"Among their earliest forms, dragons were associated with the Great Mother, the water god and the warrior sun god. In these capacities they had the power to be both beneficent and destructive and were all-powerful creatures in the universe. Because of these qualities, dragons assumed the roles taken by Osiris and Set in Egyptian mythology." Read More: http://dragons.monstrous.com/powers_of_dragons.htm#ixzz3xcDH57P6

I come from a long line of Dragon Mothers on both sides of my family.  Women who have been Great powerful Mothers with warrior hearts.  As the definition goes, we all have the power to be both beneficent and destructive. One of the keys to understanding ourselves better so that we can be more aware of the Universe around us and how we fit in is to recognize, embrace and make peace with all the parts we discover inside of us both good and bad. We who have dragon hearts have always known this raging power within us, the fire has always been there.  

Some of us were lucky to have had a "cute" little roar in our early years that most adults would find cute. Others of us never had a cute roar.  I was somewhere in-between having grown a soft curly crown of white blonde curls by the time I was two with big brown eyes and plump little arms and legs which meant a lot of the time my little dragon roars would be dismissed as cute and filed under "hissy fits". Those little dragon roars expanded into heartier roars with physical actions combined that, if I'd been a real dragon might have been celebrated as "finding my wings" but as a human, threatened my parents, teachers and friends in my world.  Pretty much by the time I was five years old, I stymied most of the adults in my life starting with being kicked out of kindergarten when I disobeyed my teacher defiantly swinging on the coat rack for our school which couldn't bear my weight thereby crashing coats and all into the plate glass window.  The window didn't break but my teacher's patience with me sure did! On the other hand I could be very cuddly and oh so loving, especially when it came to animals and nature swimming for hours in pools or oceans until the skin on my fingers and toes wrinkled up.

As the power of the dragon grew within me, I continued to attract all kinds of people by my flame but repel many with my next breath.  Being inside me was like being inside of a whirling tornado of feelings, hormones and impressions. As I grew older and my dragon tornado grew I would suck in beliefs, thoughts, understandings, misunderstandings, destructive behaviors and anything that caught my attention.  I knew there was something different about me compared to my peers, but I didn't understand what it was. This power got darker and darker so that all I wanted to do was stamp it out to make it stop hurting me so that I could stop hurting others.  I had watched the mothers in my life with their own dragons and had experienced those times when their roaring flames would spread out covering everyone and everything in their path but for many years. I wasn't able to see that I had this same power too much less understand that it was destructive yet when harnessed could be an amazing power that could be used for good.  Like the Christmas of my 21st year when visiting my Dad and stepmother in Brussels, Belgium.  Within 24 hours of my arrival, complications from a life-threatening car accident that prior summer sent me to the emergency room in the wee hours of the morning in the middle of a doctors' strike.  My tiny step-mother expanded all 5'4" inches of herself, roared in French to people to get snapping, demanded help from the Surgeon General of the hospital and his team which ended up with me receiving major life saving internal surgery very quickly and by the best doctors they had.

Poor me, poor you as dragons hatching out into a nest surrounded by ducklings. From the beginning when we opened our mouths to let out happy roars with flames we created fried chicken! No wonder we clamped down when we smelled smoke, laying thick layers over our undiscovered magic.  Instead of feeling confident and proud of my gifts, I fed the fire of guilt and shame.  I'm in awe that I survived in spite of myself until I stumbled into therapy in my early twenties and begin the long road to discovery and recovery.  Through introspection, understanding, meditation, medication, addiction recovery, and various expansion of various spiritual beliefs I am only now able to see the dragon within me and harness its power.  The image that comes to mind is that of a soul surfer on a big flaming wave.  Though I feel the power, I now believe I'm at choice as to how and when to use it instead of the power using me.  The harness for my dragon powers now allow me to feel their movement and reactions to real or perceived injustice but enable me to choose how to respond appropriately.  My heart's desire is to create peace in the world so I'm grateful to be able to create a warm fire for people to gather around rather than blast them away into the outer shores of consciousness.  

