To follow it from the beginning, start with Glenn.
Summers in New Hampshire provide a teenager with blissfully warm weather and an abundance of distractions from the boredom that seems to accompany the day-to-day existence of the young. There were the streams in which I’d fish for trout, and the marinas filled with pickerel, and Weirs Beach with its small mouth bass. My father’s boat would take a few friends and I water skiing. We had waterslides, and alpine slides, and the Weirs’ famous arcades and candlepin bowling. And there was the Gilford town beach, with its scattered scrub pine clinging to the yellow sand, a beaten down concession stand and the large grey raft moored just 10 yards beyond where the lake bottom fell away into inky blackness.
I’ve had an image involving that raft at Gilford Beach in my mind for over a week now. Imagine this: A teenage boy runs for the edge of the raft, throwing his head back as he leaps into the air. The ungainly and unsuccessful half-gainer ends with a loud thwack, flat on his back. The cheers that had urged him to make another attempt turn to the third groan of the afternoon as he rises back to the surface, his face oscillating between grimacing pain and gleeful grin accompanying a hearty, deep laugh and more than a few groans of his own.
I`ve been thinking about life, and life after death, and life before life. I`ve been thinking about what the other side might be like, what it might be like to make the journey back and forth. It’s only as I write this that I begin to understand what drew me to this image, this memory of an old friend from the mid ’70s .
Glenn had a quality that made him difficult to dislike. He combined incisive intelligence, lethal wit and a playful soul. What I remember as the most lovable thing about him, though, was his laugh, a guffaw, really. There seemed to be a deep resonant joy in his being. He always seemed to be having more fun than anyone else. Maybe that`s the greatest quality any of us can ever acquire. I have a favourite Buddhist proverb: “To a practitioner of Tendai Buddhism, everything is wonderful.” I recognise the debt I owe Glenn for exemplifying the beauty of that proverb, the truth of it.
Happiness is a choice. The unhappiest of us can’t imagine how to elevate ourselves from our misery. The happiest of us have made that choice a habit. They find joy in the strangest of places, like Glenn on that day at the lake. He dared. He risked. And no matter the outcome, it seemed, he found something beautiful to love about the experience. We all stood on the raft, feeling his pain while basking in his glee. I look back and realise that pain is not suffering, that suffering is every bit the choice that joy is, and that pain itself need be of little consequence when we make that choice.
I’ll always remember him trying, time after time, to nail that half gainer, usually landing flat on his back. I was in awe of him. I think everyone was. He never did make it. I remember most the pained grin and laughter as he climbed back up onto the raft, a pain and laughter we all shared with him. Children and young adults can be so cruel, but in the face of that kind of reckless bravery and mirth how could anyone even think of jeering him? He’d rise from the ladder, already working up the courage to try it again.
.
Not long after graduating from high school, Glenn was walking along Highway 3A in Meredith, NH, late at night and high as a kite. He must have swerved or stumbled out in front of the car that hit him and killed him. I guess that binding memory I have of him is a metaphor for how his life ended here, in this material realm. One night he just landed flat on his back.
But, like on the lake, landing on your back isn’t the end of the journey. I imagine his soul rising, looking back at his broken body, remembering the pain not just of that moment of his death, but the inevitable pain of living, the remorse for not having made more of a life gifted with so much vitality and promise. And then the grin rises with the memories of all the beauty, love and light he`d experienced even in his brief visit here. With that comes the laugh, the hearty guffaw, and already the resolve to try it all again as he rises to the heavens where friends await him, greet him, welcome him back to the spirit realm we all spring from and return to, again and again.
The image I have of the realm our souls inhabit when not manifested in these earthly bodies is like the raft, where friends urge us on to another manifestation. We throw ourselves into it, into life, with varying degrees of abandon and success, and when we rise back to the surface, it’s always to cheers and good natured ribbing, the kind that nurtures, lets us know we’re cared for. The kind that gives us the courage to give it another go.
Maybe in that realm it’s easier to be brave, to take the big risks. I like to think so. I like to think that maybe, someday, even in our human manifestations, we’ll all find Glenn’s fearless sense of wonder, glee, courage and abandon. I like to imagine life being that way. I’m trying to find a way to be that way, to make that choice a habit.
Tags: Beauty, body, Buddhism, choice, courage, crossing over, death, friends, happiness, laughter, life, life after death, light, Love, pain, past lives, risk, soul, suffering, teenagers, Tendai, truth
It’s not that I float. That indicates the possibility of falling, and there is none. It’s not that I have a position in space. There is no space. It’s not a dimension, or a plane of existence that I exist in. These are all concepts of a physical manifestation, and there is nothing physical about me. I have no substance or energy that the thoughts of a being of manifestation can measure or imagine. But you need something to imagine, so think of me as a point of light, a singularity in an infinite space of singularities. Look up into the night sky and pick a star. It’s metaphor, poetry, and only those who share the experiences of the poet can truly understand what he means. Still, I can think of nothing better to evoke in you the reality of my experience. A black hole is a singularity in space/time that eats all energy and matter falling within its influence. I am a singularity in the soul space that is not space and which emanates…light, love, beauty, things you sense as divine.
Perhaps there’s this too…. There are moments when, as human beings, we feel connected to all things, when we sense our being extended out into the objects around us, into the space around us. I remember one such moment in a 20th Century life. The sun was setting on my city of glass towers, casting an amber luminescence that reflected off the glass, refracted, diffracted, even shone through the buildings, illuminating their hollowness with warm orange rays. I could see the atmosphere itself with a clarity of actually seeing photons striking gas molecules and refracting off in quantum directions. I followed the flow of photons back through atmosphere to the edge of space, through the orbits of two small planets where I was confronted with the inspiring immensity of a star. Bits of itself leapt violently into space from a surface churning with energetic activity. I followed the emanating energy back out into space, through a solar system of planets and asteroids and stray bits of rock, dust and gas into an expanse of space dotted with solar systems, which became a cloud of solar systems, which became a whirling galaxy, which became a cloud of galaxies, which became a universe of uncountable galaxies. So immense, so grand, so beyond the usual imaginings of my mind as it existed in that body. I felt so small, so infinitesimally small in such an expanse of matter, always in motion, always in flux, a universe in which, suddenly, all things seemed possible. In that moment I was no longer a man standing on a balcony watching a sunset. I was a part of the immensity of all existence, all I had seen, all I had sensed, my being extended out into it all. I was a part of it. It was a part of me. I was connected to all things and they to me. And yet, there I was, also observing it all. Something about that made me feel immense, perfect, beautiful, divine.
If you’ve ever experienced a moment like this, then you know a little of how I experience reality in the spirit realm, in the soul space that is not space. You use so many words to describe it, this flip side of existence. I’m using words and expressions you can understand, in your present state of being. It’s not the way you would think about it were you not so intricately bound to that body and mind of yours. Words cannot express the way thought works as an unmanifested being.
But it’s as difficult for us to think in terms of the physical realm you’re reading this in. Once we are manifested into a body we forget what it’s like to be an incorporeal being. When we die and are separated from manifestation, that memory of being is lost just as fast. We forget what it’s like to have been physical. We forget having been physical. I don’t know why that happens. No one does. It’s just the way of it. Every transition is a moment of forgetting followed by a journey of remembering.
But some of us think even this is changing. We’re evolving. Together. More and more beings are achieving a state of enlightenment. Enlightenment is nothing more than remembering who you are on both sides in the cycle of life and death, both your material existence and your spiritual existence. We think this is a divine purpose, that it is the intended state for all beings, all consciousness, to know the true nature of themselves from the perspective of both ways of being simultaneously.
You may think of my state of being in divine terms, that there is perfection to my way of being as a pure soul, a spirit. You may even envy me for it. But there are experiences available only to a physical manifestation.
The epiphany of that day on the balcony watching the sunset was not in the moment of recognising my connected to all things. Ecstasy came in the moment when my consciousness collapsed back into my being, my physical being, though my senses still seemed to touch the stars. I stood there on my balcony. Taking in the beautiful light of sunset, the glinty towers, the North Shore mountains all purple and hazy in the thick atmosphere, as people walked along the sidewalk below, chattering about the day’s shopping, I stood there, and the emotional wave hit me. In my mind I had perceived my connectedness to all things. Back in my body, aware of the sensations of seeing, touching, hearing, smelling myself in the space of all things I felt connected to all things. You may envy my spiritual connectedness to all things. I know beauty, light, perfection, love in a way you can’t comprehend right now, but you sense them in a way I long for, like a kiss remembered but lost in time. I long for the way a body moves through physical space, the sensations of being alive, of creating with your own hands. You may think of the spiritual existence as characterised by divine bliss but I assure you, the bliss you’re imagining is possible only in your form.
You can touch, and the things you touch can have an indescribably pleasurable sensation. The soft downy hair of an infant, the ripe earth in a farmer’s hand as she decides which crop to sow that year, the shiver of a lover’s skin as you caress the gentle curve of his neck, the sudden jolt of energy to all your nerves and cells that accompanies almost any moment of ecstasy, or even of terror. It’s all so exquisite, so divine, so lingeringly delicious.
I realised this in that moment on the balcony as my mind, body and spirit were for the very first time, integrated and fully aware of each other. I realised the infinitesimal insignificance of my being and, simultaneously, my own immensity as a being experiencing all of creation.
Even in that life I would forget that feeling for a while, then remember it, only to forget it again. Yes, you have bliss, but you also have suffering. And when you get all caught up in either one, you tend to forget the other. There was very much suffering in that life. Suffering’s part of the journey to enlightenment, though it’s easy to go astray when in the throes of it. The bliss follows the suffering, so long as you’re willing to learn the lessons it teaches you. And that I managed to do, so in that life I experienced other epiphanies and ecstasies, moments in time of complete connectedness, and once, while writing and producing a play, I experienced that kind of blissful connection for two full weeks. Even that experience was difficult to keep in my presence, in my day to day life. But it became more and more easy as that life went on, as I learned more, as I integrated my spirit into my body and mind more and more.
And then I died. What memories I do have were a long time coming – in the transition back, I’d lost them all. It’s even harder to remember it in my present form. I’m not able to conjure up the physiological sensations necessary to relive it, even as memories. I like to believe I’m closer than I’ve ever been. That soon I’ll break this cycle of life and death, this dichotomy of manifestation and spirit. It’s what we exist for. It’s why we go back – to experience the bliss. Here, for some reason it’s easier to remember the bliss than the suffering.
It’s always a bit of a shock, the way we enter the world at birth. It’s an unfathomable suffering to an undeveloped mind and a soul in transition. It’s the one bit of suffering I can remember a little of. I remember too the breast and milk and warmth and mother that followed it, not the sensations of it, so much, but the elemental emotional content of it a little. I know that there was other suffering that comes with life. I just can’t remember it at all.
There is no suffering in my reality – it’s so difficult to remember what it even is. And I believe there’s no suffering in our evolutionary future, though that’s an evolutionary choice, a purpose, something we must strive toward individually and collectively. It’s this purpose that compelled to come to this man this morning. He’s sensitive, and I’m vibrating at my highest level in this manifest existence. I knew I could reach him with these thoughts and he would write them down. He’ll see that it’s published. I’m coming back again, taking the journey to manifestation, and one day in that life, I’ll read this and it will awaken memories I’d lost in the transition. Important memories. Don’t ask how I know this, how I can know this. My sense of time and space won’t make any sense to you, nor do cause, affect and coincidence have the same meaning for me. But if you’re reading this, perhaps it’s waking something up in you.
Hi. Isn’t it exquisite to be me?
Tags: bliss, body, connectedness, death, divine, epiphany, fate, manifestation, physical realm, pleasure, spirit, spirit energy, spirit realm, spiritual evolution, spirituality, suffering, transition
A facebook friend challenged 16 of her friends, including me, to each write down 16 random notes about themselves, post it as a note, then ask 16 of their friends to do the same. A neat challenge.
I didn’t intend to write the following, it’s just what came out. It’s not really what the challenge called for, so I’ll go back and try that one again. But I thought it was worth posting anyway. . .so here it is.
1. There’s a spiritual sensation of connectedness I get from time to time, a few moments in time that feel as though I’m connected to and can sense the existence of all things, an awareness that there is a grand spiritual reality beyond my rational ken that is graspable by my ever developing being.
2. Unless you’ve experienced something like that, I can’t describe to you the sensations, emotions or insights those moments bring. It’s like trying to describe the sensation of orgasm to someone who’s never had one. I can tell you that you really, really want to have one…trust me on that.
3. Like an orgasm, not everyone has had this experience. Also like an orgasm, some people believe they have though they have not. I am as surprised by who hasn’t experienced this as I am by who has. That says more about me than the people who surprise me.
4. While writing a play in 2000, I experienced this sense of connectedness 24/7 for a period of about 2 weeks. I would wake in the middle of the night feeling the energy of it thrumming through my body, reminding me that it had been with me all day but that my consciousness of the sensations had subsided for much of it, like what happens with pain.
5. Your body knows more about your spiritual well being than your mind does. Teach your mind to listen to it.
6. Leading a spiritual existence is like being at a dance. You can wait for someone to ask you; you can get up and dance alone; you can grab some friends and dance in a pack; you can stand by, tapping your feet, and enjoy watching everyone else dance; you can choose not to dance at all. But know this: the purpose of going to a dance is to dance and you’re really missing out on something if you don’t.
7. I’ve always wanted to believe in life after death. Now I know there is, because it touched me. I’m pretty sure about past lives, as well. I’m told that our spirits chose this life we’re living now…I believe that’s true, and that we have an intended purpose for being here and that the purpose – our fate, if you like – is of our own choosing. That purpose is why we chose to come back.
8. My point is: maybe this isn’t the only dance you’ll ever go to, so if you decide not to dance this time, you’ll have other opportunities. What have you got to lose by not dancing? Maybe a lot; the reason you came to the dance hall was to dance.
9. God, beauty, perfection, love: synonyms.
10. One of the tricks to falling in love with life – and thus, yourself — is accepting that there is beauty in everything, no matter how ugly it appears to you. Even ugliness is beautiful. The real task is to go beyond accepting it. The real task is to see the beauty in all things. Can you imagine how easy it will be to love fully, completely, unconditionally then?
11. I once knew that reason alone could answer all the important questions; I know now that reason alone can’t even answer the interesting ones.
12. Science wants to know, “What is a tree?” Art seeks to express, “What does a tree mean?” Science doesn’t always understand that these questions aren’t the same, and that the difference is essential – I understand it as the difference between knowledge and spirit.
13. Science will never discover the true nature of spirit. Not because it fails to ask the right questions, but because, by design, it seeks objective answers outside the experience of self.
14. Philosophy, as it has been traditionally practised in the West, is science. Philosophy, as it has been traditionally practised in the East, is art.
15. That feeling of connectedness I was talking about? That’s an awakening. That’s me seeing my true self, because I am connected to all things. I only came to understand this just now, while writing these 16 thoughts down.
16. If you’ve never felt connected in this way, I can’t tell you how to go about experiencing it. If you have felt it and want to feel it more…same thing. For me it often arises out of experiencing the grand moments of nature: storms, sunsets, skiing deep, deep powder, bicycling through the forest over winding single track. Other people tell me those are the kinds of things they’re doing when they get it. It can also come to me through words and images fraught with meaning, beauty, insight – as I consider them awareness just wells up inside, an energetic acknowledgement of something perfect that fits in the grand pattern of perfection. (Recall #9 above.) I’m not sure what will work for you. But I’m pretty sure I’d have never experienced it by just tapping my feet watching everyone else, or heading outside the dance hall to share a spliff, or spending the whole night on the sidelines with the rest of the wallflowers, wishing someone would ask me to dance. You have to get up and dance. Your body knows how. Just let it lead.
An addendum to the 16 thoughts.
17. Whenever you write, the most important reader your words will have is yourself, no matter who you are writing for, or to, no matter who your intended audience is. So, remember at some point to put down your pen, stop being an author and read whatever you’ve written as if they were the words of a wise, intimate friend, intended for you. Why? Because they are.
Tags: art, author, Beauty, body, body mind, connectedness, crossing over, dance, fate, God, life after death, Love, mind, orgasm, past lives, Perfection, philosophy, reason, science, spirit realm, spirituality, Transformations, writing
The memory is of my girlfriend, Corinne, tied to a tree in her backyard. She’s naked. I can’t remember how she’s responding to this, but I don’t recall any negative feelings about it. It’s playful, until her mother calls to her from inside the house. I quickly release the bonds, a plastic skip rope, and she dresses. Then she runs in. I do remember being scared about almost getting caught. The memory ends there.
Corinne was the first girlfriend I can remember, though my mother assures me there were others before her. She was beautiful, with silky blond hair, blue eyes and skin like cream; Corinne and I were in kindergarten at the time.
In their teens and twenties people ask each other, "What was your first sexual experience?" I’d always respond by saying, "tying my girlfriend to a tree, naked … in kindergarten." I’m not sure when or why I stopped telling this story. Maybe it wasn’t getting the response I was looking for. Maybe it wasn’t so funny to me anymore. Maybe…I don’t know. In my late thirties and forties, it would haunt me.
It was in that haunting time that I revealed the memory to my therapist and spirit-guide, Marilyne. "You learned that from someone," she responded. "That’s not the kind of thing a child does on his own. Someone taught you that behaviour." We’ve spent a decade trying to figure out who, to find the lost or repressed memory that would solve the puzzle of how I learned at 5 to have a girl remove her clothes and let me tie her to a tree.
Wait. There’s more to the memory. This part’s more nebulous, a part of the memory I never told anyone, until that day in Marilyne’s office. Memories this old are like dreams. We play them out in our minds, but each time we replay them, they change a little bit, until, like a dream, things are happening in our memory that never happened, that never could happen.
Wait. There`s more.
In the part of the memory I never tell, and often forget, there’s another small girl. A year or two younger than us. Is she naked too? She’s running, toward the house. She’s gone. In the memory, she just disappears. Something about it disturbs me. Disturbed me then. Disturbs me now. Was it her little sister? What was she doing there? Was she part of the game?
Typically, I can’t remember how, or even if Marilyne responded. Something else dissociated away. Well, it was years ago.
There’s something else. I think I’m the only one who saw her. I think I’m the only one who could see her. That’s crazy talk, I know. I’m going to have to tell Marilyne. I really don’t want to.
Tags: memories, sexuality, spirit
I tried to make Him understand that day. Tried so hard to give him the images and emotions of my experience the night before. But his subconcious resisted, and turned it into a dream about being in a jeep chased by a dinosaur through a jungle. A nightmare, for sure, but not the nightmare I’d lived out, not the image I’d tried to give him.
We’d been together for a year, but I couldn’t make it real for him. The images I gave him did bubble up through his subconscious the next day, but they became play, a game to be played with a girlfriend. I look back now and see that there’s no way to make my story as real for anyone as it was for me on the day I died. How can anyone who hasn’t experienced such a thing grasp the horror of it?
Another realisation came later, much later.… That’s the day he began to break, the day he began to go dark. It was too much. I’d been with him a year, but he hadn’t seen me since the first day. Just a little, but enough. A fissure that was already there opened that day, then grew and grew, and may never heal. He has tried so hard to close it, to shut out that darkness. And I . . .
Peter, I’m so sorry.
On the day you found me, you were a bright light. Brighter than all the others. Brighter almost than the light that came to me the day I died. I couldn’t go into that light, not with the darkness I had become. The pain, the shock, the horror, the rage. Attached to me. Those just would not stay behind in that bleak cellar.
I hadn’t aged a day in 32 years, had learned nothing, had only festered in my dank, dark misery yearning for life the way it had been in the few short years I’d lived it. The other light promised me the compassion I needed, the love that is the essence of being. But going into that light meant carrying the circumstances of my death with me for eternity. I wanted those memories erased, eradicated. I wanted them brutalised into submission the way I had been, and then made to die, like I had died. My resistance to the beckoning light only strengthened over the years.
Listen to me talking with your voice, our voice. Back then, on the day I died, I had no voice. I did in the moments before I died, but what good had that done me? No, once my last sigh played out, all I had was pain and rage and no ability to consider anything else.
Then you came from next door with some friends to the vacant house with the creepy cellar door out back. That day you shone so brightly, Peter. Compassion shone nearly as brightly in you as it did in that other light. And you were a being, like I had been. More than that, you had something I wanted back. Then I was still too young to name it, but in your light was the essence of something I had lost. Going to you, joining with you, I could reclaim it, I could be in a place that existed before death, before evil, before . . .
I know now there is no way to reclaim innocence. That’s lost to me here on earth forever. The greatest regret, though, and what weighs more heavily than my own loss, is how that day I began taking yours from you. Joining with you that day dimmed your light, put a fissure in your being. A year later that fissure cracked open as you played out images of my death with another innocent.
That crack. Only the moments before my own death terrified me more than seeing that crack opening, that unstoppable crack. You’d found the images, I’d given you. It had been a game until the mother called. And then something tweaked. A realisation. You knew something was wrong – the game was more than a game. The image worked its way into that small crack and, like water turning to ice, prised it to an opening into which darkness seeped. My darkness.
It frightened me. I ran and ran. Until there was only that other light, I ran. Confronted with its brilliance, I knew it could see me, see right through me. I saw myself, saw what I had become, saw my own darkness, the one seeping into you, the miserable truth of malevolence no child – no human being – should ever learn first hand. I had become death.
For the first time in 32 years I learned something new. I saw myself and wept. Go into the light? No. Not possible. I left the compassionate light that is all love, all forgiveness, the light that was forgiving me, loving me, even as it illuminated my own darkness for me to see. I could not bear its forgiveness when I could not forgive myself. In this litany of apologies I add another. Maybe going back to the cellar would have been best, certainly best for you, Instead, I returned to you with the misguided promise that I would close up that fissure I’d opened. I would purge you of that malevolence I’d let seep into you. I would make you right.
When I came back to you that night, you slept. Your light shone with compassion again, a greater depth of it than you can imagine, or you would not have survived the returning refugee of murder. You would not have survived the fissure, the wound. There it was. Still, dark, somber. Something seeped from it. Something ugly, hateful. A memory of something evil that sparked the Tyrannosaur dream, with its razor teeth and great powerful strides. You clung to the jeep as it rollicked through the jungle barely a step ahead of snapping jaws. I went to you then, tried to still your thoughts, tried to wrestle you from your dream, but the Tyrannosaur only closed the distance. It had never gotten so close before. When you awoke, it was with the sensation of crunching bone. How well I knew that sensation. It was the last thing I ever felt.
I told myself it was my presence in you, my first effort of giving since I died, that calmed you. But, no, it was your own doing. Then and now, you’ve been stronger than I. Your resilient love brought us to this point of healing. You learned to run by my example. You learned to disconnect from life, to dissociate, to draw within and protect yourself from the darkness I’d brought to you. By the time I understood how awry my intentions had gone we were inextricably tied together. I no longer knew how to leave you. It was sticky. We were stuck. And you kept us alive.
Marilyne is right to say that without your remarkable compassion you’d have died or gone insane. Listen to her. She’s wise, and sensitive. Listen to her as she tells you to seek that inner voice. She knows something unusual is here, trying to tell you something that’s so important. I’m saying it again and again. Please, hear me.
I wish you could hear me.
Tags: compassion, crossing over, death, dreams, innocence, life after death, spirit realm, subconscious, the light
While browsing in a chain bookstore I picked up a beautiful text featuring the world’s 100 most spiritual places. Leafing through it, I was startled to discover how many I’d visited. More than that, I’d knocked off nearly all the ones in places I’d travelled to. Until that day, I’d never really thought of myself as a spiritual nomad, just a nomad.
One of the places I got to that was not in that book was Shugakuin, a Tendai Buddhist temple on Kyoto’s Mount Hiei, famous now for the Marathon Monks who run a marathon every day for a year. Historically it’s more famous for being the home of Saicho, the 9th Century monk who brought Tendai Buddhism (a branch of Mahayana) from China to Japan. It took a while to catch on but, shortly after Saicho’s death in 823, the emperor gave Tendai his official approval, marking a reproach of the more ascetic Therevada influences favoured until that time.
Among Buddha’s Four Noble Truths is the central precept, "Life is dukkha." Dukkha is typically translated as "suffering," an awkward interpretation of the word’s subtle meanings and intent, but if you think of it as "you can’t always get what you want, so if your happiness is dependent on getting that, you’ll never be happy" you’ll have the right idea. (There’s a fuller explanation here .) Buddhist practice is essentially about learning to not want what you can’t always have. What differs among them is how you go about learning that.
