poem: A Spiritual Journey

A Spiritual Journey

And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles,
no matter how long,
but only by a spiritual journey,
a journey of one inch,
very arduous and humbling and joyful,
by which we arrive at the ground at our feet,
and learn to be at home.

~ Wendell Berry ~

(Collected Poems)


click the title of this post to see the original, with beautiful photo, on panhala--link at left

going with the flow of the universe

Enjoying the Ride
The Flow of the Universe

The flow of the universe moves through everything. It’s in the rocks that form, get pounded into dust, and are blown away, the sprouting of a summer flower born from a seed planted in the spring, the growth cycle that every human being goes through, and the current that takes us down our life’s paths. When we move with the flow, rather than resisting it, we are riding on the universal current that allows us to flow with life.

Many people live their lives struggling against this current. They try to use force or resistance to will their lives into happening the way they think it should. Others move with this flow like a sailor using the wind, trusting that the universe is taking them exactly where they need to be at all times. This flow is accessible to everyone because it moves through and around us. We are always riding this flow. It’s just a matter of whether we are willing to go with it or resist it. Tapping into the flow is often a matter of letting go of the notion that we need to be in control at all times. The flow is always taking you where you need to go. It’s just a matter of deciding whether you plan on taking the ride or dragging your feet.

Learning to step into the flow can help you feel a connection to a force that is greater than you and is always there to support you. The decision to go with the flow can take courage because you are surrendering the notion that you need to do everything by yourself. Riding the flow of the universe can be effortless, exhilarating, and not like anything that you ever expected. When you are open to being in this flow, you open yourself to possibilities that exist beyond the grasp of your control. As a child, you were naturally swept by the flow. Tears of sadness falling down your face could just as quickly turn to tears of laughter. Just the tiniest wave carrying you forward off the shores of the ocean could carry you into peals of delight. Our souls feel good when we go with the flow of the universe. All we have to do is make the choice to ride its currents.

this comes from Daily OM's weekday inspirational email--see link on this blog, go to Register for Free to subscribe. occasionally it's a little too "woowoo" for me; usually it's true wisdom, well put.

i voted today

at fiesta mart at 35 and 38th, about 8:30 am. it was easy breezy.

i took my voter ID card, but from what i hear, you can just go with your driver's license.

i've long enjoyed voting on election day, going to my precinct. this year i decided to vote early. there were so many new voters in the spring primaries, i wanted to give them space on election day and avoid standing in line for a long time.

it felt really awesome to cast my vote in this historic election!

dream: i transform into an angel

dreamed that someone i know can fly. it seems i have always known that about them, but have never witnessed it. i witness it in my dream. she undergoes a transformation when she returns, from a light being to an in-the-flesh person.

an older, bald, portly man seems to be overseeing this. i tell him i want to fly too. he tells me i'll get my chance, with a twinkle in his eyes.

i cross a doorway. two children in front of me have already taken off.

i feel myself getting lighter, levitating, coming down, levitating, coming down, turning in the air. wow.

i feel wings sprouting from my shoulder blades. wow.

i wake up, still feeling intensely the big white angel wings sprouting from my shoulder blades.

twittering and tweeting

i joined twitter a few weeks ago. you get 140 characters to post your response to the question, "What are you doing?"

you can follow people, and people can follow you, and you have control over this.

you get little slices of daily life and of essence from folks you like.

click the title of this post to go to my twitter page. follow me, if you wish!

fingerprint analysis

i'm just putting it out there that i am doing fingerprint analysis. i read Richard Unger's new book, Life Prints, in which he describes how to analyze people's fingerprints to determine their school in life, life purpose, and life lesson.

so far, i've analyzed 8 people's fingerprints, and they all seemed to think it was pretty right on.

even folks my age can be surprised, although many folks feel that this is a new way of putting something they already knew.

email or call me if interested. no charge at this time.

me: i'm in the school of service, my life purpose is to be spirit in action, and my life lesson is believing that i'm worthy of love.

poem: Sandstone

door of being, dawn and wake me,
allow me to see the face of this day,
allow me to see the face of this night,
all communicates, all is transformed,
arch of blood, bridge of the pulse,
take me to the other side of this night,
where I am you, we are us,
the kingdom where pronouns are intertwined,

door of being: open your being
and wake, learn to be ....