Don't get me wrong, there are still those times when I am enticed by the powerful dragon within and can think of nothing more satisfying than to scorch the earth and all who are on my war path but today I choose to fly up into the sky and expel my flames into infinity until the answers come echoing back.

Harness the dragon within while polishing its scales.

My father passed away unexpectedly, though he was almost 82, at the beginning of last year.  Because he was a retired high ranking career military office, we will honor him with the full regalia at Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, D.C. later this month so that family, friends and colleagues can honor him as his due.  

As the daughter of a fighter pilot officer my dad always seemed bigger than life to me.  I can still remember studying everything about him in all kinds of situations as he lived his life to even the very basic mundane tasks such as scrubbing the smooth mentholated Barbasol Shaving Cream onto his face first thing in the morning.  I’d sit on either the commode or edge of the bathtub and watch him carefully glide his Gillette razor across his cheek starting way up near his sideburns, then down and around his mouth to just under his chin.  Back in the days when razor blades were the most common, there was a whole ritual of changing out the blades from unscrewing just below the metal top of the shaver so that the two clasps yawned widely so that the old blade could be discarded to carefully dropping in a new blade and screwing the clasps back shut. Those times that the “razor bit him” he’d either dab it with torn off toilet paper or use the ever mysterious styptic pen that would stop the flow in mid stream.  I remember him watching me watching him from his reflection in the mirror which fascinated me because although his image looked the same, his reflection was just ever so slightly slanted off to one side.  It made me wonder if he saw himself as slanted or if he knew that he was really more handsome in real life! After he completed shaving, the next step was to splash drops of Old Spice into both of his hands from a red glass container patting the fresh smelling elixir all over his face. My reward for having been a patient awestruck witness was to receive a pat on each side of my face from his Old Spiced hands which perfectly covered my cheeks.

Recently the ANC Chaplain contacted me with a request for stories about my Dad which I then sent out family and friends. As expected, there have been many stories about his bravery during his service years and overall just how well-respected he was as a leader. What I like to dust off from my memory banks of my hero-father is the clown that would erupt now and again whether it was through the inflection of his voice, the twinkle of his eye, the complete alteration of his voice into one of several favorite characters or the ever so slight movement of his hand.  

Me and my brothers and certainly any dog we’ve ever owned knew well the art of dad’s subtle humor.  His sparkling eyes would usually give away the pending joke that was sure to follow.  He used to tease us mercilessly with the built up tension from him sitting completely still for what seemed like forever while he jutted his jaw out more and more with each accumulating minute adding a patterned slight movement of his hand which always ended in a raucous fast  movement of either grabbing our knees with his hand and squeezing the tickle out (known as the horse bite) or for the dogs, grabbing their legs or tails so they couldn’t run (thank God we never owned biters!)

As he grew older, dad’s humor only seemed to deepen in its width and breadth.  When my husband and I were newlyweds we had cobbled together hand-me down and make shift furniture which included a sunken-in futon mattress that fit into a wood frame like a folded piece of pita bread which we used as our sofa in the living room.  Late one night as our evening was winding down after watching a long movie, I got up off the futon to turn off the t.v. and noticed a furtive movement in the peripheral vision of my left eye.  Turning quickly, I caught my dad completely embellishing the moment of being stuck in the futon so that his legs could not reach the floor for him to get up. He wiggled both his legs in the air like some kind of a big bug that had found itself stuck inside of a pocket of wet mud totally making fun of himself and laughing at the ridiculousness of the situation that he had found himself in.

Although my mom and dad divorced when I was 10 and my brother was 8, mom still remembers so many moments of great laughter with him least of which was on their wedding night which really helped ease the nervous tension that they both were feeling and sealed her loyalty to him as a true friend in a time of need.  I’m in the process of writing a memoir about my life; the good, the bad, the ugly.  And because my dad, mom, me and my brothers are all brightly colorful people there is a lot of intense feelings in the memories of growing up.  One thing I’m really grateful for remembering now is how much I studied the clown inside of the hero so that even sometimes when that hero falls short in his very human responses to life, there will always be the memory of the sparkle of the clown just raring to emerge out of the shadows if I was only willing to notice him and join in the play.

The dogs had been jumping on and off the bed between my husband and me for the last five minutes as unobtrusively as they could but with just enough excitement and slight whining as each of the eight paws between them brushed the surface of the bed in attempt to wake us up so we would let them outside to bound  after quivering rabbits, chattering squirrels and tiny dragons from their dreams. I lay there for a full five minutes with my eyes closed praying upon hope that my husband would respond first so that I could relish the remaining ten minutes I had to nestle before the alarm went off to begin the day.  But, he didn’t budge and because he’d been sick for the past three days with a cold, I reluctantly hoisted my warm, sleep-deprived body off the bed wading through two hyper dogs as they coiled and jumped around me trying to not trip over our ancient Black Lab whose form I could barely make out in the gray shades of morning beginning.

My body creaked in rebellion with my sinuses that were crashing in dull rhythm to the ever changing barometric pressure telling us all that a cold front was coming.  Nausea rounded out the overall reluctant feeling of facing a new day with my brain waking up to the idea that I could choose to be in full misery feeding the negative feelings into a full brushfire of negative thoughts, judgements and actions or I could acknowledge the sucky way I felt and keep my mind open for spots of beauty that might occur.

I kept re-choosing to keep an open mind in spite of feeling like crap even as I washed my face feeling that ever-present tiny white whisker that refuses to die, cannot be plucked out at the root and tends to spring forth overnight often times catching me unaware until I find it unexpectedly just before an important meeting.  No amount of makeup or foundation can cover up a tiny white whisker springing off the side of your face reflecting the sun’s glint in your profile.

I creaked out to the front door and up the driveway to fetch the morning paper still between choosing as to whether I’d fill in all facets of what it means to be a total bitch or see what good may come in spite of myself.  As I picked up the paper and turned towards the house, there it was, the beauty I’d been waiting for showing up unexpectedly as the sun brushed the branches and trunk of the ancient Cottonwood tree behind our house its light softly dusting it all like cinnamon on an apple.  Way high up in the tallest bare branches was flock of birds perfectly perched between each other taking up three or four levels like notes in a song book.  

After years of seeing my being and the whole world through a victim’s eyes whether warranted or not, I’m so grateful to have learned that I am at choice as to how I “see” the world no matter how I am feeling physically, emotionally or spiritually. I don’t have to perpetuate the victim agony lurking in the shadow echoes of my past. Today is a new day and even if when I turn my head for a different view my neck aches in stiffness, I’m at choice as to how much authority I give the pain.  I can choose not to think like a victim. I choose to see beauty.

One of the most wonderful things about getting older is that sometimes those people, places, things, thoughts etc. that used to make me want to slink into oblivion from embarrassment has smoothed out into a reprieved island of sublimity.  Oh sure, you could say that this reprieve is simply another way of looking at denial but dang I'd rather slather myself in the sublime!

Let me share with you three ways I have previously imagined quirky outcomes that would hover on the edges of my deepest inner secrets along with understandings about myself such as how I could be a classy klutz, hilarious when a speech impediment would surface from talking too fast, and be totally unable to knit no matter how large the needles or beautiful or fine the skein of wool.

1.)  You've heard the saying, "There's got to be a pony in here somewhere (cuz the manure's so high)".  Over the years when I've shared this thought (writing and talking) from that humongous pile of caca would arise a pony with the further embellishments that if there was a pony then surely there would also be a bridle, saddle and blanket.  What I didn't realize then was how my mind's eye was seeing that the little pony.  Only when really zeroing in on what I "saw" did I realize it  was THE LITTLE PINK PLASTIC TOY LITTLE PONY!!! What?  Not a cute/beautiful real-life foal or filly?  Nope, not in my brain.  

