....play, pray. love

You're never going to get to any final place. And so, we want to remind you to relax and start having fun on the way......Abraham

I've spent a great deal of the summer being self-absorbed...

trying to figure it out...

simplify...

I want this phase of my life to be gentle, balanced, creative and playful...

I don't do well with drama

I know so many women who are looking inside, in flux...

some on the verge of leaving a long standing relationship....

some trying to figure out what will feed their soul and incorporate it into their lives in a bigger way....

some ready to break out of the box that we often find ourselves in do to expectations...

some trying to simplify...

some learning to play again....we forget...

I think if someone asked me my spiritual philosophy right now

I would just say

to love and play

It's not that I'm unhappy with my life....

it isn't that easy....

I have so many blessings...

no question about that, I am often overwhelmed with gratitude....

I want a stronger connection with Spirit....with the Spirit in me

and that seems to bring me to a place of clearing out old patterns and beliefs that are no longer serving me and opening wider to all the possibilities....fearlessly

becoming more awake...

more giving....

playing more...it isn't all so serious...

more aware and much more disciplined in my spiritual practice....

and I get lazy about that...

and it is the most necessary practice for opening,

softening and experiencing more joy.....

and I have a very fertile imagination when it comes to what might be... don't misunderstand, I love my imaginings....but I also need to stay grounded and present....some of my imaginings take on a life of there own taking more energy than they should...oh my...so much work...so little time...

in joy....

“ memories flood in...
regrets tug in one direction...
joys tug in another...
how do you hold a lifetime in your hands?
and what do you do now?
maybe you do the only thing that
ever really mattered -
you love.
you offer love.
you give love.
you receive love.
you breathe love.
you live love.
you love. ”

~terri st. cloud

With love in you, your only need is to extend it.-- A Course in Miracles

from Eat Pray Love........

I keep remembering one of my Guru’s teachings about happiness. She says that people universally tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will maybe descend upon you like fine weather if you’re fortunate enough. But that’s not how happiness works. Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it.

You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings…And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it. If you don’t, you will leak away your innate contentment. It’s easy enough to pray when you’re in distress but continuing to pray even when your crisis has passed is like a sealing process, helping your soul hold tight to its good attainments.

On this day of your life, dear friend, I believe God wants you to know...

the time has come for you to nourish your soul...

When was the last time that you swam naked?

Or sang in the shower? Or blew bubbles?

Or held a puppy? Or kissed a baby?

Or made love all Sunday afternoon?

Or prayed really softly, not from need, but from love?

Has it been a while?

Then hurry. Do it.

Hurry.

This is life that is going by..

Neale Donald Walsch

....let the Tribes gather

"A Gathering of the Tribe"

by Charles Eisenstein

"Once upon a time a great tribe of people lived in a world far away from ours. Whether far away in space, or in time, or even outside of time, we do not know. They lived in a state of enchantment and joy that few of us today dare to believe could exist, except in those exceptional peak experiences when we glimpse the true potential of life and mind.

One day the shaman of the tribe called a meeting. They gathered around him, and he spoke very solemnly. "My friends," he said, "there is a world that needs our help. It is called Earth, and its fate hangs in the balance. Its humans have reached a critical point in their collective birthing, and they will be stillborn without our help. Who would like to volunteer for a mission to this time and place, and render service to humanity?"

"Tell us more about his mission," they asked.

"I am glad you asked, because it is no small thing. I will put you into a deep, deep trance, so complete that you will forget who you are. You will live a human life, and in the beginning you will completely forget your origins. You will forget even our language and your own true name. You will be separated from the wonder and beauty of our world, and from the love that bathes us all. You will miss it deeply, yet you will not know what it is you are missing. You will only remember the love and beauty that we know to be normal as a longing in your heart. Your memory will take the form of an intuitive knowledge, as you plunge into the painfully marred earth, that a more beautiful world is possible.

"As you grow up in that world, your knowledge will be under constant assault. You will be told in a million ways that a world of destruction, violence, drudgery, anxiety, and degradation is normal. You may go through a time when you are completely alone, with no allies to affirm your knowledge of a more beautiful world. You may plunge into a depth of despair that we, in our world of light, cannot imagine. But no matter what, a spark of knowledge will never leave you. A memory of your true origin will be encoded in your DNA. That spark will lie within you, inextinguishable, until one day it is awakened.

