How is your enlightenment going? :)

Today, I was watching the latest video from rawlucas and early on in it he asked his viewing public, “How is your enlightenment going?” Hmmm. Thanks for asking, Lucas. Overall it goes well Seems the less I worry about how fast I proceed or where It seems to be going or whether it seems to be going, the better it progresses. So it goes 🙂 I’d imagine that you could look at anyone’s life and describe it as their path to enlightenment. Everything in continual process, life  existing in motion as a verb.

But still I like the fact that the question made me look at myself in this space and time and ask, “Well what have I learned lately?” or even “What do I seem to be working on?” So without further adieu, some of my current curriculum, things I’ve either come to realize lately or things I try to practice.

  1. Feeling grateful for the good things in life rocks. Feeling grateful for the lessons that I might not enjoy but need to go through would probably be a good idea too. Gratitude shows appreciation and appreciation feels good. I find so much to appreciate, the sun on my face, grass under my feet, Aaron’s warmth, Zev’s wit and intelligence, our generally good health, amusing pet’s, watching Zev, Amanda, our friends and Aaron and myself constantly find new ways to grow, flowers, waves, mountains, Moments when I just feel good (especially when it involves connection to either another being or to a place.
  2. There is a First Nation’s blessing “Walk in Beauty”. Recently I’ve come to understand that that doesn’t mean to always walk in beautiful places as much as having the awareness of the beauty that exists everywhere. In that way, you carry the beauty with you wherever you walk.  Again, it comes down to making choices. Sometimes choosing moment by moment and sometimes deciding to be a person who has that level of appreciation as often as possible, not berating myself when I don’t do that as much as gently pull myself back into it.
  3. See with the eyes of the heart, seeing connection with other’s , finding ways to identify with rather than separate from those around me. Again, seeing this as who I want to be and working at it, catching myself and continuing further.
  4. Learning how much, my less-than-positive reactions towards people is my own stuff and how much of it seems to come from guilt and either expecting too much from others or too much from myself.
  5. “What you focus on thrives.”, OK other peoples’ words but true. It makes me wonder how so many people focus on the negative so often and then wonder why they feel so unhappy and so unsatisfied.
  6. Diet seems to play a key factor in my physicality. My physicality seems to play a key factor in my emotions and attitudes.
  7. Love rules. Always. When I take time out to feel love for the people around me and as importantly allow love from them (this also goes, in general , with feeling love for and from the universe, as spacey as it may sound, it feels awesome!!!) I feel more entered and ever so much happier.
  8. Always find the funny. Laugh.
  9. We all face times when our moods, attitudes, etc don’t feel optimal. When that happened, I used to seek a cause for this, something to attack and I identified way too much with the mood. I have found a big difference in seeing it as emotional weather, a storm going on that will pass, I don’t need to be that mood or act on it, just watch it and let it past. A bit like the fear litany in the Dune books by Frank Herbert.
  10. Meditating for at least 10 minutes a day, finding that quiet space and time, can make a huge difference in my life and my perspective.

Kind of amazing, all of those seem to boil down to two words, connection and perspective. When I choose (and it usually seems to come down to choice, tho sometimes a hard-won decision) to be happy, be aware of love and beauty and feel connected and grateful, the light shines through me.


Sprouting the Seed 1

A few nights ago, on myspace and a few other places, I wrote a line that popped into my head that I thought was a great starting point for any one of a number of stories or poems and called it a story seed : “Today in my secret place I found a door”. As an exercise in writing and because it seems like fun, I decided that over the next while (days or weeks) I would sprout the seed in various ways and see where it might go. At the end of this I might take the sprout that I like best and transplant it , publishing it here after I feel it has come to full grownt . Feel free to comment and let me know which sprout you like best. First sprout:

Today in my secret place I found a door. Funny, after all this time coming here I thought I knew all of the ins and outs. Oh things shift around every now and then. After all who would want to live in a static reality? Still this spot had always been somewhat continual. To all appearances, it seems a warm cave with lighting that suits me bright enough to read in yet not so bright as to disturb meditation. The fire pit was there with wood that I restocked when I came and a carpet fragment to sit on, nice and soft, taken from a childhood memory. …

Video of the Day

I love Chrissie Hynde’s voice, Also Pink Floyd and Bob Geldof.
The stated intention of this song has been to bring attention to the plight of Gary McKinnon, a Scottish hacker with Asperger’ s Syndrome who with the aid of a simple perl script, hacked into Department of Defence computers looking for evidence of UFO’s. Whatever he found has sufficiently alarmed the powers that be in the US enough that they have fought extremely hard to extradite him to fight US judgement, despite the fact that he has already faced justice in the UK. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_McKinnon