2.) Fear of flying.  There was a time in my life where my tremendous anxiety and spill overs into panic attacks distilled themselves into a phobia about flying.  Oy vey the first few years of my marriage when we would fly from Texas to New York or California or Israel or Mexico I was filled with such a tremendous fear of dying, being hurt, being out of control that it was all I could do to just sit in my seat and not cling to the inner side of the plane. Over time I learned various techniques from using ear plugs, to listening to calming music, playing a game of cards, reading magazines, undergoing EMDR therapy and finally taking a prescribed medication but until then, there was always the tool of visualization.   I feel like a pretty enlightened person who is very aware of psychology but man oh man when it came to visualizing something that could "contain my thoughts so that they did not infect the energy of the plane or pilots and thereby partner to the possibility of a plane malfunction" I was at a loss. So visualize Kramer from Seinfeld as me (even though I'm attractive and female) and see a scene unfold where we see that Kramer is visualizing himself wearing a beige plastic helmet with various wires---for the thoughts---coming up through the helmet and back down into a loop---to contain the thoughts.  It actually worked pretty well for me.  It wasn't until talking with a good friend who shared some of the same kind of fear of flying that I realized how very different my visualization was from hers. Whereas I had a beige (not even a pretty color) helmet on with wires all over it, my friend visualized a beautiful giant angel standing behind her lifting her negative thoughts into its hands and gently blowing them into oblivion. Her blowing thoughts probably became beautiful butterflies first blinking off as bright lights.  I only admitted my visualization because the pay off was seeing her tip her head back as she built up to her fantastic laugh and let it out with tremendous sound from bottom muscles of her gut!

3.) Running away to New Mexico.   The first 7 or so years of my wonderful marriage were full of fear and anxiety for me because of commitment and intimacy issues. I'm happy to report that I have grown up so much since then as we roll into our 26th year together but back in my fearful days I would often fantasize about running away. Just grabbing my purse and leaving my husband, dogs and cats behind.  Which meant all my friends as well.  It was a rather tamed down fantasy of what would happen if I died but instead I lived and was just gone. Anyway, so where would you imagine running away? You have the whole world at your fingertips, you have all kinds of life experiences to inform your fantasy so you could come up with something pretty fantastic, right? Not me.  For some reason, I would always run away to New Mexico I guess because I loved the climate, the mountains, the people and after all, didn't Georgia O'Keefe end up there?  But in my mind's eye, I'd always end up waitressing at a truck stop wearing a polyester baby blue or pink uniform with white cuffs, collar, little white hat and squeaky shoes...like Alice and Flo from "What About Alice."  What? Really??!  No wonder I stuck out my marriage....

These are just a few of the ways that I share my creative imagination with you gentle readers to give you a taste of how my mind interprets life for me.  From a young age I was pretty aware that I "saw" things and therefore exhibited them (art, song, dance, etc.) very different from my peers.  I learned early on that not sharing or at least flagrantly exhibiting my mind for all to comment, sneer, kid, judge on was probably a good rule of thumb though I always seemed to find some kind of outlet for my imagination in spite of my embarrassment. 

Today I celebrate all my beautiful quirkiness and revel in its glorious nerd-ness.  Turns out, I really love to make people laugh and so sharing the way I see things is a great way of doing that.  It's even given me the courage to go through three Improv levels and sign up for the fourth level which starts in a week!  Who me? at my age? What on Earth could I be thinking? I'm not sure, but what fun to find out and share with others what was once embarrassing and is now sublime.

It was a cold icy night on December 12 in Denton, Texas.  I had just obsessively cleaned my tiny cedar-walled apartment, lit my gas stove on low beside my bed and settled in to smoke enough pot to help me forget the misery of the past two months. My three cats had nestled in around my legs under the blanket for a winter's nap.  All seemed better than could be expected in spite of the fact that my mother had attempted suicide the weekend before.  Upon admittance to the psychiatric hospital where she interned as an Occupational Therapist, she was able to convince the head Psychiatrist that she was mentally competent and would not make an attempt on her life again so was released to go home that same evening.  I felt scared, depressed, out of control and that my mother's life hung in the balance with the weight of her survival on my shoulders.  In October I had made the painful choice to abort my pregnancy and had not been prepared for the onslaught of feelings from that emotionally, spiritually and physically.  

