I am still trying to lean toward the center...and bring all writing, ideas, art and life's mixed media here to this blog hub.
"Leaning Toward the Center" photo taken at the Hatchery on Saturday
© Elsah Cort
[part of a new Hatchery photos series coming to birth this week...]
While sorting receipts and bills, doing my taxes at the most last minute I have ever done them, just now I came across a yellow piece of paper with a special message for me to read....the anthesis to my task at hand.
The message came via workshop flyer from Martin Prechtel:
"So many good people today no longer remember what an intact life feels like or looks like. Most of our villages, tribes and ways of livings have been so thoroughly pounded into the ground of our private personal Amnesia that groans under the boot heels of modernity's heavy tread. But be that as it may, I say our Indigenous Souls still live hiding like stealthy foxes, in the recesses of the infinite wilderness of some forgotten expanse of our real hearts. Somewhere inside a real natural soul still lives.
These soul-foxes are strong and made of a beauty and Indigenous intactness not recognized by the modern mind we've been taught to think with. If each of our wild fox-souls individually tip-toes smiling past the mental sentries that guard the palace walls where our depressions, lethargic cynicism and self righteous opinions hold our Holy Indigenous Seeds as prisoners, then maybe together after watering our seeds with the tears and grief of the remembrance of the joy of a real life, and with a brave love we can each sprout these seeds into the towering stalk of the Divine Mother again. If we all do it together then everywhere a grand Indigenous Diversity of Flowering Hearts could poke up everywhere sprouting a conscious village of hope to plant a time of hope beyond our own.
Grandiose and impossible you say? Well, that's your palace guards talking! Anyway it's better to live and die intactly making good small beauty, and failing magnificently, than to succeed at the low pay of mediocrity and the high pay of a meaningless existence......jump up like the sprouts of a tree whose fruit of hope might feed a time worth living in beyond our own."
Original artwork by Martin Prechtel
Over and over again, I catch myself stuck in grooves that keep me from opening for another perspective. The grooves are complex, ingenious at times, and appear to be innovative, tricking me into thinking I am moving, when I am really standing still.
All of my life, ever since I became conscious of thought (age 2-3), I have wondered why about almost everything. Why does it have to be done that way? Why is this happening? Why can't I effectively share what I notice with others?
What I know, for sure, is that what I know is a fluid space. Just as I attach to something or some notion as the truth, it shifts with the next input. What I don't know right now, is something I may know in the very next moment.
If I keep my hands over my eyes and ears, I may miss it. If I keep my mind closed, I may not recognize it. If I keep my heart closed, I may not live my authentic life.
Image source: scienceblogs.com
I have been shifting my daily patterns of when to write and do the dishes and just breathe in the sunshine outside. It feels a bit wobbly only because it's unfamiliar. I am learning to trust the unspoken direction of doing what comes naturally, meaning following my instinct and not my bossy mind.
It may look like chaos to someone watching me. But, what is surprising me about this pattern shift is that it's beginning to blossom into fun.
Image source: collage © Elsah Cort
"What can change everything is gratitude following each breath."
When we over think or impose our will on our life, we can feel jammed and blocked. We have a natural pilot for each day. Trust in your deeper self, and leave the path finding to this knowing center.
Dive in to your day. Stay connected to your central core.
Image source: Alex Grey
Most of us keep our lives fitting into the familiar. We do our daily tasks mindlessly, and sometimes, grudgingly. This daily grind, at home or work, holds the raw material for an exceptional life. (I am writing this, knowing dirty dishes are waiting for me in the kitchen sink, along with more than a few, procrastinated piles in my art studio to clear.)
Who says we all have to live in the same old cookie-cutter house, just because that is all that we find in our neighborhoods? Who says our routine is fixed for us, with no wiggle room? We do. And we can change our minds.
Take a look around you as you live through your day, and do something that you do every day just a little bit different today. The most profound place to start is with how you think about what you are doing. Then let your hands follow the thought.
Invigorate your life and still wash the dishes.
image called "Vortex" by Stefano Longhi
It works both ways, too much alone time or not enough alone time affects your creative life. Creativity (sometimes called art) is a necessary nutrient for the human spirit. Without it, we stifle our innate wholeness.
You don't need to call yourself an artist to celebrate your creative instincts. How you prepare food, set your table, fold your laundry, tell jokes, listen to your friends, make your bed, weed your garden, walk your dog, love your family...all invite aspects of creativity. And most of all, how you spend time with just yourself.
