Tag Archives: strength

Between Two Storms

Posted on by Standard 19
Apex: Photo by Noelle

Apex: Photo by Noelle

I walked between two storms today. Clouds built menacing and bleak to the north, while another storm front raged gray and wild to the south. I wished a walk in these beautiful spring temps, but what to do?

I made a decision.

I am master and creator of my Universe and today I command the sky, and too, I shall command the rain. I will rule the earth. The heavens may fall, but on my east to west trail, nothing will fall upon my head. No dew will touch my skin. No puddle dampen my shoe. Lightening will heal to my call and thunder obey my leash. I am my own weather front. I am an ionic gulf stream that holds all violence at bay and forges a dry path. I am Goddess Divine and this moment my kingdom.

Be still!

And so it was….

Off the Deck: Photo by Noelle

The Platte: Photo by Noelle

image Off my Deck: Photo by Noelle

Death in the Wood

Posted on by Standard 8

Beetles were still picking at the bones. I came upon it returning from, oddly enough, a dead end trail I’d taken. It was maybe a hundred feet from a service road and maybe two hundred from the interstate. It looked to be a coyote. It was such an odd location I suspected a trooper had pulled it off the interstate and tossed it here to decay. Fur was sinking into the earth and the bones had been partially scattered by scavengers.

I stared at it. One day I will seep into the earth, I thought. I sat on a nearby log and thought it a good omen to consider death for a bit. There are many meditations for pondering death, one in particular, in which you allow yourself to see your body decaying into the earth, like this coyote. So I sat and imagined I was sinking into the earth with him. It wasn’t unpleasant. The day was warm, sunny and there was a breeze under the tree. After a time, I found his bones comforting, and with that the idea of mine vanishing into the wind, too. The whole eco-system benefitted from this death. Tree roots to small weeds grew from the carcass. Green iridescent beetles thrived in the marrow and took what they ingested back into the dirt. I’d have photographed him from a lying position, but for me there’s a line in my creative hunger at lying in a bed of beetles. Still the sun would catch the red of a ladybug or the green of a scarab taking off and I felt not the least sorrow or loss. One day I will be part of all of this beauty.

After a time, I felt less and less as if my body was sitting there and more and more as if the spirit of the coyote had taken a seat next to me. So we sat. My spirit and the spirit of the coyote and we watched the beetles take his body back into the earth. It was a lovely spring day.

For Steve and Juan. Lovely to chat about death….

Spring Cleaning

Posted on by Standard 4

Photo Painting by Noelle

By accident, really
I was pulling out something else
Didn’t realize bits of an older version of me
Were just stuck back there in my brain attic, waiting to fall out

I was looking at one thing, but got another
Imagine my surprise to find that squirrely me
Just gnawing away at the old pine rafters, full of pitch and tar
I was thinking it was all cleaned out, dead and gone, buried like the past

Alas, no
Such is not the case
It’s a damn shame seeing as my boots are new and white
Still, I have a decent broom, and more, a heart that knows it’s worthy

Spring cleaning
Sometimes it goes right into summer
Sometimes, you’ve been doing nothing but bullshitting yourself in top soil
I’ve been messing around with nothing but fat tar-babies that suck you in, before spitting you out

Rendering of Fat

Posted on by Standard 8

Painting by Gregory Summers

Painting by Gregory Summers


The first stages were huge rents and gashes in my inner landscape. Hurricanes that tore away known shores and earthquakes that ripped open the well-tended lawns and careful cities I’d built to hold in, both what worked and what didn’t. Just in nature where such events alter the courses of rivers, so too, they altered the course of my deepest waters. Changing direction caused dams to crack open and field breaks to give way, no more than twigs. Tributaries formed for miles filled with mud, fertile and rich that would be ready for life. But in the beginning I only saw snapped off moorings, crushed homes, barren lakes and sandy shoals with little more of life than minnows.

