And the Grinch, with his Grinch-feet ice cold in the snow, stood puzzling and puzzling, how could it be so? It came without ribbons. It came without tags. It came without packages, boxes or bags. And he puzzled and puzzled ’till his puzzler was sore. Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn’t before. What if Christmas, he thought, doesn’t come from a store? What if Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more?

* Dr. Seuss From “The Grinch Who Stole Christmas”

A merry Christmas to everybody! A happy New Year to all the world!

Image credit: CARF

AMAZING PEACE

Thunder rumbles in the mountain passes
And lightning rattles the eaves of our houses.
Flood waters await us in our avenues.

Snow falls upon snow, falls upon snow to avalanche
Over unprotected villages.
The sky slips low and grey and threatening.

We question ourselves.
What have we done to so affront nature?
We worry God.
Are you there? Are you there really?
Does the covenant you made with us still hold?

Into this climate of fear and apprehension, Christmas enters,
Streaming lights of joy, ringing bells of hope
And singing carols of forgiveness high up in the bright air.
The world is encouraged to come away from rancor,
Come the way of friendship.

It is the Glad Season.
Thunder ebbs to silence and lightning sleeps quietly in the corner.
Flood waters recede into memory.
Snow becomes a yielding cushion to aid us
As we make our way to higher ground.

Hope is born again in the faces of children
It rides on the shoulders of our aged as they walk into their sunsets.
Hope spreads around the earth. Brightening all things,
Even hate which crouches breeding in dark corridors.

In our joy, we think we hear a whisper.
At first it is too soft. Then only half heard.
We listen carefully as it gathers strength.
We hear a sweetness.
The word is Peace.
It is loud now. It is louder.
Louder than the explosion of bombs.

We tremble at the sound. We are thrilled by its presence.
It is what we have hungered for.
Not just the absence of war. But, true Peace.
A harmony of spirit, a comfort of courtesies.
Security for our beloveds and their beloveds.

We clap hands and welcome the Peace of Christmas.
We beckon this good season to wait a while with us.
We, Baptist and Buddhist, Methodist and Muslim, say come.
Peace.

Come and fill us and our world with your majesty.
We, the Jew and the Jainist, the Catholic and the Confucian,
implore you to stay awhile with us
so we may learn by your shimmering light
how to look beyond complexion and see community.

It is Christmas time, a halting of hate time.
On this platform of peace, we can create a language
to translate ourselves to ourselves and to each other.
At this Holy Instant, we celebrate the Birth of Jesus Christ

Into the great religions of the world.
We jubilate the precious advent of trust.
We shout with glorious tongues the coming of hope.
All the earth’s tribes loosen their voices to celebrate the promise of
Peace.

We, Angels and Mortals, Believers and Nonbelievers,
Look heavenward and speak the word aloud.
Peace.

We look at our world and speak the word aloud.
Peace.

We look at each other, then into ourselves,
And we say without shyness or apology or hesitation:

Peace, My Brother.
Peace, My Sister.
Peace, My Soul

A Christmas Poem by Maya Angelou

Today is the Winter Solstice when the sun begins its return to the northern hemisphere and we celebrate the warmth, light and cheerfulness to brighten up the darkest time of the year. It will soon also be the first day of the Jewish festival of light, Hanukkah, then Christmas and Kwanzaa. As we celebrate with our families and friends in these coming days, and remember in our prayers all those who are in need, we may wish that we can really make a difference, especially for those in the third world countries where there seem to be little hope. I invite you to join me in looking at different options where you can help. In the side bar under Recommended Sites, there are a few of my favorite charities. You can click on them and read about how little it costs to make a huge difference in the lives of families who are suffering from starvation, Malaria, AIDS and the fallout of many atrocities of political strife. If you cannot afford to donate, you can still help by clicking and playing on the Free Rice site and on the Hunger Site.

May you know Peace, Light, Love and Joy this holiday season and the whole year through!

