The Happy Heart, Part III

Remembering these moments from my past brought in a new focus for me to which I had otherwise heretofore been completely oblivious.  The epiphany?  I have the ability to shine, and I have the ability to clam up, to disappear, but I have colored it humility to make myself feel that I was doing something right or pious or proper.  In fact, nothing could be more erroneous or selfish.

I had stopped myself from demolishing my fellow students intellectually, but I was cocky and confident enough physically to take it upon myself to win basketball games by exposing the opposing team’s weakness without as much as a second thought.  There was a barrage of images and brain videos from both sides of myself, which begged the question of why I allow one side or the other to dominate depending on how I view the situation, and more importantly, how I view what the repercussions may be to anyone in my wake.  Just a note of observation and something I will clearly have to monitor, it seems that physical prowess and the aspiration to physically be the best is completely acceptable for me, while intellectual mastery is to be wielded with extreme caution regardless of intent, but especially if it purposely or inadvertently has the potential to cause another to feel inferior in any way.

This all has very little to do with the exercise of The Happy Heart, but it is what came up during the hike, and I just report the facts ma’am.  Ok, that’s not entirely true.  It was the moments in my life during which I have shined unabashedly that informed my Happy Heart Meditation.

About three-quarters of the way up the trail to my pre-determined destination, I found my spot.  I hadn’t expected it, but the rock called me, and I answered.

Approximately twenty or thirty minutes up Mt. Wilson Trail from the trail head, a boulder juts out over a ravine that comfortably holds a stream in its grasp at its lowest point.  Normally, the sound of the water running through is faint at best, and more often than not, non-existent at worst.  The boulder was something I seem to have missed in the dozen or more times that I have traversed the rocky climb.  It was perfect.  It looked as if it were cut for the seat of some giant. With an ample backrest that ended about the middle of my scapula, and a width that could comfortably seat three across, it was almost too perfect (whatever that means.)  Although I would not want to be the person on the far side of this enormous natural chair as it precariously dangles a good three feet off the edge of the trail.

So, to remind you quickly, here are the directions again:

  1. Pick an image, event, person or anything that evokes a deep feeling of happiness.
  2. Imagine your heart as a large, oval room with you sitting in the center.
  3. Begin to see this deep feeling of happiness filling up the oval room of your heart.
  4. When the room is full to bursting with this feeling of happiness, allow the feeling to escape through windows of your heart and move into your entire body.

I have had some difficulty imagining sitting in my heart.  Sometimes, my brain works so linearly and literally that sitting in my heart seems ridiculous to my “rational” mind.  How do you sit in your heart?  I don’t know.  But if I did know, I would sit the way I did atop the Giantess’ rock (an inordinate amount of male references is quite boring as it’s been done so often by so many, myself included,  literarily speaking.)

I closed my eyes.  I felt the rock beneath me and behind me, comforting me, cradling me.  I listened to the water rushing through, over and around rocks in the ravine below.  I felt the cool breeze wash over my body with it’s sweet, fresh smell and the sunlight’s warmth on my back.  I watched the young 15 year old Jon Snow, mopping a floor with real joy at a school he never liked.  I saw the man offer me a job.  But I was still sitting on my borrowed boulder along Mt. Wilson Trail.

This went on for about ten minutes.  Seeing myself proud, happy and joyful, but still sitting on a rock on the side of a mountain.  Then it hit me.  I was sitting.

Then it was a landslide (not literally, thankfully.)  The Giantess’ rock was the seat inside my heart.  The mountains, the water, the breeze, the sunshine, my quaint little town back down below, California, the whole world was inside my heart.  How big is the world, I mean really, when it’s all said and done?  And what is big when the only frame of reference is the limited human sensory experience?  My heart is bigger.

I felt the room that was the world inside my heart fill up with this joy until it was ready to burst.  It was a warm, golden light.  The world and my heart could no longer contain it all.  It rushed into my arms first, then filled my torso and spread down to my legs and finally exploded through the top of my head.  I basked in the beauty of it all for a bit.

