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Posts Tagged ‘soul’

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

 

Fare Thee Well…Emerald Isle

17 Apr

Sadness Mixed With….

[Written on April 2, 2010 - my last full day in Ireland....only now discovering the draft that never got posted...truly appreciating the poem that I'd written at the end, that I utterly and totally forgot having written.  That is the masterpiece of this good-bye note to Ireland.]

There is sadness in my soul at this moment, one that I awoke with yet didn’t realize until I left the hotel and once again walked the streets of City Cork, taking the back alley ways and side streets, photographing the architecture and faces of the people, without being intrusive.

It is midday on my last full day here in Ireland and I am back and forth between computer, television and the sundry collection of books on Ireland that I’ve amassed.  I am feeling mixtures of sadness, mostly sadness, and anticipation about my return to Toronto.  It seems like I have been gone for a lifetime; perhaps it has been.  I don’t feel like the same person who landed on the shores of Ireland but a week ago; something has changed.

Not wanting to return to Canada; wanting to get in the car and just drive; drive to the forlorn shores of Bantry Bay, to make that climb up into the mountains, to sit awhile with the sheep and rams on the high hills of Ireland, listening for the whispering breezes on the other side of the mountain tops; wanting to just be.  But how would I exist, what would I do; how could I survive in this strange yet familiar land?  Would I end up, out of necessity, seeking a job in the legal profession in Cork…just another city which holds no charm for me?  Would I get caught up in the corporate world of city life in Ireland as I have in Canada?  It wouldn’t be any better.

So, as I write this note; as I knock on the door, as I ask the question, Spirit please speak to me and show me what to do.  Return I must; but for a little while or a long while?  Should I plan on returning to this land of the bard and poet to while away the hours of my life reminiscing of a life I never knew, but somehow feel I do know?

At times I feel I am in the skin of my grandmother, the 18 or 19 year old girl, who waved a tearful good-bye to her mammy and pappy as she headed with her beloved to the docks to board the boat to that strange and far away land and place called Boston; not knowing, but somehow knowing, she’d never be seeing her mammy and pappy again.  I feel that sadness and that excitement; in looking back I feel her sorrow for never again seeing her family, her Ireland before going home to be with the Father in Heaven.

I remember the photograph of grandma Dot, standing behind the wheelchair in which her beloved Paddy sat; white and ashen faced, barely a resemblance of the ruddy faced young lad she’d departed the shores of Ireland with in another lifetime.  Her face is blank, staring off into nothingness, and my grand pappy, well, when I look upon him, my heart is wretched because I believe that had he not left the shores of Cape Breton to go to the city, to be closer to his children, his life would have been better, would have been longer.

But there he sat; barely alive in his wheelchair.  And standing beside him and grandma Dot is my own father holding up in his arms my own wee girl, Christine Mary, not even 6 months old.  Generations… and it is only I who write and my daughter Christine Mary who remain behind, to tell the story, to turn the next page, to live.

So many generations, so much time, and yet I feel as though I’ve just touched them in the here and now; been a  very part of their departure and that somehow my coming home to Ireland has brought them back home to rest with their mammy and pappy.  Perhaps their spirits left off, when I stopped at the top of the mountain in the midst of the snow and rain, got out of the car leaving the door open; perhaps subconsciously keeping it open that they might exit and return to blend with the sea and the mist that covered the mountains; to float down the mountain side, over the valley below; to find and come to rest with their beloved…somewhere there by the sea of Ireland.  Perhaps should I return one day to Bantry Bay or the Mountains of Glengarriff, I will find my own rose bud blooming in the craggy and lifeless hillsides, fertilized by the return of love to its nest, at last at rest and at one as it was meant to be from time immortal.

As for me, the return to the city is one of dread; not wanting to lose this sense of whom I am that I have found in such a short space in these oh so many years that I’ve physically existed on the face of the earth.  I am so afraid that I will once again get sucked up in the much adieu about nothing of the material world…and lose myself again.  What a tragedy, after waiting for so long to find me, to lose me so very quickly.

So, tell me my self, what can I do to preserve, to reserve that special essence of me, the real me, that it not get lost in the darkness of the material and physical…until you journey me through the next door of solitude and peace here on earth?  How can this be maintained in a place that cares only about filthy lucre and not the human spirit; where product counts more than the producer?

I do not want to lose my treasure and so I beg…speak and let me hear.

I wrote the above several hours ago.  I just now sent off an e-mail to some folks and in it I quoted a Celtic poem, a blessing.  As I signed off, this poem came out of me, and I share it with you – perhaps this is the voice responding to my request of hours ago.

I Found It

May your life be filled with treasures untold, such as I found,
Treasures eyes cannot behold, neither moth nor rust can eat away their soul;
Eternal blessings indescribable, precious and weighty beyond measure,
These my dear friends…these we should treasure!

If when I look at you, I look deep within to the pool
Of togetherness that is every man, woman and child
Born out of love, sustained by love, fed with love
Nourished and guided by the hand of love
That created each of us, God’s pure expression of His Love.