~ Octavio Paz ~

nature relieves brain fatigue, says NY Times

click the title of this post to read the story and hear the podcast

back from maui

.
arrived back home on tuesday after two full, glorious, intense, beautiful, inspiring, transforming weeks in maui.

highlights:

being in maui again

staying at peace of maui again

eating ahi shoyu poke again

going to savers in kahului again

spending 6 days with katie and keith, taking them to a couple of beaches

camping with them for 3 nights at 8000 feet on haleakala

catching two sunrises and a sunset from the summit

seeing the shadow of haleakala fall across land, sea, and molokai

seeing the tops of mauna loa and mauna kea on the big island above the clouds from haleakala

hearing a man spontaneously begin chanting in hawaiian at the first sunrise

hearing nick goodness tell the legends of maui and pele

bird songs at hosmer's grove

meeting up with fellow travelers at milagro's in paia

driving to hana with glenda behind the wheel--she couldn't stop smiling

stopping at the kea'nae peninsula to see the waves crashing against rocks, and then seeing the full moon just above the horizon

meeting up with the rest of the group of 15 at wai'anapanapa state park

setting up my tent above pai'loa beach with an ocean view and soundtrack

all the learning and practices from tom best, my teacher

the heartbeat, birth canal, turtle walk, big mama, koki beach, hamoa beach, alelele waterfall, waimoku waterfall (and the banyan tree and bamboo forest on the way)

painting mud streaks on my face, jumping out and shaking a bamboo branch and yelling at fellow travelers on the way up to waimoku

getting up EARLY and watching the sunrise, especially starting when it was completely dark

doing sun salutations on the beach, on the rocks, on the grass

the talking rocks at the beach

hawaii night at the hana aloha festival and all the wonderful hula and music

being invited to fake the hula along with a singer who was also a great hula dancer at the bar at the hana maui hotel

being told by bobbi that she and tom noticed i looked like i was floating when they saw me walking--being that relaxed and centered, and having all the bodywork pay off

all the great energy surges, feeling deeply present and alive

driving the hana highway back with glenda, who couldn't stop smiling

stopping in paia at mandala for two fabulous tunics, on sale for 50% off

getting two pretty rings, of mother-of-pearl and blue topaz, and a spiral shell necklace at nahiku ti gallery

somehow managing to startle kathleen, who picked me up at the airport, with how much being in maui had changed my energy

off to maui very soon

.
i'm kinda glad to be going away for a couple of weeks to an island in the middle of the pacific ocean, part of the most remote island group in the world.

there i will camp on the side of an inactive volcano and spend time near the small, remote town of hana, camping at the ocean's edge. i'll be doing a workshop from best resources during the hana part of the trip.

while camping, my access to the outside world will be limited. there will be no cell phone or television or radio or newspaper or computer access.

all the tense headlines about the economy, the pending election, environmental troubles, etc., will be on "hold" for a while.

does that sound like bliss to you? it does to me.

it will be interesting to see when i return how things have changed. will post about the trip after i return later this month.

aloha and mahalo.

what is a maverick?

.
i'm curious about this word, as well as wondering why being a maverick is supposed to be a good thing for a president/vice president to be in this day and time, facing the problems this country faces.

from good old dictionary.com:

mav·er·ick /ˈmævərɪk, ˈmævrɪk/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation [mav-er-ik, mav-rik] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation
–noun
1. Southwestern U.S. an unbranded calf, cow, or steer, esp. an unbranded calf that is separated from its mother.
2. a lone dissenter, as an intellectual, an artist, or a politician, who takes an independent stand apart from his or her associates.
3. (initial capital letter) an electro-optically guided U.S. air-to-ground tactical missile for destroying tanks and other hardened targets at ranges up to 15 mi. (24 km).
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Origin: 1865–70, Americanism; after Samuel A. Maverick (1803–70), Texas pioneer who left his calves unbranded]

—Synonyms 2. nonconformist, independent, loner.

looking at definition 2 above, does a maverick listen to his or her associates? does a maverick explain the basis of his/her reasoning?

it seems to me that sometimes being a maverick could be a good thing, as in being able to think for oneself, and it could be a bad thing, as in making risky decisions without being accountable.

i guess it's up to the crowd to make the determination. is a maverick a good thing for a presidential candidate to be? are there other presidents who have been considered mavericks? and how often does one have to dissent from his/her associates to be labeled a maverick?

deleting text messages and photos on razr

my razr cell phone's text message inbox was full. every time i opened the phone, it said "messages full".

i could not figure out how to delete old messages. same with old photos. delete wasn't on any menu that i could find, not even settings.

i googled "razr delete messages". i read post after post and didn't know what they were talking about--tech talk way over my head, cables, etc. i kept reading and saw a mention of an "options key". i didn't know what that was. it inspired me to explore my phone.

i figured out in a blinding stroke of insight is that the middle key (-) is has multiple functions. from the main screen, it lets you select a menu, say "messages" or "multimedia". once you get to a message or photo you want to delete, press the middle key again. it becomes the options key!

so to delete text messages, from the main screen, press the middle key, scroll to Messages, select, scroll to Message Inbox, select, scroll to a message you want to delete, press Read.

now click the middle key again. Delete is the first option. press Select.

you've just deleted your first text message!

conservative white man likes obama

Thanks to Bruce for sending me this column, which ran in the Huffington Post on 3/21/2008. The writer, Frank Schaeffer, describes himself thusly: "I'm a fifty-five year old white man who has been a conservative all my life. I've been a right wing Republican activist. I'm a big fan of the military."

