Bus 9 To Paradise

a tribute to beauty, truth, love, and following your bliss…

Month: September, 2011

Quick Quotes & Lyrical Interludes

“I should not make any promises right now, But I know if you Pray
Somewhere in this world – Something good will happen.” – Hafiz

Divine Intelligence speaks in the silence of the heart. Listening is the beginning of prayer. ~Mother Teresa

Prayer is communication with the Divine. It can be whispered or chanted or written or expressed in the work you do. However it is expressed, it is never in vain. ~Donna Wilk Cardillo

Keep on shining, Keep on smiling. Don’t lose faith and don’t lose heart.
When you’re crying, Just keep trying to remind yourself
You’re a shining star, Yes you are.” – (Dan Tyler) LeAnn Rimes

Written In The Stars

I am here to tell you we can never meet again
Simple really, isn’t it, a word or two and then
A lifetime of not knowing where or how or why or when
You think of me or speak of me or wonder what befell
The someone you once loved so long ago so well

Never wonder what I feel as living shuffles by
You don’t have to ask me and I need not reply
Every moment of my life from now until I die
I will think or dream of you and fail to understand
How a perfect love can be confound and out of hand

Is it written in the stars
Are we paying for some crime
Is that all that we are good for
Just a stretch of mortal time
Is this God’s experiment
In which we have no say
In which we’re given paradise
But only for a day

Nothing can be altered, or there is nothing to decide
No escape, no change of heart, no anyplace to hide

You are all I’ll ever want, but this I am denied
Sometimes in my darkest thoughts, I wish I’d never learn
What it is to be in love and have that love returned

Is it written in the stars
Are we paying for some crime
Is that all that we are good for
Just a stretch of mortal time
Is this God’s experiment
In which we have no say
In which we’re given paradise
But only for a day

Is it written in the stars
Are we paying for some crime
Is that all that we are good for
Just a stretch of mortal time
Is this God’s experiment
In which we have no say
In which we’re given paradise
But only for a day

(Elton John/Tim Rice)

In My Mind

Forms of Politeness

1

Taking advantage of the relationships and interaction, which actually exist between what happens

to her and her desire, she creates some metaphors both obvious and opaque, as screens of rays crisscrossing

the landscape in which herself and what she expected from you in the way of support coincide,

so that I and you resemble each other, now. The way they light the land like infrared without a trace

on film, really, part of your image was linked so closely to my desire, it remained inside my body.

It never reached the emotions, which tend to damage the body, but which memory requires.

Thus a formal device was discovered for detailing information that was intimate and largely unacceptable

to what I thought I required from you, regarding beauty in idea and form. She expected distress

to automatically bring about this beauty, like a woman’s theft of fire rope from your house,

but not her hanging in the orchard by the house. She was a stranger to you.

She was never in your consciousness. Hence she was never forgotten.

She is in you the way direct experience generates consciousness, adding the energy of its materialization.

To live another person’s biography is not the same as to live his or her life.

She constructs a story line or cluster of anecdotal details, like clothes around the body,

instruments of both defense and expansion, which give meaning to fluctuations, such as in pleasures

occurring between herself and you. Her sunglasses swathed in feathers express

the contingency of a light and a space, so that the anecdote of a hanging could be utilized

as colorist or combinatory data, instead of her instinct for the imaginary in which what she imagines

represents what happens, whether or not it misrepresents it.

Sometimes it happens during a routine she represents by evenness of light on the land

or when things usually mean nothing, like harmony in light, what happens and something to mean

join accidentally. The thing isn’t what it is, but it is like what it is.

Like a fake, it doesn’t mean anything, although there is something to mean,

so that her solitude is the guise of unending repetition of a hanging or her relationship with you,

in which all that is to be included will find a place. This is empathy or sharing her intuition with her.

You look into someone’s eyes as if you were seeing through the face.

2

Because it’s not possible to absorb more than one insight at a time,

there seems to be a contradiction between the visual or space, and the context or meaning.

She felt deep uneasiness with the image of this sunset of unnatural energy, its sinister expression

of an order of impossible beauty we thought we lost, accounting for the intensity of yellow light on the hill,

which is not a thing, and it is not a metaphor, the way your life is not a metaphor to her, or

the way intense light on the hill is a recollection en plein air, in the sense that it happened.

Soon the background turns gray and the hill regains its natural color, but there are three dimensions of gray.

This is a metaphor for the fact that the hanged woman actually made contact with you, although you never knew her.

There is a link with her appearance, as with sex, or the way a name is attached to something

after naming it, by the occurrence of its name, in this case linking with the appearances

or biographies of a whole parade of lovers, so what she thinks of as human help from him

is no longer dependent on changing her desire for him in the present, but is a substitute for it.

The landscape is empty and it is immanent. The context of the woman in its reality

may differ from the context in which the viewer thinks about her, the element of transparency.

The way the viewer thinks about her is the way low clouds extend a landscape. The viewer

is acting on the landscape in consideration that the context of the viewer distinct from the context

of general human help could be a metaphor for itself.

There were yellow-leaved trees behind a screen of green ones at the edge of the orchard.

