Spring's Spirituality

 I am thinking this morning of the simple spiritual things I experience in nature.

The lower meadow needs mowing. The grasses have grown to twelve or more inches. It has been so wet that the last time I drove my mower tractor into the meadow I got stuck for two days. It will have to wait.

I did trim some Wisteria vines and pulled some ambient seedlings from the various house gardens and planted Petunias.

I again thought of man’s proximity and connection to nature’s constant spring birth and how we attempt to manipulate the natural beauty of spontaneous chaos into the patterned form of our symmetry and color.

I watched and listened to the bubbling warble of the House Wrens building their nests in a tiny birdhouse hanging in the Hackberry Tree over the Spirit Garden and in the Buddha Garden on the other side of the house. Their little brown bodies belie their feisty demeanor and territorial defense.

In the eves and beams of a large portico over the front entrance is a Robbins nest tucked in the center of a hanging fern; they built it in three days. A Turtle Dove is nesting on another eve. The Doves are squatters in an old Robins nest.

I am reminded again, as I am so often of Shakespeare’s line. “One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.” I hope your spring days are just as profound.

Overweight, Fat, Obese

So there I was sitting in a Coldwater Creek store encouraging my wife to choose some gifts for Mother’s Day.

Most of these women’s stores have a couple of easy chairs in which men can sit so that they can do their thing while their wives or loved one’s shop. Some guys read, some play with their I phone’s or Blackberry’s and some snooze. I just sat and I watched!

I was comfortable where I was. I’m old enough to not be embarrassed anymore or need to immerse myself in an innocuous activity or a fingernail check when I am in a feminine environment foreign to my every day experience.

Lingerie departments in big chain stores or in specialty stores like Victoria Secret stores are just a couple of places where I once would wait at a safe place outside the store or department.

I am sitting in this store and just observing the young women who are picking, pawing, and holding up various garments to their upper or lower bodies to see if it’s a go or if it’s a put back on the rack.

I have always been a man who appreciates the female form especially the derriere of the species. Some men are legmen and some men are breast men and I am the other location of appreciation on the female body.

What I saw in my sitting observations was not pleasant. Plump to large to very large to huge Gluteus Maximus muscles stuffed into overly tight jeans that did not nicely accessorize the young female form. It’s OK to be a big person, but not to amortize it in tight pants; it seems that defeats the purpose of slimming accessoriziation.

This is true for guys too; do we not see our bulges, our undulating rolls of excess fat, and the disproportion of middle to the top and to the legs?

The basic fact is that too many young Americans, male and female, are fat. Too fat! If we want to be healthy, svelte, trim and all the other adjectives of slim, we need to exercise and eat better.

A friend of mine recently sent me a cartoon depiction of Michelangelo’s David. The caption was “David” after two months on an American fast food diet.

I am not condemning fat people. I am suggesting there is an alternative life style that may help eliminate the condition.

The Power of Thought

Note to Congress:

Please take note of a Reuters report from Pakistan.

1. A senior Pakistani official says the U.S. troops killed Bin Laden in cold blood.
2. A Pakistani army statement threatened to halt cooperation (with the U.S.) if we repeated a violation of sovereignty.

Note to Pakistan:

Go ahead! There are many in the U.S. who find your integrity suspect, who think you have been duplicitous in your efforts to find Bin Laden, who think you are pandering to both sides for your own agenda, and who think the billion dollars and more we send to you each year is a waste of our tax payer dollars and it should cease.

Note to self and all:

There are many consequences that none of us know about or possibly even understand that effect the security of the United States by not buying off Pakistan each year or by cutting and running from Pakistani involvement.

If the current Pakistani government fails and radical contingents gain power…we need to remember that Pakistan is a nuclear power.

It’s complicated. So what’s an alternative?

If we choose to stay the same, we stay the same. If we choose a higher path of understanding and a willingness to be intuitive, then solutions will be presented to the little minds of humankind that will take us to a spiritual level where global ideologies will be comforted by diversity, but not confrontation.

It’s a thought!

Photos of a Dead Man

The selective clamor now from some individuals and from some in Congressional authority is to publically see the photos of a dead Osama Bin Laden.

I can understand it from Al Qaeda sympathizers for they have lost a demonic leader and would love the pictures to incite and condemn and build a martyred cause to attack anything American.

I cannot understand it from some American citizens, politicians and the public pulpit opinionates whose very breath into the partisan microphones they control drip with distrust of anything the Obama administration says or does.