I was buzzing.  My whole body was tingling as I opened my eyes once again.  A huge smile broke across my face, well, at least it was there for a moment.  It was so powerful that I had a slight moment of vertigo before I cautiously climbed off the stone upon which I sat.  Then I let out a booming laugh at the thought of me falling off my perch that echoed throughout the ravine.

Published in:  on January 30, 2010 at 11:13 am Leave a Comment
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The Happy Heart, Part II

So, there I was slowly, yet steadily climbing the mountain trail surrounded by images of my childhood that showed me the different sides of me.  I remembered when I was 15 and I was mopping a floor at the private Christian high school in which I was enrolled at the time, and a gentlemen that owned a Subway approached me and offered me a job because I was working so diligently with my mop.  I remembered being so proud that I had been offered a job.  And the smile of disappointment (yes, you read that correctly) on his face when he realized he could not hire me for another year.  He told me to look him up in a year if I wanted a job.

I remembered a basketball game in which we were down by 2 points.  With time running out, I found myself with the ball just inside the left wing of the 3-point line.  I remembered looking at the clock, just like every kid that shoots hoops imagines it, 3-2-1.  I looked at my feet.  I looked at the clock.  I looked at the score.  No one seemed to want to defend me, so I made a decision.  I dribbled twice, backward, behind the 3-point line to set my feet.  I shot.  The buzzer sounded.  The ball tickled the twine dangling beneath the basket, and, like any good, cocky shooter, I just left that hand up in the air for all to see the perfect form with which I had just won the game.

Those two scenes and many more played before my mind’s eye as I traversed up the narrow, rocky trail.

I began to relive many little scenes throughout my youth.  Some wonderful, some not so much.  We established in the Ascending to the Madness series that there are many sides to me, and that, until recently, part of the problem regarding my lack of an unfettered ascent had been that all of me were not on the same page.  So began the barrage of scenes of the different sides that have been with me most of my life.

I was around 10 years old.  My father was going to school, they didn’t call it seminary, but for all intents and purposes, he was studying at a Bible college to become an ordained minister, so we’ll color it seminary.  I grew up with the Bible coming out of my ears.  I was such an excellent student that I was asked to represent the entire fourth grade (if memory serves) and participate in the Bible Olympics the school held every year.  It was a great honor, or so they told me.

At the Bible Olympics, I knew every answer to every single question, without fail.  I knew every answer before every other competitor seated at the long table that seemed to stretch on forever on the basketball court of our school’s gymnasium.  Question after question.  Answer after answer.  They were all mine.  I hit my buzzer not a single, solitary time.  I froze.

I saw myself sitting there, this stiff, terror-stricken little 10 year old.  A big red buzzer button awaiting my slap, a punch, just a delicate touch?  I gave it nothing.  The crowd in the bleachers seemed to come down on top of me, crowding me, the lights blinding me.  I was frozen.  I was scared.  Too scared to even hit a buzzer.  Stage fright was only a small part of it.  Mostly, I was scared to make the other kids look stupid.  I could have.  I could have intellectually obliterated all of them.  I could have run the entire table of questions without fail.  Even when a question seemingly stumped the entire group, little Jon Snow knew the answer, but even then, I didn’t allow him to even put a shadow of his hand across the face of that ominous red button.

Published in:  on January 26, 2010 at 10:46 am Leave a Comment
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The Happy Heart (A Tangential Experience)

A whirlwind journey of last minute flight arrangements, fast food, airport security (no bags to check, but this one seems so heavy after lugging it around the airport for an hour,) book reading, burying a loved one, familial reunion, coupled with a smattering of familial reconciliation and fighting, two old friends fostering new life, beers shared with the less conservative members of my family, sleeping on couches, uncontrollably nodding off on the plane ride home (please nudge me if I snore annoyingly,) a less than stellar landing, waiting an hour for my ride because of a rare east to west tailwind, and finally crawling back into my own bed sixty-five hours later.

It’s a strange thing to be writing about a Happy Heart in the midst of a family member dying.  My grandmother passed away last Saturday evening.  In fact, I have been to two funerals in five days.  Not exactly the type of material that feeds and nurtures the subject to which I aspire to explore in this series.

