Party Animals

Summer and I were having another chat the other day.  You know Summer, she comes in June and stays until the end of August.  I'm telling her about the bugs and the heat and the humid air and the sun burns and the rattlesnakes she brings along and how it makes for a giant minus side to her stay.  She squints her eye, figuratively of course, and points out that she and Earth put up with gallons of bug spray, sun screen, exhaust from recreation vehicles and boats, piles of party trash and lord knows what else, like the horrendous and scary things we light up on the Fourth of July.

She has a point.  We could try harder to have a care about the destruction we're capable of when we're having fun.  Summer offered a slogan, which I reluctantly pass along:  Be more of an animal and less like a party animal.

I'm feeling a little used as I realize Summer has tricked me into mounting a soap box for Earth.  Before she has a chance to slide in another slogan, and I can just see her saying "Earth--love her or leave her!," I collect my weeder and trimmer and trowel, dump the weeds in the green bin and head back to the house and out of the H-E-A-T. 

 

Seduction

On the twenty-first of June, not far from when I write this, we will be enjoying the beginning of luscious, hot, seductive, lazy-making and impossible to ignore Summer, with a giant moon hanging low in the sky on the twenty-third to kick things off.  Summer, being the bighearted gal that she is, asked me to pass this message on to you:

Dear hard working humans in the Northern Hemisphere, pleeese do come play with me!  I know you have to do the things to pay the bills, deal with disputes and other pressing concerns, keep the car going and the kids from running dangerously loose.  I'm not asking for you all to commit to earth-shaking, lallapaloosas of elaborate vacations (and I have heard some of you mention that the worst blow-outs you have ever experienced happened on one of those).  I just want you to give yourself over to play.  Simple fun.  Cheap, even.  I'll be there to enjoy it with you.
Your ever-dedicated friend who happily shows up every June and stays til September,
Summer

Home Place

I live in a forty-nine square mile city.  It's big enough to have a ridiculous number of neighborhoods.  If you live in one, you find out you have neighborhoods inside yours that outsiders have yet to recognize.  If you drill down a little further, you can find neighborhoods with sort of floating neighborhoods passing through them.  We do not appreciate the floaters.  We call them homeless.

I bring this up not in the interest of making a political statement.  I am wanting to ask if you have found your home place and what it is that makes it so.   First, so that you recognize what is the core of it and you will keep even though things around it change.  Second, so that if you have not yet found it, you can begin to become clear about what you want it to be.  Because when that becomes clear, what it is you want is given the seed to draw you to your home place.

Differences

Recently, I got the chance to hang out for a few days with an old friend on her Ohio farm.  She has stayed true to the salt of the earth traditions we both grew up with while I have winged off into less charted territory.  At breakfast one morning, Barb, curious to know how far I had flung, asked me how I see healing.  My description looked something like this:

Stored away within us is a blueprint of a perfectly functioning body.  More than a blueprint, it is how our physical presence strives to be.  When it is provided with the raw materials to create that highest form of itself, it will do just that.  The best raw material is energy of the highest, purest frequencies.  When it is given the choice, the body will be drawn to the highest energies available.

In healing, the one offering the healing holds the highest level of consciousness it can access in their awareness and at the same time, holds the one who is asking for healing in their awareness as well.  Then, the one asking for healing has a resource for their body to draw on, in creating the highest form of itself.  And can then shift from dis-ease into ease, perfect being."

"Oh," she says, "like praying."

"Yeah," I say, "like praying."

One Cheese

I'm in a cheese store here in Gouda.  Facing a madly huge selection of rich country cheeses piled up on a table in the middle of the store, for tasting.  You want to come hungry.

I eat my way around the table, every little chunk of goodness as incredible as the one before.

This is getting to feel like more of a meet and greet than shopping in the cheese aisle has ever been.  I might be talking to the cheeses.  I hear myself saying things like, "You're so salty and dense!"  "Sooo creamy!" "Oooh baby!"  "I want to take you home!"  In English, fortunately.  There's less staring and moving away than there would have been if I could speak Dutch.

In the midst of this happy little vignette, I give myself a good hard mental poke--I am here to buy a cheese.  Uno.  Not half the store.

I leave with my one cheese wrapped in its special cheese paper.  I don't know if I got the best cheese.
They all seemed like the best to me.   What I do know is letting myself get a little crazy is food for my soul.

Find yourself a cheese shop, or the equivalent, and see if that isn't so. 

Having A Gnat Day

Days come along when seeing myself more like a gnat in the face of the universe than a strong, empowered she-woman looking for the next building to leap overtakes me.

After lots of trial and error, rolls of toilet paper and six ounce 90% cacao bars, I've found that a little preemptive action works better to get me through a gnat day than letting the crying jag with chocolate come on.

I can't take credit for this.  I learned it at an Awakening the Light Body seminar with Duane Packer (check out www.orindaben.com).  There was this guided meditation where we were going to "visit" some very large beings, who would see us as about the size of a gnat, if they noticed us at all.   To get big enough so they could recognize us, we gathered up all of our consciousness.  This may be sounding mysterious and it really isn't.  See--we are members of our solar system, its planets, the stars in our galaxy.  Astrologers can show us by referencing our birth date and time and location on our planet how we are affected by all of this.  And we are affected because--tahdah!!!--we are connected to all of it.  It is part of our identity.  Loosely translated, it is part of our consciousness.  If your eyes haven't rolled back in your head yet, consider that another element of our consciousness that contributes to us being bigger than a gnat in the face of the universe is all the lives we have experienced.  They as well are part of our consciousness.  We are BIG.

Okay, so how do you gather up your consciousness and get big.  I'm going to try to describe this, and understand that my description is just a reflection of what happens.  Trying it out yourself is going to be simpler and clearer than the explanation:

Get quiet and settled.  Say your name.  Imagine that there are lines of energy going out from you, connecting you to the earth, the planets, the stars.  Imagine that from all of these points of connection, energy flows back to you, right into your center, there where a point of light resides.  Next, imagine that you notice your time line.  It extends out from your center in both directions.  All the way back to your beginning and forward to what is to come.  All of this power, all of this consciousness is you.  Drink it in, breathe it, notice your light, your expansiveness.  Once again, say your name.

Big Things

A very long time ago, during the period when I interpreted my interest in teaching to mean I should be in classrooms, I gave the students in my literature class an assignment to write poetry.  Every poem they turned in got an A, just to encourage them to risk opening up their hidden selves.  Some of them had never seen such a grade before and there was a good chance they wouldn't be seeing one again.  It offered me a hint at how huge a deal being awarded can quickly become.  There was light in their eyes when they saw those big A's marked on their papers.  As if, with the award of the grade, they had just been granted greatness.

Does it make it better, are we bigger, if someone acknowledges our striving?

The challenge I offer is to be so completely engaged in the game that we live for both the lumps and the kudos.  Wearing our crowns when crowns come, leaving no moment unlived for its lack of luster or for its pain or ordinariness.

Finding our own juice.  Way in there, in our core, where our best, strongest, most beautiful selves bubble.