There are people, historically and presently, who for lack of a better phrase, were born under a bad sign. I’ve known some of them personally. For one reason or the other, they seem to have never developed a conscience that allowed them to judge good from bad.
For the now, I’m harvesting my experiences and knowledge. I’m loading my cargo hold with the wisdom from life-learned. It’s my mission as a writer, a communicator, and as an elder-in-training to share what I understand.
Do not use
sacred words
with thoughts
of destruction;
with thoughts
of consumption;
with thoughts
of false wealth.
Anger. I know it well. Anger has boiled within me to the point of dehydration of the senses. I let anger take my fertile body and transform it into a desert — something I didn’t like. I cursed the hot sand, the barrenness of rocks, plants and life. I let anger guide me to my own skeletal form, like the white bones and skulls made famous by Georgia O’Keefe.
If I could add another 30 or even 60 days to my mindfulness project, perhaps I could grab complete control over the distracting beeps, bleeps and burps. Maybe. Maybe not. The calendar and life-responsibilities, however, won’t give me those extra 30 to 60 days.
So I decided to wrap the final days with a contemplative retreat at a nearby monastery where retreatants vow to not speak during their stay.
The seven deadly sins? Well, yes. Are we not trying to improve the basics in our life and cease and desist with at least one of the deadly seven: pride, envy, anger, sloth, greed, gluttony and lust?
When I thought about this annual listing of how I can become better person in 2015, every improvement linked to one of the seven.
…the moistened soil–autumn-sun warmed–seduced dormant seeds awake. A resurrection of green slipped through the layer of fallen leaves and dried grasses. By morning a thunderous roar filled the canyon. The Kaweah River no longer struggled to trickle through plump gray boulders.
The woodsy air born from the thousands of years old coast redwoods filled my lungs on a Sunday morning 45 years ago. My California girl’s spirit awakened. I took the first steps along a new path as nature whispered her song into my ears. Harmonic resonance beneath the aged ones, those sentries of the primeval forest, comforted and healed my wounds of the day. Though a pup in my personal timeline, I did “Seek ye counsel of the aged, for their eyes […]
The free market, however, is, now, just another quaint and misused phrase funded by uber-billionaires that care-less for you, me, or the woman struggling to feed her family by making and selling popsicles after they took her job and sent it to Pakistan. She’s inconsequential, as are the men, women and children in Pakistan’s sweat factories earning poverty wages making stuff to sell in America and elsewhere.
When I try to remember the best Christmas ever, it’s impossible. It’s not that I never had a best Christmas ever. But no single memory explodes into smiling snowflakes and flashing Christmas tree lights. The same goes with the worst Christmas ever. They exist somewhere in my memory like empty beer cans tossed under a sparcely decorated dead Christmas tree. Selective memories fade in time and prove that each moment is temporary. Some moments are like the whiff of a freshly peeled orange […]