It feels so long ago that I started this exploration of my Happy Heart.  Two lives have passed, but it feels like two lifetimes since last I sat before this screen to share with whomever might be listening.

I didn’t shed a tear at Marie Snow’s funeral.  Not a single one.  At the funeral of her husband, my grandfather, Bill, who passed away three and a half years ago, I experienced the same seemingly apathetic response.  Not to say that I was apathetic.  Far from it.  Given the relationship with my father (it’s good,) it was certainly difficult to watch him in pain at the loss of his dad.  Due to familial bickering (to put it mildly,) my father was less effusive in his emotions at his mother’s funeral.

I spoke at Bill’s funeral.  I told his favorite jokes.  All ridiculous, as he may have been the corniest man to ever walk the face of the Earth.  But I knew that he would have wanted it that way.  I submit the following for your own inner corny comedian:

“What’s green and has wheels?”  Answer:  “The lawn.  I was just joking about the wheels.”

The difference between Bill and Marie’s funerals was glaringly, almost painfully diametric in presentation.  Where people got up to speak about Bill, myself obviously included, about his life and the way he touched us all, no one spoke on behalf of Marie.  One single, solitary automaton of a man, my grandmother’s last pastor, droned on and on about who and what Marie was and had been as a woman, a teacher, and parishioner.

Where I found my tears surprised me.  At a Catholic church on a Monday morning, participating in a different funeral of a man I met at the market, and that I only truly knew in passing, during a song I had never heard, a strange liquid seeped from my eyes.  This is interesting, I remember thinking.

My grandmother and Andy could not have been more different people.  A former military man, Andy was huge.  Even on the edge of his departure, supposedly weak from the hole in his intestine that eventually claimed him, he was reported to have still been giving his potentially bone-crushing handshakes lying there in his hospital bed.  A mother of six, Marie was small and thin but strong in her own right, both in the spiritual sense and the physical from many hours logged working in her garden.  They both had strength and power in their own way, but two people never lived their lives more differently.

I’m not new to my thinking that death is just a part of life and at whose table we all will eventually find ourselves raising a glass.  I was happy for both of my grandparents.  Bill had Leukemia, and Marie her Alzheimer’s.

To fret, worry, feel sadness or loss, are all a part of being human.  Being attached to those things, however, puts us in Ken’s definition of the rabbit hole.  Marie, Bill and Andy all needed to go, to get out of here, to move on to the next phase of their energetic existence.  Call it what you will, heaven, the cosmos, the after-life, it makes no difference.  Energy cannot be destroyed, so I know all three of them are better off wherever they exist now.  So, why feel saddened by their new adventures?  I’d rather rejoice in their freedom from this corporeal shell.

I write this partially to let you know where I have been and why I haven’t written this last week or so, but maybe I just needed to get it off my chest too. Either way, thanks for listening.

Published in:  on January 22, 2010 at 4:26 pm Leave a Comment

The Happy Heart, Part I

So, remember, oh, I don’t know, let’s be gracious to me and say, a month or so ago when I started Ken’s Rewriting Your Life program?  I told you there were daily exercises and journal entries and all sorts of stuff to keep me busy and on task, remember?  Yeah, I haven’t really been doing all that.  I just finished Day 5.  Ken’s going to give me no end of crap when he reads this one.  But, I’m back on track, not beating myself up too badly for my lackadaisical attitude or lack of stick-t0-itiveness.  And Day 5 has a cool homework assignment.

The Happy Heart exercise asks me to sit inside my heart once again, the same way I did way back in October when I did the Heart Song exercise.  I like this exercise much better, well, that’s not fair to say better because Heart Song certainly has its purpose and usefulness, but Happy Heart is what it says it is, and the Heart Song, well, that requires a bit of diving into the mire of sadness that accumulates in the heart.  Both extremely important, but I think we all prefer the light, fluffy stuff when it comes to matters of the heart.

