THIS is IT: Death, the Nepantla Way

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I am a nepantlera. I know I am.

But I have been in denial about it for years. I had read about it in Gloria Anzaldua’s book, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza and I had a intimate friendship with Anzaldua, but I never realized until much later that is why she loved me. Nepantleras live different because we know death intimately. Randy Conner, a close friend of Gloria’s used to say that he had to be careful because if he told Gloria it was dangerous, then she would go there! My denial must have been from all that pressure to be agringada. All that training to be an All American girl kept me from knowing myself. But they could never wipe the neon nopal off my forehead.

Maybe my turning Big Fifty is the reason I am so intensely into Death this year . Or could it be the dirty little secrets that are now being revealed about our environment like the pinche BP Oil Spill y Coal Ash Spills? Or is it that iceberg melting in Greenland that has an effect on me? Is it my society’s self disgust of our bodies? Or is it that people are killing themselves and others in numbers like gay teen suicides? Do I need to mention the continuous worldwide class and racial wars ? The polite masks have been removed and the racist faces and words coming out are retefeo y sin verguenza. “We have a Black president and too many Mexicans! ”, the Haters just come out and say it. There is so many big chingazos that we haven’t had the chance to exhale. The grief is too much too much. Makes me wanna give up and holler they way they do my life like a heartbroken Marvin Gaye said in his song. The internet has me planetary connected to Death now more than ever. What is worse is that some of us like to see realistic killings on Television. Those of us who are connected to the earth know there are no more signs of the times. These are the days the Elders warned us about. Ya se cabo el pedo. These days are dangerous times. We can’t pretend anymore. THIS is IT.

This summer after spending the day digging for Arkansas crystals with my godchild Niko, we stopped in Hot Springs to fill our containers with the sacred water . I said to him, “Baby, this is some of the cleanest water you will find on the planet. Let’s say our prayers. There may not be good water like this for very long and one day you will remember this day, Baby. And be careful the water is hot.” I watch his brown little hands on the jug saying his prayers looking all serious and being careful not to get burned by the hot water. Right then, I wanted to burst out in tears opon feeling like the next generations ahead will get to taste and know sweet water .

The truth is our planet is dying. And its breaking my heart. Yeah, you may say Earth is not dying and that we humans and other species will die but the earth will still be here. This isn’t about whether we survive or not. It’s about how we respond to our emotionally as humans who have been industrialized. Our industrial culture has taught us to fear death. Nepantleras would say that we are all being awakened. Nepantleras say we must be mas daring and embrace vulnerability. We know those that refuse to be awakened will keep on feeding who and what controls them. This is what the Industrial does to the Indigeneous.

We assimilate. We forget. We go numb. We go for chemical lobotomies via illicit drugs or legal pharmaceuticals. It’s easier to get a drug than a hug. We go back to work a week after death or birth. We go into a Coyolxauhqui state. And just like Coyolxauhqui, the Aztec goddess whose body was dismembered, we are torn apart from parts of ourselves. Nip tuck here and there. Our lives follow the script we used to deal with when the sexual abuse, incest and rape happened to us. We compartmentalize. We check out and stare at the ceiling light and will do anything to leave our bodies. And we stay there and exist. Some of us never move out of here. Y lo… we try and build community with our social anxiety! Intimacy has become terrifying. Social networks and the internet falsely numbs our loneliness like porno and candy. This is surely a death. Some of us never really get to know the healing that happens in a Coatlicue state. Few of us know Coatlicue, the goddess. Goddess of las Hijas de la Chingada… She terrifies us.

The Coatlicue state is the journey and initiation of Nepantleras. It can be a choice or it can be forced by the universe/creator. The Coatlicue state is labor before a baby is born. Its getting bit by a snake and transmuting the poison. Its recognizing and daring to revisit old wounds and space we occupy in that state is the healing. We avoid opportunities to heal old hurts and wounds. Healing is found when we touch our tenderness. As my friend, Tufara from Arkansas says, “Sometimes healing is ugly. We have to lance the thang. And it gets stanky!”. This is what we no longer know. This is what is what is lost about how to heal ourselves.
Most of us left behind are too young to be elders yet. And as each elder crosses over, we lose ourselves, lose our healing ways. We don’t even know how to breathe. We never fully inhale.. never completely exhale. All that we know now is to take our grief into our dungeons of silence and isolation. We hide. We settle. We are in a state of shock. Death is experiencing all the things we don’t want to feel like getting older, getting sick, or being broke. Death is disappointment. Death is any BYE BYE ADIOS.

If it is true and these are the days the elders warned us about and you are unprepared-here is the shortcut-Tell the truth. The preparation and the test are the same. That truth may be that you are secretly homophobic and have a lot of ugly feelings about LGBT people. Tell the truth and work on it. Work on it? See? We don’t even know what that looks like……I always say if you cant get over then you have to go thru it. Set it up. Go where you don’t want to go. Its time to freak out. This is the good red road to Nepantla

Go where its retefeo. Go where good girls don’t go. What you can’t face will find you anyway. Be daring. Dare to reclaim your power. Not power over, but claim power within and power with. Let go and feel ALL the hopelessness.

Nepantla is not just being in the middle of two worlds. Its about walking in balance. Joy and Grief are equally available. It about being present and awake. You are not here but everywhere. You are connected far better than any internet to information and intelligent creativity than you think. Nepantleras are always wanna be starting something. They pass the limits. They cross the borders. We are beautiful but how much more we could be without the ball and chains shackled to our ankles? How much more would we create and solve the issues of the planet? Who would I be and what could we do without all this hurt, doubt and hopelessness? It starts with me and ends with we. Its how we love in the little things.

My comadre and I prepare my godchild, Niko, for the death of his abuelita. We tell him she doesn’t have much time left here. I tell him he needs to say what he needs to say and spend as much time as he can with her. He says she is always sleeping more now. We tell him she is very sick. I said, “Baby she can still hear you. Light your candle. Say your prayers for her. And let me or mama hold you if you feel like crying.”
We can still talk to our dead and in some ways it’s easier when they are dead. They arent as full of angst as when they were alive. For years, I was afraid I was gonna hear voices from the dead. And I told my teacher that I ever started to hear voices and channel spirits that I was gonna shit in my pants and pack my bags and run to New Mexico to be with her. She told me I better pack up bags. And she was right. But it wasn’t like I expected it.

When my Tia Lena, the Jehovah Witness homophobe died, as I was lighting a white candle for her on my altar, I heard her. But it wasn’t with sound. She was upset she was dead and mad that I was the only one that could hear her. Here it was the first woman I fell in love with and oh how I loved her. She loved me too. But homophobia was why we stayed away for years. Who would have thought it would happen like that with my Tia? I love the tricks Creator plays on me.

You don’t have to wait for Dia de los Muertos to do this. Build you altar. Talk to your dead. Defy the military industrial complex society. Love yourself and take the time. We need to tell our stories. Death isn’t in our mind. The story of our life is written in our heart and bodies. Its in our gut. We can stop saying goodbye intellectually. Feel the stories in our body. Hear the story of each person. This is how we did it when we used to get together with our village people after supper. And we make things sacred whenever we say the names of all our beloved. Im tugging on your spirit. It’s as simple as that.

Walk fire.

Get to know death not just as a body dying but death as hopelessness. Death as drug addiction and divorce. Death as a foreclosure and bankruptcy. Death as depression, diabetes, cancer, AIDS and fibromyalgia. Being awake unnerves us being genuine means moco flowing y our knees shaking. Death softens us up wakes us up. We open ourselves and let ourselves be touched.

Only then as you step out of isolation and risk humiliation and betrayal, you will then know Nepantla. Nepantla is the space you arrive after you hold space for ourselves and others just like we do when we do Dia de los Muertos. Can we walk fire together and tell truth? And can we gather together and grieve the death of the sacred tree? Nepantleras know we have a sacred contract with that requires the utmost committement to authenticity. Or as we say,” Keeping it 100” or as the Cholas say, “ FOR THE REAL”. And then we must ask ourselves this question: To what do we commit ourselves? That is the core of how to build community sacredly. Nepantleras are the link to the sacred world.

One hot Texas day while I stopped at a long red light at a busy intersection, I suddenly noticed an energy change and my body sensed something wrong with the people in the streets. My mind was confused but my body and my eyes scanned around. Mind syncs up and I turn to the left of me because now I see people running to that direction. All energy suddenly is focused to that left corner. As the light changes, my heart softens and I am touched. A little poodle like dog had been hit by a car and everyone in that moment were all sending their best love and light to that dog. Tears well up in me as I drive off. And I am touched and reminded again of the true nature of humans is goodness. Death awakens me.

If what stands before me is death and my planet and all its ugly, then let it wake me up more to life. Let me break out of the shackles of Mental Slavery. Y you?

Firewalk with me.

Suffering Too Insignificant for the Majority to See

By Alice Walker


In this groundbreaking talk to participants at the first-ever African-American Buddhist retreat, Alice Walker describes the great toll, both personal and societal, of racism in America, and how Buddhism has helped her heal its wounds.


