August 01, 2013 – November 20, 2013

1. “How To Have What You Want” is the theme of every book in the self-help section of every bookstore in the land. You will be out of luck if what you are looking for is a book on “How To Want What You Ought To Want,” or “How To Know What You Have No Business Wanting Or Having.”
   
   The universal, unquestioned, assumption is that our Wanter knows what it is doing and can be trusted to steer us faithfully and well to the life that is exactly right for us.
   
   The truth is that we all want the same stuff we wanted when we were in the grip of The Terrible Two’s—we have merely learned a thing or two about strategy in the meantime, and no longer melt down into screaming puddles on the floor of the grocery store at the candy counter—or the candy equivalent for our place in life.
   
   What does wanting know? Our wanting is driven by our desperate quest for diversion, distraction, delight and denial.
   
   Wanting is about what we want to escape, avoid, forget and be done with.
   
   It has no association with what is being asked of us, what needs us, what is calling us to throw in with it to its lasting benefit and our eternal inconvenience and vexation.
   
   Like, for instance, our LIFE.
   
   Our LIFE is always asking the damned is things of us at the damnedest times. Giving us things like cancer and divorce and joblessness just to introduce us to what we are capable of—never mind that none of it is anything remotely connected with what we might WANT in our life.
   
   See what I mean?
   
2. Tree B&W — Andrew Lane, Indian Land, SC, October 2, 2013 — Carl Jung lays it on the line. What he has to say has been available for 75 years or longer, dismissed, discounted and ignored by Those Who Know Best And Must Be Pleased.
   
   Jung’s foundational advice is: “Know what you know about what can be known!” His way of knowing is experiential: “Experience your experience regarding all that can be experienced!”
   
   His detractors have a quick comeback: “We know What’s Best, and that’s all WE need to know!”
   
   In reply, Jung said (And I am paraphrasing a quote by James Hollis in “Hauntings: Dispelling The Ghosts Who Run Our Lives”): “As the patient turns to either doctor or clergy both stand before him or her with empty hands and are no help because they are in the same boat with the patient. All have no love only sexuality; no faith—because they all are afraid to grope in the dark; no hope—because they all are disillusioned by the world and by life; and no understanding because they all have failed to read the meaning of their own existence.”
   
   Hollis follows this diagnosis with his own prescription (quoting now directly): “We have all forgotten what our presumptive saints, mystics, and prophetic voices earnestly proclaimed: that if we wait upon the dark, it grows luminous; if we abide the silence, it speaks. we look to others to fix it all for us, and they fail us, because we have asked too much of them, because they are broken themselves, and because we have ignored, even fled, our own resources.”
   
   Stop poking around in someone else’s answers, looking for something to relieve your own emptiness and misdirection! Face your own darkness and doubt, your own fear and anguish, your own insecurity and pain! You are not alone! You have within the wisdom of generations, unconscious and unknown—probe it! You have without a culture and a world populated with people exactly as you are—find those who know what you know, who hunger and thirst as you do, who can listen to and speak of the truth of their own soul, their own experience, and help one another along the way!
   
3. GSX 65 — Waxhaw, NC, October 3, 2013 — We think the wrong things are big, and the wrong things are little.
   
   We all have shined at something we dismiss as nothing. We have our moments. No one could do it better than we do it sometimes. We discount it as being of no importance. “Anybody can scramble eggs.”
   
   We sell ourselves down the river because we don’t, we haven’t, we can’t… And overlook the things we do, have, can…
   
   What’s with ranking ourselves at the bottom of our own Top 40 list? How about a little objectivity, fairness, justice and slack? How about we cut ourselves some slack? And get off our backs?
   
   Whose side are we on? When has putting someone down ever raised someone up? When has condemnation and fault-finding made us worthy of commendation and praise? What are we doing thinking of ourselves the way we think of ourselves?
   
   If we are going to come down on ourselves for something, we should come down on ourselves for coming down on ourselves. Now we’re talking! That’s the way to do it!
   
4. Carolina Lakes 06 — Lake Crandall along Trekker Loop, Anne Springs Close Greenway, Fort Mill, SC, October 1, 2013 — Why grow up?
   
   The culture leaves us ill-prepared to answer the question. The culture would have us answer why do anything from the standpoint of what we stand to gain by doing it. If we cannot exploit something to our distinct advantage, the culture would have us have nothing to do with it.
   
   The culture admonishes: If a profit can be made, a profit will be made. But, if not. Forget it.
   
   Growing up is about doing what needs us to do it with nothing coming back to us beyond having done it.
   
   Growing up is about being who the situation needs us to be with nothing in it for us.
   
   Growing up is about living as a source of grace, mercy and peace in the lives of others—for nothing in return.
   
   Growing up is for nothing.
   
   Why grow up?
   
5. Great Blue Heron in Flight 07 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, September 9, 2013 — We have the time left for living to work with.
   
   Sure, things have happened to us. Sure, we could have done better with better choices and more of the right kind of help and cooperation. Sure, we haven’t had all we wish we had had at any point along the way.
   
   We have the time left for living to work with.
   
   Starting now, how are we going to live aligned with our soul’s sense of True North?
   
   How are we going to learn to become students and stewards of soul—reading the signs, speaking the language, tending the drift of instinct and intuition and feeling the feelings that beg to be felt—in responding to what is being asked of us with what we have to offer in the service of a good that may not appear to be good to eyes that do not see?
   
   How are we going to filter through all that we have to deal with in order to find the gold and spend it on an attitude that sends us singing in the rain, and through it, to a life others would recognize as a blessing and a treasure?
   
   How are we going to show up in every situation that arises for the work that is ours to do there, with the tools at hand, and the gifts we have been given, to offer what is needed and grace the moment with eyes that see, ears that hear, a heart that understands, and a presence that radiates compassion and peace?
   
   How are we going to live in the time left for living?
   
6. Graham Cabin — The home of Billy Graham’s paternal grandfather, Anne Springs Close Greenway, Fort Mill, SC, September 23, 2013 — Everything that can be seen is readily apparent, so why isn’t it seen? Nothing is hidden. It’s all out in the open, waving its hands. Jumping. Whistling. Calling our name.
   
   What is with not seeing what we look at?
   
   What are the presumptions, assumptions, inferences, conjectures, conclusions that get in our way? How is our seeing conditioned by how we have come to expect things to be?
   
   If our father was abusive and our response to him was, “If I try hard enough, he will be happy,” how are we continuing to play out the theme of trying hard to make someone happy? How is that early perspective skewing the way we see things today?
   
   If we are going to see, we are going to have to see our seeing. We are going to have to see how we see what we see and wonder, “How else might we interpret, assess, consider our experience?”
   
   There is what happens to us and there is what we say about what happens to us—how we see it—and what we do in response. Guess where the point of transformation lies.
   
7. Carolina Lakes 08 — Stumpy Pond, Anne Springs Close Greenway, Fort Mill, SC, September 30, 2013 — How do you evaluate your values? How do you know that what you believe in is worth believing in?
   
   How often do you reassess the road you are on, the life you are living?
   
   In light of what do you determine the value of the road, the life?
   
   How do you decide what to do? How do you gauge the quality of your decisions?
   
   How often do you conduct a review of your journey? The degree to which you are aligned with your soul’s sense of True North?
   
   How often do you say you don’t know how to think about these things so you are just going shopping, or just going to have a drink, and blow off anything deeper than “What’s for dinner?”?
8. Waiting for a Train — Waxhaw, NC, October 6, 2013 — We aren’t as alone with our life as we think we are. There is an invisible, inner, world waiting to assist us along the way. We only have to learn to access it and collaborate with it.
   
   For instance, we all know the “Uh-Oh Feeling” when it comes upon us. We all have walked into a room, or a bar, or a job and have known instantly that it was not our kind of place and we had no business being there. We are not blindfolded, spun around, lost and helpless. We only have to open ourselves to ourselves and know what we know.
   
   It is amazing that we get no instruction in establishing, deepening, strengthening and maintaining our connection with the inner guides. It is deplorable that we are led to assume that the world of ordinary, physical, apparent reality is the only world—and that it is all about wealth and privilege and getting what we want and having it made.
   
