WHAT HAPPENED?

  Somehow it came so quietly, unobtrusively, a plague in a fog of our own making.   I cannot help but wonder what happened to Americans?   I had a grandmother who lived through the Great Depression and the experiences she learned were ever with her; and as she could, she passed them on to my sister and I.  I can remember breakfast gravy being saved until supper that night -- this during a time when she and my grandfather had a small neighborhood grocery store in which they were doing quite well.  (she may only have finished the 8th grade but she was a smart woman and kept (so as I know, to the day of her passing) a spiral bound notebook on which she kept notes of even the  spending of a quarter and what it went for -- I use that as well, as my memory will allow anymore).  I remember her legacy and so do her great-grandchildren -- obviously they did not get as fresh an approach to the windows of her daily past life as I did; but they got enough to be the good human beings that they are.  When I am down (to what feels like) my last breath, I find I still move, still lay a plan for my dried up life (that is my assessment only and I find it does have its upswings as well as ebbing energies). 

  Nevertheless we have goals, hopes, dreams, ideas and when the silent finality sets in that we passed that last marker on our Journey -- the apparent last chance to change lanes and take off on an un-named highway -- we KNOW.   I scramble to make something of each day.  The past many months have been spent grieving for those whose passing have taken parts of me and I feel this gaping hole where ancient winds blow in a convulsive, divisive tearing that holds me bound to the grief I cannot seem to free myself from.  Yet, beneath the "woe is me" attitude, I see how very fortunate I have been; and, I recognize that Grief has its own bearing, apart and yet engulfing our whole existence.  When you try to have a thought about this new reality of change -- it just bounces back -- like a ball you are throwing at the side of a barn...it hits the building and bounces right off, never plunging through.  That is like my thoughts and my mind is the barn.  I think I have accepted the loss and then, from some no place, I see it bouncing back, never getting through, settling in and finding acceptance in my being.  The pain of grief on top of other health ills, the common bonds of our struggling global communities, where do I see that I can make a move, pass that obstacle that has been throwing me off for so long that I've lost my way altogether?

  Yet, it is in the lostness that I have found myself.  Late, yes.  (and being the idealistic perfectionist, I tend to come down hard on myself for not seeing sooner when there was still time; but that is LIFE.  To continue to stand in your own way is foolish and only prolongs the destiny that you are anxious to be done with.)    Once in awhile I can see back through my life scope and find myself smiling as I weigh this thing or another and see how wise the way of NO Judgment lies.  Actually, I think that Life would be so much easier for us all IF we didn't judge every passage with the calamity of high danger and certain disaster.  Emptying myself of all I have tended to cling to in this life is where I made my leap to freedom.  Freedom of the "stuff and gadgetry" of this life.  I'm not saying I don't enjoy my tv or computer or that I don't despair now and then for the car I no longer have, unable to go to the places that meant so much to me, that infuse my Spirit with even strength and calm resolve.   So, I think if I can BE  that, then perhaps I can bring some comfort and harmony to others I find my life's passing through.

  I can only BE who I am.  It takes a long time -- at least for me, and that's all I can speak about -- to come to the altar of ACCEPTANCE.   More than anything, we shun acceptance when it converges menacingly upon our way.   The only real menace is that it is not conferring upon us whatever or whomever it is that we think we want at any given time.  However, I have learned through many lone nights and years of tears, that letting go is the WAY we all seek.   Right now, the world has become much much smaller.  We have such technology that allows us to know almost instantly some awful occurrence in a far flung  tribal group in a Middle Eastern country.  We are beginning at last to see how we are all tied to one another.  Too long has been the way of "me and mine, all the time."    The world cannot work like that.  It is lopsided.  How can one nation live way beyond its means when in another, there is hunger, unbelievable sickness and not enough doctors or caregivers; where people swept to some huddlement alongside ancient sands, mountains of caves, seas that are dead, where the young women are forced to wed not love, but tradition.

