January 11th Wear Orange

The ACLU has an idea which will help bring awareness of Guatanamo Bay prison, torture and extraordinary rendition - it is "Wear Orange Day".  January 11th is the six-year anniversary of the arrival of the first prisoners at Gitmo. They've got all kinds of materials here  and if you're up for it, sign the pledge and make posters. Or just wear orange that day and your Ron Paul or Dennis Kucinich button.

What a life we live when we start to see the connections between people and nature and weather and systems. A brief trip to do errands turns into soul food and a humdrum day peels back its skin to show the shimmering glorious beauty within. A synchronous set of meetings happened today and I have taken the lesson to accept what the Universe and my higher power has to offer, so much sweeter than when I try and run the show.

"People love mysterious things, and synchronicity is like magic happening to them," says Carolyn North, author of Synchronicity: The Anatomy of Coincidence (Regent Press). "It gives us a sense of hope, a sense that something bigger is happening out there than what we can see, which is especially important in times like this when there's so many reasons for despair."

Meditation, prayer, mindful work and practice of the Presence of God all seem to stir up sychronicities. But nothing gets them going like asking my higher power to be one with me and to lead my life. Thank You!!!

In this the most curious of times, I've stumbled upon the words of the late, great Terrance KcKenna:

QUOTE  And the last sane moment we ever knew was on the plains of Africa 15,000 years ago rocked in the cradle of the Great Horned Mushroom Goddess before history, before standing armies, before slavery and property, before warfare and phonetic alphabets and monotheism, before, before, before. And this is where the future is taking us because the secret faith of the twentieth century is not modernism, the secret faith of the twentieth century is nostalgia for the archaic, nostalgia for the paleolithic, and that gives us body piercing, abstract expressionism, surrealism, jazz, rock-n-roll and catastrophe theory. The 20th century mind is nostalgic for the paradise that once existed on the mushroom dotted plains of Africa where the plant-human symbiosis occurred that pulled us out of the animal body and into the tool-using, culture-making, imagination-exploring creature that we are. UNQUOTE

The thing I really like about Terrance is his absolute grasp of the idea that we have a fetish over things - materialism - desire to horde and conquer. This can properly be called "the Fall" of humanity, when archetypal Adam & Eve were physically and spiritually cast out of the graden of total union with the creator and with the other bits of creation - the animals, plants, elements and so forth.

The sacred, the holy, the whole, the deep spiritual, can return to us only when we open ourselves to it. The bitter and fading hallucination called reality is anything but, it is a prison for the imagination and a kennel for the hound of heaven. But a change-is-a gonna come. You can feel it pulsing in the silence as you fall asleep and in teh joy that greets you with reawakening.

The veil between the peak experience and the daily grind gets thinner and thinner, and yet, for multitudes of stupefied wage-slaves and collective trance enthralled people, the care and feeding of the body takes precedence over truth, freedom and beauty.   Interesting to see how back in Miller's time,  the hypnotized were somewhat degraded and now there is more compassion as we begin to realize that all is truly one.

From Henry Miller QUOTE  Those in the thick of life, "the plugs in harness," had no time for such idle questions. "You've got to eat, haven't you?" This query, which was supposed to be a stopgap, and which had already been answered, if not in the absolute negative at least in a disturbingly relative negative by those who knew; was a clue to all the questions which followed in a veritable Euclidean suite. From the little reading I had done I had observed that the men who were most in life, who were molding life, who were life itself, ate little, slept little, owned little or nothing. They had no illusions about duty, or the perpetuation of their kith and kin, or the preservation of the State. They were interested in truth and in truth alone. UNQUOTE

Well, well - I spend a little time away and then come back, and you guys have given the place a complete makeover! Oooh, it looks very nice. I'll explore around later.  Hopefully the blog feeds will still work OK with the old  zaadz linkage.

All I have to share today can be summed up in one little word: ALL. All my needs ar emet, whether I know it or not. All the service I do comes back around to me. All my friends are wonderful and deserve my love. All people are related. All my relations. The love of God is in me for all. The love of God is in all, for me, now and always.  All people are my relations.

May all beings be happy.

ALL.

ALL.

ALL...

Here is a list of things Chicago Tribune writer Eric Zorn has learned in his fifty years on planet earth.  Everbody likes lists!

My favorite is #10.  (The rest are good, though.)

10. Empathy is the greatest virtue. From it, all virtues flow. Without it, all virtues are an act.

xenia

Troparion in Commemoration of St. Blessed Mother Xenia Petersburg
Commemorated on January 24th

In thee, O wandering stranger, Christ the Lord hath given us an ardent intercessor for our kind. For having received in thy life sufferings and grief and served God and men with love, thou didst acquire great boldness. Wherefore, we fervently hasten to thee in temptations and grief, crying out from the depths of our hearts: Put not our hope to shame, O Blessed Xenia.

Loving saint Xenia, patron of the homeless, of careers, famillies and marraiges, pray for us.

---

Happy Sunday to everybody at Gaia ~ enjoy...

Now that Dennis has dropped out, the only stauchly anti-war candidate is Ron Paul. Here's a progress report dated today.

To embody the transcendent is why we are here.
       -Sogyal Rimpoche