You find yourself on a street you’ve never
walked, in the town you grew up in
and came back to. The street is a ribbon
on a gift you’ve never opened. You walk the street
and a waft of jasmine fills you, a white cat
crosses your path, and from an open window
you hear the sound of a violin. Garlic
is in the air, and you think of the dish
in your favorite restaurant that you’ve wanted to try
but end up ordering spaghetti.
You go to the restaurant and take a seat
on the other side of the room, by the window,
and order Faraona arrosto al limone. It’s wonderful!
Now you know you’re on to something.
You stroll to your favorite bookstore and find
the poet you keep hearing about
but haven’t read. You buy the book.
You’re a blind man finding Braille. She leads you
through streets you’ve never walked, feeds you words
that taste fresh, full of garlic. You
find yourself. All of a sudden you’ve bungee jumped
into a new life, you want to free fall
with nothing holding you back. You’re ready to walk
that mountain loop you’d always thought too long.
You’re free of something you didn’t know
had a hold of you, like a ghost
you’ve lived with and just found, the haunting over.

~Robert Funge~
what have you lost?
Poems Selected by Naomi Shihab Nye

People ask me how I make music.
I tell them I just step into it.
It’s like stepping into a river and joining the flow.
Every moment in the river has it’s song.
So I stay in the moment and listen.
What I hear is never the same.
A walk through the woods brings a light, crackling song:
Leaves rustle in the wind, birds chatter and
Squirrels scold, twigs crunch underfoot,
and the beat of my heart holds it all together.
When you join the flow, the music is inside and outside,
and both are the same.
As long as I can listen to the moment,
I’ll always have music.

~Michael Jackson~

Dedicated to Kitty C. who turned me onto these poetic lyrics from the Piano Man…

Album Cover by Christie Brinkley

In the middle of the night
I go walking in my sleep
From the Mountains of Faith
To the river so deep
I must be lookin’ for something
Something sacred I lost
But the river is wide
And it’s too hard to cross
even though I know the river is wide
I walk down every evening and stand on the shore
I try to cross to the opposite side
So I can finally find what I’ve been looking for
In the middle of the night
I go walking in my sleep
Through the Valley of Fear
To a river so deep
I’ve been searching for something
Taken out of my soul
Something I’d never lose
Something somebody stole
I don’t know why I go walking at night
But now I’m tired and I don’t want to walk anymore
I hope it doesn’t take the rest of my life
Until I find what it is I’ve been looking for

In the middle of the night
I go walking in my sleep
Through the Jungle of Doubt
To the river so deep
I know I’m searching for something
Something so undefined
That it can only be seen
By the eyes of the blind
In the middle of the night

I’m not sure about a life after this
God knows I’ve never been a spiritual man
Baptized by the fire, I wade into the river
That is runnin’ to the promised land

In the middle of the night
I go walking in my sleep
Through the Desert of Truth
To the river so deep
We all end in the ocean
We all start in the streams
We’re all carried along
By the River of Dreams
In the middle of the night

~ Billy Joel ~

We’ve all had them – challenges and circumstances that leave their unforgettable impact and change us forever.  Abraham aptly terms it: the contrast.

I would like to believe that we have chosen the contrast on some level before we ever fully emerged into these bodies.  I don’t believe we chose the specifics of it so much as the generalities.  I do believe we chose it before we were capable of feeling fear and before we formed individual ideas of what’s good and what’s bad or even what’s right and what’s wrong.

The beautiful thing about making peace with having chose it all on some level is that I don’t have to understand why – just know that whatever it is, I chose it. This is a far more empowering feeling than the victim stance of this happened to me and I have no control over it and it sucks.  And I feel it’s even more empowering than searching for positive aspects in certain situations where I just can’t come by it honestly.

