Lovely Little Evelyn...

Legacy of Love

Found him...guess we'll visit later.

Little Lottie in Autumn

Connections

I ordered this copy of The Way to Love from Amazon.

As you can see from the note inside,there were at least 

two previous owners, Charles and Susanna. 

Thanks, Charles, for passing your copy, along with your notes,

on to Susanna, a stranger (?) on the train.

Thanks, Susanna, for writing the comments in the front
and eventually deciding to sell the book.

Hmmm...perhaps I could find Charles and tell him how very

significant his "paying it forward" has been for me. 

We just never know...

The Way to Love

(See the PaPa? And I didn't even plan it...just showed up in the picture.)

This little book by Anthony DeMello has found me again. 

I've read it several times over the past six years, 

and each time it finds me in a new way...in a new place, perhaps.

It's been nice to collect pieces of the readings on my blogsite, as a way of remembering Tony's words during this season of my life. 

Adding a fitting Cut-Up has been a fun reminder that

everything does belong, 

be it scripture, the thoughts of a Jesuit priest, a Cut-Up,

or even a recent vacation photo.

Here are highlights from the past several readings:

1-18-2012

What Must I Do?

"Teacher, what good deed must I do, to have eternal life?"

Matthew 19:16

Now you will move through life living from one moment to the other, 

wholly absorbed in the present, carrying with you so little from the past that 
your spirit could pass through the eye of a needle; as little distracted by 
the worries of the future as the birds of the air and the flowers of the field. 

You will be attached to no person or thing, 

for you will have developed a taste for the symphony of life.

You will find yourself traveling unencumbered and free as a bird in the sky, 

always living in the Eternal Now. 

And you will have found in your heart the answer to the question, 

"Master, what is it that I must do to get eternal life?"

(Listening to wonderful FM106.5 including FOX news.)

10-23-2012

No Stone Will Be Left

"When his disciples came to point out to him the buildings of the 
temple, he answered them 'You see all these, do you not? 

Truly, I say to you, there will not be left here 

one stone upon another, that will not be thrown down.'"

Matthew 24:1-2

So watch, observe, question, explore and your mind will come alive 

and shed its fat and become keen and alert and active. 

Your prison walls will come tumbling down 

till not one stone of the Temple will be left upon another, 

and you will be blessed with the unimpeded vision of things as they are, 

the direct experience of Reality.

No comment

10-24-2012

How to Give?

"When you give alms, do not let your left hand know 

what your right hand is doing."

Matthew 6:3

It is with charity as with happiness and holiness. 

It is not possible for you to say that you are happy because 

the moment you become conscious of your happiness 

you cease to be happy. 

What you call the experience of happiness is not 

caused by some person, thing or event. 

True happiness is uncaused. 

You are happy for no reason at all. 

And true happiness cannot be experienced. 

It is not within the realm of consciousness. 

It is unself-consciousness.

Nature is not a technician.

Nature is creative.

10-25-2012

Serpents and Doves

"So be wise as serpents and innocent as doves."

Matthew 10:16

Observe the wisdom that operates in doves 

and in flowers and trees and the whole of Nature. 

It is the same wisdom that does for us what our brain could never do: 

It circulates our blood, digests our food, pumps our hearts, expands our lungs, immunizes our bodies and heals our wounds while our conscious minds 

are engaged in other matters. 

This kind of Nature-wisdom we are only now beginning to discover 

in so-called primitive peoples who, like the dove, are so simple and wise.

When you are too long separated from Nature, 

your spirit withers and dies because it has been wrenched from its roots.

10-27-2012

Men of Violence

"The kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, 

and men of violence take it by force."

Matthew 11:12

Compare the serene and simple splendor of a rose in bloom 

with the tensions and restlessness of your life. 

The rose has a gift that you lack: It is perfectly content to be itself. 

It has not been programmed from birth, as you have been, to be dissatisfied 

with itself, so it has not the slightest urge to be anything other than it is.

That is why it possesses the artless grace and absence of inner conflict 

that among humans is only found in little children and mystics.

When Nature destroys, it is not from ambition or greed or 

self-aggrandizement, but in obedience to mysterious laws that seek 

the good of the whole universe above the survival and well-being of the parts.

