Archive | August, 2018

wink

26 Aug

I have found myself describing my interests as leaning toward inner growth or inner discovery. Language fails, but this description of inner seems a tidy way to signal to someone who may be along similar paths as I. But actually, along the way, we begin to find that there is no separation between inner and outer. Synchronistic winking in the perceived outer world reflects back this truth.

I found a song similar to one that I have been searching for for months, so I wanted to share.  Here is my best sync in my flow thus far in this marga life.  A few months ago, actually in May when I was driving my daughter home from college and she was unable to help me with the long drive because she was so tired she passed out as soon as we hit the road, I needed to find stimulation to help me stay lively in my driving. I began to wonder if I could learn to “unhear” English. I began listening to the radio talk stations to see if I could stop my mind from deciphering the words of my first (and only:) language, to only hear the sounds but not the meaning. I was unsuccessful; my mind kept jumping right to the words meaning so automatically, I couldn’t stop it. So I kept changing stations to see if I could get this automatic process to loosen in my brain.  It was a long drive. 🙂

I turned to a favorite satellite station that has stories from NPR, not news, but human interest stories all the time. The story that I caught mid-stream was about a French musician who loved American music but he did not understand the words since he didn’t speak English. He had composed a song with words that sounded like English to his ear, but these words were in fact gibberish. Hearing his song on the station at that very moment allowed me to have the very experience I had just been playing with inside my head for the past few minutes. SPOOKY from the human lens, but a solid and loving wink from the way reality actually works through a different lens.  I have been wanting to find the song again, which in my memory, seemed to have been written in the 40’s, but this morning, I found a song by an Italian pop singer who is practicing the exact same exercise with language.  I’ve linked to this campy, delicious play in the field of experience.  Wink!

Then, as I was listening to a video this morning, another sync in the practice this man is talking about in this video.  Wink!

The validation of outer reflecting inner through this experience is ongoing, I know you know.  Wouldn’t it be fun to gather and share these stories with each other? In our sharing, we further reflect our lack of separation, not only inner and outer, but from being to being, on and on. Makes me imagine an Alex Grey painting, each of us, a pair of eyes of the ONE. x

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beauty in the contrast

5 Aug

I am at a loss about how to capture the beauty in the ugly or the raw.  I moved to a new neighborhood last year.  It is on a boundary.  If I go right out of my neighborhood, I cross under the highway within a block (The sound of traffic is quite noticeable from my yard).  A block beyond the highway is an area of the city where most are struggling with day to day life, many without cars.  The foot traffic and bike traffic on this side are a reflection necessity.  If I turn to the left, I pass by ranches from the 1930s to the 1950s that are being renovated and flipped, followed quickly by a reviving recreational center, followed by a little village with trendy new bars, restaurants and breweries.  The foot traffic and bike traffic on this side of the area are a reflection of recreation.   The trending of revitalization and commerce meets starkly at a highway overpass line a  climate of poverty.

The whole area is a grocery desert, which I had read about before actually moving here.  There are two grocery stores within 3 miles of my house, but they are not the sort of store I am used to.  The closest store has been robbed so many times that they have a security guard who sits by the carts at the front of the store.  The selection is improving due to the revitalization not so far away.  They have begun to have a few organic selections in the produce section.  They have a surprisingly good selection of chocolate bars, suddenly, out of the blue. The prices are several dollars cheaper at times than the nicer sides of town.  I shop here.  I enjoy trying to find things that I want to buy amid the slim pickings.  I hope to skew the selection toward what I want, all the while, in the back of my mind, I wonder if my shopping here will make the prices increase for those who walk to this store from shanty-like apartments and trailers.  Last night a man checking out ahead of me talked to the worried cashier with a backwards, unlit cigarette hanging from the side of his mouth.  Many at the checkout are buying only large alcoholic beverages which they keep in their paper bags to drink as they walk away.

I move in many worlds, and I love how my life exposes me to contrast  daily.  I have never rested easy in the priveleged isolation I’ve known so often.  Is there something in me that seeks the downtrodden side of life?    I want to pin it, the beauty I see in this meeting of worlds.

From the parking lot of the Food Lion I can see the paper mill putting billowing clouds of smoke into the sky.  Between the Food Lion and the paper mill exists a marsh.  The marsh is full of tall wetland grass,  yellow, chartreuse, and deep green wheaty spokes  broken up only  with a few leafless dying tree sculptures here and there.  On these leafless trees sit a variety of snowy white sea birds, egrets and herons, decorating the long stretch of grass and water with their elegant bodies.  They look like large white flowers blossoming out of stark sticks. There is trash strewn in places, but the birds pull my eyes up to their pure forms;  they gather here every morning in front of the paper mill  where I sit to wait for the light to change as I drive to work, sublime elegance displayed in the nature and grey, polluted spewing of the industry, rising affluence and surviving poverty, the spectrum looping around to complete a circle.

I am a center point, observing where a range meets.  Salinated and desalinated, clean and dirty, stable and unstable.  Some mornings the wind shifts and the paper mill smell fills the air in the nicer section and seeps into our houses; the stainless appliances and granite counters cannot counter the smell; we all pray for a shift in the wind. But who would receive it then?

If I were a photographer, I could capture and pin it, this contrast.  I could snap the shot my eyes take in, but my photo attempts fail, so I turn to words, which may not be working either, but here is my stab at capturing this unnamable something my soul is attracted to instantly, the contrast available.  I stand in line at Food Lion behind the swaying man, each of us holding the center of love that we share.  I am not anyone.  I am often surprised I have a name.  I sometimes forget that I am more than just a pair of eyes, observing the beauty without definition in all that I can see.

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