Tuesdays With Jo
Remember
when the Newspaper was the News?
Your grandfather or some elder in the family read it daily cover to cover. They were informed and would sit around the table arguing politics long after you left the room.
Reporters worked diligently to find and be the first to publish a story. Foreign correspondents went into the battlefields to report the news. In our lifetime, reporters such as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, with an informant named Deepthroat, broke the story of the Watergate break-in and brought down a President.
Now we’re not sure what is true and what isn’t. If we watch the news (which I don’t, but I get some second-hand), we can tune in for 15 minutes any time of the day. If you miss it once, you can tune in later and catch it. Yet there are those, so I’ve heard, that have the TV turned on ALL DAY. Talk about programming the brain.
We begin to think what’s placed before us is the way the world is, and if you hear it over and over, whatever comes into our senses repeatedly, tends to stick. Yet we go to the grocery store, and people are doing their shopping, relatively happy. People are going for walks with their baby strollers and their dogs. Kids are on their bikes. We go to events, and people are laughing and talking about where they will go for lunch. Kids are practicing for the Olympics. Some have dreams of starting a Band. Others are hooked on the computer, and we know those brains will be the programmers of the future. People are writing, and researching and blogging, and singing-- practicing their craft. Many people are turning to spirituality and consciousness training. Many are hiring coaches to help them.
There is a world of Well-being,
Yet the news is a handful of information—primarily shocking, confusing, or dire. The news comes from a tiny pocket of people who control the media. The media owners tell what they want to tell us, and generally, it is to get attention.
Out there is a beautiful world. Do we believe it?
Keep watching the news, and you will get sucked into someone else’s mindset. It is not representative of humankind.
No matter where we are, what our beliefs or politics are, we know how watching the news makes us feel.
It makes us feel that it’s impossible to gain certainty and direction in our lives when the whole world is uncertain.
To believe that we need the outside world to be okay for us to be okay is a myth.
We must get so solidly grounded that we will be secure in our souls, and we will become the change the world needs.
That’s the TRUTH.
This morning a reader commented on an old blog post from https://travelswithjo.com titled “This is Only for Those Folks Who Want to Blog, or Write, or Be Heard.” I hit the link--it was written on Jan. 15, 2019. At the bottom of the post, I had included the link to the song, Starry Starry Night, and I listened to it again.
Don McLean sings the song over the printed lyrics and pictures of paintings by Vincent Van Goth. It is awesome. Watch it. It will feed your soul.
Music and art give us time to connect to something outside ourselves. It’s next to impossible to worry while listening to a beautiful song or viewing a gorgeous painting. Art allows us to enter into the sublime.
Isn’t that what life is all about?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxHnRfhDmrk