"Livin' Like a Lusty Flower" ~ SCROLL DOWN!!! Share Some Life With Me!

"Livin' Like a Lusty Flower" ~ SCROLL DOWN!!! Share Some Life With Me!
"Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right"

Soulshine

Soulshine

DOSE

DOSE

Friday, December 29, 2006

Splendor and Terror

"Now, for the moment, they are gone - the tubes and wires, the clergy, my wife and daughter-and across my chest is a kind of grate, as if, were it not there, my heart might escape, swell and break through. But it was contained.
My breath is shallow. I shuffle like the old man I have recently been claiming to be: not pretending now, but the real thing. Tubeless and wireless, I look in my lavatory mirror, and the face is grey almost as death - but death departing, not homing in.
Sometimes during the eleven weeks I was in Israel, Mary Ellin had her sixtieth birthday. Katherine and Benjy gave the party, their first, in their new apartment on Washington Heights, and read my greetings from the Holy Land. I celebrated our thirty-fifth anniversary in a sleeping bag on the cooling sands of the Sinai, and when I was back in Jersalem Mary Ellin phoned to tell me that Elizabeth, our eldest was expecting a baby, our first grandchild next May.
Coming up from walking Molly, our dog in Riverside Park, I had felt a little odd, short of breath, slightly dizzy: not much to go on, a ghost of older symptoms. After climbing every mountain in the Holy Land, to succumb to a few steps from Riverside Drive to Claremont Avenue, which was what I was doing, seemed ludicrous.
So I am back where I have been many times before. They have, I am told split me open like a chicken, rearranged things, and sewed me back up, as good as new, or at least a lot better than I was.
Mary Ellin reports that her father called, asking before she could tell him the latest development, to talk to me. He had just got the card I sent him from Jerusalem, and with that curiosity which at ninety-eight is still not satisfied, demanded an accounting of what was going on in the land of his forefathers. Mary Ellin gave him my current address. "Oh, my God," he said, which was, in my opinion, an appropriate response. The in-laws' flowers are conspicuous on the windowsill along with a handmade Christmas card from our artist son, and the animals from the Christmas stocking our middle daughter has put together for me: a papier-mache zebra, a glass frog, a stuffed seal. Beyond the pane, past the largest Gothic church in Christendom, a mountain in grey stone, are the pigeons, the peacocks, and the chickens, in the sun of the cathedral yard.
Temper the wind to the shorn Lamb-where do the old enter into that prescription? Are the old shorn, or are they covered by the wool of experience? Are they bright-eyed and bushy-tailed young (certainly not a shorn image) the truly shorn, having not yet grown their winter coats? It is another of those sayings that flips under examination, and then flips again. Did this latest sickness, did my sojourn in the Holy Land, Shear me or furnish me with another , thicker blanket? And is it more desireable, after all, to be shorn-better to be exposed than protected?
Indeed, at sixty-six I have been camping out in the Sinai, in the sand in a sleeping bag, celebtrating a distant anniversary with questionable food an drink? Should I have been staring sleepless across a dry, stony valley to a soaring cliff that could be, under an almost full moon, a sleeping city, a deserted monastery, or a derelict temple? Experience would seem to answer "yes."
~~
So approaching three score and ten I have managed a peak experience. Does a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and back make me a little short of being old? Pilgrims are of no particular age. But perhaps pilgrims who come back are not yet quite old. And now with my quintuple bypass I am back yet again.
As you move through your life your hope in miracles, in luck, in happy accidents, in immunity, disappears, along with your dread of the opposite. The miracle is not something that happens to you - it is all around you, and you are embedded in it, moving through it, part of it.
Accustomed to limits, to guidlelines, to markers, I stand here stunned, amazed. I haven't had such a sense of space since I was twenty-the splendor, and the terror of it. All that out there ahead of me, around me, to be explored, to be prospected, mapped, traversed.
The Holy Land and the operating theater are out of sight. For the moment the space is clear, and it is up to me to cross it.
Marvin Barrett
The above is from a consideration of old age in the form of a journal, kept in the years leading up to the author's seventieth birhday.

Monday, December 25, 2006

Copy&Paste&Bass Picks

Who can complain about cut and paste ability computers allow. Joel D. provided this link he found on YouTube. The Amazing Allen Woody. One needs only to cut and paste a url into a blogger/webpage...and voila you too can "Ride That Rockin Horse." A few of you have already seen this link. But again, thank you Joel for sharing, cause I like to share with others too! I have a bass pick of Allen Woody's with Warren Hayne's name printed on it. You'll see his black bass pick the one on the left which is printed correctly with his name on it...and the other with Warren's name on it. Allen was pissed about the faux pas and refused to play with the bass/Haynes pick...The purple pick he actually handed to me after a Blue Floyd show in Ohio. I know it's hard to see but the edge of the purple one is essentially gone. The bottom pick is a Berry Oakley Jr. I wish I had a Derek Trucks! I have a few other picks of different artists. My all time favorite remains the Woody Bass Pick w/Warren Haynes printed on it!