The Huffington Post also describes him: "Frank Schaeffer is a New York Times best selling author. He is a survivor of both polio and an evangelical/fundamentalist childhood, an acclaimed writer who overcame severe dyslexia, a home-schooled and self-taught documentary movie director, a feature film director and producer of four low budget Hollywood features Frank has described as 'pretty terrible.' Frank's nonfiction includes 'Keeping Faith--A Father-Son Story About Love and the United States Marine Corps' and 'AWOL--The Unexcused Absence of America's Upper Classes From Military Service and How It Hurts Our Country.' Frank's latest book is 'Crazy for God: How I Grew Up As One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back.'"

Read what Frank Schaeffer has to say about the presidential race, keeping in mind this was published in March.


This Good Friday Let Us Not Crucify Barack Obama

Senator Obama has a problem: the hardening of the American heart, the closing of the American mind, the shriveling of our souls, the shrinking capacity of our imaginations, our jaded senses, the seen-it-all attitude that makes us into sneering voyeurs too mean spirited to save ourselves.

I was a guest on a PRI radio show the day after Obama delivered is historic speech on race. I was a guest along with a person that the host introduced as "most responsible" for making Obama's minister's charged comments into a political football. According to the host's introduction, Republican activist Ronald Kessler used his website to turn Obama's minister's words into the story the media jumped on.

Kessler had just heard Obama's March 18 speech on race too. He said it left him unmoved. He was in a sneering mood bristling with ever-so-reasonable middle class certitude of his conservative righteousness. To Kessler the speech was just politics, nothing more. The idea of it's truth was of no consequence. To him it was all about tactics.

That night I was listening to Laura Ingraham (a show that I was on several times and where Laura repeatedly called me a "great American" because, as the father of a Marine, I'd written Keeping Faith and then Faith of Our Sons, books that praised and explained the military family.) Laura was sneering at Obama's speech. Her candidate had been Mitt Romney. As Romney's self-described "conservative-conservative" Ingraham had also been routinely mocking McCain. And she hates Clinton. Now she hates Obama more...

Bitterness as a way of life marches forward on the left as well as the right. I read the responses from Clinton supporters (on various websites) also damning Obama's speech as "just words." Some of the Clinton people sounded even more cynical than Kessler and Ingraham.

Obama is the chef who opens a new restaurant and serves honest good and beautifully prepared food made of the most wholesome ingredients only to have the food critic pan his offerings as "all too ordinary." "Where," asks the seen-it-all jaded bored critic, "are the calf's brains marinated in truffle-soaked baby duck's testicles?"

Obama offers civility in the midst of a drunken national bar fight. Obama speaks in complete sentences, well-turned paragraphs, offers thoughts with intellectual depth, nuance, humility and compassion. Obama is a reasoned essay cast before sound-bite swine who seem ready to tear anything that falls into their sty to shreds.

By providence or blind luck, we are being given a second chance. In Obama our founders appear once again stepping from the mists of time to offer a wayward great, great grandchild an opportunity for redemption. But everything is turned on its head. Good is called bad. The greatest things about Obama are used against him, decency and transparency are mocked.

Obama stands in the tradition of our founders, a citizen running for office, not a "professional" striver. But the cry goes up, "He doesn't have the experience!" Experience? At what? Playing games with our country's soul while the only real game in our nation's capitol is hanging on to power, enriching oneself at the political trough through connections, taking us to war after war, making us hated throughout the world by catering to our insatiable, unreasoning fears.

Obama is the man who reaches out to help a dying passerby and the passerby snarls, "What do you really want?" Obama came to us on March, 18 with one of the most generous and brilliant speeches that has been delivered on American soil. He spoke honestly of things all other American leaders have been too timid and self-serving to even mention. Standing behind him were the sprits of countless murdered, enslaved, tortured, lost black Americans. Their blood cries out for revenge and yet Obama offered forgiveness, perspective and understanding.

Obama is not Jesus. Obama makes mistakes. He is rightly self-deprecating. Nevertheless, imperfect as he is, Obama is offering America a fresh start. There is more decent intelligent authenticity in his little finger than the Clintons will ever know. There is more kind wisdom in Obama than in all our sneering bloodsucking moronic media combined. But we have imbibed detritus for so long that when clean food is offered we can't taste it.