I’ve found my treasure on an Emerald Isle,
I travelled many a weary mile
To find in this land from whence it began,
The treasure was there, always at hand.
But I could not see, could not find
For my eyes were blind.

I searched about, all without…
But it wasn’t there; it isn’t here on this Emerald Isle,
It is where it always was, always shall be
It’s in the depth, the essence that is me.

I found it here on this Emerald Isle,
Not that it was here in this place or this time;
I found it here because I was ready to hear
Ready to receive, ready to believe;
I gave it all up this struggle to be
I laid self down….and there found me!

(c) Shammah 2010

 

A Crown: Restore My Crown…Let Me Seek the Spiritual Only

15 Feb

As the long week-end here in Toronto comes to a close, I reflect on the few days that I’ve spent.  It’s been a week-end of soul searching; not what I had planned at all.  But, I expect no less when I turn my life back over to the Grace of God; for you see, without Him I am not.  Just now I received my daily e-mail from Aish (I’ve mentioned them time and again, and shall continue to do so).  One might think I am “Jewish” but, no I wasn’t born into nor have I converted to that “religion.”  I am nothing more, nothing less, than a child of God, who seeks to know her roots.

This e-mail contained a link that allowed me to download a pdf document entitled Three Crowns.  It is 11 pages in length and I only got to the beginning of the first page when my eyes glanced upon and stopped at the following:

WHAT’S IN A CROWN? (from Aish.com article Three Crowns by Rabbi Belovski)

The word used by the Torah for the decorative crowns on the sacred objects in the Mishkan is zer. This word is closely related to the word nazir, designating a nazirite, someone who dedicates his life to holy purposes by abstaining from wine and certain other things for a designated period. The Torah teaches us that he must avoid contact with corpses for:
…the nezer [crown] of God is upon his head. (Bamidbar 6:7)

The crown of God is upon his head – know that all humans serve earthly desires, but the true king, who has the crown and diadem of malchus on his head, is one who is free from earthly
desires. (Ibn Ezra loc. cit.) So it seems that the zer symbolizes raising oneself above the usual desires of humanity and entering a holier and more spiritual realm. Just as a crown sits on the king’s head, above his whole person, so too, the spiritual crown sets a person above the norms of the physical world.

Beginning with the first sentence of the second paragraph, “The crown of God is upon his head – know that all humans serve earthly desire….” I stop right there, because it does speak to me and it does speak to the journey that I am on at this time.  I am on a journey where I seek to seek that which cannot be seen nor heard by the human senses; I seek to know who I am and in order to do that I must go beyond the physical, the world.  Earthly desires that formulate into lusts are the causes of all evil that reigns upon planet earth.  We desire and when we get it, we desire more.  There is no end to it.  The flesh cannot be satisfied, is never satiated.

I seek to wear the Crown that frees me from earthly desires and longings, that I might enter a, “holier and more spiritual realm” I am not talking about some ghostly, spooky kind of place.  Yahshua said that the kingdom of heaven is here, right now; is within.  Therefore to find and enter into that holier and more spiritual realm I must seek within.  These few words that I’ve copied from an article from Aish speak much to my soul, to my spirit.  For me they are an affirmation that I am indeed on the right path; that all I seek is to be found within.

But I have to stop there and ask myself, “Why do I seek such?” Can it be that I am seeking these things that I might be “more important” and “lifted up” in the eyes of men?  Are my motives selfish and self-serving?  I like to think they are not; that I am seeking because He is calling me to seek.  Yahsua said, “Seek and ye shall find.”  I take Him at his Word; He spoke only the Father’s Word, my Father’s Word.  We are told as well that the Father’s desire is that, “none be lost.”

I live in a lost world.  I live in a world that seeks pleasures that pass like ships in the night; like whisps of wind, they come and they go, and the world goes on seeking more of the same; trying to grasp at contentment and joy in the material things of the world.  We shall never find these things in the created things of the world.  They are empty, shallow and impermanent.  But joy and contentment is us; is our very makeup.  We were made complete, in all ways, and it is within our very nature to return home to our beginnings.

As long as we seek “out there” we shall never be satisfied and this world we live in will always be at war:  at war with it’s very self and each of us with the other.

If I am at-one as it was meant to be (Yahshua, we are told, is our at-one-me[a]nt], then I am whole; we are one just as the Father is One.  “Hear O Israel, the Lord, the Lord thy God is One.” Hold it folks, before you go off on a tangent, it’s not about only the people in the land of Israel…and even if it were, dig back far enough and we’ll all find our human roots in Adam & Eve; ergo, we are all related, we are all brothers and sisters.  So I say to you, reader, “Hear O reader, the Lord, the Lord thy God is One.”

Religion, to me, is the greatest weapon of warfare that the evil one has formed against us, disguised as something good, then placed in our hands for our own self-destruction.  We may start out on the right path, but then man’s (my) ways take over and we try to prove to the rest of the world that “we got it right, you got it wrong.”  So the warfare, the never-ending bickering, hating, fighting and killing….in the name of religion and some even dare to say in the name of god continues.