   James Hollis, in “Hauntings: Dispelling The Ghosts Who Run Our Lives,” says that we have to sort and sift myriad influences and messages and discern which ones are truly our own, and which ones are acquired from Those Who Know Best And Must Be Pleased and deserve to be jettisoned.
   
   We have almost as much to unlearn as we have to learn.
   
   We have to learn to hear and heed the right voices, discerning what truly needs to be done from all we are told ought to be done, should be done.
   
   We have to learn how to read the signs, how to interpret the signals, how to know what we know, and do what needs us to do it in each situation as it arises.
   
   We are more than our history (and we learned the wrong lessons there). We are our future, our calling, our life—the life that is waiting to be lived. We are our adventure waiting for us to saddle up and ride. And we have all we need to do what needs to be done. We only have to trust that to be so and step into the unknown.
   
   Hollis says that we must accept, finally, that we are not our what has happened to us or what we have been told but our unfolding journey—and that we must step into our unknown future, heart in hand, and experience what it might bring us.
   
   The important thing, however, is what YOU say about what he says. And what you do about it.
9. Catawba Cloud — Catawba River, Landsford Canal State Park, Fort Lawn, SC, October 2, 2013 — Two nights ago I dreamed I was delivered a summons. For what? Unknown. I was to appear before the court to make a case for myself. Strange. What was the nature of the inquiry? Unspecified.
   
   In the dream, I stewed about what to do. What were my options? Who should I consult? I live in South Carolina now and the summons originated in North Carolina. I could just not show up. I’m out of their jurisdiction. I woke up still “in a stew” about what to do.
   
   Two days of stewing has produced the realization that we are all at the place of making a case for ourselves. We are all summoned. Asked to show up. Look our life in the eye and say why we have done what we have done and not something else instead.
   
   Leaves me wanting to take the fifth. Stay in South Carolina. Not answer the door, or the phone.
   
   My only hope is to beg the mercy of the court, and aim to be present for what needs doing in what remains of my life.
   
   I am to show up and live what remains to be lived of my life on my life’s terms. So are you.
   
   It could be a piece of cake. We are in the driver’s seat. Who is to say what our life is asking of us? WE are! What a snap. “Oh, I thought you meant this! And you meant THAT? How silly of me!”
   
   The catch is that we are our own prosecutor and the witness for the prosecution. We know when we are not living up to our life’s expectations of us—when we are letting our life down. We can’t kid the kidder.
   
   We show up, or else.
10. Carolina Lakes 04 — Lake Haigler, Anne Springs Close Greenway, Fort Mill, SC, September 23, 2013 — Part of doing what needs to be done is taking up someone else’s slack. The world is filled with people who choose to not show up, who don’t do what the world needs—what we need—them to do.
    
    Yes, I’m talking about THE brother, THE sister, Father, Mother… The one who turns a blind eye, a deaf ear to what is crying out for their attention, looks the other way, walks off to leave his, to leave her, responsibilities to fend for themselves.
    
    Our way would be a lot easier if everyone were pulling his, her, own weight.
    
    It’s amazing how one person not being there makes them omnipresent and in the way. We are always having to take them into account by covering for them, compensating for their refusal to be who they need to be—who we need them to be, adjusting to their failure to play their part as their part needs them to play it. By not being there, they become a central figure in the lives of everyone impacted by their absence. Their way of being important, perhaps.
    
    What to do? Grow up! We have to grow up to deal appropriately with those who refuse to grow up! They force growth upon us. It takes maturity to manage immaturity. So, receive the gift, and go about your business and theirs, as though you don’t resent, despise, hate, detest, etc. them for their failure to show up and take care of business—because you don’t, any more than you would if they had been born physically, or mentally, or emotionally deficient, because they were, and couldn’t handle what the rest of you did just fine with, and it is up to you to do just fine with them, and let them grow you up in ways you would never grow up if they weren’t not there.
    
