Thoughtful Preparations: Media Spin Blog

The silent truth of a tree is an antidote to the many voices babbling in the news space, the workplace, and any number of stresses in your face.

Imagine a few of the combating world leaders sitting in a circle beneath this tree, surrounded by the peace and tranquility of a fine day which the good earth so often provides. In the granduer of nature, they may humble themselves. We can only hope so.

An opinion piece in today’s S.F. Chronicle written by John Arquilla a professor of defense analysis at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA, Why we should take Osama’s olive branch, is a hopeful reminder that peace is within reach. The professional military strategist and historian points out that all wars, hot or cold, eventually reach a point of sitting down and negotiating with the enemy, such as Bush has already done with Libya’s Khadafy, a long time terrorist supporter.

This freedom of choice photo sums it up. One person with a baby, one vote.

Came across this inspirational passage by D. H. Lawrence in a recent New Yorker book review:

Dying of tuberculosis in the winter of 1929-30, unable to walk, and rendered sexually impotent by his disease, he wrote these words on the last page of his last book:

“Man wants his physical fulfilment first and foremost, since now, once and once only, he is in the flesh and potent. For man, the vast marvel is to be alive. For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. . . . The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time. We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos.”

He died on March 2, 1930, aged forty-four and weighing all of eighty-five pounds, in Vence, where Frieda, Aldous and Maria Huxley, and some others buried him, Frieda wrote, “very simply, like a bird.”

Let’s dance!

Going into 2006 not all things will go well. There will be problems to solve and unforeseen obstacles to face. Your path is full of danger, risks and rewards. Therefore, practice going to your happy place, find your song, and keep smiling.

It is with great anticipation and delight that I look forward to meeting the author of a book I am reading, The Reluctant Shaman by Kay Cordell Whitaker. She is currently on a tour, promoting her new book Sacred Link, and is scheduled to be at East West Bookstore in Mountain View on October 28th and Black Oak Books in Berkeley on Sunday, October 30. Kay’s full schedule is at her web site, A World In Balance.

My first introduction to writings on shamanism were the Carlos Castaneda booksdescibing his travels into the Mexican desert and apprenticeship under the mysterious Yaqui Indian teacher, don Juan Mateus. Unlike Castaneda’s experience, Whitaker’s Peruvian teachers, Chea and Domano Hetaka, introduced themselves and taught her on her home turf in Santa Cruz, California. Whitaker’s writing is far more accessible than Castaneda’s including practical homework lessons given to her in logical steps by her teachers. Castaneda gave much attention to building personal power in order to escape the bounds of the ordinary world of reality. The Hetekas express a greater mission through their teachings: by finding your own song, you contribute to awakening society in order to bring about global healing. Spiritual joys experienced along the way just happen to be a plus.

From Kay’s web site, A World In Balance…

This work is my Path. This is what
I came here to do, to participate in helping
the world, my community, my people. To do that,
I had to first find out about me, help me, heal me,
learn who and what I am, and how I connect
to the whole world. Once I was able to do that,
I had the tools to help someone else.

As the Hetakas have often said to me, it is for each person to objectively reexamine deep inside themselves, their beliefs, their values, and their world, to find THEIR OWN TRUTH – whatever that may be.

Hands down Mati Klarwein pushed my early painting efforts furthest. Take Gustav Klimt, Salvador Dali, James Rosenquist, throw them in a vat of peyote buttons and psilocybin, and you get Abdul Mati.

As a painter, looking at Klarwein’s work is intimidating, and I was never able to match the intense religious attention and power he devoted to his compositions. These are epic mindscapes that one must live with and merge into.

His incredible photo-realistic detail presaged the ease of use Photoshopping of collage imagery and computer graphic imagery. Klarwein is probably best known for the publishing of his paintings on album covers by Miles Davis, Santana and Jerry Garcia… but there is so much more than that!

Read. Learn. Think. This is the introductory line at Literature.org, an online library of literature.

Here is the last sentence from their online text of Charles Darwin’s “The Origin of Species.”

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

This last line has the words “by the Creator” added at The Virtual Fossil Museum web site. Thus we see the mystery of the evolution of text.