"Be water,"
Bruce Lee said. And he was paraphrasing the Buddha (I think).
Water freezes, Bruce, but you knew that.
So, too, these echinacea seeds standing stout in the sub-zero snow, bright prairie blossoms in July, hardy little warriors through all the seasons of the Midwest, and sharp--oh my, just try to harvest these little spikes known as seeds!--but the birds feed on them all winter long.
Be a seed, or plant seeds, gardeners the world over had said for thousands of generations.
Source: Buddha’s Little Instruction Book (1994) by Jack Kornfield; Page 11.
Where am I going with this, and what set me off today?
'All shall be well, all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well,', said Julian of Norwich (1342-1416), known for her 16 visions that she recorded in Revelations of Divine Love, said to be the first book written by a woman in the English language.
Old news, right? Why am I revisiting these things now, instead of writing fiction?
It all started with @manorvillemike's post, FROZEN LOCKDOWN...
....and this reply from @cliffagreen:
"All is well."
A perfect response, three words, but weighty words of wisdom--Bless you, Cliffagreen! These three little words challenged a world of worry that had been swirling inside my head.
First, let me back up. "Frozen Lockdown" may have sounded like a bit of existential despair from our usually upbeat and inspirational @manorvillemike, but it was just one post in the midst of a brutal winter. Only a few days prior, Mike had delivered these gems of hope in another series of fantastic winter photos:
Empty branches collecting the gentle falling snow. Makes the trees look like a winter explosion of white flowers...
Couple of months and leaf buds will appear, followed by the friendly green leaves...
.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, and a Hive post is worth a thousand comments and new threads.
@owasco rightly observed,
"You've got the real deal healer right there in these shots."
Mother nature, and all that. Owasco knows! Check out just ONE of her posts, any post, but for now, this one hits the spot:
Just when that stalk begins to wither, there is a second stalk ready to burst into glory and lift your spirits for another two weeks.
Other great lines in response to Mike's "Frozen" post emerged from @cliffagreen:
Well-being is the order of the universe; nothing that happens can be outside of wellness.
I replied to his reply, and he replied in kind,
The 'all is well' bit comes from Abraham-Hicks Law of Attraction. There are others, but that's where I first started working with the idea, I guess. The Tao says (and I'm sure I'm paraphrasing) 'to resist is to maintain'. Better to accept, allow, and let it pass than to fight it and hold it in manifestation longer (whatever 'it' is).
Well, I needed a new way to procrastinate working on my novel, right?
This dialogue arose on the heels of my previous post about the loss of my sister, which would be easier to accept if she'd died of cancer or a car wreck, but knowing her life was stolen, her body stripped naked and stuffed into a culvert under a lonely dirt road six miles from our home, washed out by spring rains, the killer(s) never apprehended--and all I want now is to EXPOSE them (locals, respected members of the community), knowing there is no longer anough evidence to convict anyone.... so, how do I "accept" and "move on" when my mom shops at the same grocery store as the killer(s), and one accomplice is a guy she's probably seen face to face without knowing, "Here stands the man who stuffed your daughter's dead body into the culvert."
For six years I've been fighting and "resisting" the idea that I should "let it go," when I was raised on cowboy TV shows like "Rawhide" and John Wayne movies, and vigilante justice is one thing (I don't believe I would ever play judge and executioner but I love watching Clint Eastwood do so). Avenging, er, righting a wrong, is an imperative. How to do that? For me, just pulling back the curtain and letting the community know: Here is the killer! is my mission. Nobody behind bars; they're all white-bearded grandpas now. Death will come for them, as it comes for all.
How am I to stop thinking so much about suffering and injustice in our world?
For thousands of years, the answer has been the same: detach and move on, or trust in a higher power (namely, God) who directs all things to our own greater good, yada yada. Are the mystics plagiarizing each other? No, I believe they achieve their "Aha!" moments on their own, without having read each other's books or heard their insights via the oral storytelling tradition. We have "The Muse" and the Zeitgeist to account for random people across the planet, unbeknownst to each other, discovering the same things. (See the invention of radio.)
