Posts Tagged ‘Consciousness’

Words…

What are words?

I used to believe words were comprised of language, letters, consonants, vowels, pronunciations.

Now I am not so sure.

Are not words pre-formed images, that sometime before adopting, we agree are to be transmitted?

Is not the unfinished painting above a compilation of words?

“Before she became ill, David’s mother would often tell him that stories were alive. They weren’t alive in the way that people were alive, or even dogs or cats. People were alive whether you chose to notice them or not, while dogs tended to make you notice them if they decided that you weren’t paying them enough attention. Cats, meanwhile, were very good at pretending people didn’t exist at all when it suited them, but that was another matter entirely.

Stories were different, though: they came alive in the telling. Without a human voice to read them aloud, or a pair of wide eyes following them by flashlight beneath a blanket, they had no read existence in our world. They were like seeds in the beak of a bird, waiting to fall to earth, or the notes of a song laid out on a sheet, yearning for an instrument to bring their music into being. They lay dormant, hoping for the chance to emerge. Once someone started to read them, they could begin to change. They could take root in the imagination, and transform the reader. Stories wanted to be read, David’s mother would whisper. They needed it. It was the reason they forced themselves from their world into ours. They wanted us to give them life.”

The Book of Lost Things, John Connolly, copyright 2006, p. 3.

Grassroots economics.

What does that mean to you?

Suppose it was so simple, that we could help each other?

Suppose you had a necklace for sale, and your blogging community joined around you, to get it sold?

Suppose you had a business you wanted to start, a venture, and we all joined around you and passed the word on and so on and so on?

If I was the beggar on the street, and collected one dollar from 250,000 people in the space of three days, they would have saved me, no?

Why can’t we all be the beggars on the corner and the ones stopping to drop a dollar? It starts now.

Suppose we picked up our own strength and helped one another?

What then?

Could it be the dawning of a new age?

AcrossThe Universe – I Want To Hold Your Hand
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQfRdn8wqi4]

Across The Universe – Strawberry Fields Forever (Movie Ver)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziToC3371NE]

Donovan – Sunshine Superman
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSLpX9Jlfnk]
Sit back and listen.

Enjoy.

Peace

How many times do we wish to reinvent ourselves?

To start again?

To be the master, or would it be, the mistress, of the past?

How many times, do we long to stand atop the tallest point, and scream, from our hearts, I meant well?

The snow allows us to begin again,

in unexpected ways.

It blankets our paths,

daring us to set foot again,

and to watch also,

where we step.

Today, the snow has blessed us.

I read a post daring the readers to break out and expand our consciousness and awareness:

Sibbia on “I Don’t Believe In…”.

She invited me and a few others (and doubtless the entire world if all are so inclined) to join in and challenge a belief.

Hmmmm.

Shouldn’t be so hard, should it?

I challenge many things, I challenge the appearance or the illusion of truth. I challenge perception. I challenge myself.

I find that many of us have been taught to not forgive, for if we do, we are then fools or soon to be a ready-made fool. I find that we are not taught that the lack of forgiveness many times hurts only ourselves and always in fact hurts somewhere internally. That is a given. That is a “fact”.

When we do not forgive, we take up room within ourselves, we create labyrinths with mirrored walls, pitfalls, dungeons and all sorts of traps that we have hidden the locks to, even though we were the original locksmiths.

I received a lovely parable yesterday, and share it with you today, to challenge your belief, and sometimes my own, on forgiveness.

I leave it below for you, in its entirety as I received it. I do not know the author of the piece.

Stone

TWO FRIENDS WERE WALKING
THROUGH THE DESERT
DURING SOME POINT OF THE
JOURNEY, THEY HAD AN
ARGUMENT; AND ONE FRIEND
SLAPPED THE OTHER ONE
IN THE FACE

THE ONE WHO GOT SLAPPED
WAS HURT, BUT WITHOUT
SAYING ANYTHING,
WROTE IN THE SAND

TODAY MY BEST FRIEND
SLAPPED ME IN THE FACE

THEY KEPT ON WALKING,
UNTIL THEY FOUND AN OASIS,
WHERE THEY DECIDED
TO TAKE A BATH

THE ONE WHO HAD BEEN
SLAPPED GOT STUCK IN THE
MIRE! AND STARTED DROWNING,
BUT THE FRIEND SAVED HIM.

