compassion works (but it starts at home…)

We are so very laudable, to have nurtured the desire to help ease the suffering of others through oh these many eons of Heel-over-Heart.  The outcry over mass shootings, the most recent at the Sikh temple, is emblematic of how we have miraculously shepherded our collective human Heart through all the powerfully vested applications of the overseer’s Heel.

(Funny, that in our culture, to be a ‘heel’ is somewhat disparaging. But oh how mightily we stomp and pulverize!)

So, the question is, how do you reach the disturbed fringes who do these sorts of things?  Do we study and research and develop policy to help individuals deal with their stresses?  To prevent the harm grinding our children’s psyches to dirt behind closed doors?  Do we stand up for the women and children who are being beaten and trapped and demoralized every single minute of every single day on every single block in any city, town or hamlet in America?  So that their thinking does not further derange?

Or do you wander through the burroughs knocking on doors?

Jesus had the answer, but he couldn’t transfer the key to the bulk of humanity.  I’ve heard it said that Judas was his only enlightened disciple.  So if he couldn’t do it, we are really going to have to put on our thinking caps!  And burnish the heart in ways that we, even in our seeming ‘goodness,’ can’t even imagine…

He (and others of his ilk) ask us to embrace the Whole of us.  That means our demons too. Our lack of acceptance of the demons on the outside reflects the inability of individuals to relate respectfully with their own selves on the inside.

We are mostly a MESS that way! Otherwise, who would fund the multi-billion-dollar self-improvement section?

Anyway – then the ‘shadow’ is projected, and those who represent that which we don’t want to be, are the ones that society rejects and neglects.  These are the ones we love to hate. The homeless, abused, drug addicted, obese, disorderly, sexually diverse, underclass, felons, pedophiles etc.  All of our marginalized populations are those who are scapegoated — a venerable tradition from Judaic times, which symbolically cleansed of sin by casting the offending demons into a goat, who was then banished into the desert to die…

Which, as we practice it, only further pressures the afflicted – until, like a tick, we pop them, and then gasp at the blood-spray.

We don’t see the blood on our own hands.

So it is good to remember that it’s an inside job first.  Then we have something to stand on — and something of value to share. Let’s bring compassion home, knead it with tenderness and let it rise in the warmth of our own heart of hearts…

That way, when company comes, we’ll be ready!

to smile or not to smile — THAT is the question…

i am not one to sing pretty phrases simply for the sake of putting on smiles.  Though i do love smiles, and DO smile – a LOT (thanks mostly to you guys. You’re a hoot! ;-).   I just don’t think that the experience of smiling is mandatory, and it can be exquisitely inappropriate, depending on timing and intent.

but smiling in order to achieve anything at all, simply slaps a mask on the joy that we already are.  It becomes an application, like make-up.  Like a word-processor. A means to an end.

And it will not achieve in the end what was already there in the beginning — the pure and naked joy that the mask’s very presence obscures.

unless of course, the mask wants to destroy itself.  And why would it want to do that?  After going through the bother of making itself up to begin with?

you can see how it’s a pickle!

some say you can ‘fake it till you make it,’ and encourage wearing a mask through all the thicks and thins —  until sufficient joy is pumped into the four-chambered cistern to pour out naturally, at which time the mask can come off.  And this may be valid, in theory.  I’ll claim no expertise i don’t have (Well, i might – so you’ll have to watch me!).  But it niggles me that at root is still held that smiling is a means to happiness.  And i know beyond knowing that the only true means to happiness IS happiness, in its actual expansion and upwelling through a willing and open heart.

nothing else is really even true!  It’s just a sad story wearing a mask.  So i wonder why we would think it would be a gift to the world? Or ourselves?

and it seems that too, important steps are missed: the steps of identifying the obscurations and seeing how they are pinned into place. Then the arduous practice of unpinning them, over and over again, until you can do it with no hands in the dark hanging upside-down in a gunny-sack.

once you can do that, then just try to STOP smiling! And i guarantee, there will be plenty left over to share. REAL ones…

They’re QUITE contagious ;-)

mother moon

mother moon spoke to me
she told me it’s brave to do it alone
i said, i know – i love you, mother moon
thank you
and moved on through the heartbreak
swaddled in her silver, glowing
with light enough to see by
and echoes in my mind revealing
what a very large space i am
for getting lost in…

power plays

it’s about who is moving what, where.

it’s a practical thing.

and then, thousands of years of codified maneuvering form the lines of power most amenable to movement along them — and principles of power that coolly excise what works from what doesn’t. Clickety-clack. Zap!

and of course, it seems a natural thing that power amassed, wants only more of itself, like an electro-magnet dragged through the world. And like that magnet, it will hoard itself and guard itself from the sun and the moon and all that rustles and wrests between them.

and so it is that Power sees to draw a cloak about itself, and slips through its own lines in darkness — while the masses who grunt and toil in its name are kept blind, deaf and dumb to it’s way — even unto their nameless graves, as Power swaggers scything through untold aeons of mortal meat and bone.

but as with any charlatan, the innocent can see through the mirrored raimant, and expose the fraud forthwith (along with Aunt Hattie’s warts).  They see the masked appetites, and hear the howling from beaked belly.  And so their eyes are duly averted, if not gouged, and their minds yoked to the study of the master’s will – while their own will is with terror kept from wandering.  Many, even as adults, strive for the carrot ever dangled before them, and fear the lash of the master’s whip at their heels.

funny, that we call this ‘civilization!’