This was not an area of large plantations, since the land is hilly with some bottoms of rich soil. Whites usually had small or medium-sized farms with slaves, but one pervasive thread of “southern life” ran through Leake County history. White masters raped black slave women who bore their children. The treatment of these children varied, and sometimes they were accepted or acknowledged as relatives of the white families.
And other perversity was always looming. Percy Sanders, a descendent of an early black family in the area, recalled hearing as a child about George Slaughter, a white farmer’s son by a black woman, who came to a horrible death because he “didn’t keep his place.” Ambushed by white men, including his own father, he was shot while riding his horse because the saddle horse was “too fine.” The story goes that when he was found, “the horse was drinking his blood.”
—From Mississippi Harmony: Memoirs of a Freedom Fighter, by Winson Hudson and Constance Curry

When I went to live in Mississippi in the sixties and to work in the Civil Rights movement, whose aim was to emancipate and empower African Americans who were still, thousands of them, treated as badly as and sometimes worse than slaves, I met Winson Hudson. She was trying to write the story of her life. I helped her, until I left Mississippi to live in New England. We sat under a tree and I wrote what she dictated. Today her story has become a book.

I begin with this harrowing quote simply to ground us all in the reality of being African Americans, African Indians, African Amerindians. We are that mixture of peoples, brought together very often and for centuries in the most intense racial confusion, hatred, and violence. This horrible story, which has haunted me since I read it, is typical of the kind of psychic assault we endure, while it is exactly the kind of assault today’s white majority takes no notice of, just as it took no notice one and two and three hundred years ago. This story, so chilling—The horse was drinking his blood? His own father was one of the assassins? His crime was that his horse was too “fine”?—unfortunately is one in a storehouse of such stories those of us present might hear or expect to hear, on any given day of our lives. What do we do with the shock? What do we do with the anger? The rage? What do we do with the pain?

When I read this story recently I was sitting in a federal courthouse, preparing to do jury duty. I felt ill immediately. But not as ill as I would feel an hour later upon entering the courtroom, when I was confronted with the fact that three young men of color, one Asian, two Latino, were to be tried for the murder of a policeman, whom they allegedly killed when he interrupted their burglary of a steak house. One glance at the accused trio revealed the faces of malnourished youths, barely out of their teens. The choice before the jury would be life imprisonment without parole or the death penalty. The judge, white and middle-class, well-fed and well-educated, seemed prepared to impose either choice.

Here were the contemporary brothers of George Slaughter.



My first version of this talk began with a poem by Basho:

Sitting quietly
Doing nothing
Spring comes
And the grass
Grows
By itself.

I was thinking of how I found my way from the backwoods of Georgia as a young woman into the company of the finest poets. It was a route of unbelievable, serious magic. When I was a child my family had no money to buy books, though all of us loved to read. Because I was injured as a child and blinded in one eye, the state gave me a stipend that meant I could buy all the books I wanted. When I went north to college, my first stop after settling in my room was the bookstore, where I entered a state of ecstasy seeing before me all the books of poetry I was hungering to read. It was there in the Sarah Lawrence College bookstore that I encountered Basho and Buson and Issa, Japanese Buddhist haiku poets who had lived centuries before. And also a book called Zen Telegrams by Paul Reps. We connected on the profound level of Nature. That is to say, in these poets I discovered a kindred sensibility that respected Nature itself as profound, magical, creative, and intelligent. There was no hint, as there is in other poetry, that simply because humans are able to write about Nature, they are somehow, therefore, superior to it.

So this is the way I was going to start the talk. But then I thought: it is more honest to start with the harder, more collective stuff. The stuff that makes addicts and slaves of Africans a hundred and fifty years after the Emancipation Proclamation. For I knew while sitting in that courtroom, having read the story of George Slaughter and acknowledging the young men before me as today’s version of him, that the pain I was feeling is the same pain that sends our people reeling into streets and alleys looking for a “fix” to fix all that is wrong with this gruesome picture. It is the pain that undermines our every attempt to relieve ourselves of external and internalized white domination. The pain that murders our every wish to be free. It is a pain that seems unrelenting. A pain that seems to have no stopping and no end. A pain that is ultimately, insidiously, turning a generous, life-loving people into a people who no longer feel empathy for the world. We need only listen to some of our African American comedians to see that our traditional compassion for life has turned into the most egregious cynicism.

We are being consumed by our suffering.

We are a people who have always loved life and loved the earth. We have noticed earth. How responsive and alive it is. We have appreciated it. We have been a nation of creators and farmers who adored the earth even when we were not permitted to own any part of it larger than our graves. And then only until a highway needed to be built or a condominium constructed on top of them.

I remember distinctly the joy I witnessed on the faces of my parents and grandparents as they savored the sweet odor of spring soil or the fresh liveliness of wind.

This compassionate, generous, life-affirming nature of ours, that can be heard in so much of our music, is our buddhanature. It is how we innately are. It is too precious to lose, even to disappointment and grief.

Looking about at the wreck and ruin of America, which all our forced, unpaid labor over five centuries was unable to avert, we cannot help wanting our people, who have suffered so grievously and held the faith so long, to at last experience lives of freedom, lives of joy. And so those of us chosen by life to blaze different trails than the ones forced on our ancestors have explored the known universe in search of that which brings the most peace, self-acceptance, and liberation. We have found much to inspire us in Nature. In the sheer persistence and wonder of Creation Itself. In Indigenous wisdom. In the popular struggles for liberation around the world, notably in Cuba, where the people demonstrate a generosity of spirit and an understanding and love of humankind that, given their isolation and oppression by our country, is almost incomprehensible. We have been strengthened by the inevitable rise of the Feminine, brought forward so brilliantly by women’s insistence in our own time. And of course by our own African American struggle for dignity and freedom, which has inspired the world. In addition, many of us have discovered in the teachings of the Buddha wise, true, beautiful guidance on the treacherous path life and history set us upon.



Having said this, let me emphasize that I did not come to the study and practice of Buddhism to become a Buddhist. In fact, I am not a Buddhist. And the Buddha would not have minded this in the least. He would have been happy to hear it. He was not, himself, a Buddhist. He was the thing Itself: an enlightened being. Just as Jesus Christ was not a Christian, but a Christ, an enlightened being.

The challenge for me is not to be a follower of Something but to embody it; I am willing to try for that. This is how I understand the meaning of both the Christ and the Buddha. When the Buddha, dying, entreated his followers to “be a lamp unto your self,” I understood he was willing to free his followers even from his own teachings. He had done all he could do, taught them everything he had learned. Now, their own enlightenment was up to them. He was also warning them not to claim him as the sole route to their salvation, thereby robbing themselves of responsibility for their own choices, behavior, and lives.

I came to meditation after a particularly painful divorce. Painful because I never ceased to care for the man I divorced. I married him because he was one of the best people I’d ever encountered. However, life had other plans for us both. I left my home, as the Buddha left his two thousand and five hundred years ago, to see if I could discover how I at least could be happy. If I could be happy in a land where torture of my kind was commonplace, then perhaps there was a general happiness to be found.

The person who taught me Transcendental Meditation was teaching out of the Hindu tradition and never mentioned the Buddha, the Four Noble Truths (about the fact of human suffering, its causes, and the necessity to engage, endure, and transform it) or the Eightfold Path, which provides a guide to moral, conscious living. What she did teach me was the deeper value of sitting quietly. Doing nothing. Breathing. This took me back to childhood days when I did this without thinking. Days when I was aware I was not separate from the cosmos. Days when I was happy. This was actually a place where poets, time out of mind, have frequently lived. No wonder I felt at home there.

And so I laughed. The laughter bubbled up, irrepressible. I saw the path to happiness and to liberation at a glance. It was inside myself.

Now I understand that all great teachers love us. This is essentially what makes them great. I also understand that it is this love that never dies, and that, having once experienced it, we have the confidence always exhibited by well-loved humans, to continue extending this same love. The Buddha, presumably raised as a Hindu, was no doubt disheartened by its racism; i.e., the caste system that today blights the lives of one hundred and sixty million Indians. Indians who were once called “untouchables” and now call themselves Dalits, “those broken to pieces.” They are not allowed to own land. They cannot enter the same doors, attend the schools, or drink from the same wells as the so-called “higher” castes. Their shadow must never fall on those above them. They are brutalized and the women raped at will. Niggers of India, they are.

Traditionally it is taught that the Buddha discovered someone old, someone sick, and someone dying, after having lived a very sheltered life, and that because of this suffering, inherent to all humankind, he struck out into the world to find a remedy. There’s no mention, usually, of the horrible caste system, everywhere in place in his area, which I personally find impossible to imagine the Buddha ignoring.

I like to think of the young prince, Siddhartha, observing this hypocrisy of his native religion, perhaps touching or loving an “untouchable,” and deciding there had to be a better way. A higher truth. I like to think of him leaving his cushy home and delightful family, his loving wife and adorable son, and striking out into the wilderness. Searching for a way humans could rid themselves of the hideous affliction of spirit that forced division and degradation of part of the human family imposes.

Which is to say, I felt the Buddha’s spirit long before I began to study his words. I felt him not as a god or as the son of a god but as a human being who looked around, as any of us might do, and said to himself: Something here is very wrong. People are such beautiful and wondrous creations, why are they being tortured? What have they done that this should be so? How can there be an end to their suffering?

The Buddha sat down.