They are not a border between organization and decay of autumn trees, which are organized.

The yellow leaves around your feet have an impossible beauty that was achieved and then lost.

A way you can define a woman is to remember everything the woman is not.

If you move your head fast enough, you can all of a sudden discern the whole structure

of the surface of each leaf, and it links in your stomach, as with sex.

If you remember not desiring her fast enough, you can all of a sudden discern her whole body.

You can feel in your stomach the way any moment that happened and in which you think about her goes

a long way toward convincing you of the autonomy and pre-existence of her form.

3

Her concentration became a direct experience of his life, an erotic concentration.

Her biography of her persistently locates the point of impact of one’s own system of representations,

insofar as vision itself is a representative operating on what she sees,

and for which a particular light can represent an initial condition. Even the slightest movement

of a hand or a finger is controlled and emphasized as by a spotlight of this sensitiveness,

the way repetition is a cessation of the potential for conscious experience, or death,

visiting the same places during the same seasons, at almost the same hour,

so that landscape could be a simple repetition, which thrives on reproduction,

in order to resolve what is happening into its own combination or name of words in the form of its time,

and in order to defer the story.

In a way, her memory is a theory about how the hanged woman looked to her in the orchard,

which she has to respect, in the sense that the landscape’s immanence is an organically developing

failure of its language to speak its content. The connection between word and idea corresponding

to the landscape is retained, but the connection between the word and the landscape is lost,

so the shadow of a hill stays dark during lightning. How she sees the lightning

is a time lapse into the planar dimension, a hierarchy of grammar or deference

by way of the word belonging to her such as lady suicide or woman suicide,

because the woman doesn’t die in her own absence or in effigy, so that

no existing philosophy and no philosopher will know soon, enough points with enough speed

to handle the richness of her reconstruction of her or him for long. He starts to see

patterns in the words and the patterns are pretty to him and distract him.

It is well known that lightning is attracted to body heat, a person on horseback

or a large saguaro, the way a racket of birds in the morning is a kind of empathy for two people.

If we retain the belief that her image of him or her, let’s say him, is a pre-requisite for

gaining consciousness of the unknown person, we suppose there is no direct channel of communication

to the unknown person, with the result that facts about him or her must exit into the world,

before a life can be perceived between the light and dark of function or the object, and desire or the image.

At any time one can turn into its opposite, like desire or a screen, and the object

or her story and him, who does not so much convey an image as a background

to the biography. So, he says, she must emphasize references and conditions of her own life

over its memories, or what she sees of the landscape by the manner of its illumination,

unless she says it is illuminated within the arms of a great cottonwood, yellow or green,

a faith of imaginary or real connotation repeating itself from him, like alternating current

or radioactive dirt being turned up that registers on her without marking her.

4

Her persistent observation, even after the frost, is of each leaf coinciding with its luminousness,

because of its structure as a lighted space and which shows brightness in idea and form,

so you have to maintain your own consciousness in order not to be unconscious with me.

Even if we can uniquely bridge the gap between the fact of a frost and the value

of luminousness, and even though these intrinsic properties of the plant may not be what it feels.

What it feels may be a space with pillars, so with light the space extends, as in what you believe

to live with. A belief is a word-like object. You can focus your attention on it down to a point,

like desire or memory of a strong feeling. You have a certain amount of control over your feeling

about general human help by changing what you believe, which embodies the memories

your speech is empowered to represent, she says.

Space is material, but seems to open up a beyond, which is thought to defy material in its failure

to speak its content. It still cues this content by links or desires, as to a form of physical appearance.

To the extent that she can reconstruct a context or pornography in her body suitable for a hanged woman,

a contingency is beaten back, critically. In the sense that events happening at the same time are

meaningful, but not connected, there are events which mean nothing, though there is something to mean.

This is an easy way to expect with desire from moment to moment, while the woman was hanging herself,

as if consistency and the quest for certainty were not emotional,

as when a person begins telling a story, leaves move.

He believed that when a life is valuable, there is further value when it is responded to

as valuable, but this could occur through evaluative judgement, without his attendant emotion.

The product is in one case consistent manners, in the other, beautiful manners.

(By Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge)

When Ecstasy is Inconvenient


Feign a great calm;
all gay transport soon ends.
Chant: who knows—
flight’s end or flight’s beginning
for the resting gull?

Heart, be still.
Say there is money but it rusted;
say the time of moon is not right for escape.
It’s the color in the lower sky
too broadly suffused,
or the wind in my tie.

Know amazedly how
often one takes his madness
into his own hands
and keeps it.

(Lorine Niedecker)

Choices, choices, everywhere…

With the desire to lead a meaningful AND balanced life, I am finding it helpful to focus on two questions as they relate to each situation, experience, relationship, and decision I encounter.

1. Do I LOVE this?

2. Is this sustainable?

If the answer to one is no, stop right there and throw it out. Get rid of all that you do not love in your life. This solves most “problems” at their fundamental level. Being, having, or doing anything that you do not 110% love is a waste of time. And time is our only finite resource (when considering life on this earth, as human beings).

