the presence of wind

I had the good fortune to be on a Shamanic journey the weekend after Magic died where I connected with the spirits of nature: fire, wind, water, earth, bugs, and plants. Connection with nature is available all the time and requires only that I focus my attention to use my senses to see, hear, feel, smell, and taste.

Fire is probably the only spirit that one might not want to taste in its burning naked essence, but we taste and ingest fire anytime we have eaten a plant or an animal cooked over an open flame. I doubt that I would ever lick an insect or eat dirt, and I remind myself to admire poison ivy from afar and only taste water that I know well.

The wind is an entirely different matter. Wind is air molecules who have caught the energy of the sun and use it to travel the earth. It is with us all the time. Can you taste the wind? Of course we can. We can measure its strength with our bodies, watch its effects with our eyes, smell its fragrance through our nostrils, and hear its journey as it passes through tree branches and lifts the eaves of our homes. Most of us don’t stick our tongues out to taste it as it passes by, but you might try it sometime.

Because it is always available, I have begun to pay attention to wind while walking. The west wind visited me the other day, bringing with it the promise of autumn. I felt its breath of coolness against my skin even though the temperature of the air was well over 90 degrees. As I inhaled, the air tasted and smelled faintly of dusty leaves and earthy soil. It was easy to see and hear the trees ruffling in the breeze, but that was not all I could hear. Beneath the quiet trembling of tree limbs, the wind offered me a whisper of advice: look to be happy.

I’ve been pondering this advice. It is not so much that the wind advised me to be happy. It clearly said “look” to be happy. If I expect happiness, I will seek it – I will look to find it around me. I can expect that if I desire happiness, I will find and experience happiness within myself. Even if there are some present circumstances in my life that I am not totally happy with, I can look within my being and find much to be happy and joyful about. Being happy is a proactive way of life.

When I quiet the monkey chatter in my head and connect to these ever-present spirits of nature, I realize my more complete oneness. The wind is always inside me filling my lungs, providing my cells with precious molecules of oxygen. My contribution is the carbon dioxide I exhale which the wind then carries to all the plants of the earth. They, in turn, sustain me with their nutrients when I ingest them. The wind even captures the molecules of water on my skin when I sweat and lifts them high into the atmosphere where they become clouds of rainwater. Those molecules carry an essence of me to share with the world.

The next time it rains, I am going to imagine I am being showered with happiness.

©2010 by Barbara L. Kass

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The presence of evolution

I know now that I am . . . like . . . totally connected. Here’s the scoop (and it is kind of a long one so you may want to bring along a snack):

While reading the part of about our 4 billion year evolution on Ted’s blog a few weeks ago, I started wondering: where was I all that time? Was a I rock? Solar energy? I am eternal so I must have been somewhere. We all were/are.

The Universal Consciousness must have heard me because this past week, it guided my attention to an article about evolution in an old issue of EnlightenNext and now I know where I have been: I was a predecessor. Me and a whole bunch of you got together as some kind of precursor to our current human existence and, by agreement, we united and made it happen.

The article is an interview with Dr. Beatrice Bruteau. It was done back in 2002 (so you can see that even while I am connected, sometimes it takes a while for the connection to catch up to me). Here is an excerpt from that article:

“ . . . in order to appreciate and feel the force of what the present human vocation is, we need to zero in on how the elements of any particular level of cosmic organization actually perform the uniting by which they come to constitute a new kind of wholeness in the world. There is not some outside force that causes this to occur. The capacity for it is inherent in the uniting elements, and they themselves do it by their own characteristic power. Every level of cosmic being has its own power of communication, the power to unite with others of its level to make something yet grander. This is the pattern that repeats in the course of evolution.”

In other words, all that exists has the ability to come together and create something new. We evolve. We become more than we were before.

Dr. Bruteau goes on further saying, “So a molecule is a kind of community. A cell is a kind of community. Molecules are communities of atoms, cells are communities of molecules, and so on. Now, we’re following this same pattern that evolution seems to have followed, which is unite in order to create. The new human community will be some kind of an entity, some kind of a Being. Just as the organism is a collective of molecules and the molecule is a collective of atoms. So if you can get human beings to share their characteristic human energy—which is agape, knowledge, concern, creativity, inventiveness, and all the other kinds of strictly human energies that we have—all that interchange of energies binds us together into a community. And when the whole community experiences and practices this kind of love, the crisscrossing energies form a net, and the net is the New Being that can do what the individuals that it is composed of could not do.”

Oh, my . . . a New Being. I am not sure if Dr. Bruteau means a new human being or a new way of being, and it really does not matter. I imagine that children conceived and born into such a community would be much like the children being born into our computer age society: they come hard wired and using a computer is as natural as breathing. Children born into a community based on certain qualities would find those ways of being inherent to their existence. They would be the New Being.