Most of the representations of the Buddha show him sitting down. Sometimes he is lying down. Sometimes he is walking, though this is rare. Sometimes he is shown leaping to his feet and flinging up his arms in joy. Anyone who meditates recognizes these states. First, the sitting. The concentration on the breath. Sometimes the lying down, feeling our connection to the Mother, the great support of Earth. There is the walking, which integrates our bodies with our mind state. Then there is the feeling of exuberance when we realize we have freed ourselves. Again.

How does this happen?

I imagine there are people who turn to the Buddha because they’ve lost a lot of money. My experience, however, is that almost everyone I’ve met who has turned to the Buddha did so because they have suffered the end of a love affair. They have lost someone they loved. Perhaps they have lost a country, as well, or parents or siblings or some function of their bodies. But very often, people turn to the Buddha because they have been carried so deeply into their suffering by the loss of a loved one that without major help they fear they will never recover. (I actually love this about Buddhists: that though their reputation is all about suffering and meditating and being a bit low-key sexually and spiritually languid, they are in fact a band of hopeful lovers who risk their hearts in places a Methodist would rarely dare to tread.)

This is what happened to me. I had lost my own beloved. The pain of this experience seemed bottomless and endless. Enter my teacher for that moment of my life, the Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön and her teachings on a set of tapes called “Awakening Compassion.” Under her guidance, far in the country away from everyone, on my own retreat of one, I learned an ancient Tibetan Buddhist meditation practice called tonglen, along with the teachings that accompanied it, called lojong. This involved, during meditation, learning to breathe in the pain I was feeling, not to attempt to avoid or flee it. It involved making my heart bigger and bigger just to be able to hold it all. It involved breathing out relief and happiness for myself and for everyone on Earth who was feeling as miserable as I was. I stayed at this practice for a year.

It worked. So that today I sometimes wonder what my suffering over the loss of a loved one was really about. I have almost concluded that it was the love of the Buddha reaching through two thousand and five hundred years wanting me to understand that I had some control over how much suffering I endure. Wanting me to try a remedy he had found and to see for myself whether it works.

My novel The Color Purple was actually my Buddha novel without Buddhism. In the face of unbearable suffering following the assassinations and betrayals of the Civil Rights movement, I too sat down upon the Earth and asked its permission to posit a different way from that in which I was raised. Just as the Buddha did, when Mara, the king of delusion, asked what gave him the right to think he could direct humankind away from the suffering they had always endured. When Mara queried him, the Buddha touched the Earth. This is the single most important act, to my mind, of the Buddha. Because it acknowledges where he came from. It is a humble recognition of his true heritage, his true lineage. Though Buddhist monks would spend millennia pretending all wisdom evolves from the masculine and would consequently treat Buddhist nuns abominably, the Buddha clearly placed himself in the lap of the Earth Mother and affirmed Her wisdom and Her support.

It has been enormously helpful to me to learn that the Buddha’s wife and son eventually joined him in the wilderness and that she became both a follower and a teacher. There was love between them. How I wish we had a record of her thoughts. The male effort to separate Wisdom from the realm of the Feminine is not only brutal and unattractive but it will always fail, though this may take, as with Buddhism, thousands of years. This is simply because the Feminine is Wisdom; it is also the Soul. Since each and every person is born with an internal as well as an eternal Feminine, just as everyone is born with an internal and eternal Masculine, this is not a problem except for those who insist on forcing humans into gender roles, which makes it easier for them to be controlled.

Sometimes, as African Americans, African Indians, African Amerindians, people of color, it appears we are being removed from the planet. Fascism and Nazism, visibly on the rise in the world, have always been our experience of white supremacy in America, and this has barely let up. Plagues such as AIDS seem incredibly convenient for the forces that have enslaved and abused us over the centuries and who today are as blatant in their attempts to seize our native homelands and their resources as Columbus was five hundred years ago. Following the suffering and exhilaration of the sixties, a pharmacopia of drugs suddenly appeared just as we were becoming used to enjoying our own minds. “Citizen Television,” which keeps relentless watch over each and every home, claims the uniqueness and individuality of the majority of our children from birth. After the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Che Guevara, and so many other defenders of humanity, known and unknown, around the globe, we find ourselves with an unelected president who came to office by disenfranchising black voters, just as was done, routinely, before Martin Luther King, Jr., and the rest of us were born. This is a major suffering for black people and must not be overlooked. I myself, on realizing what had happened, felt a soul sickness I had not experienced in decades. Those who wanted power beyond anything else—oil and the money to be made from oil (which is the Earth Mother’s blood)—were contemptuous of the sacrifices generations of our ancestors made. The suffering of our people, especially of our children, with their bright, hopeful eyes, is of no significance to them. George Slaughter—the surname would have been his master/father’s, and deadly accurate —was not killed, we intuit, because his “saddle horse was too fine”; he was killed because he was too fine.

This is the bind we are in.

There is a private riddle I ask myself: Why did Europeans enslave us in Africa and take us to the United States?

The answer: Because we would not go voluntarily.

The African Americans who are aiding and abetting the rape and pillage of Earth, helping literally to direct the bombs that fall on the innocent and the exquisite, are still another cause of our suffering. We look into their eyes and experience a great fright. They appear so familiar, and yet, somehow, we feel they are not. I do not call their names because essentially they are, as we are, energies. They are familiar because they have been around just as long as we have. It is also necessary to acknowledge that some of those energies we find so frightening exist within ourselves.

This poem, which I think of as one of my “bitter” poems, expresses something of their position, when they can bear to acknowledge it, throughout the long centuries:

They Helped Their Own

They helped their own
They did not
Help us

We helped
Them
Help
Themselves

Beggars
That
We are.

Underneath what is sometimes glibly labeled racism or sexism or caste-ism, there lurk covetousness, envy, and greed. All these human states can, through practice, be worked with and transformed. This is the good news for our oppressors, as it is for humans generally, since we all have these qualities to a degree. The equally good news for us is that we can turn our attention away from our oppressors—unless they are directly endangering us to our faces—and work on the issue of our suffering without attaching them to it. The teaching that supports that idea is this:

Suppose someone shot you with an arrow, right in the heart. Would you spend your time screaming at the archer, or even trying to locate him? Or would you try to pull the arrow out of your heart? White racism, that is to say, envy, covetousness, and greed (incredible sloth and laziness in the case of enslaving others to work for you), is the arrow that has pierced our collective heart. For centuries we have tried to get the white archer even to notice where his arrow has landed; to connect himself, even for a moment, to what he has done. Maybe even to consider apologizing, which he hates to do. To make reparations, which he considers absurd.

This teaching says: enough. Screaming at the archer is a sure way to remain attached to your suffering rather than easing or eliminating it. A better way is to learn, through meditation, through study and practice, a way to free yourself from the pain of being shot, no matter who the archer might be.

There is also the incredibly useful assurance that everything is change. Everything is impermanent. The country, the laws, the Fascists and Nazis, the archer and the arrow. Our lives and their lives. Life. Looking about at the wreckage, it is clear to all that in enslaving us, torturing us, trying to get “ahead” on the basis of our misery, our oppressors in the past had no idea at all what they were doing. They still don’t. As we practice, let this thought deeply root. From this perspective, our compassion for their ignorance seems the only just tribute to our survival.

Who or What knows what is really going on around here, anyway? Only the Tao, or Life or Creation or That Which Is Beyond Human Expression.

Sitting quietly.

This place of peace, of serenity and gratitude, does exist. It is available to all. In a way, this place of quiet and peacefulness could be said to be our shadow. Our deserved shadow. Our African Amerindian shadow. In European thought the shadow is rarely understood as positive, because it is dark, because it is frequently behind us, because we cannot see it; but for us, ultrasensitive to the blinding glare of racism and suffering daily the searing effects of incomprehensible behavior, our shadow of peace, that we so rarely see, can be thought of as welcoming shade, the shade of an internal tree. A tree that grows beside an internal river that bathes us in peace. Meditation is the path that leads to this internal glade. To share that certainty is the greatest privilege and joy.

I am grateful for the opportunity to join you in this first-ever African American Buddhist retreat in North America. Though not a Buddhist, I have found a support in the teachings of the Buddha that is beyond measure, as I have found comfort and support also in those teachings I have received from Ancient Africans and Indigenous people of my native continent and from the Earth itself. The teacher who has been most helpful to me, in addition to Pema Chödrön, is Jack Kornfield, an extraordinary guide and human being, whose books and tapes, among them A Path with Heart, After the Ecstasy the Laundry, and The Roots of Buddhist Psychology, I would recommend to anyone who seeks a better understanding of the enspirited life. Sharon Salzberg’s book Loving-Kindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness has been an incomparable gift. In a book called Knee Deep in Grace, I discovered the teachings of the Indian female yogi, householder, and mother Dipa Ma. Her instructions and observations seem endlessly potent.

I am deeply grateful to all the teachers who came before these four that I have mentioned. Teachers from Vietnam (Thich Nhat Hahn has been a beloved teacher), Thailand, Burma, India, China, and especially Tibet. I thank the Dalai Lama for allowing himself to be a symbol of good in a world that seems, at times, hopelessly tilted toward evil. I thank Martin Luther King, Jr., for the warm, brotherly touch of his hand when I was young and seeking a way to live, with dignity, in my native land in the South, and for the sound of his voice, which was so full of our experience. I thank him for loving us. If he had been able to live and teach, as the Buddha did, until the age of eighty, how different our world would be. It is such a gift to have his books and recordings of his words, and to be able to understand his death as a teaching on both the preciousness of human existence and impermanence.