Each of us need alone time for ideas to show up without distractions or editing.
Welcome solitude as an old, very good, friend.
image source: jacuzzikillers music blog
Learning to be a compassionate, thoughtful and diligent observer of the self can make life much more interesting. Our egos have a strong presence, but not always a truthful one. We are the creators and the maintainers of our egos.
When the ego becomes altered, masquerading as our real selves, havoc can break loose. Reacting to the world from this alter-ego's perspective can cause harm and pain, both to ourselves and others.
Always asks yourself, who's talking here?
Who's telling me to do this?
Is this for real? True?
image source: arts.cultural-china.com
from "Alter Ego", a solo exhibition by Ouyang Chun
As you work with the micro details in any situation, be aware of the deep connection to the macro picture. And vice versa. Your perspective will shift in all directions and solutions for life's issues will have deeper meanings.
All of the parts can become more than the whole by itself.
Life is a hologram, where each part contains the whole. All is in one, and one is in all.
Night sky photo with the Milky Way making the horizon light up.
Image source: photographer Stéphane Guisard
See the full 360 degree image here and more of his night sky photos here.
We are designed to think very fast, and we do. These thoughts are pouring out and are expressed exponentially with all of our fast, intricate devices that many humans are using these days. Between our natural mind speed and blog after blog of word gathering (I am not desparraging blogs here), it can feel like an onslaught. There is a race going on, all over the planet, that makes the mob glob of runners at the starting gate of a marathon look like just a few folks. Not so easy to be heard in this huge word cloud.
The outer world reflects the inner one. Our minds are infinitely more complex, just plain bigger, and mostly unexplored, than this internet thing. Getting to know your own mind, conciously and intimately, could be of more value to the human community than any new electronic gizmo or app.
And stillness, in moments here and there, is the only way I know to do this.
Every day I wonder about quitting this daily practice of writing what shows up to write, in 122 characters (which allow for a retweet) on twitter, originally called "burnout blips". Some times there is a painful pressure for me, to open for something really good to come forth. When I just let it happen with no mind editing involved, it works.
And now, each morning, I have been typing esoteric words in the google image search box to find an image that will float well with the words. I am stunned by the immensity and beauty of what I find in the ethers of this world-wide-web/internet.
Standing still, or actually sitting still...I realize I do it because I love it.
image source: hasselblad.com photograph by Rodney Smith
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So appropriate that I would be led to discover images made by a photographer who chooses to use film instead of digital, and who still works in a darkroom....
but also has a fine photography blog.
I just have to include his bio he has on his website:
We like to think we can hide out from each other and especially from ourselves. Not so. The all-knowing energy-field that made us is always connected, always tuned in. It's not about being bad or good, this or that. It's about being true to your spiritual blueprint and living your life with ethic and integrity.
Everything that does not fit within this integrity, comes back as karma to be resolved. Our work as humans is to clean up our own messes, again and again, and along the way, invite and nurture and make the entirely new and beautiful to come to life.
The earth shows us how to naturally create this deep beauty all the time, and we keep trying to sweep it under the rug. Ignoring our universal connection, we live with an ignorance that has no excuse.
image: "Karmic", painting by Horacio Cardozo
Horacio Cardozo's artist blog
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More about karma.
No one knows can know us like we can know ourselves. Are you giving yourself quality time and presence? Are you giving yourself any time at all? The inner conversation is the power center that can jump start your life, or keep you stuck in a going-nowhere eddy.
image: by UK artist Josephine Wall
What if our human eyes could see underground and watch seeds sprouting? It's happening all over our foothills right now. All this activity is going on right beneath our feet. The physical world reflects our inner one. What is sprouting deep inside you now? Sense it. Nourish it. Let it happen.
Seeds in a coneflower, waiting for the darkness of earth to help them spout....
image source: www.maths.surrey.ac.uk
We get caught up measuring our successes and failures, especially at the beginning of a new year. Comparing ourselves to each other makes it even stickier. We've heard the words "each of us is totally unique." But, do we really know the truth of this statement? Just be yourself, once and for all.
© Elsah Cort, digital photograph: natural succulent mandala
Hope is an opening we make for something new to show up. Often we confuse it with the impossible, something that we can only hope for but never could actually be for real. Hope has anticipation intertwined in it. When hope is actualized within a loving heart, all possibilities become real and hope itself, dissolves into love.
image source: Coffee Shop Dharma
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