Quote of the Day – April 30 2012

““When we hold each other, in the darkness, it doesn’t make the darkness go away. The bad things are still out there. The nightmares still walking. When we hold each other we feel not safe, but better. “It’s all right” we whisper, “I’m here, I love you.” and we lie: “I’ll never leave you.” For just a moment or two the darkness doesn’t seem so bad.”
― Neil Gaiman

OK. The above seems like an odd quote for the evening. Yet it seems somewhat apt. The rain is falling outside which will mean the dogs’ walks will be brief as neither share my affinity for walking in storms. On a dark rainy night, I think of times that friends have called me up or these days far more often messaged me needing to talk to be if not held physically, held cybernetically and told that “Yes, things would be OK, were OK as a matter of fact and that there was no knot that couldn’t be worked through. Easy enough to say and being optimistic by nature easy enough to believe. What an incredible gift to be able to be there for someone when I’m needed! I know far too well what its like to feel that taste of ashes in my mouth and that there were no answers and just knowing that another person was there helped.
I disagree with Mr. Gaiman’s quote in one way tho. I don’t believe that if we tell someone “I’ll never leave you” that its necessarily a lie. There have been many nights in the eternal now and many of them are still going on. The much-needed wisdom of friends and of strangers has stayed with me and I can feel the echo of their words in my mind therefore they have never left. If I have been of any use to anyone in that state, perhaps I am with them still.

This past week I have been working on being appreciative and grateful for the gifts that I feel every day. I have found this to be amazingly powerful and it’s additive. I keep finding more and more things to be grateful for. Perhaps one of the most important would be how grateful I’ve been to survive the rough times and to on occasion made a difference to others going through them.
Blessings,
G

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Touching by G A Rosenberg

Silver Spiral by G A Rosenberg

Quote of the Day – April 29 2012

“Think of the future as a series of pictures of yourself. Each picture portrays a different you, much as an actor changes his guise with makeup and mannerism. Each of these future lives in the time ahead of us just as our neighbours live in the space around us. Each friendly “neighbour” calls to us, perhaps over the backyard fence or on the telephone and invites us over. We must choose whom to visit.”
–Fred Alan Wolf

Sometimes when looking for the right quote for the day I luck out. I usually look for something that either reflects the pictures I am putting up, something I really want to write about or something that just blows me away. In the case of tonight’s quote definitely the latter. I often play the game in my head where I go back in time and talk to a younger version of myself wondering what I might say. Usually rather than advice on what to do, its some version of “Hang in there, it may be messier than you think but it will also be wilder, happier and much more joyous.” Then again, while there are many things I would change in this world, most of them involving ending or lessening the suffering of others, there is very little in my life that I would change. Even the most disastrous pain filled times have taught me, some of them lessons I have yet to fully learn but others I have and I regret none of them. I have been blessed with a life that I am truly grateful to every deity for.
However what about my future possible selves? Which one of them i manifest tomorrow is totally up to the choices I make now. The question is who do I want to see looking back at me when I look over the fence? It gives me pause for sure.
Blessings, G

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Golden Wolf by G A Rosenberg

Star Storm by G A Rosenberg

Quote of the Day – April 27 2012

“It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure. ”
–Joseph Campbell

And some lessons we just have to repeat over and over until we can fully appreciate the wisdom gift they have for us. I call it rabbit hole time in my mind. An idea or someone with a unique point of view I can learn from comes along and I have to jump submerging myself into another reality until it crashes into my reality tunnel or it no longer fits. Oh nothing’s wrong with it in principle, it’s the total leap into the abyss that can be problematic. Yet without leaping how do we fly? Without fully embracing another reality how do we integrate it?
Besides, vacationing in someone else’s reality tunnel can be amazingly refreshing. I’d say couch surfing has nothing on it as a matter of fact. Integrating new realities can be tricky however. Our belief systems do tend to have strong defence systems.
Blessings, G

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Battle Dance by G A Rosenberg

LT6 by G A Rosenberg

Quote of the Day – April 27 2011

“Every time we fix something that broken, whether it’s a car engine or a broken heart, that an act of magic. And what makes it magic is that we choose to create or help, just as we can choose to harm.”
― Charles de Lint

