Hi Folks:
Well, my plan for this week’s post was to talk about ‘green roofs’, but this week decided to unfold as it wanted… “The best laid schemes of mice and men go often askew…” Of course, Burns’ poem was about disturbing a mouse house, so it sort of fits into a post about ‘green building’.
Having said all that, here are the links for green building I came across this week, and we’ll get to green roofs next week. I’ll start with a green roof story, though. Continue Reading →
Hi There:
I haven’t posted any of my writings for some time now; no reason except a lack of time, and as the saying goes, there are 168 hours in the week – what you do with them is up to you! Anyway, I’m going to add some more of my archived writings for the reason mentioned above, but I think there’s some good stuff in there. Before I do I wanted to add one comment. I used to do a fair number of talks on spirituality and other things, and before I began my talks I always mentioned two things. First, I asked the people in the audience to put away their pens, paper, computers, etc. and just listen, because if your brain can’t do two jobs at the same time. If you’re trying to write and listen at the same time, one or both are going to lose out. Second, I told everyone not to believe a single word I said… at least not until they each took the time to absorb the information and decide for themselves, “This much I like, this I can agree with. This part I’m not sure about; I’m going to have to think about this for a bit. This part isn’t for me, at least not for now. I’m going to set this part aside.” I think it’s vital that each of us do that with everything we experience. It’s very easy to accept something as true because someone said it or you read it in a book or saw it on the ‘net or the late movies, but what’s more important, at least to me, is to decide how this information resonates within you. Seth said:
“You must realize that any idea you accept as truth is a belief that you hold. You must, then, take the next step and say, ‘It is not necessarily true even though I believe it.’ You will, I hope, learn to disregard all beliefs that imply basic limitations.†~ The Nature of Personal Reality, session 614.
Of course, you’re welcome to disagree with both of us!
Love,
Mike.
Here’s a look at my writings: Continue Reading →
Hello Dear Ones!
What do you think of when someone mentions poetry? Love? Longing? Beauty? Pain? Maybe even humour – particularly if you think of limericks:
There once was a man from Tumeric
Who liked his stew spicy and very thick
He sprinkled in some hot pepper, then more
Took a swallow, then swore
What he said can’t be used in a limerick.
The use of words is the storyteller’s and the poet’s craft. The tools of the trade are a writing instrument and a source on which to write. No expensive purchases or overhead costs are needed. The heart, the brain and a goodly skilled ability to utilize language is fundamentally all that is required. That’s it.
A storyteller uses his or her skills to weave a tale that captures the reader/listener and hold them spellbound till the final word. Description and storyline are essential. Believable characters are mandatory. Dialogue is optional. There is a beginning, most often a climax and then an ending to each story.
A poet has two options: to tell a brief story using the same structure as the storyteller, but in fewer words; or to take one descriptive element – what would be a paragraph to a storyteller – and grant it the grace of standing alone. Continue Reading →
Hello Dear Ones!
Upon awakening this morning, I was uncertain what to write about today. I took a quiet moment to meditate on the potential. Nothing came forward and so I put it out to the Universe to provide me guidance. Before I even got out of bed, the guidance came through. (Don’t you love it? Ask, and it is given!) How did the guidance come? As we always do, Mike and I shared our dreams. My dream is one I’ve been having a great deal lately. The story line is always different. Yet I am living in an amazing reality (a different amazing from the reality I live in my day world) that is starting to show signs of regularity. I know my way around, the people with whom I interact and the things I do. Though I’m not recalling as much as I’d like to in detail (it would make a great novel at some point!) I awake each morning with a sense of satisfaction and happiness. It’s a very nice feeling.
Mike heard what I shared and hopped out of bed to locate one of our favourite books – The Oversoul Seven Trilogy by Jane Roberts. Mike shared with me a section he felt was related to my dream - that maybe I was experiencing a dream life in Sumaria. What he shared truly resonated with the feeling I still held from my night’s journeys. Yet, surprisingly, that is not what I’ll be sharing with you today. Maybe I will another week.
