Sunday, March 8, 2009

Creating Family

Growing up without the concept of family has been an interesting journey of constant reflection, introspection and wonder on the meaning of blood relationships and lineage. Growing up without a family of birth has been even harder. I grew up creating the concept of family and keeping a disconnect between the virtual family unit that bounced around in my subconsciousness and the adult caregivers paid to destroy my soul. I grew up understanding that actual bonding and connecting to the immediacy of people who interplayed in the darkest recesses of my consciousness was to be avoided at all cost.

The child desired the connection and yet the child feared the connection of want that left deep rooted scar tissue around a heart that learned to beat to its own rhythm; find music in its own pulsation of life. The child learned that adults destroyed life and childhoods. The teenager understood that adults were complicated and yet emotionally simplistic as they gabbled about life trying to survive a world moving at its own momentum irrespective of their needs, wants and desires. The teenager became the invisible child turned into the masked adult.

The adult made the mind connection of self-care and self-introspection translated into stepping beyond the world's exactness and extraction of soul, spirit and fortitude of character and fulfillment. The adult understood finally that the world is a Universal magnet of connectors that draws and repels the human connections in ways that both complicate and simplify heart and soul connections.

The adult learned that creating family is a deliberate connection of the human spirit. It is a vital bloodline of the desire to become visible in a world masked by human invisibility. It is a conscious human connection of heartbeats and racing pulses to join like minds and interrelatedness of thoughts and feelings into deliberate intentions and possibilities. It is filling the void in the need to belong and be visible within the human connection of care and revelation. It is creating a family of intention and heart.

Monday, February 9, 2009

Parting Your Own Waters in LIfe

Last night as snow settled once again on the planet, it was time again for the inward reflections that part the waters on my life journey. Such beauty and awe, an unexpected snowfall brings into the consciousness. It creates a consciousness of thought and reflection about the moment of time that defines our collective existence. New snow parts the waters and sometimes redirects the journey for each of us.

Sometimes during the redirection along the rivers of life, we are provided with insight on the next phase of our journey. Part of that redirect includes inviting those from our past into our present and revisiting those moments of shared existence and mentorship. I was blessed this weekend to have that experience of inviting a former student back into the shared existence we had over a decade ago. It was indeed a mutual invitation for both of us.

I found our meeting to be both surreal and real as we broke bread together or in our case, fries and salad in the busy interior of diners whose conversations co-mingled along the edges of ours. She was a former student who has blossomed into an educator speaking the depth of truth and direction to students who will someday bless her as she has blessed me with her life experiences and her commitment to service. Watching her part the waters in young lives as she shared her teaching experiences was an incredible sharing of our collective commitment to education and educating students. What we both realized is that our passion for educating young lives may someday impact the student who will someday become the next President, the next teacher, the next think-tank recipient of how to stop global warming or bring peace to a a world that is hurting for connection and a deep rest.

I am grateful for those who touched my life with their friendship, teachings, mentorship and belief in my greatness of purpose and resolve in creating a life of service and becoming an educator to serve. I was grateful to share a moment with someone whose life I touched in the classroom as I realized the power of her teaching on the lives she was now impacting in her own classroom. What was even more powerful was knowing that someday, she would be sitting across the table from one of her students marvelling at the connection of former student and teacher. She would be party to a similar conversation of shared collective experiences in understanding how she would someday help her students part their own waters in life.

We are all the bearers of our life stories and the tools needed to part our own waters in life. It is within our collective humanity that we are the most powerful vehicle for change and promise of a new world and a new day. It is within our own waters that we are the most reflective and the most committed to creating new venues of opportunities and challenges that grow us deeply rooted to the intention of connection and sharing of our life experiences. This weekend, I was able to share a parting of the waters with an incredible and inspiring teacher who will always be my incredible and awesome student.

Sunday, January 11, 2009

Diving into the Deep Waters of Self

We live in a world of chaos and constant change that impacts our lives personally and professionally. There are both shallow and deep ends of the chaos and change that challenge us to dive in and take risks or remain the cautious and steady bystander taking in all of the action unfolding before us. Either way poses its own consequences of self-reflection and outward exposure. Either way requires an action or contemplation of a reaction to a proposed set of events that are ever present and ongoing.

Diving into the deep waters of self requires each of us to go deeper into our life thoughts and seek greater understandings of how we impact the world and how the impacts of the world affect us. It requires a soul-searching that creates answers and reflections that we may or may not be ready to address or answer. The dive may take us out of the comfort zones that keep us stagnated in place, time, event and life experiences. It may force us to sort out the familiar and dive into the zones of discontent and disconnect. It may require us to face the ugliness and the beauty of truths we hold dear and true to our character and our existence on the planet. It may force us to change or dive deeper into our sameness.

The dive creates the ripples of change that challenge us to change our lives and our ways of viewing the world from the sometimes narrow confines of our realities and historical legacies of truths believed and passed on as gospel unchallenged and unconfirmed. The depth of the dive forces us inward into our core, the center of our reflections and our beliefs. It stirs up discomfort in our collective comforts and exposes our vulnerabilities and fears. The very foundation of our being is called into question as the depth of the dive takes us to the heartbeat of who we are and who we project to be to ourselves and to others.

