Butterfly’s New Dawn

You people always hold onto old identities, old faces and masks, long after they’ve served their purpose. But you’ve got to learn to throw things away eventually.”
― Neil Gaiman

 

In the process of becoming, we often have to sacrifice a part of who we are to who we can be. Richard Bach talked about ‘ the butterfly being the end of the world for the caterpillar.’ This sacrifice may seem painful but in reality it is a natural occurrence. The more we try to hold on to our old selves, the more difficult the transformation will become and the more inevitable the change. Oh we may not become what we originally set out to, we may become that person who refuses to change but that was not who we were in the first place and while we may collect irony points, we just delay our full realization.
I will make the sacrifice gladly and will attempt to do it without fear. If I have to choose who’s bitch I will be I’d much rather it be the present and the future’s rather then the past.
Blessings, G

 

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The True HeartThe True Heart by G A Rosenberg

 

InterwovenInterwoven by G A Rosenberg

Quote of the Day – February 28 2013

“If the point of life is the same as the point of a story, the point of life is character transformation. If I got any comfort as I set out on my first story, it was that in nearly every story, the protagonist is transformed. He’s a jerk at the beginning and nice at the end, or a coward at the beginning and brave at the end. If the character doesn’t change, the story hasn’t happened yet. And if story is derived from real life, if story is just condensed version of life then life itself may be designed to change us so that we evolve from one kind of person to another. ”
― Donald Miller

 

Every day I hope is a new step on my journey of transformation. I look back on my past as a series of snapshots in all of which I was hopefully more ‘jerky’ than I was today. I trusted people too much and adopted the points of views of others uncritically. I thought I knew more than almost anyone around me and that I was cleaver.I was much more quick to judge and much less discerning. I hope that in the future at the end of another chapter that I will again see this period of my life as snapshots in which again I may see at least equal growth.
Of course, youth is a time for jerkiness. We are a lot more awkward in our bodies then than we become as we grow older so perhaps there is a resonance in our characters.
Blessings, G

 

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Mind Field 3

Mind Field 3 by G A Rosenberg

 
Butterfly of the Mind

Butterfly of the Mind by G A Rosenberg

Quote of the Day – January 25, 2013

“Scared and sacred are spelled with the same letters. Awful proceeds from the same root word as awesome. Terrify and terrific. Every negative experience holds the seed of transformation.”
― Alan Cohen

 

Peak Experience – A Punching Walls Story

 

It was quite possibly the worst week of my seventeen yr old life. For the past five months I had been in a religious cult, trying to shape my life to fit their paradigm.
My best friend had joined with me and how he was gone–taken by his parents because he was underaged. I spoke to him a few times and he told me that there was more to where I was then they were saying. I had started doing some covert research and found out that it was true. Bible verses that their tenants were based on were misquoted or taken way out of context.
When I went to the state head of the group to tell him about my questions, he told me that at seventeen, I should be more interested in baseball than spirituality. Then when I was in the kitchen, I ‘accidentally’ opened his private cupboard and saw a couple of six packs of beer there. This in a group that professed that any intoxicants brought you closer to Satan
Anyway, since I was asking so many questions they sent me to their farm for what amounted to re-indoctorinization. These were the intense beginner’s lectures that lasted all day every day to teach the new people drawn in the tenets. THere were also nature hikes among other things. I was to stay on the farm hearing the lectures for weeks on end till they sunk in..
Anyway, it was the 2nd week back at the farm. I did love the land there some of the best and most beautiful forest and farm land that could be found in Mendocino County, California.
THeir was an older woman with the new group called Edna. She must have been about seventy and walked with a cane. I think her children had joined up and she wanted to check it out.
She was kind and wise and amazing. Our group went on a hike and we were walking amongst some beautiful green hills.

All of a sudden my surroundings fell away and I felt if not pulled out of my body as if it just didn’t matter… I felt part of everything and that no matter what happened I was loved and that everything just fit. It was a feeling of ecstasy like I had never felt before. I knew the universe loved me because I was it’s reflection. Before that point I was almost at the end of my rope. Afterwards well it subsided but I felt renewed.

I left the Moonies that weekend but that’s another story

 

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  Ruby ThursdayRuby Thursday by G A Rosenberg

 

EmissionsEmissions by G A Rosenberg

Quote of the Day – December 23 2012

“I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.”
― C.G. Jung

 

A friend of mine on Facebook has started a new group. He is encouraging each person who joins to repeat (well type) the mantra “I AM THE NEW DAY”. I find this amazingly empowering. I have written before on my view of self-victimization and being stuck on the moments in the past when we have been hurt either by ourselves or by another. Too often, this results in an inability to move forward. Society seems to reward this behaviour. Our victims get book deals and run the interview circuit. Everyone wants to feel sorry for someone and too often sympathy can become a drug.

