silent thunder

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase "each other" doesn't make any sense. Rumi

My son is a morning kid. On weekends he wakes up shortly after I do and we usually take a long slow walk through the neighborhood before sunrise, before the busy folks wake up.. Satie utterly nails the feeling with this piece...

Even here in the desert they seem to thrive and are very expansive. I can only imagine how well they do in your humid area with all that moisture. I brought in a milkweed last year to start raising monarchs with my son and now find it springing up in neighboring pots and plots regularly.

i find giving up seeking for more, or striving to achieve through externals full of potential. It's been quite empowering to cease seeking and abide simply, here and now.

We normally work in pairs in my business. And on this show, I'm fortunate to be paired up with one of my favorite people on the planet. I've known Scott for about 8 years now. He is rapidly closing in on retirement. In my biz, it can be rare to work with a friend as we all follow the work wherever it's available. So to not only get on the same crew at this point in his career, but to also be paired up, is a rare gift for me. Scott is a rare man. A font of joy, passion, humor, always humor... driven by an intricately deep critical thinking mind and potent insights. He also has a magnificent baritone voice and sings often while he's building. Never paid much attention to Todd Rundgren until I met Scott. Scott is a very big fan of Todd and I'm beginning to see why as I listen to more of his lesser known work. He reminds me of Bowie in this tune. All that set up to share this... (sheesh I talk a lot sometimes)... The lyrics to Parallel Lines really resonated for me as Scott sang them yesterday. Particularly resonant for me given the current political atmosphere. Here's the song

i used to experience the flesh of my body as the barrier between my 'self' and the rest of the universe. It was to me, a static, mostly unchanging and seemingly solid thing. A shift occured. and now... the skin of my body is experienced as the living breathing fluid process, the very manifestation of the utterly intimate connectedness between my individual awareness and the entirety of the Cosmos.

As within, so without... As above, so below. I sense my notions of god/gods stems from the bicameral nature of mind. from those notions that arise from beyond my rational thinking self which seem... otherworldly, profoundly prophetic and indelibly out of reach/control... yet never beyond influence... always intimately responding to intentions and raw reactivity... That relationship between awareness and the rational mind, I suspect is where my notion of a god arises and for me, if there is any god, surely she is intimately woven into the very fabric of what I refer to as myself... so much so that to touch her rationally with my thinking awake self, is as rare as a fish considering the nature of water in which it saturates. That dancing spiral between my waking mind and the vast untouchable, unknowable raw ocean of unified awareness.

carrying sorrow... such burden!... until it cracks and the light floods in

Again, how grateful I am for all the wonderful folks who share here! Such words are treasure to me, and the timing of encountering them just this now... as I transition from my dream life to my waking life... uncanny! Thanks Bums... you have no idea how your words ring like bells in my life all through my days!

i dance a spiral along this fluid archway twixt the night and day

Interesting that quartz crystals are integral to electronic communication... or at least they were, not sure about more recent developments. And they've been used for scrying and communicating with the non-local/conscious self for much of human history.

My earliest clear memory is of becoming lucid in a dream back when I didn't differentiate between dreaming and waking life... and I've been coming lucid in dreams on and off my entire life. I've had countless experiences in dreams that are more vivid than physical reality and as all experience serves to reveal my authentic nature through my response to stimuli, I have come to value dream experience as readily as physical ones and have come to appreciate dreaming as a very potent realm of self exploration, unfolding realization and cultivation. The unshakable, palpable sense that the waking world is akin to a shared dream has always resonated with me. And many cultures talk of this... The Tibetans and Aboriginal Peoples of Australia come to mind. As the dreaming mind works in symbols, in my experience it can be potent ground for initiating shifts in the aspects of our minds/selves that lie beyond our pinpoint/flashlight like rantional waking mind. Though I have seldom engaged in any traditional Magick aside from rudimentary divination (norse runes and tarot) and a healthy respect for following my intuition when it reveals itself, I have worked in my dreams my entire life to great effect. The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep by Tensin Wangyal Rinpoche is a book I recommend.

Nice one, thanks for sharing. Reminds me of friends describing playing push hands with an adept master who, even though they are touching your hands, no sensation is generated in the exchange and flow, no point of resistance can be identified against which to push... it's as if there is no one to push against.

Rumi! What a treasure his words have been in my life... Some time ago I traded certainty for wonder. Hard answers for living, fluid, ongoing questions. And rigid life rules and expectations for simple presence. The result is a stunning unfoldingness of simplicity, love and bliss. Rather ironically, it seems most of my seeking was the very thing preventing me from realizing I already was, what I was seeking.

Hey bud. I'm pretty reticent to give specific recommendations. But it never seems harmful to cut out processed foods, alcohol, sugar and cut back on, or cut out meat. My diet shifted steeply back in 2011 in response to blood test results. Blood analysis revealed high cholesterol and blood sugar and I've always hovered even as a young man on the edge of the treatable zone for blood pressure. I got these detailed results not out of seeking to improve myself. I felt fine at the time. But they were revealed while seeking treatment for an irregular heartbeat that had developed while under anasthesia during a voluntary (vasectomy) surgery. Back then, rather than treat with pills, I opted to try nutrition therapy, which synchronistically, I had just studied in depth a few months before the event when getting back into full time cultivation. The shift in blood chemistry in 90 days in my case was startling (both to me and my GP) and it was achieved simply, by ommitting some foods and replacing them with high phytochemical, alkalizing foods from my farmer's market.

While vinegars are acidic, in digestion they break down alkaline; whereas meat (most of which are alkaline prior to digestion), processed flour, processed foods, carbs, sugars, coffee... break down acidic in the blood. article alkaline vs acidic foods

Add mass and flexibility insofar as possible. stretch, lift, stretch again. Nutrition. Nutrition. Nutrition. Realize that injuries are a when, not an if, become a friend to every little signal your body sends your awareness. and have fun, it is play after all...really relish in it.

Laborers use their hands. Craftsmen use their hands and mind. Artists use their hands, mind and heart. Traders profit on what others craft. Farmers feed all. Without them everyone starves and has nothing to sell or trade.

There may be pain, there may be discomfort, there will be loss. This does not mean I am suffering.

thank you.

This question, keeps arising lately without intention and I've been appreciating the process. So, without being serious at all, yet with complete sincerity... What is most obvious?

me too... I'll go look for my lower jaw later, it's somewhere under my desk right now... lol

This is pure awesome... I was just sharing this very notion with a coworker on Friday. He's a recent Catholic convert and we were discussing notions of god. My take is that: If god exists anywhere, surely it is in my ecstasy, in my joyful abandon when I'm so swept into the beingness of love that I forget to hold anything back, or add layers of conditions upon it and I become just the pure dancing love of life... and my complete dissolution into the beingness of joy, wherever I am, right now, if there is a god, surely she is here with me in this.