Breaking News

In a stunning turn of events, peace has broken out. All over the world.  In fact, it has always been here and gone unnoticed! Story at 11:00.

The news is incredulous, I know. How is it we have been so blind to the presence of peace? How is it we have walked right past it into discord, conflict, wars and violence? The Holy Wars? The Inquisition? The World Wars? Peace was there and unseen.  Countless wars, battles, attacks, skirmishes, acts of revenge, acts of aggression, murder, mayhem, brutality and oppression. Peace was there and ignored. And that's just the roster of obviously horrendous events. Don't forget disagreement, contention, quarrels, grudges and just plain everyday "I'm right, you're wrong" stubbornness-- disharmony, it seems, is hardwired into human behavior. How, then, could peace have been here all along?

Peace is the spacious, patient, ever present and all allowing environment out of which all conflict arises. And why does it arise? Simple. It arises because people believe the thoughts in their heads. These thoughts tell us, quite frequently and incessantly, that the way things are is not the way things should be. Every head has a different set of thoughts, we all want to be right and have our way, and we're off to the races. We stray from peace, our natural state of existence, intentionally. Now, I want you to consider this-- just because a thought comes up in your head doesn't mean it's true and yet even given the obvious contradiction of sometimes having conflicting thoughts and confusing thoughts, most people give their thoughts gospel status and identify deeply with them. Isn't a thought, after all, just a symbol for something else, just a collection of words spoken in the head? A flag is a symbol for a country, yet we don't take the flag to be the country do we? Thoughts come and go like clouds in the sky and who knows from where or how they suddenly appear. We would be wise to stand back a bit and watch them to gain a better understanding of the hypnotic effect they have on us and the power they hold to predispose us to conflict and discord and suffering.

 Could our personal happiness or even world peace be as simple as understanding how our minds work and moving beyond that to whatever state allows us to simply observe and experience this wonder of wonders we call Life? What if it just took that realization? What if, one by one, we commit to peace and do not waver even in the face of others choosing conflict all around us? To achieve world peace, it would eventually take, of course, all of us. But, that has to begin with some of us making the choice. Right now. Today. We can't make peace happen, peace already is when we make a conscious choice to live it.

The Truth About Love Songs

   What we have daydreamed about and yearned for has been right here all along. 

Unrequited, done me wrong, falling in, falling out, jilted and angry, dreamy and tender--love songs run the achy breaky gamut of emotions. They make us cry, they bring us joy, they make the hard heart tender and the tender heart harder. They represent mankind's struggle with love since the beginning of time and across all cultures and societies.

A few days ago I heard the remake of an old love song I listened to repeatedly many years ago when I was head over heels in love and couldn't imagine myself as being complete without that special someone. You know the one-- the perfect one, the one who is your soul mate, your twin flame, your raison d'etre.  The sun rises and sets in him, the moon revolves around him, all others pale in comparison to this one radiant love. The song took me back to those drama filled days, to the feelings I used to feel, to the pain of a love that never would be, to the despair, the longing, the yearning. And....it made me laugh. Now, if you had been by my side to see the depth of pain I experienced at the time, the many years it took to recover, you might think that to be an inappropriate, perhaps insane, or at the very least insensitive response. But I loved my reaction, and I'll tell you why.

Emotional pain, I've found, is an interesting thing. We think we are trying to avoid it yet at a very deep level, if we are honest, we can see that we crave it like children crave cookies. Not so good for us, yet we love the taste. Why? There's something about it that will teach us what we need to know about life. We know this deeply, unconsciously usually, and we seek it out. A very deep pain will either kill us or enroll us in the University of Truth, where the course of study may take a lifetime but the content is life changing.

Why do we continually look outside ourselves for fulfillment? If I finally have this or that, if I finally attain this or that, if I finally find him or her, if I finally arrive at the place I have always wanted to arrive, feel the feelings I always wanted to feel, finally find fulfillment. We grasp at the future, agonize over the perceived insufficiencies of the past and pin all our hopes on a day that never comes. Why does it never come? Because today is the only day we have. Now is the only time we have. This is the simple truth of existence which we overlook again and again. When we first see this we may experience the insight as resignation, disappointment. "Is this all there is?", we ask. That is, until we have a good look around in this new place called now, until we are silent and surrendered and at long last sense the presence of Love, our constant loyal companion, who lives here. Love sees us in all the raw truth of what we are, sees our faults, notices our self-serving behaviors, overlooks the fact that we ignore her presence most of the time and yet insists on loving us, on leaning into us until the sweetness at our core is reached. With awareness of this Love in our lives we are given the tenderness of a thousand mothers, the wisdom of a thousand masters, the passion of a thousand lovers. This one true Love fills us, blurs our boundaries, overflows into the world and changes the energy of everything.  

Love flows into our lives from the inside out, not the outside in. To meditate, to pray, or in whatever manner to be devoted to finding one's own sweet core is the only sane route to fulfillment. And when we are wise to this truth we laugh to realize that what we have daydreamed about and yearned for has been right here all along. Love is not something we acquire, love is what we are. The paradox is this: When we are able to contentedly sing and dance to the light of the moon all by ourselves, we are astonished to suddenly find love all around us and the love songs we then sing to others are true and good and lovely and strong.

Finding Leonardo

In the Palazzo Vecchio's Grand Ceremonial Chamber in Florence, Italy there is a mural which was commissioned by the ruling Medici family and painted by architect and painter Giorgio Vasari during a remodeling of the hall in 1563. In one of the battle scenes depicted in the mural there is a tiny flag with the words "Cerca Trova", seek and ye shall find. This small flag, to a San Diego engineering professor by the name of Mauricio Seracini, has been taken as a clue, a cryptic message from the 16th century as to the whereabouts of one of Leonardo da Vinci's legendary masterpieces, "The Battle of Anghiari", which had adorned a long wall of the hall but disappeared after the remodeling. For decades, painters such as Raphael were said to have traveled to the hall to study the mural, which was Leonardo's largest painting, three times the width of "The Last Supper", but then it vanished. Sercini postulates that Vasari, known to have admired da Vinci's work, found a way to preserve the mural behind his own, leaving a clue on the small flag as to it's whereabouts. A scientific team, led by Sercini, has already found evidence to support this theory and, after obtaining permission from the government of Florence, intends to spend the next year using sophisticated high tech equipment to prove it definitively. It is then hoped that the Vasari fresco can be carefully removed to extract Leonardo's masterpiece and then replaced. How astounding that this missing masterpiece could have been so very close over all these centuries, hidden by the masterful fresco which covered it. 

I can't help but point out the analogy here to our own personal quests to be a human version of a "masterpiece", whatever that may mean to any of us individually in terms of success, intellect, beauty, wealth, spirituality or altruistic qualities. We consistently and doggedly search outward, never quite finding that masterpiece we look for. Perhaps, though, we are looking in the wrong direction. Perhaps, right beneath the surface of our astoundingly complex human exteriors, in the stillness of inner space, our masterpiece waits to be discovered.

Cerca Trova.