Leo

Our doggie, Leo - relaxing on the chaise lounge...

The Doorway




Thought for the Day: When Things Fall Apart

Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of
healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome
the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved.
They come together and they fall apart. then they come together
again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes
from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief,
for relief, for misery, for joy.

When we think something is going to bring us pleasure, we don’t
know what’s really going to happen. When we think something is
going to give us misery, we don’t know. Letting there be room
for not knowing is the most important thing of all. We try to do
what we think is going to help. But we don’t know. We never
know if we’re going to fall flat or sit up tall. When there’s a
big disappointment, we don’t know if that the end of the story.
It may be just the beginning of a great adventure....

...Life is a good teacher and a good friend. Things are always
in transition, if we could only realize it. Nothing ever sums
itself up in the way that we like to dream about. The off-center,
in-between state is an ideal situation, a situation in which we don’t
get caught and we can open our hearts and minds beyond limit.
It’s a very tender, nonaggressive, open-ended state of affairs.

To stay with that shakiness—to stay with a broken heart, with
a rumbling stomach, with the feeling of hopelessness and
wanting to get revenge—that is the path of true awakening.
Sticking with that uncertainty, getting the knack of relaxing
in the midst of chaos, learning not to panic—this is the
spiritual path. Getting the knack of catching ourselves, of
gently and compassionately catching ourselves, is the path
of the warrior. We catch ourselves one zillion times as once
again, whether we like it or not, we harden into resentment,
bitterness, righteous indignation—harden in any way, even
into a sense of relief, a sense of inspiration.

Every day we could think about the aggression in the world,
in New York, Los Angeles, Halifax, Taiwan, Beirut, Kuwait,
Somalia, Iraq, everywhere. All over the world, everybody
always strikes out at the enemy, and the pain escalates
forever. Every day we could reflect on this and ask ourselves,
“Am I going to add to the aggression in the world?” Every day,
at the moment when things get edgy, we can just ask ourselves,
“Am I going to practice peace, or am I going to war?”

---from When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron

Honeysuckle View


This morning I went outside early and inhaled --
Pink roses, honeysuckle, larkspur--Russian Olive smells like oranges --
wafting in waves across the field, almost too sweet to believe.

The Last of the Tulips

These were unusually pretty - but now of course the wind
has blown their heads off...and Summer is suddenly here!

This is disturbing...
Paxil Americana
New York is in a medicated state of mind.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
By Tina Brown

May 15, 2003 |

At first I thought New Yorkers were in a better mood because the war was over.
Now I'm beginning to suspect it's because everyone is on drugs. Legal ones,
that is. At a big media party the other night most of the talk in the buffet line
was about how something called Buspar is so much more effective than Paxil
for taking off the sharp edges. As one brisk female executive told me after an
altercation with a "difficult" colleague, "I don't talk to people anymore who aren't
on meds. They're too much work."

There's always a commercial payoff to any cataclysm in America and in the
case of 9/11 it was the marketing of anxiety. It suddenly legitimized every other
form of affluent terror and brought the subterranean pill thing -- growing since the
explosion of Prozac in 1987 -- out of the closet. Now, at water coolers all over town,
people earnestly debate which prescription drugs make the best "chasers" to even
out the side effects of the meds they're already taking. There's even a certain
one-upmanship about which one you're on. It's cooler to throw away that you're taking
Luvox for anxiety rather than the more familiar Xanax ...
You can read the rest of this article at Salon.com but you have to click through a
bunch of ads for a one-day pass if you are not a subscriber...
It's worth a look though, especially for the cartoons...

Shut Up And Vibrate Already
Because you just know it's not all toxic war and BushCo and homophobic
senators, right?
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist Friday, May 2, 2003

So you look straight out into that winking sunset or up at that star-gashed
sky or over at that frolicking goofy mutt in the park or at that funky yellow Mini
Cooper or deep into the rich burgundy flesh of that goblet of wine or over at
the soft gorgeous rhythmic rise and fall of your lover's chest as s/he sleeps
and you think, this is proof, isn't it?

This is proof that there's something more, something richer and more divine
and far, far more profound and enthralling and cosmic and worthy and wet and
delicious about this damnable existence, right? You can just feel it, that
divine kick, that lick, that juice? Of course you can.

You just know, in other words, that this can't be all there is.