10-28-2012

Show No Partiality

"Teacher," they said, "we know that you speak and teach rightly, 

and show no partiality."

Luke 20:21

Look at your life and see how you have filled its emptiness with people. 

As a result they have a stranglehold on you. 

See how they control your behavior by their approval and disapproval.

Love is to be found only in fearlessness and freedom.

It is next to impossible to be dependent, to be a slave, 

when one constantly observes the folly of one's dependence.

How many activities can you count in your life that you engage in 

simply because they delight you and grip your soul? 

Find them out, cultivate them, 

for they are your passport to freedom and to love.

...the road to Reality does not pass through the world of people.

It passes through the world of actions that are engaged in for themselves 

without an eye to success or to gain--or profit actions.

You must not think for love to arise in your heart, you must first meet people.

That would not be love but attraction or compassion. 

Rather it is love that first springs in the heart 

through your contact with the Real. 

Not love for any particular person or thing 

but the reality of love--an attitude, a disposition of love. 

This love then radiates outward to the world of things and persons.

If you desire this love to exist in your life, you must break loose from 

your inward dependence on people by becoming aware of it and by 

engaging in activities that you love to do for themselves.

The moment you touch this Reality you will know

what freedom and love are.

Freedom from people--and so the ability to love them.

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Matthew 4:17 Heavenly!

"Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand."

To put it briefly, the moment you pick up an attachment, 

the functioning of this lovely apparatus called the human heart is destroyed.

You must choose between your attachment and happiness. 

You cannot have both.

(Your attachment) came from a lie that your society and your culture 
have told you, or a lie that you have told yourself, namely, that without this 
or the other, without this person, or the other, you can't be happy.

Do you want your attachment, or your freedom and happiness?

If you wish to be fully alive you must develop a sense of perspective.

If you live long enough, a day will easily come when it 
(this trifle you got so upset about) 
will cease to matter. 

It will not even be remembered--your own experience will confirm this. 

Just as today you barely remember, 
and are no longer the least bit affected by, 

those tremendous trifles that so disturbed you in the past.

The unavoidable conclusion is that no thing or person outside of you 
has the power to make you happy or unhappy.  

It is you and only you who decides to be happy or unhappy, 
whether you will cling to your attachment or not in any given situation.

Repentance, 

the refashioning of the heart, 
has begun and the kingdom of God--the gratefully carefree life of children--
has come within your grasp at last 
and you are about to reach out and take possession of it.

From The Way to Love

Mindfulness (Thanks, Suz)

Get a Life!

I suppose the best piece of advice I could give anyone is pretty simple:  get a life.  A real life, not the manic pursuit of the next promotion, the bigger paycheck, the larger house.  Do you think you'd care so very much about those things if you developed an aneurysm one afternoon, or found a lump in your breast while in the shower?

Get a life in which you notice the smell of salt water pushing itself on a breeze over the dunes, a life in which you stop and watch how a red-tailed hawk circles over a pond and a stand of pines.  Get a life in which you pay attention to the baby as she scowls with concentration when she tries to pick up a Cheerio with her thumb and first finger.

Turn off your cell phone.  Turn off your regular phone, for that matter.  Keep still.  Be present.

Get a life in which you are not alone.  Find people you love, and who love you.  And remember that love is not leisure, it is work.  Each time I look at my diploma, I remember that I am still a student, still learning every day to be human.  Send an e-mail.  Write a letter.  Kiss your mom.  Hug your dad.

Get a life in which you are generous.  Look around at the azaleas making fuchsia star bursts in spring; look at a full moon hanging silver in a black sky on a cold night.  And realize that life is glorious, and that you have no business taking it for granted.

Care so deeply about its goodness that you want to spread it around.  Take the money that you would have spent on beers in a bar and give it to charity.  Work in a soup kitchen.  Tutor a seventh-grader.

All of us want to do well.  But if we do not do good, too, then doing well will never be enough.

Life is short.  Remember that, too.

I've always known this.  Or almost always.  I've been living with mortality for decades, since my mother died of ovarian cancer when she was forty and I was nineteen.  And this is what I learned from that experience:  that knowledge of our own mortality is that greatest gift God ever gives us.