"You see, even though you will feel, for a time, utterly alone, you will not be alone. I will send you assistance, help that you will experience as miraculous, experiences that you will describe as transcendent. For a few moments or hours or days, you will reawaken to the beauty and the joy that is meant to be. You will see it on earth, for even though the planet and its people are deeply wounded, there is beauty there still, projected from past and future onto the present as a promise of what is possible and a reminder of what is real.

"You will also receive help from each other. As you begin to awaken to your mission you will meet others of our tribe. You will recognize them by your common purpose, values, and intuitions, and by the similarity of the paths you have walked. As the condition of the planet earth reaches crisis proportions, your paths will cross more and more. The time of loneliness, the time of thinking you might be crazy, will be over.

"You will find the people of your tribe all over the earth, and become aware of them through the long-distance communication technologies used on that planet. But the real shift, the real quickening, will happen in face-to-face gatherings in special places on earth. When many of you gather together you will launch a new stage on your journey, a journey which, I assure you, will end where it began. Then, the mission that lay unconscious within you will flower into consciousness. Your intuitive rebellion against the world presented you as normal will become an explicit quest to create a more beautiful one.

"In the time of loneliness, you will always be seeking to reassure yourself that you are not crazy. You will do that by telling people all about what is wrong with the world, and you will feel a sense of betrayal when they don't listen to you. You will be hungry for stories of wrongness, atrocity, and ecological destruction, all of which confirm the validity of your intuition that a more beautiful world exists. But after you have fully received the help I will send you, and the quickening of your gatherings, you will no longer need to do that. Because, you will Know. Your energy will thereafter turn toward actively creating that more beautiful world."

A tribeswoman asked the shaman, "How do you know this will work? Are you sure your shamanic powers are great enough to send us on such a journey?"

The shaman replied, "I know it will work because I have done it many times before. Many have already been sent to earth, to live human lives, and to lay the groundwork for the mission you will undertake now. I've been practicing! The only difference now is that many of you will venture there at once. What is new in the time you will live in, is that the Gatherings are beginning to happen."

A tribesman asked, "Is there a danger we will become lost in that world, and never wake up from the shamanic trance? Is there a danger that the despair, the cynicism, the pain of separation will be so great that it will extinguish the spark of hope, the spark of our true selves and origin, and that we will separated from our beloved ones forever?"

The shaman replied, "That is impossible. The more deeply you get lost, the more powerful the help I will send you. You might experience it at the time as a collapse of your personal world, the loss of everything important to you. Later you will recognize the gift within it. We will never abandon you."

Another man asked, "Is it possible that our mission will fail, and that this planet, earth, will perish?"

The shaman replied, "I will answer your question with a paradox. It is impossible that your mission will fail. Yet, its success hangs on your own actions. The fate of the world is in your hands. The key to this paradox lies within you, in the feeling you carry that each of your actions, even your personal, secret struggles within, has cosmic significance. You will know then, as you do now, that everything you do matters. God sees everything."

There were no more questions. The volunteers gathered in a circle, and the shaman went to each one. The last thing each was aware of was the shaman blowing smoke in his face. They entered a deep trance and dreamed themselves into the world where we find ourselves today."

※※※

"Who are these missionaries from the more beautiful world? You and I are surely among them. Where else could this longing come from, for this magical place to be found nowhere on earth, this beautiful time outside of time? It comes from our intuitive knowledge of our origin and destination. The longing, indomitable, will never settle for a world that is less. Against all reason, we look upon the horrors of our age, mounting over the millennia, and we say NO, it does not have to be this way! We know it, because we have been there. We carry in our souls the knowledge that a more beautiful world is possible. Reason says it is impossible; reason says that even to slow -- much less reverse -- the degradation of the planet is an impossible task: politically unfeasible, opposed by the Money Power and its oligarchies. It is true that those powers will fight to uphold the world we have known. Their allies lurk within even ourselves: despair, cynicism, and resignation to carving out a life that is "good enough" for me and mine.

But we of the tribe know better. In the darkest despair a spark of hope lies inextinguishable within us, ready to be fanned into flames at the slightest turn of good news. However compelling the cynicism, a jejune idealism lives within us, always ready to believe, always ready to look upon new possibilities with fresh eyes, surviving despite infinite disappointments. And however resigned we may have felt, our aggrandizement of me and mine is half-hearted, for part of our energy is looking elsewhere, outward toward our true mission.

