cast down your idols...and draw instead your wind chimes

we arrived at the facade of the Bandawat (the largest Buddhist temple area in Chiang Mai)and i was struck especially by the stark contrasts of man's constructed images of glistening gold, twinkling jewels, colors, bright shapes, stone relics of bird and elephant at the feet of the overly large Buddha statue. The chimes whispered so eerily in that warm silent evening, only adding to the bizarre sense that all this beauty and wealth signifying the importance and strength of Buddha was cast all to dull against the breathaking and brilliant design of god's natural dwelling place, his glorious, green, lush, unlimited landscape of forever-stretching-forests, misty-jungle-mountains, and high-stormy-skies...

though i was able to spend considerable time walking the premises, meditating in the temple rooms, breathing slowly in the sacred spaces, trying to understand and appreciate the culture and teachings of this place while also immersing myself in prayer and worship of god, surrounded by gold shimmering creatures and jewel eyed teachers, flooded my soul became with the need and the great capacity for closeness with god. i was less impressed by the bold statues, the brilliant gold and silver buildings, the colorful windows and floors, and completely taken aback by the grandeur and delicate promise evident in the most outstanding, bright rainbow that found its home softly between the storm clouds and the pure white puffs of radiance that stretched out across the sky in the background.

deep breaths as i stood in the middle of a huge, empty stone garden, listening to the windchimes dance and sing in the leaves, in the spirit of the trees, his song maybe flowing through me and all the other things...

finding the joy bird

sometimes we get lost. lost while driving. lost in physical storms. lost in the deeper, personal storms. lost while in love. feeling lost on spiritual journeys when we're really not lost at all, we just don't have a sense of where we're supposed to be going.

there are so many indicators for us simple beings, indicators for direction and guidance. i've always trusted that god has a delicately crafted plan for my life and i look to him for direction, for confidence, for hope. some people look for guidance in other forms and sometimes direction comes in the most surprising shapes and colors...that buzzing feeling deep inside of your gut spurring you on towards a decision or an adventure... or a song that continually rings right down within your chest, a song you can't ignore and can't be separated from because it is in you, it is part of you, it is you. i also think this song is god, his spirit and his energy moving within me, leading me towards the things i am naturally led to.

my best friend once told me that if i ever lost hold of my joyful spirit, my soul song, that she would 'backstroke through the muck to retrieve my joy bird'. i'm convinced that His song will never leave me, that though i will travel far, experience thick struggle and disappointment, maybe even feel disconnected from god, his song that is deep within me will always give me direction, will always give me a fresh breath and a a clear direction.

as humans relating to other humans, we are all connected, indefinitely. 'we are pieces of others. portraits painted between our brains and thymuses. we are the dirt we've eaten and the songs we've sung. we are the light of stars and darkness old beyond imagining. we are at once spontaneous fires & sacred water. we are faith and forgiveness'-Gerard Callahan

in looking for direction, for options, for encouragement, besides looking to the one who indefinitely supplies us with hope, joy and perseverance, restores our spirits and gives us a song to sing, we must look to those people around us who may feel equally lost and swirling in the midst of creation. we must pursue connectivity and unity to one another; we must see god within each other and remind each other of the melody should we ever forget or lose our place...

'create in me a clean heart, o god, and renew a steadfast spirit within me.do not cast me from your presence or take your holy spirit from me, but restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit to sustain me' -psalm 51.10-

thailand: cultural explosions

i'm starting this new season of life, this portion of my personal life narrative, in media res, which in literary terminology means in the middle. i'm not quite sure what this chapter in my story is called. its somewhere in between student and adult, child and professional, listener and leader. becoming an adult means realizing and taking responsibility for the paradoxical nature of life and taking action for what moves you. having just traveled halfway across the world to spend time volunteering in Thailand, i think i am just now coming to terms with this notion, just finally arriving at some minuscule understanding of what it is that moves me, and where that movement is focused now...

i'm not sure the best way to go about recording my experiences from this trip, which is why this story will be disorganized and maybe completely illogical. but there's a delicious ambiguity to it. ...some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. my story is long underway, constantly being improvised, altered, constantly catching me off guard and teaching me in more ways than i would ever have expected...


if you think about it, culture is truly derived from a certain group of people's relationship to the land they inhabit. how they use its resources, how they survive together, how they express themselves and enjoy life in whichever manner comes naturally. at first, thailand the country and especially thai culture seemed to be something absolutely foreign to me, something that i would never quite understand or be able in any major way to take part. but after spending the last three weeks immersed in thai culture, surrounded by the most majestic, lush forests i have ever seen, befriending small, beautiful children with whom i can just get by communicating, and experiencing a surpassing degree of self reflection and inspiration, i'm getting more and more familiar with the word, culture...

