Everyman's Journal 2011

(my fine art website)

(archived writings and poetry, circa 2002 to 2004)

(archived 2010 writings on the lessons of A Course in Miracles)

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Everyman's Journal 2011, #23

I view myself these days as a 'householder monk', meaning I am functionally living a hardworking artist/monk life in a household setting instead of a monastery. This view has arisen gradually, simply out of noticing the direction the flow of my life is carrying me, which is 'more and more settled, more and more organized, more and more interconnected-in-service with the community of awakening beings who are in my life, either locally or at a distance'.

As with all things phenomenal, this state of being arrives as a 'consciously unrequested' gift, being delivered as result of the natural response of my heart to the ever-changing circumstances of my life by a creative source deeply aware of my real needs. In other words, when I came to Yuma 15 months ago there was no long term vision, there was just the knowing I was called. And my focus was on my father primarily, something in me assuming Mom would accept membership in the home of one of my sisters after Dad died. At first, I didn't anticipate that Mom had her own ideas about her future, and was not about to abandon them. But as I was around more, I caught on, and as that happened, I began to get the 'downloads for on high' that Mom and me had a 'team' destiny, at least for a while. And that is what has come to pass, Mom leaving the assisted living home a couple of months after Dad passed away, to return to her home which I have been caring for.

I've been watching since then the re-emergence of her personal beingness. It's like her whole life has been preparing her for right now, and it's like my whole life has been preparing me for right now too, but in completely different ways. I think she thought she knew who I was... I definitely thought I knew who she was..... but both of us are (almost inadvertently) practicing that beautiful practice of 'not knowing', at least enough for there to be loving wiggle-room for each other in new and different flavored ways.

There's no pressure either way, but we are both getting to be ourselves. I expose her regularly to new stuff, and she gets what she gets. Sometimes, in my opinion (which I know better than to believe in) she's fairly clueless socially, sometimes she's perceptive and wise. See where I get it from?

I am currently doing an 'art-for-deep tissue bodywork' trade, and Jenni comes to our home each week. Mom has never seen this kind of therapy, and never listened to the kinds of conversations that happen between Jenni and I as she works on me on my massage table set up in the living room. But Mom is choosing to be present, session after session, sometimes reading, sometimes working on her genealogy, like as if my therapy is a favorite TV show she doesn't want to miss. Sometimes she forgets she's not the one being worked on, and starts up a conversation about whatever is currently important to her. Nobody resists, or tells her 'that's not the way it's done', or suggests she find something to do elsewhere. She's just included, just like in the life of 'non-accidental' spiritual practice, all things that occur are included simply because they Are Happening.

The other day, as one of my four sisters was here visiting and stimulating activity on projects that I had not yet gotten around to, I told Mom she was just like her companion dog Lady.... "Mom, I let you out of the house and pretty soon there's a mess I have to clean up!" (She and sis had gotten out the pruning shears and 'gone to town' on the lemon tree, but I was the one who was 'privileged' to clean up the debris). We had a good laugh. Which is good, for somehow hearing my mother laughing heals something deep in me.... don't know exactly what, but something very old (but very young too).

At the Wednesday evening Buddhist meditation, there was a lot of discussion about karma as it relates to mindfulness. Clearly, living with my mother is an opportunity for mindful karma completion, for although we are very different, we are still very much alike also. And just like it was my assignment last year to give my father a transition that was fully supported by a loving and present-in-person son, it evolves that my blood family karma continues, now including the gift of learning to be completely self-expressed and authentically myself while living with my mother. As family of origin dysfunctionalities often have throw me/us/you (I'll bet) into very stuck adolescent remissions, with all of it's comedy-script insanities, it is amazing to me how smoothly this karma is being eaten. Primarily on a miracle diet, you might say, of mother and son forgiving the past....

What else would be better.... for a hardworking householder monk... than to have his mother be in charge of his monastery? :-). Somewhere there must be a God behind all this....... :-)

Namaste,

David

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My partnership request.... Please consider yourself an important gateway this message is passing through on its way to others. Please do 'send it on'. Thank you.

***********************************

Rev. David Seacord

Fine Art Painter / Sufi Cherag

(my fine art website)

(archived writings and poetry, circa 2002 to 2004)

(archived 2010 writings on the lessons of A Course in Miracles)

http://davidseacord.us1.list-manage1.com/subscribe?u=306aba00e6959c604de750bcc&id=62a1ee7045

(archived entries of this years Everyman's Journal)

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Thursday, January 27, 2011

Everyman's Journal 2011, #22

January 27

Last night I attended a local ongoing Buddhist-orientated meditation group for the second time, the first time being two weeks ago when I went with a Vedantic teacher and friend named Peter. Buddhist practice is a world that I am less familiar with than some other major religions, so I am finding myself curious, wondering where I will find the familiar and where I will find 'new flavors'.

