The traveling seeds of my wishes are sown and are blossoming

I must be the luckiest girl in the world.  I must be!

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

****************

I'm in New Mexico right now.  Lots to share.  Returning to VT in a few days and will give an update within the week.  But know this:  everything we need, everything we want, everything...is already within. 

Things to address in the next post:

-empty bowl meditation
-ayurvedic spin on the optic pathway
-Shabda
-Chitta
-and whatever else I learn today/tomorrow!

Love

I want to live in a world where there isn’t a hierarchy of relationships, where romantic love isn’t assumed to be more important than other kinds, where folks can center any relationships they want whether it be their relationship to their spiritual practice, kids, lovers, friends, etc. and not have some notion that it’s more or less important because of who or what’s in focus. I want to feel like I can develop intimacy with people whether we are sleeping together or not that I will be cared for whether I am romantically involved with someone or not. I want a community that takes interdependency seriously that doesn’t assume that it’s only a familial or romantic relationship responsibility to be there for each other.


[thanks, KB]

Thing #184 I love about VT Summers

 Creemees!


I know it's February...and summer in VT is a good 3 months away.  BUT, I saw this photo and got so happy thinking about the many creemee-licking, bike riding, waterfront strolling, sunset watching, warm morning, frisbee throwing, cartwheel frolicking, bee buzzing, Red Rocks jumping, al fresco reading, GOODNESS up ahead!

Mmm mmm, VT summer, you are worth the wait.

Liberation

Nerves that fire together get wired together.  If you do something once, a loose connection of nerve cells becomes attached.  If you do something repeatedly, the bond becomes stronger and stronger and new connections are automatically wired.

Several pages can offer up entire universes

Don’t be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful for me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.

-Italo Calvino

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

Sometimes I feel like I'm seeing it all at once, and it's too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that's about to burst... And then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain and I can't feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my life

Agni

Agni

I think you are my favorite.
In many ways--
the reigning king
of transformation, the crackling beauty
of fear and heat.  The colors of what I am
told is passion, a story relayed to me over
and over, when all I crave
is to live my own, floating above
the tapestries of others.

Agni, I feel you
in my chest and in my belly.  You remind
me of palpable impermanence and glorious
resilience.  Many see you as the destroyer of things,
but I want to dance like you dance, every move
contingent on the wind even though your strength
is far greater than your choreographer's.

Teach me how
to rest in you.  Show me
how your searing power
can transform
me.

On The Origins Of Things
by Troy Jollimore

Everyone knows that the moon started out
as a renegade fragment of the sun, a solar
flare that fled that hellish furnace
and congealed into a flat frozen pond suspended
between the planets. But did you know
that anger began as music, played
too often and too loudly by drunken performers
at weddings and garden parties? Or that turtles
evolved from knuckles, ice from tears, and darkness
from misunderstanding? As for the dominant
thesis regarding the origin of love, I
abstain from comment, nor will I allow
myself to address the idea that dance
began as a kiss, that happiness was
an accidental import from Spain, that the ancient
game of jump-the-fire gave rise
to politics. But I will confess
that I began as an astronomer—a liking
for bright flashes, vast distances, unreachable things,
a hand stretched always toward the furthest limit—
and that my longing for you has not taken me
very far from that original desire
to inscribe a comet's orbit around the walls
of our city, to gently stroke the surface of the stars.

Snowy, plush puffs all over, everything moving in beautiful slow-motion, blanketed in white innocence and purity.  Tea and good tunes cozied up on the couch in preparation for some goooooooood hours of writing

***********








It takes a crane to build a crane
It takes two floors to make a story
It takes an egg to make a hen
It takes a hen to make an egg
There is no end to what I'm saying

It takes a thought to make a word
And it takes some words to make an action
It takes some work to make it work
It takes some good to make it hurt
It takes some bad for satisfaction

La la la la la la la life is wonderful
Ah la la la la la la life goes full circle
Ah la la la la la la life is wonderful
Al la la la la

It takes a night to make it dawn
And it takes a day to make you yawn brother
And it takes some old to make you young
It takes some cold to know the sun
It takes the one to have the other

And it takes no time to fall in love
But it takes you years to know what love is
It takes some fears to make you trust
It takes those tears to make it rust
It takes the dust to have it polished

Ha la la la la la la life is wonderful
Ah la la la la la la life goes full circle
Ah la la la la la la life is so full of
Ah la la la la la la life is so rough
Ah la la la la la la life is wonderful
Ah la la la la la la life goes full circle
Ah la la la la la la life is our love
Ah la la la la la

It takes some silence to make sound
It takes a loss before you found it
And it takes a road to go nowhere
It takes a toll to make you care
It takes a hole to make a mountain

Ah la la la la la la life is wonderful
Ah la la la la la la life goes full circle
Ha la la la la la life is wonderful
Ha la la la la la life is meaningful
Ha la la la la la life is wonderful
Ha la la la la la life it is...so... wonderful
It is so meaningful
It is so wonderful
It is meaningful
It is wonderful
It is meaningful
It goes full circle
Wonderful
Meaningful
Full circle
Wonderful

Courageous Dreaming

Whether we realize it or not, we are all dreaming the world into being. What we’re engaging in is not the sleeping act we’re so familiar with, but rather a type of dreaming we do with our eyes open. When we’re unaware that we share the power to co-create reality with the universe itself, that power slips away from us, causing our dream to become a nightmare. We begin to feel we’re the victims of an unknown and frightening creation that we’re unable to influence, and events seem to control and trap us. The only way to end this dreadful reality is to awaken to the fact that it too is a dream—and then recognize our ability to write a better story, one that the universe will work with us to manifest.

