“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.” Friedrich Nietzsche
I like the sensual undulating ribbon dance of this little creek at the lagoon.
“All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.” Friedrich Nietzsche.
I can’t disagree with that!
“The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.” Friedrich Nietzsche ·
For me, nature IS art and I’m grateful for it, especially this lagoon, one of my happy places.
Aloha and mahalo…
Year’s end often brings reflection and this book about light is a gratifying metaphor for ending 2022 and starting fresh with a full bowl of love and light in 2023.
The symbol of a bowl of light holds a relevant message to help us explore our limitations, how we can commit to releasing them, and learn to live in harmony.
I wrote about this book in Giving Thanks and since then, I received it as a thoughtful gift and I’m enjoying it so much that I wanted to share it with everyone.
In 1996, a revered Hawaiian elder befriended an American anthropologist, and from their rare and intimate rapport, something miraculous emerged. Through the words and teachings of the kahuna wisdom-keeper Hale Makua, Dr. Wesselman was gifted with an enhanced perspective into the sacred knowledge of ancient Hawaii.
Author Hank Wesselman, PhD, is a paleoanthropologist and shamanic teacher who has worked with noted anthropologists investigating the mysteries of human origins in Africa.
Before his passing, elder Makua encouraged Dr. Wesselman to convey much of what had passed between them to the wider world, giving him permission to share his spiritual knowledge, including:
The Bowl of Light—how we can restore our natural divine radiance
• The three directives of the spiritual warrior—love with humility, live with reverence, and know with self-discipline
• Rituals for communing with nature, receiving wisdom from the spirit world, purifying our consciousness, and more
• The Ancestral Grand Plan—exploring the path our ancestors set in motion millennia ago, and how the Plan is playing out across the world today
***
Along with the the ancient Hawaiian practice of Ho’oponopono about forgiveness, there’s a lot of wisdom we can gain from native Hawaiian culture.
“I’m sorry, Please forgive me, Thank you, I love you.”
***
I started to research more of the island’s ancestral traditions and discovered the Huna Principles from Kauai, one of the most beautiful places on this planet.
Ho’ihi . . . Respect
The seven principles of Huna were passed down as part of another Hawaiian family’s oral tradition – the Kahili family of Kauai and these have been presented in a contemporary form by Serge Kahili King. The story of the Bowl of Light provides an illustration of these Huna principles in action as follows:
The story teaches us to become aware of how the choices we make can affect us for better or worse. It is valuable to become aware of the extent that your own bowl is comprised of stones or light. Awareness provides the starting point for change.
We can limit and constrain ourselves to such a point that it is as though we stop growing, we get stuck. When we experience, and hang onto, emotions such as fear, anger and jealousy, it is like we are dropping another stone into our bowl which means we experience less light. We can also free ourselves from such limitations and flourish. We have the ability to release limitations.
We choose where to focus- either towards empowering feelings and behaviours or away from feelings and behaviours that disempower us. The choice is ours in any given moment.
The light is always there, even if at times it seems to be fully obscured by stones. If we so choose, change can be quick and it is never too late to change. We can simply turn the bowl upside down and let go of the all the stones and make room for the light.
Love and heart-centered practices increase our strength and well-being. To love is to be happy with – we experience light to the extent that we focus on aloha – light and stone cannot occupy the same space. To the extent that we have light in our bowl, we are connected to our true nature and spirit. We are all connected and our own individual light contributes to lighting the world for everyone.
We have the power to make changes in our life for the better. It is up to us to take responsibility and be the authority in our own life.
The tale is a metaphor for living effectively. It reminds us how we can be pono – in a state of harmony with oneself, others, nature and life itself.
Pete Dalton ©2020. This article first appeared on Aloha International.
Another month, another season, another year gone!
Where did the time go?
I wrote a spur-of-the-moment haiku to celebrate the first of December. While it was sunny and a balmy eighty degrees last week, the weather since turned cold and overcast and I’m freezing. My creative writing professor should be happy that I can still turn out a passable 5-7-5.
