LONGING
I long to return where my heart’s song began
The quaint city by the ocean I once knew so well
How I long to play along her sugar white shore
Swim in her ocean as deep and as blue as my longing
I long to jump up and down amidst her ocean floor with it’s scattered sea shells that tumble and stumble, all the while, tickling the tips of my toes
Crash about in her ocean waves as if I were a discarded cork, bobbing freely, just me…
©2011 Angela C. Soelzer Ragosa
You said, “I will go to another land, I will go to another sea.
Another city will be found, better than this.
Every effort of mine is condemned by fate;
and my heart is — like a corpse — buried.
How long in this wasteland will my mind remain.
Wherever I turn my eyes, wherever I may look
I see the black ruins of my life here,
where I spent so many years, and ruined and wasted.”
New lands you will not find, you will not find other seas.
The city will follow you. You will roam the same
streets. And you will age in the same neighborhoods;
in these same houses you will grow gray.
Always you will arrive in this city. To another land — do not hope –
there is no ship for you, there is no road.
As you have ruined your life here
in this little corner, you have destroyed it in the whole world.
A simple guide to mapping out the journey of your lifetime.
I read this article recently in O Magazine and found it a clever way of practicing introspection. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did…
Odysseus just wanted to go to Ithaca. No, not the one in upstate New York—the one in ancient Greece. He dreamed of it the whole seven years he spent trapped on the island of the nymph Calypso. Eventually the pitying gods ordered Calypso to free him, at which point he managed to build a boat and set out on what he hoped would be a brief and pleasant journey.
Ha.
At every turn, Odysseus’s travels were filled with surprises. He conquered monsters at sea only to find worse ones waiting on land. He encountered seductions that sent him half mad with longing. Finally, in the Land of the Dead, he got clear directions from a seer who, oxymoronically enough, was blind.
Does this ring any bells for you? Maybe you, too, feel stranded in your life, awash in a turbulent sea, or lured by the Siren song of a terrifying love. Or maybe you just hope to experience Winnipeg someday, if only for a long weekend. Fortunately, you have your own internal “blind seer”. It can feel its way into the future and draw you a map. I mean literally. Our project today is to help you create a map of your own epic tomorrows—a magically morphing guide that will get more detailed and accurate as you travel.
By David Kessler, O Magazine
Throughout my years of working with the dying and the bereaved, I have noticed commonly shared experiences that remain beyond our ability to explain and fully understand. The first are visions. As the dying see less of this world, some people appear to begin looking into the world to come. It’s not unusual for the dying to have visions, often of someone who has already passed on. Your loved one may tell you that his deceased father visited him last night, or your loved one might speak to his mom as if she were there in the room at that time.
i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite new a thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body. i like what it does,
i like its hows. i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which i will
again and again and again
kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,
i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz
of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh … And eyes big love-crumbs,
and possibly i like the thrill
of under me you so quite new
e.e. cummings
by Dr. Judith Rich
Some people say we live in a “soulless” world, or they refer to a place as “having no soul.” What does it mean to have “no soul”? What does it mean to have soul?
Some people are called “lost” souls, some are “old” souls and some look for a soul mate. We have our soul brothers and soul sisters. What does it mean to share soul with someone?
How do you know if you’re in the presence of soul, be it in a place, in a person or even in a thing? Does art have soul? Does food have soul? Does music have the quality of soul?
The answer, of course, to all of these questions is “yes.” We could look upon everything in the world as either having that ineffable quality we call “soul” or missing whatever it is we think of as soul. But what does it mean to have soul? And how do you know if you’re in its presence?
I love the following life lessons & wanted to share these with you; they come from a book I’ve been reading entitled Lean Forward into Your Life: Begin Each Day As If It Were on Purpose by Mary Ann Radmacher…
How is it that one is able to articulate the landscape of the spirit? The geography of the heart is understood and seen in ways which are, essentially, ineffable. Such understanding is a journey, a discovery, a joy: peculiar and particular. In our spirits’ holy night sky we come to know the singular beauty and magic that is our own music.
“I like Jon Kabat-Zinn’s definition of mindfulness.
“Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way;
On purpose,
in the present moment and
nonjudgementally.”
Kabat-Zinn, if you haven’t heard of him, is a famous teacher of mindfulness meditation and the founder of the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center.
First of all, mindfulness involves paying attention “on purpose”. Mindfulness involves a conscious direction of our awareness. We sometimes (me included) talk about “mindfulness” and “awareness” as if they were interchangeable terms, but that’s not a good habit to get into. I may be aware I’m irritable, but that wouldn’t mean I was being mindful of my irritability. In order to be mindful I have to be purposefully aware of myself, not just vaguely and habitually aware. Knowing that you are eating is not the same as eating mindfully.
1. It’s hard to jump high and feel down at the same time.
2. Sometimes, the loneliest moments are the ones that show you how strong you really are.
3. The riskier the endeavor the more exhilarating the reward.
