Dr. Mulkey (with Dr. McDonald), inducted today

into the American College of Physicians
at the Internal Medicine Conference in Boston

I want you to know how special your memorial to Rob was.  

I was deeply moved by the entire ceremony 

and found it fascinating hearing from the other two speakers, 

besides Tim, about their life long relationship with Rob.  

It showed me sides of Rob I was not aware of 

and how important he was to the many people 

he touched over the decades.  

He made a big impact on my life and I miss him very much.  

The world doesn't seem quite right without him in it, 

and this will be especially true for Port A!  

Take care of yourself and let me know if there is anything 

I can ever do for you! 

Voila! A dining room...

Odds in my favor...

 And what are the odds that a $1 book from Dollar Tree,

one that I fully intended to alter.

would be so perfect for this time in my life?

LOVEly!!

So glad I thought to read it first.

And then...

No way!  Yep, another super-duper read.
I selected the $1 books for their titles and their
covers, so guess my subconscious was working for me.

The song goes on...

Sarah,
Thank you for the music you offered at Rob's memorial. 

I hardly knew how to choose. 

I took away "Jazz I Like # 1." 

I listen in the car. 

It's love songs!!  

Love songs to you. 

I let  it be for me, too. 

This is the immortality I can believe in--

Rob's gift of romance having its effect in people 

he hardly knew as well as those dearest. 

Hi Sarah,

 I have been listening to Rob’s compilation of Jazz music dated 2008 

and it is just wonderful. 

Thanks for sharing Rob’s music with me.

Reflecting...

Wired!

Altered Book "Play Therapy"

 From this...

to this!

Sunday Beauty

Early evening, I headed over to my neighborhood

First Methodist Church 

for a concert by this world-renowned ensemble.

This is what was overhead!

 Later that evening, this was the "performance"

from my windows.

Saturday Paw-Paw Sightings

BINGO!

Followed by cookies and milk
(Mom & Dad in background assembling
table & chairs)

Everything belongs...

Balancing Act

Oooops...

Wheeeeeeeeeeee!

I know I am over-blogging today, but I just couldn't pass this up!  Remember Rob's "Prize-catch":

 Some seasoned anglers at the dock, upon observing his fine catch, exclaimed, "Do not eat that one.  It's a prize-winner!!!"  Of course, Rob wasn't entered in a contest at the time, but he did not eat it.  He rather decided to preserve it:

This guy, on the otherhand...read on:

Dennis Tilden poses with barracuda; photo: courtesy of Crocodile Bay Resort

As a longtime angler, Dennis Tilden knows: the quicker a fish is prepared after it’s caught, the fresher it will taste.

But Tilden, who reeled in a 32-pound Mexican barracuda recently while fishing in the Pacific off Costa Rica, did not know until dinner was being served that he’d be eating a potential world-record catch.

The International Game Fish Association lists as the all-tackle record a 28-pound, 6-ounce Mexican barracuda caught off Panama in 2010.

image: http://cdn.grindtv.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/barracuda2.jpg

The headline says it all; photo: courtesy of Crocodile Bay Resort

Tilden’s barracuda, caught during a tournament out of Crocodile Bay Resort on the Osa Peninsula, was weighed briefly before its head was removed for a soup. It’s flesh was quickly filleted and later prepared as a ceviche.

A proper certified weight had not been obtained, and measurements and other details for the paperwork were not collected, nullifying any chance for a record.

Tilden could only recall the captain telling him that the barracuda was the largest he had ever seen.

A description from Todd Staley, the resort’s director of fishing reads:

“As the chef was preparing a barracuda ceviche and getting the rest ready for dinner, Dennis mentioned the captain’s comment.

“A check with the IGFA record book showed the biggest recorded was 28 lbs. Tilden’s fish at just under 32 lbs made a delicious world-record meal.”

Tilden considered it a lesson learned, and could hardly complain about the fishing.

A day later he caught a 350-pound blue marlin to win Day 2 of the Boston Whaler group competition.

Read more at http://www.grindtv.com/fishing/unknowing-angler-eats-giant-barracuda-loses-chance-at-world-record/#cHmDPl57EqfrssxY.99

The Sweet (?) Life

Last Tuesday night, I took JOY with me to the Alamo Drafthouse to see La Dolce Vita, the last of the Frederico Fellini film series at TTU. I had, of course, heard of the film for years, and even thought I might have seen it before. However, this is one you'll definitely remember having seen! For 3 hours we experienced life with Marcella Rubini (Marcella Mastroianni), looking for love and happiness in all the wrong places.I was certainly glad to have JOY along for the ride. By the end of the movie, WE WERE EXHAUSTED, which was probably Fellini's intention. Made our settled little nests in the sky look quite welcome!

