To thine own self be true

1. Freedom and Flow–very much connected, both inner and outer. The freedom leads to flow and, in turn, flow enhances the quality and experience of freedom.

2. Gentleness, Tenderness, and Touch–three relateds that constitute The Best of Love. In those, there is a special purity and unique depth of communication–touch being an even more direct and powerful medium than words themselves.

3. The necessity of what Thoreau termed “The Wild”–what is wild in Nature (and us) ranging from the beautiful sublimeness of mountains to the special wildness of animals including us–see also Hamlet and what Joseph Campbell termed The Call, and discussed as our repressed energies within, naturally intended to be realized in our life experience.

4. After the experience of our primary imagination and pre-school experience, an Inner Child still remains (something Wordsworth elaborates on this in “Ode: Intimations on Immortality”) into adulthood. It is often seen in our love of different kinds of play. It is that Child which needs to be freed and refufilled as much as the wildness discussed in #3 above. These are two ‘depths’ related to the transcendence of limited/limiting modes of perception–the sorts of straitjackets that make people afraid to truly live and love.

5. As said earlier in other blog entries–each person, situation, and choice has limits and limitations. These can limit our perceptions of ourselves and others, as well as what we believe is possible (though there are actually infinite and neverending transitory possibilities at any given moment). The freedom we all desire and seek is, basically, limited by those limits and limitations. For that reason we need to reduce or overcome those limits and limitations through acts of will, imagination, and love. Freedom-enhancing personal choices or mind, heart, and spirit over matter. And no one else can do this for us.

Information. Affirmation. Connection. Passion (for someone or something). Things or Money.

I think, though, there is something much larger, significant, and meaningful that is desired, too. Everyone wants to be understood, loved, and appreciated (sometimes these latter two take the form of admiration) by one person or as many as possible (e.g., politicians, entertainers).

Where many folks are weak is on understanding, loving, and appreciating at least one other person. A definite limit and limitation.

In our world today, the givers often do not often receive their due or fair share by way of reciprocation. But one’s own limits (e.g., I only want this kind of love or to be loved this way) often lead to permanent or recurring disappointments and unfulfillment. Be that as it may, there is nothing more unsatisfying or even destructive than giving and giving while getting little or nothing back.

On the other side of the coin, takers are often so limited as to be incapable of understanding, loving, or appreciating anyone else. If self is the main focus, no deep or meaningful relationship can or ever will be.

Whatever people look for is always tempered by limits and limitations in self and others. Only so much is possible based on those factors.

Limits and limitations determine the amount of one’s freedom in whatever context you can imagine and in relationships. Interesting to think that a relationship, with whatever limits and limitations on both sides, can actually enhance one’s freedom in so many ways. And that the freedom that two may experience within their closeness and sharings can enhance the other person and the couple as a unit as well. Idealism or idealistic thinking perhaps, but true, nonetheless. The freedom of one within two, the freeing of the other, and the simultananeous freedom of both at the same time. Mutual pleasure, enhancement, and connection. Many levels, potentially, thereof.

Some of the aspects mentioned at first in this entry are so mundane and banal, they mostly function at a very limited level–information, things or money. Affirmation and connection can generally be achieved through family, friends, or workmates. Passion is largely an individual matter. It can be as conventional or unconventional as the individual him/herself. Passion, though, can satisfy at some deeper, missing-pieces or talent level, as in creative expression or communication of spirit or soul. In that, there is a self-actualization or transcendence worthy of following one’s own bliss.

But always, I think, one comes back to the closest relationship in one’s life–the one that leads to connected experience and consciousness–a higher, multitudinous state than mere individual consciousness with all the subjective limits and limitations that that implies. A state of joy, ecstasy, passion, inner depth, peace, harmony, and great contentment.

The only, of course, being change–such as what we see happening with blinding speed and a lack of common sense in our time. Much that is caring is no longer the “business” of governments, busy with their various entitlements and entrenched political self-interests. That and the frenzy that is advertising and the vested interests of e-media corporations.

So what’s an individual to do? Staying clear and focused is number 1 with whatever priorities and dreams one has. With all the other social distractions going on, it remains important and necessary (for survival and success) to stay true to oneself–which is, incidentally, what I have been writing about the past 12 months. It is important, certainly, though, to know oneself and to deal with whatever missing personal pieces first–to answer the most vital question (Who am I?) first. From there, one can then go on to live each day fully and satisfyingly according to whatever dreams, goals, and values. In a real sense, it is important always to stick with what one knows, believes, desires, and chooses. In that, there is real strength and resilience for dealing with whatever changes or crises may arise.

So, ironically, the only constant is also being true to one’s self and living ‘outward’ from that centre. The rest can and will stay be as irrational and crazy as it chooses or decides to be with minimal impact on the autonomous thinking and feeling individual. Individual consciousness can, then, be lived and maintained with a minimum of anxiety and distractions from what the many others are choosing or dwelling on.

In the end, one’s “ownlife”–as Orwell called it in 1984–is basic and completely necessary. It is the one life the individual is living and responsible for. No one else. That is the only constant that truly matters in the short and long run.

