Here’s some useful, along with some merely anecdotal and highly subjective discussion on the impending arrival of more cicadas than usual. I don’t remember them being overwhelming in 2004, but vividly remember being astonished by them 17 years earlier than that–more cicadas than I ever dreamed possible. A Jain would have had much trouble walking down the street for worry about stepping on one (or dozens).
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
To find water deep enough for swimming and fresh enough for drinking in the desert is absolutely exquisite, sweet, refreshment. It is love, nectar, and bliss all at once.
A half a mile away on foot in certain directions, this swimming spot was invisible. All that was readily apparent was dry heat and scrub. Sometimes, we feel similarly separated from inner nurture and support amidst the challenges of the world. When we are steady with our sadhana (yoga/meditation practice), we will more and more easily find our own inner bathing spot — karunabdhe (ocean of compassion, an aspect of shiva), even as we engage in and encounter the vagaries and tribulations of daily life. When we know the ocean of compassion is right there in which to bathe whenever we need refreshment, we can engage more fully and with more light and compassion, better to serve and love and delight, whatever difficulties come our way.
Yesterday was this year’s perihelion — the day of the year the earth is closest to the sun in the earth’s annual orbit around the sun. I find in interesting that the perihelion is at the coldest and darkest time of year. The relative proximity of the earth to the sun is of far less import for warmth and light than the tilt of earth away from the sun. So, too, with matters of the spirit. It does not matter how close we are to sources of illumination and learning, if we turn away from them. When we turn towards the light, even if the sources of light are farther from our reach, (the aphelion is in July, our hottest month), we are more likely to become illuminated.
I’ve never really been quite sure what this is supposed to mean, how to do it, or for what purpose.
Among other things, as a practitioner of moderation, it does not seem good to have a goal of getting higher and higher or to vibrate faster and faster.
I slept last night in the room that I slept in as a child. My mother now uses the room to store some of the vestiges of her old antiquing business. The carpet, wallpaper, and curtains from the 1960’s are gone, but the bed is the same one in which I had slept. The picture on the wall is a kit for making a stuffed animal that my Grandma Rose had bought me (probably when I was about 8) at the Brooklyn Museum of Art that my mother decided would be better as framed art than a sewing project for me.
The neighborhood looks different–it is far more developed as is everywhere near a big city–but the bones are the same.
It is a challenge not to feel the weight of my history and ancestry when I return. Taking the time to meditate when I woke helped me stay fully in my adult self.
When we meditate, we ideally dissolve our individual consciousness into the luminous spaciouness of universal consciousness. In that space, where we are temporarily not experiencing ourselves as an individual, we are also not experiencing our individual self in the sequence (krama) of time. The luminous spaciousness of meditative consciousness is sequenceless (akrama) and, as universal consciousness, is the place in which the sequences of being in time and space arise.
What I experienced this morning when I meditated was that I did not have to be flooded with the emotions of my, to try to graciously describe, emotionally challenging childhood. In the space of meditation I could bring to my day an acceptance of all of my life and be where I am at present, coming to a place of recognition that although I lived all of my history, it neither defines me nor binds me from expanding into a space of growing love and light.
Giant sunflower.
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.