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Posts Tagged ‘man’

The Beauty of One

03 Jul

It’s a hot summer day here in Toronto.  Looks like 2010 will be a glorious one weather wise and it is only July 3rd and we’ve already had about a month of summer weather. What’s that got to do with being the beauty of one?  Well, it’s one day, the only day I have, and as you read this it is your one and only day.

What brought this title to mind was gazing on the photographs I took today on my photo jaunt in downtown Toronto.  I had to pick up a battery for my camera at good old Henry’s and so I took the camera along.  I rarely take it with me if I am going to leave the car parked for the day as I’d hate to have it stolen.  It’s an extension of my right arm and I’d be lost without it.

After picking up my battery, I strolled along Queen Street towards Yonge Street.  Henry’s is located about two blocks east of Yonge.  On the right there’s a United Church which used to host jazz musicians that I’d go and watch during my lunch hour when I worked downtown.  Just me.  One.  I liked it that way because I could look and do what I wanted, speak if I chose, or not.  Being one, sometimes folks approached me, for you see a lot of people sleep in that church park at night and during the day they disappear so us folks in the suits could use the benches to relax and talk about…well, often about things that just didn’t matter.

As I walked along today I saw a lot of ones.  I saw one man snoozing on the bench, one flower the sole survivor on a bush that I am certain once flourished with tons of blossoms, one bicycle, one park bench with two people on it, one man walking slowly looking at the ground, trying to find….by the looks of him, perhaps a fix and my heart went out to that one.  At one picnic table there were several men, some old some new, all chatting or seeming to be chatting.  There was one bottle of seven up on the table; one being shared by many.

When I got home I downloaded my photos and what struck me was that there was more beauty and story and depth and soul in those photos that contained only one:  one daisy, one man, one bench.  You see, when there is but only one it seemed to me it left room for me to fill in the rest as I would like it to be; a creative license, for instance, to write a better story, a better ending for that one man who walked bent over, searching. Perhaps, I thought, he was looking for the one penny that would make up what was needed for him to catch a ride on the streetcar to the shelter where he knew he, just one, would find a welcome and he could get help, from some one.

One and solitary; so much beauty waiting to be written, to be seen.  I’ve lived my life with every one telling me I needed some one to be complete.  I don’t need that, for I am complete and there is more beauty in the completeness of one than in the half emptiness of two.

One, standing on a hill, shining a light of love, like a lighthouse in a storm.  Just one, standing alone.  Love on Legs (LOL).

 
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Posted in General, Inspirational

 

Seasons of Nature: Seasons of the Soul

22 May

The first part of this article is a repost of a writing I did as the “Fall” season was rolling in to Toronto and the rest of Canada.  The second part will be my thoughts, hot off my fingertips, new to even me for I have no idea what will pour forth, on the season of “Spring” that is amongst us.  In reading what I wrote about the “Fall” season and in anticipation of what I will write about the current season of Spring.

The Season of “Fall”

TIME (or Seasons) -YHWH’s and MAN’s
There is a Difference – A Mirror Opposite

Consider this before reading what I have posted below, including the ancient writing called Ecclesiastes from the Torah. Is there even such a thing as time, or is it a concept as individual as you and I?  And if there is no such thing as time, time being a divider of things into seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, centuries; a divider into what we call seasons of yet another concept of time called a “year” – then can it indeed be true that, as I spoke years ago (out of the blue, from somewhere in space this thought arose and was spoken) that to my Creator all exists at once; there is no yesterday, today or tomorrow.  All, JUST IS.  Rather a deep thought….long before I heard of quantum physics; long before that video “Down the Rabbit Hole,” and certainly many years before I picked up and began reading such things.  I quote for you from a book I am currently reading, 2012  The Return of Quetzalcoatl by Daniel Pinchbeck.  I purchased this book in March 2008, and only picked it up to begin reading a week ago (late April 2009).  Here, then, is food for thought, from another, before you read what I’ve posted below.

The existence of a four-dimensional space-time continuum means that what we perceive as the linear direction of time is only an illusion created by our particular perspective.  As the physicist Arthur Eddington put it, back in the 1920s, ‘Events do not happen; they are just there, and we come across them.’  Elaborating on this concept, Louis de Broglie wrote:  In space-time everything which for each of us constitutes the past, the present, and the future is given en bloc. … Each observer, as his time passes, discovers, so to speak, new slices of space-time which appear to him as successive aspects of the material world, though in reality the ensemble of events constituting space-time exist prior to his knowledge of them.

