Food for Soul

Information Please

When I was quite young, my father had one of the first telephones in our neighborhood. I remember well the polished old case fastened to the wall. The shiny receiver hung on the side of the box.
I was too little to reach the telephone, but used to listen with fascination when my mother talked to it. Then I discovered that somewhere inside the wonderful device lived an amazing person - her name was "Information, Please" and there was nothing she did not know. "Information, Please" could supply anybody's number and the correct time.

My first personal experience with this genie-in the-bottle came one day while my mother was visiting a neighbor. Amusing myself at the tool bench in the basement, I whacked my finger with a hammer. The pain was terrible, but there didn't seem to be any reason in crying because there was no one home to give sympathy.

I walked around the house sucking my throbbing finger, finally arriving at the stairway. The telephone! Quickly, I ran for the foot stool in the parlor and dragged it to the landing. Climbing up, I unhooked the receiver in the parlor and held it to my ear. "Information, Please," I said into the mouthpiece just above my head.

A click or two and a small clear voice spoke into my ear, "Information."

"I hurt my finger," I wailed into the phone. The tears came readily enough now that I had an audience.

"Isn't your mother home?" came the question. "Nobody's home but me." I blubbered.

"Are you bleeding?" the voice asked.

"No," I replied. "I hit my finger with the hammer and it hurts." "Can you open your icebox?" she asked. I said I could.

"Then chip off a little piece of ice and hold it to your finger," said the voice.

After that, I called "Information, Please" for everything. I asked her for help with my geography and she told me where Philadelphia was. She helped me with my math. She told me my pet chipmunk, that I had caught in the park just the day before, would eat fruit and nuts.

Then, there was the time Petey, our pet canary died. I called "Information, Please" and told her the sad story. She listened, then said the usual things grown-ups say to soothe a child, but I was inconsolable.

I asked her, "Why is it that birds should sing so beautifully and bring joy to all families, only to end up as a heap of feathers on the bottom of a cage?"

She must have sensed my deep concern, for she said quietly, "Paul, always remember that there are other worlds to sing in."

Somehow I felt better.

Another day I was on the telephone. "Information, Please."

"Information," said the now familiar voice.

"How do you spell fix?" I asked.

All this took place in a small town in the Pacific Northwest. When I was nine years old, we moved across the country to Boston. I missed my friend very much. "Information, Please" belonged in that old wooden box back home, and I somehow never thought of trying the tall, shiny new phone that sat on the table in the hall.

As I grew into my teens, the memories of those childhood conversations never really left me. Often, in moments of doubt and perplexity I would recall the serene sense of security I had then. I appreciated now how patient, understanding, and kind she was to have spent her time on a little boy. A few years later, on my way west to college, my plane put down in Seattle. I had about half an hour or so between planes. I spent 15 minutes on the phone with my sister, who lived there now. Then without thinking what I was doing, I dialed my hometown operator and said, "Information, Please." Miraculously, I heard the small, clear voice I knew so well, "Information." I hadn't planned this but I heard myself saying, "Could you please tell me how to spell fix?"

There was a long pause. Then came the soft spoken answer, "I guess your finger must have healed by now." I laughed. "So it's really still you," I said. "I wonder if you have any idea how much you meant to me during that time."

"I wonder," she said, "if you know how much your calls meant to me. I never had any children, and I used to look forward to your calls."

I told her how often I had thought of her over the years and I asked if I could call her again when I came back to visit my sister.

"Please do," she said. "Just ask for Sally." Three months later I was back in Seattle. A different voice answered, "Information."

I asked for Sally.

"Are you a friend?" She asked.

"Yes, a very old friend," I answered.

"I'm sorry to have to tell you this," she said. "Sally has been working part-time the last few years because she was sick. She died five weeks ago."

Before I could hang up she said, "Wait a minute. Did you say your name was Paul?"

"Yes," I replied.

"Well, Sally left a message for you. She wrote it down in case you called. Let me read it to you."

The note said, "Tell him I still say there are other worlds to sing in. He'll know what I mean."

I thanked her and hung up. I knew what Sally meant. Never underestimate the impression you may make on others. Whose life have you touched today?

Author Unknown

Love Always
mudra

We Are All the Same
Listen to the reeds as they sway apart;
Hear them speak of lost friends.
At birth, you were cut from your bed,
Crying and grasping in separation.
Everyone listens, knowing your song.

You yearn for others who know your name,
And the words to your lament.
We are all the same, all the same,
Longing to find our way back;
Back to the one, back to the only one.

