Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Wisdom

photo by Steve Kye
I read in an email newsletter today an offer for one of Brian Tracy's programs. Here is a quote that stays with me,and is forever true:
"In fact there is nothing more dangerous than learning from those who share only opinions rather than experience."
Thank you, Brian Tracy, and all others who remind us so well.

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Sunlight


When I read Brent Staples’ City Life editorial (“A Little More Sunlight”) in the NY Times yesterday, I was in it from the first sentence: “A tree trunk shattering in the wind can sound very much like a lightning strike.” I’d been thinking of the meandering paths minds take through history, through a day, every spark and eruption mine had had since my first sip of coffee. He wrote how the wind had accomplished in a few seconds what he’s been trying to accomplish in his garden plot for 10 years. I almost laughed out loud. The attention they paid to damp, shaded life, the nurturing of roots, the patches of light – how profoundly intimate and scrabbling such tending is.

I am listening to the birds in this springtime thrust, and thinking of earth. As I mentioned to a friend recently, this deep sense I feel of “coming home” is new to me. Maturation, times spent on Earth and a sense of it, is a part, and each spreading ripple of thought I feel from my beginnings, our beginnings, the clouds as thoughts. I will forever be a “tender of select things” – my neglect of others is simply an admonishment, a reminder, of all there is to celebrate. The leaves I see moving in the breeze, the quick flash of yellow which disappears, the way one inked word winks at me from a page, such as “Sunlight.” Happy scented spring.

Thursday, March 15, 2007

Thoughts on Hidden Memories; Notes from Sharing


Notes from Sharing: Self Discovery in Relationship by Kathy Oddenino
Thoughts on Hidden Memories


“Our growth as individuals, families, communities, cultures, the world, and the Universe is controlled by our ability to gain insight into the lesson of the experience of sharing. We are a complex network of interwoven energy which we share consciously, subconsciously, and unconsciously. This is true in all aspects of our lives from the most dramatic event to the common-place, daily life experience. The experiences of life are understood relative to the image or vision projected by the conscious mind into our life activities.” (x)

“Truth is the living spirit of consistency between the thoughts of man, the words of man, and the actions of man. We live truth when we are no longer afraid to acknowledge, accept, respect, and value the consistency from the moment of inspiration to the moment of creation.” (x)

Our first relationship is with ourself. Living truth means that we “know who we are.” We “Know Thyself.” If we create confusion and conflict within our mind by not being truth, we will create depression, anger, fear, denial, and resistance within ourself and our life. We will create an internal climate within ourself of confusion, of not being able to understand what we want. This confusion is the result of inconsistencies between our internal thoughts and feelings, and our external words and actions. This inconsistency of internal thoughts and external words is the beginning of untruth. Chances are the actions that follow these words will also take a different path. When your actions are not consistent with your words, you create another level of untruth, conflict, and confusion. (xi)

As individuals we create according to our inner truth being balanced with our external truth. Our external truth is subjected to a belief system that has been created by the ego.

“My own experience of self-discovery has been in motion since the day that I was created. My truth is creating total consistency between my thoughts, my words, and my actions.” “By seeing the opposites, I can define the opportunity to change. “ (xiii)

Accept, understand, and use the vibrational energy of your consciousness.

“When you use your soul memory, you are motivated from the memory of past lessons. When you use your spirit energy you are inspired by love, truth, and perfection. If you integrate your inspiration and motivation with your intellect, you will create with the power of the Creator.” (11)

Thinking about hidden memories and the ways these multiple levels of energies interact and are interwoven within us helps me to recognize the patterns of my personality that I have created and which ones I use and why. I have lived this duality of “tough and tenderness” all my life, because this duality was what I wanted to heal in my mind – this belief in separation, and the hostility between my male mind and the female loving emotions that I revered and felt, deep within, but had not reconciled with, truly accepted without trying to control.

"Your inherent birthright is your power of creation through the positive energy forces of love, truth, and perfection." (20)

Do you fear acknowledgement and acceptance of the soul and spirit within you?
I see better and better what the opening of a mind means, what this means to me, in this life. I see visions of the evolution of physical images, like the cells forming into shapes, the shapes forming into “apes,” into men, rising from clusters of cells into trunks, limbs, crawling to walking. I see how the images projected onto cave walls came to us, how we saw the shadowy shapes, tried to regain the memory of where the shapes came from, from the “ether” of our memory, how we are still trying to do that in different ways, with different tools.