So, sitting inside my heart, here are the directions:

  1. Pick an image, event, person or anything that evokes a deep feeling of happiness.
  2. Imagine your heart as a large, oval room with you sitting in the center.
  3. Begin to see this deep feeling of happiness filling up the oval room of your heart.
  4. When the room is full to bursting with this feeling of happiness, allow the feeling to escape through windows of your heart and move into your entire body.

Living at the base of a mountain has its privileges for the active body.  You may remember that the impetus for this whole journey was a direct response to how hard I physically push my body and the resulting pain that initially drove me to Ken’s wizardly ways.  The pain is virtually gone, but Ken is still trepidatious about letting me run, which frustrates me greatly, but I’m trusting in the process.  So, I decided that after 4 months of not doing anything, that I would go for a hike on the Mt. Wilson Trail behind my house.  It wasn’t running, but it was something.

The mountain burned about a year and a half ago.  Southern California is no stranger to wildfires, but this one came the very day that I moved into my current place of residence.  It was close enough that I had to evacuate, or so the police and fire departments would have me believe.  Being new to the area, I of course acquiesced.  Later, I found out that ‘manadatory’ evacuation cannot really be enforced, but that’s not really relevant at the moment, so I digress.  I visited the trail again a few months after the fires, but it was a rocky sea of mangled, charred tree trunks and branches, without a speck of green plant life anywhere.  Truly barren and desolate, it was almost depressing.

So, through a combination of the fires, my new found obsession with running on the beach and whatever else life threw my way, yesterday was my first time back to the mountain in quite some time.  My plan was to hike up to what is known as “First Water” about 1.5 miles up the mountain.  The trail head is just under 1000 feet in elevation and First Water just under 2000, not too strenuous, but certainly a workout.  My intention was to hike up and come back down, and then go back home and do my Happy Heart assignment.

It was not my intention to begin finding the things or the reasons or images that made me happy, but, inadvertently, that is what began to happen.  And that was pretty cool.

Published in:  on January 12, 2010 at 11:47 am Leave a Comment
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Ascending To The Madness, Part V

In a busy day of body, I saw Rob again for another cranio-sacral session.  It’s really amazing work that this man does.  I might have to start another section on here just for him.

I’ll get into cranio-sacral stuff a little later on.  Rob’s work, like any good body worker/healer/magician, is part technique, but the vast majority of the healing takes place because of the ethereal, intangible aspects that the healer brings to the table, and Rob is exceptional in that area. (Would you expect me to bring you anything else?)

What I will tell you, is that this work feels fantastic.  It’s so delicate and so gentle, it’s hard to see if anything is actually being done.  It’s not difficult, however, to feel that something is definitely happening.

Rob’s office is in Westwood, just minutes from the beach.  After our session, I had to go.  I go to the beach a lot.  Even now, when the wind whips off the water forcefully and chilly enough to bring tears to the eyes.  I love the beach.  At night, the middle of the day, sunrise, it doesn’t matter, but the sunsets are what I crave most of all.

The sunset at the beach today was the most amazing one for me yet.  And I mean ever.  There was an orange-red cloud in the form of a giant dragon.  There are indeed dragons in Jon Snow’s, George R.R. Martin inspired and created world, yet another strange manifestation.  As I allowed the water to gently caress my feet, I began to notice there were many dragons in the clouds.  For a time, I thought they were engaged in a battle.  There was one in particular, more of a Loch Ness looking sort of dragon, than the classic model flying type, that had an immensely elongated neck.  It seemed to be hovering right above me (ok, so maybe it did fly.)  It was then that I realized the dragons were only playing, the way dogs and little boys wrestle and fight for fun.

Immediately the sky changed.  My world changed.  I felt like everything was suddenly in 3D, or maybe that I was, in that very same way that I had been trying to create in Ken’s office.  It was strange madness.  I could see any specific point or section on a cloud and that point or section would suddenly seem as if it were directly in front of my eyes.  I could manipulate it if I wanted to.  I didn’t, but I certainly felt that belief in my body.  I spun around on the sand and water looking inland to the boardwalk in Venice, to the Ferris wheel on Santa Monica pier, back out to the sea, and it was all right there for me to grab, feel, smell, taste, whatever I wanted.

