Posts Tagged ‘thought’
Embracing Impermanence
I have been encountering a recurring theme of late that is causing me to ponder my desire for order in my daily routines. Also, for constancy in the products for which I grow fond. Most times, I don’t want ‘new and improved.’ I just want more of what I had the first time.
There is a measuring cup in the kitchen that I have started to use every day, now that I am measuring portions of many foods, especially the all-too-sweet cereals I passionately love. I open the middle drawer, and there it is —most of the time.
If Cyndie has been baking, it could require a search.
I tend to experience greater pleasure when my developed methods glide seamlessly along like a well-conducted orchestral piece. If it runs into turbulence, I might alter my tactics to improve the flow. Basically, I look to simplify effort, probably toward something that would align closely to a style that could justifiably be viewed as lazy.
This probably explains why I am not big on the tasks involved with meal preparation.
It is occurring to me that I will probably be better served to work on honing my skills of adaptation to the constant variations that are a reality of life, instead of always pining to have things be where I expect to find them, clean and in good working order.
Sometimes, you discover that the tire is flat. People call in sick for their shift at work. It rains when it was forecast to be sunny. The manufacturer has discontinued a favorite tool/appliance/car/shoe/food/article of clothing.
The climate is proving to be in much greater flux than most people wanted to believe. Plants and animals go extinct. Millions of people get forced to flee their homeland, becoming a sea of immigrants.
Seriously, when wasn’t change a constant, despite what our minds have a tendency to perceive?
Maybe I can find a way to nurture that feeling of pleasure I usually get from orderly routines, to also manifest in the face of unanticipated complications. They are vivid examples the universe is alive and breathing, and I still am, too. It’s a reality that I am coming to believe is not worth fighting against. Conversely, I think learning to celebrate the aberrations should offer nothing but greater peace of mind.
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I’m Curious
If you read yesterday’s Words on Images post about the simple choice that we make every day, how do you interpret the suggestion about accepting the obvious as the only plausible explanation?
After I wrote those words, with one thought in my mind, I got the impression that it likely implied the opposite of what I was thinking. I considered changing it, but then decided to let it go out into the world, as is, for readers to take from it what they will. We each come to our individual conclusions from a place of preconceived notions and personal perspectives that color our perceptions.
I expect some will align with the version in my head, and some will perceive the opposite.
Let me just say that I believe that there are unknowable possibilities, likely beyond imagining, available as explanation for what we sense and experience in our world, which others choose to miss by constraining their options exclusively to the one they construe as obvious.
I may be wrong.
And that’s the key.
Imagine the possibilities of embracing uncertainty.
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Amazing Journey
I used to live in a city neighborhood and I used to live in a suburb. Now I live in a rural setting. The differences are dramatic, as well as subtle. The common element of each is, me. Obviously, I bring my perspective to each setting. The different environments influence me, yet I interpret each place through my personal filter.
As a human being, my filter is basically similar to all the other humans interpreting their environmental influences. I feel what everyone feels about each of the three habitats. As an individual, my perspective is not identical to all others, but specific to me. We can generalize about the hectic pace of crowded places and the mellowness of open land, but individuals have the capacity to find their own mellowness in a hectic environment, or excitement over all that is found in being alone and outdoors.
People have the ability to compartmentalize their lives, and as such will become isolated and detached from that which is less familiar. For most of my life, horses were a mere blip on my radar. I knew of people who were horse lovers, but I was not so inclined. I married a person who was interested in horses, but she was far from consumed with a focus on them, so the impact on me was negligible.
Now I have a close relationship with a herd of 4 horses. I have become another person in a huge group of people with strong interests in horses. I am new to this group, and I bring my unique perspective, but I expect that I appear to the rest of the world as just another horse lover. On the surface, that is accurate, but there is more depth to all of our stories and I am inspired to figure out what about mine I should be endeavoring to tell.
Some days my amazing journey leaves me speechless. Oftentimes, I simply write about what I do, putting one foot in front of the other and tending to daily chores. There is more to it, I know, and I have a sense it is percolating within me in preparation for being told.
