roses to them off stage.
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
A triptych on beginnings and endings . . . I believe in Love
100105 07:19 {unknown at the time - this is the first meditation of three}
I believe in love.
I awoke after 4 hours of sleep, rested yet in turmoil over a dream in which I experienced apocalyptic rage wrath astonishing in that it went both ways; a dialog. Typically when I have dreams of such severity I arise like a . . . well there is a speed, we are capable of, that surpasses all analogies, similes, metaphors, similitude. The speed of sound, or light, is nothing compared to the speed with which we address/assess threat and respond to it.
The speed of thought?
I have an experiential method of assessing the truth of my dreams, carefully constructed from infancy. But I am not concerned with dreams now, since I was lead through the past 7.5 hours to this moment of writing up a postmortem/after action report.
We are about to be divorced from our Parent, God.
Our relationship is being abandoned as a hopeless failure. I know God will be fine but we will suffer tragically, as do all the children of divorce.
I know this from my childhood being abandoned for the agenda of my parents. I know myself, not alone in this, for the Second World War made many of us orphans and thus we are in the majority seeking safety where none is available. The world made safe from holocaust became unsafe for all children afterwards.
Written within us is certainty of love and terror of never finding it.
I advocate that we can find safety together. Considering myself a steward attempting to make passengers comfortable in the final moments before the crash and our mutual, meaningless, death--inevitable. I have no authority, long to be wrong, yet having been trained by everything in my life, up to this moment, am certain that this is what I have life for.
Understanding one’s self--“An unexamined life is not worth living”--is a primary task for we who want a life and love--of value. In, of and for itself.
I know, and can argue, the defense of life’s right to exist and thrive through the agency of many belief systems and philosophies. The best defense is within you yet it has no meaning definable in our communal life about to be extinguished.
“ 21:52
I have looked for signs, omens and portents that I was in error in what I previously wrote. I have been gently reproved through the agency of friends, further study and a decision to use my “school of hard knocks” education to minister to the dying in our local Hospice, where they may only need me to be a door person.
Continued . . .
I believe in love.
I awoke after 4 hours of sleep, rested yet in turmoil over a dream in which I experienced apocalyptic rage wrath astonishing in that it went both ways; a dialog. Typically when I have dreams of such severity I arise like a . . . well there is a speed, we are capable of, that surpasses all analogies, similes, metaphors, similitude. The speed of sound, or light, is nothing compared to the speed with which we address/assess threat and respond to it.
The speed of thought?
I have an experiential method of assessing the truth of my dreams, carefully constructed from infancy. But I am not concerned with dreams now, since I was lead through the past 7.5 hours to this moment of writing up a postmortem/after action report.
We are about to be divorced from our Parent, God.
Our relationship is being abandoned as a hopeless failure. I know God will be fine but we will suffer tragically, as do all the children of divorce.
I know this from my childhood being abandoned for the agenda of my parents. I know myself, not alone in this, for the Second World War made many of us orphans and thus we are in the majority seeking safety where none is available. The world made safe from holocaust became unsafe for all children afterwards.
Written within us is certainty of love and terror of never finding it.
I advocate that we can find safety together. Considering myself a steward attempting to make passengers comfortable in the final moments before the crash and our mutual, meaningless, death--inevitable. I have no authority, long to be wrong, yet having been trained by everything in my life, up to this moment, am certain that this is what I have life for.
Understanding one’s self--“An unexamined life is not worth living”--is a primary task for we who want a life and love--of value. In, of and for itself.
I know, and can argue, the defense of life’s right to exist and thrive through the agency of many belief systems and philosophies. The best defense is within you yet it has no meaning definable in our communal life about to be extinguished.
“ 21:52
I have looked for signs, omens and portents that I was in error in what I previously wrote. I have been gently reproved through the agency of friends, further study and a decision to use my “school of hard knocks” education to minister to the dying in our local Hospice, where they may only need me to be a door person.
Continued . . .
Let the shadowless light bathe and immolate us in love for one another incandescent.