Open the door,
let the blue sky span wide,
let inquisitive scents of petals enter my room,
let the first sunlight
seep through the veins of my body.
In the rustling of leaves let me hear
words that greet my being alive.
Let this morning
cover my mind with its shawl
as it shelters the new grass of the dark field.
All the love I have received-
its wordlessness
I hear in the sky, in the wind.
Today I bathe in its ceremony, its sacred waters.
The truth of a whole life as a gemmed garland
I see on the breast of that blue.

selection from Final Poems by Rabindranath Tagore
translated by Wendy Barker and Saranindranath Tagore

It is Christmas time, and I remember the magic of being a child  growing up on an island where Christmas meant the smell of imported apples and grapes from street vendors, carollers going door to door at night, stores decorated  with wintry scenes of the nativity and the most magical of all, life-size moving dolls in a toy-land come alive in a store window.

The holiday season, the most wonderful time of the year; for many it is and for some it is a reminder of Father Time under whose rule we either enrich or squander our lives. The Greek had two words for time,  Kronos and Kairos. Kronos refers to Time as we know it in the linear sense and is measured by clocks or chronometers and is derived from the Greek god Kronos who swallowed his children. Time in this linear sense enters each January 1 symbolized by an infant and departs on December 31 as Father Time, a long-bearded, bent-over old man. Kairos on the other hand is that quality of time with which we participate and lose track of. When we become totally absorbed,  involved with something or someone, we are in Kairos time rather than Kronos time. Whenever we are doing something that nourishes the soul, we are out of ordinary time and enter the dream time of Kairos where our sense of time becomes altered.

As a child I lived in Kairos most of the time, and especially at Christmas. Music was an important part of Christmas and the radio stations played carols, both secular and religious for more than two weeks before.  There was magic in the air with music, the smell of  baking and cooking, and the merry making of people as only a child can imagine. For me Christmas was definitely in Kairos time as I look back with fond memories. Now that I am much, much older coming up to my fifty fourth winter, Christmas is still a very special time but it has lost the excitement it had for me as a child. Do I wish to recreate that excitement if it were possible? No, as always with time, appearances can be deceiving and what made reality magical for me then will not and cannot hold the same effect for me today.

Time is relative to our consciousness and our state of mind. Time tends to move slowly when more than ninety percent of our life is ahead of us, and it seems to move more rapidly when there is not much of it left. Yet, I do not envy younger people for I have grown mellower with age, less a slave  to biochemical upheavals, certainly wiser and more peaceful. I look forward to developing that strange indefinable light that some elders portray that outshines the beauty of youth and reflects the glow of the magnificence of weathering.

Warning

by Jenny Joseph

WHEN I AM AN OLD WOMAN I SHALL WEAR PURPLE
With a red hat which doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals, and say we’ve no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I’m tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick the flowers in other people’s gardens
And learn to spit

You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat
And eat three pounds of sausages at a go
Or only bread and pickle for a week
And hoard pens and pencils and beermats and things in boxes

But now we must have clothes that keep us dry
And pay our rent and not swear in the street
And set a good example for the children.
We must have friends to dinner and read the papers.

But maybe I ought to practice a little now?
So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised
When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.

Taken from the book
When I Am An Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple
Editd by Sandra Martz
Papier Mache Press–Watsonville, California 1987

Trying to explain it to them
Leaves one feeling ridiculous and obscene
Their houses, like white bowls,
Sit on a prairie of ancient snowfalls
Caught beyond thaw or the swift changes
Of night and day.
They listen politely, and stride away

With spears and sleds and barking dogs
To hunt for food. The women wait
Chewing on skins or singing songs,
Knowing that they have hours to spend,
That the luck of the hunter is often late.

Later, by fires and boiling bones
In steaming kettles, they welcome me,
Far kin, pale brother,
To share what they have in a hungry time
In a difficult land. While I talk on
Of the southern kingdoms, cannon, armies,
Shifting alliances, airplanes, power,
They chew their bones, and smile at one another.

Mary Oliver

image credit: Carla216

This is the season that causes the greatest stress for many people and the most prominent source of this stress is their relationships with family members, and in particular the battleground of the estranged or disharmonious parent-child bond. Many people feel obligated to themselves to come to terms with their family dynamics during this season, and when faced with the challenge can become depressed with their inability to surmount their relationship difficulties or at best, to come to a place of acceptance of how things are.

