STILL LEARNING AFTER ALL THESE YEARS

This morning I got up before PQ, (I usually do) and went outside while everything was cool and fresh. I felt as if I had just awakened after 20 years in coma.  It was about something I’ve always had but never trusted or valued until this week.  I was in harmony with my bare feet that were very happy on everything they touched, cool grass, warm sandstone and dust.  I could have wished for fresh mud between my toes in this drought but instinctively recognized that I shouldn’t go there.  This was about gratitude for what is and faith in the rhythms of life that extend beyond our human judgment. I’m not going to worry about the harm we humans do with chemtrails, HARP, industrial pollution, stupid land development practices, and various chemical concoctions either ingested or rained down from above. The harm they cause is beginning to show everywhere and the perpetrators are trying to fix it with counteractive poisons.   As Einstein said, it is impossible to solve a problem within the system of the problem. For this moment, I trust Mother Earth and Father Sky as consummate teachers.  We may find their classes challenging and ego belittling but I don’t believe they will allow us to destroy the planet.

She's Still Beautiful After All These Years

Of course, it is the mindset itself, which will have to change.

I’m awakening to what is surrounding me and allowing it to love with me. Everything from the earth I stand on, the Magpies chirping in my neighbor’s tree, the flowers for which I’m dragging a water hose around the garden and even the annoying wind and stingiest of clouds.  There is now a fake cumulous cloud of smoke rising to the south, ominous sign of another forest fire but for some reason that has nothing to do with my opinion. Mother Earth and her family of planets are going to work things out in a manner beyond my understanding and I’m glad it doesn’t depend on human wisdom, of which there is little.

After years of soul dulling compromises, I finally realized that the sky wouldn’t fall if I enjoyed  life. What we get from an experience depends on what we are open to receive. In my case, I overestimated the obstacles and the nature or Nature. There was some heavy brainwashing behind the dilemma.  I always wanted to dance, both literally and metaphorically. Mom and dad liked to suffer and they believed that God wanted us to do whatever we didn’t enjoy. I think they believed it was a safety precaution. I took it on more than I realized.  Everything I found beautiful, mesmerizing, wonderful was out of my league and I kept it a secret, or only practiced it as if it didn’t matter which is the same thing. I believed I would be humiliated and cut down for openly following anything that inspired me.  I could possibly get away with lessor substitutes and tried many of these. I’m not sorry about the substitutes, just that I was so afraid to openly acknowledge and practice what I most valued.

Satisfied

The black cat was still asleep on a deck chair but woke up when she heard my feet on the sandstone walk, and then the white one came bounding through a space in the fence. I gave them both some freezer burned Trout I’d boiled yesterday. Whitey gulped it down as if he’d caught it wild and someone was about to take it away from him.  Blackie wasn’t sure about it at first, then decided to try it. While she was making up her mind, Whitey jumped over to her dish and almost swallowed her piece whole.  I’m definitely getting the message. Hem and haw too long, and the good stuff disappears. Finally, Miss Yellow came along and by then the fish was history.

In my quiet mornings, I read, write comments and insights in the margins, sometimes in my journal, walk around the garden and meditate whenever I get up earlier than PQ. It’s like panning for gold.  If you do it every day, you are bound to discover something now and then, maybe even better than you hoped for.  Since the last blog entry, my attitude toward our financial situation has morphed.  I’m noticing everything we have with great appreciation.  I’m buying only what we actually need and am enjoying each dollar spent as if I had a fortune.  It’s as if I landed on Mother Earth in real time and everything is closer and more intense.  The world is coming alive again. 

After years of moving the contents of my soul piece by piece into the basement, I feel that I’ve opened the door to let some light in.  Now begins the work of taking the goods up the stairs and into full daylight. However, I’m ready to take it on. Saturday our friend Mark Gordon, producer of the film, Awakening in Taos about Mabel Dodge and Tony Lujan, invited us to a showing at the home of his art teachers near Santa Fe. It turned into a lovely inspiring day. While looking at their work, I remembered how much fun it is to experiment with different materials and techniques. Art was always something I did in my kitchen when I got home from work. Time, space and materials have always been make-do. To actually study with an artist was out of the question.

 But that is history. I may or may not have a real studio to work in someday, in the meantime I’m back on the ground trusting the natural cycle of each day.   A natural reciprocity truly exists and it has nothing to do with investments for a future we can’t know.  Last week PQ sold one of his painted drums for enough 

PQ at Work

to see us through to the end of the month and that is all we need at this moment. The real treasure is the opportunity to be a part of creation in action.

After the art show, we got together at La Fonda with a woman we have known for many years and always shared simpatico. I called her last week because it was time to quit passing in the shadows and find out why we should know each other better. Overall, it was a magical day. Being well off is a state of being. To be continued.

PREGNANT VACUUM

It is hot this morning.  It’s been a strange spring in Taos.  Now a dry winter is an even dryer summer.  There are four forest fires within 80 miles and the smoke taints the usually high-resolution sharpness of a normal Taos sky.  

Each year is different.  The drought toughened some of my plant friends and did in others.  Survival of the fittest I suppose.  But what is needed to survive changes from year to year? There is also a law of attraction and right now, I’m attracting cats.  The little black cat with the cropped left ear is growing larger and her coat is getting shiny, a sure sign of improved health.  The others, Yellow and White still visit frequently, and a big Tabby Tom is now hanging out in the neighborhood.  He seems mild tempered, shy but possibly homeless. He meows as if lonesome, not the caterwaul of a male looking for a girlfriend.  He has an unusual face that reminds me of a Tibetan Fox.  I’m not encouraging him and hope that he has a real home and just likes to visit.