And, as always, I thank the ancestors, those who have gone on and those who are always arriving. It is because our global spiritual ancestors have loved us very dearly that we today sit together practicing ways to embody peace and create a better world. I feel personally ever-bathed in that love.

Let us sit for ten minutes.

Let us bring our attention to the life of our young brother, our murdered ancestor, George Slaughter. We know he was a beautiful young man, and that it was this beauty and his freedom expressing it that caused his father, himself unfree, to seek his death. We can see George sitting on his stunning saddle horse. We do not know if his half-sister, white, confused by her liking for her darker brother, gave it to him. We do not know if his mother, dark and irresistible, as so many black women are, gave it to him. We do not know if he bought it himself. All we know is that he is sitting there, happy. And the horse, too, is happy.

George Slaughter, an English name. We might think of Bob Marley, half-English, with his English name; perhaps George had a similar spirit. A kindred look and attitude.

May you be free
May you be happy
May you be at peace
May you be at rest
May you know we remember you

Let us bring our attention to George’s mother. She who came, weeping, and picked up the shattered pieces of her child, as black mothers have done for so long.

May you be free
May you be happy
May you be at peace
May you be at rest
May you know we remember you

Let us bring our attention to George’s father. He who trails the murder of his lovely boy throughout what remains of time.

May you be free
May you be happy
May you be at peace
May you be at rest
May you know we remember you

Let us bring our attention to those who rode with the father, whose silence and whose violence caused so much suffering that continues in the world today.

May you be free
May you be happy
May you be at peace
May you be at rest
May you know we remember you

And now let us bring our attention to George’s horse. With its big dark eyes. Who drank George’s blood in grief after the horror of his companion’s bitter death. We know by now that the other animals on the planet watch us and know us and sometimes love us. How they express that love is often mysterious.

May you be free
May you be happy
May you be at peace
May you be at rest
May you know we remember you

I cherish the study and practice of Buddhism because it is good medicine for healing us so that we may engage the work of healing our ancestors.

Both George and his father are our ancestors. What heals ancestors is understanding them. And understanding as well that it is not in heaven or in hell that the ancestors are healed. They can only be healed inside us. Buddhist practice, sent by ancestors we didn’t even know we had, has arrived, as all things do, just in time.



This is not a time to live without a practice. It is a time when all of us will need the most faithful, self-generated enthusiasm (enthusiasm: to be filled with god) in order to survive in human fashion. Whether we reach this inner state of recognized divinity through prayer, meditation, dancing, swimming, walking, feeding the hungry, or enriching the impoverished is immaterial. We will be doubly bereft without some form of practice that connects us, in a caring way, to what begins to feel like a dissolving world.


In addition to contemplating the Hopi message “Know your garden and where is your water,” we must also ask: What is my practice? What is steering this boat that is my fragile human life?
Take some time to contemplate what sort of practice appeals to you. If you are Christian, the words and actions of Jesus are excellent guides; especially the words and actions discovered during the past century in the Gnostic Gospels and the Nag Hammadi Scrolls. If you are an animist, there is all of Existence to be inspired by. Everything has life, everything has spirit! Perhaps singing in the choir of your church or trance dancing with friends is a connector to the All for you. Whatever it is, now is the time to look for it, to locate it, definitely, and to put it to use.

Excerpted from Alice Walker’s We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness (The New Press, 2006). Reprinted by permission of The Wendy Weil Agency, Inc. © 2006 Alice Walker.












Alice Walker's poems, novels, and short stories deal with themes of violence, isolation, troubled relationships, multi-generational perspectives, sexisim and racism.

Suffering Too Insignificant for the Majority to See, Alice Walker, Shambhala Sun, May 2007.

Michael Jackson - Earth Song

"Earth Song"

What about sunrise
What about rain
What about all the things
That you said we were to gain...
What about killing fields
Is there a time
What about all the things
That you said was yours and mine...
Did you ever stop to notice
All the blood we've shed before
Did you ever stop to notice
The crying Earth the weeping shores?

Aaaaaaaaah Aaaaaaaaah
Aaaaaaaaah Aaaaaaaaah

What have we done to the world
Look what we've done
What about all the peace
That you pledge your only son...
What about flowering fields
Is there a time
What about all the dreams
That you said was yours and mine...
Did you ever stop to notice
All the children dead from war
Did you ever stop to notice
The crying Earth the weeping shores

Aaaaaaaaah Aaaaaaaaah
Aaaaaaaaah Aaaaaaaaah

I used to dream
I used to glance beyond the stars
Now I don't know where we are
Although I know we've drifted far

Aaaaaaaaah Aaaaaaaaah
Aaaaaaaaah Aaaaaaaaah
Aaaaaaaaah Aaaaaaaaah
Aaaaaaaaah Aaaaaaaaah

Hey, what about yesterday
(What about us)
What about the seas
(What about us)
The heavens are falling down
(What about us)
I can't even breathe
(What about us)
What about apathy
(What about us)
I need you
(What about us)
What about nature's worth
(ooo, ooo)
It's our planet's womb
(What about us)
What about animals
(What about it)
We've turned kingdoms to dust
(What about us)
What about elephants
(What about us)
Have we lost their trust
(What about us)
What about crying whales
(What about us)
We're ravaging the seas
(What about us)
What about forest trails
(ooo, ooo)
Burnt despite our pleas
(What about us)
What about the holy land
(What about it)
Torn apart by creed
(What about us)
What about the common man
(What about us)
Can't we set him free
(What about us)
What about children dying
(What about us)
Can't you hear them cry
(What about us)
Where did we go wrong
(ooo, ooo)
Someone tell me why
(What about us)
What about babies
(What about it)
What about the days
(What about us)
What about all their joy
(What about us)
What about the man
(What about us)
What about the crying man
(What about us)
What about Abraham
(What was us)
What about death again
(ooo, ooo)
Do we give a damn

Aaaaaaaaah Aaaaaaaaah



Im writing an article about death and wanted to find something that would invoke how heartbroken we are about our planet and the earth changes happening now.Death of a relationship divorce losing something or someone you love very much. After my divorce, there were so many days of absolute grief and wailing. Nothing had ever hurt me so much.I wasnt sure I was gonna make it. Yeah what about us? what about me?

What about all the dreams
That you said was yours and mine...

I have been trying to feel this hurt and this song is a good start. Thanks Micheal. It must of hurt you so much you had to leave us.

Whenever I Say Your Name

This is how I always feel about you... even if ......we have a sacred contract.


Whenever I say your name,
whenever I call to mind your face
Whatever bread's in my mouth,
whatever the sweetest wine that I taste
Whenever your memory feeds my soul,
whatever got broken becomes whole
Whenever I'm filled with doubts that we will be together

Wherever I lay me down,
wherever I put my head to sleep
Whenever I hurt and cry,
whenever I got to lie awake and weep
Whenever I kneel to pray,
whenever I need to find a way
I'm calling out your name

Whenever those dark clouds hide the moon
Whenever this world has gotten so strange
I know that something's gonna change
Something's gonna change

Whenever I say your name,
Whenever I say your name,
I'm already praying, I'm already praying
I'm already filled with a joy that I can't explain
Wherever I lay me down,
wherever I rest my weary head to sleep
Whenever I hurt and cry,
whenever I got to lie awake and weep
Whenever I'm on the floor
Whatever it was that I believed before
Whenever I say your name, whenever I say it loud, I'm already praying

Whenever this world has got me down,
whenever I shed a tear
Whenever the TV makes me mad,
whenever I'm paralyzed with fear
Whenever those dark clouds fill the sky,
whenever I lose the reason why
Whenever I'm filled with doubts that we will be together

Whenever the sun refuse to shine, whenever the skies are pouring rain
Whatever I lost I thought was mine whenever I close my eyes in pain
Whenever I kneel to pray, whenever I need to find a way
I'm calling out your name

Whenever this dark begins to fall
Whenever I'm vulnerable and small
Whenever I feel like I could die
Whenever I'm holding back the tears that I cry

Whenever I say your name,
whenever I call to mind your face,
I'm already praying
Whatever bread's in my mouth,
whatever the sweetest wine that I taste
Wherever I lay me down,
wherever I rest my weary head to sleep
Whenever I hurt and cry,
whenever I'm forced to lie awake and have to weep
Whenever I'm on the floor
Whatever it was that I believed before
Whenever I say your name, whenever I say it loud, I'm already praying

Whenever I say your name,
No matter how long it takes,
One day we'll be together

Whenever I say your name,
let there be no mistake
that day will last forever

Stevie Wonder - Overjoyed

Ah Stevie Wonder...I thought this song would make me cry. I hadnt heard it in a long time. I used to listen to this in my early twenties and think of the person I longed to meet that I would finally call HOME. And how in love I would be and was already in love with long before we had met. There are some connections we have with another soul like that. In such moments if we are lucky to meet them in our lifetime, we connect in the 4th dimension where time and space are irrelevant unimportant ..time and space seem to stop linger slow and is in a ever present NOW.
If such a connection should change form or energy what should remain is a love that is deeper but is not about possession or ownership but more about freedom.
Now there are friends and then there are companeras.Companeras or Companions on the good red road as my teacher would say. And so today I find myself more in love and overjoyed .....

