bump ...to be continued...............

but for the stories of women....
we keep the memories and the records
we sing our mother's songs to our granchildren
we wail our sorrows in ancient harmonies

we sob,and weep with anguish when we lose a child
all of us, no matter where, even if we believe his spirit flies home
we are shattered, our human heart is broken

my heart is not my heart!!
i gave it away
to a little girl that finally ate
the food from my hand, grabbed my finger
and lived
and the hundreds of women that prepared food with me in the camps
as their villages burned
and the smoke was still
in our eyes
weeping with onions
and the dust of our loved ones in our mouths
our tears salted the aubergine
roasting
to the courage and tenacity of my people
my people that live in every face i treat
every hand i take in mine
to every need i was able to meet
i gave my heart
and felt the pulse
fusion
who's heart do i feel?
if my heart is your heart then i will feel you
you
are mine as breath
as it disolves
i shatter again
when your children run into my arms
when we cover their faces
when i am called away
when i long to be near
i will never forget
why we find each other here
to know the depth and power
of love like this


then shatter me again
and spill my blood with yours
that we will be mothers
against violence
and tell our stories and
write our herstory
and feed our children
life rather than greed
kindness rather than cruelty
respect rather than discrimination
forgiveness rather than revenge
inspiration rather than dogma
knowledge rather than marketed propaganda
social consciousness rather than racism
human rights rather than capitalism& politics [as we know them]
the joy of generosity
when our smiles greet
eyes remember
i am yours

You have me smile and cry all at the same time

But one feeling is overwhelming: LOVE

Alex

Alex you are a beautifull woman i admire you your words
and watt you do for humanity i feel humbled by you.oh Andrea she does it
to me also and a few other
things as well

i love flirting

The heart,
Such a powerful tool,
Many beating as one,
Shared feelings.
Joy, sorrow,
Worry, hope,
Together we are strong.
Not his, not hers,
Not yours, not mine,
But ours.

bump

....work in progress


but it took 15 min. to find my page !!

i don't like starting a new thread every time...sigh

The silence of this cave...

it's echoes so loud

surrounding me with darkness..

closing my eyes...feeling the warmth

of the light...

The simple rays of hope

envelope my heart...

the gypsy moth lands so near

holding the secrets ...my lips cannot convey

she is warmed by the flicker..

and gently spreads her wings..

catching a simple breeze..

she is gone...


JJ

If we could shrink the earth's population to a village of precisely
100 people, with all the existing human ratios remaining the same, it
would look something like the following:

There would be:

57 Asians
21 Europeans
14 from the Western Hemisphere, both north and south
8 Africans

52 would be female
48 would be male

70 would be non-white
30 would be white

70 would be non-Christian
30 would be Christian

89 would be heterosexual
11 would be homosexual

6 people would possess 59% of the entire world's wealth and all 6 would be from the United States.

80 would live in substandard housing
70 would be unable to read
50 would suffer from malnutrition
1 would be near death; 1 would be near birth
1 (yes, only 1) would have a college education
1 would own a computer

When one considers our world from such a compressed perspective, the need for acceptance, understanding and education becomes glaringly apparent.

The following is also something to ponder...

If you woke up this morning with more health than illness...you are more blessed than the million who will not survive this week.
If you have never experienced the danger of battle, the loneliness of imprisonment,  the agony of torture, or the pangs of starvation ..you are ahead of 500 million people in the world.

If you can attend a church meeting without fear of harassment, arrest, torture,  or death...you are more blessed than three billion people in the world.

If you have food in the refrigerator, clothes on your back, a roof overhead and a place to sleep...you are richer than 75% of this world.

If you have money in the bank, in your wallet, and spare change in a dish someplace ... you are among the top 8% of the world's wealthy.

If your parents are still alive and still married ... you are very rare, even in the United States and Canada.

If you can read this message, you just received a double blessing in that someone was thinking of you, and furthermore, you are more blessed than over two billion people in the world that cannot read at all.

Someone once said: What goes around comes around.

Work like you don't need the money.
Love like you've never been hurt.
Dance like no-one's watching.
Sing like no-one's listening.
Live like it's Heaven on Earth.