I went to see “Avatar” again the other night.  It was the late showing at 10:40pm.  About 12:30, I’m guessing, I started to fall asleep.  At least you would have thought so.  Sleep was too easy a label.  I was falling backward.  I was being taken.  I kept leaving to go somewhere else.  It scared me a little because I kept coming back, or waking up, but the fear was not so powerful a deterrent to keep me from going back again.

My sleep recently has started to become the same.  Not sure if it’s real sleep, an astral projection, or if maybe what I am dreaming is more real, and this body is the perpetrator of the true lie.  The parrots were back this morning.  They usually sit right outside my window when they squawk their songs to me.  I asked them to be quiet this morning.  Except, I think I pushed my head and face through the wall behind me and got directly in front of them when I asked.  Then I “woke up”.  It’s all madness.

After telling Jon Snow, for what seems to be the millionth time, that he knows nothing, Ygritte throws him another line.  “You might be learning some, though.”

Lately, especially, I have to ask what’s happening, a lot.  It’s all so wonderfully confusing.  I am getting lost in the magic.  I know that I’m working my way toward greater spiritual heights.  The ascension, if that’s truly what this is, is one hell of a ride.

Listen, I’m not saying you should believe in or subscribe to any of  this madness.  It’s just what I have been and am currently feeling and experiencing in my journey.

Published in:  on January 9, 2010 at 10:04 am Leave a Comment
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Ascending To The Madness, Part IV

Ken gave me a chi machine with which to play for a little while.  You can watch it work if you click on the link, but I know some of us are lazy, so here it is in the quick.  It has an ankle cradle that rocks side to side at a rate of about 140 times a minute.  It rocks the legs from side to side gently undulating the entire body in a manner that brings to mind children pretending to be frying bacon on the front yard’s grass on a hot summer’s day.  Ken told me to lie down and use the machine for about 10 minutes at a time, and when it stopped, he wanted me to follow the energy up my body and out the top of my head.

I often use Kelly Howell’s meditation cd’s to help me with tuning my mind because more oft than not, I just don’t want to do it, or, more accurately, I want to be led.  These are the cd’s with binaural beats.  Binaural beats are really cool.  Extremely simply put, a different frequency is played into each ear, and the two hemispheres of the brain are forced to work together, but not to hear the frequency being played in either side, but to hear a third ghost (there’s that dog again) frequency that actually helps alter your brain wave patterns to get you into deeper states of meditation.  So, being part mad scientist, I used the opportunity to combine the cd’s binaural beat technology with the chi machine.

Ten minutes passed in what seemed like an hour.  The abruptness of the machine stopping is quite pronounced, and it certainly caught me a little off guard, but I was still able to heed the direction of following the energy up and out through the top of my dome.  My entire body tingled, but not tingled like oh, it looks like a beautiful day, let me open the door, and ah! it’s freakin freezing tingle.  This was more like a hum.  In fact every time I have done it this week, the hum has been there.  It feels like my body is being pushed up from the floor in the manner in which magnets repel each other.

I felt everything spiraling upward through my head until I thought the scalp on top of my skull might actually burst.  And then I felt it.  My body jerked suddenly upward.  It felt like I was beginning to power out some sit-ups, but I suddenly slammed my head into something hard and a heavy chain surrounded my shoulders from behind and jerked me back down to the ground.  Then again with the same result.  Again.  Pass the healthcare bill already, I’m gonna need it.  (I wonder if there’s a public option for the spirit.)

I tried to leave my corporeal reality several times.  So, the next time on the machine, I started anticipating the stop, but the stop was not to be had so easily for the expecting.  And then a funny thing started happening.  I began to feel the stop.  The chi machine was sliding back and forth with steadfast, undying diligence, but I kept feeling it stop.  Each time it stopped, my spirit was trying to catapult itself out of my body, and it almost worked too, if it hadn’t been for that meddling mind pulling it back in.  Pulling me back in.

