It has been mostly Sunny these last three days but the cold has been creeping back in. It was -2.2 F this Morning, not too cold for this time of year. It is a little bit of a shock because it has been above normal lately. It is forecast to be below zero the next few Mornings.
I remember this time between Christmas and New Year as a magical time. A time of coasting through the aura of the holidays. When I was a child, there was a gathering at my grandparents house almost every night. Relatives who arrived for Christmas lingered on until New Years and the young folks were on vacation from school. I spent six years at the University, so even as an adult, I was on vacation at this time. [I say adult, rather than young adult, because I was 23 before I started college. I completed my BA degree in four years and two years later went back to graduate school. I got married after my freshman year, had my first child after my sophomore year and bought a house. The economy was much better for young people in those days. I can't imagine someone having children and buying a house while attending college in today's economy.] [I debated whether I should erase that, last off the subject, bit or put it in brackets. Brackets won- now more brackets]. Our most compelling task is to see what kind of gourmet meal we can devise from leftovers.
This has always been a magical time for me. It is a time where on the surface I coasted through fun filled days; yet, yet, there was some assessment going on. I have never been one for New Years resolutions. I wouldn't wait for New Years to make an important change. However, the tradition exist for a reason. The holiday season marks the end of one time and an issuing in of another. Whether it is the new calendar year or the new seasonal year, with the return of the Sun, a new beginning is in process.
I like to think of reaffirming my intent rather than specific resolutions. I have been very aware in the last few years how I create my future with my thoughts and feelings. I have known about it intellectually for many years; but seeing it and being aware is another thing. I don't know how it is for everybody else, but for me it has been a gradual process of emotional relearning. Understanding it intellectually is a first step, letting go of those old patterns of thoughts and feelings are another thing. Why would we hang unto an old pattern of feeling when we have determined, beyond doubt, that it creates negativity in our life? How many times do we have to experience pain before we say enough? I know that many of us have felt locked into these old patterns even though we knew we were being crazy.
What if we were to take the position that everything we have learned about ourselves, our culture, our country, our families, everything, is imbued with untruth. We see everything through a perceptual mask that was laid down by a myriad of judgements. These judgements told us what we should be seeing, not what was there to see. This modifying and programming of our seeing took place before our memory and continues to this day. Our seeing occurs in a stimulus/response fashion. We see, hear, or feel something and it excites a pattern that has already been laid down. We don't know how to see with 'new' eyes.
We have had breakthroughs. Some of us have realized we were prejudiced and saw race, politics, religion, sexual orientation etc. with new eyes. It can be greatly uplifting to realize we have been blinded by a judgement. Seeing afresh for the first time is a marvelous feeling.
The biggies, the prejudices mentioned, are easier to spot in our perceptions of the world. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of others, we have, that we never notice. It has to do with everything in our perceptual world and that means everything we experience.
What do the biggies have in common? The change in our perception had to do with love and acceptance. It was allowing ourselves to love what we earlier thought was beyond our love. I think if we examine these patterns carefully we will see that they have to do with what we decide we can love and what shouldn't be loved. What if we decided not to exclude anybody or anything from love.
How about this as a resolution? What if we make it our intent to love at every level of our consciousness? What if we decide that love is the key to the problem of our perceptual dysfunction? What if we became so aware that we could see where every thought and feeling came from and we could ask ourselves, "is this love?"
Always, we can ask ourselves, "Is this Love?" We hang on to an illusion; an illusion created by separate minds that embraced fear. We are beginning to question the reality of this illusion. Every time we invite love into our minds we weaken the illusion for ourselves and our neighbor. Can we imagine reality might be love? Let us make it our intent to find out.
Love and Peace, Gregg
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