Surely, you think, it's not all smirking inarticulate presidents and gutted
economies and bogus wars and international resentment, factories belching
venom into the sky and the oceans with decreasing federal restriction and
increasing corporate glee.

Surely it's not all rabid psychopatriots and fear-happy Bible huggers and
homophobic Republican senators promoting their tyranny of sexless
ignorance, garbage-food conglomerates consciously poisoning the population
with toxic foodstuffs far more full of synthetic goo and Agent Orange by-products
and bioengineered rat dung than actual food from which the body can draw life
and energy and funk and satisfied karmic burps.

You think: No way can it be all about thuggish 8 MPG SUVs and inexplicably
dying sea otters and 45 percent of the country actually believing Saddam
Hussein was directly responsible for 9/11. Can it?

Millions of people invoking the name of God as justification for war and hate
and death, more homeless, more poverty, more rampant population growth,
more bitch-slapped civil rights, political corruption and bizarre viral disease
and Dick Cheney making you question the very definition of sympathetic
animate biped?

Because it's just so easy to forget. It's so easy to let the crush and rush
and chain-saw babble of the world, of the major media's prepackaged hysteria,
overwhelm your senses and numb your id and pile-drive your innate ability
to look, really look at the world around you, and ultimately let them effectively
asphyxiate what you deeply sense to be true.

Not simply that everything is connected. Not simply that there is a
throbbing pulsing extant ever-present scientifically proven energetic vibration
to every damn thing on the planet, animate and inanimate, breathing or not,
each and every organism radiating forth its sacredness and its profanity
and just waiting for you to raise your consciousness just a little so you
can receive your divine epiphanic ass-slap.

It's not just that. It's that you, right now, at this moment, are much less
removed from those pulsing vibrational things than They want you to believe.
You are closer than you think.

Here is the basic formula: The more They get you to ignore and detach from
and hurl sticks of dismissive ignorance at that divine interconnectedness,
the more you feed the common tyranny of fear, the collective cultural moan,
and the easier it is for corporations and the government and the masters of
televised dread to convince you to buy into, say, a noxious war. Or toxic fast
food. Or ultraviolent entertainment. Or Celine Dion.

Conversely, the more you work to feel nature, imbibe it, soak up that juicy
interconnectedness like wine into a mattress, suck up that vibrational hum
and awe and kiss, the more you realize the value of protecting and preserving
and treading lightly, actually taking the time to taste your food, integrate with
those objects, feel that breath of your lover. Simple, really.

And, hence, the less you require of the material world. This is what scares
them the most. This is why They don't want you to notice, to feel, to
remember, or to question their motives.

Because the less you believe that everything around you is just a tedious
lifeless resource to be consumed and shrugged off, the less you feel the
need to share in the massive force-fed belief that we are here to devour
as much as possible, as quickly as possible, and blow the living crap
out of everything that gets in our way.

And then you take the idea one step further. You realize that by soaking
up that interconnected juice and raising that vibrational consciousness
just that little bit, on a day-to-day basis, you are directly and immediately
affecting everything around you, inspiring it, them, us to do exactly
the same.

The final kicker: It's all accessible right now. All you gotta do is ask.
Invite it in. Literally. Just ask.

Want to be healthy? Strong? More open and lickable and less bitter and
baffled and cynical? Ask for it, place some divine intent behind it and
breathe it in and imagine what it would feel like to radiate health and
sexual vibrancy and self-defined joy and really cool taste in shoes. That's
how you start.

Because this is the biggest collective delusion of all, that you can't get at
it, that it's so much wimpy tofu-hugging BS, so much fluffy New Age
psychobabble. What a convenient excuse that is to remain wallowing and
acidic and humming at a simplistically low, want-based pitch, happily
drunk on the disinfo They want to sell you. It's just too easy. And lazy.

And it does require work. It takes some concentrated and open-hearted effort
to raise that awareness, to tune in on that level, sift through the bogus media
and healers and teachers and pretentious yoga classes, gurus, smarmy
inane Chicken Soupy books to find the authentically divine heat and rush
and thrust.

You gotta get off your ass. You gotta question everything. You gotta see
the world anew, always, every moment, to progress and evolve and vibrate
higher.
And, to be sure, it can be a total divinely annoying pain in the ass.

But, really, when you get right down to it, what else is there?

from a post at this interesting site - www.godlikeproductions.com
this is an excerpt from a talk given by Carlos Barrios on the Mayan Calendar:
"The World Will Not End" -- Check out this stuff about Ether - The Fifth Element!