It is so easy to waste our lives:  our days, our hours, our minutes.  It is so easy to take for granted the pale new growth on an evergreen, the sheen of the limestone on Fifth Avenue, the color of our kids' eyes, the way the melody in a symphony rises and falls and disappears and rises again.  It is so easy to exist instead of live.

By Anna Quindlen.

Love

A loving promise: 

"I will never try to fix you, mend you, stop you feeling what you are feeling or give you second-hand, memorized answers. I will never pretend to be 

'the one who knows', 'the enlightened one' or some missionary for 

a conceptual truth so far removed from our present experience. 

I will not get into drama with you, I will not indulge and feed your stories and 

mental conclusions and fears, but at the same time, my friend, I will meet you 

in the fires of hell, I will hold your hand there, I will walk with you as far as you 

need to walk, and not turn away, for you are myself, and in the deepest recesses 

of our experience we are intimately each other, and I cannot pretend otherwise..."

- Jeff Foster

Aha! Little Boxes

My artist friend, 

Coco and I are getting ready for our 

SHOW next month.

Here are the latest in my line of PhoSaics...little boxes with 

treasures inside!

John 9:39 Believing is seeing

"For judgment I came into this world, 

that those who do not see may see, and that those who see may become blind."

It is said that love is blind. But is it? 

Actually nothing on earth is as clear-sighted as love.

The thing that is blind is not love but attachment.

An attachment is a state of clinging that comes from the false belief 

that something or someone is necessary for your happiness.

You see persons and things not as they are but as you are.

If you wish to see them as they are you must attend to your attachments 

and the fears that your attachments generate. 

Because when you look at life it is these attachments and fears 

that will decide what you will notice and what you block out.

What ever you notice then commands your attention.

And since your looking has been selective 

you have an illusory version of the things and people around you.

The more you live with this distorted version 

the more you become convinced that it is the only true picture of the world 

because your attachments and fears continue to process incoming data 

in a way that will reinforce your picture.

It is only when you drop your beliefs, your fears 

and the attachments that breed them that you will be freed 

from the insensitivity that makes you so deaf and blind 

to yourself and to the world.

From The Way to Love

Hang on, Tim

EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. – There he stood on the perfect afternoon, the quarterback who won a division and a playoff game nine months ago – his helmet on, uniform spotless, all ready to go. And once again Tim Tebow was confined to the New York Jets' sideline.

He tried to appear busy in this 35-9
Jets victory over the Indianapolis Colts. He clapped his hands. He patted teammates on the back. He shouted. He cheered. And there were those brief moments he was allowed on the field, including a fourth-and-11 when he took a snap on a fake punt and threw a pass to linebacker Nick Bellore for a first down just before halftime.

But really, the most famous player in football has turned into something less than even a decoy. He has become, at best, some kind of undefined threat to opponents and at worse a constant threat to Jets starting quarterback Mark Sanchez. Otherwise, he seems like someone the Jets don't need at all. It raises the question: Why is he even here?

Next week the Jets will go to New England, which is the place where Tebow last played a meaningful football game. That was only in January and the world seemed to be watching back then. That was before the Denver Broncos fired him and the Jets got into a death struggle with the Jacksonville Jaguars to acquire him. The idea supposedly was that he would be a big part of the Jets' offense – a kind of multi-headed beast whose versatility would make a weak offensive team dangerous.

That hasn't happened. In six games he has thrown three passes and run 18 times. The situations he is mostly thrown into are so obvious it's almost as if they are designed for him to fail. It seems clear that Jets coach Rex Ryan does not want Tebow. He doesn't want him as a starting quarterback. He doesn't 

want him as a backup quarterback. He doesn't want him as a wide receiver or fullback or a punt returner or any of the other things that Tebow can do so well. Ryan seems to not want Tebow anywhere near his offense.

The question about whether Tebow can actually be a starting quarterback in the NFL is a legitimate one. He struggled with his accuracy in Denver, strangely looking better on long throws than he did on short ones. The offense the Broncos ran late last season was based too much on the run to be successful during a full NFL year. It remains a mystery if Tebow can throw the ball 30 times a game and win.