ENJOY!

c

Monday, December 18, 2006

The Problem with Miracles

What Should a Billionaire Give–and What Should You? (Pete Singer)

For Mimi, Scott, Joel, Poc, Steve, Oddleif and Keith, Buddy B. Jim B. DCB and of course Eugene, Mighty and Quiche. Each one of you not only perform, work and make miracles happen, but are miracles too. True friendship is never forgotten and never dims. And to those who understand the equal value of all human life as a guide to life, not just as a nice piece of rhetoric.

Everyone at Christmas talks about "miracles" and we all know the cliche "miracles happen to those who work for them." I think it is safe to say, though I often act fearful, behave fearfully, have much hopelessness, sadness, and panic, true friends remind me that these states of being "frightened" or "hopeless" belie my true self. Often in life the "worst" happens. It is no less true that Bilbo Baggins does throw The Ring into the Molten Lava, that Scrooge joins the world after seeing the ghosts of Christmas Past, Christmas Present and Christmas Future and there really is "Somewhere over the Rainbow...where dreams really do come true."Friends are like Samwise Gamgee...when you can't get yourself to the top of the mountain to throw The Ring into Mordor they carry you the last few steps, and help to make the miracle happen. They fight off Gollum or the Wicked Witch of the West or the Children of Ignorance and Fear (Christmas Present-Dickins) Miracles are true. Working to create them is good. Therein lies my vision: Our notion of "miracle" can often appear like hope rewarded and yet we manage to miss a profound point and we fail to see "there is a problem with miracles, as well. At the moment of the miracle, God/Friend (I insert friend into this quote) suspends the laws of nature and the limited consciousness of the human mind, but because this influence is imposed from without, when the miracle ends, the presence of the Divine/Friendship (again cb here inserting friendship) is soon forgotten. Nature-human nature included-returns to its course, and a person must once again struggle with his own unrefined character."(Eliezer Shore: The Milk of Miracles)

"We all long for miracles for the sudden inspiration that will fix our lives and the world. We are like the child of that poor man in the Talmud, nursing on the milk of a miracle: When will we grow up? For no miracle can replace the work we must do ourselves. Only the most dedicated and mature effort will bring both ourselves and the world to perfection. God says, "Let us make man" (Genesis 1:26) the work depends upon both of us." "The Midrash says that "the world cannot exist without miracles." For they provide us with inspiration , and remind us that the Kingdom we are trying to build is ultimately not our own. However true growth is never a gift from above, but the result of a long and arduous process. In the end, we can achieve the transcendence that we desire, but only by overcoming the most difficult obstacles (no wonder it took Bilbo and Frodo 4 Books!). The greatest miracle of all is that a person can change." ."(Eliezer Shore: The Milk of Miracles)

"Free will is not always an advantage for creation, though it does make life and love meaningful. It also gives us a role in creation, since there is still work to be done." "Creation and miracles are about work and process, not the perfect product. The product is the result of the process." (Bernie Siegel: A Way of Healing)

An every day effort, large or small, culminating in a wonderful manifestation that gives us miracle daily. Below is an article I have taken excerpts from published in The New York Times on December 17, 2006. PLEASE UNDERSTAND, I'VE MOVED PARTS OF THIS ARTICLE AROUND, REMOVED MUCH OF IT AND ARRANGED IT SO THAT I COULD GET THE "GIST" OF IT ON MY BLOG IN A SIZE THAT PERHAPS MAY CAUSE PAUSE BUT MAY HAVE THE POTENTIAL OF BEING READ. THIS ARTICLE IS ALSO IS NOT REPRESENTED COMPLETELY. The article continues to run us through some exercises on the value of a human being and what it would cost the rich of the U.S. not even of the world, to stop hunger. How much people would have to donate at a minumum. How much they would continue to make after the donation, who should donate etc. If you like I can supply you with the the article its entirety. Nevertheless, my emphasis here is to show the value of humanity, for as I stress in my post "Throwing Stones", it is our ability to be indifferent and complacent that kills us...and stops miracles from occuring and cause us to forget the miracles that have happened. It is why I want to press on that the miraculous is daily so that we may never become too complacent, too indifferent, so that we will always "feel" the miracle and make miracles happen. Peter Singer is the Ira W. DeCamp professor of bioethics at the Center for Human Values at Princeton University. He is the author of many books, including most recently “The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter.” Perhaps some philanthropists are motivated by their sense of duty. Apart from the equal value of all human life, the other “simple value” that lies at the core of the work of the Gates Foundation, according to its Web site, is “To whom much has been given, much is expected.” That suggests the view that those who have great wealth have a duty to use it for a larger purpose than their own interests. But while such questions of motive may be relevant to our assessment of Gates’s or Buffett’s character, they pale into insignificance when we consider the effect of what Gates and Buffett are doing. The parents whose children could die from rotavirus care more about getting the help that will save their children’s lives than about the motivations of those who make that possible.