  To gather your perspective and wrap your sight in the light of the world's spinning delays, confinement of one's dreams, hopes and ideals, is to become real.  If you are passing through this Earth, then at least become aware of where you are, of who you are, and with whom you serve in the reel of so little time after all.  I heard a call and said, "it will keep, I'll do this other and then..."   But it didn't wait -- it couldn't wait on you.  LIFE cannot wait until you've got all your living done, experienced all your fun, played with all your stuff.  That is not the role of my all.   Yet, I was petulant and spent my youth on foreign contentments, all hollow, all exempting me until I was ready to take up my Journey as my Soul was pierced by the call.  I tried to balance myself on a tight rope.  Gathering a bit from this side, then the other, always tilting...almost to my conclusion.   We never think we are going to pass from this life.  You can't LIVE and be thinking of that so you are always planning and weighing the sum of who you are and what you've got and where you want to go and how can you get there.  I have learned how you don't get there.  So, I must live with the sum of my days so wasted, so asleep was I. 

  I have learned to have compassion for myself and my physical body -- and this is an imperative.   You must know your Self if you are to have any magnum of life left.   Only in near death did I come to myself; and, at times I wander in my mind, pleading for a bounce of wealth in my health, to partake in some dream or notion I might find.  Then, too, it is, I think, always better to leave with your list of "Things to Do" unfinished.  Perhaps, this is the impulse to come back, if we do that.   I am still coming to know this vessel of mine, this bar of time to enjoy a glass of wine; and, when I leave I want to be doing something.  Not lying in this bed; but out among the others.  Truly whose life would you trade yours for?   We never see the inside of all that glitters, the cost of such a game.

  I have my beloved family and knowing I've been so fortunate to have them, gives me a surge of Hope and Happiness to last for however long I may yet BE.   Learning finally, to my own self, be  true.  It is not the easy way, but it is not the worst either.  As long as we can still learn (and there is a way for all to learn, however differently we make it), we are OK.  I have learned that I am more than I thought I was.  I have learned to listen to my Dreams, for they carry my future as well as my past.   YOU are more than you think you are.  Whatever it is that you yearn to do, to be, to see...put all into motion that will bring this to pass.  Keep your awareness always on the rising.   You may fall, loose it all, even worse.   Rise and begin again.   The experience of Joy is not that well hidden from our daily toils.

~rumorsofme~

   A few have made themselves immortal because they broke with the standards of some age, waded into deep waters without a realization that they had no way of getting out.  While we  revel today in their adventurous genius, we nevertheless cast our own shadow in the way of participating in this, truly, most basic of human needs -- the need to love and be loved, to give help when asked and to have the courage and humility to accept assistance when our own way becomes beset with obstacles that stretch our own vigorously powerful (yet still untapped) Spirit to seek what we believe can only be "out there somewhere."     But, have you not had the mind-zapping conversion of an epiphany?    To some sense and degree we all have -- whether or not we accept that experience is up to us and our MIND.   YOU have a MIND, YOU ARE NOT YOUR MIND.    The controls for all your needs rests within you.  WE KNOW, yet are so  fearful of such encounters because we think it isn't the norm and what would happen if  such and such was known by him or her?   (that our brain was indeed more powerful than any of us know and can advance our way in solutions not yet known.   What I'm after is the uselessness of such  mindscaping.  You may fall off a cliff or two, be ridden with some  massive physical malady, have everything you've worked a lifetime for be pulled out from under you; but the despair and melancholia that usually arrives with demonic glistenings,  wide and wild swings of the pendulum that mankind has ordained to be the one to be in sync with --  you will forgo your own experienced Epiphany to remain as everyone else is or is trying to be, totally locking yourself in a room with no windows or doors, and relinquishing your circumstances or situations that are always changing, whether that be for your positive and someone else's negative(or vice versa), and just forfeit the rest of your sojourn upon this good Earth. 

We human beings have a  LIFE SPAN and thanks to the wonder of scientific research many, many of the once pronounced words of "smallpox" or "polio" -- and worse,  have been wiped out; however, that has left only pitfalls to some heretofore unknown diseases that are yet active in a petri dish somewhere.  And then, just as you think you've got it all figured out,  right down and through your life expectancy, a shoe falls from the sky and knocks you to the ground, leaving you to puzzle over what happened, why didn't you foresee this, how could you be so stupid to think nothing would ever challenge your peaceful existence again.  And on and on we go.  So overwhelmed with self-doubt, self-flagellation, excuse makings or fault-findings reveries, that we are losing ground by the second, using up our stored knowledge and ability to continue to learn... that the ground  is rushing at us and we missed it.   And, I don't mean "missed it" in the sense of only not paying attention to the sound of hoofs on the ground, but the wonderful bliss of loving family interactions, the opportunity for a celebration (or learning to "make up" a reason to celebrate -- Celebrate the reality that today is Tuesday, buy or make a cake (whatever) and push and pull every  bit of happiness that comes with your humanity).  

