This afternoon at Meadow End...

Visiting friends Tobiah and Steven, looking forward to Tobiah's concert tomorrow at St. Georges Church in Trotten.  The concert celebrates Tobiah's new record Are We Angels, which I hope you will listen to, and even buy!  It will feed your heart and soul, I promise!

I'm sitting in the breakfast nook with a cup of tea, while Tob, Simon Callow, Colete O'Leary, and Rowan Piggott (soon to arrive) are rehearsing. Sarah Miles just came by to say hello; Academy Award winning actress and brilliant actor, a neighbor, she's been a guest on Paradigms.

This morning I read 3/4 of the new book Buffy Sainte-Marie The Authorized Biography by Andrea Warner and discovered that my favorite of her songs, Starwalker, is her favorite too.  I listened to it over and over driving across Canada in 2005 during my grief travels.  If you have a chance to listen to the song at the link above, do, and do read the book! Buffy is one of my great inspirations.  I had the honor of an interview with Buffy in 2009, and am hoping to talk with her again this year.

You know how sometimes you encounter someone and you connect deeply with ease?  That's how this friendship is. Tobiah and I have been friends via internet and phone since she was first on Paradigms in 2010, introduced by Will McCoy, The Rhythm Rancher, who is himself an amazing musician and was a guest on Paradigms in 2010.  Well, we finally met in person 2 days ago at Heathrow when she and Steven picked me up.  When Tobiah released her new album and scheduled this concert we both decided it was time for me to visit, and so, here I am. 

I am listening to the rehearsal, and as much as I want to sing along I am keeping quiet.  I know these songs and love them.  I've listened to them all countless times, but to hear them being sung in the next room...well you can't beat that with a stick!

Music is the healer, music is the healing...if we listen to beautiful music with messages of love and care and tenderness, it can help heal our wounds. Even the most broken damaged person who has committed the most despicable acts can find healing if the seek it.

Random musings in early 2019...

Some people find treasures when they go to the sea; jewelry, shells, sponges...all in the sand.  It’s a talent.

When I go to the sea I find moments of transcendence.  The water on the sand.  The light in the water.  The sound that never stops and is always soothing.  The sensation of ebb and flow that comes and goes after immersion. The smell.  The sensations of water and sun on skin. These are my treasures.

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I like material comfort as much as the next person.  I appreciate beauty with an aesthetic that has been developed with intention. But the physical world is not what my sights are ultimately set upon.  

The images of the cosmos that we have, thanks to the technology we call science, has provided us with an easy conceptualization of what is beyond Earth’s thin layer of atmosphere. I focus on these images in my mind, often, and as part of describing to myself and contemplating where and what I am in a meditative experience.  I see myself sitting or whatever, the room, the building, the locale...always moving out (up?) seeing concentric spheres of geography, if you will, until I see the planet, the solar system, the galaxy...and out and out...all that great NASA Star Trek imagery informing images of space and the cosmos.  I find comfort in this.

Then gradually coming back, eventually returning my awareness to this body in this place.

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In the morning when I awaken I am still and peaceful...for a moment.  Then I feel tension rising in my body and my mind remembers where I am and what is in front of me and then I feel anxious, and a desire to burrow back into sleep and dreams, and stillness and peace.  No such luck though. I know that I will get up, so I do...and the anxiety diminishes as I move into activity. But always this sense of...like I am wearing a garment that is just a little too small.

Leaving 2018 behind

This has been a tiring year.  Every day more nonsense and nazification in Washington DC. It has been an ongoing exercise in coping with lies, cruelty, and destructiveness.  It's tiresome.

Every week I produce 90 minutes of original audio content.  It's good stuff, I respect the material, however it means always being on a production schedule with all that entails and that's tiring too.

One of the challenges I accepted during 2018 was to be less a bearer of bad news, and to be more a bearer of positivity.  That worked out pretty well. 

The work I do, the audio programs, are intended to inspire, and they do, from what people tell me.  I'm glad they do.  That's definitely part of my deal here on Earth, to offer good stuff to the world.  I chose this, I love it, and I'm glad I'm doing it.

Underneath all of that, deep down, all there is inside me is love of nature and animals, and a feeling of the primordial Earth...that's really all. The rest is fleeting.

Approaching Solstice...

This year the darkness is really calling me.  Since the end of October, Samhain, I've felt the pull.  The dreamtime calls.  Even the waking dreamtime is vivid, both with reflection and re-vision-ing.

I find myself going over residue from events, relationships, experiences, and gently massaging that stuff as it dissipates, kind of like when something is sticky and hardened on the floor, it takes some time and attention to get it cleaned up, and that act of cleaning can be very zen.

I read an article recently about how certain Buddhist monks end their lives by basically dissolving into light, (I am shorthanding this) and that the way this is done is to think nothing but loving thoughts for the rest of one's life.  I jokingly have said that "Oh well, that's not me!" but the truth is, while I do not only have loving thoughts, I mostly have loving thoughts, and sometimes thoughts that seem not loving are, in fact, motivated by love.  Political anger, for instance, is motivated by the love of justice.

I'm looking at this revisiting of past remnants as part of this business of being a more loving person.  Imagine (I'm sure you can!) having some emotional residue left from a relationship you had as a teenager...a friend, a peer, not necessarily a partner even...and just shining love on that situation and watch as the residue floats away.

Perhaps we humans are not as far from being our best as the worst among us make it seem.