“Walls windows trees, waves coming through
You be in me and I’ll be in you
Together in eternity
Some kind of ecstasy got a hold on me”

–Bruce Cockburn, “Wondering Where the Lions Are”

Give all, give all for love
Our maximal gifts of self
Hold nothing back
And never question why.

………………………..

further reflections–One must dare and risk in order to authentically and fully live and love. *Acceptance and letting go are the biggest keys of all.*

(previously posted on January 21, 2013)

“The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.”

“The goal of the journey is to discover yourself as consciousness.”–Joseph Campbell, (All Campbell quotes quoted on this blog are from Reflections on the Art of Living: A Joseph Campbell Companion)

The comet lit up the sky for weeks and months, changing the lives of many. A very intense bright light from somewhere else. In many ways it was the dead greats who could have told you more about it, why and how it moved the way it did. The lovers too, who lived in and for one another. They knew something about the heat and light it gave off in cold winter sky where all was otherwise frost and frigidness.

The comet glowed and was most itself beyond language, beyond time, beyond music, beyond convention, beyond mere limits and limitations of all kinds. It was free and shone like a bright spirit ablaze, filling, nay flooding a room with its veritable light and love-giving radiance.

In the end, all one could say for sure was that it was very large and unlike anything one had ever known or been remotely close to before.

And so it blazed that July on many heads-down days while others worked and chased money and forgot their own vital incandescences. Finally, it was just a brilliant reminder of what might be possible if one broke free or chose a life in stars or dream. This comet, this great glowing spirit which simply was what it was, and nothing else.

The Thrill of the Grass

“Being distracted reduces our empathy for others and blunts responses in the brain. So it’s possible that being distracted may also reduce our own happiness.”–Sylvia Morelli, TIME July 8-15, 2013

……………

So if kids and other e-media users want to be happy (likely based on getting along with or connecting with others) and more mentally sharper/aware, then they need to become less distracted. Hmmmm, what are the major distracting devices in our society today? How do those devices make people more self-focused and self-centered with less contact with real people, nature, and their immediate surroundings? If individuals lose touch with others, nature, and their immediate surroundings, how does that affect their physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual connectedness? How does that affect the way they see and view others? How does that affect their relationships, school work, or responsibility in the working world? How does that affect their fitness for long-term relationships or commitment as well as fitness for raising a family? If they feel nothing for others, who will do the demanding hospital and health care work and child care? If they feel no empathy, how will they respond to the pain and suffering of others? Will sympathy bite the dust because the condition of empathy is diminished? How chaotic and unstandardized will education become? How much more can the world become uncaring with all this e-media distraction?

It’s all there in Morelli’s quote–what we have become or shall become. It’s a pretty dark, depressing sort of scenario thanks to how much a society has sold its young, its individuals, and consumers to the great god of e-technology. Wireless Is The Word, baby! Get with the program and dumb-dumb wa–a-y down. Forget all about nature, beauty, mind, spirit, and soul. That’s just old stuff that no one needs.

we are very fortunate to have what might be termed scarce or rare moments of being with another person, someone else. In those precious moments, connection, obviously, but moreover light, warmth, gentleness, tenderness, touch, kindness, deep empathy, trust, maximal closeness and intimacy with no holding back. Loving freely and accepting the love of another. It is a special moment when all fears, doubts, and imagined priorities cease to exist and there are only the two people together and as close as they allow themselves and one another to be. In this place, there is no reason, no “mind-forg’d manacles”, only the language and expression of love and living for and inside one another. Naturally, freely and deeply. We should, all of us, be that lucky.

Thomson, MacDonald, and Harris were the first great artists of the 20th century, but because they focused on landscapes exclusively, they lacked the range and variety of Alex Colville’s work.

Colville subtly and deeply affected my consciousness and sensibility. His work speaks eloquently and timelessly about man’s inhumanity to man (his WWII paintings and drawings), man and nature, the unnoticed juxtapositions in daily life, the implicit dangers within life, and the mysteries of people, relationships, and life.

My list of favorites is a long one:

-Dead Paratrooper near Deventer Holland(1945)

-The History of Mount Allison (1948)

-Tragic Landscape (1948)

-Children in Tree (1957)

-Dog, Boy and St. John River (1958)

-Dog, Boy and School Bus Ocean Limited (1962)

-June Noon (1963)

-Snow (1969)

-Professor of Romance Languages (1973)

-Looking Up (1975) –on a poster in my garage

-Swimming Dog and Canoe (1979)

-Main Street (1979)

-Cyclist and Crow (1981)–on a poster over my bed

-At Grand Pre (1982)

-Steve (1988)

-Chaplain (1991)

-Embarkation (1994)–I own a rare signed book about this painting

-Coyote and Alders (1995)

-On a River (1996)–on a poster over my study door

-St. Croix (1997)

-Dog in Car (1995)

-Terrier and Crow (2001)

-William (2002)

…………………………

Most of my journey this past year has been about consciousness which was a theme in Colville’s work. Colville was the first painter whose work I saw which intrigued and fascinated me. His best work, for me, always starts with a definite immediate feelings, mood, or impression followed by a sense of implied context and hidden narrative. Much of his work has moved my heart, mind, and spirit. No app could ever replace Alex Colville and his body of work.