Inside of the understanding that no religion is righter or betterer than another, still something within us causes us to choose to study certain bodies of congruent thought, and not others. A few days ago I was taking a walk with a friend and part of our conversation included that for her, A Course in Miracles was her central spiritual focus.... that she found that it 'just worked' well with the way she saw and understood life. And, she is the ripe fruit of it too, being a wonderfully loving and conscious human who contributes of herself generously to the world she is in.

What I trust, with that friend or any other, is that there are no accidents in the curriculum we choose, and so that I am now choosing to be placed one night a week in a Buddhist circle is clearly for my benefit. But perhaps not so much for learning, as for unlearning....

Have you ever noticed the phenomena that, when in a new surrounding, you are less ego-active, and more open to inquiry? There is both a visible and invisible system of understandings and ways of being and communicating that makes up the language of all groups, and when entering 'a new something', what many times hits us is that 'we don't know'. Of course what our ego immediately does is to begin learning the new language, which is it's way of reestablishing familiar ground for itself. It is unaware of the gift it is throwing away.... the practice of not knowing, or said another way, the practice of being empty of knowing.

Not knowing surrounds us, and is the great stress-generating part of the reality of all egoic-identified beings. Isn't it amazing that when believing we are our egos, we identify with just about anything that will help us hide it (the not knowing) from our awareness. Yet this is a direction guaranteed to bring us.... unprepared... into painful collision with the stark fact of our existence: that we inhabit time-limited body/vehicles subject to entropy. The Buddha recognized this as the primary physical reality, and that all suffering arises from it. His teachings, as I currently understand them, are basically to stay awake and soberly contemplate the nature of this illusionary (temporary) existence, that the wisdom gained may deepen within us the ability to be discerning. Discerning of what? Simply of the experience of the true from the experience of the false. Once that is a well grounded practice, being true to what is now self-obviously true becomes consistently possible. And once consistently possible, the possibility of Mastery of Being can then come into view.

This is the journey we are all called upon.... to set aside our adolescent infatuations with form and learn to see the always present formless Reality, within which all form is only temporary content. I feel this call coming through all religions and faiths, and it is the mission of my Sufi lineage to issue the call for a recognition of our spiritual unity, regardless of which religion/faith is providing our 'current diet'. Ultimately, it is obvious that if we do not experience our Unity with all Life, that we have failed to Know anything.

But conversely, the Great Way also gives us this awesome grace.... it only takes truly knowing any One Thing completely for it to suddenly become possible to Know All Things. Because in Truth, One Thing and All Things are exactly the same. And those who embody this become, in this world, our illumined masters of Being Love.

Namaste,

David

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My partnership request.... Please consider yourself an important gateway this message is passing through on its way to others. Please do 'send it on'. Thank you.

***********************************

Rev. David Seacord

Fine Art Painter / Sufi Cherag

(my fine art website)

(archived writings and poetry, circa 2002 to 2004)

(archived 2010 writings on the lessons of A Course in Miracles)

http://davidseacord.us1.list-manage1.com/subscribe?u=306aba00e6959c604de750bcc&id=62a1ee7045

(archived entries of this years Everyman's Journal)

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Everyman's Journal 2011, # 21

January 25

"The degree of our reaction/contraction in the moment reveals the degree of our ego in the moment".

It's a lesson I didn't wish to learn yesterday, as I finished changing into my swim trunks and, shivering in the cool morning air, turned around with the intention of entering the hot springs soaking tub that I had just driven a couple of hours to get to, joining the several inhabitants already there before me. But instead of being welcomed, (this is my ego's version) "I was rudely commanded to stop, and go take a shower first". This was delivered by one man, apparently a self-appointed local guardian of the waters. Did it matter that I knew I was clean and didn't need a shower? Nope. Not to this man. "It's the rules, and everyone has to follow them all the same..."

I surrendered to being controlled (this is still my ego) but I resented being deprived of the pleasure of a dry plunge into the warm waters. As I took my medicine (the shower), all that was running through my head was a stream of "make wrong's/ put downs" that I wanted to attack this guy with. I knew that was stupid, and that the 'rule' was appropriate given the numbers of users, so I didn't let myself open my mouth. I did spiritual work instead.

I tried to remember the guy was my brother, but I was reactivated enough that it took a while to do that. In the meantime, I didn't enter the pool, but instead just let myself be drummed and pummeled by the warm waters of the 'shower'. I was able to remember that actually, this outdoor shower was my favorite part of this hot springs.... a well pressurized horizontal pipe beside the soaking tub with a line of holes drilled into it that resulted in an endless arch of hot water going first upwards to it's ten foot high zenith, then crashing down upon all the bodies standing on the cement deck under it with a therapeutic body-relaxing splash. When I had first discovered these springs, I had lain flat out on the deck under this hot waterfall for a half-hour, and after that, the few minutes I had soaked was anticlimactic.