I’m letting it simmer a bit, while continuing to embrace and savor the breadth and depth of my wild ride.
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Two Things
While trudging through new drifts on a walk with Delilah yesterday morning, it occurred to me… there are two things. I’m sure it can be argued that there are more than two things, but that is a topic for another time. I’m just writing now about the perception of two things. There are always two and though they may be distinct, they are undeniably, inextricably linked.
Case in point: there is Delilah pulling me up the steep hill at the end of our walk, and there is me being pulled up the hill by Delilah. Two things.
There is happiness, and sadness. Hope, and despair. Winning, and losing. Those are obvious. How about, almost there, and not quite there yet. Dreaming your reality, and realizing your reality is a dream. Waiting for tomorrow, and wondering where tomorrow went. There is pondering how this could have been a poem, and seeing how likely such a poem would seem trite.
The thing that I find most fascinating about all this silliness, though hardly surprising, is how it is revealing the chasm which inevitably swallows all the creative momentum and ingenious possibilities between the amusing period of conception and the time-delayed attempt to build the idea into a rewarding post.
Yesterday morning, it was vapor, filled with potential. Then it evaporated. So I tried anyway, long after my brain was wallowing in the distractions of being back in the house. My poor brain, which more than anything enjoys every opportunity to take naps whether the eyes are open or closed. Maybe I think of naps because that has become the length of time I can do anything of my own agenda. It is the duration of Delilah’s naps.
Luckily she naps frequently. When she is not napping she is begging for attention beyond my capacity to engage with her. It’s right out of the breed description: “not typically recommended for people who are inexperienced with dogs. His temperament and activity level can be overwhelming to people who haven’t had a working dog before.”
When I went down and sat with the horses on Thursday, I had left Delilah in the house. She hesitated about accepting her leash and I wasn’t up to the game of enticing her. I went out without her. That is why I was able to spend a full half-hour of blissful serenity with the horses.
Two things. I was sitting in observance of the horse activities, and I was with them as a member of the herd.
Two things inextricably linked: my daily inspirations that become blog fodder, and the hard-fought battle of doing those inspirations justice in words, sentences, commas —or not— and paragraphs. No wonder I always try to include images.
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Consciousness Streamed
Never mind that there is no reason not to keep on going despite the obvious restrictions and hesitations that never cease to exist in every manifestation of whatever reality this is at the moment that is surging past unless it’s not and instead is totally stationary and we are the ones doing the moving at such high rates of speed that it becomes difficult to discern what has already happened and what hasn’t actually happened yet in the way we currently perceive things that happen based on the senses that we have relied on to get us here thus far in our lives as measured against the backdrop of the climate as we knew it from the past fifty-some years which someday might be compared with the next fifty as a way of detecting the possibility of there being a difference as in change which would be undeniable one would hope at that point in the proceedings especially since this stream of basically unconscious rambling seems to appear about once every year maybe as a way to scour the surface of residual order in hopes of restoring some reset of rote writing routine repeated in a cycle of day after day wording that tries to make sense regardless the random missing word or unintelligible thought splayed out in broad daylight for all the world to see in the rare situation they just happen to do and willingly hang on till the end with some morsel of curiosity or macabre fascination that there will be some pot of gold at the end of this rainbow of brilliance that reaches in an arc across the screen from one point to another with shapes to decode the message therein however frightening and disturbing the exercise may be but unless some magic or miracle arrives all we’re left with is what we had on when we walked in here plus the thoughts that we carry inside of our heads that we believe must be precious because they haven’t been forgotten and lost for forever like the ones that are gone which we’ll never remember and we live with that fact because we’ve no other choice and speaking of choice that’s something we do have when it comes to this thing called love which when all else has failed is one thing that remains and in this stream unconscious where very little makes any sense love might be an answer worth considering to solve what it is that is bothering your distressed countenance.