Interestingly, neither Gates nor Buffett seems motivated by the possibility of being rewarded in heaven for his good deeds on earth. Gates told a Time interviewer, “There’s a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning” than going to church. Put them together with Andrew Carnegie, famous for his freethinking, and three of the four greatest American philanthropists have been atheists or agnostics. (The exception is John D. Rockefeller.) In a country in which 96 percent of the population say they believe in a supreme being, that’s a striking fact. It means that in one sense, Gates and Buffett are probably less self-interested in their charity than someone like Mother Teresa, who as a pious Roman Catholic believed in reward and punishment in the afterlife. Is there a line of moral adequacy that falls between the 5 percent that Allen has given away and the roughly 35 percent that Gates has donated? Few people have set a personal example that would allow them to tell Gates that he has not given enough, but one who could is Zell Kravinsky. A few years ago, when he was in his mid-40s, Kravinsky gave almost all of his $45 million real estate fortune to health-related charities, retaining only his modest family home in Jenkintown, near Philadelphia, and enough to meet his family’s ordinary expenses. After learning that thousands of people with failing kidneys die each year while waiting for a transplant, he contacted a Philadelphia hospital and donated one of his kidneys to a complete stranger. After reading about Kravinsky in The New Yorker, I invited him to speak to my classes at Princeton. He comes across as anguished by the failure of others to see the simple logic that lies behind his altruism. Kravinsky has a mathematical mind — a talent that obviously helped him in deciding what investments would prove profitable — and he says that the chances of dying as a result of donating a kidney are about 1 in 4,000. For him this implies that to withhold a kidney from someone who would otherwise die means valuing one’s own life at 4,000 times that of a stranger, a ratio Kravinsky considers “obscene.” What marks Kravinsky from the rest of us is that he takes the equal value of all human life as a guide to life, not just as a nice piece of rhetoric. He acknowledges that some people think he is crazy, and even his wife says she believes that he goes too far. One of her arguments against the kidney donation was that one of their children may one day need a kidney, and Zell could be the only compatible donor. Kravinsky’s love for his children is, as far as I can tell, as strong as that of any normal parent. Such attachments are part of our nature, no doubt the product of our evolution as mammals who give birth to children, who for an unusually long time require our assistance in order to survive. But that does not, in Kravinsky’s view, justify our placing a value on the lives of our children that is thousands of times greater than the value we place on the lives of the children of strangers. Asked if he would allow his child to die if it would enable a thousand children to live, Kravinsky said yes. Indeed, he has said he would permit his child to die even if this enabled only two other children to live. Nevertheless, to appease his wife, he recently went back into real estate, made some money and bought the family a larger home. But he still remains committed to giving away as much as possible, subject only to keeping his domestic life reasonably tranquil." For more than 30 years, I’ve been reading, writing and teaching about the ethical issue posed by the juxtaposition, on our planet, of great abundance and life-threatening poverty. Yet it was not until, in preparing this article, I calculated how much America’s Top 10 percent of income earners actually make that I fully understood how easy it would be for the world’s rich to eliminate, or virtually eliminate, global poverty. (It has actually become much easier over the last 30 years, as the rich have grown significantly richer.) I found the result astonishing. I double-checked the figures and asked a research assistant to check them as well. But they were right. Measured against our capacity, the Millennium Development Goals are indecently, shockingly modest. If we fail to achieve them — as on present indications we well might — we have no excuses. The target we should be setting for ourselves is not halving the proportion of people living in extreme poverty, and without enough to eat, but ensuring that no one, or virtually no one, needs to live in such degrading conditions. That is a worthy goal, and it is well within our reach. Peter Singer ***************************** til next time folks: this is the big message the equal value of all human life as a guide to life, not just as a nice piece of rhetoric.