- RUMI

Love Always
mudra

Courage

Courage is the joyful and fearless assumption of unconditional existence. The mark of a fully engaged soul is the ability to step into new, uncharted territory. In doing so, the individual relies on the intelligence and guidance intrinsic in Life itself. Knowing that nothing can stop us, we passionately embrace our objective, even if it means accepting changes to ourselves in so doing.

All of the great Masters speak of this. The theme of stepping forward with faith is found in every tradition the world over, from the jungle tribes to the monks on mountain tops. Willingness to try something new, to open our hearts, actions, and intentions to new possibilities is incontrovertible proof of Life's embrace.

Life, itself, is the message of the heart. In the drumbeat of our heart, we are reminded of our life from our first waking breath to our last thought of the day. In Life, we are equipped with the innate ability to try new experiences and expressions. Our souls are filled with glee as we expand our scope. There is no person who does not have the ability to grow and who is not moved by the desire for increasing engagement in creation.

http://www.reallyfree.org/archives.html

Love Always
mudra

Seven Wonders Of The World

A group of young students was given an assignment to do in class...
They were asked to list what they thought were presently the Seven Wonders of the World.

Although there was some disagreement, the following got the most votes:

1. Great Pyramids of Egypt
2. Taj Mahal
3. Grand Canyon
4. Panama Canal
5. Empire State Building
6. St. Peter's Basilica
7. Great Wall of China

While gathering the votes, the teacher noted that one quiet student hadn't turned in her paper yet. So, she asked the girl if she was having trouble with her list.

The girl replied, "Yes, a little. I couldn't quite make up my mind because there were so many."

The teacher said, "Well, tell us what you have, and maybe we can help."

The girl hesitated, and then in a soft voice read,
"I think the Seven Wonders of the World are:"

1. "to touch"
2. "to taste"
3. "to see"
4. "to hear"

She hesitated a little, and then added,

5. "to feel"
6. "to laugh"
7. "and to love!"

The room was suddenly silent - you could've heard a pin drop.

- Source Unknown -


Love always
mudra

Burning Love

By PETER SAGAL

About two months after we met, I said to my future wife, “I think we should live together.”

“I bet you do, little man,” Beth said. The little man was not spoken aloud, but still, all men within a 10-mile radius reflexively flinched as the shock wave hit them. “Well, I’ve played house before,” she went on, “and never again. Not without a real commitment.” Then, her side-mounted eye lasers burned off my hair.

But I didn’t want to “play house”; I wanted to spend every moment possible with this beguiling woman. Plus, I wanted to stop paying rent on my one-bedroom duplex for the sole benefit of my two cats. Beth was deathly allergic to them and couldn’t even enter my place, and so I had largely ceased to live there. Every day (O.K., every other day. Or every third day) I would return to my apartment in the midmorning to face questioning, sad looks from the cats.

“Where you been, man?” they seemed to say. “Is it us?”

I would assure them there was nothing wrong and slink back to the house where Beth rented a bedroom. Once, I came home close to lunch, and the cats were lint-rolling their own hair off the couch. “Whatever it takes,” they seemed to say. This did not actually happen, of course. In reality, they were only able to bat the lint-roller around, fruitlessly, with their nonprehensile paws. But I sensed their intent.

Then, just two weeks after my cohabitation proposal was shot down, Beth and I got in our cars after a night out and agreed, as per usual, to meet back at her house. I fleetingly thought of my cats. Maybe I’d bring them some flowers, or a small dead rodent. Tomorrow.

I was at the far end of Beth’s block before I realized I must have driven past her house. This seemed strange, but I am absent-minded and easily distracted, so I just turned around and went back. I missed it again. I turned around to make a third trip down the block, a slower pass, counting off the house numbers. Her house, as it turns out, was still there. The reason I hadn’t noticed it was because all the lights were out, and the usually yellow house was now black.

I parked, walked up to the door and noticed that somebody, perhaps as an art project, had decided to toss most of the first-floor furniture through the smashed windows and onto the lawn, where the various pieces had melted chair- or sofa- or table-shaped holes in the snow. I walked carefully through the broken front door. The house looked as if every surface had been spray-painted black by a group of efficient but unimaginative graffiti artists.

As it turned out, Beth had returned home herself moments before to discover that her housemate had been stripping paint with steel wool and flammable solvent and had set off a spark. I eventually found her in the house next door, where she was trying to comfort her housemate, who was unharmed but rocking in place in the manner of Job.

This, of course, was my chance.

“You’re coming with me,” I said. Since her own bed was now merrily glowing red on the inside like one of those electric fake fireplace logs, she agreed.

