It is Today. It is not Yesterday. It is not Tomorrow. It is Today.

 

I want something uplifting.

I want my life back!

This morning, I made a conscious choice NOT to read anything political. I didn’t read the “experts” who popped up in my email box. I didn’t get caught by any Google images or headlines with dire warnings. I didn’t go to any of the “expert’s” sites I’ve been reading. And I never watch regular television news.

As I searched the Internet for uplifting sites, a quote from Jane Roberts popped up as an image.

“Suffering is not good for the soul unless it teaches you to stop suffering.”

I woke up this morning from a nightmare—which I rarely have—grateful the dream wasn’t real.

If you’ve been reading me, you will know I’ve been in grief over the election and how I feel about our country. I felt, and still feel, that our freedoms are, one after the other, being dragged from us.

Then I read that suffering is not good for the soul unless it teaches you to stop suffering.”

Teach me.

I have no magic wand. I have no brilliant advice to bestow.  I have learned that you do not change anyone’s opinion or belief by arguing. It just makes them dig in deeper. They have a principle to uphold, and so do I.

However, we can inch toward the light.

Our souls are good, but we have been neglecting nourishing them, at least I have.

Last night, from the documentary The Mindwashing of My Dad, I learned how Nixon turned a blue US into a red one. A media mogul groomed him to think that Americans were dumb, lazy, and wanted to be fed. From Nixon, we learned that the only thing that trickled down from the Trickle-Down Theory was meanness.

WHO ARE WE?

Actually, we are people who want TO TRUST.

We want to learn THE TRUTH.  

Once, we looked to Newspapers, columnists, and journalists to bring us the news. We can’t all go out into the world and collect it. We have lives to live, families to feed, work to do, creativity to express and enjoy, so we trusted the collectors to bring it to us.

We paid them to do their job.

We trusted that they had reliable sources, that they were ethical, and that truth in reporting was not only morally essential, but the law.

That morphed into television- a great potential to bring us together, give us information, and tell us how the world was doing. However, it can be bought like most everything else. It became a fight for control and attention. We didn’t think it was our job to legislate morality. Foolish us.

We have been blatantly lied to, fooled, bought, or wrestled by nefarious means into a corner. And this wrestling has been skillfully orchestrated—so much so that people don’t trust anything. We can be manipulated. Take a good magician using the shell game: They can remove the ball from under the cup without us even seeing it. I once heard a magician say that even magicians can be fooled.

We aren’t lazy people. We are confused people. We’re tired.

Keep the people stirred up, and they are controllable. Give somebody the military, and we are sitting ducks.

WHO ARE WE?

WE ARE THE PEOPLE who once stood behind the principle that we are a GOVERNMENT FOR THE PEOPLE AND BY THE PEOPLE.

Once, we believed that “our problems were caused by man; therefore, they can be solved by man.” (Or women or humankind.) Then we got the idea that it wasn’t happening fast enough and that we ought to force it.

The mystical part of who we are is bleeding.

I searched Oprah and found that the real purpose of her show was to teach responsibility. That the choices we make every day have to do with what we receive.  She has paid attention to the soul since beginning of her television appearance. At first, she was afraid television wasn’t ready for it, and it wasn’t. Now she isn't afraid to mention the Soul--as in Soul Sunday, and her interviews. Many of us believe our internal Knowingness can lead the way.

Some points I learned or were reminded of this morning are:

• Don’t try to convince anyone of anything.

(It leads to anger and despair with little chance of improvement.)

• Do my positive thoughts or negative ones affect the situation?

(You are in the gap from where you are to where you want to be. That is often the case)

• Get an idea that rings your soul.
• Find something you can focus on and allow well-being, like the pitty-pat of rain on the roof, to pour down on you.

Windows

Can you believe this? Some 400 years before Jesus was born, a man said this:

 

“Someday, in the distant future, our grandchildren’ s grandchildren will develop a new equivalent of our classrooms. They will spend many hours in front of boxes with fires glowing within. May they have the wisdom to know the difference between light and knowledge.” 

 

--Plato (PLATO’S DOCTRINE: 909 Relics of Greek Philosophy).

 

 

Reality is so compelling. It has so much momentum going it’s hard to stop or change direction. 

 

Brother, are you having a problem with life these days?

 

 Maybe it’s just me.

 

I was cruising along pretty well, not worried, then I felt something was bearing down on me. Yes, I know better. I know that when you are resonating with the good, you feel good. When you focus on the dire, the dangerous, the sick, you feel down, depressed, complaining, or just off-kilter.

 

So, how do you lift yourself up when something knocks you off-kilter?

 

When I realized that we don’t know what to believe anymore. I see that people believe lies, and we don’t know who is telling them to us and why. I saw that someone can drop a dire something on us, an insinuation, and not even sign their name to it, and what happens? It becomes spread into society. People glom onto the sick and disgusting. 

 

It has something to do with the way our brains work, how we can’t stop looking at a train wreck. It gets the adrenaline up—hell's bells, take a roller coaster ride, that will get the adrenaline up too.

 

We know that fear sells. Fear keeps us off-kilter. Fear makes us uncontrollable, but we can’t help it. Fear runs us. We let the media, and who knows what all, to affect us. I read that Memes are driving our culture. YouTube, Facebook, Instagram--these are all windows for us to peer into. When people have death, sickness, unrest, unemployment thrust into their face for over a year, it wears on them. We weren’t built to live under constant threat. 

 

Darn, I was looking out the wrong window. I have a philosophy about which window to choose—this is all figurative, you know. One window shows kids playing in the street, riding their bikes, and laughing. Another shows the neighbors quarreling. Some windows even look out upon downright fighting. 

 

And then I approach my kitchen window—this is real—and there is an orchid growing on the sill that has sent up a new spike and is budding. This is its third year to bloom. Maybe because it is looking out the window to the maple tree in the back yard that is bare now of leaves, but the tree and the orchid believe that spring will come and with it baby silky leaves that will flutter in the backyard.

 

We have to focus on the good, the healthy, the beautiful. 

 

We came here for a reason, and it wasn’t to suffer. We thought this time on Earth would be a grand vacation, a joyous one, so why isn’t it? Has the outside world done it to us? Could it be that our belief in suffering and decline has been passed down from generation to generation? Well, folks, now is the time to stop it. 

 

Now is the time, as Ralph Marston wrote, To “Breathe in the sweet air of limitless possibility and make life as rich as you know it can be.” 

 

Breath wrote Dido Owlnute:

“To pause

To make space

To collect your thoughts,

To remember,

To face the next moment, 

To choose.” 

 

“Remember, you made it this far through difficulties that seemed impossible. Remember how many times you were saved at the last minute—this time is no different.”—Bryant McGill.

 

“Let us be grateful to people who make us happy. They are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.” --Marcel Proust

 

I came upon this picture, taken in Greece, of my daughter at 16. It is a beautiful window to look upon. She wasn’t posing but just standing there, and I snapped the picture.

 

 

 

“Truth isn’t always beauty. But the hunger for it is.”—Nadine Gordimer.