an updated and expanded website that includes my daily posts plus much more. I hope you like it. Don’t forget to bookmark the site and forward a link to your friends.

But, now that you are here, you can hang out for awhile—if you like digging around in old sites, that is. You may find some treasures—a Buddha someone threw away maybe—or you may just find trash.

Thank you for visiting my blog and sharing my discoveries with me.

Ed Conley

I realized that I should have looked up proper Dahlia care before I let them apparently freeze in the shed, having stripped them cruelly of their protective covering of earth. So in the close-up picture, I’ve got a lot to learn about gardening, but in the wider angle having to get new bulbs (which I did) and replant them is metaphorically correct. As we approach spring this year, I’m all about reinventing myself. Did you see the new sign posted in yesterday’s blog?

I’ve just created a new and expanded blog site (almost ready to switch the traffic onto this new track), and I got a vision this morning for a new and more interactive photography website. Oh, and just a sign that I may be going in the right direction, I was asked yesterday by the editor of Integral Yoga Magazine (that’s at Yogaville) if I would put my blog on their new interactive site that will be like Huffington Post. Wow!

So I’m planting new bulbs in my good earth. And what is the “good earth” but the ground of our being and our mind/body where we plant and grow and live in the world we create.

If you can open yourself to insight,
you are at one with insight
and you can use it completely.

Open yourself to the Tao,
then trust your natural responses;
and everything will fall into place. Tao Te Ching

Two signs appeared yesterday,  one on the street where I live and the other on the internet highway where I play.  Conley’s Photographics has a new look, thanks to the art of James Hargrave, my 30 something friend who came back to Blackstone to plant his life and grow a sign business. And this Wyde-Angle.com blog is about ready to move to a new name and address:  we-are-awakening.com

The photography business is not expanding—it’s just looking better—but the wyde-angle blog is expanding to a website that hopefully will offer more than just my daily observations. I’ll be archiving all the old Wyde-Angle posts on the new site, but since there are so many, maybe just the last year. When I look at the verbiage that has poured out of this laptop since July 2005, I feel like I’m running for my life in front of a avalanche of words.

One’s strength is always one’s weakness, and I’m always at risk of burying my self under my own words. The Tao Te Ching helps dig me out.

In dwelling, live close to the ground.
In thinking, keep to the simple.
In conflict, be fair and generous.
In governing, don’t try to control.
In work, do what you enjoy.
In family life, be completely present. Tao Te Ching

But I’ve come to prefer awakening as my working metaphor because we are all familiar with awakening in the morning or after a nap. We awaken every day. But WHO is awakening? Do we awakening to the software of the mind, a conditioned ego or belief in identity that repeats itself everyday with its whinings, fear, doubts, and tape loops of fear? Most of us awaken to that, and it’s no wonder that we cling to sleep. The suffering can get so intense that we cling to any escape: eating, drinking, sex, sports, book, movies, work, revolutions, and even our illnesses. We don’t know of any state of consciousness beyond suffering in our modern culture. “This is it!” we are told. Take a pill.

But religion has been no help. The religious mind is the next awakening from the modern mind, says religion, especially fundamentalist religion, whether Muslim, Christian, or Jewish. Traditional religion, not so much, as they like being modern and flowing with the main stream. But fundamentalism is no answer to suffering. Just look at the wars they seem to love. Conflict is their food, rebellion is their script. They are happiest when they are outside, but when they get in power, life seems to dry up. A veil is dropped over the sweetness of life and the goddess is put in the basement.

So there must be another kind of awakening, something wider, something deeper, something greater than we think we are. Otherwise, there is no hope for humanity. But to image something beyond or greater than this double-binding duality IS the awakening! Who is it that is calling us out of our sleep? Who am I…really?

This is the awakening I’m talking about and have been practicing most of my life. It’s a solitary awakening, as all awakenings are. No one else can wake up for you in the morning. You never hear, “Will you wake up for me tomorrow?”

This website, WE ARE AWAKENING will be a place were those of us who are interested in awakening to the Middle Way between the modern and the religious can share their experience and help wake each other up.

No, seriously, it was a great trip. Every moment I spend with my 98 year-old mother is precious.

Nothing has really changed in the world since the advent of technology. There are those who use washing machines, those who sell washing machines, and those who can invent and fix washing machines. Technology creates a class of experts without which the modern world would not work.

