The Art of Living...Abstraction

What's in an egg?
A song is there, in chemical notation,
invisibly packed into the genes:
Also detailed instructions for nest building,
a menu or two perhaps,
and a map of the stars...
All in the one cell that multiplies into many,
all the disposal
of the little feathered passenger,
so once hatched and fledged,
It will have more than a wishbone
To launch it's life...

The Art of Living...

Enigmas, Paradoxes
Seemingly unresolveable:
Yet somehow, if one relaxes one's heart
and opens one's mind,
and wonders the right wonders,
they become resolvable.
Take Saint George and his dragon.
If earth is a good world, one asks oneself,
Why the dragon?
Because he was needed.
Can you, in fact, imagine
any way George could have made it to sainthood
without him?

According to the Golden Legend, the narrative episode of Saint George and the Dragon took place somewhere he called "Silene", in Libya; the Golden Legend is the first to place this story in Libya as a sufficiently exotic locale, where a dragon might be found. In the tenth-century Georgian narrative, the place is the fictional city of Lasia. 

The Art of Living...The Self

For one begins as a fertile egg.
The seed soul, stirring, seeking.
Becoming a pupil in the Soul School of Life.
Growing in consciousness, in awareness,
using the tools of finitude.
The self in space and time, the while developing spirituality of life.
Through life, through death,
which evolved only later in evolution because it had
survival value for the multicelled organism...
Death that we cannot live without!?

Don't forget to sense beauty, express gratitude and experience forgiveness...SEE

Lesson From The Sane Asylum...Transcendence

Have you ever wondered?
Why each year you live seems faster than the year before?
There's a law at work here.
Called, Transcendence.
Influences time and space and consciousness of self,
for each year lived has to be a smaller portion of ones experience to date.
To the year old baby an hour is a lifetime.
To the ten year old a tenth as much.
To the centenarian but one percent of his experience.
While people he knows appear, bloom and die.
Like flowers in a garden.

Stopped To Ponder

"For the seeker, this sunrise is a metaphor, to have patience with each stage before it evolves into the next.  The sun rose in its own time.  It may be slow, but it always happens."
~Kenny Werner from "Effortless Mastery"

Observations From The Far Side Of The Glass...

A 2013 IDC report predicts that by 2017, there will be 3.5 billion people connected to the Internet, close to two-thirds of whom will use mobile devices. And those gadgets will produce around 40 trillion gigabytes of data, providing a huge opportunity to ask and answer a lot of pressing questions about how people live. OZY

Front Porch Psychology

The “primary consciousness,” the basic mind which knows reality rather than ideas about it, does not know the future. It lives completely in the present, and perceives nothing more than what is at this moment. The ingenious brain, however, looks at that part of present experience called memory, and by studying it is able to make predictions. These predictions are, relatively, so accurate and reliable (e.g., “everyone will die”) that the future assumes a high degree of reality — so high that the present loses its value...Watts.

Stopped to Ponder

Most people go through life believing that they are this story, believing that they are the thoughts they are thinking,
instead of the essence that is experiencing those thoughts

A funny thing happened on the way to therapy...

Imagine this scenario: you have been living your entire life shackled to an imaginary story of who you are. Your story tells you that you're this way and that way, with a fixed personality. And you believe so strongly that this story defines you, but in truth it has nothing whatsoever to do with reality -- it's simply a fanciful construct of the mind.

... for most of us this isn't just a wacky scenario, it's our everyday reality! And because of our constricted inner stories, we live lives of perpetual suffering.

Beach Chair Therapy

When I hear someone say, "stop living in the past."
I think to myself...but the music was so much better then.

From The Study...a conversation on possibility, Alfred Kazin

The other day … I suddenly realized, with a shudder almost … how easy it is to fall into the other-imposed trap of trying endlessly to correct and reform oneself, in accordance with this and that, one’s idea of the right person to be, when all the time, one is not merely “stuck” with oneself, as one is rightly enough, but one suffers from constrictedness, from reaction, from the million-and-one reasons, so boringly personified around one in one’s contemporaries and half-friends and stupid, genteel colleagues, who are always telling us over again that man is bad and sinful! Alfred Kazin,

The Art of Living

Violinists practicing scales and dancers repeating the same movements over decades are not simply warming up or mechanically training their muscles. They are learning how to attend unswervingly, moment by moment, to themselves and their art; learning to come into steady presence, free from the distractions of interest or boredom.

The Art of Living...

"Daughters are the only ones who can control their father."

The Art Of Living

“We dance for laughter, we dance for tears, we dance for madness, we dance for fears, we dance for hopes, we dance for screams, we are the dancers, we create the dreams.”― Albert Einstein