Old Tree

 a song of the cross

Old tree standing on the hill
blood soaked roots that rise to kill
there hangs the fruit of man’s pain
on the old tree sanding on the hill

With this tree I will build a door
to a house with healing in its floor
there remain the broken now made whole
and no latch shall be fit to this door

I am the ax that’ll fell this tree
and all of the earth will pass over me
yet I’ll rise again to open the door
made of the old tree on the hill

Victory to the vulnerable, victory to the saints
step on the healing dance in his grace
for the torture had become our gate
and the bloody roots a sign post to the way

Mind Bomb

I just blew my own mind.

I was processing some things relating to Kung-Fu when I told myself this:

POWER DOES NOT EQUAL EFFORT.

When I hit or kick I can’t tell the difference in power from weak to strong. Often I don’t feel anything and am told the kick had more power. From this I conclude that power feel like nothing. How can I control something I can’t feel? All that changed was technique. When that’s right there is no effort. Effort tries to control or short-cut to a goal, it’s necessary to the process but at some point you have to forget it and not need to feel it anymore.

Why, I’ve always thought the feeling of effort was the same as power. I’m, I’m at a loss how to accept this new thought.

Beyond the Act

New beginnings and spring they go together, according to one of my yoga teachers. Fine, I’ll run with that.

It looks like my next adventure is one through holistic health care. Instead of focusing my energies on creating I will now focus my energy on healing what is broken, mind, body, and spirit. I like this idea it feels better to me than what was before.

My time in entertainment confirmed things in me that I suspected but couldn’t name. My awareness of stress levels, my strange ability to see c to the heart, all that and the exhaustion told me that I was probably in the wrong line of work.

My fear of not finding anything better did keep me there longer than was healthy. In some ways I wasn’t ready to accept the difficult work of mending the broken people. I can’t do this. I don’t have the resources. Yet I’ve been asked to time and time again.

I’m broken myself, just a dingy rotting string to hold things together. May that be enough.

Sometimes I think I’m being redundant. I can’t remember who I’ve said what to when.

Right now I have a gift card for a spa, from my last birthday, sitting next to my computer waiting to be used. I didn’t find the time when I really needed the message to get it and now that I have time well I can’t seem to make up my mind to just pick a random thing and go.

Ordinary Thing

I’ve been given an amazing gift this evening. For someone like me, who hides behind busyness a bit and has had a full schedule, without a quality brake, since 2010, the cancellation of two appointments that were scheduled for a Sunday morning is like, like I don’t know, weird in a good way. I’ve been begging myself for a break. I guess I might have asked God for one too…

There are a couple of ways I can experience this time. I could wake up whenever and make myself a quality breakfast and read something interesting, or I could go somewhere, or I could, what? What do people do when they have time off?! 

I know what I’ll do, I always end up doing this any way, I will wake up and have breakfast at my usual hour. I will knit for a while. I will realize I’m kind of board and try to find the weirdest internet radio station I can or try to write something and then lunch will happen. I will do all of this knowing that this ordinary thing is a gift. Who knows? I may even take a nap.

This is as good as it gets.

Courage

Lately, like for the past year or so, I’ve had a mild obsession with the concept of courage.

I think it’s because I sometimes feel stuck about what I’m doing. I think of a plan and then have no idea how to make it happen. All the advice out there is, “just do it” but no one really says, this is the way to do it. So I’m stuck. 

I’m not the kind of person who tries a lot of things blindly.

At the root of all fear is a thought. It isn’t the same thought for all fears. Physical fear is all about, “Oh no, this series of events is leading to death, runnnn!” Social fear says, “These people are hostile and will kill me, runnnn!” I think those are the main types of fear and they all are concerned with preservation of life. Somehow we think life is our responsibility to preserve. Yet I wonder about that.

Let’s paint an ideal picture. This is not how things are but how they ought to be. If I am unconcerned with my social preservation and focus on yours and you are doing the same for me then we are sharing the burden of living here. So the answer is not try harder on my own account but to do better on yours. I think constantly self-advocating is exhausting, I’d rather have someone advocate for me. I don’t find advocating for others to be quite so taxing. This is a sustainable model. 

In the back of our heads there’s this little worry creature that likes to remind us that other people fail. In fact it also tells us that we fail therefore others will fail. This creature is telling you facts based on experience. Facts based on experience are impossible to ignore. Nor should you ignore them. Interesting point though, you happen to be alive and somewhat rational, past failures haven’t been terminal. So, why this ginormous emotional impact, this thing that makes us skittish around the scene of our past mistakes? 

Our culture, society, has sent us messages of dire inadequacy from before our births. But am I blaming culture? I don’t know. Education is a powerful thing that works against these messages. If we cultivate the ability to analyze messages to get at the root communication then we are able to deal with the root causes of everything.

I’ll go with a perennial hot button issue to illustrate my point, gun control. Ok, so every three years or so some broken messed up man goes and shoots out a school, or mall, or whatever and there’s this huge reaction, as there should be. We have people wanting to ban all guns, we have people arguing about the guns role in the incident. They focus on the guns because really the thing that will stop these types of killings isn’t the absence of the tool but the healing of the person, and that is way out of our control.  No one can guarantee healing for another person. I’m sure in all the massacres there were signs that it was coming but the individual was too isolated for us to notice.

Now if we were conditioned to notice things could have been managed better. I’m not saying that all murder will cease, but I am saying that it would be better to heal the person before they do a mass job thus reducing the occurrence of these events, leaving society with another productive individual. This is something the government alone cannot handle. This is something that each of us must take part in.

Why can’t just the government handle this you ask? Good question. Let’s be realistic, what can the government do about your attitude? Honestly, nothing. It’s our attitudes that isolate us. See if I’m thinking, “not my problem” or “that’s not worth my attention” or “my problems are more important” I blind myself to the person falling apart next to me. People hate being outcast, ignored. It’s a biological thing.

Obviously I can’t be deeply involved in everyone’s life. That’s just impossible. I’m human. But each one of us has been “assigned” a group of people to care for, if you will. If I blind myself to my people and they fall apart I am affected, because destruction happens.

I think courage has something to do with asking for help. Not me telling you, you need help, but me asking for it even when I think you think I have it all together. It, whatever, is all scattered out there. I don't know exactly what I'm doing, I'm not sure what I need, but I do need friends. Ones who will go questing with me to find the answers.