And, as you read the following post that I wrote…remember as individual as each of us, so too our perception and we perceive, often times what we believe and thus project into human vision.

Here in North America, here in my home town of Toronto, we are in the last vestiges of the time or season, known as the “Fall.”  An applicable name for this season, as I watch the leaves falling from the trees after but a moment of display of their glorious rainbow of colours. What an amazing spectrum of the creative Hand(i)Work of YHWH; a rainbow has kissed the leaves of the trees and in but a second the beauty begins to disappear.  I wonder, “Are they sad.  Their glorious days of rainbow colour were so short?  Or, were they content and grateful to have been given any amount of time to display their majesty?  Can we equate the lives of the trees to the lives of human kind?  As one of those, I think about my life, my seasons.  When a child, I wanted to be independent and allowed to come and go when I felt like it.  As a teenager, I knew everything and could hardly wait to turn 16 or 18…the next season when boy oh boy, life would be just superb.  Then reaching those times of my life, my thoughts projected to being 21, ad infinitum.  Do you get the point?  No matter what season of my life I was in….I wasn’t present and living it but projecting into some season down the road that I might not even have seen!  But, I am happy to report I’ve seen all of those seasons, and am at the season where instead of wishing and projecting into the future, it seems I am recalling and at times reliving the past!  When did the shift take place?  Who knows, but it definitely has and in looking back at the seasons I’ve been blessed with, what I see is that, “They were the most wonderful seasons and I missed them…just about every one of them!”

Look at the majesty of a deciduous tree as it changes from green to glorious rainbow colours to stark nakedness.  Does it twist and turn through each season; stooping or reaching in efforts to be higher or wider or thinner or have more sun, more rain, no snow?  Absolutely not; it stands and grows exactly where and how it was planted and is rooted!

Seasons.  They are marvellous and I pray that whatever Season I am currently living in (by man’s standards), I will indeed be living and truly alive to every nano-second of that Season!


The Season of “Spring”

When I think about and anticipate the coming forth of the Spring season, I visualize the blossoming tulips that I grew up surrounded by in the City of Ottawa, Canada’s national capital.  I see a particular photograph I took of my daughters amongst a bed of tulips, their tiny heads appearing to be blossoms amongst the blossoms.

I think about the budding flowers, the smell of Lilacs that I used to pick that filled my home with their sweet aroma.  I think of all kinds of things – things that seem to be “born again” after the long cold freeze of the winter.  I wonder and am amazed at those flowers that are perennials, like the tulip, whose seeds remained frozen beneath the hard crust of winter ice, yet somehow even in their darkness, they knew when the spring thaw had taken place, when the sun was a little closer to the earth where they lay hidden and its warmth kissed the still brown and dead grass that covered them like a blanket.  They some how knew it was time to “stretch out their arms”, wipe the sleep from their eyes, and rise above to be kissed by the sun themselves.  They just knew it was time to come alive, again.  Did they waste their time in thinking thoughts like, “Why bother; it’s only for a few months.  What’s the point in all this?  Year in and year out, the same old same old?”  Were they bored with the same routine that they were “doomed” to repeat year after year?  If they became rebellious, refusing to do what they were created to do – is this why some of the flowers I’d seen last year, could not be seen this year and would never be seen again?  Had they died, gone into an eternal sleep never to be awoken again, because having decided they didn’t want to do it – well, seeing as how they were created to bloom and then go to sleep, and then awaken in the spring – well given they didn’t want to do this, then their purpose for being was finished?

Some pretty hefty thoughts to think and even more so if we relate it to you and I.  We have our seasons of the soul; don’t deny it!  If we know that we know that we are supposed to be doing something, that it just fits and it comes as natural as breathing (like my writing at this very moment; it is as natural and easy flowing as the breath I breathe that I don’t even think about), and we say, “Enough!  I am bored. What’s the use?” will we wither up and die, like the tulip bulb that got tired of the spring thaw and wanted something else, other than what it was all about?  No, I don’t think that I, the person, will wither up and physically die, but that which comes naturally, which flows, will wither up and die, as surely as my lungs would collapse if I refused to breath in the much needed oxgen. I know this to be true, because in those moments when it is not convenient for me to just write, but I get this “brainstorm” of a philosophical idea that needs expressing, and I can’t…well, I feel like I shall surely explode it I do not allow it to “Spring” forth into full blossom….