This isn't about politics. I'm a fifty-five year old white man who has been a conservative all my life. I've been a right wing Republican activist. I'm a big fan of the military. If Obama can reach out to me he can reach out to anyone. He can win in November.

What I'm saying here will lose me friends. For instance the Bush family gave one of my recent military-related books a ringing endorsement. After Laura Bush read an excerpt out on Meet The Press sales skyrocketed. I probably won't get too many more of those sorts of endorsements. But the chips are down and the presidential choices this year are too important not to not fight for.

As I see it our choice is between a good and heroic old man whose time has past and who will perpetuate failed policy, a jaded woman of the establishment, who will do anything to perpetuate her family's dynastic "claim" to power, and a brilliant, openhearted new founding father the likes of which America has not seen.

Obama comes to us from outside the system that has produced our present multiple crises of wars of choice and a failing economy. He does what all truly great leaders do: he speaks to the soul in plain self-revealing words of hope.

If we squander this undeserved reprieve and choose business-as-usual, if we don't elevate ourselves out of our self-made mire, we will step into a future of steep and steady decline and war without end. It won't matter if you are right or left. It won't matter if the Republicans or the Democratic Party wins. We will all lose.

I think there is reason to hope. There are decent people out there who have refused to go along with the smear-by-association campaign. Mike Huckabee defended Obama. McCain said we can't blame Obama for his minister's words. Not everyone on the right is stooping as low as the Clintons and the right-wing media scavengers.

Obama is worth fighting for. He is worth losing old friends for. History has thrown America an unlikely lifeline. Do we have the decency, the sense, the last glimmer of sanity needed to open our hearts to change?


Frank Schaeffer is a writer and author of "CRAZY FOR GOD--How I Grew Up As One Of The Elect, Helped Found The Religious Right, And Lived To Take All (Or Almost All) Of It Back."

risk of palin becoming president is 1:6 or 1:7

mentioned in a column in today's NY Times, Bob Rice of Tangent Capital pointed out that the actuarial risk, based on mortality tables, of Palin becoming president if the Republican ticket wins the election is about 1 in 6 or 7.

roger cohen, the columnist, points out that's the same odds that your birthday will fall on a wednesday.

are we ready for that?

poem: Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches?

please enjoy this amazing poem by mary oliver. click the title of this post to see the picture and hear the music that accompany these words on panhala.com.


Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches?

Have you ever tried to enter the long black branches
of other lives --
tried to imagine what the crisp fringes, full of honey,
hanging
from the branches of the young locust trees, in early morning,
feel like?

Do you think this world was only an entertainment for you?

Never to enter the sea and notice how the water divides
with perfect courtesy, to let you in!
Never to lie down on the grass, as though you were the grass!
Never to leap to the air as you open your wings over
the dark acorn of your heart!

No wonder we hear, in your mournful voice, the complaint
that something is missing from your life!


Who can open the door who does not reach for the latch?
Who can travel the miles who does not put one foot
in front of the other, all attentive to what presents itself
continually?
Who will behold the inner chamber who has not observed
with admiration, even with rapture, the outer stone?


Well, there is time left --
fields everywhere invite you into them.

And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away
from wherever you are, to look for your soul?

Quickly, then, get up, put on your coat, leave your desk!


To put one's foot into the door of the grass, which is
the mystery, which is death as well as life, and
not be afraid!

To set one's foot in the door of death, and be overcome
with amazement!

To sit down in front of the weeds, and imagine
god the ten-fingered, sailing out of his house of straw,
nodding this way and that way, to the flowers of the
present hour,
to the song falling out of the mockingbird's pink mouth,
to the tippets of the honeysuckle, that have opened

in the night

To sit down, like a weed among weeds, and rustle in the wind!


Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?

While the soul, after all, is only a window,

and the opening of the window no more difficult
than the wakening from a little sleep.


Only last week I went out among the thorns and said
to the wild roses:
deny me not,
but suffer my devotion.
Then, all afternoon, I sat among them. Maybe

I even heard a curl or tow of music, damp and rouge red,
hurrying from their stubby buds, from their delicate watery bodies.

For how long will you continue to listen to those dark shouters,
caution and prudence?
Fall in! Fall in!


A woman standing in the weeds.
A small boat flounders in the deep waves, and what's coming next
is coming with its own heave and grace.



Meanwhile, once in a while, I have chanced, among the quick things,
upon the immutable.
What more could one ask?

And I would touch the faces of the daises,
and I would bow down
to think about it.

That was then, which hasn't ended yet.

Now the sun begins to swing down. Under the peach-light,
I cross the fields and the dunes, I follow the ocean's edge.

I climb, I backtrack.
I float.
I ramble my way home.

~ Mary Oliver ~


(West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems)