Farzad tells it like I feel it. He creates what wells up in him. I love how this video begins with the sounds of children. I admire his message, his beautiful work and how he lives life so open heartedly.

A man stole my car a few days ago and ended up dying in an accident minutes later. This is perplexing to say the least and had me contemplating why someone would give their life for a car. Full story: http://morsemusings.wordpress.com

As for me, I am not willing to give my life up for objects or wars.

I am a book lover. I have so many books that it's time that they lined someone elses shelves. As of late, I have been sorting through titles to decide which ones I can live without. In doing this I am re-reading books that I haven't seen in years. I simply adore this book, written by Brad Blanton, here's one of my favorite excerpts:

Radical Honesty: Page 56 (levels of telling the truth) ...

We all get to make this choice between manipulation and communication over and over again in life. John Stevens, a Gestalt educator, wrote beautifully in his book, Awareness, about the dilemma of trying to win love through manipulation as opposed to communicating.

A great deal has been written about trust and love, and that if you can build a trusting, loving relationship, then people can be honest with each other. I believe this idea is exactly backwards. It is very nice if I feel trusting and loving toward someone, but if I don't feel this way, what can I do about it? Trust and love are my feeling responses toward another person, and these responses cannot be manufactured. Either I feel love or I don't. All the emphasis on trust and love results in many people pretending to feel trust and love "because it's healthy, and will bring about closeness, honesty, etc." — adding a new area of phoniness and dishonesty in their behavior.

Honesty, however, is a behavior and is something I can choose or not choose. I cannot decide to love or trust, but I can decide to be personally honest or not. And when I choose to be really honest and say what I experience and what I feel, I am showing that I can be trusted.

This is the only kind of behavior that can bring about a response of trust. Trust is my response to a person that I know I can believe. Even if I dislike a person, I can trust him if he is honest with me, and I can respect his willingness to be himself honestly.

Likewise, honesty does not always bring a response of love, but it is absolutely essential to it. When I am honestly myself, and you respond warmly and with caring, then love exists. If I calculate and put on a phony behavior in order to please you, you may love my behavior, but you cannot love me, because I have hidden my real existence behind this artificial behavior. Even when you love in response to my phony behavior, I cannot really receive your love. It is poisoned by my knowledge that the love is for the image I have created, not for me. I also have to be continually on guard to be sure that I maintain my image so that your love does not disappear. Since I have shut myself off from your love in this way, I will feel more lonely and unloved, and try even more desperately to manipulate myself and you in order to get this love.

In contrast, when I am honestly myself and you respond to me as I am in that moment. I can receive this fully and know the satisfaction of being really related with you. This honest relating is not always joyful or pleasant — it is sometimes sad, sometimes angry, etc. — but it is always solid and real and vitally alive.

This vitality of relationship is, in fact, the love we try so desperately to win. It is only available to people who practice telling the truth.

The second level of telling the truth comes about through experimenting, usually in group therapy as well as in real life, to find out the difference between trying to make things happen through manipulation and having things happen through telling the truth. Once you decide to live that way, you have to continue to work away at it, because the most important thing to know about the truth is that it changes. You can really be mad at someone and hurt by him or her and stay stuck there. Or you can tell them and express it out loud and what was true a moment ago becomes no longer true.

BONUS REMIX:  practice truth telling, it's free!

Brute force, no matter how strongly applied, can never subdue the basic human desire for freedom and dignity. It is not enough, as communist systems have assumed, merely to provide people with food, shelter and clothing. Human nature needs to breathe the precious air of liberty.

-His Holiness the Dalai Lama

I’ve learned to read the tones in your voice
the intensity of your touch and the lines upon your furrowed brow
I breathe in your kind nature, your humor, your tolerance and desire
magnified in our interactions
you inhabit me
sweetness and joy in our motions
free to explore beyond the parameters of my being
penetrating communion allowed to unfold
silencing tender intricacies of heart and reason
I disappear

sanctuary

Today I began writing my Gratitude List. I found some inspiration (!) I also found inspiration to make a huge batch of French Onion soup, which I plan on enjoying later today.

