So this is how I wish it looked here now. I dunno about anyone else but I think I'm just about done with winter. This path in the woods behind where I used to work was a major source of replenishment/rejeuvenation during the warm months. Going out there during my lunch break was consistently healing, even if the sun was not shining as in this shot... but the sun did and will make a big difference - it does even while we still have all this snow. More scheduled for the next couple of days too... :<(
The depressingness of the winter Will Pass, folks, I Declare it so...

Since you asked Mike... Here is Obie in all his RELAXED Glory! This may look like a funny position for a cat but I can tell you he also sleeps with his head literally upside down sometimes...

This is my best friend, sexy partner and wife. I love the brightly coloured red and blue energy coming up out of the back of her head!

This seemed a good companion photo to the piece below. It's of the abandoned house behind our laneway...

I was reading an article on Bs... It attempted to 'academically' address the issue of our current 'culture's' use of 'bullshit' i.e. not the term but the actuality...
My problem with this is that just about anywhere and everywhere I look I see what I would call anything from mild to 'supersized' ( ! ) bullshit. How can I address an issue that I think is crucial to overcome for the continuance of our very existence as a species when the stench of it fills my nostrils and my standing in it makes me feel that I can only be inherently dirty?
My only starting place for typing of this can be in putting out my version of what I figure is it's opposite: QUALITY.
Now the Quality that I refer to is, I think, the same referenced by Robert Pirsig in Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. In that sense, I choose to believe that there is somewhere in each of us a Knower of Truth. The quality vs. bullshit differences we can note in people are explainable by a combination of how much conscious access as well as how much unconscious access they choose to have to that Knower of Truth.
But what about the free-ranging bullshit in all of our institutions, social and individual frameworks, in our ethnic and national mythologies? Those multilayerings of bullshit do not often seem to be doing what the original stinky stuff is 'supposed' to do - become fertilizer for food or flowers...
Maybe I don't have a sufficiently long telephoto 'lens' on my viewpoint - maybe in 100 more years it'll be clear we were on the verge of a breakthrough in early 2005. News corporations are definitely threatened by the questioning of net writers. Those emperors may yet be seen 'sans frocks'... Blogs do feel like a revolutionary medium - my writing has no-one but me - at least at the moment (!) it has to account to. To touch my sense of the possiblity of a Quality Self (in this brief note here) has helped challenge my belief that bullshit is pandemic. And maybe it works for you too.

Here's one from England in August of 2003 - neat because the land and houses in the background give you some perspective on the size. This one was only of moderate size: some have been intricate designs of say 900 feet...

Boy, I must have a big need for colour and spring these days! Find myself choosing shots from the last couple of years that yell Vibrancy - as there is not much of it around... Next I'll post a crop circle - that'll Do It more...

These are a type of marvellous flower which would be about one inch worth for what you see here. This is the top of a flower stalk out in a conservation area behind the hospital where I've worked for 19 years as a psychotherapist. That conservation area was part of what kept me sane during many depressed times while I worked there. Now my clinic has moved off site and this summer I will have other areas to visit and photograph. Mmmmm, actually the photo of striking blue coloured berries earlier down the blog that have the bright burgundy leaves is from behind my new work location.

Couldn't resist one more. What's neat about this is that you cannot possibly know for sure what season this is from :-] The bird is a hint, though...

Then again, can't you just wait for the return of these guys, and the days when we get to share an outside cafe table with them?

A Puzzle Process: Where in Ontario is there this Egyptian staring at a snowstorm? Big Kudos for whoever can figure it out. Dan has an advantage, Jess and Amanda disadvantages... The Orb flying by would know too.

So Saturday was my 57th birthday and this weekend has been one of consequent ongoing change. Just heard from my eldest daughter that her doctoral thesis is off for reading by her committee and she’s hoping to defend it by April/May… Knowing her thoroughness, it’ll probably happen. She’ll get her doctorate and what it did for me was spur me to read back through my own doctoral thesis: which I never followed through to the finishing of the degree. It was good – although clearly not academic enough: but then, I’d rather be a thinking outside the box person – it’s part of being an Aquarian: I’m allowed!

Who do we love?

An advantage of being able to go back through electronic/ computer file diaries: I found this quote this morning from just about ten years ago – and I’m still doing well at getting this ‘more’ - - -
From February 19, 1995 – “I guess the dilemma has always been the paradox of feeling I have to "constrain" myself within the seeming Limitedness of this world. This occurs in everthing from relationships, WHO I AM, how I can act on this world, the use of money, to the boredom (and paradox) of Time. Underneath, however, I've always sensed pervasively and inherently my UNLIMITEDNESS..... What it feels like I need to do is to establish new relationships between myself and all these different elements in my life.
What is really significant is the FEELING, the feeling of peacefulness that I don't have to give myself up to the subtle sense of Pressure. Somehow the Inner Trant just got a little less powerful ! ! ! Instead, I can let in the underlying most important Feeling, and that is Loving Myself, Loving my Life, Loving Wherever and However and Whoever I WANT to LOVE.”