I would like to advise caution against dividing the world into two types of people, those who are of the tribe and those who are not. How often have you felt like an alien in a world of people who don't get it and don't care? The irony is that nearly everyone feels that way, deep down. When we are young the feeling of mission and the sense of magnificent origins and a magnificent destination is strong. Any career or way of life lived in betrayal of that knowing is painful, and can only be maintained through an inner struggle that shuts down a part of our being. For a time, we can keep ourselves functioning through various kinds of addictions or trivial pleasures to consume the life force and dull the pain. In earlier times, we might have kept the sense of mission and destiny buried for a lifetime, and called that condition maturity. Times are changing now though, as millions of people are awakening to their mission all at the same time. The condition of the planet is waking us up. Another way to put it, is that we are becoming young again.

When you feel that sense of alienation, when you look upon that sea of faces mired so inextricably in the old world and fighting to maintain it, think back to a time when you too were, to all outside appearances, a full and willing participant in that world as well. The same spark of revolution you carried then, the same secret refusal, dwells in all people. How was it that you finally stopped fighting it? How was it that you came to realize that you were right all along, that the world offered to us is wrong, and that no life is worth living that does not in some way strive to create a better one? How was it that it became intolerable to devote your life energy toward the perpetuation of the old world? Most likely, it happened when the old world fell apart around your ears.

As the multiple crises of money, health, energy, ecology, and more converge upon us, the world is going to collapse for millions more. We must stand ready to welcome them into the tribe. We must stand ready to welcome them back home.

The time of loneliness, of walking the path alone, of thinking maybe the world is right and I am wrong for refusing to participate fully in it... that time is over. For years we walked around talking about how wrong everything is: the political system, the educational system, religious institutions, the military-industrial complex, the banking industry, the medical system -- really, any system you study deeply enough. We needed to talk about it because we needed to assure ourselves that we were not, in fact, crazy. We needed as well to talk about alternatives, the way things should be. "We" should eliminate CFCs. "They" should stop cutting down the rain forests. "The government" should declare no fishing zones. This talk, too, was necessary, for it validated our vision of the world that could be: a peaceful and exuberant humanity living in co-creative partnership with a wild garden earth.

The time, though, for talking merely to assure ourselves that we are right is coming to an end. People everywhere are tired of it, tired of attending yet another lecture, organizing yet another discussion group online. We want more. A few weeks ago as I was preparing for a speaking trip to Oregon, the organizers told me, "These people don't need to be told what the problems are. They don't even need to be told what the solutions are. They already know that, and many of them are already in action. What they want is to take their activism to the next level."

To do that, to fully step into one's mission here on earth, one must experience an inner shift that cannot be merely willed upon oneself. It does not normally happen through the gathering or receiving of information, but through various kinds of experiences that reach deep into our unconscious minds. Whenever I am blessed with such an experience, I get the sense that some benevolent yet pitiless power - the shaman in the story - has reached across the void to quicken me, to reorganize my DNA, to rewire my nervous system. I come away changed.

One way it happens is through the "gathering of the tribe" I described in this story. I think many people who attended the recent Reality Sandwich retreat in Utah experienced something like this. Such gatherings are happening now all over the world. You go back, perhaps, to "real life" afterwards, but it no longer seems so real. Your perceptions and priorities change. New possibilities emerge. Instead of feeling stuck in your routines, life changes around you at a vertiginous pace. The unthinkable becomes commonsense and the impossible becomes easy. It may not happen right away, but once the internal shift has occurred, it is inevitable.

Here I am, a speaker and a writer, going on about how the time for mere talk has ended. Yet not all words are mere talk. A spirit can ride the vehicle of words, a spirit that is larger than, yet not separate from, their meaning. Sometimes I find that when I bow into service, that spirit inhabits the space in which I speak and affects all present. A sacredness infuses our conversations and the non-verbal experiences that are becoming part of my events. In the absence of that sacredness, I feel like a smart-ass, up there entertaining people and telling them information they could just as easily read online. Last Friday night I spoke on a panel in New York, one of three smart-asses, and I think many in the audience left disappointed (though maybe not as disappointed as I was in myself). We are looking for something more, and it is finding us.