Sentinel

I really need to learn the secret of attracting money.  I’m pretty good at attracting many things but money is the great challenge.  I know this is all about the major life step that I’m supposed to master next. Two days ago, I suddenly saw an image of myself as a little girl pretending to know what she was doing because she had to.  Up until that moment, I took for granted that I lacked confidence in dealing with the need for money. I’ve been feeling sad and guilty because the money I inherited from the sale of my parent’s house after mom passed, is gone.  PQ and I don’t have enough SS and SSI income to live on. There have been nightmares about having to be a shop girl again or possibly a receptionist in some office.  I almost talked myself into accepting this fate and then realized that my current life style would make this challenging.  The old days of painting until 2:30 am and beyond every night and then working all day, are over. I can’t pull it off physically anymore. Furthermore, PQ isn’t able to do much physical work around the house and property and I have to fill in the gaps. I stay quite busy just handling every day tasks and I’ve become attached to writing and painting as well. Worst of all, we would have to give up traveling to Arizona or even Santa Fe whenever the opportunity comes up. 

One morning, after a sleepless night it dawned on me that my so-called “higher self” is responsible for setting up this crisis and when it rains, it pours. The Photoshop program that I rely on for editing web graphics and photos suddenly quit working and so did our water heater. It looked like we would need several hundred dollars that we don’t have.  In addition, the kids didn’t have money for gas this month and we helped them out with a couple of small tanks to tide them over until Jay’s check comes in.   Well, nature abhors a vacuum so we’ve taken care of that requirement.

Any kind of personal progress is like peeling an onion. Just when you feel that you know your issues, some event pops up to expose assumptions previously overlooked. Usually it’s something like the ugly wall paper in your grandma’s living room, taken for granted and never noticed until some unexpected light reveals that it should go. I guess this means that I’m ready to dissolve the assumption that I can’t make money in a manner that allows me to be myself. Ironic isn’t it, this should still be an issue after I’m technically retired? As it turned out the Photoshop disaster was the result of installing another external hard drive. The program detected a change in the computer’s configuration and demanded reactivation. I had an older version and Adobe no longer maintains servers to activate its older versions. It took about a day and a half to go through the help forum to learn this but on the bright side, I discovered that it was actually possible to download a free version slightly newer than mine from Adobe exactly for this occurrence. Fixing the water heater wasn’t free but we discovered that we had been seriously overcharged by the guys who worked on it last year and they set it up to go out again in about a year. It now has a more reliable thermocouple. It is the Devil’s job to challenge change. You must truly mean it to pass the test.

Something is always missing. Out of the vastness of creation, we sense and crave the parts that fail us or more accurately, those we fail.  They are the key to wholeness. This is a hunger, desire, and often a misdirected obsession. But, the latter is extreme. Often the missing pieces are so far back in the shadows that we don’t recognize them and attempt to fill our vague yearnings with something familiar or officially sanctioned. This operates on the cultural and planetary levels, as well.

The earth is disturbed and we humans are disturbed because of it. After all she is our life source but Somehow, we fail to get the connection.  Our future (if we are to have one) demands a new set of values. The scientific priesthood teaches us that nature is just a lifeless material resource for us to bend, use and arrange at our convenience. It is implied that we are so special and so smart that we can become like gods (thus we have no need for a supreme being). There is ultimately nothing we can’t do eventually. In the meantime, those that live outside the highflying temples of science are having a harder and harder time.  Weather is becoming extreme, and who will be able to recoup the damages as tornados, floods, forest fires, and drought make life ever more difficult and repairing the damages more costly on an already strained economy. So far, I don’t think we have a very good grade as gods in training, maybe a D minus.   

Surely it makes sense that any genuine god must be inside as well as outside, and otherwise quite unlike the traditional aloof father figure to be avoided except in crisis situations or when in need of special favors. The less we understand of ourselves, the less we are able to connect with our source.  We have lost empathy with our own nature and thus we lose connection with the natural systems that created and support us. Is this insane?  Of course, it is, but unlike the depressed and psychotic people among us that are sensitive enough to mirror the state of things, there aren’t any pills to suppress symptoms of the social insanity we live with and that has put us in a dangerous situation.

Science and the corporations have replaced the church in the role of heavenly father but the belief that we must be disconnected from our support system, our Mother Earth hasn’t changed. We are screwed if Mother Earth and Father Sky can’t be reconciled and live happily ever after. For now, It’s hell cause we kids are caught in the middle.

Chinese Sage Chuang Tze comments on the questionable nature of social position and approval:

King Wei of Chu, having heard of the ability of Chuang Tze, sent messengers with large gifts to bring him to his court, and promising also that he would make him his chief minister. Chuang-Tze, however, only laughed and said to them, "A thousand ounces of silver are a great gain to me; and to be a high noble and minister is a most honorable position. But have you not seen the victim-ox for the border sacrifice? It is carefully fed for several years, and robed with rich embroidery that it may be fit to enter the Grand Temple. When the time comes for it to do so, it would prefer to be a little pig, but it cannot get to be so. Go away quickly, and do not soil me with your presence. I had rather amuse and enjoy myself in the midst of a filthy ditch than be subject to the rules and restrictions in the court of a sovereign. I have determined never to take office, but prefer the enjoyment of my own free will.

It would seem that the desirable situation is to be free to be what one is and acquire the necessary elements to fulfill that goal without becoming a sacrificial ox.