So, the wise ones may attain their insights by their own experience and reasoning, but they end up echoing each other. Jesus came 500 years after Buddha, and much of his lore and biographical details are like a plagiarism of the Buddha. But the author of Ecclesiastes 1:9 preceded Buddha:
The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
"That which is done is that which shall be done"
Old news, I know. Accept it! Repeat the mantra. Like the shampoo bottle instructions: Lather, Rinse, Repeat. Repeat the mantras. Repackage them, sell them like new, but keep hammering them home.
Today, we have books and the internet and fewer excuses for passing off old ideas as our own new revelations. Maybe we need contemporary people to peddle the old messages, but seeing some people capitalize on them, with fortune as well as fame? Meh.
@cliffagreen mentioned the Abraham-Hicks Law of Attraction, and I was annoyed to find that a woman named Esther calls herself Abraham and claims to channel his wisdom. Ok....
"Just like Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret, the uniqueness of Esther Hicks and her teachings as Abraham don’t seem to be all that original, however. She too got her schtick from elsewhere," A Critique of Abraham Hicks & the Law of Attraction. And no, I did not read "The Secret," but I've read countless Positive Thinking books from various religious or philosophical persuasions. I shouldn't read too much. It just makes me cynical. More from that critique:
Exactly fifty years prior to the publication of the best-selling book and DVD The Secret, Earl Nightingale released a vinyl record in 1956 that set the motivational world on fire. It was called The Strangest Secret and it shared the same fundamental premise as Rhonda Byrne’s 2006 The Secret; we become what we think about and our thoughts create our reality. His self-written and recorded LP sold over 1 million copies making it the first-ever spoken word album to achieve gold status. After his phenomenal success, Nightingale went on to form Nightingale-Conant which became one of the largest self-help audiobook publishers ever. With only a one-word difference between the names did Byrne steal Nightingale’s title and message? We may never know but they are undoubtedly two of the biggest and most successful proponents of the Law of Attraction in the modern era.
There's more, and please know that I am not disparaging anyone who quotes Abraham Hicks; she took the good stuff and knew how to "sell" the ideas, which is pretty much what Paul of the New Testament did as he almost single-handedly spread Christianity to the world. (Google it. I swear I will not "go there" now.)
From the same source cited above, here's the "more" on purveyors of positive thinking who write best sellers:
Why did Rhonda Byrne and the Hicks’s become world-famous multi-millionaires while Sheila and THEO never did? They had something Sheila and her husband didn’t: extensive experience marketing and selling product. Byrne was an infomercial and TV producer prior to creating The Secret. She knew how to dazzle an audience with presentation and packaging. Jerry was a prominent Amway salesman who was married to a highly successful Amway saleswoman named Trish. And Esther was Trish’s bookkeeper, thus she was also heavily immersed in the culture. Amway was a prominent multi-level marketing business known for its pyramid marketing scheme.
The basic message, to detach, to deal with suffering and move on, has been around so long, it's crazy that so many millions/billions continue to suffer. How does the "Power" of Positive Thinking (or Christian prayer, in particular, the Rosary, and "The Lord hears the cry of the poor") change the world? Children continue to starve in Africa. That Nobel Prize winning photo of the vulture watching and waiting for the toddler to die, and the photographer committing suicide a few months after: I can't say "It's all good" and move on.
In March 1993, photographer Kevin Carter took a trip to South Sudan, where he took an iconic photo of a starving little girl being preyed upon by a vulture. He said that the high pitched whimpering sound of a toddler near the Ayod village attracted him. The girl was taking a rest while struggling to get to a feeding center.... It was a rule for the journalists in Sudan not to touch victims of the famine, to avoid the risk of transmitting diseases. Carter though came under a lot of criticism for not assisting the girl...He was consumed by the violence he had witnessed and haunted by questions about the fate of the girl. He told an interviewer that after this he smoked cigarettes under a tree and cried. 3 months after receiving the price, Carter committed suicide.
by UNBELIEVABLE FACTS
Why are we so bad at "accepting" suffering and pain, disaster and death?