I remember Cory Wright,  a young man who grew up here in Blackstone that is now one of my code experts. While he was on the traditional educational route here, what he loved doing was learning the code of the internet. He remembers when he had his awakening. “I was looking at a friend’s new internet connection and I suddenly realized that you could create these web sites. It was like a light going off.” There was the power, he instinctively knew. Image when the first books were written and some young man, the first to see one of these books in his village perhaps, realized that learning to read was where the power lay. And it was just one jump further to say, “I want to be able to write books, not just read them.”

And so our modern digital culture depends on and is driven by those who hold the power to create the tools we work with, tools that are now our tractors and trains. So my advice to young men and women is, “Learn the language of our technology and you will go very far indeed. Eveyone will need you.” I certainly do. Thank you, Brian and Debra.

“If your action is motivated by doing something for others, for bringing benefit to others and not expecting any result or reward for you, such an action is called Karma Yoga.  But if you expect a result, if you do something to get something, then it is karma. Karma Yoga is service, service for the joy of serving; you don’t even wait for thanks. That way, you can keep your mind calm; there is no reason to be disturbed. Whether people appreciate your action or not, even if they criticize you after having done it, that is their business. You have done your job; you are satisfied with what you have done; you did it to your capacity; and you don’t expect anything in return, so your mind is always calm. That is Yoga: calmness of mind.

If you want to accord with the Tao,

just do your job, then let go. Tao Te Ching

We moderns are so so full of trash that we can hardly live, and if fact, a truthful observer would say we aren’t living at all. We are just suffering: living, breathing, walking around suffering, with maybe just a few breaths of fresh peace once in a while just to keep us from committing suicide. This is a blunt statement but it is true. Just look at our so-called relationships with family, friends, and strangers. All we do for the most part is exchange our trash. We like meeting new people because they look like empty landfills we can dump out trash into. We’ve probably filled up our friends and family.

Gossip, now there’s a big trash exchange. But lets define trash before we get lost in the words. Negativity is trash. And positives are trash if they leads to negativity. And what is negativity? Judgment. So here it is folks: all judgments are negative trash and they will bury you if you don’t throw them out.

The truth we don’t realize about judgments—which is another word for grievances—is that they are like plaque in the arteries. They are sticky! They cling to the mind in groups gathering strength in numbers. Then when the pressure builds up, they burst into the mind like a black oil gusher, and pity the person standing in this foul rain without an umbrella. The next thing they know is that they are having a mud fight, everyone screaming at each other over some buried grievance that needed venting. Even if the combatants kiss and makeup (makeups are always enjoyable because they give license for the eruption to happen again), the trash just keeps on coming in. Grievances like company.

So taking out the trash—and I mean really taking out the trash—can only happen when forgiveness is brought in to do the work. Forgiveness works like this: it holds each piece of emotional trash as it comes up, feeling the weight, touching its texture and sharp edges, but it makes no judgment about the worth of the trash. The trash has no reference point outside itself. It is just trash. A feeling is just a feeling until we hook it to a grievance and give it meaning. Once that happens it’s too late: we are actually thrown into the dump truck and become the garbage.

Forgiveness is a practice. You can’t just by will or thought become a forgiving person, because that has a reference point outside itself. You want to be a forgiving person so you can be a better person, and you want to be a better person so you can get love, money, success, whatever. Forgiveness can’t be bought or prostituted. Forgiveness is forgiveness. You either do it or you don’t. But you can practice forgiveness, and it’s best to practice with little pieces of trash instead of waiting for a refrigerator to land on you.

Taking out the trash begins and ends in meditation. Meditation is forgiveness. You practice forgiving yourself.

Jimmy Hargrave found his sweet spot yesterday. He is building a sign business from my backyard shop, and suddenly orders for signs came pouring into the door of his new business. This was the sweet spot he had been looking for. But maybe sweet spots just come when you are ready. Jimmy had come to me ten years ago for help in building his sign business, but it never took off as he personal problems unseated his focus and he left town to “kill his evil twin brother,” he said when he came back. So maybe we are the obstacle that keeps us from our sweet spot.

There are sweet spots that happen like miracles, Edward’s fishing hole, and there are sweet spots that are more lasting and require a little work. I have found in my search for the sweet spot in my life that it comes when you allow life to be sweet no matter where you are. Then where can you go that you are not in your sweet spot. If the fish bite or if the fish don’t, life is still sweet. That’s a win/win spot to be in.

One allows life to be sweet but accepting the unsweetened life without judgment or grievance. Forgiveness, that is the sweetning one has to add to life. “Life, this very present moment that you are, I forgive you for not being what I expect you to be. I just accept you as your are.” Do that and life will love you for it.