Diving into the deep waters of self is about the introspection of life thoughts and the assessment of our place in the Universe. It is only then that we can dive respectively into our authentic inner selves and grow from the depths of our core in creating the foundation of who we choose to be in this life and beyond.

Sunday, January 4, 2009

The Metaphor of Winter's Snowfall

I love snow and its inherent symbolic meaning and that smug way that it polarizes geographical communities with its blanket of insecurity. Ah, winter's snowfall puts an icy coat of generosity on the land and tempts those who dare to venture out on its icy road rinks with the thrill of sliding vehicles, the jack-knifing of Metro buses, the invisibility of trains and planes that never arrive and never depart to and from destinations unknown...interesting metaphor of snow as temptress and smug.

The metaphor of winter's snowfall the day before the start of school in the new year leaves its own irony of meaning and impact on a world again unprepared to salt the wounds of the deepest snowfall's gouge on the earth and its roadways. Snow falling on a barren planet creates its own destiny of choices and life thoughts. There is something about the multi-layering of winter's snowfall that slows time and invites introspection and reflection.

The beauty of a sudden snowfall is that begins with the flittering of a few flakes which compound into masses of translucent whiteness spreading its wings of flutter over everything in view. Our thoughts are like the flutter of reflections that are present without invitation and absent when inner inquiry is truly needed. As I watch the snow continue to fall tonight, I am reflective as I was when the first snowfall happened in December 2008.

I'm reflective on world need and world peace. I reflect on war and devastation and the hatred that spurs violence and disconnect. I think about children who are abandoned and left to grow through childhood alone surrounded by their innermost wants and needs of connection. My thoughts wander into global apathy and atrophy where the brilliance of life and creation are mere afterthoughts in political polarization and human genocide. I think about the homeless and the life decisions left to ponder for hundreds in tents and under the viaducts of life. I think about when I was homeless and I am grateful for life's circle and the resiliency of youth.

I don't miss the metaphors of winter's snowfall; I embrace them with full heart and life thoughts. What I know is that life is short indeed and like the flutter of snow wings, it comes and it goes. It is so important to appreciate the grandeur of life's offerings and the samplings of its bounty. Within the sweet sanctity of winter's blessings, the snow offers us a chance to reflect on the beauty of our existence and on the tenuous bond of our connection with the Universe.

As the snow continues to blanket my gratitude and my yard in my precious nanosecond of life on this planet, I am grateful for each flutter of snowy angel wings. I am at peace with my own life thoughts and my journey. It is the snow that dusts my joy with millions of snowflakes and the fullness of a snowy embrace. I love the snow and always will.........

Saturday, January 3, 2009

The Baggage We Carry In Our Lives

Let's face it, we all have baggage. Those portable containers that pass through airport security are not the only baggage we carry through life. We all have that clutter of baggage from our past and present that threatens to block the goodness and bounty from getting inward into our hearts and into our lives. It is that silent and sometimes not so silent baggage that is triggered by life thoughts, ours and others that is allowed to wander as actual manifestations of what defines us.

The baggage we carry in our lives is ingrained within our cellular structures, light and life-giving, invisible life forces that direct our life journey. Yet, that baggage can also be as weighty as a two-ton truck barreling down on our existence bringing to our fore, the power of life's reckoning. It is a constant delusion if we walk through this world asserting that we are devoid of what comes with the first cognizance of thought and reflection, "baggage."

It is those delusions of life sans baggage that stifles our creativity and innovation and devoids us of our most precious internal motivation to embrace the fullness of life's opportunities and connections that should be our destiny and our heart. The weight of baggage can be transformed from emotions and actions into anchors that threaten to drag us deeper into the mire of what was then and what could be now in our lives. Baggage has a historical legacy in that it is passed on from generation to generation to hold and bear and buckle under its scrutiny and its judgment.

We will always have metaphoric and actual baggage that we lug through the valley of our destiny and trek up the mountaintop of our desires. What is inherent and what must be understood is that when we go to the "baggage claim" of our life thoughts to review and retrieve the emotional, psychological, behavioral, social and a host of other "als," the baggage is ours to deal with and bear. The scars left in the aftermath are also ours. Baggage can be both a burden and a release of historical legacies and past experiences that serve to continually undermine the legacy that we are trying to build in our current consciousness.

So, again, let's face it, the ugly and beautiful undeniable reality of living is that "we all have baggage that we carry in our lives." The most important point is that we are aware of our baggage and what we intend to do with it as we traverse the hills and valleys of our life thoughts and our life's journey towards our own personal "baggage claims."