I drove the still-stunned Beth over to my apartment and left her waiting in the car for a moment while I shooed the cats into the back stairway. Eventually, I ushered Beth up, and she changed into some of my old sweat pants, climbed into my bed and concentrated on trying to breathe. And there, with occasional changes of clothing and posture, she has remained ever since.

Our daughters love this story because to them, there’s nothing more romantic than a guy rescuing his inamorata from a burning building. They like to invite their grammar-school boyfriends over and have me light a match so that they can reject anyone who flinches.

The cats, meanwhile, were adopted by the woman who lived downstairs. She took a 1960s commune approach to cat ownership, meaning that they were allowed to roam anywhere they liked, and most often they roamed up the stairs, back to my apartment, where they would scratch on the back door and sing “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going” from “Dreamgirls.”

Despite what you might think, I honestly had nothing to do with the fire. It was, like many turning points in many life stories, mere random chance. But even on the scale of interventions of Fate, it was pretty dramatic — I ask a woman to live with me, she says no. A short time later, her house spontaneously combusts. With that example, I have taken a more accepting, passive approach to achieving my desires in life. If somebody refuses a request, or if things don’t work out the way I had desired, I don’t argue. I sit back, and I wait for something to explode.

Love Always
mudra

To See

To see, to really see,
you must take off your head
and put it well aside, friends.

Open the eyes of your heart instead.
Open the ears of your soul
and ride on the river of light
that glows along: a constant caterpillar
leading you back home
to where you came from and have forgotten.


Your eyes see not into the nature of things.
They see the diver, but not the dive,
they see the winding smoke, but not the fire burning inside,
they see only the road before them, and not the moon sailing beside.
Rather you gouge them out than stay blind
to true vision which resides only in the chest,
beating, and pounding.
Why do you think the heart beats?
To call your attention, so wandering,
back to it.


Come home then, come home.
You can ride the big stream of heart.


Let the spirit rise out of you like steam,
like a snake uncoling, like a dreamer stepping into the dream.
The flowers are watered then with your tears,
the wounds are healed with your lips,
and pain is found out in everyones' hearts
and purged away to the lake, the sea, the ocean,
where it drowns in the cleansing waters.


Wash your ego from your self,
and step out of your skin
which is battle-worn and bruised from abuse.
Come swim in the golden waters of this pond,
naked, wearing only your spirit.


It's warm here like luminous oil massaging you.
There are morning doves and orchids at night
and in the day, there is rest and the stars.


The trees sing you lullabies
in harmony with the breeze
and the moon sometimes eclipses the sun.
You always have playmates--
ones who cry and laugh at once,
reveling in the irony, the paradox of the universe.
They work to stop suffering,
but their pain and their joy become one here
--pain a vine winding around the tree of joy,
and all explode together in green
where branches touch the sky.

Love Always
mudra

Becoming Unstoppable

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYeFgkGwGxs&feature=related


Love Always
mudra

Learning Trough the eyes of a child

Children's Sayings

Children see things

With different eyes

They smell, sort, sigh, sing, and say things

With such refreshing insight

That we can't but stop

And listen to them

And learn to appreciate

The lessons they teach us.

- Yomi Ogunnaike



OUT OF THE MOUTHS OF BABES

A three-year-old went with his dad to see a litter of kittens. On returning home, he breathlessly informed his mother there were 2 boy kittens & 2 girl kittens. "How did you know?" his mother asked. "Daddy picked them up and looked underneath," he replied, "I think it's printed on the bottom." Another three year old put his shoes on by himself. His mother noticed the left was on the right foot. She said, "Son, your shoes are on the wrong feet." He looked up at her with a raised brow and said, "Don't kid me, Mom, I KNOW they're my feet." On the first day of school, the Kindergarten teacher said, "If anyone has to go to the bathroom, hold up two fingers." A little voice from the back of the room asked, "How will that help?" A mother and her young son returned from the grocery store and began putting away the groceries. The boy opened the box of animal crackers and spread them all over the table. "What are you doing?" his mother asked. "The box says you can't eat them if the seal is broken," the boy explained. "I'm looking for the seal." Can people predict the future with cards? My mother can. Really? Yes, she takes one look at my report card and tells me what will happen when my father gets home. A father was reading Bible stories to his young son. He read, "The man named Lot was warned to take his wife and flee out of the city, but his wife looked back and was turned to salt." His son asked, "What happened to the flea? A four-year-old girl was learning to say the Lord's Prayer. She was reciting it all by herself without help from her mother. She said, "And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us some e-mail. AMEN" Where's the English Channel? I don't know - our television doesn't pick it up.