So I knew my only real problem was my own reaction to this guy's attitude, which of course, eventually I was guided to see was one that (in other situations in the past) was the exact same attitude that I was guilty of having towards others myself. In fact, just two nights before, while waiting outside the San Diego's People Coop, I found myself breathing the second-hand cigarette smoke created by a man smoking directly in front of a sign that requested 'No Smoking on Co-op Grounds'. At the time, I had also wanted to say something (I 'passed' on that one too), which certainly would have been received as resistantly as I received my lesson yesterday morning.

By the time I was ready to be social and enter the pool, my 'adversary' was gone, and again, a few minutes of soaking was all I wished for. But the ego event continued to live in me as a trigger for inquiry.... why had I so completely lost consciousness and lowered my awareness by resisting? I have known for years that these kind of events are like 'surprise tests'. Many times I have stumbled, sometimes flat on my face in the mud even, but I have always found a heart in me that was bigger, and more willing to forgive, than my desire to go to war and mentally murder a brother. Yesterday's test was for some reason tougher, perhaps I am hearing, because I have asked to be 'well prepared'.

In any case, in what Ram Dass would call 'grist for the mill', the spiritual mileage gained from breakdown is often greater than that available from easy good fortune... if the authentic inquiry of the heart is followed. And while the ego in me that still loves to look good did not want to share this 'adventure', I knew as it was happening that this lesson would be my dharma to share.

And where it has led me is to taking a new look at my own sadhana practices, with an eye toward developing greater remembrance moment to moment. For it is simply true that I was not thinking with equanimity of the limitless perfection I/we exist within in the moments before getting hooked.... I was habitually believing once again that I was a body/mind, and excitedly anticipating a physical pleasure about to be indulged in. Now there is a 'jewel of a clue' for me/you to examine.... :-).

Namaste,

David

***********************************

My partnership request.... Please consider yourself an important gateway this message is passing through on its way to others. Please do 'send it on'. Thank you.

***********************************

Rev. David Seacord

Fine Art Painter / Sufi Cherag

(my fine art website)

(archived writings and poetry, circa 2002 to 2004)

(archived 2010 writings on the lessons of A Course in Miracles)

http://davidseacord.us1.list-manage1.com/subscribe?u=306aba00e6959c604de750bcc&id=62a1ee7045

(archived entries of this years Everyman's Journal)

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Sunday, January 23, 2011

Everyman's Journal 2011, #20

January 23

It is a universal law that we are of one essence, and given that, it is obvious to me that wherever that essence has been placed into denial, sooner or later we attract another opportunity to reestablish what is actually true.... in other words, to heal the past and share love again.

In my life, the last few days with my visiting friend Sarah have been that opportunity. And it has surprised us both that the 'friendship connection'--- once thought dead--- has been easily regained, as if all the turmoil and suffering of our romantic breakup had never happened. I believe this is a result of a particular discipline: the telling of the truth to each other. Of course, this is not necessarily easy, for we are required to look within deeply to find out exactly what is the truth for us each individually.

All personal love relationships contain elements of trading needs in them, and it is honest to know that openly. It's the complexity of the trades that produce confusion, particularly when driven by forces and needs within ourselves that we have not yet fully seen. For if we had fully seen them, we could have avoided a lot of the dramas of getting them met by just announcing 'what the deal is that will work for me' to the other at the time of 'contract signing'.

My assumed contract with Sarah was to provide her with emotional safety, while her assumed contract with me was to be my adventure mate. For far too many reasons to relate here, our years together were marred by continual fulfillment breakdowns of those expectations, and eventually we unchose each other. But God's purpose in bringing us together did not allow for a complete severing, and the reality of many long-distance phone conversations full of attempts to understand both what had happened and what was happening became our karma. In this way we have remained spiritually partnered.

Getting together for a few days has blessed us both, for it has allowed for the rediscovery that love is not a function of how things look, but rather it is a function of fully accepting and honoring how things actually are. In other words, by being deeply present with each other and honestly communicating, the truth heals all forms of the dream. And in that, the truth discovered is that we will never not love each other, and that we gave many years of our lives to supporting each others growth into becoming who we are being today was an absolutely essential part of our life's plan's.

Like me, Sarah has a ministry of words to accomplish, in the form of writing plays, movies scripts, and novels. And I am clear, as ACIM teaches, that no one but her can birth those gifts to this world, just as no one but me can paint my images. The life of the creative artist living in our times (or any time) is basically a life of finding the courage to expose ourselves intimately to the world, which can be a very scary thing to do. It is good to have close friends to share with on this journey. In telling me the stories of her New York City life, I can see that the law of attraction is working perfectly for her, placing the doorways she must walk through right in front of her again and again. The emotional safety I provide my friend Sarah is to simply reaffirm that her life is 'on track', and to continue to encourage her to have faith in herself in the face of her life's challenges. And the view of my life in Yuma that she was able to see and appreciate on this visit lets her know that I am perfectly situated to accomplish my true dharma by being here also.