We are what we think.
All that we are arises with our thoughts.
With our thoughts, we make the world. —BUDDHA

The nature of the cosmos is such that whatever vision you have about yourself and the world will become reality. As soon as you awaken to the power you have, you begin to flex the muscles of your courage. Then you can dream bravely: letting go of your limiting beliefs and pushing past your fears. You can start to come up with a truly original dream that germinates in your soul and bears fruit in your life.

Courageous dreaming allows you to create from the source, the quantum soup of the universe where everything exists in a latent or potential state. Physicists understand that in the quantum world nothing is “real” until it is observed. The distinct packets of energy known as “quanta” (which consist of particles of matter as well as light) are neither “here” nor “there”; in a sense, they are everywhere in space/time until you or I decide to take note of them. When we do so, we tease them out of the web of infinite possibilities and collapse them into an event in time and space. These energy quanta like to link up with each other once they’ve selected a particular form of manifestation. As soon as they manifest, reality becomes fixed: Our reality is “here” instead of possibly everywhere.

But quantum events do not occur in the laboratory only. They also happen inside our brain, on this page, and everywhere around us. Even if they’re separated by millions of miles, or by days or weeks, these quanta of energy remain intimately linked; consequently, if we interact with one, we affect the entire system that this energy is part of. When we access any part of the dream, the great matrix of energy, we can change reality and alter the entire dream.

Modern physics is describing what the ancient wisdom keepers of the Americas have long known. These shamans, known as “the Earthkeepers,” say that we’re dreaming the world into being through the very act of witnessing it. Scientists believe that we’re only able to do this in the very small subatomic world. Shamans understand that we also dream the larger world that we experience with our senses.

The Earthkeepers I have studied with in the Andes and the Amazon believe that we can only access the power of this force by raising our level of consciousness. When we do, we become aware that we’re like a drop of water in a vast, divine ocean, distinct yet immersed in something much larger than ourselves. It’s only when we experience our connection to infinity that we’re able to dream powerfully. In fact, it’s our sense of separation from infinity that traps us in a nightmare in the first place. If this sounds like circular thinking, you’re right. Which came first, the nightmare or the sense of separation from infinity? The answer is that they occur simultaneously.

To end the nightmare—to reclaim our power of dreaming reality and craft something better—we need more than the recognition of how this process works. We need to have a visceral understanding of our dreaming power and experience it in every cell of our bodies. The intellectual comprehension of our ability to create reality mimics but then forestalls the kind of dreaming we’re capable of. If we don’t get beyond mere intellectual comprehension of this concept, we’ll end up lowering the bar and creating a far less glorious and beautiful experience of the world than what we’re capable of crafting. With a visceral understanding of our power to dream, we realize that we can share this experience of infinity right here, right now, and stop feeling dissociated and disconnected.


Alberto Villoldo, Ph.D. is a psychologist and medical anthropologist who has studied the spiritual practices of the Amazon and Andes for more than 25 years.


Alberto Villoldo

[thanks for the inspiration, KR!]

Ode to the Bee

Pablo Neruda

Plentiness of the bee!
Coming and going
from orange, blue and yellow
from the softest softness of the world -
she hastily enters on business the flower crown
and exits with golden coat and yellow boots.

Perfect with a waist of lines of dark bands
with tiny always busy head and watery wings
she enters scented windows, opens silken doors
enters the sanctum of the most fragrant love,
stumbles over small droplets of diamond dew
and from all visited houses she takes mysterious honey,
rich and heavy, of dense fragrance
and liquid light that falls down in drops
until she reaches the bee palace
and deposes the product of the flower, of the flight
and of the seraphic, secret sun.

Plentiness of the bee!
Sacred elevation of the unity,
palpitating school!

Sonorous buzzing multitudes that tune the nectar
passing swiftly drops of ambrosia -
it is the siesta of the summer of green and of the solitudes of Osorno.
Above the sun stitches his lances in the snow, lighting the volcanoes
wide as the oceans is the earth, blue is the space
but there is something trembling,
it is the burning heart of the summer
the heart of multiplied honey,
the noisy bee in the living comb of golden flights.



Bees, pure selfless workers,
thin, flashing proletarians, perfect fearsome militia
that in war attack with suicidal stings
buzz, buzz over the earth’s realms
family of gold, windy multitudes
shake the fire of the flowers
the thirst of the stamens
the sharp thread of fragrances
that unite the days and make the honey
surpassing the wet continents
and the farthest islands of the sky of the West

Yes:
Let the wax raise green statues
let the honey overflow in infinite tongues
let the ocean be a comb
and the Earth be a tower and tunic of flowers
Let the world be a cascade,
magnificent head of hair,
unceasing growth of Beedom!