I would guess there are probably a hundred people or more in the American military, including the members of Seal Team Six and their command and control personal who have seen the dead body and body wounds of Bin Laden.

There are many notable and distinguished Americas serving in posts and positions in the Obama Administration that were there in the situation room or at the CIA headquarters to watch the operation in Pakistan.

Do you think that any of those people, including members of Seal Team Six, would lie just to say we got Bin Laden?   Good sense and logic tells you no they would not. Personal integrity is important to all of these people and we have no reason to question it.

Those who want to see the pictures of a dead man are voyeurs with a penchant for ghoulish photographs. Grow up!

The South and Tornadoes

The few images of need still coming out of the South are powerful. They affect us all.

Along with the tornado destruction of homes, crumbled buildings, and bodies, come the tears of the living. Sometimes they come in sobs, sometimes in wails of disbelief. The old cry for the loss of memories, hoping for the strength to start again. The very young cry not fully understanding the new memory of loss.

There is worry from all, especially for and from the children for their security of a familiar bed or toy vanished with an ill wind that claimed so many lives. Parents do what they can to comfort the little ones, to reassure, but the eyes always mirror the fearful heart.

Right now Alabama and beyond scream, you can feel it, as victims search for their lives in the puzzle of rubble and find yesterday's peace is tomorrow's uncertainty.

As we hear the stories of those in need, as we become numbed by the statistics of loss, we cannot feel secure because we have normalcy, because we have shelter or we have food, or because it didn't happen here.

Instantaneous response to need defines true service. Despite the difficulties the victims of both political and nature's wrath must know they have not been forgotten by the collective healing spirit of what we call community...of what we call the humanity of humankind.

Osama Bin Laden

Bin Laden is dead! How we choose to react to the news of his death is what is interesting in our evolution as a society and in our personal attainment and awareness of spiritual oneness.

Osama Bin Laden was filled with hate and he spread his brand of funded terrorism to many and any throughout the world. He killed Muslims and Christians alike. It didn't matter as long as his personal vendetta was assuaged with the blood and carnage of the causes, culture and people he hated.

I don't regret or mourn his death. I pity his life's choices. He was born into privilege as one of many siblings of a prominent Saudi Arabian family. And like all despots and inhumane rogues of history something triggered a dispassionate detachment from the innate God-goodness that is within each created soul who incarnates into this earthly environment.

To me that is sadness for if one of us succeeds via good works then in some small way all of us succeed. The corollary is also true. If one of us chooses hate, prejudice, and the infliction of terror on humanity as a life choice then again in some small way all of us are diminished in our collective advancement toward the Oneness of All That Is.

While I welcome his death for what his life perpetrated on so many, I must also acknowledge that all judgment belongs to a Higher Authority whose infinite understanding and omniscience of our human failings far exceeds anything we can conceive.

There is another issue in all of this that is troubling. Pakistan. Despite it's public pronouncements that it is fighting terrorism, its actions belie that statement. Some official factions in Pakistan have aided and abetted Bin Laden and Al Qaeda for years. Few in the world believe Bin Laden could live in comfort with his family merely 40 miles from the Pakistani capitol and not have some collusion with the government.

We, the USA, give them billions of aid dollars each year for any number of reasons and it is time we stopped and demanded accountability.

A Neighbor

A neighbor died the other day! He lived in a rooming house not too far away. He stopped to talk to me a few years ago, but I don't remember his name. I wish I did. Death always needs the dignity of a name. He drove a cab for a living.

He was a young man probably in his early forties. He was heavy, somewhat unkept, but always friendly. He'd drive his cab past my house everyday and, if I were out, we'd wave to one another.

I don't know what the cause of his death was, but I was saddened when I heard it.

There are many souls like this man who live quiet lives, unassuming and going about their business doing everyday jobs that serve their fellow citizens. Jobs of service. Jobs without acclaim. Jobs rarely appreciated. Often when these souls pass to that other place few notice and fewer still mourn the passing.

e.e. cummings once wrote: "Small service is true service...even the daisy by the shadow it casts protects the lingering due drop from the sun."

It is my belief that angels hide in commonality. They do so to give the rest of us the opportunity to be gracious, to be empathetic, to be loving, compassionate and caring. I don't know about you, but I've missed many humanitarian opportunities from angels that have crossed my life's path.

The death of my neighbor reminds me that I need to try harder.