Gratitude For All Of It

It is easy to feel gratitude for the so-called good things that come to us. But the real path is to see how we can cultivate gratitude for all of it. This is the path of liberation and the beginning of the end of suffering. Rumi said this much better than me. This poem means a lot to me. First it was sent to me by a dear friend. It is good to know that people value my friendship. Secondly, I shared it with my dear friends as well. And now I hope it will make a positive difference in your life. Happy Gratitude Day!

I said: What about my eyes?
God said: Keep them on the road.
I said: What about my passion?
God said: Keep it burning.
I said: What about my heart?

God said: Tell me what you hold inside it.
I said: Pain and sorrow...
He said: ..Stay with it...
The wound is the place where the Light enters you.

~ Rumi

Late Fall Campfire at Hawkscry

Over the past week we have been staying at Hawkscry while refinishing floors in town. The weather was rather warm, the moon was nearly full, and a lovely time was had around the campfire Thursday evening with friends.

A day in Gay America

For many, the perception of gayness is highly influenced by the media hype focusing on the most extreme elements of the LGBT world. In particular there is a strong tendancy to point ou how different LGBT people are, thus making it easier to dislike or distrust them. Hopefully these photographs will help dispel that perception. Gay people are really no different from non gay people except that they are attracted to the same gender. This attraction is not a choice, but a part of their central being. Enjoy the images.
http://www.advocate.com/day-gay-america/2011/10/28/day-gay-america-2011?page=0,0

What Gay Agenda? (TED Talk)

Watch out America. The Gay Agenda is apparently more dangerous than terrorism! Watch and find out why. 

Detachment (Films Worth Watching)

Director Tony Kaye’s long-awaited film stars Academy Award® winner Adrien Brody as Henry Barthes, a substitute teacher who conveniently avoids any emotional connections by never staying anywhere long enough to form a bond with either his students or colleagues. A lost soul grappling with a troubled past, Henry finds himself at a public school where an apathetic student body has created a frustrated, burned-out administration. Inadvertently becoming a role model to his students, while also bonding with a runaway teen who is just as lost as he is, Henry finds that he’s not alone in a life and death struggle to find beauty in a seemingly vicious and loveless world.

Kaye has molded a contemporary vision of people who become increasingly distant from others while still feeling the need to connect. Detachment features a stellar ensemble cast, including Academy Award® winner Marcia Gay Harden, Christina Hendricks, William Petersen, Bryan Cranston, Tim Blake Nelson, Lucy Liu, Blythe Danner, James Caan, and newcomers Sami Gayle and Betty Kaye..

STOP-THE-CLASH Who's afraid of Muslim Rage?

Our perception of reality is heavily influenced by what we choose to pay attention to as well as what the media decides to present to us. In both cases we are severely limited by the narrowness of those two perspectives. Recently we have been all but bombarded by images and media coverage focused on the unrest in the world apparently the result of a trashy islamophobic film entitled The Innocence of Muslims; violence which has led to or been associated with the death of the US Ambassador to Lybia, as well as to many other deaths and countless injuries. One could be forgiven I suppose in believing that every Muslim sanctions and participates in such irrational and violent reaction to something that should be dismissed out of hand as a ridiculous individual rant, of which there are countless examples in a free society.

But this would be unforgivable. Responsible thinking people should question the tendency to swallow hook line and sinker the media depiction of "news". The fact is, gaining an understanding of our world and the events that shape it requires a suspension of immediate perception in favor of a more measured and porbistic reflection. This means work, and unfortunately only an alarming few have the stomach for it. WPS

To gain some perspective on the unrest I propose the following article.

http://en.avaaz.org/783/muslim-rage-protests-newsweek-salafists?utm_source=avaaz_newsletter&utm_medium=blast&utm_campaign=stop-the-clash

Deepak Chopra: The Mideast Protests, Social Networks & the Global Brain

There’s a fascinating connection between the social network and where the human brain is going. For a long time, neuroscience held a wrong belief—several, actually—about the brain. The number of brain cells we have was seen as a fixed number that declined over time. No one realized that stem cells in the brain can renew lost neurons at any time of life. But the most exciting discovery was that everyday experience rewires the brain.

Even though it looks like a thing, your brain is a process. It is always in a state of dynamic flux. New connections and new cells are being born, and as the rewiring occurs, something astonishing happens. Your personal reality changes. The brain processes reality, and when new pathways are formed, the world becomes different.

We are witnessing a global test of this thesis in the Middle East. The future there seems to be a race between the mullahs and the iPad, between sermons in the mosque and tweets on a smartphone. After the Bush administration’s disastrous invasion of Iraq, the number of cellphones in that country exploded, even amid social collapse. Young people desperate to be part of the wider world started expressing their yearning through social networks. Tweets and texts were critical during the Arab Spring, especially in getting large numbers of protesters to gather in Cairo’s Tahrir Square.

When the moderate, progressive elements in Egyptlost to the Muslim Brotherhood, it seemed like a huge setback for social networks and a massive victory for the mullahs. Yet the long view is far more hopeful. Millions of tweets, texts, emails, and phone calls have one thing in common: they are neural signals in the global brain. A cabdriver talking all day on his cellphone in Manhattan is weaving himself into the society back home, and the more he communicates, the stronger the neural pathway he is creating.

Silent opposition brought down the Berlin Wall because consciousness, although invisible, is incredibly powerful. Social networks have the capacity to swiftly alter the global brain. On the surface, most tweets are small passing events. But stand back a bit, and you see that a new identity is being formed, a global “we” that anyone can participate in. This newly shaped global brain can topple the traditional barriers of religion, tribalism, nationalism, and political oppression.

Before the social network, think of what it took to escape the mindset of a repressed culture. You had to physically move away, plant yourself in a foreign country, and probably continue to fear for your relatives stuck back home. Now, in the darkest hours of Syrian resistance, as in Libya, Tunisia, and Egypt, anyone can send and receive messages from the global brain. As this stream of messages continues, it reshapes the individual brain, too.

What I’m saying isn’t mystical or hypothetical. The destiny of the whole planet depends on reaching beyond the narrow interests of rich nations and multinational corporations. A community of humanity needs to be formed. It’s completely possible for that to happen. In fragile, hopeful ways, it already has.

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Deepak Chopra is the author God: A Story of Revelation, in addition to more than other 60 books that have been translated into more than 80 languages and include numerous New York Times bestsellers. Dr. Chopra is a fellow of the American College of Physicians, a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists, adjunct professor at Kellogg School of Management, and senior scientist with The Gallup Organization. Timemagazine has described Dr. Chopra as one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century and credits him as “the poet-prophet of alternative medicine.”

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