Thursday, January 3, 2013
Windows
As I gracefully age I'm of the growing opinion that along with pensions and new body parts we all deserve a window with an achingly beautiful view.
I'm presently in my favorite chair looking out at mine. Beyond the planter box flowers valiantly holding on to early summer blooms, past the recently repaired and soon to be repainted wooden banister, past graceful Pohutakawa limbs is a view of the gentle Waitemata Harbor. No matter what unforeseen treasures or calamities a day brings into being, this view-- with it's sea green turquoise colors and it's beauty are always waiting for me. I never grow tired of the discovery, nor does it fail to put the days into perspective.
I count this panoramic gift as a wholly sublime reminder that my life transpires in a living picture postcard. Moment by seasonal moment hours measured in the movement of weather systems, sunsets, tidal ebbs and flows all swaying their songs in the constant winds that push my home against its crevice in the hillside.
The local architect who stood 40 years ago where the house now stands, was thinking of a shelter here a in homage to this vision. I'm certain of it. Large important windows, including the ones in the kitchen, all draw the eye towards where the horizon meets the waters below. One's eye, and one's heart are swept beyond the height of wood beam ceilings, and the charm of terraced rooms spiraling upwards. Every first time visitor to our home forsakes the wonderful architecture of the house and makes a beeline for the veranda, often commenting on how we must never get tired of it all.
All one can do, from where I sit is to not forget to be part of paradise. Boats sail past, their white sails like skirt hems across a dance floor. Hot air balloons the colors of rainbows hover in the dawn air and birds maneuver thermals like kites on strings. Whether the view from these windows has calmed a restlessness in me, or a restlessness now subsiding allows me to love what I look at more each day, I cannot say.
I'm learning that for many of us, our eyesight changes for the better with time. The loss of physical acuity gives over to seeing from the heart. Whether we see the world with a jaundiced regard or deepening appreciation has little to do with focal length. Your daily windows and mine can teach us how sight might serve as a meditation on the love of things as they are. If the eyes are windows on the soul, then surely the soul with a window full of rapture to gaze upon, has a reason to look more deeply.
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
Stakes of the Game
Everything.
After 54 years on the planet and if you believe in it who knows how many lifetimes, this is my conclusion.
We don't have to go looking for the road to enlightenment. We're on it- we can't miss it.
We can however, ignore it.
Ignoring it looks like getting by, going numb, playing small. It looks like a perpetual game of blame, shame and regret.
Just to be clear, I've never met anyone enlightened or otherwise who doesn't have many examples of what was less than skillfully lived. We get scars. We grieve, we're angry and afraid sometimes and we hurt.
Great people go through heartaches and they botch things all the time.
They just don't stop there.
Best of all, really awake people stay committed to joy.
Sounds so cliche I know. But joy isn't pollyanna and it's not distraction or denial.
It is plunging deeply into now....cultivating a taste for what Byron Katie calls "becoming a lover of what it is".
The discovery that we can love all of it, even our suffering means you now hold the only keys
to personal transformation that ever existed.
What we love we transform. You get the same house, family members, body type and life situation you had before-
Only now you get it.
There are consequences.
Getting it can lead to:
a cessation of moaning and complaining
a perhaps new tendency to be a pleasure to be with
things delighting you that you didn't previously see or appreciate
meditation
taking better care of yourself and by extension others
opportunities born of a grateful mind
and a whole host of other things too terrible to contemplate when we've been convinced that suffering
was a necessity or a sign of intelligence.
So there. I've just saved you the price of doing est , psychotherapy, spiritual paths and colonics.
You're welcome.
Friday, October 28, 2011
Shamanic Healing...making friends in unseen worlds

Manning up to Motherhood- Waitomo Caves

Saturday, September 10, 2011
Life as quality of Self-Perception: Pouring paint on one's essential nature
Sunday, July 10, 2011
On the edge
I wanna know:
Who we are now.
If you share my thirst for being real and not habitual.
I wanna know if friendship, laughter and deep intimacy are still somewhere on the menu and the sex that goes along but doesn’t come without
Whether we still have sufficient guts, love, or compassion to tell the truths that came so easily once, but that now could send it all tumbling like a house of cards
Knowing that whether or not we survive the listening,
The only certainty is that wounds don’t heal in the silence we retreat to for safety.
I wanna know
What lives underneath the layers of “us”
what it might feel like to be celebrating what we now diplomatically ignore
about the different needs and desires where your heart protect its’ own secret reasons and so does mine.
I wanna know
what would make either of us ecstatically happy and whether we still share a vision for making that happen
I wanna know where in us individually lies the seed of self-redemption which if nurtured would grow us into joyful expressions of life renewed and to hell with partners and parents dutifully resigned.
I wanna know my heart’s desire- know your's- know if our marriage serves or hinders
yes or no or both.
Know if what gets us through the times when I’m sure its over can still be rightfully be called courage?
Or if we're hanging on how come?
I wanna know if we still love us
Not because we once said we always would-
But because we choose to do so now.