Tag: metaphysics

exploration, hiking, insight, journey, Metaphysics, Nature, nature lovers, soul's grounding, Uncategorized

Vulcanized: Thrown into a Fire

beverlysalas

“Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.”    Henry David Thoreau

The path I tread over and over again these days is very narrow, very crooked, very jagged.  It leads me to that which I am in love: volcanoes.  Well, not just any volcano, and not so much the lava spewing caldera (though I have dawdled in awe near such a one) but rather the five or six volcanoes sitting in a southerly row on the west mesa of the Rio Grande rift valley.  

 

I do not visit as often as I would like.  I would live on one of these ancients if I were allowed.  JA, Black, Bond, Vulcan, Anam Cara (soul friend), all beckon, ...a tiny hut would do, a one-room cabin like Thoreau’s, or a simple cave from which to safely watch the weather unfold.

Power dwells here, along with peace and possibility, but also danger.  Tread nonchalantly at your peril.  This rattler is but one example of the many inhabitants: 

Startled on top of JA

But where you might find hell, you might also find heaven.  The noisy world of the city is replaced by silence…..the air sometimes so still, so serene…where solitude, ceremony, and insight sit side by side by side.  Come!  Walk with reverence. You will see (Carlos Cataneda-type ‘seeing”) not only visual wonder, you will see what wonder is and what can be.

What wonder is: the diversity of our planet.  These critters can all be found on one volcano…Anam Cara.  They are various bugs of the beetle variety.  Wonder-full.

What can be:  the image below begs you to imagine…

As the earth rotates counter-clockwise away from the sun, I give myself over to the swirl of the planet, orientate to the dance, and feel myself moving…a speck on the edge of this great sphere, grasping my proper place in the immensity of that which I am part.  Feeling, also, my connectedness to the universe and to infinity.  

Sometimes I climb seeking the full moon, and try to catch  the rising moon in my hands, 

 

 

 

 

 

then release the setting sun with breath.

If I stand on a volcano and wave my arms, I might produce the “butterfly effect” sending new winds, new events circling the earth.

If I stand atop a volcano and shout, “Take care of our planet!  Take care of our beautiful home,” I might change the course of fate.  It is right that I should consider these things both heavy and light, light as a beetle’s wings and as calamitous as human demise.  Vulcanized.

insight, meaning of life, Metaphysics, Philosophy, salas seeking solace

The Unbearable Darkness of Seeing

beverlysalas

100_4668

  The Unbearable Darkness of Seeing: Part I

“The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us.” HDT

I awoke to find myself falling down a deep, dark hole. How could this be happening when all the “omens” were aligned?

Yet now it seems I must agree with those who believe that people who see “signs” and Points of Convergence (see blog, Jan 14)) see nothing but a human construct born out of desperation: the need to ascribe meaning to it all.  But there is no meaning, there only “is” which is to say, our state of being.

Good god!  How many times must we have our world rocked before we give in…give up…realize coincidences are the children of chance?  Fate does not exist…merely odd coincidences we want to call fate because of our seemingly inherent need to understand at least some of the chaos.

There is no meaning!!!

Convergence is happenstance!  I have been running a fool’s errand lo these many years…always looking for the “connections” the universe has planned for me. Ha!  Such hubris!  The universe does not care. The universe does not contrive..the universe is but a molecular construct. Do not relegate events to unseen powers!  That is just more/different religious bullshit.

Searching for Thoreau…lost.  Where? I do not know!

Security…the word exists but the state of being secure does not.  Security = chimera = an illusion or fabrication of the mind; an unrealizable dream. a construct with no real foundation – a castle in the air.

“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” HDT

I set in pounds upon pounds of solid foundation. I did my work, more than my share, yet in the end I looked the fool.  Do I now tell Thoreau to go to hell?  He wouldn’t hear me anyhow.

“There is no value in life except what you choose to place upon it and no happiness in any place except what you bring to it yourself.” HDT

journey, Metaphysics, occupation, Thoreau

Points of Convergence/The Circle Game

beverlysalas

“The universe is wider than our view of it.” –Henry David Thoreau

Has this ever happened to you?  The answer, or that thing you’ve been searching for, was actually right there all along? You passed by it many times, but you did not “see”?  At least not immediately. DSCF1606But then, once you truly opened your eyes, once you zoomed in the lens and found your focal point, your vision became clear.  You had to laugh!  Laugh at yourself for being such a blunderhead. Laugh at the universe for playing games with you.

Do you see it?  The town’s name?  My blog: searchingforthoreau?   The town I have been passing through for weeks now.

DSCF1602Henry David Thoreau, one of my heroes, gave a great deal of his life over to communing with nature while transcending the material world.

I give as much as I can!   (Who hasn’t said that before?)  I could do with less.  I could give more.

Yet a man (or a woman) has to eat.

Plus, I love the classroom, a petri dish of human interaction where tremendous growth and change can take place  It’s always a grand adventure.