AFTER HE RECOVERED FROM
THE NEAR DROWNING,
HE WROTE ON A STONE:

“TODAY MY BEST FRIEND
SAVED MY LIFE”

THE FRIEND WHO HAD SLAPPED
AND SAVED HIS BEST FRIEND
ASKED HIM, “AFTER I HURT YOU,
YOU WROTE IN THE SAND AND NOW,
YOU WRITE ON A STONE, WHY?”

THE FRIEND REPLIED
“WHEN SOMEONE HURTS US
WE SHOULD WRITE IT DOWN
IN SAND, WHERE WINDS OF
FORGIVENESS CAN ERASE IT AWAY.
BUT, WHEN SOMEONE DOES
SOMETHING GOOD FOR US,
WE MUST ENGRAVE IT IN STONE
WHERE NO WIND
CAN EVER ERASE IT”

LEARN TO WRITE
YOUR HURTS IN
THE SAND AND TO
CARVE YOUR
BENEFITS IN STONE.

T HEY SAY IT TAKES A
MINUTE TO FIND A SPECIAL
PERSON,
AN HOUR TO APPRECIATE
THEM,
A DAY
TO LOVE THEM,

BUT THEN
AN ENTIRE LIFE
TO FORGET THEM.

SEND THIS TO
THE PEOPLE YOU’LL NEVER
FORGET.
I JUST DID.

IF YOU DON’T
SEND IT TO ANYONE,
IT MEANS YOU’RE IN A
HURRY AND THAT YOU’VE
FORGOTTEN YOUR FRIENDS.

TAKE THE TIME TO LIVE!

DO NOT VALUE THE THINGS
YOU HAVE IN YOUR LIFE, BUT VALUE
WHO YOU HAVE IN YOUR LIFE!

AND IF I HAPPEN TO GET IT BACK,
THEN I KNOW MY PLACE IN YOUR LIFE

“Be kinder than necessary, for everyone you meet is fighting some kind of battle.”

I HOPE this message finds you in good health

To God be the Glory for the great things He has done!

I ask myself, no, I hesitate as I type this, do I really ask myself?

I think not. I think I know, no, I know I know, what enrichment is….

It is a day not long ago, a trying one, and just when a pause interspersed itself, Louis Armstrong came on, singing Hello Dolly and I heard my grandfather singing, singing like Louis. Yeah, I know, no one sings like Louis, but if you heard my grandfather, you too would shake your head.

I read Ronnie’s post on The Door to the Universe is You and it fit, it resonated, and I said, damn, I thought my landscape was limited, I thought, with my headlamp, flashlight, and pickax meandering through the labryinth of my mind that I could find the creased bits of parchment to give me the map to the treasure chest, but you see, in my mind, in my search, the treasure chest had boundaries…I read Ronnie’s post, the door to the universe is you, and my heart exploded.

Let me add, as I wrote this, my husband, that beautiful man, was trying to get us ahead, up on a stool, changing lights and before I could type the word “exploded”, well, the bulb crashed to the ground, and yes, it exploded everywhere.

So am I enriched? More than I can describe. It is the hug of a child, slippery from the bath, throwing him upon a deep comforter to cushion the fun, the giggles, the sheer delight in the moment.

We are what we decide, no matter what life hands us. And yes, I have been handed lemons, but heck, it’s easy make lemonade. The thing is, I can’t help the lemons I have been given, so what choice is there? I’m in charge of me, I decide how I feel.

I have learned, I have many hats, I decide which ones I wear and when, and sometimes, just sometimes, I wear them all at once.

Enrichment?

Who decides?

You do.

Namaste.

I sat here, for a blessed moment or two, doing nothing but seeing.

I saw that despite my attempts to clean up my shelves, a piece of paper had a mind of its own and somehow became lodged between one shelf and another, in a space which served to highlight it: A Novena to St. Jude.

Now I have always known St. Jude is powerful and clever, but this beats all, quite a funny way of reminding me I owe him a few prayers of gratitude.

I sat again, unwilling to pick up the novena prayer, not quite yet, this is my stillness and prayer to me is active in a way mere thought is not.

I had just stopped working on a memorandum, research, the pursuit of questions without quantifiable answers, but whose answers, when found exonerate or impose liability and to be frank, I was done, I was “still”.