I actually dreamed one night about someone very close to me who is a heroin addict.  I dreamed we were in non-physical and talking about how we were going to come down to earth in these bodies and have this relationship with each other.  We spoke eagerly about this adventure we were going to have and there was this sense that this undertaking meant lots of challenges with thrilling twists and turns.  But there was no fear, no judgement at all about it, the only feeling was one of enthusiastic anticipation.

The dream scene then changed and we were in physical bodies here on earth.  We were in a small boat on a river and we were still happily awaiting the contrast we were about to experience.  Then the water became choppy, darkness descended and one of us was thrown overboard into the water.  At that moment, the drama began to unfold and we were both lost in the dream.  We forgot the initial agreement we made in non-physical.  We become immersed and lost both literally and metaphorically in the water, in the dream I was dreaming, in the drama.

The dream ends but leaves behind its message: this was all a choice and from your non-local vantage point, you were not afraid, nor did you say this is a good pile of things to experience and this is a bad pile of things to experience.  You wanted it all.  You didn’t just come to paint with the color yellow, you didn’t just come to ride the smooth train from point A to point B.  You did want it all.  And remembering this, I step out of immersion and I make peace with where I am and what I have lived and will live.  Making peace, I pass from moving against the current of life to moving with the current of life.

We celebrate freedom from Great Britain today – yet wherever we live, whoever we are, no matter our circumstances we possess an inner freedom that can never be taken from any of us.  And that freedom is the freedom to choose who we are and how we show up in this world.  Nick Vujicic speaks here about this inner freedom.

He has a couple of points I would like to comment on:

1.  live on purpose

whenever possible let yourself plunge into life

2.  it’s a lie to think that you are not good enough

never ever let yourself believe that you are not good enough, become a champion of yourself and you will never hold regret.

Make me sweet again

fragrant and fresh and wild

and thankful for any small event

~Rumi~

]]> http://simplyblessed.heartsdeesire.com/2009/07/04/fresh-and-wild/feed/ 0 Beth/Bethie Single_Flower http://simplyblessed.heartsdeesire.com/2009/07/03/faraway-places/ http://simplyblessed.heartsdeesire.com/2009/07/03/faraway-places/#comments Sat, 04 Jul 2009 02:12:32 +0000 heartsdeesire http://simplyblessed.heartsdeesire.com/?p=2029 ]]>

as twilight begins
and darkness descends
light pours into small spaces

and I am tossed out into the violet night
half remembering now the questions I asked:
what’s it like in that other realm?
and
will I be alone?

answers drift in from faraway places
and hang like forbidden fruit
words and images impossible to translate

relief comes as the first blush of morning arrives
wind strokes my hair
I turn back to what is familiar
and the simple language
for things: table, chair, cup, spoon, plate

now in the pulse of a quiet sleep
I dream that I have abandoned the questions
and am wrapped in the arms of the answer:
I am not alone.

©heartsdeesire

Image Locale

The thing I like most about waking up in the middle of the night is choosing then to spend time consciously creating my next day.  Last night laying there, I thought about my day and how I would like to feel during the day.  I began to breathe consciously and then silently say: I breathe life into ease, for instance.  And then I’d stop and feel the body sense of what ease would feel like and stay there long enough to feel how good it feels.  And then I went on to silently repeat: I breathe life into contentment.  And again I’d pause and feel what contentment feels like in the body, I’d practice in my mind’s eye walking around wearing contentment.  One thing led to the next and it began a whole series of “I breathe life into….”  It was the most delicious experience.

Today, what I am experiencing is exactly what I breathed life into.  I think I’ll try this whenever I wake up during the night, it will give me something to look forward to.  Oh goodie, I’m awake, time to play with my new process :).  And before you know it, I’m back asleep and the me who wakes up is the one I befriended during the night.  Just another way I make my inner world a friendly place to be.  The world cannot help but reflect that back.

Following up on my Two Minds post, I’m including below Neville’s words on the topic of two minds or allegiance to the inner/outer world.  This is an excerpt from Awakened Imagination.  Awakened Imagination is a very short read and a great overview on the teachings of Neville Goddard.