My Gratitude List

I am thankful for those I love
I am thankful to God
I am thankful for my healthy, smart and beautiful children; Ben, Joe, Bailey and Mia
I am thankful for my home amidst the green pastures and rolling hills
I am thankful for my dear pets; Rosie, Garfield, Sam, Max, Teddy and Chester
I am thankful for Jane returning my Rosie home when she was missing
I am thankful for my dear niece
I am thankful for my dear and loving friends and neighbors
I am thankful for feeling at peace
I am thankful for the earth spinning on it’s own
I am thankful for the abundance of my garden
I am thankful for being born with everything I really need
I am thankful for being creative
I am thankful for my computer
I am thankful for the thrill of practicing Mediation
I am thankful that there is a solution for every problem
I am thankful for the people I have met through my job
I am thankful for the money I make
I am thankful for my books and the authors who wrote them
I am thankful for having enough to share
I am thankful I had Oysters Rockefeller last weekend
I am thankful to be smart
I am thankful to be beautiful
I am thankful for sunny days
I am thankful for rainy days
I am thankful for water
I am thankful for electricity
I am thankful for my clothesline
I am thankful for my health
I am thankful for my nice teeth
I am thankful that I am compassionate
I am thankful knowing that everything will be alright
I am thankful it’s almost Christmas
I am thankful for snow
I am thankful to have a sled
I am thankful for tulips
I am thankful for onions  

"At morn, at noon, at twilight dim
Lady thou hast heard my hymn:
In joy and woe, in good and ill,
Goddess, Mother, be with me still,
When the hours flew brightly by
And not a cloud obscured the sky,
My soul lest it should truant be,
Thy grace did guide to thine and thee.
Now, when storms of fate o'ercast
Darken my present and my past,
Let my future radiant shine
With sweet hope of thee and thine.

Edgar Allen Poe

Love is rarely what we think it should be, and we are rarely who we would like to be when we are in love. On one hand we want love to be enough. Yet on the other hand, we are rarely satisfied with the love we have. So fear and love battle it out. We become silent when we so desperately want to connect. We jump in too fast when we know we should be slowing down. We act cool when we feel hot. We wake up in the middle of the night to snuggle next to the one we love, yet we barely touch each other during the day and when we talk, so seldom do we listen.

We put on an act, then worry we won't be loved for who we are. We reach out. We shut down. We cry. Confined to our preconceived ideas. We want love just to happen. Love is not convenient. And if we are in fear, love just keeps failing to blossom.

The peaks of love can be maddening; the highs are higher and lows are lower than we are ever prepared for. Love requires more of us than we think we can give. It pushes us past our breaking point yet we don't break. It is unpredictable, then sedate. It tears us up while making us better. It is never what we expect, it is rarely what we think it should be.

We fear being rejected, so we become people pleasers and call it love. We fear seeming inadequate, so we look for a partner who is perfect and call it high standards. We fear looking stupid so we keep ourselves when our soul yearns to open up. We fear we are unlovable, so we hide our true self from those we love. When we blame those around us, we are clouded by fear.

Love has us looking for our own reflection in other peoples mirrors, hoping for a glimpse and a glimmer of a truth we so long to hear, to really know it and feel it right down to our bones: that we are needed, cared for, accepted, and that our being here matters so very much.

I wrote this and read this outloud for dear couple I knew well, on one summer's night, during a relational blow. I often wonder how different their lives would be without the fear in their love.

Whatever attitudes we habitually use toward ourselves, we will use on others, and whatever attitudes we habitually use toward others, we will use on ourselves. The situation is comparable to our serving food to ourselves and to other people from the same bowl. Everyone ends up eating the same thing--we must examine carefully what we are dishing out.

-Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, "Eight Mindful Steps to Happiness"