What I will be sharing is what Mike next read to me – from the same book. Mike read from Oversoul Seven’s Little Book (found at the end of the second of the three books in this trilogy) entitled The Charmed Life. And, my goodness, it was like I was hearing about my own life both here and in the dreamtime! Continue Reading →
Hi Folks:
In Elizabeth Gilbert’s (wonderful) book, ‘Eat Pray Love‘ she has a conversation with her friend Giulio about why Rome is a beautiful city, but it’s not ‘her’ city. Giulio says that each city and each person has a word to describe them, and if your word and the city’s word don’t match, you’ll never be comfortable there. It’s easier to type out the conversation than to try to explain it, so we’re including that section here (pp. 102-104): Continue Reading →
Hi Folks:
Well, Friday is upon us and that means I’m turning my attention to ‘being green’ once again. I labeled this post ‘Seeing the Light’ for two reasons. On one hand, with the plethora of information that’s coming online today in all aspects of being ‘green’, sustainability, corporate responsibility, etc. it seems that more and more people are indeed ‘seeing the light’. Further to that, as I type this I’m listening to the TEDxSOMA live and the focus of this series of talks is on interconnection/ interactivity, sharing ideas and communication. We all share this little blue marble, and we all need to work together to find a better way to live on it. In the book ‘The Sacred Balance‘, David Suzuki used this analogy (allowing for my memory here): take a basketball, and overlay a sheet of tissue paper onto this ball. The basketball represents the earth (yes, the earth is an oblate spheroid, but stay with it). All life on earth exists in a layer comparatively similar to that layer of tissue paper. Visualizing that changes how one sees the world.
Seeing the light also means something completely different because artificial light has revolutionized how we exist in the world. Whereas we once operated largely from sunrise to sunset, artificial light changed that forever. We shifted from torches to candles to oil lamps, and in about 1809 Humphry Davy invented the first electric light. This idea was latched onto by others, and Thomas Edison finally perfected the idea for the vacuum bulb that we know today as the incandescent light bulb. They come in a variety of sizes, shapes, some have gases inside the bulb, but by and large the idea hasn’t changed. I’m not going to try to guess the impact of the electric light on the industrial revolution, but it was nothing short of revolutionary. The biggest problem with the incandescent bulb however, is that it’s horribly inefficient. Any child who ever used an ‘Easy Bake Oven‘ could tell you that an incandescent bulb is primarily a heat source that also gives off some light. Somewhere around 80% of the energy used by an incandescent bulb is lost in giving off heat. Halogen lamps are a type of incandecent that were first used in the movie projection industry in the 1960s. They’re now used in car headlamps as well as in residential and commercial use. Halogen bulbs use less energy and last longer than typical incandescent bulbs, but still generate a lot of heat. Continue Reading →
Hi Folks:
I actually wrote and posted this yesterday, but I’ve felt compelled to come back and add an introduction to it (perhaps solely for my own edification) as to why I wrote it in the first place. In a way it began when I read a comment on a photography forum by someone who said s/he could never use ‘Camera A’ because it doesn’t have ‘Live View’. Now s/he has a valid point in how s/he sees photography and how it works for him/her, but it got me thinking… if you went back in time 10 years and said to the people at any of the major camera manufacturers that you wouldn’t buy their camera because it doesn’t have live view, they’d look at you funny and ask, “Live what?” Now live view certainly has value and I’m not trying to demean it by any means, but it brings back to the surface the question of, “Is is the camera or the photographer that matters?” Asking that question among any group of photographers will cause either discussion or riots depending on the group, and I’m not going to pick one side or the other because I think they’re both important. On one hand, one can’t expect to make the same images with a Holga as with a Hasselblad. That’s not to say that one can or cannot make good pictures with either a Holga or a Hasselbad, only that the type of images made with each will be quite different. A photographer is not bound by his or her tools. At the same time, if someone starting out were to drop $50K on camera equipment with no understanding of photography, s/he’d probably find it a frustrating experience getting the images s/he imagined making with this equipment. Continue Reading →
Hello Dear Ones!
Been doing some research on poetry to add to the scope of this post from your perspective – as a reader. My goodness, the number of poets who come into this medium with a heavy heart is dis-heartening.
