We Love.

We love.

Americans are at their best when we are loving.

Whether its our spouses, partners, children, pets, homes, states, country, freedom, constitution, bill of rights, we are a passionate people.

I saw a headline the other day claiming that “Americans don’t recognize their country anymore.” Supposedly because we’re divided.

Who in their right mind would expect 320 plus million diverse peoples to agree on most things?!?! Anything?!?!? (Oh, that's what all that nifty surveillance is far ... they're going to try to use our buying habits, reading habits, posting habits, watching habits to herd us like cats ... hehe!)

If you study our history, Americans have been “divided” since the birth of our nation. Politics has, since our country’s inception, been rife with nastiness and name-calling, i.e. the more things change the more things stay the same … So don’t let anyone hoodwink you into believing “these times are somehow different — more awful — so bad —blah blah blah blah blah blah blah”.

Years ago M. Scott Peck wrote a book titled The Road Less Traveled, the title a line from a Robert Frost poem. It was a bestseller. An analysis of why it was a best seller back in the day claimed it was because the first line of the book was: Life is difficult.

And those three words hooked millions of book buyers because it confirmed an innate truth that at the time, perhaps, was not readily acknowledged in public. Remember all those silly saccharine sitcoms they used to foist upon us …

See, we’re always hungry and scavenging for Truth. We really don’t want or need or thrive on sugar-coated, palliative make me-feel good solipsism.

We really want the Truth, even when it hurts. Even when it breaks our hearts.

This picture reminds me of that.

Photo credit The Mirror

It reminds me that to love is the most magnificent thing on this planet. And whether that love is for your precious child, your loyal dog, or the freedom to voice your Truth, that love is the only thing that tethers us to the Divine.

So love someone or something with everything you've got.

Unleash your passion.

And open your big mouth about that.

We Are the Creation

We are the creation,
The creation unfolding,
Infinitely loved by the Divine. — Heidi Garrett

Beyond the cliches, platitudes, and other superficials spoutings on love, lies an experience of a type that surpasses verbal explication. This is the experience of which I will attempt to speak. The love that brightens our lives with ecstatic joy and sustains us when we are beyond reach of all else, in the abyss of despair. Every life claims such peaks and troughs of human existence.

And yet love never abandons us.

I’m in the midst of my first read-through of God’s Ecstasy by Beatrice Bruteau. I say my first read-through because this book is going to require a re-read, if not several re-reads. Bruteau is a mathematician and philosopher. She has a mastery of quantum theory that will remain forever beyond me, but it is her extrapolation of that understanding into a theology of “the creation” that has had my mind pinging around like a ball in a pinball machine for the past few months. I read a few paragraphs every day with breakfast and let them percolate. She's the first “theologian” (I use the term loosely to mean anyone who applies spiritual concepts to our experience) who has satisfied my longstanding disagreement with the “we are one” religions and philosophies. [We are one and many.] I love it. Doesn’t THAT have a ring of truth to it? Okay, I’m tangent-ing …

Last summer I began to consistently meditate again. I’d fallen off the bandwagon. As someone who doesn’t have tons of worldly attachments, loosening my spiritual ones has never really been a helpful thing in the long run. So last summer, when I began to realize something was missing from my life, I began consistently meditating again, often outside in my backyard. Among the grass and the trees, the wind and the bugs, the sky and the clouds, the wonderful fresh scent of it all … and I connected with an abundance of love that I don’t remember ever connecting with before.

Sometimes when I meditate I get eureka-type insights. I prefer to not write them down, because I have a strange (is it strange? I don’t know) belief that if the insights are valid they will endure … or rise again until I won’t forget them.

The insight I had on one of those summer nights beneath a full moon was that: We humans are incapable of unconditional love. I know! You laugh that I had to meditate to come to that realization. But this was a cellular understanding. Think about it … we’re all exhorted to “love thy neighbor as thyself” and told that “love conquers all” and, well, you know, “love means never having to say your sorry”. But who is supposed to do all this loving? Imperfect humans? We, who none of us have ever been loved perfectly or unconditionally, are supposed to expect ourselves to be perfectly and  unconditionally loving of others? We who learn by imitation?