I know I don't speak for everyone on the planet and that I am more than a little sensitized to the woes of humankind...and to the stupidity that allows such goings on as genocide (in our lifetime!!), which we still only see the Holocaust and the brutal murder of millions of innocent human beings as the only example of that --- don't hear much about Darfur; and, now we have turned a corner and have been met with our worst nightmares.  LIFE is encumbered with a series of checkpoints.  The highs of good fortune, such as a pay raise, a new birth in the family, a diagnosis that says we are ok after all.  Then there are those passages which test every fiber of our being, every nuance is fraught with dishonesty, greed, needs that we cannot fill, hopes on hold or lost altogether.  Now, around that corner, we see a mob.  It is a matter of preserving our life and the lives of those we hold most dear and near.  But.  Why are they a mob -- ok, they look like a mob.  They have menace tattooed on every inch of skin, and the look in their eye is you.  Now is the time that our primal survival instincts prevail.  No thought. Period. Just judgment.  We turn and look behind us where another mob (gathering of people with malicious intentions) is arming themselves with rocks, broken glass, hammers, guns.   How in the hell did we get from where we were to this?

Mankind always hits this "check point" because we as individuals are not alive on this planet to see or experience the good we do living beyond us.  Oh, the evil men do, is all too easily on the scene.  Children from the time they are born are raised to hate.  Not hating anything for anything rational (you can hate that all the cereal is gone and you have no breakfast --- that is understandable and will dissipate as soon as your appetite is fed).  These scenes of small children being taught to hate and do harm to another for no reason they know except that they were taught this behavior.   The prison systems are overflowing with them.  (that is another story).  

Actually, that is just about what humankind is:  a Story.  A story of good vs bad, hope vs despair, justice over injustice, the death of Hunger and poor Education. (everyone can learn. we just don't know how to teach them with our antiquated teaching methods.  all people have "learning pathways" and as we have come to this realization, the more benefit children have of learning in a way that they can understand and the world will benefit from.  Actually the world has already benefited from the efforts of children who were previously told by their teachers that they were "hopeless" -- and they believed that, their parents, most dismally of all, believed that.  All these check points take time.  When you begin to think of the Earth's formation being what it is today, and how long that it took, what massive upheavals took place -- and may very well again, you begin to have some experience with Truth.   The "sky is falling" -- but guess what, it has many times already fallen.  Yet, we are still here bungling along pathways that unfortunately are not going to bring about the listless stream of days and nights which now find us lost in trenches of thoughts that we see no way out of; people are resorting to means of violence and mayhem when that won't help either. 

Because we are here for only a span of years and we don't pay attention to the knowledge that History  yields to us, we keep going around the same corner every time.  We are still meeting that same mob (older maybe, but younger too and for the same reasons as they have always had--their share of the fine homes, electronic gadgetry of a quivering sale and fail, more and more "bling", faster cars, higher end fashion being fetched on lower end earnings.  They see they don't have a chance at a formal education that is more likely to infuse their livelihood with the possibility of purchasing such things; OR, the magnificent order of the Credit Card, the magical, mystical little card opening all previously shut doors, barriers to the better side of the tracks and an endless stream of "stuff."   I mean, now it doesn't even last as long as the older models did; and they are built NOT to.  Therefore, just when you think you're off the addiction to credit, something breaks down, just gets too old to function any more and we are frozen into a way of life we cannot sustain, could never sustain, but were easily talked into a dream home (a man's castle) -- who wouldn't grab such a brass ring?    That is after all, the American Dream.  People have come from all over the world, with all kinds of misconceptions about the "American way of life."    That illusion is swiftly being drained and made public fodder for the media, which still plasters their pages of sprawling compounds, where a small house saw many a descendant of that family survive well, develop the skills needed for the shifts and shoves of LIVING THE AMERICAN DREAM. 