100105 21:55
When Randy died I experienced relief, not for me, or him, but us both.
I continue in my awareness and gratitude the gifts of The Cranston Funeral Home. Dave carrying Randy down, cruciform--arms outstretched--down a narrow, corkscrew stair--the last time I saw Randy’s face. He was finally in peace.
We requested no embalming his body since he’d been, in life, a human pincushion.
Patty Cranston called, later on, to say that he was dressed and she’d set candles around him. We didn’t go. They, the Cranston family, donated a burial plot, and head stone, in their family grave site. Gave a Styrofoam coffin, and buried him for free; we were that poor then. I have always found peace in cemeteries, I still do. Yet the next day when he was buried I fell to the ground in uncontrollable grief. I remained in grief for 33 years until, at or around, his 43rd birthday, had he lived.
I will spare you the farther details of my life and instead dwell upon ours about to expire.
It may merely be my death song, this concern the world’s end, mine alone.
An event un-remarked since there will be none left to sing the eulogy.
As for my last request I will be cremated and my ashes spread upon the desert--no words requested or required--no marker unless my beloved friend is otherwise occupied and places the plain brown box with my ashes in a plastic bag in the nearest dumpster.
We are born alone and die alone in the final equality of death, and no marker significant will withstand the sands of time grinding it back into dust along with us.
Death slow, swift, meaningful or meaningless, does not diminishes the nobility I experience in all of you and all our life here and now.
The Gifts of God are magnificent as you are, or allow yourself to be; generous or penurious. I curse no one now yet know the wrath of myself too well to forget it. Forgiveness is a wealth that few give and fewer receive and acknowledging the author.
Let the shadowless light bathe and immolate us in love for one another incandescent.
In closing I can only record, this date, this hour, that I was lead to read John Donne’s “Meditation XVII”
‘for whom the bell tolls’ it tolls for us. Now. Tomorrow. This year or next, inevitably, life has no meaning without death.
Continued . . .
When Randy died I experienced relief, not for me, or him, but us both.
I continue in my awareness and gratitude the gifts of The Cranston Funeral Home. Dave carrying Randy down, cruciform--arms outstretched--down a narrow, corkscrew stair--the last time I saw Randy’s face. He was finally in peace.
We requested no embalming his body since he’d been, in life, a human pincushion.
Patty Cranston called, later on, to say that he was dressed and she’d set candles around him. We didn’t go. They, the Cranston family, donated a burial plot, and head stone, in their family grave site. Gave a Styrofoam coffin, and buried him for free; we were that poor then. I have always found peace in cemeteries, I still do. Yet the next day when he was buried I fell to the ground in uncontrollable grief. I remained in grief for 33 years until, at or around, his 43rd birthday, had he lived.
I will spare you the farther details of my life and instead dwell upon ours about to expire.
It may merely be my death song, this concern the world’s end, mine alone.
An event un-remarked since there will be none left to sing the eulogy.
As for my last request I will be cremated and my ashes spread upon the desert--no words requested or required--no marker unless my beloved friend is otherwise occupied and places the plain brown box with my ashes in a plastic bag in the nearest dumpster.
We are born alone and die alone in the final equality of death, and no marker significant will withstand the sands of time grinding it back into dust along with us.
Death slow, swift, meaningful or meaningless, does not diminishes the nobility I experience in all of you and all our life here and now.
The Gifts of God are magnificent as you are, or allow yourself to be; generous or penurious. I curse no one now yet know the wrath of myself too well to forget it. Forgiveness is a wealth that few give and fewer receive and acknowledging the author.
Let the shadowless light bathe and immolate us in love for one another incandescent.
In closing I can only record, this date, this hour, that I was lead to read John Donne’s “Meditation XVII”
‘for whom the bell tolls’ it tolls for us. Now. Tomorrow. This year or next, inevitably, life has no meaning without death.
Continued . . .
