Hung over. Tired. Hard to get out of bed.
What happened? I had nothing to drink . . . no alcohol . . . no drugs.
What happened? I had nothing to drink . . . no alcohol . . . no drugs.
Opening up to a stranger is never easy. But when you feel trust and an open vulnerability offered to you, you can shed your safeguards and become the loving person I believe we were always meant to be. Just yield slowly.
Why do I feel the VA (Veterans Administration) likes to push my face into the mud every once in a while? Like treating me like a number, not a person, another Vietnam War survivor that someone on some staff gets paid for seeing, stamping and shuffling off after extracting information to satisfy the Great Bureaucracy.
Allison,
Hold onto to it. (That feeling of bliss that you can find only in the quiet.)
Better yet, remember it, as if your Life depends on it.
The looming towers of Three Mile Island (TMI) grew in size as I drove from Conshohocken to Harrisburg, PA, some 90 miles away. It was on this very day, March 28, 1979, that America experienced fear and second-guessing of its decision to build nuclear reactors so close to populated areas.
Reach inside of yourself. Look for the Love. It’s there. Now, let it flow throughout your body, your system. Never mind thoughts trying to intrude onto this feeling. Your love is stronger and mightier than any thought — negative or otherwise.
“. . . Grow Spiritually and Help Others to Do So . . .
It’s the Meaning of Life . . .”
— Leo Tolstoy
A judge destroyed the governor, while I survived an explosion before winning a civil rights case in court. This was all in a dream.
Compensation and Review Board is the name given to a panel of persons with the Veterans’ Administration that recommends whether a disability rating should be approved for a deserving veteran.
Your “Beloved,” is what you need. You yearn and long for Him, don’t you?
Always have, always will.
Some words, phrases, even entire messages look different through the lens of time. Take this feeling I expressed to a friend half-way around the world about the “yearning” I felt on reading Sufi poems for the first time. It moved me so much that I “penned” my own feelings of life-long “longing” to be with, what the Sufis call, “my Beloved” — the Higher Being that can take the shape of your Most Perfect Loved One, the Divine.  Continue reading
I danced a Sufi “dervish whirling” at the Buddhist Center today.
A door to the possible mysteries of life opened slightly yesterday. My friend, Joy, introduced me to the Kabbalah.
On and off clicks the light from the sun. On and off, on and off, and so it goes. The sun winning this playful skirmish with tall objects on the Earth below. Light to dark, light to dark flashes before my eye. (Got an eye patch “over me left eye, young Mr. Hawkins,” like Long John Silvers from Treasure Island, but mine’s from a detached retina, and not from pirating!) Something is causing some effect on a part of my brain as my good pupil enlarges and decreases like a strobe light at a Heavy Metal concert with me thrown into a mosh pit.
Played “peek-a-boo” with the sun and shade this morning. On the road from Ambler to Conshohocken, PA, I engaged Old Sol in a game the Almighty must have created for mankind’s appreciation. Why else would God — who caused the sun to come into being from some huge cosmic explosion — have invented shadows? It’s all part of His Love for us humans!
I squeeze the malachite stone as if it was one of those “stress” balls used to relieve tension and exercise the forearm.
A vision of prehistoric man appears as I meditate with a Malachite stone in my hand. I am that person, that man who is bare-chested and hairy in this meditative “dream.” So much hair growing at my chest and back I initially think I’m wearing a covering over my upper body. The hair on my head is long, tangled and unwashed. Don’t think I ever combed it, even with my fingers, let alone use some devise to run through the matted hair follicles.
I close my eyes and my Sufi teacher guides me.
Already kneeling while sweeping litter from the powder room floor where the cats spilled, I sat back on my haunches. A clean commode beckoned to me. Yeah, I felt a “calling“ from this white porcelain-based ancestor of the old “WC” (“water closet” to the Baby-Boomers who called it the “John” or simply the toilet).
For a better over-all life, PLEASE STAY “ON” THE GRASS.
I focus on my hands clasped together in front of my lower chest, with one good eye barely open and the other hidden behind a black eye-patch.
I am “whirling.” Circling on a carpeted floor at a Quaker Meeting Hall room going round and round. No dizziness this, my second time out. I project a feeling of Love and “nudge out‘” fears of falling and/or appearing awkward and uncoordinated. I am dancing with my “Beloved,” as a dervish man displaying his affection to the Oneness of the Universe, the Glory of the Spirit.
I spoke from the USA to a woman in Scotland Monday and felt my world leap ahead a full millennium as I “saw” her on my computer screen at the same time I spoke to her. I had never experienced this before. Never knew society had such technology.
I hate to admit this, but I become afraid when I get into harm’s way. I try to avoid it. Try to go with the flow. But when harm settles in my general area, I become as timid as a rabbit jumping back in a hole after seeing his own shadow.
“Chef J” had no idea what she was getting herself into when she surfed the computer early Saturday morning. But, by the end of the day, she found more than a dozen people who were “just like her,” struggling to make sense of a world that seems cold to the sensitivity of others.
Running water. Somebody designed a way to allow it to flow from a water way directly into our houses. And not just to one spot in my Conshohocken, PA, home, but at least four: the kitchen, two bathrooms and a spigot for hosing plants outdoors.
Heaven on Earth. What a beautiful idea.
Why must one wait for death to enjoy this state of eternity? Why not enter while one is still alive?
Went “international” yesterday. Had breakfast near my home in Conshohocken and greeted 11 people from five countries as I “table-hopped” brandishing my All-American smile, learning you don’t have to travel the world to find your Self. The world can find you right where you live. If you open your heart.
I talk too much.
Didn’t always. I was one of those “quiet” ones when I was young. Seen, and not heard. I believed that “empty barrels made the most noise,” as the nuns taught us in grade school.
“He’s a real banana head,” the doctor who delivered you pronounced right after your birth. You looked more like a “prune” with all those wrinkles, kinda like an aging Dwight Eisenhower or a Winston Churchill, but with a lot more wrinkles.
Kneeling on my knees, I hold the bowl out with one hand, while placing the other hand on the wooden floor, crawling from one side of the chair to another.