Tag Archives: Intention

Kaleidoscope: A Divine View of Ourselves

Posted on by Standard 2
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Image from Devianart.com

Today, I send into your meditation a Kaleidoscope.

Imagine you have picked up a beautiful kaleidoscope off the shelf in a lovely, out of the way shop you stumble upon, down an unexpected alley. The shop is full of all sorts of curiosities and beautiful trinkets, games and pieces of art. You have been wondering the shop for a few minutes, enjoying touching and admiring many things when you come upon the kaleidoscope.

There’s something of the unexpected in a kaleidoscope. You never know what patterns and beauty you will see within. Thus, you follow your impulse and pick it up. You are surprised at how substantial it feels in your hand. Clearly very well made of a porcelain-like material, with these intricate designs and writing that appear similar to Sumatran script down its sides. The rims are made of gold and you find yourself even more entranced than a moment ago.

You place the kaleidoscope to your eye and peer in. As with all kaleidoscopes the objects that create the patterns within are made of rich colored glass, but there are also beads of gold and silver that seem to refract light into the glass. When you turn and face the sunlight streaming through the shop windows the colors explode in every direction, bringing to life the most amazing patterns. Each turn of the scope gives ever greater delight. It’s as if you can feel the colored patterns seeping into your body through your eyes. Whatever the price, you decide you must have it. You can’t help feeling there is something truly magical about this kaleidoscope and an immense good fortune for having found your way to this shop. You want to look into it again and again.

And there is, of course, something magical about it. This kaleidoscope is your human life and the viewer is your spirit gazing through it.

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Image from Devianart.com

Your life was chosen from a myriad of options in the divine shop of human existence. Your life was an intentional decision and there was such delight and sense of wonder and eagerness to see what patterns this life you are living would create. Feel the power in that. There were an infinite number of choices, and your spirit chose your life to experience itself through. Not random, not accidental and not the last trinket on the shelf some unlucky spirit got stuck with. No one is a lump of coal in some spirit’s Christmas stocking. Everything about your life was a magical moment of conscious decision and creation, entered into with pure joy and awe.

Pay close attention now and let us see something even more powerful and unique about this kaleidoscope. It’s size is of your design. The number of colors within it, your choice. The number of times it’s turned and the pattern allowed to change, your decision. Each of us are sovereign beings with complete freewill. The limitations we experience are of our own choosing. The level of diversity, depth, color, range, complexity of our nature is something we build and create daily.

It’s important to understand there are no wrong choices. No matter what we think of the events of our life or the changes we’re experiencing our highest self is always delighted with the patterns of our nature. It peers into us only with the eyes of love and wonder, and as such it can see nothing else. It does not see the person you harmed or the person who harmed you the way you see them. It does not interpret your losses or successes or those of your enemy the way you interpret them. It does not see the unexpected, as unexpected, or the confusing as confusing. It sees into your life with immense clarity and vision that envelopes all of who you are and all of whom and what everything else is, simultaneously. It sees the beauty and grace in all things.

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Image from Devianart.com

There is never disappointment in our beingness or even a hair’s breath of regret in the choice to live through us. All those feelings of discord are only our level of disengagement with that love offered freely and without restraint or limitation.

Your higher self is an infinite being. It can live an entire lifetime gazing enthralled at one particular pattern that never changes, reveling in the patterns beauty. It can spend ten thousand lifetimes, turning the scope again and again, seeing millions of configurations if it so chooses. Nothing is ever lost to it. Nothing is squandered, diminished or thought less of for being the pattern it is. It knows only delight, excitement, wonder at what it sees in the pattern it is witnessing now, for no matter how far down a hole we may think we are, it knows completely our potential to climb out. It waits with delicious anticipation for us to take our next step toward love, in each and every moment. It will wait a minute, it will wait ten thousand lifetimes with the same anticipation. It’s infinite. Only love and potentiality matter to it, not time.