A little boy was in a relative's wedding. As he was coming down the aisle he would take two steps, stop, and turn to the crowd alternating between bride's side and groom's side). While facing the crowd, he would put his hands up like claws and roar. So it went, step, step, ROAR, step, step, ROAR all the way down the aisle. As you can imagine, the crowd was near tears from laughing so hard by the time he reached the pulpit. The little boy, however, was getting more and more distressed from all the laughing, and by the time he reached the pulpit, he was near tears. When asked what he was doing, the child sniffed and said, "I was being the Ring Bear."

MORE KIDS' SAYINGS
http://www.uwsp.edu/education/oogunnai/chi...DSay.HTML"]http://www.uwsp.edu/education/oogunnai/child/ecetech/KIDSay.HTML

Love Always
mudra

“What’s the fastest path to your joy? When you can answer that question and use it as your guidance system in your day-to-day activities, then nothing else matters. The only homework you’ll ever need do is to determine if your next thought or action is the fastest path to your joy. It’s your roadmap. As you relax and allow and come into your knowing, finding the fastest path to your joy will work without fail or exception. Enjoy the ride.” ~iON

Love Always
mudra

THE REALISATION OF BEAUTY

Things in which we do not take joy are either a burden upon our minds to be got rid of at any cost; or they are useful, and therefore in temporary and partial relation to us, becoming burdensome when their utility is lost; or they are like wandering vagabonds, loitering for a moment on the outskirts of our recognition, and then passing on. A thing is only completely our own when it is a thing of joy to us.

The greater part of this world is to us as if it were nothing. But we cannot allow it to remain so, for thus it belittles our own self. The entire world is given to us, and all our powers have their final meaning in the faith that by their help we are to take possession of our patrimony.

But what is the function of our sense of beauty in this process of the extension of our consciousness? Is it there to separate truth into strong lights and shadows, and bring it before us in its uncompromising distinction of beauty and ugliness? If that were so, then we would have had to admit that this sense of beauty creates a dissension in our universe and sets up a wall of hindrance across the highway of communication that leads from everything to all things.

But that cannot be true. As long as our realisation is incomplete a division necessarily remains between things known and unknown, pleasant and unpleasant. But in spite of the dictum of some philosophers man does not accept any arbitrary and absolute limit to his knowable world. Every day his science is penetrating into the region formerly marked in his map as unexplored or inexplorable. Our sense of beauty is similarly engaged in ever pushing on its conquests. Truth is everywhere, therefore everything is the object of our knowledge. Beauty is omnipresent, therefore everything is capable of giving us joy.

In the early days of his history man took everything as a phenomenon of life. His science of life began by creating a sharp distinction between life and non-life. But as it is proceeding farther and farther the line of demarcation between the animate and inanimate is growing more and more dim. In the beginning of our apprehension these sharp lines of contrast are helpful to us, but as our comprehension becomes clearer they gradually fade away.

The Upanishads have said that all things are created and sustained by an infinite joy. To realise this principle of creation we have to start with a division--the division into the beautiful and the non-beautiful. Then the apprehension of beauty has to come to us with a vigorous blow to awaken our consciousness from its primitive lethargy, and it attains its object by the urgency of the contrast. Therefore our first acquaintance with beauty is in her dress of motley colours, that affects us with its stripes and feathers, nay, with its disfigurements. But as our acquaintance ripens, the apparent discords are resolved into modulations of rhythm. At first we detach beauty from its surroundings, we hold it apart from the rest, but at the end we realise its harmony with all. Then the music of beauty has no more need of exciting us with loud noise; it renounces violence, and appeals to our heart with the truth that it is meekness inherits the earth.

In some stage of our growth, in some period of our history, we try to set up a special cult of beauty, and pare it down to a narrow circuit, so as to make it a matter of pride for a chosen few. Then it breeds in its votaries affections and exaggerations, as it did with the Brahmins in the time of the decadence of Indian civilisation, when the perception of the higher truth fell away and superstitions grew up unchecked.

In the history of æsthetics there also comes an age of emancipation when the recognition of beauty in things great and small become easy, and when we see it more in the unassuming harmony of common objects than in things startling in their singularity. So much so, that we have to go through the stages of reaction when in the representation of beauty we try to avoid everything that is obviously pleasing and that has been crowned by the sanction of convention. We are then tempted in defiance to exaggerate the commonness of commonplace things, thereby making them aggressively uncommon. To restore harmony we create the discords which are a feature of all reactions. We already see in the present age the sign of this æsthetic reaction, which proves that man has at last come to know that it is only the narrowness of perception which sharply divides the field of his æsthetic consciousness into ugliness and beauty. When he has the power to see things detached from self-interest and from the insistent claims of the lust of the senses, then alone can he have the true vision of the beauty that is everywhere. Then only can he see that what is unpleasant to us is not necessarily unbeautiful, but has its beauty in truth.