Then, what happens when you get the AMERICAN DREAM?    I can, as I said, only speak from my perspective; however, I found it all a little of "is that all there is" (from a song sang by Peggy Lee).   After all, how many houses can you buy, how many  shoes can you wear at one time, how many golf clubs and country clubs and Penthouses can you possess and allow yourself to enjoy their existence?  You are too busy now, holding on to all these grand prizes of your makings.  Regardless of how you came to have them, at what point do you get shoved aside by the "bling" so that now the "bling" has you?  We are all glitter-eyed at the slush of stuff we want other people to admire us for.   Yet, there is a growing hollowness inside where there was expected to be a forever kind of contentment and happiness, a kind of self-admiration society of one.  In all the getting, where was the giving?  When GIVING is left out of the equation, you are soon to experience an emptiness that you know nothing can fix.  Your relationships are the the balm needed, for how ever many, or how ever few, that is where we go when we can no longer go and do or have any place to go to.   There is where you will be told the truth because there is where LOVE lives -- it connects with the LOVE inside you that you have bartered for stuff.  If you are fortunate to have the strength of family, you will survive and you will pass along to your sons and daughters the values of integrity, generosity, kindness, compassion, work, contentment and feelings of acceptance for yourself and respect of others.  It is only as we have walked through the fires of this world that we can be there to mentor those coming up now.  Knowing as we do that they will find their own balance in an unbalanced jungle.

It's taken hundreds of millions of years  for earth to evolve to its current morass; and, frankly, I don't know how this will all turn out.  I can get down and depressed over all the inadequacies we face unless and until I turn my view to the wellspring of Love, where Happiness lives and Hope reigns.  We will tumble like clothes in a dryer (I still miss that fresh air clean of open  sunshine and wind blowing through the sheets you climb into at day's end) until we get a handle (and now it is a Global handle we need, because we are all at risk, our economies, our far outdated beliefs and methods of survival are undergoing massive changes and I think, we will all be the better for it).  Yes, there will be losses, sudden set-backs and reversals of fortune, ideas being turned on their heads as we swivel in a maddeningly wild sweep and force of cataclysms leaving us as dizzy as the History of Mankind up to this point.  We are wild-eyed at some of the beliefs of ages past, of civilizations that lasted for thousands of years and seemed to rule all the known mounds of sands and meadows of flowers.  Yet, we are still here, even with such frighteningly stored chemicals and unknown mechanisms for the majority of us, that would bring every mountain down, the seas would swell and bury all life, and we would have to recognize that we set all that into motion.  As long as it is used intelligently for energy supplies and other sources that prevail for the benefit of humanity we will survive alongside these beasts of some science-fiction writer.

The thing, of course, is that we cannot depend upon anything or anyone as we must be ever vigilant to keep our own house in order.  As long as that is being kept this earth may survive until the sun burns out; and by that time there may be capabilities to have entered deep space , manned space ships may lead to the colonization of distant planets where life as we know and live it can also flourish there.  The one thing we can never do is become complacent as we now are eating the scum left from the bottom self-centered few.   To want "somebody else or something else" to deal with all these decisions... we can always have something or someone outside of us to cast the blame on.  These people we send to Washington, D.C., where there will be a lot of blood-letting to take place whenever someone stumbles.  It amazes me, election after election that someone even wants such a job.  They go as sacrificial lambs to our beliefs and goals.  This is what is being asked of us now.  What do you want?   What are you willing to give up to have it, if indeed your cares and indulgences may be the price?    We are all our bottom line.  We work, play, suffer and redefine our way everyday.  Your thinking is what makes it so.   When you can turn that corner and instead of a mob, see a smiling chorus of humankind, with open arms and willing hands to help rebuild our American Dream, then you know you have reached a summit inside of your Self that no one can touch.  You made your circumstances and situations and they are always changing, just as you are, as you mature and grow and bloom. 

That is the picture I choose to see.  One in which Love and Compassion holds the Key and everybody has one.

~rumorsofme~