Free Google Photos
“Your task is not to seek for love, merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself you have built against it.” Rumi
Little Gem
Tag Archives: blog
Little Gem
Late afternoon at Clement Park
“I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. I possess tremendous power to make life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration, I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis is escalated or de-escalated, and a person is humanized or de-humanized. If we treat people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming.”
— Haim Ginott
Tornado
Free Google Photos
I play with tornadoes in my head. I don’t have a good explanation for this. It’s been going on for about three years. When I say play with them, I mean, I imagine riding them or collapsing them down around me or even dancing around them. I think it started when someone told me our energy body could expand the length of one to two football fields. That’s one big energy field. It intrigued that part of my brain that is Xena Warrior Princess, the part of me that likes the idea of being powerful. Clearly, because who plays with tornadoes in their head?
It happens most often when I’m working out or dancing in my home. Something about all that physical energy triggers all this awesome mental energy and I’m whipping those bad boy tornadoes into my command in no time. A few days ago, I had such a session dancing in my house and afterwards went to run some errands. As is often the case, my mind was churning on all sorts of things I need to deal with or figure out. I was beating myself up about something when it dawned on me I play with tornadoes in my head. That seems the most natural thing in the world to do, but curtailing my critical, judgmental, whining mind seems daunting. Something about the incongruity of that caught my attention. I can play with tornadoes and wield them to my will, but stopping myself from being angry about the guy who cut me off on the interstate is challenging?
Einstein said if you want to be brilliant use your imagination. If you want to be really brilliant, really, really use your imagination. What if dealing with all this weirdness we’ve got rocking in our brains is no more than playing with tornadoes? If in our imaginary mind we can do anything, than why can’t we apply that same focus, sense of play and energy toward wrangling in our real mental storms? What if it’s all an illusion? Tornadoes, ideas of being unloveable, Roger Rabbit, I’m lazy, my spouse lied, I’m spiderman. Really, they are all just thoughts running around inside our skull. What would happen if we treated all our thoughts the same way? Imaginary characters we can play with or not. The choice is ours.
Fresco
Unknown source or origin
Chips of concrete
Rock falling and plumes of dust
I look, an old fresco
Rich colors, now fading, cracks and missing pieces
Empty spots appear and within them – light
Iridescent, pulsating, alive
Pick in hand I hack
Cut
Smash
Tear at the image
Trails of rubble
I am not Gretel
I will not
Be following this
Trail back to anything
I once was
Step back
Ahhhh
How I’ve hungered for her
Glowing like the midnight sun
Luna
Super Moon taken July 23rd by Leilani May in Denver, CO. Thank you for letting me share, Leilani!
If you meditate and have not checked out the Insight Timer App you should. It is certainly a fine timer to use while meditating but that isn’t what makes it awesome. It’s the connection to people meditating world wide and the various meditation groups you can join. Great way to build a habit of meditation and connect with people in a beautiful global sangha.
Most recently, Juan Crocco of Santiago, Chile sponsored a meditation event around the Super Moon at Summer Solstice. It was an extraordinary event where individuals from Tasmania to Nova Scotia shared pictures of the moon and spiritual community. The following poem I wrote for the event. The beautiful, super moon photo was taken by my fellow Insight Timer friend and wonderful colleague Leilani May.