What if you absolutely cannot get rid of it? Change it into something you do love. That is the power of love; it has the power to transform.

How do you do this? Find something to love in that which you don’t love. (This is also helpful if you have no control over changing whatever it is you don’t love (like other people’s behaviors or actions that directly impact you).) Even if it’s one little thing, you can always find the silver lining, the beauty, the genius in anything. It just takes practice and paying attention. It is through finding the thing of beauty, the one thing you CAN truly love in the relationship, situation, or experience, and focusing all your attention and energy on this one thing, that you can bring about transformation. Love is transformative, so in order for us, as human beings to transform anything, we must BE loving.

So, what if you already know you do love this?

The next question to ask is: is it sustainable? Raam Dev, one of my “new-to-me”, favorite writers, answers the question, what is sustainable?, beautifully and has a simple way to help anyone consider if an action or decision or purchase is truly sustainable. He suggests, “If I replicated my choice across all seven billion people on the planet and then amplified those seven billion choices by several generations, would I be left with something sustainable or something that contributed to an unsustainable future?” For expansion on this thought, see the entire post here.

Well then, what about if you love this choice, this relationship, this experience, this thing, or this situation, but it is fundamentally NOT sustainable? Then ask yourself this: Is there a way to make it more sustainable? Is there a way to TRANSFORM this unsustainable “thing” into something sustainable without losing the aspects of it which I love most?

Again, start with what you love, for love transforms.

We can apply these question to everything we encounter, if we desire to make choices that more clearly reflect who we are. Because, after all, we are all LOVE, and love is all there is.

Try it. Let me know what you discover.

And remember, whatever choice you make:

“You might worry that you’re making the wrong choices — you’re not. There are no wrong choices, there’s only the fear of making the wrong choices.” - Leo Babauta (more here.)

Full Moon Realizations

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If You Forget Me

I want you to know
one thing.

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.

-Pablo Neruda

poems and pictures are the soul’s way of communicating. Snapshots of the mystery: not fully exposed, but hinted at, glimpsed in the spaces between the mind’s chatter and the heart’s subtle insistence. Somehow capturing the space between emotion and logic, an image, a phrase, a poem, or a synchronicity give us a flash of enlightened understanding of both the heights and depths of our potential. Even if we cannot maintain it in perpetuity, in that one moment’s experience, everything becomes clear, and to grasp these moments of clarity while deeply mired in the grand mess of living, is magical, pure bliss.

And Rob Brezsny’s horoscopes always do the same for me,

So, mine for the week (Sun/Moon/Rising):

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): The Jerusalem Syndrome is a temporary
psychological phenomenon that on rare occasions overtakes travelers
who visit Jerusalem. Under the influence of ancient holy sites, these
people may become obsessed with religious themes or experience
delusions that they are characters from stories in the Bible or Koran. I
don’t expect you to fall under the sway of such an outbreak, Aquarius,
but I do suspect that you will soon have some intense spiritual stirrings.
To ensure that they will enlighten you, not dishevel you, stay well-
grounded. Have regular meals, please. Sleep well and exercise now and
then.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): “Sentiment without action is the ruin of the
soul,” said environmentalist Edward Abbey. The “ruin” doesn’t happen all
of a sudden, because of a single small failure to translate sincere
intentions into good works. Rather, it’s the result of long-running laziness
or passivity — a consistent inability to do what one’s passions demand. If
there is even a shred of this tendency in your make-up, Libra, now is an
urgent time to shed it. According to my astrological analysis, you simply
must carry out your soul’s mandates.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): A veterinarian in Nashville was asked to do
something he had never done: diagnose and treat a wounded whooping
crane. Experts devoted to safeguarding the endangered species advised
him to wear a billowy white suit. That way the wild bird would be more
likely to accept his attention. “You learn very quickly how to communicate
dressed as a marshmallow,” the vet said after completing his work. Be
prepared for a metaphorically similar encounter, Leo. You, too, may face a
prospect that resembles interspecies conversation. I hope you’ll be as
adaptable as the vet.

For yours, see more at: Free Will Astrology

Bittersweet

For Me It Isn’t Over

You cannot put a Fire out –
A Thing that can ignite
Can go, itself, without a Fan –
Upon the slowest Night –

You cannot fold a Flood –
And put it in a Drawer –
Because the Winds would find it out –
And tell your Cedar Floor –

-Emily Dickinson

Bliss: Follow it.

“If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are—if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.” – Joseph Campbell

 

Relationships 101: why don’t they teach this stuff in school?

More and more drawn these days to finding new ways to talk about, to re-frame, and to help heal and celebrate committed relationships. What gives more meaning to our lives than our closest relationships? Do you know anyone whose life is not primarily impacted by their significant love relationships? This one element, more than finances, more than career, more than health even, more than any single other thing, shapes and defines who we become, the choices we make, and how we live our lives. We can live without many things, but one thing we cannot live without is human touch.

Why don’t they teach the important stuff in school?

Out in search of it on my own, here is what I have found:

I love thisand thisand thisand thisand this…and this:

what the world needs now

Oh Darling

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.
-by W.H. Auden

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