Followers

Monday, February 28, 2005

God, God, God!
























From the depth of slumber,

As I ascend the spiral stairway of wakefulness,

I whisper God, God, God!

Thou art the food and when I break my fast
Of nightly separation from Thee

I taste thee and mentally say

God, God, God!

No matter where I go,
the spotlight of my mind

Ever keeps turning on Thee;

And in the battle din of activity my silent war cry Is ever;
God, God, God!


When boisterous storms of trials shriek

And worries howl at me,

I drown their noises, loudly chanting

God, God, God!

When my mind weaves dreams

With threads of memories,
Then on that magic cloth I do emboss;

God, God, God!


Every night, in time of deepest sleep,

My peaceful dreams call; Joy! Joy! Joy!

And my Joy comes singing evermore;

God, God, God!

In waking, eating, working, dreaming, sleeping,

Serving, meditating, chanting, divinely loving,

My soul constantly hums, unheard by any;

God, God, God!


- Paramahansa Yogananda

Friday, February 25, 2005

Excuse me while I gush. A recent discovery, as least by me, of a near recent find in South Africa where it nears extinction in it's natural habitat. Aloe polyphylla (Hardy Spiral Aloe) Zone:7b-9.

Posted by Hello

Sunday, February 20, 2005

For Claire Simpson on Her Birthday

Claire-social/political commentator and a writer/lover of limericks. This one's for you.

There was a young lady named Ransom
Who was ravished three times in a hansom
When she cried out for more
A voice from the floor
Said "Lady I'm Simpson not Sampson."

Happy Birthday

Saturday, February 19, 2005

Freedon























... as a flower blown out by the wind

goes to rest and cannot be defined

so the wise man freed from individuality
goes to rest and cannot be defined.
gone beyond all images
gone beyond the power of words...

- from Sutra Nipata

FOR KENDA

Life is truly enigmatic.
Our lives roll by day by day. Workdays then the weekend. We put our time in. We're good people and we do our best to do a good days work. Sometimes the day is barely bearable, then a one comes along that lifts us up and sometimes we even string a few good days together. But mostly we trudge through our days more numb than not. We don't ask for much. We get by. It's just work. Usually the same for most of us. Months pass, years, and it's the same ole.
Once in a blue moon something occurs that wakes us up. We're offered something. Something bright, something that has just a hint of a promise of a good new change. We're smiling now, we're telling our mate, our friends, and they smile with us, hope with us. Fantasies begin. How the change will affect our future, fantasies of how WE will change and we begin to want this by now radiant gift.
It's an advancement in our work, say. A move up. A move to a new environment with new views and new challenges and new friends. A chance to come alive and find new pride in what we do. This could be a really good change . Maybe what we've been waiting for perhaps without even knowing it.
The meeting finally comes.....but it doesn't happen. It goes to someone else and we're left with the awful, awful feeling that washes over us when we receive bad news. The initial blow slowly loses it's sting. It's a disappointment, a disappointment at first more painful than we can admit. We have our grief.
Our friends, our mate do what they lovingly do and it helps. And gratefully the disappointment begins to move into the background and in a while we return to numb. The daily grind again. Not all bad, but not the very best. BUT WAIT.
Perhaps we've missed the message.
Perhaps something much larger and much more important is happening.
And this is the wonderful news. If we can only go back to that moment when the advancement was offered and the minutes, hours, days afterward and how that felt, perhaps the REAL gift will dawn on us. The real gift might be that we've received a message, and the message might be we're ready for a change. A change for something better, a change to something new, different, exciting, a move to something larger. But this time a change initiated by ourselves. And this is important. Again, remember those first days and that feeling of growing excitement and of our life becoming more alive. It's important to remember that. Hold on to that. Duplicate that.
So what now. Well, let's look around and examine where we might want to go. What position might be opening up where we are, that in the future perhaps say with some outside study we might want to take on, something fun, interesting, challenging and fulfilling. And now we start preparing for this change that we're going to facilitate ourselves, for ourselves. We begin collecting ideas, we start a dialogue with our self and those close to us with the subject being.....What work would make me happy? What work would engage me and make my heart sing? And that bad news in a surprisingly short time becomes transformed. We have the possibility of our new day. We're dreaming again. There's excitement, the smiles are back along with the hope.
And that just might be the best gift of all.

Wednesday, February 16, 2005

What Is Grace?


"What is grace?" I asked God. And He said, "All that happens." Then He added, when I looked perplexed, "Could not lovers say that every moment in their Beloved's arms was grace? Existence is my arms, though I well understand how one can turn away from me until the heart has wisdom."

- Saint John of the Cross, from Love Poems from God, compiled by Daniel Ladinsky.
Photo of plumeria by Kent Fox, Hilo, Hawaii, kentfox96720@gmail.com