. . . for whom the bell tolls . . . John Donne
Meditation XVII
XVII. MEDITATION.
PERCHANCE he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill, as that he knows not it tolls for him; and perchance I may think myself so much better than I am, as that they who are about me, and see my state, may have caused it to toll for me, and I know not that. The church is Catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does belongs to all. When she baptizes a child, that action concerns me; for that child is thereby connected to that body which is my head too, and ingrafted into that body whereof I am a member. And when she buries a man, that action concerns me: all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another. As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come, so this bell calls us all; but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness. There was a contention as far as a suit (in which both piety and dignity, religion and estimation, were mingled), which of the religious orders should ring to prayers first in the morning; and it was determined, that they should ring first that rose earliest. If we understand aright the dignity of this bell that tolls for our evening prayer, we would be glad to make it ours by rising early, in that application, that it might be ours as well as his, whose indeed it is. The bell doth toll for him that thinks it doth; and though it intermit again, yet from that minute that that occasion wrought upon him, he is united to God. Who casts not up his eye to the sun when it rises? but who takes off his eye from a comet when that breaks out? Who bends not his ear to any bell which upon any occasion rings? but who can remove it from that bell which is passing a piece of himself out of this world?
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee. Neither can we call this a begging of misery, or a borrowing of misery, as though we were not miserable enough of ourselves, but must fetch in more from the next house, in taking upon us the misery of our neighbours. Truly it were an excusable covetousness if we did, for affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it. No man hath affliction enough that is not matured and ripened by and made fit for God by that affliction. If a man carry treasure in bullion, or in a wedge of gold, and have none coined into current money, his treasure will not defray him as he travels. Tribulation is treasure in the nature of it, but it is not current money in the use of it, except we get nearer and nearer our home, heaven, by it. Another man may be sick too, and sick to death, and this affliction may lie in his bowels, as gold in a mine, and be of no use to him; but this bell, that tells me of his affliction, digs out and applies that gold to me: if by this consideration of another's danger I take mine own into contemplation, and so secure myself, by making my recourse to my God, who is our only security.
XVII. MEDITATION.
PERCHANCE he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill, as that he knows not it tolls for him; and perchance I may think myself so much better than I am, as that they who are about me, and see my state, may have caused it to toll for me, and I know not that. The church is Catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does belongs to all. When she baptizes a child, that action concerns me; for that child is thereby connected to that body which is my head too, and ingrafted into that body whereof I am a member. And when she buries a man, that action concerns me: all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another. As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come, so this bell calls us all; but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness. There was a contention as far as a suit (in which both piety and dignity, religion and estimation, were mingled), which of the religious orders should ring to prayers first in the morning; and it was determined, that they should ring first that rose earliest. If we understand aright the dignity of this bell that tolls for our evening prayer, we would be glad to make it ours by rising early, in that application, that it might be ours as well as his, whose indeed it is. The bell doth toll for him that thinks it doth; and though it intermit again, yet from that minute that that occasion wrought upon him, he is united to God. Who casts not up his eye to the sun when it rises? but who takes off his eye from a comet when that breaks out? Who bends not his ear to any bell which upon any occasion rings? but who can remove it from that bell which is passing a piece of himself out of this world?
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee. Neither can we call this a begging of misery, or a borrowing of misery, as though we were not miserable enough of ourselves, but must fetch in more from the next house, in taking upon us the misery of our neighbours. Truly it were an excusable covetousness if we did, for affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it. No man hath affliction enough that is not matured and ripened by and made fit for God by that affliction. If a man carry treasure in bullion, or in a wedge of gold, and have none coined into current money, his treasure will not defray him as he travels. Tribulation is treasure in the nature of it, but it is not current money in the use of it, except we get nearer and nearer our home, heaven, by it. Another man may be sick too, and sick to death, and this affliction may lie in his bowels, as gold in a mine, and be of no use to him; but this bell, that tells me of his affliction, digs out and applies that gold to me: if by this consideration of another's danger I take mine own into contemplation, and so secure myself, by making my recourse to my God, who is our only security.
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