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Image from goosart.com

This life you are living is a kaleidoscope. You are choosing the limitations of the tube, the color of the glass, the aperture of the spy hole… all of it. Even more fascinating, at no time, does your spirit rail against the limitation of the tube, either. For the tubes limitations are what allow the formations of patterns. They are chosen limits, until one decides to change the limits for something smaller or broader, depending on what serves us. Spirit can’t look into vastness and experience an individuality. It must confine itself for a time in a human life that has distinct edges, created by our beliefs and perceptions. We may decide to change a belief and expand our point of view or our way of being, but we chose to be inside this tube for a time. And in that choice we are playing with the limitations we set to ourselves to build our kaleidoscope. We wanted something we could look through and that decision gave us this very unique and specific life.

We have a fixed sense of who we are, our personalities in particular, largely because we’ve created – through our beliefs – the limitations we live within. It is an illusion though to see them as fixed. We can make them so, if that serves us, but if the confines we’ve found ourselves living in have become constricted, boring, dull, diminished, dark, negative, self-limiting, imprisoning, than truly we need but turn the glass tube. Make a decision to change. Make a decision to imagine ourselves as something new, and the tube begins to turn. The colored glass and metallic balls begin to tumble and who we are shifts into a new pattern.

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Image from Pinterest.com

Do not let your old stories of who you are define who you can be. Disengage from other’s points of view of who they think you are, and ask yourself if that is who you wish to be? Allow yourself to imagine that any configuration of you, that no longer serves you can be let go, freed up, re-designed into something else. As Einstein said, “Energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be changed from one form to another.” You are pure energy, in a constant state of flux and evolution. Know the limitlessness of that!

As you sit today, see if you can feel the porcelain tube with it’s magical script etched down its sides turning just a little and then allow yourself to open to whatever comes next.

If you enjoyed this piece, I would be honored if you checked out my book, either at the Amazon link below or the Lulu link at the upper right hand. Many blessings to you…

Sacred Imperfection

Posted on by Standard 22
On the Hiking Path: Photo by Noelle

On the Hiking Path: Photo by Noelle

“As long as the ego runs your life, most of your thoughts, emotions, and actions arise from desire and fear. In relationships you then either want or fear something from the other person. What you want from them may be pleasure or material gain, recognition, praise or attention, or a strengthening of your sense of self through comparison and through establishing that you are, have, or know more than they. What you fear is that the opposite may be the case, and they may diminish your sense of self in some way. When you make the present moment the focal point of your attention–instead of using it as a means to an end–you go beyond the ego and beyond the unconscious compulsion to use people as a means to an end, the end being self-enhancement at the cost of others. When you give your fullest attention to whoever you are interacting with, you take past and future out of the relationship, except for practical matters. When you are fully present with everyone you meet, you relinquish the conceptual identity you made for them–your interpretation of who they are and what they did in the past–and are able to interact without the egoic movements of desire and fear. Attention, which is alert stillness, is the key.

How wonderful to go beyond wanting and fearing in your relationships. Love does not want or fear anything.”
~ Eckhart Tolle

I happen to love this quote, but I must confess I wonder if I shall ever achieve what it suggests. Though I spend a daily habit in embracing what is here, I find myself fluctuating between the extraordinary ordinary preciousness of this now and the seeming forgetfulness of an ego on speed. Struggling, often, to be this self-aware, awake, and evolved being all the great Mystics speak of. On paper we can all sound amazingly evolved, but I wonder if Tolle, Tuttle, Kabat-Zinn or Foster have to, themselves, remember their own teachings, again and again. Sometimes Alice’s rabbit hole is a donut that has no bottom.

I remember seeing the Dalai Lama speak. He opened with the following, (paraphrased, of course) “Look I am just a man. Look here. See? One eyebrow goes up and the other goes down. One has tufts of hair growing out, while the other doesn’t. There is no perfection here. I am an ordinary person like you. I am a sacred being as much as you, which is really all any of us are. Sacred imperfection.” I don’t remember what else he talked about, but I remember him pointing at his eyebrows and laughing heartily at his own aging body. I find immense comfort in that, and so, it is what I take into this day. My sacred imperfection.