Thursday, December 14, 2006

And the Politicians Throwin' Stones

So the kids they dance
And shake their bones,
And the politicians throwin' stones,
Singing ashes, ashes, all fall down.
Ashes, ashes, all fall down. Heartless powers try to tell us
What to think.
Then the flesh is ink
History's page will thus be carved in stone.
And we are here, and we are on our own
On our own.On our own.On our own.
(John Perry Barlow and Bob Weir)

US Scientists Reject Interference
This article was published by The BBC December 14, 2006
By Jonathan Amos
Science reporter, BBC News, San Francisco
There have been claims of political interference on climate issues Some 10,000 US researchers have signed a statement protesting about political interference in the scientific process. The statement, which includes the backing of 52 Nobel Laureates, demands a restoration of scientific integrity in government policy. According to the American Union of Concerned Scientists, data is being misrepresented for political reasons. It claims scientists working for federal agencies have been asked to change data to fit policy initiatives. The Union has released an "A to Z" guide that it says documents dozens of recent allegations involving censorship and political interference in federal science, covering issues ranging from global warming to sex education. Campaigners say that in recent years the White House has been able to censor the work of agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration because a Republican congress has been loath to stand up for scientific integrity. "It's very difficult to make good public policy without good science, and it's even harder to make good public policy with bad science," said Dr Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security. "In the last several years, we've seen an increase in both the misuse of science and I would say an increase of bad science in a number of very important issues; for example, in global climate change, international peace and security, and water resources." The statement was released at the American Geophysical Union's Fall Meeting. It is an annual gathering of Earth scientists. Last year, it triggered a major row when a discussion here resulted in the renowned US space agency climate scientist Dr James Hansen later claiming he had come under pressure not to talk to the media on global warming issues. Michael Halpern from the UCS said the statement of objection to political interference had been supported by researchers regardless of their political views. "This science statement that has now been signed by the 10,000 scientists is signed by science advisers to both Republican and Democratic administrations dating back to President Eisenhower, stating that this is not business as usual and calling for this practice to stop," he told BBC News. The Union said is was hopeful that the new Congress taking office in January would show a greater commitment to protecting the integrity of the scientific process. Jonathan.Amos-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk

Wednesday, December 13, 2006

If Not For You

If not for you,Babe,

I couldn't find the door, Couldn't even see the floor, I'd be sad and blue,If not for you. If not for you,Babe, I'd lay awake all night, Wait for the mornin' light To shine in through, But it would not be new, If not for you.If not for you My sky would fall,Rain would gather too. Without your love I'd be nowhere at all, I'd be lost if not for you, And you know it's true. If not for youMy sky would fall, Rain would gather too. Without your love I'd be nowhere at all, Oh! What would I do If not for you.If not for you, Winter would have no spring, Couldn't hear the robin sing, I just wouldn't have a clue, Anyway it wouldn't ring true,If not for you. Bob Dylan Posted by Picasa

Tuesday, December 12, 2006

"Weather Report Suite: Part II (Let It Grow)"

Posted by Picasa photo by wildflowerworl words by John Barlow music Grateful Dead
"What shall we say, shall we call it by a name
As well to count the angels dancing on a pin
Water bright as the sky from which it came
And the name is on the earth that takes it in
We will not speak but stand inside the rain
And listen to the
thunder shout
I am, I am, I am, I am
So it goes, we make what we made since the world began
Nothing more, the love of the women, work of men
Seasons round,
creatures great and small, up and down, as we rise and fall"

"Weather Report Suite: Part II (Let It Grow)"

Morning comes, she follows the path to the river shore

Lightly sung, her song is the latch on the morning's door.

See the sun sparkle in the reeds; silver beads pass into the sea

She comes from a town where they call her the woodcutter's daughter

She's brown as the bank where she kneels down to gather her water.

And she bears it away with a love that the river has taught her.

Let it flow, greatly flow, wide and clear.

Round and round, the cut of the plow in the furrowed field

Seasons round, the bushels of corn and the barley meal.

Broken ground, open and beckoning to the spring; black dirt live again.

The plowman is broad as the back of the land he is sowing.

As he dances the circular track of the plow ever knowing.

That the work of his day measures more than the planting and growing.

Let it grow, let it grow, greatly yield.

