Wolves and words

02 Jun Wolves and words

I was driving to work this morning and had the thought of “what is valuable to people like me?” Like-minded people want and need similar things. I always value the opinions of people who think like I do; i.e. find similar things important, satisfying, amusing, beautiful, etc.
Isn’t that how we take our trips, plan our vacations, paint our pictures, write our books?
Who is it that provides that value? Or what does?

When you see a beautiful photograph someone has taken you have that little something in your heart space that you’ve associated over the years with the concept of beauty. It’s a feeling not just a set of words. So what is it that makes you feel that? It’s similar to the butterflies in your stomach that you get when you think about that speech you have to give next week or that love in your life that looks at you in that certain way.
It’s truly a chemical reaction that occurs, I will not argue that. But I do believe there is something, as usual, behind what the brain is doing. There is a carried energy with things like beauty.
Just like when we can feel, using our body awareness sense (the seventh of twelve senses we actually have), the aliveness in our heart, when we breath into it and feel it. Maybe it’s a little anxious in there. Maybe its soft. Maybe it’s hard and impenetrable. Whatever it is, you will not doubt me when I say you can feel the energy of your own heart.

Well, I believe that beauty, like your heart and every thing else in the universe, has it’s own energy. Sure it’s a concept but only because that’s the only way our thinking brains can understand beauty: by putting it into words. Try this. Say “beauty” out loud to yourself and watch your mind as it attempts to bring up a picture or idea that it appropriate for beauty. After a few seconds of that awareness try it again, only this time close your eyes and try to feel beauty in the area of your chest. Let beauty radiate from that area and just be aware of it for a few moments. Before you allow your mind to start labeling or describing, open your eyes and mark on a piece of paper for thirty seconds or more. If you’re doodling lines, writing words, or simply making a period for thirty seconds, that’s great.
What you’ve just done is allowed the universe to manifest itself as beauty through you. In the moments it takes for you to mark down that feeling you are a vessel for beauty.
Of course all energy is the universal energy, God or whatever word you use to describe the all-ness of the universal energy, and It is simply lending energy to your heart or beauty so that it may manifest as itself, thus getting to know itself.
Isn’t that what we’re all doing here, just getting to know ourselves before we die?
Surely the Earth is just a larger scale manifestation of the universal energy, of God. Maybe God is allowing us to exist so that he can get to know himself better. Isn’t that what we do when we create? We reach inside and feel around, looking for something tangible and real. When it materializes we rush to put it down in words, paint, movement, or whatever expressive medium. And then we look back at it over and over. Whether its through the lens of love or fear determines how we will evolve. And that’s what’s amazing: that God allows us to have that choice. “Which wolf will you feed,” the wise Native Grandmother told her grandson.

God never really had a choice, it seems. When we review ourselves, our work, or progress with Love, we grow. Theories are being forgotten that the world expands and then contracts. It’s more possibly a perpetual movement, one with no destination and with no one beginning. Like the painting or the story we write, the end product can only be as beautiful as this moment. It doesn’t matter how it will look it only matters how it looks right now, at this step, at this moment. And it’s always just this moment. As Eckhart said, “you can think of the past but it’s still only this moment. You can think about what is to come but you only can at this moment.”
So it’s a perpetual choice to constantly be aware of this step in our painting, our grand landscape photograph that we’re taking at this moment. Honoring this step is what will make the end result, if there ever is one, so damn perfect. And Irony is Love because the more I honor this moment, the less I care about the end result.

I hope everyone has a lovely weekend. Taking my brother to New Orleans for his bachelor party. Firefighters, Lifeguards, and Crossfitters, oh my.

Will