So the unfolding of my nightmare life that night shouldn't have come as a surprise to anyone least of all me.  Within the first half hour of heavy smoking on my bong, I began to have horrible fearful thoughts.  An image came to my mind from a horror movie that my Dad had taken me and some friends to for Halloween when I was 14 and my mind had further taken the vision of a body with no arms and legs lumbering into my room with my mother's face.  Shaking uncontrollably, I phoned my best friend, Cindy, who lived two houses down from me with a house she shared with two friends.  Although her boyfriend was spending the night, she invited me to come sleep on their couch so I left my space heater on low so my cats and plants wouldn't freeze and headed down the street to safety.

Within minutes of settling into blankets on pillows on my friends' sofa, I heard a swirl of furious movement in the house.  Cindy's boyfriend, Robbie, was talking fast and harsh as he ran out the door and down the street. Within seconds Robbie came running back yelling at the top of his lungs, "Lynn your house is on fire."  I jumped up and ran down the street to see large orange and yellow angry flames licking the windows of my apartment. My knees went weak, all my cats were inside and my apartment was also one of four inside of an old rock house...there were other people at risk.  I screamed and wailed at the top of my lungs in desperation and in a moment of disorientation Robbie thought that he was hearing me screaming from inside so he kicked in the front door.  The minute Robbie kicked in the front door, the fire took hold and boomed into a raging mass of flame of desolation.  I sat on my knees on the cold concrete sidewalk whimpering.  Robbie soon ran outside with my oldest Siamese cat, Daphne, who was alive.  He ran back into my apartment and came back out with my big fluffy male cat Avatar who had been frantically coiling up under the sink looking for protection.  Then out of the corner of my eye I saw a movement and my grey cat Gandalf, came running up to me after jumping out of one of the busted windows.  All my cats had made it so I jumped into action.  I ran up to the house next door belonging to our landlord and banged frantically until his wife answered. It took a while to wake Richard from his drunken stupor and when he finally came to he was ranting and raving and calling me a stupid bitch, asking what I had done.  I ran to all the other apartments in the house waking up my neighbors, luckily they all made it.

We all sat outside watching with horror as the flames continued their destruction waiting for the firemen to arrive.  Once the flames had been put out and everyone who lived in the house had found a safe place to be until daylight, I called my father who lived in another country to tell him what had happened.  He couldn't quite believe what I was telling him.  I found out later that he had even called the Denton Fire Department to find out if there was a fire on my street but because it had happened at 1am my fire had not made it to their books yet (this was before computers!)  He called my step-mother's parents who lived in San Antonio and because of my irresponsible behavior over the last few years, sent them a check to cover expenses for clothes and supplies for me.  

So many friends came to my aid in spite of my reckless reputation.  Cindy has photos of me stuck in a book somewhere as I picked through the ashes of my apartment in hopes of scavenging something that survived.  All the plants another friend had temporarily loaned me had perished. A leather coat that I had been so proud to possess disfigured out of shape. Both blow dryers melted against the wall. But I was grateful that me, the other people in the house and my cats were physically unscathed.

I think it was the purring of my cats cuddling up next to me in a temporary makeshift bed in a boyfriend's room in his frat house that gave me hope that there would be better days ahead.  I was still very young, headstrong and naive, ignorant about the correlation of my choices in life and their consequences but a little seed of hope had been planted through the outpouring of love from so many.  Even though the next five or so years would continue to unveil the hard realities of life, I'm grateful that seeds of love were able to take hold in my heart.

Do you see life on the macro, or big picture level, or do you see it on the micro, or are you just focused on yourself? I don't believe there is a right or wrong way to view life. Probably most of us toggle back and forth between macro and micro all the time.  And some of us have a tendency to start from one or the other on a regular basis.  I believe knowing how we see the world helps us to understand ourselves much better.

For example, I'm a macro person.  I'm the person you want by your side to help you figure out the big picture for your life, your family, your company.  I can "see" the potential for how things can be whether it's personal growth or design.  This is a wonderful talent and very useful for many when I've cleaned up the strings of my ego that can become hard and brittle influencing the tint and texture of the big picture. 