On this gloomy day
Slate sky; the clouds heavily
Pregnant with iced rain.
Dr. Seuss wrote this about December, too…
“How did it get so late so soon?
It’s night before it’s afternoon.
December is here before it’s June.
My goodness how the time has flewn.
How did it get so late so soon?”
Joni Mitchell and The Circle Game, all about seasons. It’s definitely the mood of the day.
“Time and tide wait for no man”
We can’t stop the passage of time nor the movement of the tides, no matter how much we might want to halt the inexorable inevitability.
This proverb appeared about 1395 in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Prologue to the Clerk’s Tale but I also found a source that said it was recorded as early as 1225 and is reputedly a quote from Saint Mahrer. However, it’s also believed that the expression time and tide wait for no man might be older than that.
My son sent me this photo while he was at Golden Gardens Park in Ballard, Washington on beautiful Shilshole Bay.
It depicts the lowest tide in decades, four feet lower than average.
We have the same exact phone but he takes better pictures than I do, and of course he likes to send them to me to show me what I’m missing.
It’s so true–time and tide wait for no one.
From the wonderful people at Project Coyote, download a free ebook to learn more about the beautiful songdog: Coyotes in our Midst:
https://projectcoyote.org/resources/books/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=8962dc96-ad12-412d-9113-cb717cf36b2c
And definitely watch this video encouraging the concept of compassionate coexistence:
Happy New Year! Best wishes to everyone for a safe, healthy, abundant, and JOYFUL 2022.
Since my DIL is a neuroscientist, anything that relates to the brain and how it works is a topic of conversation around Casa de Enchanted Seashells.
According to Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Health, Happiness, and Wisdom, we can change our mind–to change our brain–to change our mind.
The beauty of self-directed neuroplasticity means we really can teach old dogs new tricks.
Author Rick Hanson’s premise is that if we intentionally choose positive thoughts, we can change our life for the better.
Here’s an excerpt about JOY:
Internalizing the Positive
1. Turn positive facts into positive experiences. Good things keep happening all around us, but much of the time we don’t notice them; even when we do, we often hardly feel them. Someone is nice to you, you see an admirable quality in yourself, a flower is blooming, you finish a difficult project — and it all just rolls by. Instead, actively look for good news, particularly the little stuff of daily life: the faces of children, the smell of an orange, a memory from a happy vacation, a minor success at work, and so on. Whatever positive facts you find, bring a mindful awareness to them — open up to them and let them affect you. It’s like sitting down to a banquet: don’t just look at it — dig in!
2. Savor the experience. It’s delicious! Make it last by staying with it for 5, 10, even 20 seconds; don’t let your attention skitter off to something else. The longer that something is held in awareness and the more emotionally stimulating it is, the more neurons that fire and thus wire together, and the stronger the trace in memory.
“Focus on your emotions and body sensations, since these are the essence of implicit memory. Let the experience fill your body and be as intense as possible. For example, if someone is good to you, let the feeling of being cared about bring warmth to your whole chest.
“Pay particular attention to the rewarding aspects of the experience — for example, how good it feels to get a great big hug from someone you love. Focusing on these rewards increases dopamine release, which makes it easier to keep giving the experience your attention, and strengthens its neural associations in implicit memory. You’re not doing this to cling to the rewards — which would eventually make you suffer — but rather to internalize them so that you carry them inside you and don’t need to reach for them in the outer world.
“You can also intensify an experience by deliberately enriching it. For example, if you are savoring a relationship experience, you could call up other feelings of being loved by others, which will help stimulate oxytocin — the ‘bonding hormone’ — and thus deepen your sense of connection. Or you could strengthen your feelings of satisfaction after completing a demanding project by thinking about some of the challenges you had to overcome.
3. Imagine or feel that the experience is entering deeply into your mind and body, like the sun’s warmth into a T-shirt, water into a sponge, or a jewel placed in a treasure chest in your heart. Keep relaxing your body and absorbing the emotions, sensations, and thoughts of the experience.”