But even if he isn't a good quarterback, he is a very good football player. He isn't fast but he is elusive. He makes tacklers miss. He knows how to break through holes in a defensive line. He can catch. He can block. He can be everything Brad Smith once was to the Jets back when Smith helped make New York's offense go. Back when the Jets acquired Tebow, Ryan said he would use Tebow often.

Instead he has barely used Tebow.

After Sunday's game, Tebow stood in the back of the locker room and addressed the media the way he always held news conferences as the Broncos' starting quarterback. He talked mostly about the fake punt. He said it was something the Jets had thrown into the playbook this week. The call was his. If Indianapolis was lined up a certain way, he was to call for the fake. He did. Bellore was wide open. He lobbed the ball over Bellore's shoulder for an easy 23-yard pass play that set up a Sanchez-to-Jason Hill touchdown.

Someone asked Tebow if he had been practicing the throw for weeks.

"I've been making that pass since Pop Warner," he said.

Mostly he seemed irrelevant on Sunday. In a week in which Sanchez's future with the Jets has been an open question, Ryan seemed to be sending a message that Tebow is not essential to what he wants to do. When asked about Tebow's pass on the fake punt, Ryan made sure to mention that the owner Woody Johnson wanted to be sure Bellore could catch the ball. Ryan laughed as he said he assured his boss that Bellore could. But the fact of informing Johnson of a fake punt almost suggested that he was trying to appease his boss who undoubtedly wanted Tebow to be a Jet more than he did.

On Sunday the Jets won with 161 yards from running back Shonn Greene. Tight end Dustin Keller (one catch, 6 yards) was back. Suddenly the team that wasn't using Tebow when it lacked its offensive weapons really doesn't seem to have use for him now that Maybe there is a bigger plan. Maybe Ryan's insistence that he will decide when the time is right to use Tebow is a suggestion that he will be suddenly thrown out for 20 plays against the Patriots or the Dolphins or some other big moment.

After Sunday's game Tebow said he still watches the piles of DVDs of other quarterbacks that he used to take home every night when he played in Denver. You can tell he longs to be something more than he is: something bigger, something relevant.

For now, he's not even a decoy.

He's just a guy Rex Ryan doesn't seem to need or want.

Susan

How grateful I am to have Susan in my life

at this tender time when questions

surface and easy answers 

don't always follow.

We are blessed

to have each

other,

now

.

Luke 14:21 A gift?!

"The householder in anger said to his servant, 

'Go out quickly to the streets and lanes of the city, 

and bring in the poor and maimed and blind and lame.'"

Think of someone you dislike--

someone you generally avoid because his/her presence 

generates negative feelings in you.

Now understand that if you invite this person, 

this beggar from the streets and alleys into your home, 

that is, into your presence, he/she will make you a gift that none of 

your charming, pleasant friends can make you, rich as they are.

He or she is going to reveal yourself to you 

and reveal human nature to you.

The revelations that this beggar is going to bring 

will widen your heart till there is room in it for every living creature.

1 Ask,"Am I in charge of this situation or is this situation 

in charge of me?"

2 The way to be in charge of this situation 

is to be in charge of yourself.

3 All you have to do is understand that there are people in the world 

who, if they were in your place, 

would not be negatively affected by this person.

Therefore, your negative feelings are caused, 

not by this person, as you mistakenly think, 

but by your programming.

This behavior,  

this trait in the other person that causes you to react negatively--

do you realize that he or she is not responsible for it?

This poor person here in front of you is crippled, blind, lame, 

not stubborn and malicious as you so foolishly thought.

Now you will realize that this beggar came to your home 

with an alms for you--the widening of your heart 

in compassion and the release of your spirit in freedom. 

Where before you used to be controlled, 

now you have the gift of freedom 

to avoid no one, to go anywhere.

From The Way to Love

So that's what this weekend was--a gift!

A hands-on workshop in remembering that I generate

the feelings and the responses.

The beggar merely shows up with his/her

blind efforts to maintain control,

crippled, misguided attempts at attention and love,

and lame pursuits of temporary happiness.