I noticed that Wayne Dyer recently thanked Neville Goddard on his PBS special, Excuses Be Gone, for his inspriation on a process he developed from Neville’s work.  I also wrote about my own processes that I adapted from Neville’s teachings under the posts: The Art of Revision, Playing It Forward and Creating Probable Realities.

If you were to read one book of Neville’s, Awakened Imagination would be my highest recommendation.

“Because life molds the outer world to reflect the inner arrangement of our minds, there is no way of bringing about the outer perfection we seek other than by the transformation of ourselves.  No help cometh from without; the hills to which we lift our eyes are those of an inner range.  It is thus to our own consciousness that we must turn as to the only reality, the only foundation on which all phenomena can be explained.  We can rely absolutely on the justice of this law to give us only that which is of the nature of ourselves.

To attempt to change the world before we change our concept of ourselves is to struggle against the nature of things.  There can be no outer change until there is first an inner change.  As within, so without.

If we would become as emotionally aroused over our ideals as we become over our dislikes, we would ascend to the plane of our ideals as easily as we now descend to the level of our dislikes.”

I had often felt the words: “the world is a mirror” sounded like another spiritual cliche and I would almost bristle at hearing it.  It’s one of those things I asked myself: what the hell does that mean?!

Now I have someone in my life that does appear to be a mirror of sorts.  Let’s call her Rea, short for reality :).  I realized she is the outpicturing of me.  The me of two minds on a subject that is near and dear to my heart.

There is the me who believes in the happy ending.  I’ve even seen and felt that happy ending, in my mind’s eye.

Then there is the me who gives myself to the “reality” of what appears to be, in the moment, an undesirable unfolding.  Something that I take to count against my happy ending.  I put my spiritual stock in that other consciousness, the me who gives up her faith in lieu of what looks like the facts before her.

Now my friend Rea is often given to saying things like “let’s face reality here”.  Abraham says don’t face any reality you don’t want to create more of.  I’m sure Seth would chime in similarly and the Field Center states that facing reality is an invitation to counterintend which loosely means to run counter to what you would like to intend about a thing.

I am the one of two consciousnesses, of two minds and Rea is the stark image and reflection, the mirror of what this other mind gives its allegiance to.

Yet I have other examples in my life of people who reflect my consciousness that carries faith in the desired outcome.  But who do I pay more attention to but the one who pisses me off with her “let’s face reality” spewings.  I’m mad that she might be right yet I’m mad at my own reflection, my own outpicturing of one part of my consciousness.  Mad at my own ability to create such a good mirror of myself.

Why is it so easy to be seduced by a mindset I don’t want?  It’s a question I’m not even going to answer.  The why doesn’t matter and answering it won’t provide me with greater consistency.  The practice matters and the consistency of it matters most of all.  If I’m going to be inconsistent, of two minds, I’m going to see lots of people and circumstances outpicturing my inconsistencies.  I should thank them, they tell me exactly where I’m vibe-ing.  They invite me to be restored again to One Mind.  I accept the invitation willingly and gladly.

I am free to be seduced by outer conditions and I am free to remain faithful to that which is not yet seen in the “flesh”.  I’ve seen it in my mind’s eye, I’ve felt it, I’ve lived it there.  It lives, it breathes, it walks, it talks.  This is what I choose to be captivated and enamored with.

No one says it better than Rumi:

Close your eyes.

(see it in your mind’s eye)

Fall in love.

(let yourself fall in love with the ideal, let yourself be captivated by it)

Stay there.

(stay consistent)

And if I should see the outpicturing of inconsistency again, I won’t shoot the messenger.  I will thank them, truly, for the invitation to fall in love again with what I believe in.  Should I be held spellbound by anything, let it be by that which is my heart’s desire.  Let me lose myself inside that inner world where it already exists and let the outer world do what it does, I have my own world to attend to.  So be it.