If you’re searching for something to read, here’s a suggestion…
From Pam Jenoff, author of The Orphan’s Tale, The Lost Girls of Paris is a remarkable yet tragic story of friendship and resolute spirit by a ring of female spies trained in Britain during World War II.
Way more brave than I could ever hope to become, this book is vividly rendered and inspired by true events. Jenoff shines a light on the incredible heroics of these spies and weaves a mesmerizing tale of courage, sisterhood, and the great strength of women to survive almost anything in the face of danger.
But really, who knows how we might answer the call to save our children from another Nazi-like regime, right? As we all aware, mama bears are tenacious and fierce!
This time I was unlucky enough to be in the middle although in sniffing distance of first class. I cherished the almost princess moment with my wistful view of the curtains that separated THEM in their rarified air from US, the hoi polloi.
To my left was an older-than-me male; slightly obnoxious. He moved around a lot, didn’t settle down, and then THIS: he attempted to man-usurp the shared armrest.
OH NO HE DINT.
I might be all of five feet tall and my feet might BARELY reach the floor, but NOBODY has the right to hog the shared armrest. Bad form, lack of etiquette, and not on my watch, buddy.
I strategically waited until he reached down to get something from his under-the-seat bag and I FIRMLY planted MY arm on the arm rest. HAH! I thought to myself, that’ll teach him. I let him have it back after I felt my point had been made and received.
He finally decided to nap and covered himself with his jacket which invaded MY territory, so I shoved it back over to his side- that’s when I got “Sorry.” After about fifteen minutes or twenty minutes, I must confess that I took a certain amount of pleasure in waking him up so I could use the restroom. Just a CERTAIN amount of joy, not a lot. Not too much. (Tee hee.)
Harrumph. Don’t ever mess with a short curly haired girl, old man.
To my right was a young guy who had an edition of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian wedged in the little pocket attached to the seat in front. It stared at him, unblinking, willing him to pick it up and read, but for two hours he resisted the allure of McCarthy and the urge to absorb those tortuous words. First he tweeted A LOT and then he fell asleep, woke up, and cracked open the novel. I wonder if he had any idea what he was getting himself into, and felt like telling him this might NOT the best time to read McCarthy as he’s the antithesis of a light, not-too-demanding author, but I kept my own counsel this time. His mistake, though. Cormac is the stuff of nightmares.
On the other hand, I was firmly immersed in one of my fave authors, Sophie Kinsella. This time it was her 2017 book, My Not So Perfect Life. It was like drinking the perfect cocktail on a balmy summer evening. Kinsella rarely disappoints and I was immediately drawn into the characters, their situations, and relationships. Like all great reads (in my opinion) it ended with the main character finding her happily-ever-after true love.
I read nonstop until we landed.
Home. There’s no place like it.
As we transition into another Mercury Retrograde (whatever that means) and another super moon, this Sunday finds me in a sort of melancholy mood. The Full Flower Moon coincides with a total lunar eclipse in some areas, so a lot is happening above us.
As above, so below.
These words from Rainer Maria Rilke resonate deep within my heart.
“So you mustn’t be frightened, if a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you have ever seen; if an anxiety, like light and cloud-shadows, moves over your hands and over everything you do.
You must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall.
Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don’t know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going?
Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change.
If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better.”
Have a lovely Sunday, everyone!
I love jewelry boxes. I love them so much that I wanted to pass on the sweet tradition and sent baby Char a ballerina musical jewelry box fit for a princess that plays a tune from Swan Lake. Char wore a rainbow colored tutu for Halloween, so it’s definitely this Grandma’s job to nurture an early appreciation for dance.
It turned out that she loved it so much (and so did Theo) that I had to send him one too, only his featured characters that twirl around from Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince and plays Mozart’s Eine Klene Nachtmusik. It’s about the right time for him to read that book, too.
I also found a new one for me (of course), and it’s better in real life than the photos portrayed on Amazon. The green is truly a beautiful background for the gold dragon. This one doesn’t play music but I have another one that does, so I’m content.
Now we’re all happily playing with our new boxes…a thousand miles away from each other.
Enchanted Seashells by Princess Rosebud 