Hmmmmm...Well, I declare,
seems we're all a bunch of two-year-olds.

'Nuff said!

Ah, yes!

Connecting back to spirit.

No matter what happens to you, you have a choice as to how to interpret it. You will make that choice—consciously or subconsciously. You can focus on the body’s drama—your friend’s hurtful words, her mistake, her betrayal. But if you do, you won’t be able to escape the emotional experience of being at the effect of her words. By choosing to focus on the material drama, particularly the drama of guilt, you increase your attachment to the material plane and thus your vulnerability to its dysfunctions. You forgive because you wish to stay above the dramas of the material world, particularly the drama of your addiction.

Your alternative choice is to focus on the innocence in your friend—on her divine reality that is beyond, and truer, than her bodily self. All of us are made of love, yet all of us make mistakes. In detaching from an overemphasis on someone else’s mistakes, you detach from an overemphasis on your own. As you reach across the wall of separateness—and there is no wall thicker than the wall of judgment—then the wall comes down. That is the miracle of forgiveness.

Forgiveness is selective remembering, a conscious choice to look beyond guilt to innocence. In common parlance, it usually amounts to simply cutting people more slack. This serves you. Judgment and blame put stress on the body of whoever is doing the judging and blaming, and stress is the time bomb at the center of your addiction. It is in “staying above” the drama of the body that you dwell more harmoniously within it. Your body was not created to bear the burden of your overattachment to it, but was created as a container for the light of your spirit. It will more easily remember how to function perfectly when you remember the perfection in everyone.

As you forgive others, you begin to forgive yourself. As you stop focusing on their mistakes, you will stop punishing yourself for your own. Your ability to release what you think of as the sins of others will free you to release yourself, putting down the weapon with which you punish yourself so savagely. Forgiveness releases the past to divine correction and the future to new possibilities. Whatever it was that happened to you, it is over. It happened in the past; in the present, it does not exist unless you bring it with you. Nothing anyone has ever done to you has permanent effects, unless you hold on to it permanently.

Lettuce Pray

92

64

 2

Dear God,

Give me peace and strength for this journey.

Amen

64 + 2 x 4 days = Whew!

SAYS WHO?!

Mission Impossible

The Amazing Race

Let's Make a Deal

Are You Smarter than a 2-Year-Old?

The Young and the Restless

But we did it!

Now I'm going to go lie down...

Matthew 2:20 Well, isn't that special!

"Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the

Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head."

"I not like you, Emmy."

(just spoken by Sawyer when I told him, for the eleven-hundredth time, 

he couldn't put his Thomas T-shirt on yet because t's too cold.)

Hmmmm.

Looks like Sawyer and I have passed the honeymoon period 

of the occasional fun-filled overnight

and journeyed right into the stark reality of living together for four days now.

It's easy to be "special" for a short amount of time; anything longer 

reveals the challenge of staying special.

Here's what The Way to Love has to say about this:

Think of someone whose love you desire. 

Do you want to be important to this person, 

to be especial and make a difference to his/her life?

If you do, open your eyes and see that you are foolishly 

inviting others to reserve you for themselves, 

to restrict your freedom for their benefit, 

to control your behavior, your growth and development 

so that it will suit their interest. 

It is as if the other person said to you,

'If you want to be especial to me then you must meet my conditions. 

Because the moment you cease to live up to my expectations 

you will cease to be especial.

You wanted to be especial to some, didn't you?

So you must pay a price in lost freedom.

You must dance to the other person's tune just as you demand 

that other persons dance to yours if they want to be especial to you.

To ask to be especial to someone means essentially to be bound 

to the task of making yourself pleasing to this person. 

And therefore to lose your freedom. 

Take all the time you need to realize this.

Love can only exist in freedom. 

The true lover seeks the good of his beloved 

which requires especially the liberation of the beloved from the lover.

And I'm getting to learn this (hands-on) from a child who, 
at this stage of the game, has no clue what he really wants, 
he just knows he wants it! And if he doesn't get it, he doesn't like me, 
I'm not special to him anymore.

Aha!

I think this works with big folks too!

(PS: I'm not aware that Jesus ever asked to be special.)