Thought to lighten things up for you a bit today! Here’s a cute poem by Wendy Morton:
Streaming Flamingoes
Poems are everywhere;
starry, ephemeral, delicious,
for the eating.
Take for instance,
the cyclist
with a pink flamingo aloft,
streaming with iridescent ribbons,
a sunlit metaphor.
Or the skateboard guy
with a suit and flowering tie,
all grace and light,
simply on his way to work.
Or the gift of a recipe for pumpkin soup:
take a pumpkin,
fill it with broth,
potatoes, carrots, thyme.
Bake it.
Eat this poem.
Poetry can be fun! Take any topic. Add humour. Rhyme or no rhyme, matters not. Put sentences together that match, or mix lines up a bit for added flavour.
One afternoon when my son was four and a half years old, he wandered out from doing his thing in the bathroom and his trousers were down around his ankles. Here’s the poem that surfaced in my mind and onto the page:
Oh little boy at half past four
with trousers dragging on the floor
the bathroom may now be a chore
yet every day I love you more.
Haiku poems are simple three line poems and can be fun ways of capturing emotions more expressive than a mere sentence. Cinquain poems are five-lines. Click here for a few examples of other easy styles to use. Check out the List poem style. Here’s one of my own personal five line favourites (though it’s not a cinquain as the syllable and word count don’t match the formal style):
Sunset symphony
scents of cedar
and fresh mown grass
titillate the senses.
I’m smiling!
There was a day when I had a poetic inspiration to write a poem about writing poems and, yikes! a writer’s worst nightmare – no working pen in my purse to capture the thoughts before they dissipated like fog at sun’s rise. Anyone watching me would have wondered what possessed me – I was quite frantically attempting to find something in my purse that I could use as a writing tool. I was ready to use my lipstick tube when I recalled having been to an art store a few weeks before to purchase a turquoise pen. No turquoise pens were there to be found. What they had were artist brush pens in different shades of blue than what I had in mind, yet I was moved to buy one and put it in a zippered compartment that I never normally use. With a huge feeling of relief at finally finding a creative tool, this was the resulting poem recorded that day:
Poem as Art
What is this?
A poet without a pen?
Glad tidings be
That fancy marker
Grace my person
And my purse
To allow the artistry
Of words
The creation of phrase
The lyric of tongue
To unfold in indian ink
Peacock blue
Upon lined page
As yet empty
Awaiting breathlessly
The touch
Of the artist’s stroke.
No topic is too simple or foolish or too often written about by others to be written about by you if you are inspried to do so from a creative and playful bent. If you find magic in the world around you, anything and everything can be your inspiration!
Clouds
White clouds growing
changing in the east
building
expanding
as though the Ghostbuster’s
Marshmallow Man
was very slowly
arising
stretching
up and out
from a long held
crouch.
Here’s an exercise for you if you’re so inspired to indulge:
Below I’m going to give you the description of someone I saw one day last summer. I would encourage you to write a poem – or several poems if inclined – about this individual. Be playful. Be inventive. Trust the words that come to your mind. Write them down no matter how foolish!
Don’t edit what words you hear in your head before you write them out, and don’t edit them once they’re on the page. Never use an eraser! Never use the delete key! Once words have been removed, you can’t get those thoughts and inspirations back. And trust me, some of my worst phrases or sentences may have been inappropriate for the piece I was working on at the time, yet – lo and behold – I found them to be modifiable and ideal for something else along the way!
Here’s the description:
*an 80 something woman with long ringletted hair, wearing a sun-faded yellow, broad brimmed hat with wilted blue silk flowers. She sports an aged gingham print summer dress hiked to her knees, showing off her rolled-down support hose while riding a rust-red bicycle. She hums a tune that has her smiling. Though you do not recognize the tune, imagine it to be … any tune you choose. Possibly: K-K-K-Katie, Beautiful Katie, You’re the only G-G-G-Girl that I adore … Or maybe: Barney Google, with the goo-goo-googly eyes, Barney Google with a wife who’s twice his size … ( yes, those really were songs that were popular in her day!)
