On my return home from my walk i saw a huge bird circling above me; on closer scrutiny i could see that it was a bald eagle, although i could only discern a very small area of white on its head. That, and the speckled feathers indicated that it was obviously a "teenager". Wild with excitement, i stopped and stared and looked around to see it there was anyone around to share this wonderful sight with. A young boy saw me looking, and stopped, i turned to him as he was preparing to cross the road, and pointing skyward, said to him: "A bald-eagle, a teenage bald eagle!!". He replied: "oh wow, I have never seen one before". So together we stood, looking up in awe at the magnificent young bird.
As the wild creature flew eastward i said: "It's symbolic you know, of..." and as i searched for the right word he said: "Flight, being able to take flight". I said: "Yes! that's exactly it." We smiled at each other, then both continued on our separate way, united only in that brief yet joyous moment in time, each taking with us a Perfect Gift of Knowing.
Thursday, February 09, 2006
Sunday, February 05, 2006
Watercolour 22" x 22" I Hide Myself Within My Flower by Zen Chuang, a physician painter whose medical practice and artwork seek to "paint our days with colours, fill our lives with beauty!" www.FromEarthToSky.com
pp. 94-95 "Friendship: A Vessel of Soul-making
In the practice of friendship, we might keep this important aspect of soul in mind: its need for containment. [my highlighting] Our capacity to keep a secret could be important to a friend who may feel free to talk to us in a spirit of confidentiality. It often happens, too, that what goes on among certain friends has to be protected from other friendships. Emily Dikinson's biographer Richard Sewall notes that Emily made a separate world of her various correspondents and friends: 'The letters to Higginson say nothing about Bowles, the letters to Bowles say nothing about Higginson; the letters to Helen Hunt Jackson say nothing about either of them.'
A friend could also offer containment by receiving another's feelings and thoughts without a strong need for interpretation or commentary. Sometimes, of course, we ask friends to offer their opinions and judgments, but even then we expect a high degree of acceptance and recognition of who we are. In friendship, we want to receive and to be received.
In the years of my work as a therapist, many people asked me to be their friend rather than their therapist. 'Couldn't we just meet at a coffee shop,' they would say, or, 'If you talked to me about yourself, this conversation wouldn't be so one-sided.' Clearly there is a difference between being a friend and being a therapist, the latter role lacking the mutuality of friendship. I have come to understand this common distaste for the therapeutic role and the desire for friendship as the soul asking for what it know is best. To the soul, there is hardly anything more healing than friendship. I suspect that a patient's wish for friendship with a therapist is more a correct intuition than a defense." [my highlighting]
- Thomas Moore - Soul Mates: Honoring the Mysteries of Love and Relationship
In the practice of friendship, we might keep this important aspect of soul in mind: its need for containment. [my highlighting] Our capacity to keep a secret could be important to a friend who may feel free to talk to us in a spirit of confidentiality. It often happens, too, that what goes on among certain friends has to be protected from other friendships. Emily Dikinson's biographer Richard Sewall notes that Emily made a separate world of her various correspondents and friends: 'The letters to Higginson say nothing about Bowles, the letters to Bowles say nothing about Higginson; the letters to Helen Hunt Jackson say nothing about either of them.'
A friend could also offer containment by receiving another's feelings and thoughts without a strong need for interpretation or commentary. Sometimes, of course, we ask friends to offer their opinions and judgments, but even then we expect a high degree of acceptance and recognition of who we are. In friendship, we want to receive and to be received.
In the years of my work as a therapist, many people asked me to be their friend rather than their therapist. 'Couldn't we just meet at a coffee shop,' they would say, or, 'If you talked to me about yourself, this conversation wouldn't be so one-sided.' Clearly there is a difference between being a friend and being a therapist, the latter role lacking the mutuality of friendship. I have come to understand this common distaste for the therapeutic role and the desire for friendship as the soul asking for what it know is best. To the soul, there is hardly anything more healing than friendship. I suspect that a patient's wish for friendship with a therapist is more a correct intuition than a defense." [my highlighting]
- Thomas Moore - Soul Mates: Honoring the Mysteries of Love and Relationship
Monday, January 30, 2006
an excerp from Soulmates pp.76-77
Chapter 2 - Intermingled Souls: The Family of the Soul
"Questions about evil and suffering are the most profound mysteries we can tackle, but blaming our struggling human parents for these utterly deep mysteries distracts us from our own responsibilities. The result is that we lay a huge burden on our parents and other relatives, one they canot bear successfully, and we also avoid facing the mysteries of evil and suffering in our own lives, and as our own individual, life-shaping challenges. James Hillman has made the interesting observation that by divinizing our parents, we dehumanize them. Or, to put it another way, when we idealize the family, we also demonize it. When we resolve our own questions of absolute meaning by reducing them to family dynamics, ultimately blaming our parents for life's difficulties, we dehumanize our parents and oversimpligy the challenge of our own existence.