 

By my saying this, please do not think that I am discounting ANYONE’S pain. I have cried from the things I’ve heard that friends and family have gone through. When I hear or read about some of the truly creative ways that we have found to be destructive towards each other it hurts. At the same time I try very hard not only to know the pain of the person whom it has been inflicted on but to know the pain of the persecutor also. I would love to build a world where such pain does not exist. Who would like to help? Any ideas?

 

So yes, we have gone through a lot and we may still go through more but do we cling to the pain of the past or do we become something more than a victim, an object of pity not just for others but for ourselves. What do we want to become? How do we heal? I believe these two questions are intimately intertwined.

Blessings, G

 

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Black Light Mandala

Black Light Mandala by G A Rosenberg

 

Page of PentaclesTarot – Page of Pentacles by G A Rosenberg

 

Quote of the Day – December 19 2012

“We can see the Divine in each speck of dust, but that doesn’t stop us from wiping it away with a wet sponge. The Divine doesn’t disappear; it’s transformed into the clean surface.”
― Paulo Coelho

 

Transformation is constant. It may sound cliche but I feel like I’ve spent more time becoming than I have spent being anything. Tho through everything, the good times, the bad times, the disasters, the blessings (and with good reason Carlos Castaneda says to see both of those as merely challenges rather than assign value judgements), the horrible acts that people do to each other and the wonderful acts of kindness and heroism that take place every day. There’s no part of any of it that’s not divine. If you think of the universe perfect and complete beyond time and space there are no disasters merely a different spot of colour in a multi-dimensional tapestry.
Blessings, G

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Queen of Pentacles

 

Tarot – Queen of Pentacles by G A Rosenberg

Starry Night Mandala

Starry Night Mandala by G A Rosenberg

Quote of the Day – April 8 2012

“Transformation means removing the rocks from our garden, the boulders that block our naturalness… when we were kids, we were free and innocent. As time passed, we accumulated the rocks of resistance, piling them up until they become mountains in our minds. Transformation comes not by adding things on but by removing what didn’t belong in the first place. We change by pealing away all the toxic layers, emotional debris, and beliefs that we have added on over the years. We forget that there is something perfect already within us; through years of habit and hypnosis we took a wrong turn, and now we automatically look outside ourselves for something that will fix us”. – Baron Baptiste, “40 Days to personal revolution

I speak quite a bit about the potential for each moment to be a new beginning. Yet how often do I take advantage of it. I am as guilty as anyone and possibly more than most of falling prey to old habits of thought and being, many of which I believed myself to have outgrown. I hear the voice of an old friend saying “See how we are”
What can I remove from myself today that I no longer need? How about impatience and anger? Those are good ones. At some point I have found myself letting what I have to say take precedent over other people’s expression. I find myself either cutting them off in conversation rather than listening and so probably lose out in at least two ways from this. I might be able to figure out where they’re going in conversation but in trying to shorten their route I am depriving myself of learning it. I can change this.
What other changes can we make either by losing the build up of bad habits or developing new ones? This universe is a pretty big canvas on which to draw and we are large as the saying goes. We contain multitudes.
Blessings, G

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Waking Spirals by G A Rosenberg

Universal Rave by G A Rosenberg

Quote of the Day – February 29 2012

“Only when the writer is willing to be transformed in the writing, will the audience be capable of transformation. ”
–Varja Krishna

Tonight is heavy with memories and emotion. Funny how someone telling a story about their own lives can catalyze an avalanche within. Now if I can only find the words to talk about some of it without bogging down in details or getting dry. Amazing how easy it is to clench up inside, to play hide and seek with my own past.So we will see whether i can take some of the pressure off and be willing to transform through my writings. I was once told by someone that when they looked at me they thought I had something missing inside. It’s time to find it

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Stare by G A Rosenberg

Quote of the Day – July 25 2011

Art can transform the way we see ourselves and the world.
Sacred art has always depended on this possibility.
Theosis means coming closer to God by contemplation of icons.
New ways of seeing lead to new ways of being.
When your being is transformed,
The world according to you transforms.
–Alex Grey

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Auric Landscape by G A Rosenberg

Quote of the Day – February 22 2011

“I see the potential for a new world being born in front of me and all around me, and I feel the only way to bring that potential into being is to know myself.”

–Gary Zukov

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Outward by G A Rosenberg

Gazing by  G A Rosenberg