I saw someone write these words…

Life…it’s a hero’s journey.

It is.

I confessed, yes.

So, now what?

Instead of saying no, how can I say yes?  Yes to the current situation, yes to the future. 

Yes to the light feeling I have. Yes to the smile on my face. Yes to what I carry inside.

It seems like I’m already doing it.

I love counter-intuitive thinking, the ability to see things, life, people in ways we don’t readily see. A great example is this post on why it’s good the economy sucks. From my reading of it, this economy is forcing you, me, the writer, everyone to think differently about our money, our stuff, our psychic energy. Are we directly ourselves and are dwindling resources in the proper direction? Good, thought-provoking questions. I love this sort of thinking. I love how adversity is a teacher.

I haven’t been ignoring the economic crisis we are all facing. It’s been a slow-motion disaster, a hurricane we have to live through every day. And what is amazing is this–how much of this is intangible. Perception, confidence, greed, fear. Untouchable concepts, hard to touch, but my God, can we feel them. How can you overcome them, reach some semblance of balance in a world seemingly gone mad?

I wonder, am I suffering from a failure of imagination. Or, am I, in my stillness, finding the way forward?

Hmmm, I think, with a bemused smile, the way forward.

Interesting, and kind of counter-intuitive…

The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.

-Kahlil Gibran

(hat tip)

Over the weekend I had a lot of dreams, but the problem is there was a lot of static inside, and I couldn’t/haven’t deciphered them. Aargh.

So, so true…

When I write, I let off steam. But I want it to be more than that. I want to be able to connect with the wider world. I believe my words and my experiences are part of a wider universe. What I go though in life isn’t unique–it is universal. People have gone through worse than I have. I have to be aware of that. I don’t want to live in my head all the time, and that’s why I write, to let it out of me. And to make the connection with others.

I like writing with no theme, a sort of stream-of-conscious rambling, or rummaging through my cluttered, always-on mind.

*****

I was called distant by a friend this week. And honestly, I had reason to be distant (we have a very serious reason). But, instead of being too defensive about it, I asked myself a simple question:

Am I distant?

I can be, yes. Because I am shy, I have to continually fight through that. I have to come to terms with some of the less glamorous aspects of me. As another friend says, it’s about progress, not perfection. I have to keep trying and keep trying.

*****

Nice quote

I come from the East, most of you [here] are Westerners. If I look at you superficially, we are different, and if I put my emphasis on that level, we grow more distant. If I look on you as my own kind, as human beings like myself, with one nose, two eyes, and so forth, then automatically that distance is gone. We are the same human flesh. I want happiness; you also want happiness. From that mutual recognition, we can build respect and real trust of each other. From that can come cooperation and harmony.

-His Holiness the Dalai Lama

*****

Alike!

I knew the President and I had something in common (of course, besides skin color).

I was on Twitter last night, and via TweetDeck, noticed a bunch of people posting quotes. One after the other, they came in a torrent. Good quotes, silly quotes, thoughtful quotes. I jumped in adding a a few of my own. It was a good way to fall asleep…

I had a dream.

I was on a highway, and there were bridges and overpasses swooping and soaring above the landscape. Where were they going? Where were they coming from?

Who knows.

Ah, love. Romantic love.

Who doesn’t want vanilla skies and white-picket fences? And to give the roses and chocolates to their beloved? I certainly do.

Yet.

Maybe my view of love is jaundiced from what I do during the day. I see, from afar, some of the worst that man does to his fellow man. Such as this one from Cambodia. I could pluck out many more. Every day.

When you see that, you wonder how in the hell can human beings love each other.

Then you read something like this.

Redemption.

Humans are capable of love and its total opposite. This fact has to be acknowledged. I believe humans can overcome the spectacular bullshit they pull like the Khmer Rouge to do something like give back lost money.

I’m not knocking romantic love, and I’m not celebrating nihilistic tendencies.

I want love. I don’t want my view of it to be jaundiced. But I’m realistic about it. And what people are capable of. Through it all,  I still believe in them.

Love it when an idea comes into my head. The light is on and burning brightly for the masses.