Now, make a poem from the above as it inspires you. Make it playful, fanciful, light, loving. Yes, you can make it sad if you are so moved … yet my hope for your expansion today would be to show you how easy it can be to become poetic – in every aspect of your life, from the frying pan’s sizzle to the awe of dew drops on the first crocuses of Spring – and to do it playfully as a child might.
Here are a few examples from my own inspiration:
The yellow hat brim flapped and flapped
Against her cheek it slapped and slapped
The bicycle chain it tapped and tapped
As the old woman hummed a tune.
Or how about?
The blue flower wilted, drooping sadly
Rolled support hose retracting badly
Little old lady peddling madly
Humming gladly.
Or this one?
Yellow hat and wilted flower
Hair in ringlets a winded mess
Support hose rolled beneath the knees
Above the knees a gingham dress.
I’ll leave you now with, hopefully, inspirations floating around in your own mind. Go find that pen and some paper or open up your word processor and have fun!
Once done, if you care to send your results on to me through our comments option below, I’d love to read them! Let me know if it would be okay for me to publish here what you send me – I will honour your request – even if it means publishing it anonymously or with your first name only!
Happy poeming!!!!!
In Light and Laughter,
Marcia
Hi Folks:
I thought that subject heading might cause a few people to scratch their heads in wonder, so permit me a moment to explain. First of all, I’ve had a love affair with the earth since I was a boy living in the woods in Quebec. I’d come home from school, drop my books on the kitchen counter, yell a quick hello and I was gone until dark. To this day, the ‘woods’ is my true home. As such I’ve loved gardening for a long time too, both indoors and out. The first apartment Marcia and I had together was above the double garage, attached to the main house. We had a large picture window in the living room and we had so many plants that several visitors to our landlady asked her if she had a greenhouse!
Marcia’s often said that all of my plants want to be trees. In one home we had a 15-foot cathedral ceiling and we had 4 plants over 10-feet tall, including FRED, our Christmas tree. In our guest bedroom we had a hibiscus plant that was basically an 8-foot diameter ball that took up half the room. We planted a Brugmansia in a pot, expecting it (as per the image that came with it) to grow about 2-feet high and have a number of white flowers. Ours grew 6 feet in a couple of months and had one flower that was nearly 2-feet long. It was a night bloomer, and every evening all four floors of the house were filled with the most amazing scent. In our last place together we had two poinsettias that re-bloomed 14 months after we got them. One of them put out 24 blossoms! So, where’s the danger in all of this you ask? Ah, I was just getting to that. Continue Reading →
Hello Dear Ones! Glad you stopped by…
The past two posts: Poetry Corner and He Says/She Says have focused on the topics of Light & Joy and Being the Light. This mind of mine was enjoying the energy from these inspirational topics. As a result my meanderings today are still being directed to the subject. Perusing my book shelf for something solid to consider and discuss had me opening texts at random. Eckhart Tolle’s book A New Earth was the hands down winner.
Rather than attempting to paraphrase Tolle’s work, I thought to inspire you from the master himself. (Please note the italics are mine.)
When you say, I enjoy doing this or that, it is really a misperception. It makes it appear that the joy comes from what you do, but that is not the case. Joy does not come from what you do, it flows into what you do and thus into this world from deep within you. The misperception that joy comes from what you do is normal, and it is also dangerous, because it creates the belief that joy is something that can be derived from something else, such as an activity or thing. You then look to the world to bring you joy, happiness. But it cannot do that. This is why many people live in constant frustration. The world is not giving them what they think they need.
Then what is the relationship between something that you do and the state of joy? You will enjoy any activity in which you are fully present, any activity that is not just a means to an end. It isn’t the action you perform that you really enjoy, but the deep sense of aliveness that flows into it. That aliveness is one with who you are. This means that when you enjoy doing something, you are really experiencing the joy of Being in its dynamic aspect. That’s why anything you enjoy doing connects you with the power behind all creation.