"What shall we say, shall we call it by a name

As well to count the angels dancing on a pin

Water bright as the sky from which it came

And the name is on the earth that takes it in

We will not speak but stand inside the rain And listen to the

thunder shout I am, I am, I am, I am

So it goes, we make what we made since the world began

Nothing more, the love of the women, work of men Seasons round,

creatures great and small, up and down, as we rise and fall"

Sunday, December 10, 2006

Prayer Flags

photo by xiaobai60 Thirty spokes are joined

together in a wheel, but it is the center hole that allows the wheel to function. We mold clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that makes the vessel useful. We fashion wood for a house, but it is the emptiness inside that makes it livable. We work with the substantial but the emptiness is what we use. Lao Tzu

 Posted by Picasa

WAKAN, MANITOU... "Home Transcends All Physical Dwellings..."

Image hosted by Webshots.com

photo by xiaobai60

WAKAN, MANITOU...MANIDO

"In every Native American language, there is a word which refers to the mysterious, unknowable power of the universe: a power which, even when it manifests itself in ways that affect human beings, still remains a great mystery. Among the Lakota, that word is wakan, while among Algonquin-speakers, such as my own Abenaki people, it is manitou or manido. When great and powerful things occur which are beyond ordinary human power or understanding, when there are miracles such as the coming of the White Buffalo Woman, they are wakan."

(from: WITH VISIBLE BREATH: Miracles in Native American Traditions by Joseph Bruchac)

"With every breath I walk,

Toward the nation I walk,

With visible breath I walk,

Something holy, something

ancient

Something red I bring...

~ The Song of the

White Buffalo Calf Woman

At Home In The World
By Tracy Cochoran
The Christmas Eve after 9/11 I went with my family to a candlelight service at our local Episcopal church. I listened to the story of the Nativity. How right it seemed that God would appear in a humble setting and not in a cocktail party on the Upper East side of Manhattan. The sanctuary was made dark and the first candles were lit. People sang "Silent Night." As one candle tipped into another, I felt like I was watching the unveiling of a greath truth ~ that God does stand for Love and Peace and all qualities in us that seem too soft for this world. I thought of the cross, of the way the horizontal temporal intersects with the vertical and eternal. As the sanctuary filled with light, I realized that the presence of the highest in the lowest places wasn't a solitary event never to happen again. It was always happening.
I looked over At Alex. She was staring straight ahead. I wondered what she was experiencing. I loved her so much that I started to despair. But then I thought of Gandhi, who once said, "When I despair I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won." All through the horizontal pull that on its own takes us outside of ourselves, the vertical is an ever-present possibility. We can always come home to ourselves, come into alignment ~ body, heart, and mind. "Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony," said Gandhi.
Since the attacks, I'd come to see that our true individuality does not consist in anything that seperates us from others but in our ability to open up and respond to life without fear or self consciousness.. In those moments when we are completely integrated and grounded, we can become a gateway for the divine. In the months after 9/11, I had taken to cooking, to lighting candles. Instinctively, I was returning to a role that woman have filled since the dawn of time, keeping the home fires burning. Intuitively, I knew that sharing meals is eternal and enduring, and that the softest things ~ love, the smell of banana bread ~ overcome the hardest. Now I realized that by these ordinary acts of nurturance, of connection, we can become a channel for the hightest vertical and horizontal in balance. I thought back to the day I took Alex to see a former president. I'd had the feeling I was taking her to the inner ring of the tribal fire, to see sombeody who I imagined had been transformed by his extraordinary experience to become a channel that could transmit to the rest of us a sense of greater possibility. I'd wanted her to make her home in the big world. Now I realized that every time we're fully present and respond to life fully, without thought or reservation, when we are at home in ourselves, baking banana bread, acting out all the ordinary little acts of our horizontal lives, we come home to our true selves, a channel for the higher.

"Home is where the Heart is..."

it's just me cb

Friday, December 01, 2006

The Brain Is Wider Than the Sky

The Brain—is wider than the Sky— For—put them side by side— The one the other will contain with ease —and You—beside—Emily Dickinson

www.cosmotions.com Please visit www.Cosmotions.com

The work you will see on these web pages will inspire you...Thad V'Soske has done an amazing job of showing us how lovely the world is...please tell your friends to visit www.Cosmotions.com Thad's inspiration and patience in showing us the mystery of the known and unknown will amaze you. You will be able to see and understand just what a wonderful job he has done in sharing Lovelight and SoulShine. It's all good But this is better! www.cosmotions.com

Free Hugs ~ My Arms Are Wide Open

Carter Heyward: Love, like truth and beauty, is concrete. Love is not fundamentally a sweet feeling; not, at heart, a matter of sentiment, attachment, or being "drawn toward." Love is active, effective, a matter of making reciprocal and mutually beneficial relation with one's friends and enemies.

Elie Wiesel: The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.