This is a difficult one. Trying to decide what emotion is being conveyed necessitates being in touch with our own emotions as a starting point and as we have all seen, this territory lies almost completely unexplored by many. One of my favorite books when I was growing up was Emotion to Enlightenment. The back cover describes the jest of the book quite well. "As we expand our awareness, we slowly move from a world of ever-recurring conflicts, discord and suffering both internally and in our interpersonal relations, to a gradually growing sense of abiding joy and harmony with all that is." The authors, in their deep and abiding love for their readers, sought to guide us through the transition from being ruled by our emotive forces to reigning them in, expanding their scope and deciphering the electro-chemical status of our own minds and bodies, so that we might use our own emotive forces to illuminate our path to enlightenment.
There are more than enough sob stories and morose diatribes about lost love, the death of loved ones and the inhumanity and injustices expressed by individuals and groups upon others, upon our selves,but the overriding emotions behind all of these messages is one of the "unfairness" of it all. Even many of the stories and accounts that I read that try to deal with the positive emotions hold in them a sub-text about what we are missing, or how good things could get if only we would or could X or Y or Z. Little is written about the understanding that emotions are tools that we can use to read the territory of our souls or how we might unveil the inner workings of our organism by focusing on these transient states of consciousness. Perhaps that is why this book was so important and necessary for my own development. I learned early-on that any decision worth making is also worth the consequences.
Some claim that there are only two emotions, love and fear, but in spite of holding great wisdom, this may in fact be too curt a response to our inner lives. I recently had an in-depth discussion with a person who believed that our calendar was based on the life of Jesus. Their fear, I suppose was that if we odid not mak time by His death, our culture would cease to exist. I laughed heartily when explaining that The moons and weeks are all derived from pagan gods and goddesses, it put an immediate end to discussion. I must have strayed over the line into threat. My emotional attachment to the whole event was so slight that I nearly didn't mention it here, but it reflects the schism between a linear, perceptual model and the paisley fractal of honoring the multiverse.
I feel a deep sadness over the fact that many trend toward an awkward inharmonious single-mindedness, but rely on inane data to make decisions. Data, most frequently is arbitrary. The capriciousness of "knowing something because you measured it is preposterous. My heart aches when friends say that they have never had an experience that they could call spiritual. I physically hurt from the want that they too could feel the heartbeat of Mother Earth alive within them, to bask in the Milky Way and feel it clouding over the star field behind. Understanding the miracle of the human eye, a root of perception, tuned well enough to detect a single photon. Both humbling and exalting, for everywhere we look in nature miracles such as these abound, yet wherever the hand of man has fallen, unrivaled ugliness has become the norm.
These are the heart wrenching truths we must all confront in our own way, come to terms with in our own way, but the empathy we can have for one another when we are willing to talk openly about the reality with which we are confronted can be the beginning of a whole new conversation about how we interact with the Earth, her creatures and one another. During my years as a brewmaster, I gave rise to millions of generations of yeast. Amongst them I was a sort of lord, and master. When I put them into the compost pile after my time with them, I blessed the very ground they were to enrich. I have taken hundreds of tons of material out of the waste stream, put it to good use and the vast majority of that material was compost.There will be more soil around the places I have lived and I learned the importance of doing that from my grandmothers.
The one from Up North just threw her potato peels and apple cores and melon rinds over the fence that separated her yard into mowed and untamed woods. She lived at the outskirts of town and it bothered no one. The city grandma from Down South though, she was hemmed in by neighbors and felt that her yard had to be a showcase. She would save all of her vegetable peelings and compost in quart milk cartons that she opened all the way at the top. When they were full, she would bury them systematically, first along the fence, then, a foot out or so, then two feet out from the fence, each time leaving her trowel where the last bin had been buried. After a few times down the garden beds, she would start back at the beginning so that over time, each square foot got a carton every few years. She was on that same lot for fifty years. Sometimes I think of how mush siol she built up and it makes me proud.
Just as I want to care for and help soil microbes to thrive, going about their important work of eating, excreting, absorbing moisture, exchanging gasses, and reproducing, I wish for all my fellow humans to be able to meet their full potential as well. To achieve this goal, we must first be offered clean air, clean water and healthy soil upon which to build our civilization. I have the same love for humanity itself as I do for the soil microbial community, the living universe/multiverse and this is the same love that I feel for all the gods and goddesses who reign. No ill can fall upon those who understand that we are the force behind the multiverse and the connections we make will have ramifications for at leats the next seven generations. Trying to carry across the idea of agape love may be difficult, but it is the prevailing impetus for every word I write. If not for the love of All, I would not have the desire to write.
There are more than enough sob stories and morose diatribes about lost love, the death of loved ones and the inhumanity and injustices expressed by individuals and groups upon others, upon our selves,but the overriding emotions behind all of these messages is one of the "unfairness" of it all. Even many of the stories and accounts that I read that try to deal with the positive emotions hold in them a sub-text about what we are missing, or how good things could get if only we would or could X or Y or Z. Little is written about the understanding that emotions are tools that we can use to read the territory of our souls or how we might unveil the inner workings of our organism by focusing on these transient states of consciousness. Perhaps that is why this book was so important and necessary for my own development. I learned early-on that any decision worth making is also worth the consequences.
Some claim that there are only two emotions, love and fear, but in spite of holding great wisdom, this may in fact be too curt a response to our inner lives. I recently had an in-depth discussion with a person who believed that our calendar was based on the life of Jesus. Their fear, I suppose was that if we odid not mak time by His death, our culture would cease to exist. I laughed heartily when explaining that The moons and weeks are all derived from pagan gods and goddesses, it put an immediate end to discussion. I must have strayed over the line into threat. My emotional attachment to the whole event was so slight that I nearly didn't mention it here, but it reflects the schism between a linear, perceptual model and the paisley fractal of honoring the multiverse.
I feel a deep sadness over the fact that many trend toward an awkward inharmonious single-mindedness, but rely on inane data to make decisions. Data, most frequently is arbitrary. The capriciousness of "knowing something because you measured it is preposterous. My heart aches when friends say that they have never had an experience that they could call spiritual. I physically hurt from the want that they too could feel the heartbeat of Mother Earth alive within them, to bask in the Milky Way and feel it clouding over the star field behind. Understanding the miracle of the human eye, a root of perception, tuned well enough to detect a single photon. Both humbling and exalting, for everywhere we look in nature miracles such as these abound, yet wherever the hand of man has fallen, unrivaled ugliness has become the norm.
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| Garbage Jewelry |
The one from Up North just threw her potato peels and apple cores and melon rinds over the fence that separated her yard into mowed and untamed woods. She lived at the outskirts of town and it bothered no one. The city grandma from Down South though, she was hemmed in by neighbors and felt that her yard had to be a showcase. She would save all of her vegetable peelings and compost in quart milk cartons that she opened all the way at the top. When they were full, she would bury them systematically, first along the fence, then, a foot out or so, then two feet out from the fence, each time leaving her trowel where the last bin had been buried. After a few times down the garden beds, she would start back at the beginning so that over time, each square foot got a carton every few years. She was on that same lot for fifty years. Sometimes I think of how mush siol she built up and it makes me proud.
Just as I want to care for and help soil microbes to thrive, going about their important work of eating, excreting, absorbing moisture, exchanging gasses, and reproducing, I wish for all my fellow humans to be able to meet their full potential as well. To achieve this goal, we must first be offered clean air, clean water and healthy soil upon which to build our civilization. I have the same love for humanity itself as I do for the soil microbial community, the living universe/multiverse and this is the same love that I feel for all the gods and goddesses who reign. No ill can fall upon those who understand that we are the force behind the multiverse and the connections we make will have ramifications for at leats the next seven generations. Trying to carry across the idea of agape love may be difficult, but it is the prevailing impetus for every word I write. If not for the love of All, I would not have the desire to write.
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