I am in the midst of reading In Search Of Stones by M. Scott Peck MD the author of the widely read book, The Road Less Traveled. Peck was on vacation visiting sites of ancient stones in England, Wales and Scotland. He wrote about our discomfort with mystery, with not having answers, that we feel the need to find reasons as to why things exist, to the extent of fabricating solutions which are then passed on as truth. This is the human dilemma; the need to assuage our fear of the unknown and the need to fix things so that we feel comfortable and in control when in fact our very intentions prevent us from knowing; that the discovery of truth and the perfection of life’s ambiguities lies in not knowing. I empathize with his admission that as he grows older, he is less inclined to be as opinionated as in youth because so many of his illusions have been stripped away with age.

In this book Peck is extremely candid about his own foibles, being a famous man whom many place on an absurdly high pedestal and his difficult relationship with his children.  He said, “It is also unclear to what extent the problem is due to us being terrible parents or maybe due to the possibility that we’ve been almost too good in some ways. And while we are striving for healing, it is furthermore still unclear how much healing is probable or even possible….Indeed, one of our questions is whether or not this closeness is excessive, thereby requiring our children to keep their distance from me.”

Peck observed that the learning at that stage of his relationship with his children was about separation and that he was not prepared for it even though as a psychiatrist he understood the child’s need to individuate,  not just geographically but psychologically. He spoke of the common knowledge that disturbed parents can interfere with this separation process so as to retard it or even make it impossible. He mentioned that psychiatric literature tends to imply that this separation process is completed by the child and his parents by the end of adolescence when in fact the struggles continue on for many children throughout their twenties, thirties and into their forties, and for the parents they are well into their fifties, sixties and seventies. He went on to say that the professional literature does not talk about how painful it can be for all concerned.

So here we are once again, another holiday season upon us and all the skeletons are rattling in the closet. We attend the obligatory family functions, walking on eggs and making the best of our learned wisdom with our years of dealing with this issue. And yet, at the end of it all we continue to beat ourselves up for failure to be super parents or children. Peck’s words echo the pain of our trying to be good parents or children: “And sometimes,  even though they’re our own children, it’s not so easy for us to like them when they’re so different from us, when they no longer want our concern, and when their desire for our liking is so much of a one-way street…Am I feeling sorry for myself?  Yes and no.” Peck continued, “I have not learned how to love neutrally…On an emotional level it feels heart-wrenching. It feels unfair that God should have called me to passionately love my children for thirty years and now, rather suddenly, should be calling me to a neutered kind of love. It feels like I must almost stop loving them….But I never bargained for the possibility that I might have to have stripped away from me even my accustomed kind of love for my own children. I cannot imagine any part of aging to be more painful than that. Nor can I yet imagine what it will feel like when such stripping is finished.”

Peck’s words are the sentiment of many parents to different degrees and yet here is the opportunity for great spiritual growth if we can but allow ourselves to accept that out of the dynamics of our parent-child relationships, as imperfect as they are, are perfect for what we need to learn in this stage of our lives. Like all of life’s paradoxes, our family relationships are not meant to be what we want them to be until we are done with them. They are the grist for the mill of our spiritual healing journey.  Kahlil Gibran said. “Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They came through you but not from you and though they are with you yet they belong not to you.”

To recognize that we as children or as parents are always doing the best that we can for who we are and the stage of our learning, is the one consolation for letting things be, not trying to fix or control the outcome of our dysfunctional family relationships.  With this outlook we can forgive ourselves and each other for the shared pain and grief we inadvertently inflict upon each other. To love and respect ourselves and each other anyway, no matter how we judge ourselves and others is the greatest healing.

May this season of love and light bring continued growing opportunites.

Love is the reason we are alive:

“Love would never leave us alone,
A-yin the darkness there must come out to light….”

So goes the lyrics to Bob Marley’s song. We are love; being love and to be loved is our true nature. In Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, love is the third level after basic psychological and safety needs are met, followed by self-esteem, self actualization and later self-transcendence. I do not agree with this simplistic ranking of needs and in today’s world where safety needs are being diminished daily, even in the First World, are we to think that our need for love, to love and be loved is not as important, now that our very human survival needs are lacking?