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Chillin’ Nearby
After spending most of the day on Monday working on the lawn tractor and getting the field mowed, I needed to spend some quality time in the paddocks yesterday, while it was still sunny. Today is predicted to be the beginning of a two-day soaking of rain, and those paddocks are miserable to clean when it is muddy.
As it was, they weren’t much better than miserable in the corner I was hoping to rake. There are still large areas where the ground remains saturated with water, which results in many deep hoof divots, the continued build up of manure from winter, and almost impossible footing for trying to do anything about it. The task involves trying to remove months worth of accumulated manure that is soaking wet and stuck into the mud, raking it across a terrain that is filled with pot holes that serve as perfectly frustrating traps.
I have to be mindful to avoid allowing that frustration to fill my thoughts, because I don’t want that to become the message our horses pick up from me. I have yet to master the art of literally “hearing” what they might want to communicate to me, but they definitely are conveying something by means of proximity. Legacy will walk towards me and pause, continually closing the distance if I neglect to stop what I’m doing to meet him. Eventually, he will come right up into my face, so that I can’t not stop what I’m doing.
Yesterday, I met his gaze and did my best to let him know what I was thinking, and we had a bit of a stare-down. Then we each “went back to grazing,” he, literally, and me, by getting on with raking.
Just as often, it seems, Hunter is my companion when I’m cleaning the paddock. While I was raking that same area yesterday, he wandered over and just stood next to where I was working. He wasn’t looking at me, but just standing beside me. After a short time, he decided to lay down, right there on that same spot. It is the closest I’ve ever been to a horse that was laying down, so I decided to take a picture.
It warms my heart to know he feels that comfortable with me, and that Legacy will behave respectfully when standing as close as he was. Obviously, we are communicating something.
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Just Know
This deserves to be a blog post. The question posed was about how to stay positive despite the scary amount of negativity in the world. Far be it from me to come up with a concise reply.
I knew how to answer it for myself, but I had to think a moment, about how to communicate my process to another person. It was a wandering explanation, as each insight I explored seemed to spawn another that deserved mention.
What came to me right at the start was that having a positive disposition isn’t something that I do, it has become something that I know. The rest of my rambling response was an attempt to provide enough background to give the words more weight than just a routine platitude. It doesn’t seem logical to me to offer advice along the lines of just needing to “know” that things are not as bad as they appear to be. On the other hand, does it suffice for me to proclaim that they simply need to live through enough experiences to gather the insights I have acquired?
I don’t think I can reclaim everything I came up with at the time, but the simplified version of why I know things are not as bad as it seems is this:
I have overcome a history of depression. I have mended a dysfunctional relationship with my wife. I have almost completely eliminated my exposure to commercial broadcast media. That alone, probably makes the biggest difference on the amount of unwelcome news and energy that was previously bombarding me.
I have become aware of energy that we emanate and absorb. This one isn’t as ‘out there’ as may appear to some people. Science has proven that emotions are contagious. It is easy to notice that a depressed person in the room can bring people down, an angry person will spread bad feelings, and a happy and pleasant individual can lift the spirits of those with whom they interact. I have witnessed the impressive distance our electromagnetic heart field energy radiates, during my time working with horses in Arizona when I joined Cyndie for the conclusion of her apprenticeship training.
Our energy is a powerful force. We should arm it with something positive and profound. I have always felt in my core that love was the vital component of all human interaction. We know to “love thy neighbor” and many of us believe we should love our enemies. I believe love is the way to heal, to bring peace, to raise healthy individuals, and, radiated in advance, to engender best possible interactions with others. Let love be the primary vibe riding on your projected energy field and you shower all in your vicinity with good will.
All of these things combined, provide a sense of knowing, despite all that seems wrong in the world –and think about it, people have been predicting that the ills of the world indicate ‘the end is near’ for eons– we hold unbelievable power for good with our love that can blossom if we alter our focus from all that is wrong, dwell on all that is right, and develop our skills to radiate healthy love in every direction. It magnifies. Love begets more love.
Try it. You can’t help but have a positive disposition when you put your attention to it!
Relative Something 