I love you

((((((((Alex))))))))
Lovely Lady, My Friend, Love you, You Rawk!!!

i am so full of contradictions !!

i throw my hands in the air!! toh ham kum rah!!

what are we but the expression of this constant breathing of energy !!??

how can i expect or imagine i could be anything less??!! or more???!!!
than all of this!!

and that somewhere in this soup , an "i" is looking, is listening, is sometimes glimpsing...well here i sit...laughing like a mad one..
most likely, i am.

i have lost my voice.
i cancelled appointments

pushed them all to friday
and now it's friday and i am barely a whisper

i feel fine...my energy is even high
no fever
so , what is it i don't want to talk about?????
what is stuck in my chest and in my throat????

what is so impossible to say out loud???
and why should it matter in the big picture??

i am so tired of words and all these stories that want to be told...

i want to be clean, to meet any moment ,with an open honesty to what it asks for, of me....and i don't know how

i used to be able to surrender more easily
than i am these days....

don't ask me 'how' i am
look at EVERYTHING...that's 'how' i am.

physician , heal thyself


i shut my door, not to trap my joy
but to free my anguish and my grief

We are all so full of contradictions...ain't it grand?


A stifled voice ... unwilling to speak... but I hear you anyway - the ripples in the pond are far ... so ripples heard by many ... not just me ...it is safe to speak

... even in anguish ... in grief ... I hear a symphony and my heart strums along with the melody.

Wrapping you up in sweet embrace.

ok i just had to do this ....take it or leave it.

The demand to be safe in relationship inevitably breeds sorrow and fear. This seeking for security is inviting insecurity.
Have you ever found security in any of your relationships? Have you? Look carefully and ask yourself what is secure?
Most of us want the security of loving and being loved, but is there love when each one of us is seeking his own security, his own particular path?
even being woven with another, each has an idea of their own

What is love? The word is so loaded and corrupted that I hardly like to use it. Everybody talks of love - every magazine and newspaper and every missionary talks everlastingly of love. I love my country, I love my king, I love some book, I love that mountain, I love pleasure, I love my wife, I love God. Is love an idea? If it is, it can be cultivated, nourished, cherished, pushed around, twisted in any way you like. When you say you love God what does it mean? It means that you love a projection of your own imagination, a projection of yourself clothed in certain forms of respectability according to what you think is noble and holy; so to say, `I love God', is absolute nonsense. When you worship God you are worshipping yourself - and that is not love.

Because we cannot solve this human thing called love we run away into abstractions. Love may be the ultimate solution to all man's difficulties, problems and travails, so how are we going to find out what love is? By merely defining it? The church has defined it one way, society another, and there are all sorts of deviations and perversions. Adoring someone, sleeping with someone, the emotional exchange, the companionship - is that what we mean by love? That has been the norm, the pattern, and it has become so tremendously personal, sensuous, and limited that religions have declared that love is something much more than this. In what they call human love they see there is pleasure, competition, jealousy, the desire to possess, to hold, to control and to interfere with another's thinking, and knowing the complexity of all this they say there must be another kind of love, divine, beautiful, untouched, uncorrupted.

Throughout the world, so-called holy men have maintained that to look at a woman is something totally wrong: they say you cannot come near to God if you indulge in sex, therefore they push it aside although they are eaten up with it. But by denying sexuality they put out their eyes and cut out their tongues for they deny the whole beauty of the earth. They have starved their hearts and minds; they are dehydrated human beings; they have banished beauty because beauty is associated with woman.

Can love be divided into the sacred and the profane, the human and the divine, or is there only love? Is love of the one and not of the many? If I say,`I love you', does that exclude the love of the other? Is love personal or impersonal? Moral or immoral? Family or non-family? If you love mankind can you love the particular? Is love sentiment? Is love emotion? Is love pleasure and desire? All these questions indicate, don't they, that we have ideas about love, ideas about what it should or should not be, a pattern or a code developed by the culture in which we live.
So to go into the question of what love is we must first ideals and ideologies of what it should or should not be. To divide anything into what should be and what is, is the most deceptive way of dealing with life.

Now how am I going to find out what this flame is which we call love -
not how to express it to another but what it means in itself?

I will first reject what the church, what society, what my parents and friends, what every person and every book has said about it because I want to find out for myself what it is. Here is an enormous problem that involves the whole of mankind, there have been a thousand ways of defining it and I myself am caught in some pattern or other according to what I like or enjoy at the moment - so shouldn't I, in order to understand it, first free myself from my own inclinations and prejudices? I am confused, torn by my own desires, so I say to myself, `First clear up your own confusion. Perhaps you may be able to discover what love is through what it is not.'

The government says, `Go and kill for the love of your country'. Is that love? Religion says, `Give up sex for the love of God'. Is that love? Is love desire? Don't say no. For most of us it is – desire with pleasure, the pleasure that is derived through the senses, through sexual attachment and fulfilment.
I am not against sex, but see what is involved in it. What sex gives you momentarily is the total abandonment of yourself, then you are back again with your turmoil, so you want a repetition over and over again of that state in which there is no worry, no problem, no self.