La Dolce Vita (Italian pronunciation: [la ˈdoltʃe ˈviːta]; Italian for "the sweet life" or "the good life")^[1] is a 1960 Italian comedy-drama film written and directed byFederico Fellini. The film follows Marcello Rubini, a journalist writing for gossip magazines, over seven days and nights on his journey through the "sweet life" of Rome in a fruitless search for love and happiness.

3 Amigos: Love, Fear, Anxiety

A LOVE AS FIERCE AS THE SUMMER SUN

Don't search for love, or try to make others love you. Simply be what you seek, give yourself what you long to be given. Be more loving, open your heart wider, without expectation, without needing anything in return. You'll get hurt? You'll waste your love? You'll look like a fool? Keep opening anyway. And opening. Your heart needs to break sometimes, so it can give more love, and in giving, receive. In the cracks, compassion will take root.

You can still say no. You can still draw, redraw and erase boundaries as you go. You can still leave, or stay, or never come back, or return. But you are loving yourself first. And through that love, loving a world. No longer waiting for others to save you, or complete you, or remove your pain, yet no longer denying yourself the love that in the end you can only give yourself. No longer protecting a broken heart by trying to close it. And no longer being a masochist either, dishonouring your own boundaries to find a love you could never find outside of your very own heart. Others will disappoint you until you realise this. Love sees others as they are.

The sun has given her light freely for billions of years, delighting in the life she brings to all beings; a joyful warrior of love, she is in relationship, first and foremost, with her own shining.

- Jeff Foster

BE GENTLE WITH FEAR

Be gentle with fear.
It is a child of the unknown.
It has travelled light years to find you.

Do not be afraid to feel it fully.
It will not harm you.
Let it come closer, let it penetrate you if it must.
Feel its aliveness, its pounding heart, its vibrations and tingles in the body.
Until there is no division between 'self' and 'fear'.
Until you cannot call it 'fear' at all.
Until there is only life, raw and immediate, and nameless, and benevolent.

Fear is a breaking open into the unknown,
a shattering of certainties.
It is the forging of a new path into the vastness of night.It is the thrill of being awake.

Fear reminds you
That you live on the edge of mystery.
That you drink from the fountain of possibility.
That your being is vast.
That only the false can die.

Do not push your fear away, or label it 'negative' or 'unspiritual'.
Do not pretend it is not there.
Do not rush to delete it, or transform it, or even heal it.
It is not an enemy, and not a mistake.
It holds great intelligence and healing power.
It is ancient and wise.
Bow before it.

Let fear be fear, fully itself.
But do not be afraid.
Let the body shake, let the heart quake.
And know that you are present.And opening, and opening.

Let fear, so misunderstood,
Come to rest in your vast heart.

Standing on the threshold,
You take those first steps into the void.

You are shaking but you are so damn alive.

- Jeff Foster

HOW TO BEFRIEND ANXIETY

When you feel anxious, don't pretend not to be anxious, for this feeds the anxiety, adds an extra layer.

What you run away from always haunts you. Don't cover up the discomfort or distract yourself from it, or pretend to be 'fine'. Eating, drinking, shopping, pill-popping, incessant talking, whistling, rushing around mindlessly, running to check your messages or contact a friend, trying to control everything around you, spinning off into the narrative of 'me and my busy life', these are all ways to avoid the fact of anxiety, ways to abandon yourself in your time of need. (Yikes! I believe Jeff  is a "Peeping Tom"?)Breathe. Feel your feet on the ground, your belly rising and falling with each breath. Don't think about your anxiety, and how to get rid of it - that is the old paradigm. Feel the anxiety more completely! Locate it in the body - is it in the belly. the chest, the throat, the head? Drop the word 'anxiety' (for it is a second-hand word) and directly feel the living sensations that are there, moment-by-moment, without trying to get rid of them or stop them, without even hoping they'll go away. Allow yourself to be curious about what's alive in your body right now, about the physical sensations of this moment. Come out of past and future, and dive into presence. Breathe into the sensations, dignify them with breath, with oxygen, with life, with your kind attention. Are there butterflies in your stomach? Do your muscles feel tense? Which ones? Can you bring some loving attention and breath there? Let the sensations know that they are allowed to be here, that they are included in life, that you finally have no agenda to destroy them, that they can stay, for now. And there is only Now.If thoughts are spinning out of control and having a party, if there are many thought-clouds in the sky of awareness, that's wonderful. Don't try to stop thoughts or silence all these voices, pictures, memories, fantasies, for that makes you more anxious too. Only thoughts would want to stop thoughts. Be the sky, in which thought-clouds can dance. Thoughts are not reality, and they are not who you really are. They are sounds and pictures.Thoughts may be shooting off into the future or past, but that's okay - that's what the mind does, it constantly rewinds and fast-forwards. Yet you are here. You are right here; here is where your presence lives. Allow all thoughts to be here, with you, all sounds, all feelings, all urges. Even allow your feelings of non-acceptance, your urge to escape this moment. As the body releases tension, you may find yourself shivering, yawning, laughing, even shaking, or just resting more deeply...If you cannot accept yourself completely as you are, then can you completely accept your complete inability to accept? And if you can't accept that, can you see that even your inability to accept is part of life, part of this moment, part of the movement of the universe? You don't have to accept yourself, or accept this moment, for it is already accepted. It is already here, already alive, already the way it is. (DUH!)Anxiety is just a little child, who has arrived in your space. It has not come to ruin you, or hurt you, but wake you up. It only wants to be acknowledged, held, allowed in to the vastness of the moment. The anxious one longs for a home. Will you run away when it arrives again, distract yourself, or finally turn to greet it?