The true picture is bigger than the personal, always. The divine Knower that guides our lives is like a weaver, working the warp and weft of the loom of existence with the threads of our individual lives. Most times those threads of life only cross and touch once, hence the millions of people that pass by us as nothing but background. But out of that gray scale existence there are those who appear to us in various degrees of color... an indication that there is a karmic work to do arriving. In responding to these karma completing opportunities, it is important to maintain the perspective of the impersonal, applying the skills of spiritual detachment even while entering the 'playing fields of relationship'.

In knowing each other as 'another myself', love manifests as appropriate compassion, allowing (as they say in Landmark) another to be exactly as they are, and exactly as they are not. Obviously, this means we chose to give up the 'I trade you' game, replacing it with 'I accept you'.

Namaste,

David

***********************************

My partnership request.... Please consider yourself an important gateway this message is passing through on its way to others. Please do 'send it on'. Thank you.

***********************************

Rev. David Seacord

Fine Art Painter / Sufi Cherag

(my fine art website)

(archived writings and poetry, circa 2002 to 2004)

(archived 2010 writings on the lessons of A Course in Miracles)

http://davidseacord.us1.list-manage1.com/subscribe?u=306aba00e6959c604de750bcc&id=62a1ee7045

(archived entries of this years Everyman's Journal)

To subscribe, simply click on the code below to open the subscribe window.

Saturday, January 22, 2011

Everyman's Journal 2011, #19

January 22

The highly underrated zen of ironing clothes was a good teacher for me yesterday. It's the kind of activity that is easily boring, which is why it can be a great teacher of mindfulness. Because you just can't produce good ironing without being present. In that way, it's as much an art form as creating a painting.... for although the skill set differs, the present tense awareness needed is pretty equal.

Since no one will pay thousands of dollars for a well ironed shirt though, it is also a good practice in being nobody, in being humble. And also, as it is unusual to be complimented for what is commonplace and expected, ironing is a good practice in performing invisible selfless service. I can remember my mother ironing for us for hours at a time, usually singing hymns as she did it.

Obviously, I did some ironing today. My stimulation for the activity was noticing that my visiting friend Sarah's wardrobe was not surviving her luggage containment well, and she was looking more than a bit rumpled. As we had plans to attend an art opening yesterday evening (where I knew I would be introducing her to more than a few curious friends) I wanted her to look good (which, of course, was about melooking good too... so funny, aren't we?...). So I offered to set up the ironing board for her....

Before she did half of the first piece, I offered to iron her clothes for her. You see, Sarah is completely a writer. When she's writing, she can forget to eat, forget to sleep, forget to wash dishes or keep house.... all that stuff, for.... well, a LOT longer than I can. And mostly, she doesn't care about clothes as long as she's warm enough. So, does she know how to iron? We don't need to go there, but probably not. I say that because as I ironed and she watched, she commented "wow, it's a lot of work chasing down all those wrinkles, isn't it?". That's the comment that triggered my thoughts about ironing as a spiritual practice, hence this writing....

Me, I was trained to iron by my mother early on. Once a week was Sunday, when Dad preached to his Protestant congregation and we all had to go and set in the pews being nice and looking clean and if possible, well ironed. Sarah is a preachers kid too.... her Dad was an Episcopal priest. But things were different there, I guess, and she never had to learn to iron like me :-). Anyway, the real point is that even though we are not what we look like, we are also free to look like what we are.

And that is a gift of compassion to the limitations of the world. It says to the world "I understand what frequencies you are able to see in, and I will present myself to you within those frequencies so that the possibility of Love being shared can be present for us..." Otherwise, I would simply wear comfortable rags everywhere, like I do when I am painting. Or if it is warm enough, little or nothing at all.

We did wear clothes to the art opening though.... nicely ironed clothes, if I say so myself. And as we moved among and intermingled with the good-sized crowd of art appreciators, nobody noticed. That was just perfect. For it was like what I have learned about service from participating in the Landmark assisting programs... that when nobody in the course even notices the assistants and/or their activities, that is when excellence is present in the assisting team. Said another way, selflessness seldom needs to call attention to itself.

Namaste,

David

***********************************

My partnership request.... Please consider yourself an important gateway this message is passing through on its way to others. Please do 'send it on'. Thank you.

***********************************

Rev. David Seacord

Fine Art Painter / Sufi Cherag

(my fine art website)

(archived writings and poetry, circa 2002 to 2004)

(archived 2010 writings on the lessons of A Course in Miracles)