Con Toda Palabra

It is so rare that I meet humans that live a full authentic expression of themselves. I am in awe and long to be in such peoples presence. They are like flowers in full bloom. A flower doesnt hold back its color or scent.It simply IS what IT IS and has no limits in its expression. Its not afraid to be what it is. Such is what this song speaks about. Con toda palabra means with all meaning and expression of THE WORD.



Con toda palabra
Con toda sonrisa
Con toda mirada
Con toda caricia

Me acerco al agua
Bebiendo tu beso
La luz de tu cara
La luz de tu cuerpo

Es ruego el quererte
Es canto de mudo
Mirada de ciego
Secreto desnudo

Me entrego a tus brazos
Con miedo y con calma
Y un ruego en la boca
Y un ruego en el alma

Con toda palabra
Con toda sonrisa
Con toda mirada
Con toda caricia

Me acerco al fuego
Que todo lo quema
La luz de tu cara
La luz de tu cuerpo

Es ruego el quererte
Es canto de mudo
Mirada de ciego
Secreto desnudo

Me entrego a tus brazos
Con miedo y con calma
Y un ruego en la boca
Y un ruego en el alma


Lhasa de Sela (September 27, 1972 – January 1, 2010), also known by the mononym Lhasa, was an American-born singer-songwriter who was raised in Mexico and the United States and divided her adult life between Canada and France.

WOMEN SEX ADDICTS

From http://www.sexualrecovery.com/resources/articles/women.php

Adapted from The National Council on Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity

A fine line exists between what may be considered by most people acceptable sexual behavior and what is sexually addictive or compulsive. This is especially true for women in a society such as ours where sex is often treated as a commodity. Our culture discourages women from being assertive and direct in the expression of their sexual needs, thereby encouraging a less direct and potentially seductive or manipulative style. Some women go beyond these culturally-sanctioned behaviors and use sex compulsively as a means of gaining power and love.

The idea of being "love addicted" may be preferred by sexually addicted women because it fits the romantic, nurturer model of woman, whereas the term "sex addict" connotes an image of a "nymphomaniac", "slut", or "whore". The "love" that these women describe is often an addiction to the yearning or euphoria of romance, but has little to do with love.

The elements of sex addiction in women are the same as in any addiction: compulsion, continuation despite adverse consequences, and preoccupation or obsession.

The following behaviors when taken to excess are suggestive of sex addiction in women:



1. Compulsion, or unsuccessful attempts to control a sexual behavior:

changing relationships to control sexual fantasy and/or activities
swearing off relationships, only to give in to the next "right" lover
breaking promises to self or others to stop abusive fantasy or sexual behaviors
switching to caretaking others, workaholism, overeating, or romance novels to take the place of a sexual relationship
2. Continued behavior despite negative consequences:

unplanned pregnancies, abortions, sexually transmitted diseases, or violence
terror or shame resulting from sexual activities
decreased productivity at work due to sexual behavior with self or others
relationship problems resulting from extramarital affairs or excessive time spent on sex-related activities
depression related to inability to change sexual patterns or their consequences
substance abuse or eating disorders to numb shame and other negative feelings related to sexual activities
3. Obsessive thoughts in planning or obtaining sex:

neglecting family, relationship, or career because of time spent preoccupied with sex or sexual partners
Some sexually addictive behavior patterns in women may include: excessive flirting, dancing, or personal grooming to be seductive; wearing provocative clothing whenever possible [a form of exhibitionism]; changing one's appearance via excessive dieting, excessive exercise, and/or reconstructive surgery to be seductive; exposing oneself in a window or car; making sexual advances to younger siblings, clients, or others in subordinate power positions; seeking sexual partners in high-risk locations; multiple extramarital affairs; disregard of appropriate sexual boundaries, e.g. considering a married man, one's boss, or one's personal physician as appropriate objects of romantic involvement; trading sex for drugs, help, affection, money, social access, or power; having sex with someone they just met at a party, bar or on the internet [forms of anonymous sex]; compulsive masturbation; and exchanging sex for pain or pain for sex. For most people, sexual relationships, fantasies, and activities are normal behavior, but for the sex addict, they cause problems.

Most sexually addicted women have not had parental role modeling for how to have emotional intimacy in nonsexual ways. Research has shown that there often is a combination of rigidity and lack of emotional support in the sex addict's family of origin. The majority of women sex addicts were sexually abused in childhood -- 78% in one study.

Women sex addicts may have long periods of inactivity in their sexual addiction. At such times, they may become sexually anorexic, the opposite end of the sexual dysfunction spectrum. During periods of sexual anorexia, they may become excessive in other areas, for example eating.

Many sexually addicted women have sought professional help for psychological problems, but their sexual compulsivity was never addressed. Therapists who understand sex addiction, believe the client's sexual history, and can help the client stop the behaviors and deal with the underlying feelings, are the most helpful. In addition, 12 step programs such as SLAA, Sex Addicts Anonymous (SAA), Sexual Recovery Anonymous (SRA) and Sexual Compulsives Anonymous (SCA) can help women manage periods of abstinence and can teach them how to integrate healthy sexual behavior into their lives.

Madonna - Frozen

Love is a bird, she needs to fly
Let all the hurt inside of you die
You're frozen
When your heart's not open

Haiku Mind, An Interview With Clark Strand

Clark Strand is a writer, haiku teacher and poet, and formerly a Zen Buddhist monk and senior editor at Tricycle. His first book, Seeds From a Birch Tree: Writing Haiku and the Spiritual Journey, is due out in July from Hyperion. He recently spoke with Tricycle about haiku, writing, and meditation.

Tricycle: What relationship have you discovered between haiku and mediation?

Clark Strand: A certain kind of hokum accompanies much of haiku today. People imagine it to be something other than it is in spiritual terms. But haiku is very, very simple. In the same way that you make yourself very simple by following the breath. You clear your mind, let go of everything else. In the same way, writing haiku takes you right to the heart of the moment. That’s the Zen of haiku, really. Being able to let go of everything and enter into this space. Haiku is seventeen syllables long, so it seems very small.

Tricycle: Do you consider haiku to be part of your meditation practice, or is it a practice unto itself?

Clark Strand: I think it’s a practice unto itself. It’s not a formula that you can just practice and attain the desired results. You have to really throw your heart into it, with no remainder. It’s certainly not scary. It’s just this delightful little poem, really. The haiku mind and the Zen mind are ultimately not different from one another.

Tricycle: Do you have a strict discipline for practicing haiku?

Clark Strand: I did for many years. From the time of my elementary school days, I walked every day—two or three hours a day. Toward the end of high school, I started combining it with haiku, because I found that I could write haiku while I was on these walks. And so then, for almost twenty years, haiku was the thing I did when I was walking. That was my daily discipline. But I didn’t realize that this was a spiritual practice for a long time, I just did it for its own sake, almost as a hobby. I didn’t take it very seriously until I discovered that when everything else was gone, that was what remained. When I left the monkhood, when my first marriage was gone, when my first teacher had died. When there was nothing left, haiku was there—sort of a treasure that had been there all along and I had not taken it to heart.

Tricycle: You have taught haiku for years, and you have taught meditation. Do you see a similar transformation with students of each?

Clark Strand: Sometimes I see deeper transformation in my haiku students. The problem is that when people practice meditation—especially since we’re all almost all converts—of necessity that involves, at least in the early years, a sort of neurotic investment of energy. It doesn’t accomplish anything. You sort of overshoot the mark. My haiku students are able to absorb the teaching and find the teaching within themselves, almost without realizing that they have or that it’s coming.

Tricycle: How does haiku do that?

Clark Strand: It drops you right off at the doorstep [laughs]. You just knock and see for yourself. Sometimes, aiming lower you accomplish more, and haiku is something that, if you like it and practice it as a hobby, you may find that you are doing it all the time. So that this is a meditative awareness training you are engaging in constantly, all day long. How many people can really meditate or follow their breath all day long? How effective is that, really? I don’t know. I tend to think that people often have truer, deeper results when they approach their life or their lifestyle on a realistic level. Haiku does that for a lot of people, I think.

