Skip to main content

2020 Pandemic Journey Day 48

May 8, 2020

Today’s image – Yesterday had a full moon, albeit behind cloud cover.  While out that afternoon in a prairie park, I called my good friend and creative collaborator to talk about things going on.  She and I have published on a collection of art and poems and are compiling another. She paints break taking cosmic starscapes on enormous canvases, a painting wherein its viewer can get lost. She sees herself as a light work on a mission to assist with a vibration elevation that will create a beautiful ascension event that brings people into the fifth dimension. When I try to wrap my mind about what that means, I can only imagine the music group from the sixties. She has trained as a hypnotherapist, taking clients during a session that might last three or four hours back into past lifetimes to look at previous events or relationships in those lives that might be playing out still in a current lifetime.  Yes, she is an esoteric thinker, living within a very eccentric cosmology.  Her generosity and intended goodwill include sharing abundant information (or misinformation).  It varies from uplifting art and memes to sessions of channeled soul talks, videos from the latest conspiracy theorists and new-age spiritualists. The latter tend to annoy me because they come off as misguided and unproductive rabble-rousing (as I have ranted about in previous entries).  

I want to be woke and all, but my tightly laced science framed mind vets most of her dissemination as incendiary bunk. And at this point, my triggers are so sprung; our conversation can quickly grow spiky and heated. The story she tells me (and herself) is that she tries to take it all in and give a fair listen to every opinion. I think her zeal for many of the quirky infomercial comes out of gullibility. I wonder if she ever learned to practice critical thinking skills (she indeed demonstrates mastery with them her painting practical life skills). 

In the realms that she lives, with her spirit guides counseling her big life decisions, I am never one to egregiously disparage her.  I love her too much. So I have decided to challenge myself with a thought experiment. I will read or watch everything she sends me with an open mind, looking for how the information or message inspires her to share them. And most of all, practice the art of not reacting in anger or frustration.  And to do this out of respect for her and to practice a little surrender of my rigid thinking.  Because what if I am wrong?  I must hold that question too.  Is my programming so intractable that I cannot delve into another viewpoint long enough to give it a measured and honest consideration?  To sit with an idea, I consider as hooey for a little longer to seek some middle ground. Maybe there is an opportunity to learn how to reconcile differences and even contribute to the softening of the vast body of polarized opinions that have threatened our country’s domestic tranquility and stability.  Can I take up the simple practice of standing in the mental shoes of another as she extends what she considers crucial information to me?  Even if, as I suspect, those ideological shoes give me thought bunions, I can say that I gave them a try.  The bunions will go away when I put my own back on.  Come find me if I get lost.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Death Might Be Just A Holy Rend

  Death Might Be Just A Holy Rend And life a faithful pillow - a pillow to go flat, a spirit to drift off,  glaciers to melt and raise the sea. The blueprint is clear - Expect a tiny storm of mercy–  full of crows and bottle flies to debride the corpse,  to tithe the land.      And respect the putrid demise - things that fall apart make space for miracles.   Yet there persists the memory of breath rinsed in lavender and salt air. Then the dreams for blood and semen to revive, to metabolize  every tired, sad gospel into a hatch of octopus. Death confesses everything as she conjures her necrosis, as she feigns redemption, fools us with false devotion. She believes our defiance will set her free.   We must let grief to be the thread and needle to darn the rend, renew the cloth. then we can grasp the nascent green of winter wheat in spring.
Post a Comment
Read more

Covid Journal Entry 14

April 4, 2020 Today’s image – Exploring social cohorts. So, on campus now there is a small village of us living together, the remnants of those in residence this year.   We are an international population: seven from the US, six from Vietnam, five from China,   four from Morocco, one from the DR and two dogs/three cats.   We share four large buildings where we live, take our meals, study and exercise, on a five-acre campus. The rest of the two hundred and sixty or seventy odd community members are sheltering in their homes; some of the teachers and administrators dropping by during the week to work in their offices.   We have had little or no contact with them so far.   Our chef and his crew of two come in by rotation to prepare and serve the daily meals, a maintenance duo tend to the essential tasks and repairs, the city services haul away trash and recycling, the postal service, UPS and FedEx still deliver mail and packages.   It’s Iowa and the gove...
Post a Comment
Read more

Tongue

When I was ten, my dad pot-roasted a cow’s tongue. He brought it to the table on a platter, unsliced, open: a chaise lounge, red and velvet, slip of the lip to swallow us whole. The tongue is a door, a bed of confession, zipper to seal the deal. There is a jade plant on my window sill. Its many tongues sip silent molecules: water vapor, nitrogen, cool pool in the Kalahari. Tongue as cave, as conveyor, as flight of brown bats. Tongue holding space between us, gilded and strong with hope and death - a pocket for everything. Last night a snag of locust blew down over chicken wire. Five hens escaped. The snag, a tongue to freedom, to better pickings, a generous ledge. Sometimes a tongue wags, ungenerous, it keens to ten fingers times twenty dangling over a hand-hewn gunnel. There were children in that boat, fleeing with family over turquoise water. Maybe it was the Mediterranean or cold Aegean Sea - a wide tongue to crac...
Post a Comment
Read more