Isn’t that a double bind? A demand that simply can’t be achieved?

So … what if we have it a bit wrong? What if all these exhortations, guilt trips, shamings, cajolings, to love one another perfectly and unconditionally are simply … misguided?

I think we do need unconditional love.

But maybe, just maybe, the answer isn’t an outside to outside connection. Maybe the answer is an inside to outside connection. Let’s just say you meditated, and in that meditation, you connected to a source within (What source within? That spark of divinity within us all … the spark I call the soul flame) … so let’s just say you meditated, and in the silence you were able to experience an infusion of unbounded love. Let’s just say, you did this, experienced this for 3 - 5 - 10 - 20 minutes every day, most days. And it was the most complete thorough experience you ever had of feeling perfectly and unconditionally loved. Like you didn’t have to hide even a speck of who you are. And you felt that unbounded love FOR every quark of your being and IN every quark of your being.

Mightn’t that alter the way you perceived, approached your day … and the people around you? Mightn’t you naturally (no pasted on fake sh*t here) smile at the next person who came across your path?

Probably.

Would it create a lightening-strike transformation? Like, would you in one fell swoop be delivered from your old grumpy, irritated-irritating, distracted self?

Probably not.

But, what if … you meditated every day?

I'd like to re-quote a powerful message from one of the meditation articles I linked to in Meditation & Eclectic Spirituality, Volume 4.

A Case for Meditation in Schools: Aguirre's conclusion to this opinion piece is quite powerful:

When we are able through meditation to take the time to love ourselves, we stop looking to the world for love and find it within. Through self-love and awareness, there is no longer a need to inflict your emotional pain upon others, as it becomes easier to view yourself in others, and realize that hurting others is hurting oneself.

I'd like to posit replacing the concept of experiencing self-love with the concept of experiencing the unconditional love of our creator ... the same creator that created the universe the galaxy the stars ... and loves it all.

The Illusion is That We are Not Loved

Eww. I inadvertently came across a troubling account of a popular spiritual teacher on the internet. I read the whole thing and even taking it with appropriate skepticism—it being one-sided and all—it left me feeling nauseous. One of the most disturbing aspects of “spirituality” is the teacher’s dark side. Whether the teacher is a New-Age pimp or the descendant of a revered Buddhist lineage or a smarmy Protestant tele-evangelist or a pedophile Catholic priest, spiritual teachers possess a dark side. Because they are human. And humans are both dark and light, from birth til death, we all cast a shadow. (Unless of course you’re Lily Dane … hehe!) Whether the teacher is ordained upon their own authority, anointed by a master (who was anointed by a master…), or blessed by a religious hierarchy, all spiritual teachers are human. Always a good thing to remember. Best not to sit at their feet.

Anyway … on top of that, I got halfway through Sri Aurobindo’s The Integral Yoga (which is quite long!) and was like, okay, enough already. I need to take a break from all these other people’s thoughts and ideas and get back into my own reality! So, this is going to be my last Sunburned post of the year. For I don’t know how long, more than a couple decades, I’ve taken the last couple weeks in the year to contemplate the year that is ending. It’s time for me to set aside researching, etc. and do just that.

I’ll leave you with one of my current beliefs (a newer revelation for me, and one I’m still integrating): The illusion is that we believe we are not loved. In truth, we are deeply loved by God, Our Creator, Source, The Cosmos, The Divine, THAT THING, whatever you want to call it. In fact, we swim in a cosmic soup of love. However, because we’re conditioned to seek love (approval) from our parents, siblings, friends, lovers, husbands, wives, children, teachers, bosses, etc., who will always fail at loving us perfectly because, well, that’s not their purpose, we fail to create a relationship with the source of unbounded love that is always available to us.

