Here and Now...What's Happening?

[Marianne]

Rain wishes

[1inMany]

I was just sitting here thinking. I am wondering how such big things can fade. And how much of a struggle it has been to cling to what I know, what I see, what happens. There was this one experience I had a couple of weeks ago, and when I stopped freaking out (eye roll at myself) I understood how big I am. Well, how do I put this. I understood that I am so big that I cannot possibly comprehend how big that is. And sitting with the experience, I felt how limiting being a human being really is. And now, I have trouble recalling that.

I went into town a couple of weeks ago, and happened to meet a couple who raises cattle and has a farm. The animals are happy, grass fed, no steroids, etc., etc. And we got to talking. They want me to come out and keep their books for them, do record keeping. I was very taken aback, but agreed with excitement. To tell you the truth, it scares me to think of what I agreed to. If I have this much trouble remembering and clinging to what is real without very much human interaction, what will it be like when I am back out in the world? On the one hand, I want very much to stay in my safe hidey hole. On the other hand, would it feel great to feel useful again?

I'm going with M this week to the college she likes, attending the orientation and (hopefully) getting her registered for classes. And I *have to* do a better job of getting Em some type of education than I did last semester. But...at the same time...sheesh, what a waste. What am I preparing them for, exactly? This is such a game.

I was handed a copy of the Bhagavad Gita. I'm still in the beginnings mostly, but one thing that stands out to me (paraphrasing) is when Lord Krsna tells Arjuna to lament neither for the living nor the dead. That we are immortal and we change bodies like garments.

Sometimes I know what is real and what is not. I want to know that all the time. I want to be in that center place, my very core, and not have buttons that get pushed. I want to experience the freedom of not being yanked. I guess that is what I meant when I said that I still have work to do.

Buttons to disarm, behavior to disassociate from. I am thinking, though, that maybe the way to do this is not to look specifically at these behaviors and patterns and do something with them. Maybe it really is the meditation that gets me closer to who I am, and the closer I get the farther away are these things I used to identify with. Good thing I'm going through a spell of clinging to the practice

Much Love,

[Dennis Leahy]

Posted by ulli (here)
Got that guest cabin finished. This is the side which faces the river. Bedroom double doors on the left, living- dining room sliding glass doors on the right. When I get back to Costa Rica I will start to look for suitable furniture.
If we win the lottery we will build 11 more of these as well as a pool and start a village.

Looks lovely!

That slab is a blank canvas. I want to do a pebble mosaic on it:



Dennnis

[eaglespirit]

You Are A Powerful Spirit, 1inMany Dear!

[1inMany]

Posted by eaglespirit (here)
You Are A Powerful Spirit, 1inMany Dear!

Goodness, eaglespirit. How in the world you get *that* out of my ramblings, I will never know.

Much love to you, and hugs too

[eaglespirit]

I try not to turn threads into chat rooms....but this is too important.

You Are A Powerful Spirit, 1inMany Dear!

I am reading between the lines when You write...and there I find a monumental Human that does not really belong on this planet because You are soooo immensely good it takes breath away...and so You ARE on this planet...move those mountains and take little credit as it is what You are!!!

[dan33]

ROXY MUSIC on TANGERINE DREAM and vice versa.


From 5:58

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=hlPJYXVvimQ

From 1:15

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=UCT9VpLoN84

[meeradas]

Refilling the 'news' stand @ "the job",
i got the first puke reflex of the day.

Warmongering, whereever one looks.

Disgusted. Disgusted at "our western values".
Asking myself "what the hell are these so-called "western values"?
Lies everywhere, as a rule. Bombing for peace.

I've f*cking had it; that's it, can't take more.
M/out.

[Redstar Kachina]

..........

[eaglespirit]

Posted by Buddha's Palm (here)
OK, it's 54 degrees in D.C., and I have to wear a sweatshirt to exercise outside...um, isn't it supposed to be summer?

54 DEGREES??!!!

: ) : ) : )

[transiten]

Hi!

It just started raiming and 1:st thing i see when logging in is Mariannes rainwishing post. It's a long extremely hot summer here in Sweden and this rain is soooooo welcome!

[ulli]

I can't really go into details here, but I need help.
Things are pretty tough, on all fronts.
Barbados only looks like a paradise on the surface.


Listening to the cooing of the wood doves in the trees around me,
to get anchored in the here and now.
Oh, and also to Roxy Music, thanks to Dan33.
Reminds me of happier times..