Beginner’s Mind

Posted on by Standard 3
Image re-posted from The Mind Unleashed Facebook Page


Image re-posted from The Mind Unleashed Facebook Page

I thought I was at center. I felt as balanced as a ballerina in Swan Lake. At the place of nirvana where cherry blossoms float down and the world smells of nag champa. Where you aren’t wrestling snakes in the evangelic’s circus tent, but sipping honey from lily cups. One of those cool Zen-catching moments that Ram Dass and Kornfield talk about as casually as the goodness of roasted potatoes at Sunday supper. You know when the sky opens as to Moses and you’re blessed with eternal peace. Then the horns blared and I looked at the dashboard clock. Funny how certain we can be about things, until we’re not.

Time. The time to get from here to there. It haunts me like a wolf. If I can let the time go then I’m catching Phoenix feathers and dropping into downward facing dog, a hawk swooping Earth. Hourglass snatches me up, though, and she is a mean old, nanny demanding I learn my lessons. Feels like someone should have mentioned that time is a whip cracking in your head that’ll be your undoing if you aren’t careful. Instead we are offered lovely chimes to mark it.

I thought enlightenment was a place, like Intercourse, Pennsylvania where it was always funny to touch that spot on a map. That with the right amount of effort and time I’d be there, properly dressed and ready for congratulations. The fattest, blissed out cat, in full lotus that ever walked through the doors of the Ritz Carlton of the Tao Te Ching.

Oh, all of the thoughts you have thunk, little grasshopper.

A work in progress from The Writer’s Church in Boulder, CO. Hosted by Marj Hahne. Inspired by “Elegance” by Fleda Brown.

Sing

Posted on by Standard 2
A study in the formation of frost: Photo by Noelle

A study in the formation of frost: Photo by Noelle

Who should sing the song of goodness and well being into the world? The Buddha? Jesus? Mother Teresa? Why are we waiting for a great leader when we each have a song of love in our throat? We sing our life into being through our thoughts. Offer anger and the world is dark. Offer tenderness and the world is soft. We sing by thinking and we are always singing.

The world needs simple lullabys as children need them for soothing and sleep. And like a baby the Earth does not know its mother’s voice as stage worthy, nor if it be heard by one or thousands. The Earth simply knows our voice as the voice of love.

There are no small acts of love and no common voices. You are Mohammed or Rumi or Osho. So sing. Sing as though the world were your stage and your heart should burst with the love it has to give out. For in truth, that is how it is.

Let Them Run

Posted on by Standard 4
Re-posted from Enchanted Nature's Facebook page

Image re-posted from Enchanted Nature’s Facebook page

I want freedom. Freedom from a tongue bound by convention. Freedom of thought that need not be harnessed back like horses wild. Let them run, I say. I want freedom of time that has no tick. No deadline. It belongs only to me. I am the boss who’s burning that midnight oil for inventions that build a life. My life. I want freedom of style as I slip on skinny jeans, GoGo boots and too much eyeliner. I want freedom of money, mullah, bank, green dogs braying with a jingling, jangling pick me up off my sad ass, hard times, hard luck self. I want freedom of space. Open plaines and wind swept deserts. Where I can walk a mile or ten in my crusty, beat up hikers and no one holds my line to any destination I desire. I want freedom of heart. Open it up wide as a storm gray clam glistening with sea water and pearls, while it still holds the grit I earned honestly. I want the freedom to love you. Love you as I take you into my skin, bury you deep in my belly and warm you up like mama’s stew. I want the freedom to open myself to possibilities and disaster. Good times and crazy adventure. I want freedom that only a bird knows. Alone, in a winter wood, with nothing but silence and every branch I own.

Work in progress from The Writing Church Writer’s group hosted by Marj Hahne, Boulder, CO. Inspired by the poem “What Do Women Want” by Kim Addonizio

Little Gem

Posted on by Standard Reply
Continental Divide: Photography

Continental Divide: Photography by Noelle

“EVERY path may lead you to God, even the weird ones. Most of us are on a journey. We’re looking for something, though we’re not always sure what that is.  The way is foggy much of the time. I suggest you slow down and follow some of the side roads that appear suddenly in the mist.” Real Live Preacher

Little Gem

Posted on by Quote 3
Late afternoon at Clement Park

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