During my search for employment to get paid the bread, to buy the bread, it was necessary to travel to Crownpoint, NM a number of times.  To and fro my friend and I would go, across the vast landscape, in awe of the majestic scenery.DSCF1605 - Copy

Dreams and vows and lives converge…

One Dream: to live with Native Americans, to learn their ways. Many years ago my family immersed itself in the way by way of the of the cowboy and Indian genre on television shows.  We couldn’t get enough of them…shows that featured the wild west.  Who to root for? Simple for me. Who to pretend you were while playing with the neighborhood kids?  I played Tonto. I played Sacagawea.

I Vowed:

“Honor all with whom we share the Earth:
Four-leggeds, two-leggeds, winged ones,
Swimmers, crawlers, plant and rock…”DSCF1548

“Regard heaven as your father, earth as your mother, and all that lives as your brother and sister.” –Navajo Proverb–

I wanted to walk that path as closely as a white person is able. I found Henry David Thoreau when I was sixteen and understood: this nature-loving white man’s words and ways would help me hold the Navajo ethos close to my heart.

   Points of Convergence

100_7233 Destiny or Chance? Fate or Coincidence? What’s your take?

The desire to teach again, to live the Navajo way, to live like Thoreau: with nature while writing about nature (both human nature and nature nature) found me creating a blog, but also interviewing for a position on the faculty at the Navajo Technical University. The Humanities Dept Chair showed me around the campus.  We walked and talked and at one point we watched a huge bird, silhouetted against the sun’s own sky, swoop up and over an escarpment. Prof. Tallant confessed, “When I die, I want to come back as a bird, a raven to be exact; they have attitude and altitude.”  I quickly responded, “Me too! If I get to live again, I want to return flying, like a keen-eyed hawk.”

In the bookstore 2 hours later:  On a jacket and on a sweatshirt hanging on the racks, on the T-shirts folded neatly on shelves, I saw the NTU mascot, the university spirit animal.  One of the T-shirts proclaimed, “We are the flying hawks!”

I will be a flying hawk…reincarnation through teaching.  Very interesting, you must agree?

Not until I was back home in Albuquerque, recalling my wish for reincarnation and the flying hawks did it all connect…I have been passing through Thoreau twice a visit.  I will be teaching literature and writing to the flying hawks of NTU. I will continue driving every week through Thoreau on my way to Crownpoint, driving across (and soon exploring) some of the most magnificent expanses of nature a heart can hold.  Henry David would have much to say about that!

Destiny or Coincidence?DSCF0425

“Not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.” –Henry David Thoreau
Metaphysics

Thanksgiving Metamorphosis “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.” -HDT

beverlysalas

My mother died in mid-October on a blue-sky, Sunday morning. Devoutly religious, the timing of her passing—the Lord’s Day—was in and of itself somewhat mystical. Given a choice, Sunday would surely have been the day she would have chosen for her soul to rise up to her God. Knowing this gave me peace and a soft smile.

Yet ever since God slammed the life out of my nineteen year old sister, killed in a car crash where she was the only casualty, I have remained a skeptic, an agnostic regarding the Holy Spirit. Not my mother. In spite of that sorrow, she saw her eighty- eight year life as an on-going opportunity to reflect God’s glory by giving to all those around her.

Mom had a butterfly collection. Not real ones, but butterflies of all materials and sizes: metallic butterfly magnets, wooden butterfly wall hangings, plastic butterfly kitchen aides—yellow, orange, blue, and golden butterflies—half inch butterfly envelope stickers, along with two foot square butterfly paintings. The flight of more than seventy butterflies floating about her walls and gardens begged the question, Why such an affinity for butterflies?

My mother’s naming me the executrix of her will (my father had already passed) necessitated many trips between my home near Baltimore, MD and her home in northern Pennsylvania. The weeks went by and winter drew near; I sensed a pressing need to complete my duties distributing and dissolving her assets. These obligations required me to work in my childhood home for several days at a time, week after week, clearing out the detritus of fifty years.

I had traveled yet again to Pennsylvania on Thanksgiving, first to spend the day with my sister and her children, then to continue with the dissolution of Mom’s estate. On the Sunday following Thanksgiving, feeling both physically and emotionally exhausted, I took a break.

My car transported me 20 miles south to Wilkes-Barre, a small city bordered on the north by the Susquehanna River. Autumn’s leaves were long gone; winter weather had set in weeks before, yet the afternoon bloomed unseasonably warm, the air crisp and refreshing as I walked the river trail along its shore. The Susquehanna felt alive, a living breathing presence stretching its tendrils wide, lapping gently where water met land, gurgling as it passed over shoals and sand creating eddies and swirls. River grasses whispered with the wind. Sights and sounds, sun and air. I gave myself to the elements, breathing in a dreamy, hypnotic peace after weeks of sorrow.

Lost in memories, wondering about the meaning of life, the value of any one life, my heart posed several questions to the universe…questions as prayers. Is spirit real? Does the soul exist? Do we get to come back?

A fluttering about my face brought me back to the present where a brilliantly beautiful, blue and black butterfly floated by. In northern Pennsylvania! Near November’s end. Coincidence or response?
Metamorphosis…Mother….Mariposa…….Thanksgiving!  metamorphosis