When we say that beauty is everywhere we do not mean that the word ugliness should be abolished from our language, just as it would be absurd to say that there is no such thing as untruth. Untruth there certainly is, not in the system of the universe, but in our power of comprehension, as its negative element. In the same manner there is ugliness in the distorted expression of beauty in our life and in our art which comes from our imperfect realisation of Truth. To a certain extent we can set our life against the law of truth which is in us and which is in all, and likewise we can give rise to ugliness by going counter to the eternal law of harmony which is everywhere.

Through our sense of truth we realise law in creation, and through our sense of beauty we realise harmony in the universe. When we recognise the law in nature we extend our mastery over physical forces and become powerful; when we recognise the law in our moral nature we attain mastery over self and become free. In like manner the more we comprehend the harmony in the physical world the more our life shares the gladness of creation, and our expression of beauty in art becomes more truly catholic. As we become conscious of the harmony in our soul, our apprehension of the blissfulness of the spirit of the world becomes universal, and the expression of beauty in our life moves in goodness and love towards the infinite. This is the ultimate object of our existence, that we must ever know that "beauty is truth, truth beauty"; we must realise the whole world in love, for love gives it birth, sustains it, and takes it back to its bosom. We must have that perfect emancipation of heart which gives us the power to stand at the innermost centre of things and have the taste of that fullness of disinterested joy which belongs to Brahma.

Music is the purest form of art, and therefore the most direct expression of beauty, with a form and spirit which is one and simple, and least encumbered with anything extraneous. We seem to feel that the manifestation of the infinite in the finite forms of creation is music itself, silent and visible. The evening sky, tirelessly repeating the starry constellations, seems like a child struck with wonder at the mystery of its own first utterance, lisping the same word over and over again, and listening to it in unceasing joy. When in the rainy night of July the darkness is thick upon the meadows and the pattering rain draws veil upon veil over the stillness of the slumbering earth, this monotony of the rain patter seems to be the darkness of sound itself. The gloom of the dim and dense line of trees, the thorny bushes scattered in the bare heath like floating heads of swimmers with bedraggled hair, the smell of the damp grass and the wet earth, the spire of the temple rising above the undefined mass of blackness grouped around the village huts--everything seems like notes rising from the heart of the night, mingling and losing themselves in the one sound of ceaseless rain filling the sky.

Therefore the true poets, they who are seers, seek to express the universe in terms of music.

They rarely use symbols of painting to express the unfolding of forms, the mingling of endless lines and colours that goes on every moment on the canvas of the blue sky.

They have their reason. For the man who paints must have canvas, brush and colour-box. The first touch of his brush is very far from the complete idea. And then when the work is finished the artist is gone, the windowed picture stands alone, the incessant touches of love of the creative hand are withdrawn.

But the singer has everything within him. The notes come out from his very life. They are not materials gathered from outside. His idea and his expression are brother and sister; very often they are born as twins. In music the heart reveals itself immediately; it suffers not from any barrier of alien material.

Therefore though music has to wait for its completeness like any other art, yet at every step it gives out the beauty of the whole. As the material of expression even words are barriers, for their meaning has to be constructed by thought. But music never has to depend upon any obvious meaning; it expresses what no words can ever express.

What is more, music and the musician are inseparable. When the singer departs, his singing dies with him; it is in eternal union with the life and joy of the master.

This world-song is never for a moment separated from its singer. It is not fashioned from any outward material. It is his joy itself taking never-ending form. It is the great heart sending the tremor of its thrill over the sky.

There is a perfection in each individual strain of this music, which is the revelation of completion in the incomplete. No one of its notes is final, yet each reflects the infinite.

What does it matter if we fail to derive the exact meaning of this great harmony? Is it not like the hand meeting the string and drawing out at once all its tones at the touch? It is the language of beauty, the caress, that comes from the heart of the world straightway reaches our heart.

Last night, in the silence which pervaded the darkness, I stood alone and heard the voice of the singer of eternal melodies. When I went to sleep I closed my eyes with this last thought in my mind, that even when I remain unconscious in slumber the dance of life will still go on in the hushed arena of my sleeping body, keeping step with the stars. The heart will throb, the blood will leap in the veins, and the millions of living atoms of my body will vibrate in tune with the note of the harp-string that thrills at the touch of the master.

Love Always
mudra