Observations that dive deep into life and come up with treasures for all

One of my bride’s from last year congratulated me on renewing my vows at Christmas. (see earlier blog) I wrote back:

If you are in the wedding business it is good to stay current, right? After photographing so many weddings in the last decade it was very good for me to remember how it was or is on the inside of the vows.

I have discovered that wedding vows are like a wedding cake. The first vows are usually at the first layer, then as the marriage bakes in the heat of love, the vows deepen as the rest of the cake becomes available to the heat of maturing consciousness. Now the vows expand to include all the layers of the cake. And here is the icing: a fully baked marriage is very, very sweet…..but not too sweet…it’s just right.

We were divorced for a year in the 70′s, but failing at divorce, we remarried. So with this renewal, that makes three weddings for us. Divorce (and I should know) is when the cake is taken out of the oven before all the layers have finished cooking.

But Love is a great cook, so the best recipe is to surrender to the cook and let Her bake the cake. One must have faith in the Master Cook when you can’t see what is going on in the oven.

Posted under General Observations, weddings

Well, I’m back from my annual Florida trip to celebrate my mother’s birthday in Tampa with her brother. She is 95 this year and Uncle Tommy is 86, and each year we have a dinner party to mark the passing of another year on this earth. This year was especially good because both my son and daughter were there with us, with my daughter singing at the piano bar. This birthday was the best yet, and we’ve been making this trip for seven years, ever since I got my mother to move to Blackstone so I wouldn’t have to make any more trips to Florida, where she was living.

Visiting different families and friends on vacation–we visited four different households this time–is like Star Trek. Remember how the Enterprise would visit different planets each week and the crew would get involved in their worlds. Well, that’s how I feel when I visit households on vacation: each is like a different planet with its own concerns and problems. Of course, unlike Star Trek, we don’t solve any problems and change the course of the planet’s history. We just visit and share our worlds.

Posted under General Observations

The head I showed a few days ago before it got hair is finished.

Posted under General Observations

Tomorrow we leave for our annual migration southward to Tampa, and as usual we are not looking forward to the long drive. My hip already hurts just thinking about it. But this year will be different, especially for Tommy, my Uncle, because we have taken the center piece off his table by no longer eating meat or drinking martinis.

My wife and I were vegetarians for about 15 years while seiously practicing yoga. Then we gave it up for 15 years while seriously practicing Southside Virginia. Now we’re going meatless again, and we are not seriously practicing anything. Who can explain it? We can’t. Meat and alcohol just left us last July, like old friends who one day just decided to leave without a word goodbye. So how are we going to explain it to Uncle Tommy?

His whole world wraps around these two gifts to the senses, good meat and drink. Entertainment in Tommy’s Tampa is experiencing the many wonderful restaurants there. He won’t understand why we took that off the table. “What else in life is there,?” he will say.

There are lots of good reasons not to eat meat. One can argue health reasons, moral reasons, ecological, or religious reasons. but we don’t argue about it or try to explain it. None of these reasons motivated us. Ours was not a “reasonable” decision. It was a “natural” decision.

My best answer is to this puzzle is consider the child who pushes the dinner plate away or off his high chair with a sudden sweep of his arm, which says clearly, “I’m not going to eat this.” And no amount of games or threats will make him even sample the poisonous green peas and carrots.

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This letter by Cotton Matther, a Puritan religious leader in colonial Massachusetts, could have been one of today’s revealing e-mails that are being forced to the surface in our current political/religious storms. When righteousness and profit hold hands under the table, don’t eat the food that is being served.

In the year of our Lord 1682

To Mr. John Higginson:

There is now at sea a ship called Welcome, which has on board 100 or more of the heretics and malignants called Quakers, with W. Penn, who is the chief scamp, at the head of them. The General Court has accordingly given sacred orders to Master Malachi Huscott, of the brig Porpoise, to waylay the said Welcome slyly as near the Cape of Cod as may be, and make captive the said Penn and his ungodly crew, so that the Lord may be glorified and not mocked on the soil of this new country with the heathen worship of these people. Much spoil can be made of selling the whole lot in Barbados, where slaves fetch good prices in rum and sugar and we shall not only do the Lord great good by punishing the wicked, but we shall make great good for His Minister and People.
Yours in the bowels of Christ
Cotton Mather

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When my friend, who is a sculpturor, showed me this block of wood, I had no idea there was a head hidden inside. He said there was and that his hands were going to bring it out. I imagined a soul imprisoned by some evil magician in a block of wood, you know, like in the myths and fairy tales. This is a very common theme, but we miss the mark when we think fairy tales and myths are only for primitives and children. They are really mirrors of our own personal journeys; there is a story for every stage of the journey that we are on.