One of the clues that I have some "cleaning" (see http://www.hooponopono.org/) of my ego and thought process is when I take the big picture and see every scenario as a horrible outcome just waiting to happen.  

Take a conversation that I had yesterday evening after the sun had set when my husband and were enjoying the crisp night air and the return of our screech owl to its house on the Cottonwood Tree.  I had been depressed, afraid and feeling overwhelmed from a conversation that I had with a good friend about the weather being warmer, the animals and insects being all akimbo and the resulting pregnancies and pending births way earlier in the year than usual as a result. So I asked my very practical, engineer-minded, down-to-Earth husband what he felt his life was about? He gave a very nuts and bolts response about living as best we can each day and enjoying each day as it unfolds, and also that he did not feel like he had any great talent or strength to help out the world beyond what he was already doing nor would his life have an impact on the planet now or after he is gone and that if anyone did remember him after he had died, no one would 50 or 100 years later. He then asked me why I was asking him this and I explained my thoughts of the past week about global warming, etc.

This type of response from him used to piss me off so much during our first years together 25 years ago, but today I know who he is deep inside and who I am much better. And I realized that I was using my preference to see things on a macro level, that are germane and very important to us all, to the point of catastrophic proportions to take the focus off of what was really making me squirm which related to an important family event happening later this month.

In the core of my center I believe the most important thing for me (and you) is for us to live our lives as well as we can each day. Period. End of story.  If this is all there is, this being the day as we see it in front of us right now, then it's important for me to be kind where I can, clean up my part of the street (figuratively, emotionally, spiritually) and enjoy what I can when I can.  I also believe that each of us has a special nugget of exquisiteness to share that only we have. In all the 8 billion people on planet Earth only you have your nugget and only I have my nugget.  When we get centered into ourselves and with the great magnificence of the unknown (I call this "God" but you can call this whatever is right for you) our nugget knows how to unfold and we know how to allow it.  

In other words, if my nugget is related to doing something for the world on a grand scale, then in my center of centers I will know this and trust the directions are locked away in a zip file just waiting for me to say, "yes". And if my nugget is one that focuses on just being the best at being "Lynn" as I can be so that I can spark light into whomever I come into contact with spreading love and hope, well than that is just as important.  

I wonder if we might have more than one nugget like a bowl of Snap, Crackle and Pop, but I suppose as we allow ourselves to "become" we will understand the nuggets as they surface.  

Yes Virginia, your life is very important.

Do you see life on the macro, or big picture level, or do you see it on the micro, or are you just focused on yourself? I don't believe there is a right or wrong way to view life. Probably most of us toggle back and forth between macro and micro all the time.  And some of us have a tendency to start from one or the other on a regular basis.  I believe knowing how we see the world helps us to understand ourselves much better.

For example, I'm a macro person.  I'm the person you want by your side to help you figure out the big picture for your life, your family, your company.  I can "see" the potential for how things can be whether it's personal growth or design.  This is a wonderful talent and very useful for many when I've cleaned up the strings of my ego that can become hard and brittle influencing the tint and texture of the big picture. 

One of the clues that I have some "cleaning" (see http://www.hooponopono.org/) of my ego and thought process is when I take the big picture and see every scenario as a horrible outcome just waiting to happen.  

Take a conversation that I had yesterday evening after the sun had set when my husband and were enjoying the crisp night air and the return of our screech owl to its house on the Cottonwood Tree.  I had been depressed, afraid and feeling overwhelmed from a conversation that I had with a good friend about the weather being warmer, the animals and insects being all akimbo and the resulting pregnancies and pending births way earlier in the year than usual as a result. So I asked my very practical, engineer-minded, down-to-Earth husband what he felt his life was about? He gave a very nuts and bolts response about living as best we can each day and enjoying each day as it unfolds, and also that he did not feel like he had any great talent or strength to help out the world beyond what he was already doing nor would his life have an impact on the planet now or after he is gone and that if anyone did remember him after he had died, no one would 50 or 100 years later. He then asked me why I was asking him this and I explained my thoughts of the past week about global warming, etc.

