Black berry season!
Brimming with antioxidants and low in calories, blackberries are your fruity friend full of fiber.
“You can’t do anything positive with fear, but you can do everything with love.” – overheard at a Course in Miracles (ACIM) meeting.
For June, I received, from the love of my life, a coastal seascape dried flower arrangement.
On the handcrafted wooden box two starfish are displayed, one in front and the other on the back. All seashells were naturally harvested, meaning the animals were not killed to make the arrangement, but rather their exoskeletons were found after death. The aqua grasses, natural ammobium, and German statice form a structure designed to highlight various sand dollars, scallops, conches and sea urchins. The gifts from the sea and land are thoughtfully positioned to take full advantage of the distinctive shapes, colors, and textures of this rich and summery focal point.
“One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach. One can collect only a few, and they are more beautiful if they are few.” – Anne Morrow Lindbergh from Gift from the Sea.
At Texafornia Tamale Co. up in Blue Jay, I recently ordered out a vegan dinner.
Vegan beans and corn tamale with vegan beans, rice, salsa and chips and a side of gazpacho.
And so glad my huge big hot oven is working again. I made a jalapeño, mozzarella, red onion and tomato sauce pizza for my husband and a Daiya vegan Jack style cheese, tomato sauce, red onion and oregano pizza for me. Hot, hot, hot!
and
Eat well, stay well.
Eventually, if you are on any kind of spiritual path, you realize your ego does not have your best interests in mind.
Seemingly, your ego acts in your behalf but in actuality, it keeps you from being happy, experiencing joy and achieving authenticity.
Your ego is a false mask of who you really are and is a device used to get through a construct we invented in order to be domesticated.
Your ego is a self-reflection of your apparent self as mirrored by others, looking for approval outside itself. But the real you is inside.
The challenge is to dig deep beyond the ego self, deflating it to attain the truth of higher self.
Your ego does not want to give up attention, the need to be special or right. It wants you in turmoil, chaos and drama, not peace and quiet. For if you were to get meditative, go within and outside what society thinks of you, you would realize you had no need for ego, fear and labels. This is the spiritual journey.
Every fight, argument, disagreement, resentment, injustice and bad mood can be traced back to your ego; its wanting to hold on to some notion, its desire to control, its lack of understanding or care for others. Your ego gets you into a lot of trouble and causes a lot of discord.
Paradoxically, when love is always the answer, your true self shines, warms and nurtures you and everyone else in its path.
Try it some time. Ask yourself where am I coming from? What is my true intent? Why did I just defend that?
Even though your ego wants to dominate you and everyone else, it is really quite fragile, once you learn the truth.
When asked what do you really want in life? Do you answer with ‘Rule the World’ or to have Peace? Do you honestly want to sink the ship over a misperception, closed mindedness, arrogance or stubbornness like in the Titanic? Or do you want to save yourself and everyone else by listening to advice, opening up to the bigger picture and the world of possibilities (one of them being you might be wrong)?
Your ego will not easily step aside but with the constant awareness, dedication and commitment to come from a place of love/truth and be damned with your place/role in society, you can grow and we will all profit.
When we come from ego/fear, we destroy our lives and everything around us.
When we come from love, we come from courage/heart and enhance our world, guaranteeing the evolution of the human soul.
I believe all artists or creative types are to some extent searching for meaning and a way to intone their findings in order to translate it back to them. It is certainly a process of interpretation.
Imaginative minds are reaching inside to excavate truths, unearthing veins of gold that mostly deliver just a dusting of what is really embedded in them. Just the edges of profundity are shared.
Many if not all inspired beings are governed by displeasure, uttering the sounds of pain via their symbol of art. Suffering, manifesting and inflicting tears into explanations of survival within a soul trapped inside a human form.
It is rare for meaningful or original work to seep into a pleasant frame of mind because when you are in the joy of lightheartedness, it sounds trite to describe it as you are experiencing it.
An Invocation:
Oh, great creative spirit, lend me your thoughts. I listen and transcribe what you want the world to hear. May I be a conduit to spirit, philosophy and poetry. May I help others with your words. Help me clean and polish each phrase and turn of speech. Oh, Grace, divine soul of writing and love everywhere, help me say in clear words of understanding, flow and logic, what it is I need to release, express and share with the world. Thank you.
And so it is.
“Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love.” – Rumi
Happy Father’s Day to the man I married and had three adorable, fabulous and healthy children with.