Do the thing you are afraid to do and the death of fear is certain.–Ralph Waldo Emerson.

(hat tip) (This twitter thing is starting to pay some dividends.)

Hmmm…

I wonder about something, and someone.

On the outside, I may seem rigid, a rules man. But, like the jazz I love, I’m not scared of improvisation. I’m not really afraid to break a rule here or there.

Bare with me. In jazz, some of the best music comes from improvisation, being flexible enough to play outside the notes on the sheet music.

I have a friend. And I talk about flexibility, relaxation with this friend. And I wonder sometimes if the message gets through. I hand out flexibility and relaxation, and I get back pressure, force and rigidity. It’s almost as if my friend sees flexibility as a fault, a flaw. I don’t believe it is.

Zen, as a spiritual discipline,…is consistently opposed to rigidity…Fixity is death; fluidity is life.–Winston L. King, Zen and the Way of the Sword

I’ve written about this before, but I’ll restate it. Flexibility is freedom, rigidity is a jail cell. The cage may be gilded, but it’s still a cage.

Let’s say, hypothetically , I want to love someone. What I could do is hold on so tightly to that love that withers and dies because I’ve smothered it. Or, I could lighten my embrace and feel it grow.

If there is something I want, and want badly, the worst thing I can do is hold on tightly to it. The tighter my grip, the less I truly have it. (I have to have this or I’m not complete without it! Tosh.)

Relax, and let go of what you want. Don’t possess it, don’t pursue it. Sit. Still.

To my friend, I say to you–flexibility. Fluidity. Not brittleness. Fluidity.

Interesting thought here…

The secret of life is to “die before you die” and realise there is no death.

(hat tip)

Who would go the beach in the middle of February, with a wind whipping out of the north, and temperatures below freezing?

Dare you ask?

I live in central New Jersey, and one of the great things about being here is I can finish this post right now, and be walking on sand and staring at the ocean in less than a hour. Ain’t life grand?

It’s the middle of February. What can you possibly see?

The sun continues its daily journey above an empty beach

A desolate landscape? Hardly.

Contemplation

In flight

A dance of light

Sand dance

Mass of feathers

Symbolism

My word, exactly

Your humble writer/photographer

You can see all of the pictures here

There is patience, and there is not patience.

Patience is not putting up with someone else’s BS, thinking that if you do, that person will love you enough more.

Patience is compassion, understanding, time, time and more time. It’s not condescension, or arrogance. It is humility. It is humanity. It is love. True love.

It is what it is.

To me, the scariest book in the Bible is the Book of Revelations, which details the end of the world. (Another scary book to me is The Turner Diaries, but that’s another discussion for another time.)

This weekend found me making some revelations. Nothing as world-changing–or world-ending–as those in the Bible, but my eyes are more open now…

If you keep putting your hands on the stove, pretty soon, you won’t have a hand left.

Patience is always necessary. Sorry, you can’t avoid it. Of all the arrows in your quiver, this is the one you must have. No negotiations here.

Time heals wounds. But if you rush time, the wounds will be compounded, making the job of recovery that much harder. The step forward you think you’re taking may be a step backward.

Your friends may sometimes disagree with you. They do have your best interests at heart, even if you don’t hear from them what you want.

Another thing about friends. They know things. Heed their wisdom. They don’t want to see you make the same mistakes they’ve made.

The universe is in balance. Are you? Are you sure?

Commercial pilots will report on the weather they are flying through to alert others behind them to rough conditions–rain, ice, lightning, turbulence.

Friends do this, too. If they see a friend in trouble, or if the friend is heading into something, they’ll alert them to the dangers ahead. Why? They have flown the same paths, they have been through the same things, and they do not want to see their friend get caught in the same rough air. In short, they are showing their friend compassion.

Whether the friend heeds their advice and cautions, that, Shakespeare would say, is the rub.

The pilots ahead of you have told you what the weather ahead is.

“Areas of trouble give out rays of hope; the one unchangeable certainty is that nothing is certain or unchangeable.”

and

“Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men.”

Both from John F. Kennedy

(hat tip)

I had a dream last night.

