~ A Joy Warrior's Journey
When the hot winds blow, child,
when winter’s ice returns,
when the world feels barren and bleak,
when, in the midst of the darkest nights,
fear or pain weigh on your heart,
recall these petals, so soft and sweet,
and remember how tender
love can be.
“With my luck,” a friend began, “I’d trip and fall and break my leg.”
“Well, you know,” I said teasingly, “our thoughts create our reality. Be careful what you wish for.” We both laughed.
But it’s true. If you go around thinking of yourself as a clumsy fool with terrible luck, life is likely to accommodate you. Remember that phrase I mentioned a while back, “What the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves.” That’s really how it works. There’s a host of technical reasons why and how it happens. But the bottom line is that it does.
The proofs the Prover brings aren’t always literal, of course—although they can be. I wasn’t suggesting my friend would actually fall and break his leg. It’s more the essence or quality of our thoughts that the Prover proves.
The other day, I heard a guy put it this way, “When you do low vibrational stuff, you get low vibrational people and situations in your life.” I think that says it pretty well. And “low vibrational stuff” includes the thoughts we think, our self-talk, our mental movies.
When you find that you’ve fallen into a pity trap, or get mired in boredom, anger, sadness, or fear, one of the quickest ways out is to check what you were thinking then choose a different line of thought. Ask yourself what’s good about the moment and see what comes up. If you’re really bummed and your brain tries to tell you that nothing is good about the moment, tell it, “Well, besides that, what’s good?” You are, after all, conscious enough to remember to check your thoughts. And that’s a good thing in itself.
Another good thing is that we always have alternative thoughts available. Whole hosts of them! We just have to keep asking what’s good and move in its direction.
One alternative that I find puts things in perspective for me is a little paragraph by author and public speaker David Icke. He says the trick to freeing ourselves from something we’re experiencing is not to identify with it.
“You are not your emotions, or thoughts, or the things your remember, ” he says, “or all the sensations your physical body is registering. You are the one who is feeling the emotions, listening to the thoughts, remembering the memories, seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling. Those are the things that you are experiencing. They come and go. Whatever comes and goes is not you. You are a vehicle for all that is, and was, and ever will be to use in its endless explorations.”
If that’s the case, why not choose a different line of thought, different things to say about yourself, a movie that turns course and runs in a more empowering direction?
It takes practice, of course. Some of the ruts we get stuck in are pretty sticky. But every time we choose to look for the good the moment holds, for its opportunities, for its invitations, we get better at it and stronger. We catch ourselves sooner, before we slide all the way into our habitual pits. We start to discover that it’s freeing and fun to be in control, to remember we’re explorers in a universe of possibilities, that we can choose to nudge our paths in new directions, to step into a brighter, truer reality – even if we take only one small step at a time.
Wishing you a lifetime of endless discoveries of the good.
Warmly,
Susan
Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay
I was wandering aimlessly through a park
I had not walked for a while, searching,
casually, for an invitation, for the whisper
of a word, of a sound, a quiet wave of color,
a scent on the breeze – a sign saying This Way.
We all, I suspect, look to signals and grace
to point us toward the most propitious paths.
Then, as if in answer, something said,”Look up.”
And so I did, of course, and there above me,
cascading down from the branches of a tree,
were hundreds of white blossoms, hung
like lanterns from a vault of emerald green,
shining their light, shining their gentle light.
Subtly now, spring’s colors deepen.
From her limitless palette, she dips
her brush into crimsons and burgundies,
into scarlets and golds. Her creations
grow more elaborate and complex.
Her flowers yield the first small signs
of vegetables and fruits. The air,
perfumed still with lilacs, takes on hints
of roses and cut lawns. Days of rain
give way to long stretches of sunshine.
From the country roads, dust rises
in clouds in the wake of passing cars.
In the tall lush grass of the pastures
goats and calves and colts and lambs
leave their babyhood behind and move
with a new independence as they graze.
But, as if to remind us that she still remains,
her mornings come wrapped in birdsong
and fog, and violets still sparkle in the dew.
This song is spring’s overture for summer.
and the curtain is slowly beginning to rise.
Between the stands of white and purple phlox
that dance along the roadsides, wild carrot blooms,
Queen Anne’s predecessor, lace for Lady May.
It’s the least the earth could do, this touch of grace,
to thank her for all the lovely gifts she tucked
in fields and woods and gardens during her splendid stay.