Our purpose is to manifest the truth of who we are individually. (Yes, that’s my current belief, and has been for awhile!) In that endeavor, we will love. But none of us will love perfectly. Best to remove that pressure from ourselves and others. And know that the more we are able to experience the love of the divine, the closer we will come to being the human we were born to be. (That at least, is one of the things I’ll be going off and contemplating for the rest of the year … and probably for a long time thereafter!)

Yes, the post on the Christian mystics is coming! Most likely in January. So until then, peace, love, and joy to you!

The Weekend Extract: Wicked Nixies & Wicked Games

After everything Melia survived in Half Faerie, you might think the poor half-faerie could get a break. Maybe fly off into the sunset and live happily ever after…

Uhm. Not yet.

This weekend's extract is from Half Mortal:

They heard the song—a duet—before they saw the singers. A siren’s ethereal face peered over the cliff’s ledge; her enormous wings—they looked like they belonged to an oversized butterfly—beat a slow and steady rhythm, suspending her in midair. Two arms wrapped around her neck. Her singing partner—a glamorous nixie—peeked from behind the siren’s neck through a tumble of golden hair.

Tatou stepped back.

Melia froze.

Sirens lured mortals to a watery death, but a powerful one could seduce a creature from the Enchanted World, too. All of a sudden, Illialei, which had always struck Melia as a lush and whimsical paradise for overgrown children, filled her with horror. Never mind that the siren and nixie were technically from the Muannai Valley.

“We were coming to dive.” The siren sounded like a swan. “We couldn’t help but hear your call.”

Melia and Tatou backed up one step at a time. Distance was the only thing that might protect them.

“It’s the black eagle,” the nixie said in the common tongue.

Melia clamped her beak. A row of small pointed teeth contrasted with the nixie’s pouty mouth. Nixies—distant kin to Illialei’s mermaids—were the water faeries native to Tyrannis. They were smaller than mermaids, although not as small as pixies, more like the size of a short field faerie—about three feet long. They were reputed to be wicked.

“You know me?” Melia asked.

The nixie showed more teeth.

Melia flinched before she realized the water faerie was smiling.

This week's song is siren Heather Nova's silky cover of "Wicked Game"…because Melia's still having a hard time letting go and falling in love...

eliciting Primal from Exquisite Prose

I am reading The Reckoning by Alma Katsu. I peruse some of the reviews before I am even done and am kind of glad to see that Anne Rice comes up. I've always been a big Anne Rice fan, I think I love Gothic.

I went through my own Goth phase…shaved head, doc martens, got the tattoo…frowned a lot. No new piercings though. One in each ear seems like plenty.

Katsu makes me dance. It is the best way to describe it. Her books are like a fire and I hop around them with little twirls and feints and jabs. One thing for sure, this story of hers about Lanore and Jonathan and Adair and the mild-mannered doctor, Lucas Findley, of all people, makes me think.

Yes. No. Ahh. Hmm. I tug on my bottom lip. Queen of the Underworld?

Other than one flashback--excuse me for a sec, while I have a writer's meltdown over the single flaw in an otherwise perfect book---which was repetitive even though it's a different point-of-view and almost put me to sleep…Lanore has returned because she's owning more of who she is. I like that. I don't mind my characters being dark, just OWN IT.

I have issues with Adair. My god, who wouldn't? He's such a creep. Okay, he's much worse than a creep. He's diabolical, sadistic and…a little bit stiff for someone who's such a libertine.

Jonathan and his whole plot line is kind of weirding me out, and yet…

THIS IS A GREAT effing READ!

I tell you (other than that one snoozefest of a flashback) this is like Anne Rice finally got past Religion and reached Love. Not because Katsu is getting it all right, I would quibble about some of the details of motivation, and yet, she's pulling us into that room, the one where all questions are safe to ask…and as a reader and a writer, I applaud her.

The thing is this, I don't think she's trying to sway you or me, I think she's just opening the doors and inviting us in. And that's what makes a great writer. And that's what makes a great read. And that's why I am over here dancing around the fire, shaking my rattles and beating my drum.

Katsu is eliciting Primal from Exquisite Prose.