Luna, Luna, Luna
You call to my lupine heart
And pump my blood, an immense ocean
With powerful tide
Divinely rolling into shore
Luna, Luna, Luna
I sing to your celestial body
Awash in the love of your heavens
And enchanted by the world you
Reveal to my lover’s eyes
Luna, Luna, Luna
At once, I become the hunting owl in the elm
And the mouse scouting for seed
The deer moving softly within the briar
And hare whose ear twitches
To fox’s stealthy approach
Luna, Luna, Luna
You awaken my sense of Mother Earth
Her thrumming, steady beat
Which taps my palm, little more than a moth’s wing
As my hand grazes the long grass stalks
That glisten silvery green in your moonlight
Luna, Luna, Luna
I sleep no more in this dream world
My vision has become as sharp as a nighthawk
I feel a mystery moving within me
Only to realize you have
In this dark night
Lit up the luminous nature of my spirit
For me to see I am the mystery
Luna, Luna, Luna
I sway in your pearly glow
A dancer alive in the field
I am a living galaxy twirling in your wake
My body a night shadow
As mystical as monks moving
By candlelight to whisper their
Midnight vespers
Luna, Luna, Luna
Feel my spirit reflect your brilliance
For I, too
Am a celestial being rising into the heavens
To light a comet’s trail for all to see
Luna, Luna, Luna
You call to my lupine heart
And pump my blood, an immense ocean
With powerful tide
Divinely you send me back out to sea
Luna, Luna, Luna
Night Hawk
Baby Cooper’s Hawk; Free Bing Photos
I hear the call of a young hawk in the twilight. It’s calling to it’s parents for food. It’s a distinct sound. Plaintive, persistent and young. It calls as if it has not eaten in days or with a sound one would associate with deep loneliness. But it is fed with great care by parents never truly out of sight. I have struggled, of late, to realize this is how I have been praying. Plaintive, persistent and with an immaturity difficult to face. It would be easy to allow this growing awareness to burn my wings and bring me down. Yet, the key piece of the analogy is the parent aloft and ever watchful. Equally persistence in it’s readiness to feed me what I need. My youthful demands do not change the parenting. It is steady, attentive and focused. I may pray like an eyas certain it will starve for food, but Source Energy patiently awaits and knows I am growing steadily into a great flyer.
Moth
Free Google Photos
A moth got into the house this morning. I noticed him because he was flopping around on the floor. His wings had likely gotten wet from the snow melt from the roof. I was about to toss him out again, but it’s only in the twenties and he couldn’t fly. I was sitting next to the gas fireplace which was on
looking at him in my hand. He must have felt the warmth of the fire as he suddenly spread out his wings so they could dry. I had the sudden image of seeing a butterfly do the same thing after a rain when I was a child. Spread its wings so the sun could dry them. I realized in my grief of late that, that is what I am doing. Spreading the wings of my heart in meditation and letting divine love warm me up and dry me off. I am too heavy to fly right now. I need to wait, open up and let the Universe warm and dry me for my next flight. I left the moth on the mantle. With luck he’ll leave my sweaters alone.
Little Gem
Lake Algae at Johnson Reservoir: Photography
“The lesson which life repeats and constantly enforces is ‘look under foot’. You are always nearer the divine and the true sources of power than you think.” John Burroughs
Blessed Toe
beautifully cracked… like me… Photography by Noelle
Blessings to my broken toe. I’ll confess I was angry with you over the past week for interfering in my work out and yoga practice, not to mention hindering my shoe selection. But this morning you didn’t hurt so much so I decided to try some yoga. Because of you I had to go slower. Be more thoughtful and focused about each pose. I had to be kinder and gentler with myself and pay attention to little things. I had to think of which poses I could do and as a result, pulled out some poses I hadn’t done in ages, which totally charged my practice. So thank you, broken toe. I had no idea what a blessing you were.
Patience and Crawdaddies
Stained glass at Living Arts Center in Denver: Photography by Noelle
As a child I was quite the tomboy, catching bull frogs in the lake behind my house or craw daddies in the creek. I still listen to frogs on summer nights to determine where they are and to what mate they call. I’m especially fond of finding crawfish in the streams that I hike. Spring has been slow to come to Colorado and the creek is running fast, deep, ice cold and swollen with snow melt. Not very hospitable for a crawfish. Still, I look. Today, I was about to turn away after quite some time standing, when it’s tail caught my eye as it scurried across the creek bed beneath a rock. Life! Spring is here!
I meditate so that I may cultivate the quiet, the patience, the awareness and the love for this moment. Even the long waiting part. Even if there’d been no crustacean. Even with the red wing blackbirds that squawk like old Bolsheviks into my ear from the thicket for my intrusion. May you live a long life my mud-digging friend. You lit up my heart tonight.
Meditation Travelogue 
You must be logged in to post a comment.