Hundreds of suns, snow and autumn leaves have passed hence. New sprouts have broken through, green and lush. Like tree buds hungry for life, I turn toward the sun. It warms and stirs long forgotten pools of energy, but it’s impact has nurtured more change, subtler and more curious than the first. As shorelines ravaged by storms reshape and build new dunes and forests spring up on land once scorched and burned, I am someone else strange and new, yet never wholly stable. I am melting, it would seem, as rendered fat, strained for impurities without seeking perfection. An alchemical mix of old stories retold, cleaned of sorrow and guilt. Still more floats to the surface to be skimmed off, detritus of costumes torched and gone. Each round less to find and the oil grows more golden and clear. There is a tension, but less struggle. Resistance half hearted that dissolves more quickly to surrender. Each day more leaves me with little fanfare or grief. Even as I weep comes joy and welcomed release. I ponder how easily I have come to the ocean, nearly naked and with so little in my hands. It seems odd how much we carry to define who we are, when what we are can never be defined.

Rain Lullaby

Posted on by Standard 8
Free Bing Photos

Free Bing Photos

It’s a steady and soft staccato upon the roof. With no wind it’s pattern is a gentle, but persistent tapping on my heart. Rain, like snow, creates a cocoon made of water. I watch it stream down windows; a cleansing power that pours over my mind. Everything shifts slightly under its trance. I step out onto the deck, below the eaves. Water, alight from street lamps, streams off the roof as brilliant water gems. The air is infused with moisture and wraps my body, delicate and cool. I let it seep in and breathe deep of the fresh atmosphere. This may be the great healer.

Back inside the lights in the house are warmer, the blanket pile thicker, the silence within, deeper. Come to me, sweet sleep, and let us slip away on a rain lullaby.

What Matters

Posted on by Standard 2
Uploaded from a 2011 TED talk "The Rediscovery of Wonder"

Uploaded from a 2011 TED talk “The Rediscovery of Wonder”

In the things that matter there is a hunger
It arrives, first, as desperation and fear
But like stages of grief it changes
Initially, it comes and is denied
Then raged at for its lack of presence
Finally, pleaded with to come soon
Then silence

Eventually the things that matter
Arise out of us to be fed
Not by another, but by our own heart
This is met with mild disbelief
Then curiosity
Finally, delicious amusement
Then silence

Night Rain

Posted on by Standard 14
From the roof of my hospital: Photo by Noelle

From the roof of my hospital: Photo by Noelle

The hour is late and sleep should have long since found me, but instead I lay and listen to the steady rain upon the roof. It had been snow earlier, but now the temps hold above freezing and it comes down in taps obliterating any evidence that winter once lived here. I feel an odd sorrow for her passing, but know it will be brief. By weekend’s end this same rain will fuel an eruption of life that this dark, wet night hardly can ponder.

In the the light of my neighbor’s window cast upon the ceiling of my room, I see the rain drops running down the windows as shadows moving above me. I am reminded of old grief that once felt as heavy as the vanishing wet snow, but now, like rain to the irises in their beds it is the fuel to a heart breaking through dirt.

The bed is warm and dry, the cats snuggled close and asleep. It seems a shame to drift off to sleep in this cozy cocoon, but even butterflies must rest to break free.

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.

Happy Easter

Posted on by Standard 9

I do not celebrate Easter, as I’m not a Christian, but I am a huge fan of resurrection. Rising from the dead. All of us have been there. Losses, traumas, unexpected tragedies – that laid us out. Laid us out flat. Destroyed the life we once new and left us completely lost and hopeless. In those moments we think we’ll never get up, never live again, but then something happened. We got up. Maybe shaky and wobbly at first, but we got up. We started walking. Maybe we didn’t even know what direction to go, but we started walking anyway. We survived. Many of us did more than that, we began to grow and thrive. We recovered and made ourselves anew. Like the Phoenix we built ourselves from the ashes, turning the gray soot into colorful wings.