Such jewels! Such abundant treasure! All to reassure us
that, after the cold bleak winter, life returns,
magnificent, and singing joy.
I washed the breakfast dishes with the scent
of lilacs sending me into a world of dreams
as it wafted through the open windows.
Iridescent bubbles slid down the surface
of my cups and plates, and lacy white curtains
waltzed in the breeze. When the last fork
was clean, I dried my hands and went out
for a tour of my gardens, so lush now.
And then she did it, Merry May, her gift
of the day proving how she got her name.
At the edge of the garden, a motion
caught my eye. A prince in disguise!
I laughed at the surprise. And although
I didn’t kiss him, he let me gently stroke
his pebbly textured back. Spring laughs
in flowers, said a poet once upon a time.
And now comes May, the merry one,
making me laugh with her gift of a toad.
As if the fragrant blossoms weren’t enough,
a yellow swallowtail came to sip the lilac’s nectar.
She was the first I had seen this year, regal
and lovely as she fluttered from flower to flower
on her delicate wings. Once more, I found myself
catching my breath in astonished wonder
that such a thing could be, right before my eyes,
in this heady, perfumed May air.
The sprig of young oak leaves startles me,
a shaft of sunlight bathing it in yellow-green,
sharp in its brilliance and in its contrast
to the hunter green needles of the pines,
in whose midst it grows. But the color
isn’t what struck me; it was my realization
that I knew this oak; I encountered it
last fall, glowing russet red. “Why, hello!”
I say to it, right out loud. “Good to see you
looking so fine. Good to see you.”
I have stood in this very spot before,
staring up at this very same tree.
And somehow it feels like meeting
a friend, right here at the edge
of the woods.
For days, I have been watching the lilac’s buds grow plump,
their pale purple trumpets lengthening, the tips of them
swelling until, one here, one there, they burst into white stars
that pour forth a scent brewed, you would swear, by angels.
Today it wafts through my open windows, perfuming the rooms,
and I, enveloped in the fragrance, breathe, and believe
that surely I am tasting the essence of heaven.
“What I don’t know I make up,” I used to tell people as a kind of joke. I left it up to them to figure out where fact gave way to fantasizing.
I was listening to some talk about ChatGPT this week. “What is ChatGPT?” you ask. (Here’s a good description.) Basically, It’s an online tool that’s sort of like a cross between an unimaginably vast library and a great personal assistant. A big bevy of those First Adopter types are praising its capabilities. It’s passed the bar exam, scored well on the SATs, and developed detailed business plans, for example. It’s fast and smart. You’ll be hearing about it more and more, I’m sure.
Well anyway, it turns out that when ChatGPT can’t find an exact answer for you, it, too, will make stuff up. And it’s very good at it, I hear. The Artificial Intelligence developers label the phenomenon “hallucinating.”
I thought that was an interesting word choice. When I make stuff up, I think of it as imagining. But what’s the difference when it comes down to it? Regardless of which term you give it, it’s a story our brains fabricate, both the living and the machine kind.
Personally, I thought it was a bit eerie that a language tool rooted in Artificial Intelligence would make things up. Why would it do that? It doesn’t have an ego to defend, after all, or emotions to sort out. It’s not trying to entertain. Maybe it’s a technique it uses for problem-solving. That’s one of the purposes our own story-making serves. Fortunately, ChatGPT doesn’t hallucinate anywhere near as much as we humans do. It’s more of a cut and dried here-are-the-facts kind of operation. We, on the other hand, are living in our dream worlds, our story worlds, more than we’re not.
To borrow the AI developers’ term, we’re usually living in a hallucination. There’s not necessarily something wrong with that. It’s the nature of the human mind (and maybe machine mind, too) at work. It’s a way of figuring things out, of looking for solutions.
What separates us from the machine, though, is that we can turn our attention away from our imaginary stories and focus on the here and now, with all its colors, and tastes, and sounds and smells. We can feel the air moving through us and around us. We can notice our bodies and adjust them at will. We can respond to the action around us. We can decide to play a different movie than the one that we were engulfed in minutes before. Or we can go back to it. But in the meantime, if only for a moment or two, we can be here, consciously alive in the midst of a living, mysterious world. And isn’t that amazing? And isn’t it amazing that we can be amazed?
Wishing you a week where you abandon the trance repeatedly to rediscover the mysterious reality right before you.
Warmly,
Susan
Image by ThankYouFantasyPictures from Pixabay