Some thoughts on Love

Love is like a clear strong voice, speaking truth, heard above the confusing tumult of lies, deception and fear based thought.

Love is like a river flowing wild and free. I trust and surrender knowing it will carry me to wherever I am meant to be.

Love is like the twinkling eons of starlight, belonging neither to the past nor to the future, but here, fully present in the now of our hearts.

Love is like my lover's touch, fire consuming flesh, but so much more, for heart and soul find renewal is this blaze of consumation.

Gratitude

One of the greatest lessons in my life has been the practice of gratitude. Oprah attributes much of the success in her life to a daily practice of journalling at least five things she has to be grateful for before she goes to sleep at night. I have found it raises my spirits, sees me through even the most challenging of times and in a curious way ti always seems as though more good things show up in my life when I am mindful of what I already have to be grateful for.

This is a typical list that I might write. Find your own style and grow your gratitude muscles by daily practice. It will be a gift in your life.

Oh, I am so grateful for this perfect gift of a perfect day at just the most perfect time of my life. I am also grateful for the recognition that every time has been the perfect time; all I had to do is relax, breathe and live it.

I am so grateful for:
This bright, clear, Autumnal day. It started with dark clouds and heavy rain; now it has mellowed into a soft rosy apple of a day ready to be bitten into, deep white delectable flesh already dripping its sweet juices onto the pages of my life. Mmmmm, scrumptious.
Blue skies with dark grey clouds scuttling by, driven by the blessing of a wind that makes this such a good drying day. More joy in burying my nose into fresh sun and air dried clothes. Two washings completed and number three swirling and gurgling around in the machine next door.
Ah the merry trickle of water pouring from the outlet pipe onto the kitchen floor. What a joy to know that one phone call will bring the ideal man to fix it. The floor could do with a wash anyway. Why do I want to laugh? Why am I not having a foot stamping, rip roaring, "why me" temper tantrum? To quote another free spirit in a totally different context, "Quite frankly, my dear,I don't give a damn". The book said, "Don't sweat the small stuff" and a newly cleaned, kitchen floor is definitely small stuff.
My youngest brother's 40th birthday; all the good memories of his childhood and knowing that even although physically he is an ocean and an entire continent away from me in Vancouver, he is forever only a heart beat from my heart.
My 84 year old father walking so much more confidently; he is such an inspiration; three TIAs and he is out on the golf course every day, no longer playing, but out there keeping his many friends company. What a blessing those men are; they give him their time and their support; they encourage him and help to keep his mind sharp. I may not enjoy golf but I so appreciate their loving fraternity with one another.
My 78 year old mother outside hanging out her washing this morning as I hung out mine. How wonderful to see her so fit and active. How lucky I am to have both of my parents so close by and still with me. How even more grateful I am that my heart is filled with love for them and I know that I am loved unconditionally by them.
The sound of the little waterfall at the bottom of the garden. It is such a soothing yet enlivening sound. I love it after the heavy rains when it can be heard all through the house when I open my windows. It is an absolute joy.
Kicking my heels in the air; feeling like a 17 year old instead of 54 - then how is a 54 year old supposed to feel? I don't know but then again who cares? I feel what I feel and I feel alive, uproariously, mischievously, joyfully, soul stirringly, alleluia chorusing, fireworks exploding stars across the sky, ALIVE!

The Universe is such a fun place to explore. Stand by and ready to launch. Have an adventurous day.

Over and out!

Lebanon

The web entangles me
in sticky threads of grief
Trapped in my rage
A roar dies in my throat.

I look into that mirror darkly,
Eyes blighted by the horror
Of the reflections I see.
Souls lost in pain and terror
Lives extinguished in a war
that was no choice of theirs
For who would chose war
but the criminally insane?

The bodies of children pile high
In a cataclysmic chasm of the damned
The innocence of their faces tormenting
With undelivered promises of peace.

I cannot watch this.
I chose to run from the
incessant sounds of war
brought into my home
in digitally mastered surround sound
Scurrying to hide myself
from pictures of horrors
A refugee on the road
To no escape.

A single crimson blossom
Falls from the rhododendron
Into the crystalline lake
And I am haunted by
the supercilious voices
of politicians who claim
the moral high ground
with hands as bloody
as that flower staining
the still silent water

Who is Maria? - The Musing of a Moment!

Gosh on a good day, I'm not really sure. I have this hazy concept of self that keeps drifting over the fictional boundaries of time, space and individual definitions of human beings. I just sort of am, in the way that the wind, the sun, the stars, the grass, the trees and the birds just are.

I am the bird song I hear outside my office window. I am the breeze that caresses my shoulders stealing its way in from the garden. I am the open window, open door, open something or other that allows all manner of thoughts, feelings, sensory impressions to flow. I am me and you and everything.

How tiresome! I cannot get my brain to work in a linear, rational, analytical way today. It is filled with sunshine and storm clouds, sorrow, and joy, impatience and the infinite patience of the divine. I would say I am a crazy mixed up kid but that archetype is fighting it out with the wise old crone who also inhabits this vortex of energy that might be considered to be Maria.

Who am I today? Am I defined, corralled into a box, by what I do or say? Or is there something far beyond all of that which is who I am at any given moment. I sense immense fluidity, shape shifting denizen of the energy of the source. Shall I permit myself to pop out from one of the boxes marked psychotherapist, listener, hypnotherapist, writer, mother, fifty four year old, woman, wife, lover, friend, firefly, butterfly, fire breathing dragon? Ah, I think not, then do I think or do I simply dream this life into existence?

Quirky old day today. It is so beautiful, so filled with magic. The Source is bursting out all over, shining in the soft greening of the trees, shimmering in the blue blaze of the sky, singing to me in a thousand bird voices. a million buzzing bees and the seductive whispers of the waterfall. Who is Maria? She is all of these things. She is Source and of the Source. Source, sorceror? Sorceror, Source?

Shhhhh! Do you hear the Goddess calling? She calls from deep within each of us, for we are all the Goddess. We are one.

Who is Maria?

Just a dream. Go back to sleep and who knows who you may create in your slumbers.

Serpent

The snake slithered sinuously between the sleepers as they lay nestled together in the naked innocence of unknowing, children in the dawning of time itself.

Touching, caressing, the serpent draws from secret wells of sensory pleasure great scarket gushes of sensation, staining the pristine purity of their dreams.

Seductive murmurings whisper in their slumbers, bringing that to life which once was suspended still and quiet in the limbo of ignorance.

The apple of the tree of knowledge, once bitten, cannot be made whole again. Bitter sweet is this fruit, the gift of the Serpent.