I was in a restaurant back home, and I was ordering a cheesebruger and buying a magazine. I reached for my wallet and found I didn’t have enough cash. No problem, I’ll just use my credit card. Well, that was declined. Ok, I’ll whip out my debit card. Declined. No money at all.

I checked my accounts–I’m fine.

But I’m wondering. Were my lack of money and me doppelgangers–stand-ins–for something else and someone else? Me a stand-in for a friend, and the money being a stand-in for time?

Is my friend, whom I care very much about,not taking enough time to do something extraordinarily important?

I want to be in a relationship. I really do. I feel like I have a lot to give to someone. At the same time, I’m comfortable with myself. And I know I can always improve (remember–progress, not perfection). I found this paragraph from this blog intriguing…

If you feel secure, you can enjoy being alone, and solitude is a state that people seek to deepen their connection with nature, the spiritual, and their own being. The “being alone” that people dread is that state of being out of connection with others: not belonging, not being understood, feeling invisible, like you don’t matter. It’s the sense of isolation, being on the outside looking in, feeling left behind. Although being lonely is associated with “single”, it actually is not the province of being single. (See Bella’s review of research in Part I and in Singled Out).

Now, I know what tomorrow is, and I don’t want anyone think that that ol’ chehaw can’t turn on the afterburners when it comes to romance. But a relationship is a helluva lot more than romance.

(hat tip)

I’ve been accused of trying to flatter people, and I hope I know better than that.

“He who knows how to flatter also knows how to slander.”–Napoleon

(hat tip)

Like politeness. No matter what the state of the economy is.

There are points in the day where I just want to be still. Not do anything or go anywhere. Just sit.

In western society, there is immense pressure to move, keep moving, gotta move gotta move gotta move. All I want is for 10 minutes, 15 minutes, to be still. That’s all, nothing more. Just be still.

We tend to see calmness, peace, stillness as signs of weakness, a lack of passion for life. Hardly. I believe that I can handle the passion for life, the passion of love, the calmer I am.

Meditation, zazen, is something I want to do more of. In a way, it helps me stay off the hamster wheel that life can be sometimes.

Maybe I should twitter about just getting out of the shower. It can’t possibly be as bad as twittering about your flying over Baghdad, or costing your party a shot at a state senate majority.

Ah, the joys of Twitter…

The wind here today is ferocious. Gusts of up to 60 mph. It’s been bad enough here in New Jersey that three people have died this afternoon.

What does this fearsome wind portend? What changes are coming on its invisible currents? No one really knows. The howling outside my window is a clear sign that powers beyond what mere mortals can conjure up. A day like should be a humbling  one, a reminder of who we are and where we are.

A gentle reminder that I Tumble a lot of good stories I see to my Tumblr page. (Check out the story on the Religion of Personal Development. Thought-provoking stuff.) And the Twitter experiment seems to be going well. I haven’t twittered that I just got out of the shower, and that’s great.

I spent many a Sunday in church, and always in a suit I hated wearing. Maybe the sermons I heard will stick, who knows. But I do remember the rhythm and cadences of the preachers. If you believe them or not, ok–but you had to be mesmerized by them and the way they could enthrall a congretation.

I was thinking, if I had a sermon, what would I preach it on. Maybe this.

You need to be as grateful for your enemies as you are for your friends. You don’t go searching for enemies (at least, you shouldn’t). But even the people you think hate you, or the people who did wrong by you, can teach you something.

The question is, are you willing to listen?

You need to be as grateful for your enemies as you are for your friends.

(I can hear the church saying amen right now.)

I mean, really.

I was driving on the turnpike this morning and everyone seemed to be in a rush. Changing lanes, speeding, tailgating–all rising to get to jobs they despised.

Huh?

And there’s some knucklehead out there wondering if Obama’s presidency is a failure–three weeks in.

Are you kidding me? Seriously?

I’m not scared of going fast, but why is everybody in such a damn rush? Slow down a little.

Or, the Tao of Small Things.

Last night, I bought a basketball to shoot after work.

I’ve stopped eating after 8 (on school nights).

I’ve started walking again after a cold winter stretch.

I listen to ambient music after 8 (also on school nights).

What do those things have to do with anything?

A lot.

These are little things, little pieces of the puzzle of my wellness, physically and emotionally. I want to build on these small things everyday, and hopefully keep them going for the long haul. From little acorns, big oaks grow. I want to keep growing because the journey never really ends.

As a friend told me, it’s about progression, and not perfection.

Normally, my commute into the office isn’t much to write about. Get in the car, a few turns, listen to the radio, and you’re at the office. But I noticed two things today…

As I turned the corner to get on the road, I saw the moon, ablaze, aglow, hovering just over a deep blue horizon, as the sun was rising in the opposite direction. Just stunnin and beautiful.

My commute takes me past an airport. And it’s always fun to watch the planes on final or seeing them take off. This afternoon, the timing was perfect–a jetliner was starting its takeoff roll as I was coming along. I looked at the jet as it gained speed, outracing the cars on the turnpike. Then a few seconds later, it lifted off from the runway, heading to some far-off destination with its precious cargo.

Have you ever wondered why roads are where they are while you’re driving somewhere? Some old horse trail or Indian trial has now become a superhighway. An easy way to get to point B from point A.

Somebody, sometime or another, had to blaze a trail. Cut through dense forest, slog through swamp, climb over mountains, walk through a blazing desert.

What path are you blazing today?

It’s been quite cold here in New Jersey since the beginning of the year. I like cold weather, but it sort of drained me a little. Bundling up against the cold, dreading the walk to and from the car. The snow we got made it better.

Then yesterday, something happened. It warmed up. If you could call 45 degrees warm. But, after weeks of bone-chilling weather, the 45 degrees and sun felt like manna from heaven. Enough that I walked to the coffee shop. Through the now-melting snow.

It’s supposed to be warmer today. It’s time to shed some of those winter layers.

Before it snows again.

“Be patient with yourself. Self-growth is tender; it’s holy ground. There’s no greater investment.” – Stephen R. Covey

I am going to do something I never thought I’d do. I’m surprised–shocked–that I’m going down this road. And who knows where it will lead.

I am going to…

Start posting updates to Twitter.

(What, you were expecting something big? )

I don’t really get Twitter. It has its uses, surely–it can be an easy news to spread news. But mostly it seems to be used for navel-gazing exercises–something I want to avoid here. I don’t want to twitter about every detail of my day (do you really care about whether or not I’m eating cheese now?) Instead, if a deep thought comes bouncing in my head, I’ll try to put it on my Twitter feed here, which you can follow.I don’t want it to take away from my blogging–actually, I may use it to highlight it.

This is an experiment– I may abandon it, or simply get bored with it. We shall see.

There’s a difference between alone and lonely.

From the outside, it might seem that I’ve been lonely all my life. The only black kid in class. The only black kid in Boy Scouts. The only black guy in an office. The only black guy in the jazz club. For my first 18 years, I was an only child.

One day, in my first year of college, I was eating lunch alone in the cafeteria. My computer programming teacher walked by and said, “There he is, sitting in solitary splendor.”

In this society, we treat being alone as if it is some horrible, disfiguring disease. It simply isn’t the case, I don’t think. In this day, where information swirls constantly and we are being asked to process it quickly, isn’t some solitude called for? Some way to keep and maintain our humanity? We can always re-engage, dive back into thte river of life. We shouldn’t be penalized for wanting to sit on the shore for a little bit.

Solitary splendor, indeed.

I get in the car after a day’s work and turn on the radio. I always try to grab a traffic report, given the vagaries of the highways in the area. Driving on the turnpike is always a roll of the dice.

Lo and behold, there is a truck fire on the turnpike, in the direction I need to go home. Now, here is the decision point: do I take my normal route home, or take a detour? Simple–take the detour, a route I haven’t used in months, but still remember. The detour is slower, and I hit a little traffic near the turnpike. But I end up on the good side of the traffic backup, and I continue down the highway.

So, what did we learn today? A plan B is always good to have. Know there’s more than one way home.

And always listen to the traffic reports.

Beware the barrenness of a busy life.–Socrates

We all need a little room for contmeplation as we run around in our daily lives.