[1inMany]

Posted by ulli (here)
I can't really go into details here, but I need help.
Things are pretty tough, on all fronts.
Barbados only looks like a paradise on the surface.


Listening to the cooing of the wood doves in the trees around me,
to get anchored in the here and now.
Oh, and also to Roxy Music, thanks to Dan33.
Reminds me of happier times..

May the wind of correction gently wash over and deliver the Highest and Best to all involved.

Much Love,

[donk]

Good for you 1, I think it will be good for you...today it occured to me: I think I'm going back to school to become a couselor/therapist...I do enough from the "arm chair", might as well create a reality where it's what I "do".

MF, here's another "new" song (and artist) I like, perhaps my taste are too old for you though:

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=mVAxUMuhz98

[genevieve]

donk--

My first thought after reading your post:

Skip the school and just do what you already be.


Peace Love Joy & Harmony,
genevieve

[Dennis Leahy]

Quick appeal for healing energy sent out to my little brother, who has a diagnosis of "atypical mycobacteria abscessus", now down into the bone in his jaw. He's facing facial surgery and skin grafts, and months to possibly years on very powerful antibiotics (I cannot in good conscience recommend just colloidal silver, oil of oregano, and/or MMS when he has been told this could be deadly.) I think it was misdiagnosed several times over the past 6 months, which is why it has progressed so far.

Send healing, please.

Dennis

[donk]

Posted by genevieve (here)
donk--

My first thought after reading your post:

Skip the school and just do what you already be.


Peace Love Joy & Harmony,
genevieve

Yeah, but in order of having the luxury of providing that service to those around me, I am firmly entrenched in the middle-class-American-white-bread reality and the necessity of decent income and health insurance. I have to use the system in order to take further steps toward breaking free of it, which is my ultimate goal. I have succeeded in using my 9-5 in the finance industry in providing loads of REAL experiences, without letting the finance industry consume my soul.

However, it has increasingly grown tiresome, and I’m approaching a crossroads where I need to assume more responsibility (which would be giving more of my energy to my corporate masters than I’m comfortable with). In order to avoid that, I will USE the education system to acquire a piece of paper that will allow me to charge strangers (to provide my material), using the time I’ve accepted I needed to sacrifice/compromise…my pound of flesh to the psychopathic corporate system, in order to satisfy my spiritual and emotional needs….three birds with one stone, necessary evils and all of that…Baby steps.

[dan33]

[eaglespirit]

Well, since I'm in between things at the moments....and atrocities abound and are ongoing(including Ulli's matters in Barbados, wish the best) here there and in the east Mediterranean, of course...thought I'd post this pre-trip trip by Kevin. As is my usual unusual, we all need to stand up a bit more and shout out in our very own lives in front of us!
...

In the Asylum, all you can do is Laugh: Preparing for the Great Debate, or Some Such Thing


Decades ago, during my first sojourn to the Emerald Isle, my backpack and I ended up on the steps of a strange establishment called “The Walnut House”, on the outskirts of Limerick. I was exhausted and broke, and not especially picky about where I’d rest my head, so I ignored the odd look in the proprietor’s eyes and paid for a night.

I should have known better, especially after an especially impudent Irishman, clearly some local wag with inside knowledge, guffawed at us through the open front door,

“Is this the Nuthouse?”

It was, indeed.

The owner of the place, Peter Fitzgerald, was a complete lunatic, even by Gaelic standards. When he wasn’t talking my ear off about his latest ecstatic vision of a virgin, Pete somehow was able to hang images of the latest pope and various papist martyrs every foot or so on every wall in his humble inn of five cluttered rooms. And I’ll spare you the details of what he served me for breakfast the next day on a cracked ceramic platter bearing the curious words,

“I’ve been to Carlsbad Caverns, New Mexico”

Peter Fitzgerald is shuffling up from my memory these days as I prepare to travel to the land he hated so to engage in a public debate whose title, I kid you not, is this:

“Be it resolved that the Roman Catholic church is a force for good in the world.”

Welcome to the Nuthouse.

I trust that all my gentle readers will know on what side of that proposition I will fall, when on April 24 I stand up at the oldest debating society in England and in the world, the Cambridge Union, and wrestle with that mad suggestion, face to face with some pious wanker of an opponent who thinks he can buy insurance in heaven with enough payments to the papacy.