—Mary Talbot

check out how to write Haiki
http://www.wikihow.com/Write-a-Haiku-Poem

Regaining Confidence in Artwork « Super-protective Factor

Regaining Confidence in Artwork « Super-protective Factor: "My daughter asked me to draw a princess for her. She had been drawing herself often, and recently she had stopped. She had begun asking me or my husband to do it for her every time. I knew that she was judging herself harshly, and I wanted to see if she could work through it.
I heard her request and told her, “No, honey. I know you can do this.” She whined and cried, “No, all I do is scribble-scrabble!” I asked her if someone had told her that and she said it came from school. I just stayed with her, letting her know I love her and that I believe in her and I know she can draw a princess. She cried and wailed and screamed “scribble-scrabble!” for 30 minutes. I kept loving her and reaffirming my belief in her. Finally, she picked up a crayon and started drawing. She was happy, willing and confident the rest of night.
I did question myself at first. And of course, I would love to draw a princess, but I know she loves to draw and it was painful to see her being so hard on herself.
Staylistening was a really comfortable way for me to set a limit without feeling like I was walking away or giving myself away. I knew I could really help her through this. It was really great to see her release that hurt – I didn’t want to jump in and save her. I had confidence in both of us.
After her cry, she was happy and confident. She has been drawing princesses, and more, ever since and has been giving them to me as presents. She hasn’t described her work as “scribble-scrabble” since. I even heard her sticking up for her little brother when another kid told him he was coloring scribble-scrabble.
–a mother in San Francisco, CA"
from the blog
http://superprotectivefactor.wordpress.com/
Stories from HAND TO HAND

Rocio Durcal - Amor Eterno

TRUE LOVE FOR ANOTHER COMES FROM SELF LOVE

As a teenager, I used to listen to Rocio's album over and over. Ah, how I spent many days singing along with her on other Juan Gabriel's songs. Juan Gabriel is an openly Mexican gay songwriter and singer who is well loved everywhere. Music is music and people dont care really.
After coming out, I learned so many jotos/as loved her. I wasnt the only one. Mention Rocio to latina lesbians and sale un swoon.
When I did a pilgrimage to Mexico and in San Juan de Los Lagos, Jalisco, we did a special mass and procession for our people. We all pitched in to pay for the church service and the conjunto band of teens to play music for us while we walked around the plaza. When we got to the steps of the church, Mrs.Aguallo, who had lost her husband a few years before, requested they sing "Amor Eterno". This was their song. This is my song for you, my lost one. May you find you way home soon.You are loved. Eres amor.

Tu eres la tristeza de mis ojos
que lloran en silencio por tu amor
me miro en el espejo y veo en mi rostro
el tiempo que he sufrido por tu adios

Obligo a que te olvide el pensamiento
pues siempre estoy pensando en el ayer
prefiero estar dormida que despierta
de tanto que me duele que no estes

Como quisiera ahhh que tu vivieras
que tus ojitos jamas se hubieran
cerrado nunca y estar mirandolos

Amor eterno e inolvidable
tarde o temprano estare contigo
para seguir amandonos

Yo he sufrido tanto por tu ausencia
que desde ese dia hasta hoy no soy feliz
y aunque tengo tranquila mi conciencia
se que pude haber yo hecho mas por ti

Oscura soledad estoy viviendo
la misma soledad de tu sepulcro
tu eres el amor del cual yo tengo
el mas triste recuerdo de Acapulco

Como quisiera ahhh que tu vivieras
que tus ojitos jamas se hubieran
cerrado nunca y estar mirandolos
amor eterno e inolvidable
tarde o temprano estare contigo
para seguir amandonos

Amor eterno (amore eterno) eterno....

Eternal Love
You are the sadness in my eyes
silently crying for your love
I look in the mirror and see my face
the time I have suffered for your goodbye

Force myself to forget the thought
I'm always thinking about it yesterday
I'd rather be asleep than awake
it hurts so much that your are not here with me

Ahhh I'm wanting you to be alive
your eyes never have been
never be closed and watching

Eternal love and unforgettable
sooner or later I will be with you
to continue loving you again

I have suffered so much for your absence
that from that day till today I am not happy
and although I quiet my conscience
I know I could have done more for you

Dark living loneliness
the same solitude of your grave
you are the love of which I have
The saddest memory of Acapulco

Ahhh I'm wanting to be alive with you
your eyes never have been
never be closed and watching
eternal love and unforgettable
sooner or later I will be with you
to continue loving you

Eternal Love (amore eterno) eternal .

Marcell and the Truth YOU SAVED ME

Need I say more?...Te mando mas healing..may you find peace and your way home

As

Dont you know that true love ask for nothing.

This is originally by Stevie Wonder but I also love this version by George Micheal and Mary J Blige.
This is what I define as suavecito/a. I like that Mary J is wearing a suit and that GM is all in his gayness.Its all about staying in love and loving yourself. Its about soul, self respect and self love of all of that you are good or bad. Its not about being somebody's else fake concept of cool or playing somebody's role or script. No formulas. Pure creativity is within them and their gifts.Being themselves...
I love that they are dancing with themselves and each other.
I sing this song all the time. Yeah I sing maybe not perfect but I sing. I just feel like this for the most part in everything I do. You cant take my joy away.. not now... not ever... even when Im sad..joy right here inside me.
Ill be loving you always even when I am being cabrona...maybe loving you means I have to be cabrona. Ill be loving you always..winkwink

AND SO THIS IS CHRISTMAS AND WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?

-John Lennon

I actually wrote this last year at Christmas, Monday, December 29, 2008

I woke up with this song in head and while I may be having a good time with family and friends this Christmas, the question today must be answered. What have I done?
The song is John Lennon’s Christmas Card to his beloved planet. Its more than a “I wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year” tralalalala song. It has the background singers and Yoko Ono singing, “War is over if you want it”
So John gave his planet a song wishing us well. John Lennon also left us reminder that if we really want war to be over, we can have it. So I begin to think of war.
If I think of what my country has done to other people in other countries or even within itself-a civil war I think about civil rights, apartheid and specifically apartheid with indigenous people and their descendents. I think about me and my Mexican people. I think of anti- immigration and gay hate. I think of self hate.I also think of conflicts between me and people in my community. In all my hurt, have I waged war against people, or have I waged war against the hurt between people? I have waged war with the hate and hurt within me and between us. I hate we cant get it together and be together. Togetherness is all I am after. Not together as in I own you. But a belonging. I belong to somebody. Somebody cares a lot about me is all about what I am about!! Have I gone to war against someone or something? Who and what am I fighting? And what is a good fight?
War is over if I want it.
So my war is over with you.
If no one is my enemy. Then what is destroying me and you? What keeps me from loving you? It brings me to my final conclusion that I am my own worst enemy. I have done my best to transform my hurt and I still remain in love. I want to master hurt -both mine and yours . I want to have the mastery to not walk away from a fight, but to face a fight by not fighting at all. I want to fight IT the things that divide us..no not you.
I just want to be able to wave my hand or say the right things to open your heart, or better yet by my mere presence transform hurt. So
I must remain in love to wage war against the hurt between us. This in turn will become effortless and then I will have learned the lesson of
Unconditional Love.
Now, then this turns into a good fight not war.
And so now this is Christmas and my question is:
And what have you done for love?
War is over.

AJUA! ITS BEGINNING TO LOOK LIKE CHREEZMAS!!!

I can eat 6 easy all by myself. But gringo version would be two each. Chubby gringos would eat 6 easy. Im hungry. I love toasting tamales on a griddle where the corn husk is slightly charred with hot coffee or chocolate in the morning with my beloved and family all beside me and good friends.....maybe with some homemade salsista y eggs with chorizo....makes see God all over again.add some mezcal in my coffee...ummm.
Ora Si its beginning to look like CHREEZMAS. I love you baby! Eres Dios!
P.S You can only see God, if you are really in love.

You'll Lose A Good Thing

I awoke the other morning with the song in a dream called,"You'll Lose a Good Thing". At first I didnt think about what it all meant but I started to sing it in the dream and I sounded good of course.So, I think this is a lot on peoples minds or at least on my jedi knights minds lately. Or of the awakened minds I know,we have this to ask of our beloved. If you lose me, you'll lose a GOOD thing.
Jessica, my Jedi knight friend says, MO BETTA.
i had found different versions, but I thought since Im Tejana, how perfect than Freddy Fenders version of soul song. I love it. Here is the version of it and yeah I am a GOOD person.

Archangel Tzaphkiel
B107 - Turquoise/Deep Magenta
Born - 14th December 2009 at 11.00am
The deeper aspects of the Divine Feminine
The watery aspects of the whole of Creation
Dwelling within Binah on the Tree of Life
Ruler of the order of the Angels called Aralin
Guardian of the Akashic Chronicles and their mysteries
The holding of an eternal ocean of compassion
The deeper aspect of intuition, the inner tuition of the heart
The overcoming of obstacles and the healing of strengths
An invitation to inner disarmament in order to reveal the True Gold
The death of what was and the purification of Myrrh
A love that asks us not to "get out of the Way,"
but to become the Way
A glimpse, and a call, from deeper realities and dimensions
An expansion of personal individuation into the collective
Through this bottle She comes to protect the light workers in the temples of their bodies

Dear fRIENDS

The birthing of TZAPHKIEL commenced on the 19th November, the morning after Linda Tucker and I completed the White Lion Aura-Soma® workshop at Dev Aura. In the birthing processes of the Equilibrium bottles, it has been the longest we have experienced so far. When the understanding was given that the birthing would be complete on the 14th December, we realised that this day also corresponds in the Angelic realm to the Angel Ariel, whose name means "Lion of God." In addition, the function of Ariel as "perceiver and revealer of Divine mysteries" further relates to TZAPHKIEL as guardian of the Akashic Records, also called the Book of Life, in which the story of each soul is said to be written. TZAPHKIEL is offering us access to the ancient-future mysteries of Love and Truth so that more of the totality of who we are might become manifest in our present lifetime. As we progress from the energies of B106 to B107, we are approaching the end of a long tunnel that has been filled with shadows. As the new light of personal and interpersonal harmony dawns, we can begin to see the peace that beckons to us from the spaciousness of a transformed future.

