Life is beautiful

As I write the above I am sitting in a coffee shop listening to a beautiful, soulful musician.  It’s actually a gift that I am able to listen to him right now.  He’s from Australia and on this oh so rainy day, his show was supposed to be canceled.  He sits in his chair plucking the strings of his guitar with divinity flowing from every finger with every strum.  He tells a story of finding his queen and his children and having the gift of music in his life, and it makes me misty eyed.  At the same time I read an article about setting goals that are outside of your comfort zone. That place of discomfort is where motivation and life truly begins.
We are interesting creatures, us humans, we have such beauty and light within each and every one of us yet we suppress it.  We watch movies and iconize others for achieving the dreams that reside within our oun hearts yet let our heads convince us that it’s not possible.  What stops us from dreaming big and living bigger?  The irony is that we know what’s stoping us, we know it very well, we confront that powerful force every morning in that bathroom mirror.  Oh how I wish for the day when we step aside and stop hindering ourselves from Heaven….oh the human drama.

….and then she jumped

 I learned one of life’s greatest lessons from a man named “Cave Man” while surfing off the coast of San Diego. He noticed me watching him curiously while washing the sand off my board and approached me, beer in one hand, cigarette in the other. His shirt was off and his skin was like leather. He introduced himself and asked me the question that my soul has asked me many times, “wanna try it?”. My curiosity had been directed towards the rope that was tied between two trees, a make-shift tight rope created by a man who had seen more in his lifetime than I could ever dream of. My answer was of course “no”. As loud as my soul shouted yes, my head always seemed to shout louder. The answer of my friend and companion that day was, as it usually is, “sure why not?”.
        Afer a few minutes of watching her “learn the ropes”, so to speak, my soul cried out once more and this time I listened. Wobbling uncontrollably, I put one foot on the rope and grasped the shoulder of my new friend Cave Man. He put his cigarette to his chapped lips and spoke these words to me…”you have to put all your weight, everything you have, on one foot before you can take the next step”. A leather skinned man, who smelled of smoke and booze, taught me one of the most essential lessons in life that day. If you aren’t fully grounded in the present before you take the next step into the future, you’ll always be a little wobbly.
Thank you Cave Man.

Life is an elipse

In the 17th century, Johannes Kepler decided that the planets didn’t move in a circular motion but rather in orbits, which could be represented mathematically as an ellipse….what if this is also true of life as we experience it? They say that life, politically moves in a pendulum, moving from extreme left to extreme right….what if the two combined are true? What if life as we experience it is moving in it’s own elliptical orbit?
In the very beginnings of modern, western thought, there were great thinkers. Mathematicians were also philosophers, astronomers, even artists. The world was new to them and they had to think of it globally in order to take it in. There were no shoulders for them to stand on so they had to create universal theories of everything. There were no paths for them to start upon, they had to forge their own from scratch.
Today, we have gotten far away from the great thinkers and have moved into specialization. In this shift, I feel that we have lost the big picture. Today’s neuroscientists don’t have time to be philosophers, to think about the implications of their daily discoveries. We are so over-loaded with the information that it takes just to get to the top of all these specialized fields that it makes me wonder if there’s any time to innovate when we get there. Is this specialization getting us to our higher self or is it leading to our own extinction? Maybe it’s time for less specialization and more globalization. A change of course in our orbit……..maybe.

Money

 So I just read a friend’s blog about money and the massive amounts of it that has already been spent on the “WAR ON TERROR”.  His point was that there are much better ways of spending our money (like education, the environment, health care you know things that might actually benifit us).  The thought that popped into my oh so dreamy “new agey” mind was that it really has nothing to do with money.  If you think about it, money is meaningless.  If we are spending billions of dollars on this war, yet we are so called trillions of dollars in debt, then where is this “money” coming from?  This “money” is nothing more than a representation of power, a representation of where we place our values. 
      I think this is a very hard concept for a lot of people to grasp, or I should say that this is a very hard concept for people to release.  We have been scared into thinking that money is associated with our very survival, that without it, and the power that is associated with it, we are nothing….we are powerless.  The interesting thing is that I think the people who do get this concept are the people with no money at all…..for example, I once had a lot of problems with my credit.  I would buy all this stuff and pay for it with this card and then get these bills at the end of the month and I would pay a little bit of it and then when I thought that bill was getting too large, I would find somewhere else to put it where it seemed like it might be “a better deal”.  After a while it caught up to me and I found it harder and harder to find places to tranfer it to.  The real issue I was facing, or rather not facing, had nothing in this universe to do with money.  The core issue was my avoidance of what I was valuing.  
     My purchaces weren’t based upon what I valued or even on what I desired, in fact I couldn’t even tell you why I bought most of the things I bought.  Keeping up with the Jones’s comes to mind…..When times got tough and I was forced to deal with this issue that I had been pushing to the back burner, I dealt with it in the most conscious way I could.  I didn’t just find another place to transfer my issues, I dealt with them head on.  I took a good hard look at why I was spending way beyond my means and what exactly I did value and what I did choose to spend my money on……Now, I am making less money than I ever have, I have no credit cards to fall back on in an “emergency”, I’ll be paying a monthly bill for the next four years on things I have already gotten rid of…..and I have never felt richer.
      I think this country, this world, is like a teenager with his first credit card.  We aren’t putting any attention on what we choose to spend our money on, and there are no parents around to check us if we’re on an unhealthy path.  It’s time we start checking ourselves.  Money has no value aside from that we place upon it.  Our money is “backed” by gold; it’s value determined by the price of that gold…..what do you think someone from another planet would think about our “value system”?  It’s based upon a shiny rock that someone once thought was pretty and then someone else decided it had value because they wanted a shiny rock too.  We like to think that we are so evolved yet here we are hundreds of years later still fighting over the shiny rock that the neighbor just found.
      No govenment, no one ever can determine for you what is valuable and what is not.  Decide for yourself, let your neighbor decide for themselves and don’t ever be scared or pressured into thinking you are wrong.  Sent with so much love and compassion……NAMASTE!!!!!