When ideas spring into mind, thoughts that might seem crazy “according to the world” (what does the world know….look at the mess we’ve created by the ‘uncrazy’ thoughts), we need to start trusting our selves, our intuitive selves, no matter the barometer of the world’s standards.  If we keep stifling that which Springs forth naturally, surely the spring will dry up and die like the fresh flowing spring water running by my home; a dried up creek because the water just sat there and stagnated, became polluted and unable to move….and just dried up in the hot summer sun.



TIME (or Seasons) -YHWH’s and MAN’s
There is a Difference – A Mirror Opposite

Mosaic.jpg

Consider this before reading what I have posted below, including the ancient writing called Ecclesiastes from the Torah. Is there even such a thing as time, or is it a concept as individual as you and I?  And if there is no such thing as time, time being a divider of things into seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, centuries; a divider into what we call seasons of yet another concept of time called a “year” – then can it indeed be true that, as I spoke years ago (out of the blue, from somewhere in space this thought arose and was spoken) that to my Creator all exists at once; there is no yesterday, today or tomorrow.  All, JUST IS.  Rather a deep thought….long before I heard of quantum physics; long before that video “Down the Rabbit Hole,” and certainly many years before I picked up and began reading such things.  I quote for you from a book I am currently reading, 2012  The Return of Quetzalcoatl by Daniel Pinchbeck.  I purchased this book in March 2008, and only picked it up to begin reading a week ago (late April 2009).  Here, then, is food for thought, from another, before you read what I’ve posted below.

The existence of a four-dimensional space-time continuum means that what we perceive as the linear direction of time is only an illusion created by our particular perspective.  As the physicist Arthur Eddington put it, back in the 1920s, ‘Events do not happen; they are just there, and we come across them.’  Elaborating on this concept, Louis de Broglie wrote:  In space-time everything which for each of us constitutes the past, the present, and the future is given en bloc. … Each observer, as his time passes, discovers, so to speak, new slices of space-time which appear to him as successive aspects of the material world, though in reality the ensemble of events constituting space-time exist prior to his knowledge of them.

And, as you read the following post that I wrote…remember as individual as each of us, so too our perception and we perceive, often times what we believe and thus project into human vision.

Here in North America, here in my home town of Toronto, we are in the last vestiges of the time or season, known as the “Fall.”  An applicable name for this season, as I watch the leaves falling from the trees after but a moment of display of their glorious rainbow of colours. What an amazing spectrum of the creative Hand(i)Work of YHWH; a rainbow has kissed the leaves of the trees and in but a second the beauty begins to disappear.  I wonder, “Are they sad.  Their glorious days of rainbow colour were so short?  Or, were they content and grateful to have been given any amount of time to display their majesty?  Can we equate the lives of the trees to the lives of human kind?  As one of those, I think about my life, my seasons.  When a child, I wanted to be independent and allowed to come and go when I felt like it.  As a teenager, I knew everything and could hardly wait to turn 16 or 18…the next season when boy oh boy, life would be just superb.  Then reaching those times of my life, my thoughts projected to being 21, ad infinitum.  Do you get the point?  No matter what season of my life I was in….I wasn’t present and living it but projecting into some season down the road that I might not even have seen!  But, I am happy to report I’ve seen all of those seasons, and am at the season where instead of wishing and projecting into the future, it seems I am recalling and at times reliving the past!  When did the shift take place?  Who knows, but it definitely has and in looking back at the seasons I’ve been blessed with, what I see is that, “They were the most wonderful seasons and I missed them…just about every one of them!”

Look at the majesty of a deciduous tree as it changes from green to glorious rainbow colours to stark nakedness.  Does it twist and turn through each season; stooping or reaching in efforts to be higher or wider or thinner or have more sun, more rain, no snow?  Absolutely not; it stands and grows exactly where and how it was planted and is rooted!

Seasons.  They are marvellous and I pray that whatever Season I am currently living in (by man’s standards), I will indeed be living and truly alive to every nano-second of that Season!

Enjoy nature’s Fall, it’s remnants.  This is my Toronto’s Fall Season.

