My friend Zeenat of Positive Provocations has just celebrated her birthday by embracing the child within her. She’s determined to be forever four and I’m joining her.
I choose also to shed the 30 from the 34 and embrace the 4 year old IN me. Yippeee…. Continue reading
Eckhart Tolle on the essense of spiritual awakening, time, space and the now moment.
I have always loved music and have always loved the sound of wooden flutes. Once long ago I discovered a recorder in a second hand shop and a little booklet explaining how to use it. I tooted on that recorder whenever everyone else was out of the house and I day dreamed and dreamed about becoming a flute player.
Time passed and I met my husband to be. He had a silver flute that he tooted on when everyone else was out of his house and he day dreamed and dreamed about becoming a flute player. We tooted to each other, became close friends and confidantes. Eventually we married and decided to move to the coast to live a very simple lifestyle. We stripped our possessions down to the basics and sold our “tooters” to secondhand dealers and moved.
Today I enjoy the simple pleasures like making music with friends. I don’t “toot”, I sing and drum, and use whatever I can find to use as a percussion instrument. But the tooting never stopped and by that I mean the music in my head and in my dreams.
This week I received a tweet from my friend Robin Easton. Robin is an Author, Blogger, Speaker, Musician, Nature Photographer, Adventurer, Hiker, Canoeist, Camper, Potter, Glass Artisan, Gardener, Traveler, Lover of Life and Laughter. The link she tweeted was to a wonderful piece of flute music. TheKeithESmith was so inspired with Robin’s Naked in Eden book that he created a lovely piece of music for her.
If you have visited her blog then you will know how connected to nature Robin is. You will know the source of that connectedness is her capacity to love without reservation; to allow love to fill the spaces and places within where fear once had its stronghold. And you will know she’s a self-taught musician.
Naked in Eden is a story based on Robin’s life, the story of a young woman’s awakening, as she turns away from death, and walks into the arms of Life.
‘You must be mad to live in the bloody jungle, mates.’ Not mad exactly, just disconnected and seeking more meaning and adventure in their lives. An eccentric free spirit who never quite fit in, Robin Easton saw her soul mate in Ian—a rugged, rowdy Aussie who wanted out of the confines of his family’s business. Together they planned their Great Escape: to live off the grid in a remote area of Australia’s Daintree Rainforest.
But as their Jeep wound its way closer to the tiny black dot on the map, Robin couldn’t have fathomed just how the jungle would test her mentally, physically, and spiritually. As she came face to face with her fears of deadly snakes, leeches, and man-eating crocodiles, she began to unravel the mysteries of life and death, love and loss, and nature and humankind. Hidden in the forest mist, she discovered our biological relationship to the natural world and our unique place in it.
Allow
Love will flow in just as swiftly as it flows out.
Are you a doodler? Have you ever drawn mandalas ? I had a very busy week full of medical and laboratory appointments and I spent hours traveling between them. While sitting in waiting rooms I began to doodle and produced several mandalas. My girfriend who was visiting and chauferring me between appointments got into the act as well.
“Mandala” is a Sanskrit word which lossely translated can mean circle, polygon, community and connection representing wholeness. They are a geometric compositions, symbolizing spiritual, cosmic and psychic order. Hence they can be seen as a models for the organizational structure of life itself as they are cosmic diagrams depicting our relationship to that world that extends both beyond and within our bodies and minds.
The mandala pattern is used in many religious traditions from ancient Aztecs calendar and Taoist “yin-yang” symbol to sand mandalas created by Navajo Indians and Tibetan monks to demonstrate the impermanence of life. — What is a Mandala?
Mandala (Sanskrit maṇḍala मंड “essence” + ल “having” or “containing”. It is also often translated as “circle-circumference” or “completion”, both derived from the Tibetan term dkyil khor is a term used to refer to various objects. It is of Hindu origin, but is also used in other Indian religions, such as Buddhism. In the Tibetan branch of Vajrayana Buddhism, they have been developed into sandpainting. In practice, mandala has become a generic term for any plan, chart or geometric pattern that represents the cosmos metaphysically or symbolically, a microcosm of the Universe from the human perspective.
In various spiritual traditions, mandalas may be employed for focusing attention of aspirants and adepts, a spiritual teaching tool, for establishing a sacred space and as an aid to meditation and trance induction. Its symbolic nature can help one “to access progressively deeper levels of the unconscious, ultimately assisting the meditator to experience a mystical sense of oneness with the ultimate unity from which the cosmos in all its manifold forms arises. The psychoanalyst Carl Jung saw the mandala as “a representation of the unconscious self,” and believed his paintings of mandalas enabled him to identify emotional disorders.
View also:
http://thistimespace.tumblr.com/post/311544915/new-year-mandalas-art-as-meditation
http://thistimespace.tumblr.com/post/309015609/mandala-transitions
If you aren’t into drawing in the round or into drawing at all. Even if you don’t use photoshop you can create a depiction of connection using layers of images like this one (click image to enlarge).
