I was driving across town the other day, to visit someone near and dear to me when I noticed a commotion in the road ahead. Cars swerved around two men who were racing to get across traffic to the other side of the street.
They looked desperate, panicked and it seemed that it was a life and death urgency that they get across this road. I saw their arms flailing as if they could use them to deter the cars somehow, their eyes wild and feral. I remember breathing a quick prayer for their safety.
they got across, and no one was hurt and as I passed I realized that it was a small school that they were trying to get to. A preschool, where children were being dropped off at that time. There were children who had seen this commotion, and as I slowly passed, my eyes showed me the story of these men, who turned out to be photographers trying to catch a shot of some person of public interest in the midst of their day.
Paparazzi as we call them. All that adrenaline and risk just to get a picture of a famous person trying to capture some semblance of normalcy by dropping their child at preschool.
This incident stayed with me all day! I couldn't get it out of my head. I kept thinking about the image in my mind of the men as they crossed the road and how it made me feel. To me they looked like people in the middle of an emergency. They weren't at all, it wasn't what it seemed at all. It made me realize how we all do this in our lives. We use our human emotion and energy so well at times but with an intention or motive that just doesn't fit the level of emotionality that we express. This is incredibly depleting. Almost like the great white shark, who exudes so much energy to hunt and make a kill, but if the prey isn't fatty enough, doesn't have the right amount of substance, the energy of the hunter won't be replenished. All for nothing.
I feel that as a race we have lost sight of exactly where our energy is most useful. Of just exactly what the meaning of abundance is. We seem off course to the point of living these minute pathological existences that in the end, don't even feed us, don't nourish us enough to be able to see where we are to go next, and so we continue to go further and further off course.
When I read the news and try and make sense of the world and its state if disrepair, this concept of being off course comes into my mind again and again. I keep getting a global sense that we are all spending most of our energy on the wrong things. Its subtle, I think it crept up as technology advanced. We went from a society that used T.V.s to babysit, and just continued along switching to video games, cellphones and all manor of digital entertainment possible to keep the kid busy so we could work, work, work, to be able to buy more technology to keep the kid busy so we could work, buy, work, buy. For what? Where are the relationships? Where are the human connections?
How have we drifted so far from compassion? How is it that sensitivity, and emotionality have become useless in today's society? More importantly, for those who are slightly aware of this dis-ease, how do we reconnect??
When I think about happiness, the first thing I need to know is what makes me feel safe. The only way for me to be able to feel safe is to first allow myself to feel unsafe! I think we spend so much time turning our back's against the cold hard truth of our emotions, that we have lost the ability to hear our own inner truth, the voice that let's you know what works for YOU, because of who you are and how you were raised. What our TRUE needs are, not the things we need to numb us from our emotions.
For me it is the Earth. To me, she is the ultimate mother. A good friend told me a story about how he sat with an elder man in his mid seventies who had been living connected to a spiritual practice for most of his life. The man said, " when people pray, they are always looking up, shaking their fists and pleading up to the sky?
" God is not in the sky, he said, God is here in the earth, with us.." This somehow made perfect sense to me. I have noticed throughout my life that whenever I have had an experience where I am close to nature for any particular period of time, I tend to feel a distinct calm, and or sense of elation for a long time thereafter. Think about it. When was the last time you walked through a forest, swam in the ocean, or spent time planting and tending in your garden?
It's meditative, some say. I think the reason for this is that when we can get out of what we have created as humans, and into what just is and always has been, we can hear more clearly. If we can learn to smell the rain in the air, we can remember to shut the windows. Nature has a way of healing her children, and we are all children of the earth. We Do belong here and i think we all deserve to heal. All we have to do is redirect our attention slightly, and learn to listen to the world.
In my life, this means, planting a garden and tending it. Spending time out doors watching my plants and seeing when they need more water, maybe less. Watching the weather and how it affects my garden. Learning from this has led to more ways for me to find little ways to return to Eden so to speak and what I have found has been that I seem to have a clearer sense of myself in general.
It seems we have so many choices as human beings during this amazing time of change on earth. We can continue taking the path of least resistance, ignoring all the warning signs and recklessly turning our backs on our rich inheritance. Or, we can adjust ever so slightly, choose the second door, the one that allows us to participate a little more, and remember what our true intention is, that has been whispered down to us through the ages from our ancestors. We already have all the answers, we have just forgotten how to listen to ourselves. Even if we fail, our mother will take us back. We will all return to the earth eventually, we will return to ourselves and to each other. There will be no consequence, no one will be left behind, so knowing that, why not sit outside on your patio once a day and think about what it is that really makes you happy, peaceful and secure? What do you really want out of this life? Really. It may just be right there in front of you, staring you in the face.
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