So I continued to stare thinking about a series of email exchanges regarding how much is too much, when does thought and excavating the past liberate us and when does it encumber us?

My eye glanced to a lovely book, an older version: Little Pictures of Japan. And I was drawn to its cover and wanted to jump in and indulge myself in its ability to take the complex and make it simple but I didn’t.

I continued to sit and stare.

My mind became drawn to a book: Where the Wild Things Are, by Maurice Sendak. One of my absolute favorites from childhood.

I stood up, I picked it up, walked back to my chair and sat down.

I love it just as much today: the child on a journey, confronting and meeting his fears, and regarding them unblinking.

Yes. It was the perfect ending to that line of thought if I had not just stepped outside afterward and for the second time today heard a long forgotten song playing from a neighbor’s home which propelled me to view myself remotely as a beautiful and pure child and to want to smother that child with kisses and thank her for her dreams, for her courage to believe, for her vision and to promise her, I would begin to take down the walls that stood in her path.

See Ronnie’s Out of My Head piece:  Where the Wild Things Were

There are days when there is nothing I want to say or post.

It is a period of being devoid of having anything new to say or an opinion that is not expressed elsewhere.

Perhaps it is uncertainty.  (And no, the “perhaps” was not a play on words).

Many people out here in Blogland have volumes to write in a seemingly endless and reliable fashion.

I am not one of those bloggers.

I find that silence is sometimes my best friend.  I have days where I absorb, I hear and think and feel what is going on around me, but I let it pass through without grabbing on to see what will settle and to not push myself into believing one thing or another.

A recent post here related to Widows in India, arguably only a very small percentage of a vast population, but the subject induced a long series of comments.  I understand why, the title alone:  Widows in India, did nothing to demonstrate that the subject was less than the entire class of Widows.  I could understand why someone who has lived and breathed in a Society, and has taken on obligations and watched others around take on obligations, would feel the need to enlighten us further.  I also understand the varied responses and different interpretations of others who commented on that particular piece.

It made me realize, not for the first time in my life, how much of this world is an illusion.  I say this because we all see the world with a different vision, different senses, different emotions, etc.  All of these “reactions” play out what our individual world amounts to, whether accurate or not, I am not convinced that there can ever be only one version, one vision.

-S.E.

*I enjoy the lack of permanence in chalk-contradiction as I took photos of some of the stages.  Yet, I did not take a photo last night even though the skies threatened to open up again.  I play the same games with myself with writing, if I have a thought, you know the kind, that strikes of wanting to be preserved, I normally will not reach for paper or the keyboard.  Instead, I feel, if it is worth saying, worth knowing, it will come back to me.  I see the maze I create as I am a fan of pure stream of consciousness writing.  I’m laughing, ?pure?, as if my mind does not edit at least somewhat before my fingers hit the keys.

Anyway-enjoy-may you have a blessed Saturday.

I am not a sophisticated listener of music, I only know what calls to me, and it is such a wide variety.

I sat this early evening outside, surrounded by trees which must be hundreds of years old, and I watched them watching me.

Did you know the movement of the trees, if watched with an open mind and without hurry, do not follow the patterns of proscribed wind?

The leaves move in different patterns, fluttering even within the stronger gusts, they are dancing and shaping themselves against the sky for us to read, if we could only but remember.

There are things calling me to go inside, the day to day events, chores, what you might call, existence, but I am enraptured by what I am witnessing, the leaves and the branches, the very limbs are acting against the wind and dancing.

The first symphony I ever have understood.

I was reminded today about the “Little Arrow in the Upper Right Corner”, by Ronnie over at Out of My Head.

For kicks, I started clicking and clicking. I saw some lovely blogs, but it was a blog focused on saving children and stopping child slavery, that caused me to stop and read and then start clicking on the resources/links listed.

I began to read articles written by Shelly Seale.

The information focused upon the plight of children in India. I of course had read many things about the plight of children in India before, but today, it hit me differently and I was overwhelmed by the enormity of how many children live not only without parents or other family, but live under despicable conditions at the behest of people that mistakenly call themselves human.

I came across information on The Miracle Foundation and news articles talking about the founder Caroline Boudreaux. The grace of one open heart with the humble goal to simply help children is beyond inspiring.

Excerpts of Monteray have been moved to a new page, entitled:  Monteray, The Book