A Call for Fusion

As he met with audiences in Santa Fe, Mr. Barrios told a story about the
most recent Mayan New Year ceremonies in Guatemala. He said that one
respected Mam elder, who lives all year in a solitary mountain cave,
journeyed to Chichicastenango to speak with the people at the ceremony.
The elder delivered a simple, direct message. He called for human beings to
come together in support of life and light. Right now each person and group
is going his or her own way. The elder of the mountains said there is hope
if the people of the light can come together and unite in some way.

Reflecting on this, Mr. Barrios explained: "We live in a world of polarity:
day and night, man and woman, positive and negative. Light and darkness
need each other. They are a balance. Just now the dark side is very
strong,and very clear about what they want. They have their vision and
their priorities clearly held, and also their hierarchy. They are working in
many ways so that we will be unable to connect with the spiral Fifth
World in 2012."

"On the light side everyone thinks they are the most important, that their
own understandings, or their group´s understandings, are the key. There´s
a diversity of cultures and opinions, so there is competition, diffusion, and
no single focus."

As Mr. Barrios sees it, the dark side works to block fusion through denial
and materialism. It also works to destroy those who are working with the
light to get the Earth to a higher level. They like the energy of the old,
declining Fourth World, the materialism. They do not want it to change.
They do not want fusion. They want to stay at this level, and are afraid of
the next level.

The dark power of the declining Fourth World cannot be destroyed or
overpowered. It´s too strong and clear for that, and that is the wrong
strategy. The dark can only be transformed when confronted with simplicity
and open-heartedness. This is what leads to fusion, a key concept for the
World of the Fifth Sun.

Mr. Barrios said the emerging era of the Fifth Sun will call attention to a
much-overlooked element. Whereas the four traditional elements of earth,
air, fire and water have dominated various epochs in the past, there will
be a fifth element to reckon with in the time of the Fifth Sun: ether. The
dictionary defines ether as the rarefied element of the Heavens. Ether is a
medium. It permeates all space and transmits waves of energy in a wide
range of frequencies, from cell phones to human auras. What is "ethereal"
is related to the regions beyond earth: the heavens.

Ether the element of the Fifth Sun is celestial and lacking in material
substance, but is no less real than wood, stone or flesh. "Within the
context of ether there can be a fusion of the polarities," Mr. Barrios
said. "No more darkness or light in the people, but an uplifted fusion. But
right now the realm of darkness is not interested in this. They are
organized to block it. They seek to unbalance the Earth and its environment
so we will be unready for the alignment in 2012. We need to work together
for peace, and balance with the other side. We need to take care of the
Earth that feeds and shelters us. We need to put our entire mind and heart
into pursuing unity and fusion now, to confront the other side and preserve
life."

More at the website: sacredroad.org

Am I seeing things?

Bush, Blair Nominated for Nobel Prize for Iraq War



Thu May 8,10:28 AM ET
By Alister Doyle
OSLO (Reuters) - A Norwegian parliamentarian nominated President Bush
and British Prime Minister Tony Blair for the Nobel Peace Prize on
Thursday, praising them for winning the war in Iraq ....(from yahoo news)

Excuse me? I don't know whether to laugh, or cry. Is this a joke, or are
we in such a hopelessly Orwellian nightmare that these men are honored as
peacemakers for carrying out this horrible war? War is Peace,
the headlines blared a month ago, and I guess it is true. Newspeak is all we have left.

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron
feeds.I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.
I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Wendell Berry

Bosque del Apache, San Antonio NM - 4/03

I haven't been blogging lately, for a number of reasons.
One is, I seem to be allergic to the computer.
I sit here and almost immediately begin to experience
a dizziness, like everything is closing in on me...my
shoulders ache and my eyes throb....I get up and walk
away, and feel better right away. It has something to do
with the information I feel bombarded with, and the
struggle to rise above it. I have some conflicting emotions
particularly with the weblog, because I don't want to simply
ignore world events, nor do I want to become absorbed
wholly in the negativity of the craziness whirling around us.

What's to say, beyond the obvious? I cherish my life and
loved ones and I truly believe that the highest goal is
simply to be happy, in spite of it all.

I have had a few technical difficulties - posts I wrote which
did not appear - vanished - and were forgotten. Maybe
not important, but the spontaneity is lost along with the words.

And so, I'm back - at least I think I'm back...
We have had a series of visitors who seem to step out
of deep time-space warps into our lives, for only a few
hours, bringing messages.