There’s so much out there that needs fixing. So much inside of us as well. At the same time, I’ve been noticing something more and more of late. So much of finding our way to health has to do with forgiving ourselves for being hurt in the first place. We forget that we’ve placed those lessons in our path because they were what we most needed to become the people we are. How could we comfort someone who’s life is hurting if we never felt hurt ourselves? How could we relate to lost love, lost chances and lost hope and help others to heal themselves through it if we had no basis to relate? Each of my scars mental or physical throughout this life and all others have been tickets to empathy and compassion so I am grateful for them.
Blessings G

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Watching the Fractal Sunset by G A Rosenberg

Abstract B by G A Rosenberg

Additional quote of the Day – April 26 2012 (A Long One)

“Very nice,” I said. “But why did you bring me up here?”
“It’s time for you to see the fnords,” he replied. Then I woke up in bed and it was the next morning. I
made breakfast in a pretty nasty mood, wondering if I’d seen the fnords, whatever the hell they were,
in the hours he had blacked out, or if I would see them as soon as I went out in the street. I had some
pretty gruesome ideas about them, I must admit. Creatures with three eyes and tentacles, survivorsfrom Atlantis, who walked among us, invisible due to some form of mind shield, and did hideous
work for the Illuminati. It was unnerving to contemplate, and I finally gave in to my fears and peeked
out the window, thinking it might be better to see them from a distance first.
Nothing. Just ordinary sleepy people, heading for their buses and subways.
That calmed me a little, so I set out the toast and coffee and fetched in the New York Times from the
hallway. I turned the radio to WBAI and caught some good Vivaldi, sat down, grabbed a piece of
toast and started skimming the first page.
Then I saw the fnords.
The feature story involved another of the endless squabbles between Russia and the U.S. in the UN
General Assembly, and after each direct quote from the Russian delegate I read a quite distinct
“Fnord!” The second lead was about a debate in Congress on getting the troops out of Costa Rica;
every argument presented by Senator Bacon was followed by another “Fnord!” At the bottom of the
page was a Times depth-type study of the growing pollution problem and the increasing use of gas
masks among New Yorkers; the most distressing chemical facts were interpolated with more
“Fnords.”
Suddenly I saw Hagbard’s eyes burning into me and heard his voice: “Your heart will remain calm.
Your adrenalin gland will remain calm. Calm, all-over calm. You will not panic. You will look at the
fnord and see it. You will not evade it or black it out. You will stay calm and face it.” And further
back, way back: my first-grade teacher writing FNORD on the blackboard, while a wheel with a
spiral design turned and turned on his desk, turned and turned, and his voice droned on,
IF YOU DON’T SEE THE FNORD IT CAN’T EAT YOU, DON’T
SEE THE FNORD, DON’T SEE THE FNORD . . .
I looked back at the paper and still saw the fnords.
This was one step beyond Pavlov, I realized. The first conditioned reflex was to experience the panic
reaction (the activation syndrome, it’s technically called) whenever encountering the word “fnord.”
The second conditioned reflex was to black out what happened, including the word itself, and just to
feel a general low-grade emergency without knowing why. And the third step, of course, was to
attribute this anxiety to the news stories, which were bad enough in themselves anyway.
Of course, the essence of control is fear. The fnords produced a whole population walking around in
chronic low-grade emergency, tormented by ulcers, dizzy spells, nightmares, heart palpitations and
all the other symptoms of too much adrenalin. All my left-wing arrogance and contempt for my
countrymen melted, and I felt genuine pity. No wonder the poor bastards believe anything they’re
told, walk through pollution and overcrowding without complaining, watch their sons hauled off to
endless wars and butchered, never protest, never fight back, never show much happiness or eroticism
or curiosity or normal human emotion, live with perpetual tunnel vision, walk past a slum without
seeing either the human misery it contains or the potential threat it poses to their security . . . Then I
got a hunch, and turned quickly to the advertisements. It was as I expected: no fnords. That was part
of the gimmick, too: only in consumption, endless consumption, could they escape the amorphous
threat of the invisible fnords.
I kept thinking about it on my way to the office. If I pointed out a fnord to somebody who hadn’t been de-conditioned, as Hagbard deconditioned me, what would he or she say? They’d probably read
the word before or after it. “No this word,” I’d say. And they would again read an adjacent word. But
would their panic level rise as the threat came closer to consciousness? I preferred not to try the
experiment; it might have ended with a psychotic fugue in the subject. The conditioning, after all, went back to grade school. No wonder we all hate those teachers so much: we have a dim, masked
memory of what they’ve done to us in converting us into good and faithful servants for the Illuminati.
— From Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, Illuminatus

