2009 Inspiration Awards, Pass-Them-On

2009 Inspiration Award

My old friend Paul Harvey did a nice thing and passed along to me an Inspiration Award, with a plug for my blog on his active historians' site. I do remember the poem he refers to in his note, and his "ruffled purity." Thanks, Paul!

Here are just a few I want to pass it on to:
1) back atcha, Paul, and all of your contributing editors. When I drop in, I find a world of historians, educators, academics that introduce me to a world of scholarship, thought, and information that makes me smile and give a great big wave to our History horizon. And thanks for your links, too - I've visited A Historian's Craft a few times and love her view. What a treat!

2) Kathy Oddenino's NDPstories blog - because learning to know the nervous system and why our human design as energy and matter is so beautiful (and designed to heal!). Also so refreshing and needed in our world where so many of us are sick and without the knowledge that we are made to heal ourselves. NDP stories

3) My friend Pesay You's blog - a spiritual philosopher with an engineering mind the likes of which you won't read anywhere else

4) Expanding World is my friend Linda Bruce's blog. An activist for enjoying our world's many creations, a playful creator of abundant talents, and a crusader for "public health." Check hers out!

5) Saturdays in Saxapahaw When I moved to North Carolina, this little town was undergoing its own change - reinforcing, enhancing, acknowledging the beauty of history and also building for Now, the future! Thanks to all who have been part of this effort! If you visit the "new" Saxapahaw General Store, say hi to Jeff Barney for me.

More blogs I want to pass on will follow! Thank you, Paul for the inspiration-

A Lot Cheaper Than Therapy

"For those who resolved this year to read more books, the Sacramento Bee offered a guide to bookstores in the California capital. As the paper so nicely noted, 'The bookstore is a meditative place full of wonders to discover, and it's a lot cheaper than therapy.'" Shelf-Awareness

The Fine Art of Creating Ourselves

Love is a beautiful emotion, but it must be used wisely to protect ourselves from energy that is traumatic to our Spiritual energy. We must be able to differentiate between the energy that feels good with our energy and the energy that does not feel good with our energy. (22-23, K Oddenino handout)

When we learn to live through the love within us, we trigger the love within other people. (23)

Creating ourselves is a fine art. We create a new image of ourselves and our focus in life.

I love learning Spiritual Philosophy. I love the way I feel when I make connections in my mind, like answering questions that may have lain dormant for years, or centuries, which "suddenly" are remembered, uncovered, revealed by the winds of change blowing in a new time and space. Jan. 18th's seminar on Our True Relationship to Physical Energy and Why We Create Disease inspired me further as this year begins.

Here are a few thoughts inspired from the day's learning, and the Inauguration into a New Year of Change. Rather than blame or judge, find the lesson, the connection for you of your soul and spirit lesson as it is reflected in the physical, in your behavior, your thoughts, feelings, the need to “chew on” what you are not yet ready to let go of. It has not always been easy for me to change my image of friendship, for example – my image of myself as a friend, or of others as friends. Why? Because as an ego self I believed that change meant “loss”? As I did change my image of myself, I was sometimes reluctant (afraid), or slow to see, that changing my image of myself meant changing my perception and therefore the reality of my physical, mental,and emotional interaction in some relationships. Fear begets defensiveness, control, protectionism, jealousy, competition. This illusion controls thought like a binding glove, or rope. Any tethering that is tightly bound is a control, not a safety net. Even this is making the image physical – rather than the “tethering” of the umbilical cord, the silver thread that connects us in the image of creators to creation. Meiosis, mitosis, the threads of chemicals that build themselves, connect, interact, change and grow, let go. The fear is a belief of an old self which had to make sure “I” was real, by pinching myself, opening my eyes, blinking. Are you still there? Here? How do I know, unless I can touch, feel, hear you? It is a dependency upon the five PHYSICAL senses as real only in their “physical” interpretation. I chose to be born as a triplet, with the inimitable support of my parents and brothers and sister. To be together as energy, as a conception then expanding, growing through evolution into an embryonic energy and on into the development and birth as a physical being, is a way to be conscious of the whole cycle, with “witnesses.” Clever, isn’t it.

Fear of change and a perception of change as a “loss” rather than gain is a fear of life, a fear of death, a fear of love, a fear of "energy as real." Expressions as an ego self are easy and quickly drawn. They become habitual, obsessive. Expressions as a loving self require attention to detail in the ways that women throughout history have woven beautiful blankets, knitted beautiful tapestries, made delicate, elaborate tablecloths and bedspreads which are passed down through generations of families. It is the lessons of energy, as energy, that we are created to learn. Their expressions can be beautiful, as we honor the art of their (our) creation, and take the time and energy to create the beauty our love motivates us to create.