Toronto_in_the_Fall.JPG

 
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Posted in Religion & Spirituality

 

Sabbath Blessings: Shabbat Shalom…Just Be!

07 May

shabbatToday, this moment, Sabbath shall be upon us, and another blessed opportunity to refresh in the presence of my Maker, Sustainer.  The Sabbath, what a wonderful opportunity presented to me for a chance to come before Him and turn it all over; all the things of the past week that might have been good or bad, just turn them all over to Him, and sit down and relax, just knowing I am in His Presence.  An opportunity to turn off the movie in my mind, to close my eyes and rest, quietly contemplating…nothing, or if thoughts come, allowing them to continue flowing along on the river of life, barely touching the surface, until they have floated out of sight.  Just to allow them to continue along their journey, perhaps returning again, but not stopping them to embrace or ponder for any length of time.  Considering that it is my life force that carries them along and it will continue to flow in its perfect circle of life….washing away as it were the cares of the world.

I came across the image below that I’d saved to my computer a very long time ago.

There is such a powerful message in such a tiny photo, even without the words.  When I first saw this image, it brought out a poem within me, a very simple one; just a few lines, and one I’d like to share with you now.  It is called “Through His Eyes”.  Just look at that tiny newborn baby being held in a parents hand, a hand that seems so very big in comparison with the wee baby.  Then take a look at you and I and try to imagine the Creator who sees all, knows all, is all.  Can you even begin to fathom the magnitude of His awesomeness.  Then in line with that recall the thought, the Word that tells us that we are created in His image, but a tiny fragment of who He is – and try and put yourself in His shoes….as He stands there purveying all that He has Created – in time we call past and time we call present and time we call future.  And having purveyed and attempted to survey all that He might have in His “sight” – try to see yourself in there.

In line with the fact that there are many planets, much larger than the planet upon which we live, Earth.  When seen through the magnification of a NASA telescope, earth looks like something the size of a pea in comparison with other planets.  Keep that vision in your mind, and then try to visualize where you would be on that tiny pea, you a millions of people, for instance the 5 million that live in my city Toronto.

Do you get the sense of the message that my Spirit got….when it spoke to me the words of the brief poem, Through His Eyes?

Then take this revelation of “how grand” we are not, and line it up with our grandiose ideas and ideals about ourselves:  how “wealthy”, “pretty”, “smart”, “astute”…whatever the adjective that you choose to apply to yourself – and in comparison with Him…does any of it really amount to even a hill of beans?  How arrogant we are, us human folks.  We don’t even give Him the credit for our very being:  our perfect health and our ability to….do anything.  We do and go about things as though we are our own authors of our intelligence or whatever it is that keeps me or you “puffed up” in our grandiose ideas.

But….through His eyes – well, just how do you or I measure up.  Are we even a “speck” in His eyes?  Hardly, and yet we are the finest and largest mountains in our own eyes.  What foolishness, do you not agree?



Through His Eyes

Cradled in the palm of His hand,
Through His eyes, I see all that I am.
I thought I was big, grown up and wise,
But not so, when seen through His eyes.

I lay there, tiny and curled up,
But a mere speck, not very much.
When seen through His eyes,
It’s scary to think I once thought I was wise.

Now, having written that and read it again, I would add that yes, I am wise and that I readily admit – however, giving thanks to He who created me and gave me the wisdom and intelligence that allow me to make my way in this pilgrim’s journey on earth; spiritual beings clothed in flesh, vagrant wanderers…until that great reawakening when the flesh and bone gets shed and we come face to face with the likeness of ourselves in our Creator.

So given this intelligence, and this wisdom, and this ability; these “talents” if you will – what is the purpose?  Is it to serve self and self alone?  No, it is not for that reason alone.  Yes we are given abilities that we might eke a living, provide for our loved ones, but it is not solely for “self consumption.”  We are given “talents” to share with the rest of the world to enable each of us to live a better moment today or tomorrow.  All of our abilities, if joined and if shared with the world, would likely eliminate all the things that we see around us that hurt us:  the suffering of the poor, the homeless, the widow without a means to support her children; people in other countries without even a glass of water.

Not so wise – if I choose not to have “eyes to see” and a “hearing heart” that prompts me to action, to share my abilities and giftings with the rest of the world.

Shabbat Shalom…I send you spiritual blessings and richness…pay it forward my friend!

 
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Posted in Religion & Spirituality

 
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