Since 14 December corresponds to the heart influence of Ariel, the connection between the Lion and Ariel (which relates to B23 of the Equilibrium bottles) with the emergence of TZAPHKIEL suggests that what comes to us through the birth of B107 is the power and purpose of a compassionate Lion-Hearted Love -- a love come to alchemize us further toward the golden-beingness of personal and collective individuation. Thus, TZAPHKIEL invites us to expand the feeling of love into the purpose and commitment of love. This expanded love holds an ocean of compassion in which we may bring all we have ever been into reconciliation and harmony with all we might become. It is a love that asks us not to get out of the way, but to become the Way. It is a love with the presence to not only energize the little things in our daily activities -- events, encounters and the why and how of what we do -- but also to propel and expand our personal individuation into collaboration with the individuations of those around us, and ultimately to all in the evolution of the collective Earth-Heart.

In our personal journey of individuation we often respond from the mental plane rather than listening more to the star within, the shining essence of our being which speaks to us an "inner tuition" ever reminding us of who we are. As we go along in a direction where decisions are made and perceptions understood mainly from the intellect, the inner light may seem to dim. Thus when we sense a "call" from a more profound level or dimension, at first we may feel an uneasiness or anxiety. The Deep Magenta in TZAPHKIEL is the depth that is being stirred as the soul asks us for deeper acknowledgement. Each of us is a gossamer light-being, fragile within the density of our physicality. We often push at our physicality too hard, and in our striving the gossamer may seem to shrink as we begin to feel our vulnerabilities, which we can mistake for weaknesses. However, when difficulties surface and give us a feeling of being over-exposed, they are actually asking to be healed, and ultimately revealed as our greatest strengths.

When we look at the numerical correspondences of 107, we are given also the sense of a test -- a test in relation to the karmic patterns of B10, the Wheel of Fortune, and B7, the Garden of Gethsemane, the final test of faith. B10 is about the karmic seeds and the consequence of what we plant, and the 7 is the test which is always amplified to maximise our opportunity as we plant the seeds. When these two bottles or understandings come together in the Green/Violet of the Troubadour, B17 (10 + 7), then we are reminded of the colours of the B106, Misty Pale Olive/Misty Lilac, and we see the progression from the muted light of B106 to the soul-stirred illumination of the Turquoise in B107. The B17 Troubadour bottle represents the outward journey of B95, Archangel Gabriel, messenger of the star. This reminds us of the soul/ incarnational star connection that enables us to bring down that which is above us through that which is before us: the information, energy and raw materials of the conditioned patterns needed to commence the transmutation toward the gold within us.

Since we tend to identify more with the dense material of our being, TZAPHKIEL as the Divine Mother comes in compassion to help us birth the light body from within the chemistry of our physical bodies. In this way we are offered the "light-support" needed to respond to the soul-stuff within and above. As we engage the deeper within-realms, the energetic presence of the soul star above us is drawn closer to our physicality. The "base mettle" of our humanity is transformed by the commingling of the human and the divine within us. We ultimately become "temples of light," as the fullness of who we are and what we are here to do is illuminated and expressed.

It might be said that if Truth is the "What" of our purpose, then Love is the "Way" which can illuminate how our Truth is to be expressed. TZAPHKIEL comes to help birth and accelerate us into alignment with our mission and purpose. Change and loss are experiences that create space in us quickly for the taking in of something new. As we become lion-hearted, with the courage to allow rather than resist difficult events or circumstances, we begin to see them as the contraction of energy that necessarily occurs before the bursting forth of new life. And when we are truly ready, some ordinary event will suddenly -- and yet naturally -- occur, leading to a remarkable encounter or opportunity that will seem to draw together all the elements of our creativity and life experiences as if we had been prepared our whole lives for this moment by some prescient future. As this occurs, TZAPHKIEL can help to ease us out of old karmic patterns as well as the contrivances of effort - the pushing and pulling at life to achieve this thing or that. Where we have become over-identified and fatigued by circumstance -- losing sight of our bigger purpose -- the rescue aspect of the Turquoise of B107 invites us into the grace of unfoldment and the wonder of allowing ourselves to simply step into the flow of our fulfilment.

The numerology of B107 further illuminates the rescue aspects of the Turquoise that are related to our individuation. 107 reduces to the single digit 8, the numerical correspondence for manifestation, and we must not forget that this is connected to the whole of the Aura-Soma® ("light-body") system (the letters of Aura-Soma numerically correspond to 8 as well). B8 (Anubis) relates the story of how the heart is weighed against the feather for lightness of being. As this story affirms, when love propels us we often move through our lives with a sense of flying or "floating on air." A heart that is not heard or expressed becomes heavy and wing-tethered. TZAPHKIEL calls forth the questions of Love and Truth that determine how much our hearts are heeded in our life choices: Do we love what we do, or are we doing something other than what we love, or are we unable to put our love into what we do because we are out of love with ourselves?

TZAPHKIEL therefore comes as the Divine Mother to support us with compassion and protection so that we might allow our hearts to return to expressing love through what we do and the way in which we do it. This support is offered in the Clear/Turquoise combination of B86, which is the return journey of the 8, relating to Titania, the Queen of the devas and the fairy realm. Titania's story of "release from misplaced love to a remembrance of her true feelings" invites us to activate the "colour code" of Love and Truth residing within our own hearts to create a life that matters -- a life that is utterly expressive of our own unique being and purpose. To help us with this, Titania's winged devic realm offers to be our intermediaries to the angelic realm in order to bring messages from above to the Earth plane. In this way, the Earth of our personal and collective physicalities, as well as our planetary dwelling, may be healed and evolved by the resonance and acknowledgement that human interaction with the devic world brings. Supporting this interconnection is also part of the mission of TZAPHKIEL.

TZAPHKIEL brings the first bottle to contain the essential oil of myrrh. This month commemorates the long-ago birth of a new Light of the Divine, heralded by the Nativity Star of the Christ. Paradoxically, myrrh -- long associated with funeral preparation -- was one of the three gifts given to the newborn Jesus. This correlates with the concept that the birth of the Christ in physical form began mankind's transition from the "old covenant" to the "new covenant" -- as the birthing of a Love that would ultimately transcend the aspects of dogma and law that held humanity in old Self-defeating patterns. Thus, a new birthing may be said to signify the death of what was so that what will be can be born. Myrrh's anti-microbial properties also suggest a support against subtle energies, as well as societal constructs and manipulations, which can sabotage us as we begin to birth more of the eternal totality of ourselves into the present life.

This energy of TZAPHKIEL, expressing the deepest aspects of the Divine Feminine to nurture and protect, does not have to be pushed or pulled, but rather allowed and accepted as an expression of the I AM of Life Itself ever-birthing within, through and as us. On the outside, it is Love living out loud with lyricism of heart and a joyful roar of purposefulness as we crawl, walk, leap and fly through our days and dreams upon this Earth. It is Love with the lightness of being that is so naturally expressed when it no longer has to strain against fear, unwillingness, shame or feelings of unworthiness that usurp our most precious birthright, which is to be Love Itself. This is indeed the time of emergence for the particular and unique hue of Love-in-Beingness which each of us has come to shine forth into this world, a world which so needs the full Love-and-Truth of us all.

In Love and Light
Mike Booth, with thanks to Terah Cox


AURA-SOMA Products Limited
Tetford, Horncastle, Lincs. LN9 6QB
T: +44 (0) 1507 533581 F: + 44 (0) 1507 533412
E: info@aura-soma.co.uk W: www.aura-soma.net
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Winter Solstice Monday Dec 21 2009

--- On Sat, 12/19/09, eden@13moon.com wrote:

From: eden@13moon.com
Subject: Soul-Stice 3 Year Phaselock with 2012!
To: locamotion1320@yahoo.com
Date: Saturday, December 19, 2009, 7:10 AM

Greetings Tribe of Light

WE ARE FAST APPROACHING SOUL-STICE - THE 3-YEAR PHASELOCK WITH 2012!

Please tune in, esp at the precise moment:
Monday Dec 21 9:47AM PST, Yellow Solar Human day, 13Kan

but also, know that during Solstice the Sun stands still for 3 days
before the Return of the Light - so it is an auspicious window of time!

While these are important times to gather with our family and communities, these are also important times to go deep within ourselves and to let go of the old, making space for new life and new creativity to blossom.

In this regard, I would like to share with you a message I found very inspiring, in the hopes it might also move you to engage in personal ceremony during this 3 day window.

The following message is from my dear friend and cosmic ally, Ariel Spilsbury (author of The Mayan Factor and the 13-Moon Oracle):

"Dear Beloveds,

What a powerful "Duir" door this Winter Solstice offers! Solstice means Sol-sun and stice..stands still. Far from the frenetic energy that is promulgated by the culture, the three days around Winter Solstice are a time to go inward, to "stand still" in the darkest time, to deeply inquire into what shadow baggage is calling to be totally released before you enter into the cycle of the Return of the Light. Some things are true, and sometimes they are truer still. This is one of those times. We have been personally and culturally in a process of dissolution of our baggage for many years now, and THIS solstice is time to look at what single shadow you have carried in your life that is like a "curse" or "spell" that you have "been under", that you are truly ready to take FULL RESPONSIBILITY FOR ITS CREATION AND FULL RESPONSIBILTY FOR ITS RELEASE!