So a few weeks later my friend brought me the head he had found in the wood. He said it was a woman, and that hair is going to be added later in the form of wire. But to me the head was complete. It can be either a man or a woman, and in the light of the window there is a timeless feel to the form that makes it seem that it could be anyone.

How did that head get in that wood, I wondered? Where did it come from? What did it do to get lost? But the head doesn’t answer, yet its silence says more than words could ever write. The head, of course, came from a creator, the sculpturer. It had been locked inside him and stayed there until the wood came along and gave the head a form and a life.

This head was not made from thought and thought’s plan. How would thought tell the hands what to do? You can’t command a head like this to appear. You can’t make hands carve a head. And you can’t offer the hands anything that would make them want to carve a head they didn’t want to. Hands are like stubborn children who won’t cooperate no matter what bribes or punishments you offer them. Hands have to be free.

So what frees a head like this from the prison of the wood? The head wanted to be born, obviously. On the inside of every artist, the soul of his art kicks and punches until the artist surrenders and lets whatever is going to be born come out. He will be surprised and anyone else.

And on the inside of each of us is a natural Selt that wants to be born. And until we surrender to the knocking and let who ever we are out, we will never be who we truly are.

Posted under General Observations, meditation help, up lifting

Remember that old radio show called the “Shadow.” Most don’t unless they, like me, are of the age where your life span bridges the two world of radio and TV. Any way, the Shadow was a super hero kind of guy who did good works without being seen. He put the fear of God in the bad guys because he “knows what lurks in the hearts of men.” Then there was this ghoulish laughter fading off into the shadows of the night. Can’t ever forget that!

We all have a shadow in our lives, and like the radio shadow, it knows what lurks in our hearts. But this shadow is like an invisible anti-self that screws up all our good intentions. When we have an active shadow, we will lay the best plans and suddenly be surprised to find that the plans resulted in a disaster. “Who screwed this up,” we cry, and then in the distance we hear the laughter and the old radio refrain, “The Shadow knows.”

Our shadow is made up of everything in our consciousness that we don’t allow into the light. When we are always right, you can be sure that everything that is wrong will be lurking in our own shadow. When we divide a whole world into two parts, with us being in the “right” part, you can be sure that the other part is inside building up a shadow. Whatever we lock up in our basement, comes out in the night and really messes up our lives. Everyday is Halloween for the Shadow.

So until we see our own shadow, we go through life casting this darkness in front of us, thinking all the while that we are in the light. Remember the movie Ground Hog Day, where the hero had to go through the same day over and over until he saw his shadow. Once he cast the full light of consciousness on his shadow the madness ended. Once he made his world whole again, the shadow disappeared.

That’s how you can tell if you have a shadow…when every day is the same Ground Hog Day. And just like in the radio show, our shadow puts the fear of unknown in our ego, and we scurry back in our holes for another round of winter.

Posted under General Observations, up lifting

Weddings in Southside Virginia are great celebrations and offer our entertainment starved inhabitants something that city people take for granted: a night out on the town. However, being in the country has it’s perks–our “night on the town” is free.

But I’ve come to realize is that a wedding is not just about separate people coming together in a big party. It is really about a network of family and friends making itself visible…like a spider web suddenly caught in the sun light, or a map where all the roads are drawn that connect each and every town.

At the center the network are the Bride and Groom, which, like the hub in a wheel, hold the extending spokes together. The wedding starts like the big bang that started the universe. A wedding is a network that expands outward in a complex of relationships of friends and family until it gets so far from the center that the pull of gravity is not strong enough to bring those in the far reaches to the wedding.

A wedding is like a great magnet–or a hole in space–that draws all caught in its pull back into its source, where each part of the network forgets its separateness in a moment of joy when they hug and kiss the bride and groom. Like moths they come to the light and wait their turns to kiss the bride.

The coming together of opposites, the creation of a new unity, the sacrifice and death of individual egos for Love, and the two families merging and mixing to make an even greater family..this is the dialectic of life. This is the way we grow. When two become one, conflict is resolved, uncertainty and separation ends, and peace overcomes us all. A whole is created that is greater than its parts. The struggle of love to overcome itself is over.

This is the mystery from which the Bride and Groom draw their power to call this network of family and friends back from their separate worlds. Here they are seen and strengthened so that the links that hold them together will never break. A wedding is a beginning of the new, and at once the renewal of the old.