Therevada seems oriented primarily toward learning to not want anything. Tendai, and the Mahayana and Zen precepts from which it is derived, are more inclined toward discovering the beauty in all things (a very Daoist mode of thought). Nothing exemplifies this approach to not wanting more aptly than a quote from Saicho himself…
To a practitioner of Tendai,
Everything is wonderful.
It’s perhaps my favourite quote and no surprise it shows up in the very first post of Transformations . But, oh my, how difficult a tenet it is to live by! I try…and sometimes succeed. Those are good days. Very good days.
The other days? Well, you can’t always have what you want.
Tags: book:isbn=0877734154, book:isbn=1402747373, book:isbn=1426203365, book:isbn=1888729023, book:isbn=1888729104, book:isbn=1888729108, Buddhism, dukkha, sacred, spirituality, Tendai, wonderful
Hmmmm. . . feeling in the mood for a little passion today…
I love the gestures, the embraces. I love the passionate, sensual energy captured in each painting, especially Chekirov and Martinez … Oh My! My imagination soars, crosses the ocean between us and you are here, embracing me.
Tags: art, Beauty, dance, embrace, Love, paintings, passion, prints, sensuality, touch
I love Passion ! Now that’s an inspiring gallery. But sweetness, how ever did you miss this Chekirov print?
Hmmm? Ms. Passionate Parisien?
Yes, Paris is a date…Quatorze Juillet at the North East leg…and then after the Tower, we’ll find a wonderful little pension and while away the days as the French scurry all about us, intent on baguettes, crepes and demi tasse.
Tags: art, Beauty, Love, paintings, paris, passion, prints, sensuality
Hey Staci,
Found some more butterfly images to play with. I’m thinking about making them part of the site theme. I’ll have to talk to Tweet about the Twitter one. We’ve been having a little to-and-fro on that. I’m really liking two, which I think will work well: the one with the single yellow butterfly in the field of blue…or the yellow monarchs on daisies.
I guess that’s three 
Anyway, as always…hover the cursor over the images for some notes…
Hmmm… the more I look at it…I think the lonely yellow guy is the way to go. That splash of vibrant yellow in a huge field of saturated blue oughtta look great!
Tags: art, Beauty, butterfly, colour, emergence, paintings, Perfection, photographs, prints
The butterflies are gorgeous, gorgeous. All of them, but I really love the monarchs and daisies. They’re special. I know you’ve already sold Tweet on the lonely butterfly, but … if you’re going to go with butterflies anyway, those are stronger images. I do like Tweet’s avatar, though!
Was it at all tempting to categorise that post under "Perfection" rather than "Beauty"? Or in addition to? I know you tagged it ‘perfection’, but there is something so perfect about them, something that transcends beauty…maybe they deserve to be categorised in "Perfection" too? I know your intention for that category is for representations of ‘enlightened paths’ rather than expressions of beauty, but … butterflies are a metaphor for transcendence to a state of perfection. Is there anything more perfect than a butterfly drying its wings after emerging from the chrysalis?
That brings me to the butterflies themselves. Do you really think they’re the best thematic representation? When we brainstormed names for the site, the themes you were most drawn to were emergence, transformation and metamorphosis. You say the big changes are still coming (an amazing possibility given the profound breakthroughs and changes you’ve already experienced) so why pick a thing so perfect?
I just had a quick google for metamorphosis and found this image…maybe it’ll give you something to think on…so many great themes in it — and a butterfly too!
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lol — listen to me. Using "God Beauty Perfection Love :: Synonyms" was my idea (I do so love it. It’s my favourite of the "16 Thoughts " … oh, 17 now). And the butterfly is a near perfect representation for it: It’s divine, beautiful, perfect and who couldn’t love a butterfly? Becoming the butterfly is what this site’s all about, right?
Go with the butterfly. But use the daisies!!! They’re so gorgeous, gorgeous!
xx
Tags: art, Beauty, butterfly, change, emergence, metamorphosis, paintings, Perfection, prints