Playing slightly out of tune,Symbols through the looking glass,The sea reflecting moon. Each minute forms a new existence, Bits of rapture and fleeting emotions, A thousand years is but an instant,The past holds frozen in the distance. They say you cannot understand this life,And live it simultaneously.You must give in; let it sweep you up,To give coherence to the mystery. We can fly around as birds,Forming intricate and subtle patterns,Creation birthed of imperfection,The sea rejects no rivers. This ride requires no explanations,We are choreographers of this dance,Authors of our stories,Creators of our chance.
Jung, Mozart, Plath, Monet, Rumi. They have all taught me what it mean to be human.
Fake images.
My favorite part of Thanksgiving is probably the 'thankful circle', where we each share what we are thankful for while sitting... in a circle. Not only is this meaningful and thought provoking it is unbelievably adorable to find out the creative, insightful and off-the-wall things that my children are thankful for.
This year Shem asked if, rather than listing only a few things we were thankful for, we could take our time listing all the many things we felt we wanted to voice our gratitude for. This seemed like an inspired idea so we all agreed, little did we know how many things children are grateful for! As our Thanksgiving dinner slowly grew cold Shem, Emma, Ella and Owen spent well over an hour listing their often silly but always heartfelt gratitude for the world around them. Here are just a tiny selection of some of my favorites.
Shem: All nine planets (attempting several times to list them all but somehow always missing Mercury) but most especially Earth and Pluto, water (which was repeated at least four times), our many pets, rivers, streams and oceans, metal, books but not paper (because it meant trees were being harvested) but yet still paper, kind of, because he really likes to draw, and his compound family.
Emma: Her Godparents Ash and Derek, all her pets (including three horses a distant uncle told her she could share with him five years ago), all the mythical creatures (each was named one at a time, from centaurs to dragons and chimeras to wraiths), both the Greek and Egyptian pantheon of gods (also listed one at a time, including what they are gods of and some myths as well), music and Pluto (who kept popping up and whose planet-hood was vehemently defended, because as Emma says "A planet's a planet, no matter how small").
Ella: Animals (which each deserved their own individual mention), nature, hippies and peace, Pluto (naturally), words and numbers. Much of Ella's time was also spent espousing the many things she was not grateful for which include: pollution, mean people, people that hurt animals, and especially God whom she claims stole Emma's boca burger.
Owen: Was first and foremost grateful for himself "me", followed by "you", the heart on Mommy's shirt, his family (repeated even more often than Shem's water), aliens and monsters, haunted houses and ghosts, Frankenstein, the tooth fairy, Christmas, the guitar, leafs, his family, Pluto (because it just wouldn't make sense if he hadn't), dinosaurs and animals, himself... oh yeah, and his family.
Hakuna matata is a Swahili phrase that is literally translated as "There are no worries", in the words of the lovable meerkat Timon this means "Put your past behind you". Simple enough words for a task that most of humanity never really accomplishes in their entire lifetime. Who among us does not carry with us the baggage that our parents heaped upon us by raising us in inherently flawed manners, though who can really blame them when they themselves spent their lives coping with the issues handed down to them by their own parents? What small percentage of people have walked away from ex-husbands and wives, even ex-boyfriends and girlfriends, without an entire repertoire of battle-scars on their souls? Sibling rivalries, bullying received during our school years, a plethora of injustices met out in the 'real world', each and every one of us are bound with iron chains to the weight of decades worth of baggage.
Yet, what is the past, really? Beyond a hodgepodge of selective memories strung together to form a loose, hopelessly inaccurate and ultimately delusional narrative - one formed under the thinly veiled notion of an excuse for our behaviors in the present moment. And how much of our personal history, when it really comes down to it, do we hold even a modicum of influence over at any given moment?
On the flip side of the same coin we have the illusion of a history yet to be written. Would Timon's words be any less wise if we turned them around to say "Keep your future out ahead of you" or in other words "Cross that bridge when you come to it"? We all walk through life with our head stuck in the clouds, gazing out at a mirage that we perceive to be the horizon. To countless among us thoughts such as 'After a few more paychecks...', 'Starting next week...', 'Once
On a less dramatic scale we can see this same problem when two people are deep in conversation. With rare exceptions the person who is listening at any given moment is concentrating not on the words they hear, nor on their meaning to the speaker, not even on the speaker them-self; instead their attention is focused on formulating their next reply. Although our present actions may well influence the shape the future will take, what power do we really have over something which does not yet exist? Little more than a dream, we hold more power over the flight path of a butterfly in Tibet.
Yet the present itself is a fleeting notion, it is something that can only be discussed in the abstract for the moment we begin to discuss it the moment has already slipped beyond the cusp of the present and into the past. Like a rock in a riverbed we must allow time to flow over and around us, making no attempt at grasping and holding to anything that happens. In the words of Sylvia Boorstein, "
Buddhism teaches that the origin of all suffering is attachment. Craving and clinging are natural reactions to life; we cling to our possessions and our wealth, we crave attention and affection, we attach ourselves to our loved ones and to our lives. Yet the objects of our attachment are transient, their loss is inevitable, thus suffering will necessarily follow. You pine for the love of someone, if your love is unrequited you naturally become sad or frustrated. Suppose, instead, you come to find that certain someone loves you too. The moment you share your love for one another, the moment that by all rights and reasons should be unmitigated joy, some part of you shifts to a fearful, defensive posture. What if they should stop loving you, move away or even die? In that instant that we attain that which we have been craving we begin to cling to it for dear life.
Arguably the most difficult things for us to learn to sever our detachments from are not our cars and houses, not our bank accounts, not even our loved ones... that which we grasp onto most tightly is our paradigms. The image we carry of ourselves, the lens through which we see the world, the guide by which we interpret our lives are often so ingrained, so intrinsically a part of who we are that we shrink in terror from the loss of them. We allow our beliefs, opinions and conceptions to shape our lives at such a fundamental level that many of us actually identify with them. Strip away our politics, our religion, our day-to-day world views and many of us don't even have a concept of what 'self' would be leftover.
The source of these deeply enmeshed attachments stem from an attachment to our thoughts. We suffer from the belief that whatever pops into our mind is part of who and what we are, thus we cling to the random wanderings of our brain under the delusion that our thoughts are as much a part of us as our own skin. I am learning to see my thoughts and emotions like clouds, there to be observed and considered but lacking any personal attachment, drifting across the sky of my mind leaving no trace of their passing. By identifying ourselves with our own attachments we tie our mental and emotional well-being to a vulnerable, false 'self'. This is why people become so defensive of their paradigms, what we feel as an attack on our core beliefs is seen as an attack on our very selves. To question someone's political stance or religion, for example, is perceived on par with coming at them with a knife, an attempt to cut away a part of themselves.
This simple, terrible truth is at the heart of the conflict between conservatives and liberals, Christians and Muslims, Capitalists and Socialists, husbands and wives, parents and children, friends and neighbors. It plays a core role in humanity's destruction of the environment, the exploitation and enslavement of one person by another and virtually every war ever waged in human history. These attachments are, quite literally, the fountain from which all suffering springs, thus it is only by finding these intrinsic attachments within ourselves and confronting them head on that we, both individually and collectively, will ever escape the vicious cycle of misery that binds humanity in a prison of our self-deluded creation.
The past is a pliable myth and the future is merely an illusion, the present moment is all that exists. 