So, off to Ken I go yesterday.  Tales straight out of books coming to life in front of my very eyes, messages from beyond, or something to that effect, and a new attitude for a new year and a new decade, I had so much to talk about yesterday, and I was feeling really good, so away I went, ready for whatever the wizard could dish out.

I open the door to the Firm Body Evolution Spa, where Ken’s office is located, walk in to the left and immediately find myself facing a certain idolized celebrity.  She’s much smaller than I would have thought, I hear myself saying safely within the confines of my mind, thankfully.  Mark, one of the very few that work in that office, politely introduces me, and boldly proclaims that I give the best hugs.  She who shall remain nameless (except for the perceptive) says she’ll be the judge of that.  She looks up at me and says, “Uh, you’re gonna have to come down here or something.”  I’m only too happy to oblige.  After the hug, while she publicly proclaimed that she thought we were pretty even, I could tell she still thought she held a slight edge.  It was cute.

I was lying on the hip rotation machine wondering at the wonder of it all.  That’s partially true, and actually, after much reflection on all of the fantastical madness that has become so prevalent on this journey, I was lying there still questioning what was real.

From the second story window of the FBE Spa, all you can see of the La Brea Tar Pits across the street while lying down on a hip rotator machine is a palm tree or two.  I chose a palm tree and focused on a specific leaf, trying to blur the edge of it.  That edge was the edge of reality I told myself.  I can blur the edge of that leaf with my eyes the same way I can blur all this world and the spirit world.  Focus on the edge.  The edge of madness.  Madness isn’t bad, you just have to be able to sift through it.  The edge.  The edge.  What is… Hey the end of that leaf looks like the end of the pony tails on those guys from “Avatar“.  I’d like to be in a 3D world.

And so it was that I began to try making the palm tree out there feel like it was in 3D.  And I was doing beautifully.  Floating in and out of my fantasy while the machine went about it’s business caring little to nothing of the swirl of thoughts going through my mind.

“Get off that machine!”

Ken walked in so suddenly and with that mock authoritative voice from behind my line of sight, I nearly jumped out of my skin.  Oh, he got a kick out of that.

We did our work.  Ken’s adjustments have been doing wonders for my physical body, so these days, after some quick physical tinkering, we have been doing more of the theta healing for the spirit, mind and emotional body.

Ken listened, perpetually looking so slightly bemused, as I poured out all the madness.  Smiling coyly, he relished every minute, every detail.  Through the characters manifesting in my physical life, my spirit trying to escape this body, dancing on the edge, holding the hand of madness, he listened and smiled.  He likes this me.  I like this me.  I was the child that wonders, asks questions and is fascinated by it all.  That’s not me all the time.  I’m trying to figure out how to let that part of me play a bigger role.  Neither of us really realized there were more personalities of me that like to sabotage the whole, until today.  This session was about putting all of me on the same page to ready myself for a joyful initiation.

After the work, we walked to grab a bite to eat and discuss what was going to be our next plan of action for me for this year.  He did theta healing by proxy.  We both agreed it might look weird if he was holding my hand at the bar of Callender’s while asking me questions and then pulling on my fingers.  Ken energetically, spiritually, put himself in my place and pulled his own fingers.

On a beautiful, sunshiny, L.A. winter day of about 75 degrees, we joked and laughed back to his office.  My cute, new friend was still there when we returned.  She was oh, so cute, when she showed me a dancing elephant that played the harmonica on the side of the road that she had met in India, I think.  She asked for another hug.  This one was for real.  Not that the first hadn’t been, but this one was, just right on.  Now that we were familiar with each other’s techniques, pressures, and correct, necessary height adjustments, we really laid one on each other.  Then she asked Ken what she did before she met me.  How fun.  Just another nugget.  It made me happy.

