Maze of Life

We are all lost in the maze of life. There is no way out except death. In the meantime, the issue is to live as well as possible. It takes courage to stay awake for the greatest show on earth: our own lives. Staying awake is the key to life more abundant. Everyday, grab hold of moments of stillness and quiet. Let the stillness seep in slowly until arriving at deep stillness. Suddenly, one may hear white noise in the the ears. Awareness of the body becomes more obvious. It’s different each time. That is part of the wonder of being-here-now. Relax deeply into It, there’s no other place we need be. Just here and now complete with forces of distraction all around! You become stillness!        

                                               ~  americ@well.com

Today's Destiny

Today! You have an appointment with destiny. The idea of destiny suggests some future great event that will happen to us. For a young person, perhaps, the day of meeting the love of their life; a mature person, the day a grandchild is born. Or, for a whole culture, the day the world ends. Destiny, however, is nothing greater than the meeting of the present with the future. When does that happen? That’s right now as the present meets the future – today. We don’t know when we’ll die. We can’t assume waiting for destiny as some “big event”; but, feeling totally present, today itself is a big event.

Being a Philosopher-at-Large

From time to time, I feel that I'm really a "philosopher-at-large". It's one of my jobs in this life. I reflect on things. I am not a writer, but more a speaker. That's why I use audio so much. That which appears real to me is often unspeakable and un-writable. The best I can do is sing or write a spontaneous poem. So here I am - reflecting on myself, in public, about this occupation of philosopher-at-large. Thankful for so many people who keep visiting this philosopher-at-large blog over all these years. You keep me going.

Time Monster

In the end, we get swallowed up by the time monster. Easy to think that time is not real. Time is personified by clocks, chimes, bell towers, time stamps, a side bar on computer screens, and much more. The price of life is time. But beyond time is eternity. People in jail are said to be "serving time". The events and stages between conception and death are the "story of our lives". Stories happen in time, like movies and novels. Life implies death; death implies life.

Stardust and lightening

We are stardust; we are lightning. --Joni Mitchell*

When I was a child in the first and second grade, a little girl named Sherry would play with me. She was an outcast. She had wild unkempt golden hair, and talked very softly. Other kids made fun of me for even talking with her. One day she brought a little book with a picture of a star. She said, “We come from there.”

We come from the stars, the very substance of our bodies is stardust condensed from the heavens. We are in the heavens already; someone else on some other star system could be looking our way. We are sparks from a central fire, a whole universe, forged by the power of that fire.

---

* From her song, “Woodstock”

Eternity’s Carpet

Time …

always lost

moment to moment

facing past

turning into

no time

hold on,

no way

step into

time

gliding on eternity’s carpet

~americ

The link to Americ's SoundCloud (It's wonderful to hear his voice)

https://soundcloud.com/americ

Walt Whitman - "Go Directly to the Creation" - Americ and Walts' Prediction for our future

Wonderful lines from Walt Whitman's preface to his 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass:

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body. . . . The poet shall not spend his time in unneeded work. He shall know that the ground is always ready ploughed and manured. . . . others may not know it but he shall. He shall go directly to the creation.

"Time Poverty" Published in 2016 - Reposted now in 2024...per usual you were right Americ.

 We live in a technological world, where every eighteen months the power of computers doubles. But at the same time we live in a cultural world where expectations rise to meet the expanding possibilities of technology. So that as fast as we create new ways to save time, we find new desires to chip it away and distract ourselves even more.
If I was a wise man like Lao Tzu, Buddha, Jesus, or Krishna, I would not know, or even understand, what time poverty is. But I am not. I'm just an ordinary human being, with ordinary problems, faced with schedules, deadlines, bank accounts that rise and fall, and there is, all too often, this pressing sense of there not being enough time, not enough time to do all the things that need to be done. I can scramble around with different strategies to manage that time, so that the lists become prioritized, and I'm supposed to know what to do first and next. And yet no matter how much I try to manage that time, new variables, new events, happen continuously to disrupt that.

For me, not being wise, to rise above time is to ignore it for a while, and try to enter the space of what I refer to as eternity. For at all points in time, if I focus deeply enough into this particular single present moment, then I'm arrived, I have arrived, I am exactly where I should be at this particular instant. I'm fully present here, not having to be anywhere else, so that gripping sense of not having enough time fades away into the eternal moment. That is the way time poverty is transcended, by going right into time, through time, into what is timeless.