The gurus are probably right, and I'm probably guilty of too much resistance, but when I read The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment 10+ years ago, I just felt angry, not inspired. The Holocaust, Stalin's millions of men, women, and children murdered, Mao's millions, and smaller injustices on a lesser scale, like the local minister who gets away with murdering someone's daughter and disposing of her body like roadside trash, and nobody believes the good reverend could be the cause of all this pain and bereavement. It wasn't until I became a mother myself that I experienced the magnitude of my sister's loss.
But there are good (plausible, useful, "common sense") messages too in the Tolle book:
The pain-body wants to survive, just like every other entity in existence, and it can only survive if it gets you to unconsciously identify with it. It can then rise up, take you over, “become you,” and live through you. It needs to get its “food” through you. It will feed on any experience that resonates with its own kind of energy, anything that creates further pain in whatever form: anger, destructiveness, hatred, grief, emotional drama, violence, and even illness. So the pain-body, when it has taken you over, will create a situation in your life that reflects back its own energy frequency for it to feed on. Pain can only feed on pain. Pain cannot feed on joy. It finds it quite indigestible.
That makes sense.
Once the pain-body has taken you over, you want more pain. You become a victim or a perpetrator. You want to inflict pain, or you want to suffer pain, or both. There isn’t really much difference between the two. You are not conscious of this, of course, and will vehemently claim that you do not want pain. But look closely and you will find that your thinking and behavior are designed to keep the pain going, for yourself and others. If you were truly conscious of it, the pattern would dissolve, for to want more pain is insanity, and nobody is consciously insane.
DISSOLVING THE PAIN-BODY: An excerpt from THE POWER OF NOW by Eckhart Tolle
You "will vehemently claim that you do not want pain"
True. "But look closely," and you
"will find that your thinking and behavior are designed to keep the pain going"
Whatever!
I need to call the vet, schedule a haircut, mail some native prairie seeds to two women in North Dakota who share a garden. I met them via a seed-selling Facebook group, Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company, but the supply exceeds the demand for seeds in these days of {{{Lockdown!}}} See @manorvillemike's other posts on that topic, and see, I do come full circle, after all my detours along the way!
[
"Get your orders in early, seed suppliers urge, as food security and garden therapy drive sales"
And note the date. This is now. Hannah Kost · CBC News · Posted: Jan 20, 2021
I'm resisting the urge to cull more of @owasco's comments from the "Frozen Lockdown" post that sent me like a dog after shouts of "Squirrel!" down this path.
Speaking of dogs, Bear hasn't shown his face here for what seems like a year. Prince either, and he has stories, poor boy. How much money should a dog owner spend to keep a beloved companion alive and well, or at least, not in constant pain from arthritis caused by bad food advice from our vets?
Is it better to fight, to live, or to let it all go and die? Prince appeared to be ready to die, but his $4 a day dose of Deremaxx has restored his will to live.
My own will to live is surprisingly tenuous. If not for my husband and children, I'd probably have let go a long time ago.
Last year, I fell by the wayside with Covid lockdowns leaving me "frozen" and unable to do more than paint "Quarantine Cats," and even the cats froze up when a wicked and prolonged case of vertigo shut me down for months. I'm still climbing my way back to my old normal, which was a lot better than the new normal of vertigo followed by a derecho of historic proportions, and, yeah, life is what it is, right? Some things are best passed over in silence (Wittgenstein).
Here is Bear, sniffing the trail of some varmint that raids the seeds I leave in a flower pot on the front porch. Nobody seems to be eating the Culver's Root (dark, spiky seeds in photo), and that's good, because a woman whose maiden name is Culver saw my post and asked me to mail her some seeds. I'm glad the mice and ground squirrels found more tempting fare. All the juniper (red cedar) berries have been pillaged, and that's all right with me.