Published in:  on January 8, 2010 at 10:59 am Leave a Comment
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Ascending To The Madness, Part III

I awoke the other morning to my usual goings on in the canyon.  The parrots making the unbelievably awful noise that they mistakenly believe to be music to my ears, the sun shining right through my eyelids from the corner window of my bedroom.  It was a good sleep from which I awoke.  Baby’s and rocks and logs never had it so good.  It was deep, and I had gone to bed the night before at a very early hour, so it was exceptionally ample.  It was only days after the session with Ken that I broke down quite a bit, now that I’m thinking about it.

I went about my routine of showering, dressing, grabbing this computer and walking up the hill to the market for coffee and a bite to eat.  The proprietor of the establishment, a petite woman, around fifty years old, always has the energy to greet everyone with a brilliant smile, and this day was no exception.  She peered at me over the reading glasses perched on the edge of her little button nose, flashed that wonderful smile, and said, “Oh! You’re not awake yet.  Coffee.”  It wasn’t a question.  A little cackle, and she set off to make a cup for me.

Later that day, in the middle of the afternoon, I once again walked up the hill next to the wash that comes down from the mountain, crossed the little wooden foot bridge by the green park bench in the southeast corner of the parking lot, and I made my way across the narrow street to the front door of Mary’s.  Fallen leaves,  bigger than my head, colored gold and faint green with hints of red, tickled my flip-flop clad feet.  A local and a market staple, as well as a retired Pasadena police offer that loves to “sing” Bob Dylan songs to me, stopped me to say hello, and before he could finish the word, he stopped himself, and said, “Man! You’re not even awake yet, are you?!”  It happened a third time that day, and you know what they say about things happening in threes.  Actually, maybe it’s just that things happen in threes.  Whatever.  I just know that for me, that’s almost more than one and a half times more than it needs to happen to make it stand out and feel a little eerie to me.

Somewhere, somehow, I’m not fully awake.  I may not even be partially awake.  But on which side?  Maybe it’s both sides.  How do I know it’s only two sides?  Maybe there are many more sides than just two.  I could go in circles for days.  This much is clear.  Someone, or something, maybe even just a different version of me, is trying to tell me to wake up.

So, even the messages, the lessons are becoming animated, real, tangible things it seems.  I’m starting to wonder how much I have allowed myself to regress, because surely being in the human body with human emotions is a regression from the ambivalent, unattached spirit whence we came and to where we return.  So, what is the real?

Published in:  on January 7, 2010 at 11:25 am Leave a Comment
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Ascending To The Madness, Part II

Ok, so Ghost and Melisandre show up in my “real” “waking” life as if bringing to this world, the world of “Inkheart“. (I know, try to keep up with all the pop-culture references in this series.)  And if you know that reference, the answer is no, I have not been reading the books aloud, and, no, again, I do not think I am a Silver Tongue.  Ok, so, that is strange enough, but there’s more to Ygritte’s quote.

I talk to Ken quite a bit, obviously, about all this stuff.  And like any good romantic hero struggling to find his way, I am constantly reminded about what I don’t yet know, or, in the case of Ken, what I have not yet remembered.  And now, seemingly quite suddenly, I find myself with the lines all blurry.  What do I know, I mean really know, that I am currently not allowing myself to remember that I know?  The deep stuff.  The magical stuff.

And then there was the anger.  Not madness, this time, but real, actual anger.  I was trying to find a reason for anger anywhere and everywhere for about a week and a half.  On the road, at work, oh, at work!  Sure, I could quit.  Show them my flair and walk.

Everything was eating me.  I was angry at people in general for not getting it, not seeing the picture the way I do.  How could they be so stupid, so blind?  It’s right there! I have felt like screaming to them.  How do you not see it?!

In another attempt to bring a fictional book to my current reality, I had to ask myself the question from “Illusions” by Richard Bach.  How can I help those I only want to smack the ever-living shit out of? Ok, so Bach’s character never said that, but he was fed up with people.  I had to be honest and admit that I was starting to look down at some people.  A lot of people.  Almost everybody, actually.  I was suddenly a pious new age jerk.  How the hell did I end up here?  I’m not like that.  And then it hit me.  You know nothing, Jon Snow.