As I think about Neural Depolarization and the power of this healing that is designed within us, I think about the reality that “we are energy first.” Understanding the energy of us as the energy of the Universe pulsing within us, and the “microchips” of thoughts are our dreams-coming-true or whirling into another form, dissipating, changing. When I think about the memories, or energy streams, that have come to me so strongly through my life, I am finally coming to terms with them – i.e., opening to them as “me,” as energy, not as an identity stream but as the flow that moves and helps me define myself and my passions, the passion of living. Each personality I see the stream reflecting “for” me today: CS, with that haunting image of the females in her family, especially the “mothers,” seeking freedom in a strictured environment, leaping from windows, the haunting energy of war as a backdrop, and the creative juices of drawing, of longing for love, and the love of ideas stimulating a mind even as the pontificating ego of her intelligent man-friend distracted her and seduced her with her need “to be loved”; GB and his wild and willful mind that had its sharp edges in its thrusts of inspiration and ideas, his impatience and restlessness with “moving on,” to the next idea, the next town, even the next impulse and urge to defend himself, to find “the truth!”; SW, her "gravity and grace,” the need to find the truth too, the need for answers to her questions, her absolute devotion to thinking, to the sharp thrill of thinking, and the restless thought that she was only a shadow compared to a mind like her brother’s, much as she loved him, and that this shadowy sense of “what is it,” where is the mercy, compassion, justice, truth that is substantial and not shadowy, haunted her. This character Blake, well, what to say about Blake, and this energy of, again, the sharp thrill of cutting and waxing, sealing, coloring, the softening of the edges of sky, of fingers reaching to the sky, skin blending into sky colors, the earth shapes molding into the human forms as naturally as the hand of “God.”

When I think of these streams and their prominence in my thinking mind energy’s fingering, playing with, touching, wondering, I feel other levels of my mind opening, I feel my fingers opening to touch other crevices, wisps, the energies of each thought opening, each thought opening into words, the vortexes that open infinitely into more.

Now it is time for this flowering, this opening of my mind just to love, to be. Now I am sensing the strength of an older man, a smiling man, sitting with his elbows on his knees, palms open, explaining something to a listener who sits across from him, a friend – everyone is a friend. He is partly bald, calm, comfortable, neatly dressed, open necked shirt. Yet this is an “old” image, not a modern one. It is a blending of energies together, like a coming together of a lot. Perhaps this is part of the healing of some of these religious association-images, such as the one early in my life that was solidified by the Bible-toting Texas preacher who visited us in Nigeria, and I had the series of images then of big rings, big hands, dangling crosses, long skirts swishing. This breeze has a much different energy, a spring breeze with the casual scent of flowers. I feel the skirt, filmy, flowery, yet covered by a long soft linen shirt, open, free, and hair easy, long, dropping bits from clips. I’m leaning over the edge of a bed, brass bedposts, gleaming chrome, a soft rug, I am smiling, the left over lingering of a smile. Someone has just left the room, and it was a smiling moment. These are opening moments, I am leaving the sharp edges behind, and feeling the flow of forever.

It is no wonder we become so confused by what we sense that we cannot identify as “fact.” Our mind is dependent upon fact-checking, and yet what do we create our facts to do? With each moment we may feel the power of love, that we are made to create with this energy of love, truth, and perfection. We must learn enough to know what truth is, what this cycle of consistency, of stability, of change means to us as a mind, and a sensory being in constant motion and change.

Vaudeville? Flappers? Driving a Rolls-Royce down a tree-lined drive in early Spring? Guiding a rickshaw before they were cool through a crowded street in a town that has changed names several times just in your lifetime? Standing under a shower on a Caribbean island, the shower head attached to the side of the wood house, the blue ocean a dazzle that goes on and on even after you close your eyes and you know it will stay that way forever in your mind. Tap shoes that tip black, then blue, then brown, the polish a high luster that is only matched by a fine car rubbed clean or a smile that is as bright as a light. Then feathers, chickens squawking, children laughing as you run around the dirt yard trying to catch the bird, laughter loud as the roar of the soccer fans you can still hear in your ears from that first game so long ago.

Go much further and feel the flow of ideas that come with a wooden chalice lifted from a long table, reclining and full of the wine of ideas and laughter and the distant memory of food. Go further again and feel the smile that comes through tears as a mother waves a son off from home, the tears that become a flood when that sending is to war. Each teardrop has its own makeup which reflects the lake that we remember from every myth we have ever heard, every hope.

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

My Friend Ric


http://ricconnstudio.mysite.com/
Check out my friend Ric Conn's paintings. I like this one.

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Howard and Peeps

Picture by PIJ (CM Buffington)