:>}One corner of a house's response to the previous post...

News item: An Indiana farm wife called the local phone company to report that her telephone failed to ring when her friends called - and that on the few occasions when it did ring, her pet dog always moaned right before the phone rang. The telephone repairman proceeded to the scene, curious to see this psychic dog or senile elderly lady.
He climbed a nearby telephone pole, hooked in his test set, and dialed the subscriber's house. The phone didn't ring right away, but then the dog moaned loudly and the telephone began to ring. Climbing down from the pole, the telephone repairman found:
1. The dog was tied to the telephone system's ground wire via a steel chain and collar.
2. The wire connection to the ground rod was loose.
3. The dog was receiving 90 volts of signaling current when the phone number was called.
4. After a couple of such jolts, the dog would start moaning and then urinate on himself and the ground.
5. The wet ground would complete the circuit, thus causing the phone to ring.

Which demonstrates that some problems CAN be fixed by pissing and moaning....

Or... how about a shot of the beach? I can still Feel the Sky from that day

So we're back to winter in Ontario... This shot from last year is to perk up my or anyone else's day. That little taste of a sense of spring we had for a few days last week is Gone - and the letdown was painful. Maybe there is also more solar radiation coming, or the pace of galactic influx of energy for change is heightened - or maybe I just got caught in a time at work where I have many silly 'noting processes' I'm supposed to do and my resistance comes up as depression... Then again, maybe it's alllll of the above... Blessing This Connection, Barry

Tight view from my desk of the sky... with intervening Diefenbachia leaf and dried tall grasses!

Meditating a life into Immediacy

So yesterday I had been a definitely passionate morning... meeting with people whose stories both moved me as well as gave me chances to offer perspectives and thoughts/feelings that were apparently helpful to them - but which were also deeply edifying to me in my own relationships with myself, my life and my 'loves' - be they my wife, our cat , my 'kids', my colleagues or all the 'others' I feel linked to across the world. I believe this process is the way psychotherapists are best able to assist - by walking meditatively beside others (and the Other, maybe?)

'Sinteresting: I get to this place of Passion for life and a sense of immediacy in these moments and weeks that I can never articulate fully, and it's because the words are so small. I watch us bloggers (if I can be so seemingly grandiose as to call myself that) 'shifting' our worlds through the meditative process that this is - that http://trueancestor.typepad.com/true_ancestor/ so articulately references...



Blessing All Our Connections,



Barry

This was our 2004 Version of Christmas Tree - with Oberon - Maine Coon Cat (usually called Obie...) sitting contemplating life beside it before we took it down last week

Well simple movie posting didn't work!

Tried to post a short movie but it didn't work the way I tried it. Have to find out how to do that... Had a good weekend and not much time dedicated to noting here. Seems like lots of people start enthusiastically then tend to peter down in number of postings. One wonders/reflects: why am I doing this thing of noting to myself on the w w web?
I know part of my motivation is having found some peoples reflections on their blogs really helpful because I was able to deeply identify - or because I got something fresh from their reflections - and I'd like to offer something that others would find helpful I guess...
But I don't think that would be enough - unless one was to stay (or become!) narcissistically fixated... For me I know I'm also looking to find some thread of dialogue with the Whole - with whoever it is that one talks to in the night - or the early morning as this is for me.
Wrote a long missive to my wife's uncle in england last night clarifying the lousy information that yes his sister (my wife's mother) really does have Alzheimer's and some of what that means. These two - brother in England and sister here in Canada have been chatting by phone every week for decades - and he now is facing how to handle losing his sister in this slow withdrawal of awareness way. My heart goes out to him.
Also wrote a long note to my brother in Edmonton. (Hope you understand what I was meaning Don...)
MMMmmm, I guess that's part of where (in those two letters) that I've put my writing energies this weekend.
It's my 57th birthday this Saturday. I still feel like an 18 year old inside - just far more willing to be patient with myself and the world now... also happily married which is probably why I'm so relatively calm now in comparison to how I was before.... :>)

Just read the world petition for peace and justice at:
http://www.zmag.org/wspj/index.cfm

Verrrry worthwhile.

Even more colourful... The combination of colour tones in this has impacted me each time I see it.

Thought I'd add a reminder of SPRING to come!

'Sbin a few days since I posted. Had time to STOP and think about a lot of things, not all to be shared here... but I do find at the moment that I am listening more intently to myself in the middle of some of my conversations recently. I have yet to discern if it's from having started this blog or whether it's the other way round: this evolving shift in consciousnes also led to starting the blog (!) The photo: I don't know about anyone else but I find this shot very evocative - even meditative in a mandala like manner. It's intersting too, for me, as it may be for you - - to know that the name of this type of SUV is a PILOT... quite symbolic I thought! Soyanara, Blessing All our Connections, Barry