Love is the basic need of all beings. In experiments performed with newborn babies where one group were given a lot of love in the form of human touch and the other were given minimal physical touch, the first group grew healthier and stronger compared to the control group. This to me, means that love and being loved is the highest motivation for living and the power to love ourselves and one another is paramount in these uncertain times. We are quickly losing our basic safety needs; our cities are crime ridden, families are losing their homes due to foreclosures, and with the tremendous amount of people losing their jobs, the burden of a safety net against adverse impacts of illness and accidents is a daily threat to our well-being. Maslow’s third level of needs, that of belonging and acceptance from a social network or supportive family ties is an important aspect in this period of financial disaster that is the reality for many families. In circumstances such as these, the hierarchy of needs according to Maslow are blurred. We need the support of a network of caring people to help us to meet our basic needs of food, shelter, health-care and emotional support.

One can argue that we as a civilization have come full circle where all our needs have been met according to Maslow’s hierarchy and are now privileged to have the choice to focus on any one level if we wish; that our ancestors who were so focused on their survival needs were not ready to maximize their highest potential. Isn’t it interesting that we are in the midst of chaos with global warming, environmental destruction and meltdown of our world economy as we reached the zenith of our human potential according to Maslow? I believe that human needs are not hierarchical, but are universal, and change according to social and economic circumstances. When any one of these needs on the main five levels are missing, we revert to poverty of body, mind and spirit.

What Maslow puts at the top of his hierarchy, self actualization and self transcendence are the fruition of our innate wisdom and its manifestation as our highest life purpose, which in the western world is synonymous with intellectual development. I believe that the capacity to access our highest potential is always available to us, but its priority is determined by the the mores of the society to which we belong.  In the Eastern tradition, it has always been customary for families to send a male child to be trained in the oral tradition of a monastic education, to become a keeper of the wisdom teachings and a spiritual guide for the laity. In our western society where intellectual development is now valued, we focus on educating all our children.  Our highest potential though, is our capacity to love and is the one constant that is essential to all areas of physical, emotional, mental and spiritual development.

As children we were naturally focused on love, our world was full of enchantment and the miraculous. We learned how to be a separate individual in a competitive society and assumed all the limitations of loss, scarcity and fear associated with such an outlook. The spiritual healing journey is about accepting love back into our lives, to be consciously aware of it in ourselves and in others. This is the highest purpose of our lives. We take for granted the one thing that gives meaning to all of life. In the words of Bob Marley:

You ain’t gonna miss your water until your well runs dry;
No matter how you treat him, the man will never be satisfied.
Say something! Could you be – could you be – could you be loved?

In Robertson Davies novel, Fifth Business, the protagonist Dunstan Ramsay was invited to dinner at his childhood friend, Boy Staunton’s home and a discussion arose about Boy’s efforts to train his wife to become a  more suitable partner, fit for the lifestyle of a man with political ambitions, who was making a fortune in the sugar business. Boy and his wife grew up in a small village, Deptford, Ontario and as he prospered, he dropped his parochial values, but his wife was not able to keep up with the sophistication of the society that they now enjoyed. Boy had discovered Dr. Emile Coue who had great success with the auto-suggestion, “Every day in every way, I am getting better and better,” to effect a cure for his patients whether their ailments were physical, mental, emotional or spiritual: “Best of all it provided ‘moral energy’ and Boy Staunton was a great believer in energy of all kinds… He wanted Leola to acquire moral energy, after which social grace, wit and an air of easy breeding would surely follow.”

Leola obediently repeated the formula as often as she could, every night for six weeks, but nothing much seemed to be happening. Boy suggested that she was not trying hard enough. Dunstan thought that she might be trying too hard, to which Boy countered that one can never try too hard at anything one does. Dunstan referred to the Law of Reversed Effort, “The harder you try, the more likely you are to miss the mark.” He quoted Dr. Coue, “Don’t clench your teeth and push for success, or everything will work against you.” Dunstan suggested that Boy should read Baudouin’s Suggestion and Auto-Suggestion to get things right. The argument continued and Dunstan told Boy. “I don’t suppose  it does work for you. You don’t need it. Every day in every way you do get better and better, in whatever sense you understand the word, ‘better,’ because that’s the kind of person you are. You’ve got ingrained success.” Boy insisted that Dunstan should bring his book by Baudouin and help Leola to understand it, which he did; “Poor Leola did not get better and better because she had no idea of what betterness was. She couldn’t conceive what Boy wanted her to be. I don’t think I ever met such a stupid nice woman. So Dr Coue failed for her, as he did for many others, for which I lay no blame on him. His system was really a form of secularized self-seeking prayer, without the human dignity that even the most modest prayer evokes. And like all attempts to command success for the chronicallly unsuccessful, it petered out.”