My goodness nobody packs a wallop like you do!
Thanks for the multiple mentions!
The killer is now a minister? See this part confuses me. And you know him? Do you go to his services and glare at him? I think I would.
I don't buy the "all is well" bit. We need to fight like hell now. Maybe our learning how to fight like hell, instead of allowing supposed enlightened entities tell us to make like water and do nothing, is the "all is well" part. As Dr. Zach says, either we will go extinct, or we will transcend, and the time is now. I know which side I'm rooting for.
xo
Sorry for the confusion. Again, I do not "know" - but I have been told that a Vegas wheeler-dealer, a Navy veteran, came to Waverly to kill my sister. After her body was found, he came to reside in Waverly as a new hire on the police force. He did all he could to mislead witnesses, tamper with evidence, keep the case cold. He became a minister next. For several years he had a church in a town half an hour away from me. Just once, I crashed a funeral to see him singing the praises of Jesus, playing his guitar, and consoling the bereaved with his talk of immortal life in heaven. He glared at ME, I swear, and vanished after the funeral. Years ago when my mom came knocking at his door to insist that he return Julie's diary, he never did show his face - his wife handed off the diary. So, yeah, I should stand back and let the FBI handle the testimony of the lone witness who tells me this stuff, but he started talking 21 years ago. I didn't hear his story until 2015. Others dismissed him as a drunken felon or a liar. I took him seriously. Codename "Denmark" (for Hamlet's "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark"). I could have called him Hamlet, but someone had a pet pig by that name, and I couldn't unsee Hamlet the Pig. Now, that dirty cop... I can codename him "Hamlet."
Thanks for reading and inspiring me daily with all your insights and wit and fun photos. :)
More wallops! He was assigned the case, a case he was implicated in? So he got the diary as evidence? He glared at YOU? The witness is still alive? The murderer is still alive? You don't really need to answer these questions again.
This story is so horrible, all so horrible.
Oh, every police officer in the state will attest that Bobby J is a good man, a good cop, yada yada. He will never be incriminated. Who let him take Julie's diary home instead of making sure it stayed at the police station? Who knows. Is he the reason there is not a single entry in the month of November? Julie and her diary were regular correspondents. It's fishy that she went "radio silence" in her diary. Trying to take down the money-laundering drug trafficking predators, though, is beyond my humble skill set. When the FBI is on part of the syndicate, the only higher power is God... or Vigilante Justice. (Thanks for reading all this swamp speech. I hate sounding like such a whining defeatist.)
This is worthy of a whole new post!
Just when I was letting Bruce Lee cajole me with Be water, you remind me of the FIGHT fight fight FIGHT that is so deeply ingrained in me.
Rawhide! omg, the lyrics are more fitting than I realized!
Move 'em on, hit 'em up, hit 'em up, move 'em on
Move 'em on, hit 'em up, Rawhide
Cut 'em out, ride 'em in, ride 'em im,
let 'em out, cut 'im out, Ride on in, Rawhide!
H'yah! H'yah!Keep movin', movin', movin',
though they're disapproving,
Keep them dawwgies rollin', Rawhide!
Don't try to understand them,
Just rope and throw and brand 'em,
Soon we'll be living high and wide!
I can still remember the entire tune!
Trying to make sense of their actions just leads us astray.
Tend to agree with you owasco With AI at out door step our future looks grim.. Evil people in control must be confronted..
AI and eugenics. And I'm not sure the entities we need to fight are human. We've been led to believe there are no others. I don't believe that anymore. The entities are shadowy, not of the three dimensions we inhabit, so we can't see them. Something like that.