Often in our Spiritual Philosophy seminars, Kathy Oddenino brings up the potential of DNA research to “show us who we are” as eternal energy beings. She shares stories of her life in the medical world, when she worked with others in research to uncover these patterns of life at a time when DNA research was in its infancy. At the seminar on Sunday (this year’s focus is on Being Spiritual, understanding Energy and the Ethical Values…), I thought about this again. When I, as a thinking mind, take in information and add to my storehouse of experience, and I do not understand the relationship of the information to myself as an energy being, I remain the same identity I was before I heard the information, except maybe I have added a little swagger. There may be an added sense of confidence, the blind faith of “information” as a tool, a god that protects me from the dangers of ignorance, should I ever need that piece of information. I trust I’ll know where to find it. It may be like knowing I need a photo ID now to board an airplane. Without it, there is chaos, maybe frustration, a necessary change of plan with a variety of levels of drama. With ID in hand, I feel secure – I have what I need, what they want. If I feel I don’t have what I need, or what someone else may require or want, do I feel insecure? What an interesting pattern this is! During the seminar we spoke about the imperative that we know ourselves as unique, as individuals, as creators, that we trust ourselves above others. Only we can learn to know ourselves as energy beings, to craft the dynamic personality we want to be, to live. Copying another, depending upon another's example even, dishonors us as eternal energy beings designed with unmatched intelligence. To know this as an eternal energy being (as all human beings are) is to love the excitement of “having what I need always.” No more shaking like a leaf on a tree when confronted by an “unknown,” as a DNA researcher who fears that his own DNA markers will “mark him for life” as he is bound by his (or her) belief that we live only one life! The joy is in the living, the thinking, the loving,the discovery, changing, the reality that as energy we have a precise design and we create patterns as energy through which we express ourselves as we search, live and change.

I have no doubt about my identity as an energy being - do I? As a thinking mind I am learning to eternally appreciate the beauty of the reality that we are our own creators, the gods of our own design because we share this common heritage of an intelligent design, as eternal energy beings. How do I love? By honoring this joy that conscious creation brings, always, and by acknowledging and sharing the love I feel. My friends, I honor you in your creations and want to know more! History is our patchwork of stories as evolving consciousness. I’ve gotten some text messages from soul images of myself that I’ve read with new eyes, in this “transition to power” time. No more will I depend upon the strength of relationships as "fixed bridges," as I still honor our mutual creations with their time and space signature. Now, the task that thrills my soul is to honor the changes we live, the attractions of energy that continues to expand itself as I/we nurture it. This is a kind of “re-birthing” for me in this new year. And it’s one more growing-up lesson! As an acquaintance experiencing the sadness of loss and the sweetness of memories wrote to me, yes, happy new year…it will be a good one, I feel sure. It’s a big journey.

Insects, Dwarfs, Individuals - Energy is Real!

A Nature-loving friend recently sent me a wonderful book called Inagua: An Island Sojourn (1940), by Gilbert Klingel, along with a beautiful card she made where these words (among others) were written: “Within oceans, upon reefs of time, patterns of Love, emerge.” A few years ago this friend sent me another book by Klingel on The Chesapeake Bay which I loved. Klingel’s writing opened the world of the water to me in ways I will never forget. Inagua, too, is opening my mind to energy experiences Klingel so beautifully shares. His book is a record of two expeditions to the small island.

Klingel was born in 1909 and built his first boat when he was 20. In the late 1930s he and a sailing companion set off from Maryland on an extended voyage, and after a series of "mishaps," found themselves shipwrecked on the island of Inagua (3rd largest island in the Bahamas. Most of his instruments were lost, but Klingel decided to stay, take pictures, and explore the island.

Some of the accounts of his expeditions have been published in other bulletins, but in his book, as he writes, he shares more of the perhaps more human sensations and happenings which “have no place in a biological treatise.”

“Discovery is largely a matter of point of view. I have walked down a street without being aware of its existence. The same avenue from a thirty-story window or from the sanctuary of a manhole between the car tracks belongs to two different worlds; people assume the proportions of scurrying ants or conversely loom skyward like Brobdingnagian monsters. From a thirty-story window a man appears but a mote in a horde of swirling insects, from a manhole he dwarfs the street in which he walks. My submerged position in the pool placed me in the manhole category and put a new value on everything I saw. Only when I have begged, borrowed or stolen an airplane and gazed at the Inaguan surf from the height of a thousand feet will I feel that I have begun to exhaust its potentialities.” (111-112)

Klingel’s book is an expression of his experiences as an energy being, in relationship to this island habitat. His fascination, learning, adaptation, engagement are displayed beautifully in his words, so his love of life as this energy interaction is clear, just as the love my friend shared with me was obvious and clear in the card she wrote to me and the act of sending me this book, which she knew I would love.

As I begin this year of focusing on understanding Energy more intensely, more clearly, in my human life, I appreciate these gifts more deeply than ever. These are energy images that support me in my growth as consciousness, and in my nurturing of this life as the adventure of energy interaction. I’ve been reading a lot about Energy, about our hidden memories (from last year’s handout from Kathy’s first seminar, on Hidden Memories as Cellular Memories), and about how we are a consistent reflection of precisely what and how our mind is thinking, how we are reflecting our thinking into the external reality that we live by the words we speak, actions we take, emotions we live. I love how Kathy writes that we in effect are “text-messaging” ourselves from our own Soul to look deeply into our internal energy fields to recognize the energy images we have created and are living.

What Klingel does in his superb powers of observation of Nature, especially the water, and all of its teeming life and change, I am bound to do internally, as I observe my own history in the making. Friends I have stood with, cried and laughed with, loved (or thought I loved, at the level of my experience of/as love), come to my mind as I assess my experiences, and as the images come and go, I get the text messages from my own soul energy fields identifying distinct levels of thinking, feeling, and emotion that I created and molded as I adapted to the power of the surf, sun, tide, and “intruders.” As I gain experience as a conscious mind, I honor the life of change as its own energy, and the images I know myself to be change with the tide. What is the truth of me? When I feel irritations like infections that are skin-deep, or that go deeper to lead me to an image I have not yet recognized or totally acknowedged and "updated," I marvel at what healing means to me now, how healing feels. I marvel at all of the prompts to myself to Just Listen, observe, Love. I can only change myself, yet I influence all, as energy. What energy do I want to be?

Happy New Years!