This type of response from him used to piss me off so much during our first years together 25 years ago, but today I know who he is deep inside and who I am much better. And I realized that I was using my preference to see things on a macro level, that are germane and very important to us all, to the point of catastrophic proportions to take the focus off of what was really making me squirm which related to an important family event happening later this month.

In the core of my center I believe the most important thing for me (and you) is for us to live our lives as well as we can each day. Period. End of story.  If this is all there is, this being the day as we see it in front of us right now, then it's important for me to be kind where I can, clean up my part of the street (figuratively, emotionally, spiritually) and enjoy what I can when I can.  I also believe that each of us has a special nugget of exquisiteness to share that only we have. In all the 8 billion people on planet Earth only you have your nugget and only I have my nugget.  When we get centered into ourselves and with the great magnificence of the unknown (I call this "God" but you can call this whatever is right for you) our nugget knows how to unfold and we know how to allow it.  

In other words, if my nugget is related to doing something for the world on a grand scale, then in my center of centers I will know this and trust the directions are locked away in a zip file just waiting for me to say, "yes". And if my nugget is one that focuses on just being the best at being "Lynn" as I can be so that I can spark light into whomever I come into contact with spreading love and hope, well than that is just as important.  

I wonder if we might have more than one nugget like a bowl of Snap, Crackle and Pop, but I suppose as we allow ourselves to "become" we will understand the nuggets as they surface.  

Yes Virginia, your life is very important.

The thing about “waking up” (becoming conscious) to the world around us is that we can’t seem to do it just half way. Or at least I haven’t figured out how.  Being awake to the reality of this world as best as we can understand it is like being “a little pregnant”.  What I mean by comparing waking up just a little bit vs. being just a little bit pregnant, is that if you define pregnancy from the moment the sperm hits the ovum and a zygote is created to waking up a little bit when the spark of awareness inside of you opens your perception up to just how much is going on in this world, you’re either in or you’re out---there’s no half-way about it.   Upon waking up, some of us spend our whole lives desiring to learn as much as we can about ourselves and the world around us.  And there are also those of us who think they might avert fear of the unknown if they could just go back to being comfortably numb (thank you Pink).

The thing is once we’re awakened, we can’t ever really go back to being in that deep sleep of not-knowing again.  

When I was in my early twenties I took a large amount of homemade LSD for the third (and last) time in my life. I was quite unprepared for the resulting unravelling of defense, thoughts and feelings as a result. Rather than preparing myself in a proper way prior to taking LSD as some friends would have done before they tripped, I did not make sure that I had rested and slept the night before (I’d actually eaten some mushrooms 24 hours prior), I did not eat good nourishing food and I had not designated a safe place to trip much less assign a “guide” who was not tripping themselves.  So, as things were primed to do, when at the peak of my high it was time for a male friend I’d been in denial about desiring as more than a friend had to leave which meant he had to take us all back into the city so that he could take his estranged wife from home to work, I went into an immediate fight or flight mode.  On our way back, as our car began its descent down a large hill, I began to relive a horrible car wreck I’d been in fours years prior.   My skin turned clammy and grey and my body temperature dropped suddenly.  I knew this was going to be a really bad trip.    Once my friend dropped me and my two tripping friends off at our house, my mission was to find a way to make the thinking, fear and awareness crowding every corner of my brain to S T O P. I hoped that by crawling into bed and pulling the covers over my head that I could just sleep it off.  But that wasn’t the case, the LSD had other plans and so for the next 24 hours I had to weather the way my brain exploded with fear, questions, philosophizing, theorizing, denying etc.  I was scared to death and it was in the middle of all of this that I realized that the only person who could save me on the brink of insanity, was me.  The good news; however, was that so many my walls of my denial were crumbling. The gig was up.  Desperate to find help, I queried several friends I trusted for names of therapists, interviewed several  and found one who could help me to crawl back to sanity. Through that process I learned that I suffered with anxiety and panic disorder. It was her thought also that the LSD had stripped most if not all of the filters in my brain. I was in individual therapy for several years. It was a painful but oddly relieving process where discovered who I was, how my upbringing, environment and genetics had influenced and effected me and my response and reactions to life as a result. 