The majority of my days and the hours within those days are filled to overflowing with joy in all I do, those with whom I interact and in all encounters wherever I am in any and every given moment. It is exciting, then, when I see Tolle describing the feelings I have, that the joy is coming from within me – rather than me looking to find joy from those around me and the things that I do. It explains so much. Source fills me with the gift of joy, the light of my being radiates out, touched with the joy of Source and illuminates me, those I interact with, and the chosen corner of this physical world we are experiencing. Rather than looking to find joy outside of myself and to soak it into me as a sponge would draw in water, the joy comes from inside of me – and it is unlimited. A sponge is limited in its ability to absorb. Excess dribbles out ineffectually. Joy radiating out from within is unlimited and reaches out to all within its scope. The gift of knowing the joy within, of watching the effect it has on those with whom I connect, fills me to overflowing with the greatest and deepest sense of rightness. The more I live my life in this fashion, the deeper the sense of joy – the richer the gift that I and those around me are blessed to experience.
Selfish? Not entirely – though there is that aspect to it. The more joy I allow in, the greater the joy I feel. The greater the joy I feel, the more I am able to share. The more I share, the happier I am and the richer my relationships and life experiences. It becomes a cyclical spiral of energy feeding in upon itself and moving the spiral upwards, higher and higher into the furtherence of more and more joy.
I stated above that the majority of my days and the hours within those days are lived from this place of joy lived outward into my reality. I’m not perfect at it. Better and stronger and more at ease with the connection to this way of being, yet not perfect. It is now easier and easier, though, to recognize those moments when I am not living life from a place of joy – of concious choice to be happy and to fill myself up from within with the power of Source – God, the Universe, All That Is. I get a gnawing feeling within my being – it feels like fear – that antsy, restless, nervous sensation that something’s not right. I get this odd churning near my solar plexus that is trying to convince me that I should be afraid of something. When I look at it, I realize there is no logical reasoning for such an emotion to be filling me up with trepidation. There is no anger inside me. Anger, for me, is a misguided response to the deeper and truer emotion of fear. It is almost as though I’m a little girl and I have an angry parent near me. Not knowing what I may have done wrong to cause them to be angry, I have a sense that I am about to be spanked or punished for something in which I took no part. It is the frightened little girl feeling that tells me that I am not connected to Source, not living from a place of joy.
Holding on to this feeling only feeds the feeling and leaves me weak and vulnerable and of no use to myself, let alone anyone outside of me. I get jittery, begin to question whatever I’m doing in the moment and have even second guessed myself to the point of immobility. It has taken many years of trial and error, questioning and listening to myself, and my Self, to help me to be aware of this feeling and to know what it is I can do to let it go.
What is it that works for me? I smile. I smile at myself. I smile at my Self. Knowing myself to be a perfect child of the Universe – not a human child with baggage carried into adulthood – is what has me remembering that I am a being of light. My inner light – like the light of a single candle – is perfect in its unique beauty. My inner light, like that of a candle, dances and flickers with its own personal response to the world around it. Put two or more candles together in the same room and none of them responds the same way as the others. Each dances and undulates and flickers to a beat, a flow, a reality of its own. So too does the light within each of us. We dance our own joyous dances moved by the music, the flow of the Source of Universal energy bubbling up from within us as we allow it to fill us and to radiate out to the world.
Knowing how amazingly wonderful I feel when I am connected to Source, how could I possibly want to return to the feelings of human weakness of fear and insecurity? Yet it does happen – the return to those yucky feelings. Oddly it can sometimes take hours for me to recognize that I’ve returned to this place of emptiness and restless lacking. Though I seldom go back to my past in thought – it may be helpful now in the sharing to tell you it used to take me months to get beyond this feeling of fear and restlessness. There was even a time when I spent years living in this zombie-like state. I shudder at the remembered life before this one.
Today, the joy I feel in the knowing that I now have it within my ability to release that restricting series of limiting emotions adds to the joy of my days and the minutes and hours of those days! The source of that power, that ability is not mine. It is in drawing the joy, the light and the love of Source, of God, of the universal love of All That Is up from within myself and allowing it to first fill me and then to radiate out through my eyes, my words, my actions.
Light and Joy. What a way to live!
In Light and Laughter and Love,
Marcia