Over and over Ygritte says that.  And I’ll admit that I started to read this series of books just so I could look for parallels to my own “real” life.  (You would do the same thing and you know it.)  Be careful for what you wish.  So, I have to find some humility as well as rid myself of this anger.  Great.  That should be easy.

Published in:  on January 6, 2010 at 7:24 pm Leave a Comment
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Ascending To The Madness, Part I

“You know nothing, Jon Snow” – Ygritte, a wildling character in George R.R. Martin’s series “A Song of Ice and Fire”

So, yes, there truly is a character in a book series with whom I share a name.  I know this because I am currently knee-deep in the third book of the four currently published.  And, yes, that is an exact quote.  And, yes, it is a fantasy series.  And, yes, I am a dork.  And, yes, I do enjoy indulging my inner nerd-child from time to time.  So there.

I give you that quote because I want to express how strange this life has become.  I suppose I could have quoted Jim Morrison in his song “Waiting for the Sun” about this being the strangest life I have ever known, because that would have worked as well and as effectively, if not as surreptitiously.

It’s interesting and not too strange that this character exists somewhere, and that he’s running around with my name.  Jon Snow, the character was publicly born 22 years to the year after I was.  How soon before his public unveiling he was born in his creator’s world, I couldn’t say, but I believe, and I haven’t done any real research on the subject, so don’t quote me, but I think it’s pretty rare to share both a first and last name with a character of a NY Times bestseller.

Ok, so that is fine and dandy, but what happens when the worlds start mixing together? the real and the fantasy.  (I could talk for a good while on what’s fantastically real and what’s the real fantasy, but for now we won’t do that.)

I have inexplicably had characters from the book showing up in random ways, and not to belabor the point, but to provide proof of said randomosity, I will cite two perfect examples without giving away any of the plot points of the books for those who may want to read about my fictional doppelgänger.

First, there is a sorceress named Melisandre.  Melisandre is always dressed in red gowns, and in my reader’s mind, she has this Elvira crossed with Cruella de Vil sense about her, but in a sexified, good way.  (Let me fantasize my fantasy in peace, thank you.)  A woman showed up at the restaurant during the holiday season wearing a crushed red velvet coat.  The coat had a flipped up collar that enveloped almost all of her neck, and it flowed all the way to the floor hugging her small waist in the middle and flaring at her boots as it swept down her thin frame.  Her hair was blonde with fire-red tips that gently tickled her shoulders.  Not that I was paying too close attention.

Jon Snow’s character in the books has a direwolf named “Ghost”.  One of six direwolves found in the first book, the animal is named for his albino characteristics of white fur and red eyes.  I came home last week after a long Saturday of work to find my neighbor Andres’ dog, Shogun, lying on my kitchen floor.  Now, I don’t see Shogun very often because of the layout of the cabins in which I live, so I forget that he is there sometimes.  Shogun is a large Akita (I think) that is blind, so his eyes are glassed over by cataracts, which makes his eyes look incredibly spooky.  Shogun is also completely white and about 100 pounds.  Ghost was in my kitchen.

Published in:  on at 7:20 pm Leave a Comment
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My Secret Letter To The Gods

Almost one moon has grown full and large, birthed the Darkness that swallowed it whole, before again being impregnated with the life of Light.  This, since last I put pen to paper here in this holy hiding place.  Guarding my secrets, my fears and my secret fears.

Words have been written to show me the power I possess and secretly hold in fear.  Men causing antique aircraft to hover like helicopters, men changing their visage with a simple wave of their hand and passing through walls as if they were made of air, shadows armed with blades as real as the ground beneath my feet (for whatever that may be worth) to spill a man’s blood, driving cars with no gas required, dead men walking as natural as life.

And yet, here I stand, feeling no wiser than I did a month ago when I called upon my brother the Raven.

I feel him inside my body, mind and spirit.  This cage of flesh keeps him safe, or is it my own ego that is safe by his continued imprisonment?

I ask again to be given the strength and courage to burn this physical cell and free the Raven so that we may spread our wings and soar, as brothers, as one.

It is our time.  Thank you.

Published in:  on December 23, 2009 at 10:19 am Leave a Comment
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