You say you love your wife. In that love is involved sexual pleasure, the pleasure of having someone in the house to look after your children, to cook. You depend on her; she has given you her body, her emotions, her encouragement, a certain feeling of security and well-being. Then she turns away from you; she gets bored or goes off with someone else, and your whole emotional balance is destroyed, and this disturbance, which you don't like, is called jealousy. There is pain in it, anxiety, hate and violence.
So what you are really saying is, `As long as you belong to me I love you but the moment you don't I begin to hate you. As long as I can rely on you to satisfy my demands, sexual and otherwise, I love you, but the moment you cease to supply what I want I don't like you.'

So there is antagonism between you, there is separation, and when you feel separate from another there is no love.

But if you can live with your wife without thought creating all these contradictory states, these endless quarrels in yourself,

then perhaps - perhaps - you will know what love is. Then you are completely free and so is she, whereas if you depend on her for all your pleasure you are a slave to her. So when one loves there must be freedom, not only from the other person but from oneself.

Love is something that is new, fresh, alive.
It has no yesterday and no tomorrow.
It is beyond the turmoil of thought. It is only the innocent mind which knows what love is, and the innocent mind can live in the world which is not innocent. To find this extraordinary thing which man has sought endlessly through sacrifice, through worship, through relationship, through sex, through every form of pleasure and pain,

is only possible when thought comes to understand itself and comes naturally to an end.
Then love has no opposite, then love has no conflict. You may ask, `If I find such a love, what happens to my wife, my children, my family? They must have security.'
When you put such a question you have never been outside the field of thought, the field of consciousness. When once you have been outside that field you will never ask such a question because then you will know what love is in which there is no thought and therefore no time.

You may read this mesmerized and enchanted, but actually to go beyond thought and time - which means going beyond sorrow - is to be aware that there is a different dimension called love. But you don't know how to come to this extraordinary fount - so what do you do? If you don't know what to do, you do nothing, don't you? Absolutely nothing. Then inwardly you are completely silent. Do you understand what that means? It means that you are not seeking, not wanting, not pursuing; there is no centre at all. Then there is love.

But if you still want to find out, you will see that fear is not love,
dependence is not love, jealousy is not love, possessiveness and domination are not love,
responsibility and duty are not love,
self-pity is not love, the agony of not being loved is not love,
love is not the opposite of hate
any more than humility is the opposite of vanity.

So if you can eliminate all these, not by forcing them but by washing them away as the rain washes the dust of many days from a leaf, then perhaps you will come upon this strange flower which man always hungers after.
If you have not got love - not just in little drops but in abundance if you are not filled with it - the world will go to disaster. You know intellectually that the unity of mankind is essential and that love is the only way, but who is going to teach you how to love? Will any authority, any method, any system, tell you how to love? If anyone tells you, it is not love. Can you say, `I will practise love. I will sit down day after day and think about it. I will practise being kind and gentle and force myself to pay attention to others?'

Do you mean to say that you can discipline yourself to love, exercise the will to love? When you exercise discipline and will to love, love goes out of the window. By practising some method or system of loving you may become extraordinarily clever or more kindly or get into a state of non-violence, but that has nothing whatsoever to do with love.

In this torn desert world there is no love because pleasure and desire play the greatest roles, yet without love your daily life has no meaning. And you cannot have love if there is no beauty. Beauty is not something you see - not a beautiful tree, a beautiful picture, a beautiful building or a beautiful woman. There is beauty only when your heart and mind know what love is. Without love and that sense of beauty there is no virtue, and you know very well that, do what you will, improve society, feed the poor, you will only be creating more mischief, for without love there is only ugliness and poverty in your own heart and mind. But when there is love and beauty, whatever you do is right, whatever you do is in order. If you know how to love, then you can do what you like because it will solve all other problems. So we reach the point: can the mind come upon love without discipline, without thought, without enforcement, without any book, any teacher or leader - come upon it as one comes upon a lovely sunset? It seems to me that one thing is absolutely necessary and that is passion without motive - passion that is not the result of some commitment or attachment, passion that is not lust. A man who does not know what passion is will never know love because love can come into being only when there is total self-abandonment. A mind that is seeking is not a passionate mind and to come upon love without seeking it is the only way to find it - to come upon it unknowingly and not as the result of any effort or experience. Such a love, you will find, is not of time; such a love is both personal and impersonal, is both the one and the many. Like a flower that has perfume you can smell it or pass it by. That flower is for everybody and for the one who takes trouble to breathe it deeply and look at it with delight. Whether one is very near in the garden, or very far away, it is the same to the flower because it is full of that perfume and therefore it is sharing with everybody.




ok i'm breathing...!!!