You are more striking, handsome, responsible and charming with every year!
“Yes, we are going somewhere, yippee, love to ride in the car!!” said Cindi on Thursday.
“PUP cupcake at Three Dog Bakery in Arrowhead! I can be super good doggie!” Cindi said on Friday.
“Yum, yum. I cannot even believe my lucky stars today!” said Cindi, when presented with the opportunity.
“Oh, my gosh, it smells so good, I am going to just turn this baby over and start from the bottom up!” Cindi said spiritedly. 
“I am going to take this over to the grass where I can just plunk myself down and lay down and just enjoy this. I am in heaven.” said Cindi wagging her tail and in seeming pure ecstasy.
“All gone!” said Cindi, exactly 25 seconds later.
A day in the life of a special pet with momentary highlights.
Poise gives you the ability to keep information to yourself when needed. Like when it would divulge too much or it could hurt others.
When we criticize aloud, we make ourselves look miserly and it says something about how we feel about ourselves more than how we feel about the other person.
Your ego’s need to be right, to make yourself important, to be a know-it-all, the desire to always one-up or upstage others, will cause you to lose your composure and reveal facts maybe you should have kept to yourself. In many mysteries, including Agatha Christie’s, the inspector or crime solver leads their suspects precisely into this trap. The killer’s offense and guilt is tapped into surreptitiously by using his vanity, pride or weakness as a doorway to get him/her to talk and spill data, no matter how minute, that doesn’t quite fit or mesh with their story or whereabouts.
When your ego needs to be fed, it craves attention and validation. When you feed it, you have lost your poise or equilibrium.
The difference between your ego vs. your self-esteem or confidence is the need to have an audience, expecting applause vs. being self-assured and content for the sake of your own authentic true self or put another way, deception vs. integrity.
People create all sorts of drama and carry through all types of antics to get attention when all along, love, poise and courtesy are the most attractive forms of behavior.
Next time, pause and be poised when your ire is up. Keep your composure and check your attitude. Are you taking something personally?
“Be a gracious host and an even more grateful guest.” – Me
In Blue Jay, CA, the San Bernardino County Library brings great literature, reading groups, literacy programs, audiovisuals and warmth to this tiny mountain community that spawns its population three fold after Memorial Day to Labor Day and caters all year long to the beginning, visiting, insatiable, or older reader. Since I consider myself a part-timer, visiting with a beginner’s mind, greedy for well-placed words and more mature, all my needs are met.
But, to make it even more delectable, they have a room in the library called The Corner Bookstore located in the far right corner of the building. No sooner did I drop off my groceries at the treehouse, walk Cindi on her well traversed back road, give us both a little snack and fill the bird feeder for our friends, I was off and running to the village’s treasury of bound and written thoughts.
Delightful and adventurous, I spent at least an hour perusing titles, opening up tomes and leisurely choosing titles. Alas, I came home with two dozen goodies ranging from New York’s Real Housewife Carole Radziwill’s memoir, What Remains to Willa Cather’s classics, The Professor’s House and My Antonia to Edith Wharton’s famous, The House of Mirth to Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Nobel prize winner, One Hundred Years of Solitude and everything in between.
Time spent selecting, skimming and then purchasing these gems was delicious; secluded and companionless, yet intimately snuggled up with the writer. Isn’t that what every reader craves? Isn’t that what every writer wants; to sneak into bed with you, to enter your head, your thoughts and transfer a visual, an emotion or a human connection?
Perhaps no place in any community is so totally democratic as the town library. The only entrance requirement is interest. – Lady Bird Johnson
Our bodies are earth suits and succumb to natural law. They are born from a spark of combustion. They are wired in womb and pass through a rapid transformation. Leaving behind recognition of their mission, bodies are born into the world, vulnerable, depending on other bodies to take care of and teach them. They acquire environmental cues to fear, to obey, and to distrust. By virtue of life given, they must also bloom, reproduce and wither. Our bodies molt daily, marching forth towards death.
But our mind, soul, heart, our very essence is eternal and returns to its source, lessons learned. Once again, it has evolved. Once more, returning to another dimension of space and time.
Each experience is solitary. Each life is on its own journey. But, together we move forward or end in a cipher.
WE are the creators of the God Consciousness.
“The universe is transformation; our lives are what our thoughts make it.” Marcus Aurelius Antoninus