clear days!!

we've been having them lately in Hilo -- beautiful blue sky greeting me as i awake and look out the big window!  and they're all the more beautiful, coming after the days of  r a i n  and  g r a y.... 

Mr. Chainsaw was here today, after a rather long absence.  he was chainsawing, this morning, and the wind was blowing fiercely (very rare for here!), and both of those things were making me feel very tense and hurried; i was answering emails, and i felt as though someone were chasing me down a chute, at full speed, into the teeth of a roaring buzz-saw!!

Michael had recently reminded me of something i had learned years and years ago: when something is bothering you, instead of trying to escape it, BECOME it! -- and it will no longer bother you.  i had first learned this when living in apartment buildings and dealing with the noise -- er, 'music' --from neighbors' stereos; and i had used it successfully there, and also, a few times, in cases of great physical pain.  i was able to 'become' the music, and the pain, and i discovered, once those things were not separate from myself, they disappeared from my awareness!

i tried to use that procedure today, with the noise of the chainsaw ... and finally did succeed fairly well; but i must say, it was more easily done with the loud music and the physical pain!  i think it was at least partly because both of those were constant -- whereas the chainsaw noise was off-and-on, without even a pattern of off-and-on-ness.  starting and stopping with no predictability -- so i would become the noise, and then it would be gone, which would startle me into realizing that i really was NOT the noise ... and then it would start again, and i would have to become it again, etc....

about 4 hours of this was all i could take, and then i shut off the computer, had a quick lunch of avocado and dulse and parsley and grains, rested for a few minutes in the rocking chair -- finally got myself to slow down from what had felt like a-hundred-miles-an-hour all morning -- and then set out on the bike for downtown Hilo.

it was early afternoon, still under the great blue sky, and i was suddenly feeling wonderful and free and expansive and thoroughly HAPPY!  and this old song came along -- from way back in the 1960s -- and i was singing it and singing it as i rode along....

i grew up with this song, and have always felt a certain 'corniness' about it -- and i have to say, on looking deeper into it, there's really nothing corny about it at all; in fact, i was quite taken today by the profundity of it!  if you can exorcise the ghost of some half-blotto Las Vegas lounge-lizard singing it, and just sing it to yourself, as if it's the first time you've ever heard it, and get into what it's really saying ... you just might be surprised at the depth of spiritual truth in it!!  i was amazed today, to think that a pair of popular-song writers, 40 years ago, would have understood that everything we see in our world is truly a projection of some aspect of US!  the only way they would have known it was to have experienced it themselves; and then they put it in a song; and then people like me heard the song and thought it was 'corny', and even made fun of it ... and, only 40 years later, had experienced enough of Life ourselves to see that this old 'corny' song was in reality a gem of Self-realization!!!