Well might you ask why I’ll even debating such a ridiculous notion that the biggest criminal racket on our planet is “doing good”. Wading though the muck and mire of other peoples’ fallacies like that is about as pleasant a prospect to me as sitting with Peter Fitzgerald for another hour.

But naturally, I’m going to do it. I am part Irish, after all.

Far be it from me to spill the beans of what I’ll be arguing in Cambridge in a few weeks, but to employ one of Carol’s appellations for me, being pretty impudent and “cheeky monkeyish” myself , I can’t resist shooting a few of my arrows at the advancing enemy, even if it does give away some of my position.

Bumpy Johnson was a compassionate sort of killer who had this penchant to feed the hungry kids in Harlem with free turkeys every Christmas, back in the seventies.

The corpulent mobster would personally hand out the big stuffed birds to all his poor and adoring fans from the back of a flat truck off Lexington Avenue. Of course, Bumpy was able to garner the loot for such charitable works by first wiping out all the local drug dealers – his preferred method being to burn offenders alive with kerosene – and cornering their heroin trade in that part of the Bronx. But most people didn’t want to talk about that, even when their own relatives were overdosing and dying from Bumpy’s trade.

For New York City loved Bumpy Johnson with the adulation of True Believers, and the hordes of politicians and judges and media moguls who no doubt also drank from Bumpy’s trough mourned him greatly when he finally left this mortal coil.

Was Bumpy Johnson a force for good in the world?

Or how about Pablo Escobar, the Medellin drug cartel’s “robin hood” gangster who routinely funded housing projects and free medical clinics for Colombia’s poor families? Was Pablo a good guy? Is Monsanto Corporation a positive power on earth because it constructs schools for the kids of the third world farmers whose lands they’re adulterating?

The Mafia hoods are all good catholics who give routinely to charity and make all those church-sponsored charities happen, when they’re not whacking someone or laundering their stolen wealth through the ever-compliant Vatican Bank. And the Mob really must be good guys, after all, since “Pope Francis” himself hung out with them recently in Rome and taught them how to be nicer people. Or something.

Of course, you can engage in any degree of lies and hypocrisy when you’re a “pope” and your business pulls in a few trillion bucks a year. You can even traffic and kill kids and have Presidents have tea with you.

During my first year as a clergyman in Port Alberni, I learned quickly who was the worst child sex offender in town, mostly from his victims or their families. The bastard was an elder at the nearby Anglican church. He was also the head of the local Rotary Club and led their charitable fund raising campaign every year. He was the buddy of the Mayor and a “good Christian”. Nobody wanted to hear about what he did at night.

Yes indeed, this world is such a Two Faced Janus that it’s hardly surprising when the top worldly power, the Vatican Incorporated, embodies the madness of benificient monstrosity to such an ultimate degree that all one can do, apparently, is laugh.

Now, I assume that just smirking at my Cambridge debating opponent and tossing poignant barbs of irony and ridicule at him, or her, will not cut the mustard on April 24. The university crowd will want a good show that day, and being scholars, will clearly need to dissect and discuss and minutiae their moral substance out of existence. And yet some basic, disgusted part of me feels that there is little else to be done in the face of the organized mass insanity we are confronting, than to guffaw at it all.

Another mick, the writer George Bernard Shaw, prescribed exactly such a course a century ago, when he was asked for his reaction to the outbreak of another lunacy known as the Great War to “end all wars”. (Remember?)

George calmly said to the reporter,

“Soldiers on both sides should shoot their officers and go home”.

Later, the cheeky Irishman commented that the best way to bring down the rich and mighty was to laugh at them. For it is undeniable that something is shaken loose by doing so: not just the stupid and unwarranted air of legitimacy surrounding the psychopaths who rule us and tell us what to believe, but that thing within ourselves that plays along with the great dissociation and believes that yes, might must make right, and the butchers do have a good side, after all.

The next time someone insists that “There are also good people in the church, you know”, I plan to shove a ripe melon in their face. Or something worse.

http://kevinannett.com/

[donk]

This one mighta been a mouseketeer, in the vain of a Brittany or Miley, sure it's rife with NLP and occult black magic, but i love it anyway...and can't listen to youtubes at work without it being embedded, so sharing in hopes those that don't think there's any good music being made start digging deeper and finding some gems:

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Bag1gUxuU0g

The lead singer here was a good friend of mine through high school and college, so this is a “local” band, I guess, though as close as Philly is it’s tough to get up to see her unfortunately:

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=pzX2x-tRwJs