- Jeff Foster

Heavenly Healers

Among the many who have assisted me on my spiritual journey 
through the years, Jim Flamming, John Claypool, Henri Nouwen, 
and Barbara Brown Taylor, to mention only a few, 
Jeff Foster is the most recent.

Karla and I attended one of his "meetings" in Boulder last month.

Until then, my relationship with him was via his website, his monthly

newsletter, and several books of his that I continue to read from time to time.

It would be difficult to describe the experience of being "with him",

but there is an article below, written by an observer at a meeting in the UK

who does an excellent job of finding the words that I could not.

Jeff's newsletter usually arrives with words that are just right

and just in time, given what's going on in my life.

His words about death resonate so deeply

with my current experience.

It is truly Heavenly!

Love is stronger than death

Where does a loved one ‘go’ when they die?

Where does a wave ‘go’ when it crashes onto the shore?

Nowhere. No place.

The wave was never separate from the vastness of the ocean in the first place, so it cannot ‘return’ there. Water cannot leave water, nor return.

Nothing happens at all, from the perspective of our true nature.

Death is simply the deepest relaxation into unborn, undying presence.

Your loved one did not ‘go’ anywhere, friend. They simply rested even more deeply in their own nature, which is your nature, which is presence. Not two. Never two.

They are now where they always were – in your heart of hearts. And they can never leave.

You will carry them.

Love is stronger than death.

~Jeff Foster

Blog by Phil Shanklin

Jeff Foster

Life after Jeff

Jeff Foster – Falling in Love With Where You Are

The Study Centre, London, 24/01/15

The latest research published by the Institute of Education into the nation’s beliefs* tells us that 64% of women and 37% of men believe in life after death.

Whilst no-one has returned yet from the other side to corroborate this belief there is clearly an appetite for an afterlife – apparently a bigger appetite among women. When the entertainer Roy Castle announced he had terminal cancer he was asked if he was afraid of dying. “Well, millions have done it and there have been no complaints so far.”

Whether you are a believer or not and whether you are afraid of the Grim Reaper or not after you’ve listened to Jeff Foster on the subject you won’t be afraid of death or dying any longer. “The experience of death is not an experience for the one dying.” That’s a relief then. “You cannot be present at your own death.” It reminds me of Epicurus’ take on our final curtain call: “Death is nothing to us since, when we exist, death is not present to us and when death is present, we have no existence.” End of.

However, if you are grieving for the loss of a loved one or, as was the case for one woman in the afternoon open question session at Jeff’s recent meeting at The Study Centre in London, two loved ones (she lost both parents in the past two years) death has definitely not lost its sting.

“Death is the end of the illusion of the separate experiencer” Jeff confides. He unhurriedly and with quiet compassion, using the illustration of a wave breaking back into the ocean, leads the grieving one to a place where the pain of loss is allowed but is shared and in a deeply loving way, diffused. As Jeff puts it in one of his poems, “Your loved one did not ‘go’ anywhere, friend. They simply rested even more deeply in their own nature, which is your nature, which is presence.” When we “fall in love with where we are”, even if where we are is full of grief, we also fall into the vastness of our own presence which holds all. “Every thought a galaxy, every sensation a solar system.”  Death is the ultimate awakening.