Key to this ability, however, is the part where Dr. Bruteau says “. . . if you can get human beings to share their characteristic human energy . . ..” How many people does it take to form a community? To create this New Being?

According to Eckhart Tolle in A New Earth, we don’t need everyone. We just need critical mass – just enough to give energy to that way of being. Given our capacity to understand and change, I also don’t know that being a New Being would be reserved only to the newly conceived. I am so very different now than I was even five years ago. In making changes to myself, growing, and evolving, I often ask my atoms, molecules, and neurons to come together in a new agreement, a new way of thinking, and a new way of behaving. I could not have accomplished what I have in my life had I relied on my old community of cell wiring.

A large part of my own evolution was by conscious agreement. We all do this. When learning a new skill, we all require that some part of us gets rewired and creates a new set of connections that can do what we are learning. This new unified collection creates each one of us as a New Being who can do what could not be done before had those atoms and molecules not come together.

Each of us has a “characteristic power” – it is our individuality that can unite with other individualities and create a New Being. What is even better is that, just like molecules and atoms, we remain our individuality. We are not absorbed into some collective (shades of the Borg!), but by our own agreement we belong and support a way of living that some of us are only beginning to imagine.

Keep imagining. Each of us was at one time a precursor set of molecules that eventually got together to make us the humans we are today. Today, we are still a precursor set of molecules to the next iteration of our existence.

I wonder what we will make.

©2010 by Barbara L. Kass

The presence of absence

The limits of being human are never quite so obvious as when our loved ones die. Their absence is so pervasive to the point of being its own entity.

A few days back, I sent my beloved kitty into the great beyond and still cry about it. My perspective remains intact: this was a very old cat who had stopped eating and lost the ability to drink water. She was not going to recover and could have lingered for weeks, yowling over her water dish managing only to take a lick or two. I was clinging to her life more than she was, and I still doubt whether I made the right decision to assist her on her way. I would much have preferred that she die of her own accord and, eventually, she would have, but after how much suffering, I don’t know.

Her absence is still very much in residence. Her ghost is here. I glimpse her image out of the corner of my eye as I pass a corner where she slept and on the stairs she would run down to greet me when I came home each day (yes, not your typical aloof cat). These empty spaces are full of her absence. They used to be full of her presence.

If our loving were so strong, I imagine that our connection would supersede death. But, the actual physical connection is severed. My connection with those in my life who have died is in the memories and recreating the feelings in those memories in a bittersweet dance. It is the irretrievable presence that most consumes my misery. It is one thing to be separated while knowing that the other still physically exists. We can retrieve another’s presence in our lives. It is another thing when death is the separator.

Those who have physically died have entered an energy state our human senses cannot always detect. Why this is so, I don’t know. But I believe there must be a life-sustaining reason for it. One of the laws of physics says that energy can neither be created nor destroyed – it only changes form. We don’t know that energy cannot be created. We only know that as humans we cannot create energy. It is the law of our human existence, not necessarily of our energy existence.

In the presence of absence, there are lessons to be learned. Absence itself is an energy that is teaching me to be present in each moment and be mindful of the memory that I am currently creating.

©2010 by Barbara L. Kass

The presence of connection

Extraordinary connections are finding their way into my life. Over the past several days, friends have been writing on their blogs about similar thoughts and ideas to the point that it has become clear we are all being awakened by a shared energy. A new friend from Gaia (http://anewgaia.ning.com/) introduced me to a book Power vs. Force by David Hawkins. Reading the foreword and preface at Amazon reveals that the author discovered his eternal presence at a very young age and followed a remarkable path of healing. Of course I will buy and read the book, but today what stood out for me was the idea that we are not our personalities.

I refer to personalities as the superficial presence that we all present to the world and believe that is who we really are. The superficial personality is ego driven, inflamed with fear, and desperate for love and acceptance. The eternal presence patiently watches the personality in action and might occasionally nudge (or, in some cases, whack) us, whispering “you are more than this.”

Some people have dramatic enlightenment, brought back from the brink of self-destruction and death by some miraculous realization.

My path to enlightenment has been one of reluctance, even though I pursued it relentlessly. I kept thinking if I just adjusted my personality all of the time to all of the people and situations I would be in, then I would “get it.” Then, I would be accepted, loved, blah blah blah. My path to enlightenment and reconnecting with my eternal presence was found by pursuing the path of working very hard to become like everyone else. It was tedious, painful, and didn’t work very well.

The path where I am connected with my eternal presence is much more peaceful, lighter, less anxious. When I am connected with my eternal presence, I am eternally connected to all of you.

 ©2010 by Barbara L. Kass