Each hug and kiss with the Bride and Groom are like tiny stars blinking in a great galaxy. Here is the source of their light.

And when the wedding is over and the last shrimp is eaten, the network fades into the next day. Gone to be only remembered. But another wedding will come and a new expanding network of happy connections will be discovered.

Weddings are like worlds being created from and then dissolving back into the bliss of the Lord’s sleep.

Posted under General Observations, weddings

On getting a book of poems by Hafiz

Thank you Dear One for the gift of Hafiz. I don’t know how I have escaped not knowing him. I have certainly read all around him, making friends with those who knew him, yet never catching their conversations among themselves when they talked about his poems. I have certainly benefited from the influence of Hafiz on those who have influenced me, Emerson for one. So now I come upon Hafiz as though he has been following me in the shadows of the trees like a savage indian watching this strange invader of His earth.

Like a golden thread he seems to run through time, asking us to follow it back into ourselves to its golden source of light. The poems are the outward bubbling of the sun, visible only to those who are used to looking at the sun for a very brief time, maybe through hole in their ego, made there so they could look at the source of light without too much damage to an eager soul.

This morning at tea I read a few to Tilly and right away I know this man. He speaks to a part of me that was there when the poems were written. My hand with pen could follow the words as they came from my mouth. My eyes could see the letters appearing on the white blank page as they spoke.

And yet, even though this part of me was there when they were wrote, the words and images surprise me as though I had never heard them before. Familiar yet perfectly new. Ancient, yet brand new fresh.

I have some other friends like this. Lao-Tzu for one. To walk with them is like going down a path and sharing the sights together. It is a path that has no beginning and no end, but the sun is always shining, and the next turn always opening a surprise as if each moment were a gift.

We live with two hands writing. One writes what is common to all experience, the things that we are doing, the things that we have done. The other hand, which for most is buried in a deep pocket, writes from the soul. It was never taught to write at school. But Hafiz, he writes with both hands so that the eternal and time mix together in his ink. and you can find what ever you want as you feel over his words with your fingers like they were braille. What we get depends on which hand, which fingers, we feel the words with. The right hand only knows what is of time, the left hand only knows what is eternal and timeless….I believe you are left handed, right? Love Dad

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My wife was in a cook’s fit this last night and this morning. Her yesterday’s bread did not rise because it was full of water. (Bear with me as I try to explain something I have no language for.) Then when she stopped trying to figure out what went wrong, she remembered using the 2 cup instead of a 1 cup for measure. So, being the creative cook that she is, she doubled the flour and other measures to balance with the extra water and put the bread in the fridge to stop it from rising. This morning she found that the bread rose despite the cold, and now it’s in the oven to see what will result from this second birth.

Which reminded me (ah, here we go, a language that I understand) of all of us parents who have adult children who have come home half baked and don’t seem to be able to leave until the bread is fit to eat.

Our children are like loaves of bread, and we may not always get the recipe just right, and forever after the bread just doesn’t taste right. Everyone knows what good bread tastes like, no matter what the recipe. And each of our children is a different recipe. But what happens is that we get one recipe we like and try to use it with a different bread. This doesn’t work. Each bread must follow its own recipe.

So when the loaf comes home to haunt the cook, what does the cook do? Try to recook the bread with the same recipe? No. Won’t work.

So how do we find the original recipe that was lost or never used many years ago? I think it’s possible to find it. I may be wrong, but I do because I believe in creative design. If the original design or recipe was the wrong one, the right one exists. We just have to be creative in order to find it.

Here is the recipe for finding a creative design. First, let go of the old recipe. Throw it out. Forget it. Gone. That means all your old recipes for parenting, all your shoulds and advice from friends and memories of what your mom and dad would have done or did with you.

Second, accept the fact that you don’t know what the creative recipe is. It has to be revealed to you, or written in the space the old one left.

Third, accept the fact that the adult/child wants to find the creative design as much as you do, and wants you to give him/her the space to find it. The adult/child will feel that space when he/she feels accepted for what they are by you. We know when someone, especially a parent, is trying to put an old recipe on us. It doesn’t taste good.

Fourth, Be patient. Some bread takes a long time to rise.
It is not easy to let go of the old recipe, and you will be tested so you can find the old ingredients you are still holding on to. Have faith, the bread will rise.

If you love to cook and love to eat great bread as I do, then this recipe for half-baked loaf may work for you

Now, I can’t tell you if it has worked for me yet, I’m still in the fourth stage. But I have faith it will.

Posted under General Observations