Resurrection is not so much an event, as a process available to all of us. We each can resurrect our lives no matter how battered and torn up they may seem. So I wish you all a very Happy Easter. May this day bring hope to the most beleaguered souls out there, that you can live again, even if right now you feel your life is dead.

Defiance

Posted on by Standard 12

I started thinking about this post when I was dangling from the bar in the playground. I wasn’t supposed to be dangling, I was supposed to be doing chin ups, but the up part… well… it was more complicated than I first expected. There were a couple of guys putting some new paint on the pool house trim at the local rec center where I am dangling, slightly defeated. I pretended I was stretching my arms, as if I intended to be hanging here unable to lift myself. I may be weak, but still proud. I’m no triathlete, but I pride myself in staying in shape. Hundreds of flights of stairs, yoga, push ups… I mean… I put effort into this. An inch shouldn’t be too much to ask. Seriously, an inch up. How hard can that be? Apparently, much harder than it looks.

I flip over and dangle by my knees off the bar, upside down. Though absolutely no health benefits in doing this, it still provided a brief acrobatic feeling that took away the shame of no chin up. I swung back and forth looking at the slides and jungle gym. Kids play here all day and they use these bars. When I was a kid I used these bars. I bend backward and grab my ankles. If I had a popsicle hanging out of my mouth the scene would be complete. I commit to returning here several times a week. One pull up. One chin up. Anything. That is my goal. My defiant Holy Grail.

I get back on my bike and head off down a trail that winds through neighborhoods and hugs a creek. I haven’t ridden in years, but like the chin ups, feels like the next phase somehow. Nothing makes you feel younger than riding a bike. In two seconds you are ten years old and it’s summer. It does not provide the steady attention to nature I enjoy while hiking, but the feel of the wind in my face, and the speed… oh that feeling of flying down a hill. The thrill is no less wonderful to me now at age 52 than it was at 10. I’m rusty, but I don’t care. It’ll come.

I try some of the dirt paths made by local children. Some are steep down hills, while others have little bumps for rocketing your bike over. I delight in being one of the neighbor boys dashing over a hillside for just a few moments. There is a curious fear at lifting off the ground on a bike that daunts me a little at my age. “Broken bones and hips”, my ego whispers. “You could fall or crash”, the small voice whines. So I do it again and again. Fear be damned.

As I ride along, I realize there must be a way to get through a neighbor’s yard to the field beyond. A child would’ve figured that out. So I begin to look and sure enough, a slip of a pathway passes between two houses covered in bike treads that leads to the larger field. A man is heading out with the trash from one house and I dash down the passage quick as lightning before I can be flagged off. I laugh out loud as I hit the field and race across it through tall grass and hard packed trails. I am the opportunistic thief Oliver Twist would’ve been proud of.

Here’s the thing about falling in love with yourself. You are constantly looking for ways to enjoy life. Ways to entertain yourself. Ways to make yourself laugh. I laugh mostly at what I’ve been told about aging. When I turned forty the women at my office gave me black balloons and my cake in a wheel chair. They meant it to be funny, of course, but we don’t realize how much we tell each other it’s over when really its just begun. How much we share the passed on story of decline and decay that was given to us by someone else. That life is like some creepy, slow crawl to the grave. I don’t want to give that to any of you. I want to give you vitality and joy. Laughter and hunger to learn new things. To be plotting your next re-invention, not your retirement.

I want to give you defiance of what everyone has ever told you about the laws of the body and death. Death is coming. It is as certain as the sun rising. So what? That isn’t even interesting. It’s predictable. What’s interesting is what we are doing with the time we’ve been given. That’s fire. Ask yourself, what do I value above all else? Then chase that with the power of a lion. Today, for me, it’s freedom. It’s remembering the promises I made to myself in my youth. It’s remembering to keep the fire burning in my belly for the life I’ve been given. It’s defying everything I’ve been told about how things should be.

Worth a glance, a short list of those who defied age.
http://mindvalleyacademy.com/featured/never-too-late