He’s a good listener is Jeff and he embodies the truth that to a hurting human being “alone in their enormous exertion”, as Kierkegaard puts it, to be heard is to be loved. David Augsburger says “being heard is so close to being loved they are almost indistinguishable.” Jeff collapses the distinction because you can tell he sees you and him as one and the same expression of the same divine spark glowing with common consciousness. One of my favourite words in Spanish is ‘una chispa’ … a spark. We are all ‘chispas del dios’. Divine sparks.

You very much get the feeling with Jeff that he knows what you’re going through because he’s been there himself. And he has. During his talk, ‘Falling in Love With Where You Are’, he gives us an insight into his journey. After studying Astrophysics at Cambridge University in his mid-twenties he encountered a long period of depression and illness, and as he tells it, he became addicted to the idea of ‘spiritual enlightenment’ and embarked on an intensive quest for the ultimate truth of existence. In self-imposed house arrest at his parents he read every spiritual book he could lay his hands on until the seeking came crashing down and only a clear recognition of the non-dual nature of everything remained with a deep acceptance of the present moment. No more seeking.

It is this ‘deep acceptance’, also the title of one of his books, which is the hallmark of Jeff’s teaching that is drawing increasing numbers of enquirers to his Facebook page and meetings like this one at The Study Centre in London on a sunny Saturday in January. He recalls the days when he was less popular. “When I held my first meeting here ten years ago it was in the basement with ten people. Now look!” A sell out audience of two hundred share his surprise. How come this slight, mild mannered and frankly unimposing English man appeals to such a broad audience? An audience which, I can’t help noticing, is comprised of as many men as women. What is his secret?

He brings no new teaching other than deep acceptance of where you are. He offers no special technique to get enlightened. Apart from his books he has no merchandise – no signed photographs like the ones I have of Mooji. As it says on his website “he belongs to no tradition or lineage, and makes his teaching accessible to all.” He’s like a bingo caller who tells you you’ve all got a full house but refuses to shout out the numbers. Not your usual guru. No method. No teacher. If you’re into Van Morrison you’ll love Jeff Foster.Its interesting to compare how our modern day non-duality gurus present themselves. A platform. A chair. A table. A jug of water. A glass. So much is common. A vase of flowers is pretty much mandatory. Jeff started with marigolds from Londis which were surreptitiously upgraded to tulips from the local florist at coffee break – a bit of behind the scenes flower re-arranging. Mooji likes his blanket and a framed photograph of his teacher Papaji. Jeff has no such picture and does not appear to walk in the footsteps of any teacher. In fact, I have not heard him refer to any guru, teacher or even advaita tradition in his talks. No – that’s not strictly true. Twice I have heard him refer to his dad as his teacher and once to his cat. But there is no picture of his dad or his cat next to the flowers on the table on the platform. That would be cool.

His dad has Alzheimers and Jeff has had to learn to deal with a variety of raw emotions arising in relating to his father whom he clearly loves. “Disgust is an interesting one. You can learn a lot from disgust.” This is why we like Jeff – in his down to earth anecdotes there is no separation between his experience as a human being coping with his life and our experience coping with ours.Yes – that’s why we like Jeff. With most gurus you meet you can feel the separation – they know something you don’t know … and they know they know. With Jeff there is no separation in more than one sense – he makes you feel we’re all in this together in “the vastness of our own presence which holds all.” That’s the kind of non duality we like. Other gurus point to ‘That’. Jeff points to his dad … and his cat.

For more information about Jeff and his upcoming events you can go to:http://www.lifewithoutacentre.com.

And the greatest of these...

LOVE

You Are Love Itself - The Unconditional Screen of Present Awareness - Je...

You can't be 'in' the Now (or 'out' of it); you ARE the Now! - Jeff Foster

The Good News, Life More Abundant, The Great I Am

Between 'what was' 
and 'what will be'
there is a vast space 
called Now. 

It is your true home.

- Jeff Foster

Ones...

 Fancy One!

 Little One!

He really gets into the Baby Channel.

 Messy One!

But beautiful signs of life...again.

Piece-making One!

Back again...for more.

Sassy One!

Shakin' those tail feathers...

Thanks, Deb.

Stormy One!

That's the Pioneer (my home) 

with a huge, threatening storm cloud 

in the background.  

Making peace with the pieces...

 From this...

 to this.

Perfect timing!

This at 3:35PM

while listening to Chloe Agnew singing

"The Prayer".

Lovely!

Chloe Agnew sings ''The Prayer''

Wise words from a friend...

Please do not forget that you let go of your mother only months ahead of Robert –  grief gathers at times and finally storms in and says “work  with me and I will lead you to a new creation, identity, pastures, rest…through the grief work."

Room with a view...