In this discovery process, I learned about the concept of choice---when I was at choice as to how I responded and what I was at choice about.

This LSD tripping gone awry is an extreme example of how I “woke up” which I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy!   This is just one reason why I believe we humans can’t just wake up half-way.  Oh of course I could have made the choice to never get into counseling but then I may not have ever found out about12-step recovery programs or any of the other myriad of spiritual explorations that have helped me through this waking up process.

My fighter pilot Dad used to constantly say to me, “shit or get off the pot!”  It’s a rather indelicate way of saying in six words what I just said in 700 but you get my drift.  

Instead of waiting for some earth shattering, wall crumbling event to happen to us, isn’t it much kinder for us to welcome the birth of realization of who we’ve been carrying around inside of us our whole lives?  Breathe, just breathe, there are so many paths and doors just waiting for us to take and open.

You and I can't be the only two people out here in the Universe who absolutely love to read all kinds of writings.  Thank g-d for the endless sea of writings from which we can pick from depending on our moods or purpose.  As a writer, I often sit inside of the cozy privacy of my own head and judge the hell out of others who have written. My thoughts swing from, "I could have done that", "that piece is so elementary", "been there done that!" to "wow, how could my writing possibly compare to this masterpiece."

The common theme that rises out of this for me is that what a published writer has accomplished in whatever format it is, is that they have w r i t t e n.  They have endured whatever process was needed for them to get their thoughts and information on to a page and they have published it. Period. End of story.  The net net is that usually what has irritated me the most about a piece is that whoever the schmuck-face is that wrote it, WROTE IT!  They didn't keep their thoughts and ideas; however simple, over done or ridiculous I may perceive it to be, stuck inside of their heads. They put it into print (digital and or paper).

And then there is the perfectionist tyrant who lives inside of my head. Actually, I wonder if there is a whole troop of perfectionists who I have allowed to take up residence in my head.  So powerful have I allowed it/them to become that I often abandon myself before I even begin to actualize an idea to prose or art because "it" just couldn't possibly meet, much less exceed, the perfectionist committee inside me.

So, I'm standing up to them and have made a commitment to write every day.  Even when I don't feel the big satisfying "hit" of writing something that grabs you. We need to write something because people like you and me will look forward to reading it.

Because, after all, most of us---if we're honest----don't really know what is just beyond this world of the life we are living right now.  Yes, we can make our best guess at it, yes we can choose to believe various pathways that Prophets and Masters have shared with us through the years; however, just like the experience of something as personal as childbirth, we won't really know what is beyond this life until we're beyond this life.

With that said, what we can know is how we experience death around us such as how we are effected by the death of people, animals, plants, species, ideas, cars, etc. And/or what we do in the process of the dying of others and as well as after they/it have gone.

Two deaths rocked my world this year. The first was my father who passed four days before his 82nd birthday.  One of the biggest gifts that came from all of the work I've done on clearing out baggage from stories and experiences of my life is that when he died instead of feeling like there was a big hole in the Universe, I experienced feeling even more connected to the whole of it.  Oh sure, I cried a lot and there isn't a time I don't hear an Air Force jet flying over head that I don't think of him but I'm pretty sure he'd love that his death helped me to see even more deeply how we are all connected.

The second death was the unexpected passing of the favorite brother of a very good friend from college. Although she adores her other three brothers, the one who died was her rock---actually he was perceived as "the rock" by their entire family.  The gift I got from this death was having the ability to fully show up to hold the space and be of support to my friend, her husband and her family with no expectations other than to share and give love.  I realized that all the experiences of deaths of people, pet, nature, ideas, etc. through the years had truly opened my heart up enough to allow for the growth out of self-centeredness into compassion for others.

Do I believe there is something else besides this life we are living right now? Absolutely. Can I prove it to you? Have no desire to do that because I believe it is in the proving that there is something after death we become distracted from living fully which is exciting if you think about it because instead, we can begin to grow and explore all there is in our heads, hearts and souls right now while we're breathing here on Earth so thoroughly that, hopefully, when our time comes we will be able to release with joy from a life well lived.