 

And so it goes. Now obviously Mrs Shea and Wilson were speaking in allegorical terms. Sometimes tho when my son comes home from school and he starts talking about what he was taught that day I begin to wonder

 

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Electric Pathways by G A Rosenberg

Quote of the Day – April 26 2012

“I can choose either to be a victim of the world or an adventurer in search of treasure. It’s all a question of how I view my life.”
― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

On this one, I’ve chosen long ago. While I may have used by people, never have I been a victim. Many times when I have entered relationships I saw in my mind’s eyes where they would lead, both good and bad. The good was love and fellowship and joy in the presence of another. The bad (relatively speaking) was lessons that I needed to learn or perhaps repeat to drive home the point I had insisted on missing before so even the bad was a win. When the time came to move on, rarely cleanly I left feeling properly devastated but never really victimized by the other. Was I victimized by myself? Perhaps so. It all depended on how badly I needed the lesson, that treasure that Coelho talks about. Are there any treasures greater than increased awareness and increased capacity for love? I don’t believe so. I am grateful for my life and all the people in it, even the ones who have challenged me, perhaps them most of all.
Blessings, G

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Heart of the Fractal by G A Rosenberg

Quote of the Day – April 25 2012

“Relax into the moment and let the universe do the driving. If there was a secret to happiness in life, I’d say that was it.”
–Jed McKenna

Five of us come upon a rock with that quote engraved on it in five different places. The 16 year old teenager in Connecticut, so very unsure of himself but so sure of what he knows doesn’t get it and scoffs pretending he does. Another, twenty-four and living in Boston just opening up to aspects of his personality he couldn’t before and that he still feels the need to hide nods but can’t quite figure out how to apply it. There is a thirty-four year old man in Toronto. He’s kicked the tires of life a few times, had some adventures, knows that what the rock says is true but is worried that things may get even stranger. The boy’s father laughs and laughs, thinking he gets it as he chases his son and their dog down the hill as his partner awaits them. For me now at fifty, it’s how I roll.
I’ve learned a lot from being all five. I still have many lessons from each of those younger men that I have yet to integrate tho I know that will come with time. The pieces are mainly there. Any needed I have no doubt will come my way. Tho as I type this, I feel bemused by the idea of seeing my younger selves as my teachers.
Blessings, G

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Pyramid of the Wheel by G A Rosenberg

Zev Having Fractal Dreams by G A Rosenberg

Quote of the Day – April 24 2012

“Late, by myself, in the
boat of myself,
No light and no land
anywhere,
cloudcover thick.
I try to stay
just above the surface.

Yet I’m already under and living within
The Ocean”
–Rumi

Another night floating bobbing up and down along the consciousness stream, thinking of dogs to home and kids in need and of how great my meditation time was today. Time without thought, focusing on breath and sensation not thinking tho occasionally the thoughts come what system would work best for all? Why do we spend so much time pursuing happiness that we forget to enjoy the moment? floating breathing down deep and back up connecting to the mother below and the sky above and i am back to a conversation about art and blank pages and in breath, feel it expand and slowly out breath and once again the rhythm start, the calm returns and sun feels  nice on my eyelids and in breath and tuning into the feelings, a moment of sadness let myself feel it so it passes and out breath…You know how it goes.

 

By the way what do you think about the new theme for the blog?

Blessings, G.

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Knight’s Vigil in the Four Elements by G A Rosenberg