Philosophers and founders of religion have considered these absolute questions about evil and suffering and have offered far more substanstive answers. Buddhism, for instance, looks for the source of suffering and points a finger at our own cravings. Native American traditions wonder about suffering and understand it as the work of an evil community in the dim past of prehistory, like the Bow clan of the Hopi, whose corruption brought about the destruction of the world. Christianity asks the question and answeres it with the mythological story of Adam and Eve.
What if, instead of thinking obsessively about our own family histories, we looked instead to the old stories for explanations of our suffering? For example, to imagine that Adam and Eve, our mythological parents, are responsible for evil and suffering is first of all, to acknowledge that these matters are not really problems, but rather mysteries. Second, we might recognize that the roots of these mysteries do not lie in any temporal dimension but are eternally located in the human heart, mysteriously part of the human condition." - Thomas Moore
Chapter 2 - Intermingled Souls: The Family of the Soul
"Questions about evil and suffering are the most profound mysteries we can tackle, but blaming our struggling human parents for these utterly deep mysteries distracts us from our own responsibilities. The result is that we lay a huge burden on our parents and other relatives, one they canot bear successfully, and we also avoid facing the mysteries of evil and suffering in our own lives, and as our own individual, life-shaping challenges. James Hillman has made the interesting observation that by divinizing our parents, we dehumanize them. Or, to put it another way, when we idealize the family, we also demonize it. When we resolve our own questions of absolute meaning by reducing them to family dynamics, ultimately blaming our parents for life's difficulties, we dehumanize our parents and oversimpligy the challenge of our own existence.
Philosophers and founders of religion have considered these absolute questions about evil and suffering and have offered far more substanstive answers. Buddhism, for instance, looks for the source of suffering and points a finger at our own cravings. Native American traditions wonder about suffering and understand it as the work of an evil community in the dim past of prehistory, like the Bow clan of the Hopi, whose corruption brought about the destruction of the world. Christianity asks the question and answeres it with the mythological story of Adam and Eve.
What if, instead of thinking obsessively about our own family histories, we looked instead to the old stories for explanations of our suffering? For example, to imagine that Adam and Eve, our mythological parents, are responsible for evil and suffering is first of all, to acknowledge that these matters are not really problems, but rather mysteries. Second, we might recognize that the roots of these mysteries do not lie in any temporal dimension but are eternally located in the human heart, mysteriously part of the human condition." - Thomas Moore
Saturday, January 28, 2006
Thursday, January 19, 2006
Monday, January 16, 2006
[my] Austen Heeley Mach11 (old photo)
More things that begin with "A"; Thank you, Mr. Boy, for the inspiration, by reminding me of the alchemy inherent in all of us, and also that when one really really wants something with all one's heart, the Universe comspires to make our wishes come true!
and, Aghora 11, by Robert E. Svoboda: "Dedication: She, the Eternal One, who is the Supreme Knowledge, the cause of freedom from delusion and the cause of the bodage of manifestation. She indeed is sovereign over all sovereigns. (Devi Mahatmya, 1.57-58) Dedicated to the Great Goddess, the Divine Mother of the Universe: the Kundalini Shakti. "
More things that begin with "A"; Thank you, Mr. Boy, for the inspiration, by reminding me of the alchemy inherent in all of us, and also that when one really really wants something with all one's heart, the Universe comspires to make our wishes come true!
and, Aghora 11, by Robert E. Svoboda: "Dedication: She, the Eternal One, who is the Supreme Knowledge, the cause of freedom from delusion and the cause of the bodage of manifestation. She indeed is sovereign over all sovereigns. (Devi Mahatmya, 1.57-58) Dedicated to the Great Goddess, the Divine Mother of the Universe: the Kundalini Shakti. "
Sunday, January 15, 2006
Saturday, January 14, 2006
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