Most recently, Siglinde Schwenzl visited for a morning
from Kauai, with her stories of island life. She told us
about the Tobias materials, a channeled wisdom...
I like this Silent Prayer I found on the website,
Crimson Circle. ...This is my offering for Mother's Day.

It begins:

In my heart, I accept my perfect Being.
I accept that the joy that I have intended is already in my life.
I accept that love I have prayed for is already within me.
I accept that the peace I have asked for is already my reality.
I accept that the abundance I have sought already fills my life.

IF YOU CAN'T GO TO SLEEP(for Harley)

My dear soul
for tonight
what do you think will happen

if you pass your night
and merge it with dawn
for the sake of heart
what do you think will happen

if the entire world
is covered with the blossoms
you have labored to plant
what do you think will happen

if the elixir of life
that has been hidden in the dark
fills the desert and towns
what do you think will happen

if because of
your generosity and love
a few humans find their lives
what do you think will happen

if you pour an entire jar
filled with joyous wine
on the head of those already drunk
what do you think will happen

go my friend
bestow your love
even on your enemies
if you touch their hearts
what do you think will happen

Rumi

The Cat
His name is Widdles - we call him that, and although it may be
somewhat embarrassing ( his given name was Wylie) -- he doesn't
seem to care one way or another. He was dropped off here a few
years ago by Jody - my daughter's cat - for a few months visiting,
but he has never been claimed.

At The Turning Of The Tide By William Rivers Pitt
Thursday 1 May 2003

One of my earliest memories of childhood is of sitting in front of the television watching a baseball game with my mother in our apartment outside Boston. The year was 1975, and the Cincinnati Reds were playing the Red Sox in what has gone down in history as one of the most remarkable World Series matchups ever. The Reds were winning the game I was watching that day, and I turned to my mother and told her I was rooting for them. I wanted to be on the winning side, and even at that tender age I could sense the aura of inevitable doom that cloaked our hometown team.

You can’t do that, she said. The Red Sox are your team. It is wrong to bail out on them because they are losing. You stand with your team no matter what. Besides, she finished, some day they will actually win this thing, and you’ll miss out on the celebration if you discarded them before that happens.

I’ve been a die-hard Red Sox fan ever since. I remember Bucky Dent the way some people remember Sirhan Sirhan. I was watching the World Series in a basement in Newton in 1986 when that ball skipped nimbly through the legs of Bill Buckner, and my friend was so outraged that he punched the low-hanging ceiling hard enough to dent the linoleum floor of the kitchen above us. I just sat there, numb and dumb, with ceiling tile dust in my hair and a sinking feeling in my gut. Later that night we were walking back from the store when we were accosted by an abysmally inebriated Sox fan whose whole world had been destroyed. He made us do pushups on the greasy blacktop of a gas station to offer some sort of atonement to a universe that had, once again, reached out to crush us. We were young and small, he was huge and drunk, and as my nose lifted and fell off that oil-soaked pavement I thought, somehow, that it all made sense.

In George W. Bush’s America, being even moderately liberal these days is like being a Red Sox fan. You know what needs to happen, you know what is right, and yet some cosmic force akin to the lingering shade of Babe Ruth always manages to ascend from purgatory and batter you into dust right at the moment when something good and great is within your grasp. If you do manage to get your lineup together - home run issues, grand slam arguments, All Star players - you will get completely outspent by the damned Yankees who are sitting in your division with more money than God and the will to use it. Baseball, like politics, has no spending limits.


Read more at truthout.org -- this article -- At the Turning of the Tide, by William Rivers Pitt

The Vanishing Bogeyman
or
Now You See Him, Now You Don’t
by Richard Wall



Being a meditation on the comings and goings of late in Arabia and Mesopotamia, and the significance of the number six, with apologies to the late, great E. E. Cummings.

Saddam Hussein Al-Takriti
That name has a good ring to it, doesn’t it?
But most of us know you
As just plain
Saddam

Your regime lasted 24 years
That’s quite a long time as dictators go
Two years longer than Mussolini
whom the people done strung up good and true,
Double Hitler
And about as long as
Your hero
Joe Stalin
But not as long as Franco
Or Salazar
Who fell off a deck chair and lost his mind
They still brought him papers to sign
Until they decided one day
To pull the plug
On his life support...

...read the rest of the poem at Lew Rockwell's site