What pattern has come down your family line that you have felt to be completely unable to be changed, so powerful was its "spell"? And by spell i mean the strength and tenacity of the belief system or pattern. Reaction is a portable prison.* Culturally this is a potent time to break the spell and break free! These dark days during Solstice are particularly powerful for that process, so please consider taking time to do a deep contemplation to discover what the spell has been and do an intentional ceremony to release it for yourself and the collective One!

This does not have to be a "heads down, serious, un-fun" process. It can be as easy as asking yourself, "I wonder why I would cast this spell in my life and who is the character in me who is continuing to perpetrate it in my movie and further more "I think i will just make a new casting call and REWRITE THE SCRIPT of my life movie without that pattern!! That could be a lot more fun way to look at doing this process. "How can I animate and amplify the most desirable story/script for my life? What NEW VOW do I want to put into motion in my life?" For moving through the "duir" of the new year, these are questions worth answering in a Solstice Ceremony. As starhawk says in a wonderful chant you can use, "The Wheel is Turning, What Will You Give to the Night? Response: _____________ is gone with the night. Answer that and truly give it to the Dark Mother to be transmuted, that the Divine Child in you may be birthed this Solstice!!!

Starhawk's traditional Solstice Greeting: "This is the night of Solstice, the longest night of the year. Now darkness triumphs; and yet, gives way and changes into light. The breath of nature is suspended; all waits while within the Cauldron, The Dark King is transformed into the Infant Light. We watch for the coming of dawn, when the Great Mother again gives birth to the divine Child Sun, who is the bringer of hope and the promise of summer. This is the stillness behind motion, when time itself stops; the center which is also the circumference of all. We are awake in the night. We turn the Wheel to bring the light. We call the sun from the womb of night. Blessed Be."

"The winter solstice is the shortest day of the year and the longest night, known also as the Mother Night. It is considered to be the start of a new year and the rebirth of the new sun. We honor the power of darkness, the Divine Mother, the womb of creation. Yule is the return of the sun and rebirth of light. It is a time of new beginnings and a great time for dedication to new projects. We celebrate and welcome the rebirth of the sun Goddesses. Winter Solstice is a magical time for visions. Rhiannon rides through the dreams of her people by night, transporting them to the place between the worlds where they can create their own visions, giving them a gift of what they need most, helping them to make their dreams real. Let us collectively dream a new heart-centered world where our visions of Heaven on Earth are manifested."

*******************************************************************

And here is an excerpt from my 2012 website to tune in with the larger picture
http://www.13moon.com/prophecy page.htm


2012 - What's the bottom line?

On a collective scale, we are experiencing a time period in which all that has been unconscious is becoming conscious. All that has been hidden is being revealed. Whether we look to our own lives, or to the state of global affairs, the locks are being thrown off of secrets, the wounds, vulnerabilities, shadows and incongruencies are being exposed. Simultaneously, the truth and depths of our authentic beingness is also being revealed. As the Hopi say, we are living in the Time of Great Purification. Simple words, vast meaning.

We are living in precious and precarious times; exciting, fragile and mysterious. Our human population of 7 billion people is unprecedented. According to Wikipedia, by the year 2000, there were 10 times as many people on Earth as there were 300 years ago. According to 2009 data from the CIA's factbook, the world's human population now increases by 220,980 people every day. We are each drops in this sea of humanity, part of the physical and psychic collective. We are remembering our unity by facing our shared challenges. The crises we now face are bringing us together to inspire our constructive creativity. There is no way out of this prophecy, only a way through.

This is now the time to embrace all that has been dishonored or denied, for it is emerging to be purified and sanctified. All that is manifesting on the inner and outer planes reflects the sacred intensity of these prophetic times. The polarities and imbalances within us and around us are becoming clearer. Love, beauty, co-creation, and compassion permeate this world. Multi-faceted victories of art, community support, healing and evolution shine all around us, illumating the spirited grace of our true nature. Meanwhile, this world is steeped in fear, brutality, pain, and disease. Endless anguish of anxiety, separation, disconnection, confusion, isolation - alongside the toxic realities of egoic, callous greed and corruption, materialism, addiction, and dangerous ignorance. Accountability is required on all levels of our existence. In this process of becoming transparent, we are invited to shed egoic programs of fear and limitation, letting go of and transducing old stories about ourselves and our identities.

The 2012 synchronization is reminding us we are on a journey together; the twists and turns of our lives contribute to the collective manifestation taking place. We need to honor the importance of the closing of this cycle without hyping it up with fear and expectations. We need to let go of focusing on dates in the future and embrace the possibilities that live within us, right now, that are here to guide us into the new pages that we can write with our collective consciousness.

Let's drop the script that 2012 is bringing the end of the world and understand that it is bringing the end of a great cycle. Rather than passive victims, we are here to be conscious participants of this world age transition process. Let us perceive 2012 as a code signalling us that these planetary moments are summoning us to align with our deepest potential and access the deepest dimensions of who we truly are, knowing that as a whole we are enduring a great initiation process to learn how to live in harmony with each other and with Nature.

It seems the fundamental question this prophecy is pointing us to is: How can we live and operate in conscious awareness of our Oneness, our Interdependence? We are being asked to deeply understand that our lives are intimately woven together with All of Life. We must embody this comprehension and let it guide our human efforts.

The bottom line is that this world is ours to shepard. This moment lives within us. We are all instruments of culture. We need to focus our attention on our powers of creativity as human players in this planetary equation. Our mental, spiritual, emotional and physical energies are the vivid colors splashing on the canvas of Life. What is the quality of our collective art? How can we refine our contribution?

This is no time to try to figure things out with the mind, but rather to learn to listen from the heart. The more conscious we become of our potential to be conscious, the more our potential finds us; our self-reflective awareness deepens and flowers.

We need to support ourselves in processing the trauma of these times. Rather than furthering the trauma by numbing out and being indifferent, it is important we face the pain and tragedy of our world that is crying out. The medicine this can offer comes when we let it break our hearts into even deeper compassion, opening the channels for more holistic responses.

Ultimately, we can only find a harmonious way through this passage by finding our hearts. That is the message. Why? Because our heart is naturally tuned to the unity of all of life, and therefore lives in respect of it. By finding genuine compassion, we access genuine wisdom. As Jose Arguelles says: "We are the Peacemakers we've been waiting for!"

The moments unfold,
bringing tests and opportunties.
The mystery blooms in our heart,
with petals of innocence and stalks of wisdom.
We shine as fellow rays of light
in an emerging garden of loving awareness.
Basking in each others' abundant colors,
we are One under the Sun.



ALL BLESSINGS OF COURAGE, JOY AND CLEAR KNOWING TO YOU IN THESE POTENT TIMES!
Eden Sky, Red Self-Existing Skywalker

SOLSTICE SYNCHRONIZATION: A New World Is The Song of Heart: http://galacticculture.wordpress.com/


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Grand Elder Grandfather Cirilo Perez Oxlaj | Shift of the Ages

Grand Elder Grandfather Cirilo Perez Oxlaj | Shift of the Ages

Changing Our Attitude Toward Pain

From the book, “Practicing Peace in Times of War” by Pema Chodron -An excerpt from the chapter Changing Our Attitude Toward Pain

According to Buddhist teachings, difficulty is inevitable in human life. For one thing, we cannot escape the reality of death. But there is also the realities of aging, of illness, of not getting what we want, and of getting what we don’t want. These kind of difficulties are facts of life. Even if you were the Buddha himself, if you were a fully enlightened person, you would experience death, illness, aging, and sorrow at losing what you love. All of these things would happen to you. If you got cut or burned, it would hurt.

But the Buddhist teachings also say that this is not really what causes misery in our lives. What causes misery is always trying to get away from the facts of life, always trying to avoid pain and seek happenings-this sense of ours that there could be security and happiness available to us if we could only do the right thing.
In this very lifetime we can do ourselves and this planet a great favor and turn this very old way of thinking upside down. As Shantideva points out, suffering has a great deal to teach us. If we use the opportunity when it arises, suffering will motivate us to look for answers. Many people, including myself, came to the spiritual path because of deep unhappiniess.Suffering can also teach us empathy for others who are in the same boat. Furthermore, suffering can humble us. Even the most arrogant among us can be softened by the loss of someone dear.

Yet it is so basic in us to feel that things should go well for us and that if we start to feel depressed, lonely, or inadequate, there’s been some kind of mistake, or we have lost it. In reality, when you feel depressed, lonely, betrayed, or any unwanted feelings, this is an important moment on the spiritual path. This is where real transformation can take place.

As long as we are caught up in always looking for certainty and happiness, rather than honoring the taste and smell and quality of exactly what is happening, as long as were always running away from discomfort, were going to be caught in a cycle of unhappiness and disappointment, and we feel weaker and weaker. This way of seeing helps us to develop inner strength. And what’s especially encouraging is the view that inner strength is available to us at just the moment when we think we have hit bottom, when things are at their worst.

Instead of asking ourselves, “How can I find security and happiness?” we could ask ourselves, “Can I touch the center of my pain?” Can I sit with suffering, both yours and mine, without trying to make it go away? Can I stay present to the ache of loss or disgrace-disappointment in all its many forms-and let it open me?” This is the trick.