The revolutionary spark of our true mission has been fanned into flames before, only to return again to an ember. You may remember an acid trip in 1975, a Grateful Dead concert in 1982, a kundalini awakening in 1999 -- an event that, in the midst of it, you knew was real, a privileged glimpse into a future that can actually manifest. Then later, as its reality faded into memory and the inertial routines of life consumed you, you perhaps dismissed it and all such experiences as an excursion from life, a mere "trip." But something in you knows it was real, realer than the routines of normalcy. Today, such experiences are accelerating in frequency even as "normal" falls apart. We are at the beginning of a new phase. Our gatherings are not a substitute for action; they are an initiation into a state of being from which the necessary kinds of actions arise. Soon you will say, with wonder and serenity, "I know what to do, and I trust myself to do it."

- http://www.realitysandwich.com/gathering_tribe

.....love & friendship...For Good

....I shared this beautiful expression of love with a friend last night and I want to share it with you..

.my blog friends...

who I learn from..

.It is from the musical Wicked...see it if you can, it's wonderful..

....art & friends

Artist and friend janet Morita with a jane Gyer painting

This year is the twenty-fifth anniversary of Timberline Art Gallery in Oakhurst, CA.…

also known in the early years as the “Guild of Mountain Artists” and who better to honor with a retrospective than well-known, well-loved and well-respected mountain artist and long-time Timberline artist, Jane Gyer, who passed away in 2004.

In Janie’s “Creed”, she suggests that we: “Celebrate life, spread joy, look for rainbows, laugh a lot, believe in yourself”…I knew Janie through the Positive Living Center in Oakhurst…and know she really did live her ‘creed’…

Her husband, and dear, dear man, Jack, was always her strongest advocate, her most avid spokesperson, and her constant help mate and soul mate…

He was at the Retrospect,

meeting new Janie admirers and seeing old friends who came to honor her….

Janie was at one time the "artist in residence" for both Yosemite and Rocky Mountain National Parks and was once featured on an episode of the NBC "Today Show."

She produced more than 1,000 paintings, murals, mosaics, theater set designs, prints and book illustrations as well as many sketches and unfinished paintings...can you imagine?..

1000 pieces of art....

The show will run from August 14th till September 6th, 2010 at Timberline……

the gallery is open every day.

see it if you can….

jack with some of his many, many friends...

Two friends and fabulous artists, Carolyn Hartling, who curated the show...

and Colleen Coffman, our Timberline President...

Wonder what they are cooking up next?

Goddesses Sheyla and Maggi Belle...inspirations in my life!

Contemplation?

This Spirit Figure has found a home with this beautiful woman! Made for each other for sure!

....that darn inner voice

Choices

.......a woman's spirit-self is found in solitude, in recognizing the validity and truth of her own feeling values and that one's personhood is not found in safe conformity to outer values but in the darkness of personal discovery....

Sr. Christella Carbaugh

I think every now and then women......young, old, or in between

come to a place where something changes and we have to go within to understand what the change means and how to merge with it...even joyful change usually requires acceptance...

I have the choice of letting a shift become part of my journey,

or change courses then and there

...I can even den the shift has happened...

I know how to....deny...repress.....

smile when I want to cry

play nice, when even when it doesn't feel good

doing without thinking the things expected of me

deny my inner voice

even when it's screaming

I've come far enough to find joy in my life every day...this isn't about a good life or not so good life it's about being true to myself

I know I have to continue moving forward, I'm not done yet...change...oh my.

I can do a lot of things to keep that voice sounding far off and very small

Sometimes I can drown it out all together....

I can convince myself that fiction is fact....

and that fact is fiction.

Then something happens and burying that voice no longer works....

I have to look at my stuff..my life.

and that means going within to actively listen, to open

sounds simple..

it can take a long time

it means further emerging and merging with the essence of me...

hurts sometimes that stretching and unbending

letting my old soul speak

...and listening....

letting go of old scripts

allowing

looking at myself to see if I'm being true

because if I don't,

this thing, this change, this shift....this opportunity for growth...will just sit here...in me

...waiting serving no purpose and leave me feeling off balance....

getting 'in touch' also means crying...the ugly cry...the one that hurts

while it's breaking down that strong woman thing so I can really get in there and look...so I can listen to the woman in me who wants to be real and juicy...

and it can take a long time...or come in a quick flash...this hearing

and it means reaching out to friends who don't judge, but mirror back..

and then still tell me that I am lovable

or

I can look at it and shovel more stuff onto it...there is always that...lol

....Woman standing on a hillside, peering,

peering into blues space...

...what will woman be?

...not yet fully revealed

...but coming

...coming

...what will woman be?

judith Duerk