Robertson Davies touched on a most interesting subject, that affirmations work for people who are already successful in imbibing the message of their auto-suggestion and fail to manifest suitable results for others not so inclined. For example, people who use affirmations to improve their material wealth and have an outlook of abundance, generally tend to generate more material wealth and emotional well-being. Those who repeat their affirmations but have an attitude of scarcity and lack are less successful at acquiring the outcome they desire.

I believe that in order to use affirmations successfully, one must first understand the truth of who we really are. If we believe that we are inadequate and life is burdensome and abundance is only for a lucky few, then no amount of verbal repetitions and visualizations would change our basic assumptions. The awareness of our truth that we are already whole, infinitely wise and destined for the fruition of our highest potential if we are courageous enough to do so, is the first step towards success at employing affirmations to empower the change we want in our lives.

In her book, A Return to Love, Marianne Williamson said, “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we’re liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

Image credit: Janesdead

In the aftermath of the terrorist attack in Mumbai, the financial capital of India, we learn of the heroic deeds of the staff at Victoria Terminus, the main railway station, and the luxury hotels that were under siege for more than forty-eight hours. These staff members performed acts of heroism that, without their quick thinking and common sense, the death toll might have been greater than the almost two hundred reported dead. These brave employees at great personal risks, went above and beyond the call of duty.
An article in the New York Times recounted how one man singlehandedly saved many lives by getting on the microphone and calmly directed the panicking crowd to exit safely away from the area where the gunmen were focused. From his glassed in office, he spoke in two Indian languages repeating the order until the terminus was cleared.  The gunmen finally found his office and sprayed it with bullets but he was luckily unharmed.

The article related that the employees of the restaurant at one of the hotels, young people between the ages of twenty and twenty-five, calmly ushered over two hundred restaurant guests to rooms where they could be safe. The young people continued to remain calm, made snacks and kept the restaurant guests as comfortable as possible, during the ordeal that lasted several hours. When it was safe  to leave, the employees formed human chains to escort the guests outside and some of them were shot and gravely injured in the process.

How does one remain calm, grounded, and continue to function in such a terrifying and chaotic situation? I believe that in such unusual circumstances where we undergo extremes of emotion, the mind ceases to behave in its normal manner of recycling useless thoughts and becomes still. In stillness, our Awareness, the greater part of ourselves, takes over and we are able to perform  acts of heroism that we would not think we are capable of ordinarily. When the mind becomes quiet, we can access this great reservoir of inner courage, strength and clarity, which is the domain of the Self or Awareness.

The spiritual teachers of the East tell us that the Self or Awareness is our true nature. The Self is described as the one consciousness which manifests as us and everything around us. One of the analogies for maintaining stillness and living life from the witness state of Awareness is to see the mind as a mirror. A mirror reflects everything in it without being changed by the comings and goings of all the images that come before it. So too in our daily lives, we navigate  the ups and downs by recognizing that the truth of who we really are is not affected by the activities around us. Just like the mirror that reflects everything that comes before it and yet remains unchanged, we are not reacting to the changing phenomena of the world. The events that manifest in life are not taken personally.

When we identify with the ego, we feel separate and are affected by the cycles of change and impermanence of life. When we identify with Awareness, we can witness and respond appropriately to all the scenarios that unfold in our lives, without reacting and being affected like a mirror. Our minds become very stable and clear without relating things to ourselves. We are just all things as they are,  not vacillating between likes and dislikes and their attending moods. Our only reference point is the task at hand and we act with clarity and detachment. We are the great Self that encompasses all phenomena. With this perspective we are one with our environment, not separate from it. We are life, life is not happening to us. We then live from a place of inner peace and calm.

Those  employees were acting in a manner in which they were living from their highest truths. They had a clarity that allowed them to do what was needed without holding back, giving of themselves without personal concerns for their own safety. What heroism, what a testament of true spiritual mettle!