Thursday, January 1, 2009

Reflections on New Year's Resolutions

So, it's 2009 and the list of New Year's resolutions have been written, rewritten, spell-checked and deleted yet again because somewhere deep in the limbic system of the brain, emotions and the case of status quo are wildly acting out that things will never change. Change is a hard thing for most of us. As we grow in an adult presence, we know what life and society expect us to do and how we are expected to behave through the various psycho-social, emotional stages of development, but oftentimes we veer to the left or right of the road that we are expected to take. Change can't be about society; it has to be about what we know must be done, not what we are expected to do in life by others. Inherently, we all know what heals and what magnifies the wound.

It feels odd that our lives are lived based on guilt and fear that people, known and unknown, dead and alive, won't like us or will judge us because of our individuality. Isn't it the individuality that creates the uniqueness of our existence and the diversity of our societal inclusion? Aren't we encouraged to be unique and follow the mapping of our hearts to what is real and good for us and to us and ultimately positive for the collective societal us? Yet when the time comes and it comes often, the double-standard becomes prominent on how we judge each other and each other's actions. We become stagnant in the want of change and fear the doors that we close on our own lives.

So why create a list of New Year's resolutions that you aren't interested or committed to keeping in the first place? There are reasons to create a list and reasons not to bother. I actually created a list of goals and actualizations for 2009 that I am already seeing manifest in my life. I won a $1 on a scratch it lottery ticket on the 1st day of the New Year and that is ominous towards the financial foundation that is number #10 on my list of resolutions. It must mean that for me, the list works and it's already in action manifesting my wants and wishes, or it means that I am opening doors and entering them on the journey with open heart and mind, or it means that my 1 in 758,000 chance of getting a dollar win on a lottery ticket was pure luck. Whatever the case, it is my belief in the meaning that furthers the actualization of the list.

Yet, for others, a list is meaningless if there is no faith or belief in one's own ability to change and grow. If a person wants to write and publish a book of poetry for 2009, yet never writes one poem because of the creative pressure to produce or fear that no one will like the poems, that might be a resolution with no wind in its wings. If someone is still being held hostage by the cruelty of what was done in the office of employment in 2008 and chooses to fight injustice and denigration with silent suffering and psychological burn-out, that might be a resolution that requires an intervention of another kind and not simply a place on the New Year's resolution list.

For 2009, I want to live life with verve and vitality as I have always done in previous years. I want to see the rock in my pathway as a collection of walkways through life. I want to spread the sunshine of happiness as a new light cast in the darkest places of human degradation and nurture the spirit of hope and peace of a planet evolving into its own consciousness and reckoning. I want to embrace reflection of principle and integrity as my legacy and gift to the planet and tender to those heart connections that I make along my life's journey.

I want to create an ambition of change and making a difference in my own life and in the lives of those I touch with the richness of a destiny and future so awe inspiring as the heaven of an "aurora borealis" of heart and soul. I want to mark my time on the planet with the accomplishments that are manifest in others because I was blessed to be a part of their lives and allowed to make meaningful and auspicious contributions to their growth and goals.

What I have learned in past years and continue to learn as I reflect on my New Year's list of resolutions is that the greatest gift of humanity is the gift of love. It is love that drives the spirit of contribution and partnership in the collaborative synergy of the Universe. It is love that will produce the change in the collective minds and hearts of a world unified in cause and purpose.

It is love that will create a 2009 of peace, change and resolutions that are reflective representations of the motivational step-stones of the human consciousness. I like my list as I step boldly into the newness of the open arms of a New Year with reflection, passion, solidity of principle and a progressive march towards a future legacy that will be about the giving and the gift of love.

Welcome 2009

As I sit here in the early morning synergy of a new year, I am awash in the endless possibilities of what 2009 will have in store for my life. I have long forgone the desperate lists of changing my ways to meet the foregone conclusions of the collective consciousness. For me, this new year as all past years will continue to be about life's journey and those hearts and lives that have been touched and connected along the way.

This new year will continue to be about the service of the soul and the gathering of reflective thoughts on the cognizance of the Universe. It will be about understanding the essences of what each year presents in the growing thoughts and actions that reflect our world and our collective hearts and minds. This year will be about the manifestation of the dream and the actualization of the dreamer.

I welcome 2009 as a time of reflection and true renewal and a time to let the poet inside of me wax poetical expression unbridled and untethered to a world in dire need of heart songs and redirections of the soul.

Welcome 2009-A Poem

I pause and reflect on the moment
of a year that has come and past
I revel in what life will offer now
what time will turn and cast

I gather at the hearth of a Universe
and absorb the lessons learned
I pause at the door of a planet
to seek the peace so yearned

I wonder if the past will circle
the world in its magnitude
I listen for songs of redemption
on the wings of a beatitude

I am awash in the possibilities
in the heartbeat of this new year
I am true to the calling of purpose
that life has manifest so clear

I welcome 2009 in its greatness
with open mind to what it will show
I walk purposefully on the journey
of life thoughts and what I must know

I marvel in what life will serve me
in its majestic majesty of right
I open my mind as its servant
and follow the tunnels' light

I have joy in the endless workings
of a life that is lived to its core
I rest on the wings of the Spirit
as I welcome 2009 and more.