I'm falling down the rabbit hole and have touched on what you are saying.. Wonderful and Scary stuff coming out of Quantum computers..trying to find truth were ever I can get it..BitChute has some eye opening stuff to explore.. check this out...https://www.bitchute.com/video/nODGAVvwW1Kj/
Thank you! Adenochrome, I mean, surely something inhuman is effecting that wish to stay alive by destroying life.
What's coming ..
Make like water and do nothing...
You nailed it!
All this Buddhist/New Age advice to "accept" all that is seems to go against human nature.
We are born to fight. Life is a struggle. We are wired for it. We are not wired for passive acceptance.
Wow. Thank you Owasco. You have pulled back the curtain. I see now why I'm so opposed to this "good advice" to accept what is, detach, and move on. That is not how life on earth evolved.
We are fired to "take arms against a sea of trouble and by opposing, end them," to keep the Hamlet metaphor going. One of the few Shakespeare plays I read, every word. I have not read Merchant of Venice, King Richard, or anything beyond King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, Midsummer Night's Dream, and... maybe Twelfth Night... and whatever play inspired "Kiss Me Kate." (Oh my derelict memory.) --Taming of the Shrew!! I read that one.
I'm a disgrace to my degree in English Lit.
I think that you are right about transcendence. What we are going to transcend, is the conflict (the fight, fight, fight) innate to our earlier evolutionary forms. What we are realizing, humanity as a whole, is that there is no separation. That we are all one. With every life form. There is no enemy to fight -- because the perceived enemy is us. The illusion is that it isn't us, and that others are a threat we need to defend against. There simply is no threat. We are all moving forward together. (CC: @carolkean)
Oops, it took me two days to find this comment!
Libby McGugan delivers the same message, and I'm trying to internalize it: not to resist, not to fight, but to "be" and unite and see that we are all one. The self as a separate and distinct entity is an illusion. What then makes the ego so powerful, so forceful? Whassup with all these illusions and delusions persisting after thousands of years of gurus, prophets, and wisemen like the Buddha?
I continue to feel alone, not "at one" with anybody or any god(s).
Maybe it is only in death that we awaken.
If the ego, and our attachment to it, persists after thousands of years, are the teachings all lies? Maybe. It would be ridiculous for me to sit here and claim to know that they are not lies.
I do think that we get to choose what we believe in, and then we act according to those to beliefs. From belief and through action, we create the world that we live in. I think that my actions are more peace-oriented, more loving, if I believe in oneness and in our evolutionary leap forward.
Frankly, I have done serious harm to other people in the past. I never want to do it again, and fighting for survival is not worth it, to me, because of that experience.
Perhaps I just have to believe that we can be better.
I'm with you - yes, we choose what we believe in, and how we live, and forgive, and "let live."
Live and let live.
Glad I could be an inspiration for someone like you Carol.. Someone with an immense literary background.. I had to take a break for lunch .. before I finish this post..It's a long one..How's your super cat Bobi the Bad ?
LOL - Bobi the Bad is the same little bad*ss pipsqueak as ever. He thanks you for asking. And insists that you turn on every faucet in the house for him to get his fill of every possible source of water.
I draw the line at the upstairs. Nope. Not going THAT far, little tyrant king.
LOL again: me, an "immense" literary background - I bluff my way with Bartlett's quotations, which was what we used before Google.
But thank you! And you are indeed an inspiration. Who else would put up with the attitude of Scary Mary and feed her many offspring? I need to go visit them at your blog. Seems I recall you have the equivalent of Henri le Chat Noir's "the white idiot." And Mary does resemble Bobi enough to be his mother... scary, very!
Mary has not changed one iota since coming into the house about 3 yrs now..She will not make friends with another cat.. She is fat and happy just having me wait on her.. She does love me.. as long as I stay in line.. Ahaa
LOL!
Good man. Good servant of Mary. That tyrant queen!
Interesting that the other cats seem so companionable with each other.
Yes everyone gets along very good.. Being indoor cats we are use to being locked down.. and still keeping our wits