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| "The Soul's answer to the problem of time is the experience of timeless being." the Uroboros |
(from one of my favorite, monthly resources, the powerpath.com)
I returned hOMe from a lovely July 4th celebration spent at Bird Rock community park where tribes representing many North Park houses, neighborhoods and businesses gathered. It was a sweet scene with babies crawling around and squealing, dogs hiding from the bursts of fireworks overhead and adults playing Frisbee, croquet and other games. A new friend, and well-known owner of a locally-sourced, organic food truck, pulled up curbside and fed the crowd FREE vegan burgers. Ours came complete with a heart-shaped dollop of a creamy beet sauce on the bun. "Because it's my business and I can do whatever I want!" was his response to why he provides this community service. WOW! Yes, please, and more! Now, this is what I call FREEDOM and INDEPENDENCE.
I crawled into bed with my latest partners, Clarissa Pinkola-Estes' Women Who Run with the Wolves, Phil Cousineau's Once, and Future Myths: The Power of Ancient Stories in Our Lives, Anthony Stevens' Ariadne's Clue: A Guide to the Symbols of Humankind, and Ishmael Tetteh's The Way Forward: Nature's Principles and Practices for Empowered Living. I beelieve in the power of osmosis, so bee sure you are consciously aware of who you are sleeping with. : ) And, I am really falling for Cousineau's typed print:
(from page 46) "The [Kalahari] Bushmen storytellers talk about two kinds of hunger.... They say there is physical hunger, then what they call the great hunger. That is the hunger for meaning. There is only one thing that is truly insufferable, and that is a life without meaning.... There is nothing wrong with the search for happiness. But there is something greater - meaning - which transfigures all."
Yesterday, before I departed the Treehouse, M. was watching a Tedx presentation on her tablet. It was of an Exteter Professor speaking about "Soil, Soul & Society," and he began by preaching that, as Americans, we must shift our values & mindsets from thinking that we are tourists to knowing that we are but pilgrims here.
(from page 62) "We are like the pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales who are reminded by the innkeeper at the Tabard Inn to tell one story on the way to the cathedral and another on the way home. He has seen and heard travelers come and go for years. He knows that the journey is incomplete, not even a bona fide pilgrimage, without the stories that try to glean meaning from the chaotic incidents along the way.
But not just stories will do. The soul demands more.
"Don't be satisfied with the myths that come before you," said the Sufi poet Rumi seven centuries ago. "Unfold your own myths."...
Out of the struggle with ourselves, from the fire in our souls, comes the thing that never existed before - the music, the art, the words that make life endurable, and more creative and sublime."