thailand is all about ceremony, about respect, tradition, taking life slowly and savoring everything. my initial perceptions of this country were of a somewhat impoverished nation simply trying to survive, using food stands, markets, cell phone booths and other miscellaneous business and community centers as a means to creating and maintaining an economy. i wasn't attuned to the beauty of the culture, of the more subtle efforts at pursuing education, the arts, spirituality.

i didn't realize that these are a people who do still have some sort of relationship with the earth-their lifestyles and means of making money mostly revolve around the tending of the rice fields, the harvesting of fruit and vegetables, making fiber paper out of washed and dried elephant dung, using the plants and trees and natural resources to make housing, clothing, cookware, entertainment, hardware.

culture comes from relationships and i'm beginning to examine the idea of a one world culture, where we embrace unity rather than uniformity and begin to share with one another these various cultures, practices, understandings. its not something to differentiate humans from one another but rather to celebrate the beauty of our diverse race, our different needs and talents and habits and our creativity and dependency on the earth...

finished...now it all begins....

"Give thanks to the Lord for He is good, His love endures forever...this is the day the Lord has Made; I will rejoice and be glad"

These are the words, the ideas, the state of being I am left with as I finish up my last final exam, experience my last time sitting as a student in a classroom at Point Loma, turn in my very last major literature analysis...

I'm all smiles. The day is bright, my life is light, I'm blessed beyond belief and I find myself in the most delicate, nourishing soil as I embark on new journeys...

Here's to the end of a season, an amazing four years of growth, laughter, memories, tears, and to the beginning of everything new and bright and big and beautiful...

language

language is never a permanent fixture; therefore we do not have access to these 'universal truths' that keep getting mentioned and discussed because language is all we have to understand truth and meaning, yet ours is so completely limited with respect to god... we can't even fathom the true existence and magnanimity of god or how he relates to us because we are limited even in the way in which we fathom!

prayer

o thou, you are the perfection of love, harmony, and beauty, the lord of heaven and earth and all that exists in between and far beyond,

open my heart, soften my eyes, and quiet all my stirrings, that i may hear your voice, which constantly comes from within.

aum. amen.

a treatise of sorts

the discourses of philosophy, love, spirituality and existence seem to constantly overlap one another; a magical and mystical dance of sorts that captures our human attention and draws us in, begging us to question the meaning of life, the means to the end, the rhyme and reason to our relationship to the divine.

i'm reveling in the cooling mist that has drifted effortlessly down upon every delicate part of the earth this morning, relieving me from the intense heat of the past few days. i've watched the light from the new day surreptitiously find its way into my bedroom window, annointing every object and space with a soft, hopeful, and cheery glow. i've spent time in this silence, doing my morning meditation and prayer, gaining energy and a peaceful demeanor towards the day...and now i'm beginning to piece together a sampling of beautiful thoughts and ideas from the reading i've become so immersed in lately. like the small spark you experience when you rush too quickly across a carpeted surface, i've caught a glimpse of the larger picture that all these pieces, all these colors, are working towards completing...

a novel i just finished, Steppenwolf, Herman Hesse discusses man's desire for finding communion with the divine, for escaping the duality of one's self and one's despairing emotions to find true happiness, to exist in all the fullness and richness that being alive can offer. again and again i'm reminded of what John records of Christ's teaching in the New Testament- "I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds" (12.24). Essentially he suggests that we as humans must always first die to ourselves in order that we can live the full life intended for us by our Creator God. The miniscule exposure i've had to different yoga practices and teachings emphasizes the same message; each of us is responsible for all the rest, every individual soul is essentially a part of the larger communion of souls, therefore we must take on the responsibility of loving others before ourselves. Deep within us IS the kingdom of God, in the stillness that is so often muddied by our material lives we have an unlimited state of existence and bliss. there has to be some degree of separation from ourselves and our physical needs, worries, attachments, in order to increase our capacity to experience god, to experience joy and weightlessness...
another author, Milan Kundera, writes The Unbearable Lightness of Being describing our tendency to make our lives incredibly heavy, burdened by emotions, questions, fears. he writes a beautiful romance that underscores this notion of living in the moment, not taking everything with such gravity but letting life unfold around us and participating fully in it and ascribing meaning and depth to life, but not being limited by our mortality. like Nietzsche would argue in nihilism: there may be no eternal return or cycle of living. all of our experiences occur only briefly, and only once, therefore we MUST make the most of every moment and live fully alive. god's spirit is in us and he has blessed us with the ability and the opportunity to enjoy a beautiful, rich, blissful existence with him, if we would only let go of ourselves and our egos and take part in the glorious story that we're already swept up in...