What constitutes reality?

All such notions as causation, succession, atoms, primary elements...are all figments of the imagination and manifestations of the mind. -Buddha

Chloe - January 22, 2002 - July 28, 2006

My heart is broken today. Chloe, I lost you this week to a sudden illness. You were always by my side for the four years of your life, and I really cannot believe you will not be here. You are a beautiful girl, and I love you very much.

And, to my little boy Mac, our house seems very quiet, we will have to make some noise.

Oneness

I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together. - The Beatles

Cast Your Fate to the Wind

A month of nights, a year of days
Octobers drifting into Mays
You set your sail when the tide comes in
And you cast your fate to the wind
You shift your course along the breeze
Won't sail up wind on memories
The empty sky is your best friend
And you just cast your fate to the wind
That time has such a way of changing a man throughout the years
And now you're rearranging your life through all your tears
Alone, alone
There never was, there couldn't be
A place in time for men to be
Who'd drink the dark and laugh at day
And let their wildest dreams blow away
So now you're old, you're wise, you're smart
You're just a man with half a heart
You wonder how it might have been
Had you not cast your fate to the wind

Cast Your Fate To the Wind
Steve Alaimo
Words by Carel Werber
Music by Vince Guaraldi
By the Vince Guaraldi Trio, the instrumental peaked at # 22 in 1963

Note From Justine

...we were possessed by a desire to communicate
ideas and experiences which overstepped the range
of thought normal to conversation among ordinary people.

Our intimacy was a strange mental order.

Discovering behind the darkly woven sensuality will be
a friendship so profound that we
shall become bondsmen forever.

...her efforts to achieve herself
led her always towards and not away
from him. The world has no place for this
sort of paradox.

Excerpts from "Justine"
by Lawrence Durrell
The 20th Century's finest fiction writer

A Secret

Where did the days go
free spirit days
when I was a secret
and no one knew
time was once
when I was free from
lords and kings.

I long to escape
into fiction and fantasy
to float on billowing
white ermine clouds,
diamond studed starground
dazzling the eye,
the sun reflecting light
through crystal prisms
with colors of the rainbow.

My spirit flies,
flies with the delicately
woven wings of a butterfly,
world of the ordinary ask not
too much from me,
I can compromise no more.

Taking a direct path

I always listen for what I can leave out.

Miles Davis

Remembering Stonedell

It's not like the farm...

Looking beyond lead framed windows
with the tears of the city's pollution
adding layers to the already somber day,
the sky projects a heavy gray mist
across the rooftops and
a cool current moves over me
as I watch
the movement of children on a path
across my yard.
Wires for communications
ornament leafless trees
houses peeling years of color
from their stationary stances.

Remembering
not so many days ago
hillside hues of summer green
wildflower yellows dotted violet,
majestic movements of sleek horses,
resting in the shade of giant oaks
countryside patterns of white fencing
with barns looking like
a picturesque daydream
lying back in a hammock
watching the butterflies dance.

The solitude on a country afternoon
seems so far removed
as the truck is unloaded with shouts
of frustrations
and the highway moves
its crowds and horns
and squealing tires.
Another day
the city sounds
come together...
a continous discordance.

Gladly letting that moment go

Each moment of our lives is imbued with richness and magic. The passage from one second to the next is a miracle in its own right and worthy of being savored. Yet our minds tend to wander away from the present, preferring the unchangeable nature of the past or the nebulous character of the future. A consciousness fixed in the present exists in a state of optimal sensitivity. It responds to life as it comes, reveling in the pleasures of the moment and then gladly letting that moment go.

Fully Present In Time Living For The Moment
Daily Om

Red-winged Blackbirds

Warm ocean waves
gently pushing
and pulling me.
Smooth and sensuous
swallowing me,
wrapped in the womb of
a velvet cavity,
holding me in
some monolithic trance.
Rythmic, continuous
wandering, floating
moments controlling me
with tenderness.
But the peace is temporary,
the tranquility short.

The door flew open,
something cold engulfed me,
and the chill
in the humid night
paralyzed me.
Serenity was only an illusion,
street lights glowed
on the pavement
marking the truth
and the silence was broken
by screams in the wind.

Light pierced my eyes
while the moon slid
across the sky.
I tried to catch my breath,
it would not come.
Red-winged blackbirds
shot across my vision
and the night turned purple.
I could not close my eyes
the light caught my fluttering heart
sending electricity through
my body.
My hand flew back
against the lucid night
and its weight
rested on my weariness.

Lama Surya Das on exercising awareness

In Lama Surya Das's book "Awakening to the Sacred," the author continues his journey to help Americans discover dharma, or practices of Buddhism.

In the chapter Enlightenment by Many Names, he says of practicing awareness; "Practice eye gazing by looking into your own eyes in a mirror and noticing whatever comes up in the mirror of your own internal awareness. Can you look at your own sense of identity? Can you see what you are thinking-watch you own inner diaglogue? The eyes are said to be mirrors of the soul. Just observe what comes up, minding the mind. Up the ante by holding another small mirror behind your ear and look into your many reflected eyes. Go into the myriad reflections, you and you re-reflected and re-reflected; lose yourself in the experience. Then look into who you really are."

Read more in this important book released in 1999 by publisher Broadway Books, an imprint of Random House.