    Everything is grist for the mill, you know, and we are milling our own maturation, by seeing everything as a part of the summons to show up, grow up, get out of the way and allow our life to pull us forth—even against our will, and strong desire for justice or just what’s fair.
11. Around Bass Lake 05 HDR — Moses H. Cone Memorial Park, Blue Ridge Parkway near Blowing Rock, NC, October 8, 2013 — We aren’t here to let the unconscious direct our living. Consciousness has a part to play. Our life is a dialogue all the way.
    
    The unconscious has its flow, its sense of direction and purpose, its intuition regarding pace and timing and what’s coming up. Consciousness understands order and sequence and how things work in a practical, down-to-earth, matter-of-fact kind of way.
    
    Consciousness keeps the unconscious grounded and aware of the physical, social, and cultural requirements impinging upon the specific here and now of our living. The unconscious calls consciousness to a larger awareness of meaning, purpose and value. Together, they work out what is proper, appropriate and needs to be done in each situation as it arises.
    
    Stack up the situations unfolding, merging, dividing, multiplying and you have quite a life—which neither consciousness nor unconsciousness could manage on its own.
12. Used in Short Talks On Contradiction, etc., Around Price Lake 04 HDR — Julian Price Memorial Park, Blue Ridge Parkway near Blowing Rock, NC, October 9, 2013 — Here’s my idea of 5 rules to live by:
    
    See what you look at.
    
    Know what you know.
    
    Throw away doctrine and theology, and embrace the truth of beauty in art, music, nature, good company and good food and drink.
    
    Wake up, show up for the life that needs you to live it with the gifts that are yours to give, whether you feel like it or not, whether you are in the mood for it or not, whether you want to or not, whether it is convenient or not—understanding that it is like this: You are playing the lead character in a movie about you, and the script calls for you to live your life by doing what is called for in each scene, in each situation that arises. If you were an actual actor playing the part of you, you wouldn’t get to say, “I don’t feel like it today. Maybe tomorrow. Come back in a week. I feel like a drink now, or watching TV.” No, you would play your part, to the hilt, striving for an Oscar worthy performance. So? Live your life to the hilt! Offering what is called for in each scene, regardless of how you feel!
    
    That was a long break. Pick up where we left it with this: square up to the way things are and what needs to be done about it, and do it in each situation as it arises for as long as there are situations, without having to profit from it in any way.
    
    Bear consciously the pain of your contradictions (like the difference between the way things are and the way you want things to be) without trying to escape it (in diversions and distractions) or deny it, or disappear it by resolving them quickly with a solution that solves nothing. Suffer the lack of solutions and let the problem, the conflict, become an image for you. Work with the image. Paint it. Write it. Sculpt it. Draw it. Make it into music. Dance it. Express it in ways that deepen, expand its reality and make it real. And wait for the shift to happen. When the door opens, walk through.
    
    If you think that turns out to be more than five, think of the overage as lagniappe. I’m only charging you for five.
13. Around Price Lake 07 HDR — Julian Price Memorial Park, Blue Ridge Parkway near Blowing Rock, NC, October 9, 2013 — Our symptoms are the way we carry pain unborne, anguish unacknowledged, agony denied its rightful place in our life.
    
    When we refuse to feel our feelings, our body turns against us in an attempt to wake us up to what we are not doing. When we refuse to suffer, we suffer.
    
    And we invent medical science to treat our symptoms. And take medication so we won’t feel our life.
    
    You can see that this isn’t going anywhere.
    
    We have to feel our life. It’s the only way to know what to do with it.
    
    We can’t get all mental, and intellectual, and think our way through, or out of, anything. We LIVE our way along the way. And LIVING is FEELING. EVERYTHING. And thinking about what would be appropriate to do in response. And doing it.
    
    This is called keeping our life aligned with who we are and what we are called to be about.
    
    When we get out of alignment, we feel it. Then, what do we do? Feel the pain and do the work of realignment? Take a pill? Have a drink? Or a smoke? Overeat? Develop a symptom? Ignore what we’re doing? Wonder what’s wrong?
    
    When we kid ourselves, our bodies keep score. Our symptoms are our body’s way of waking us up, seeing where we are kidding ourselves, and realigning ourselves with the way that is the way for us—with the soul’s sense of True North. And pay the price, consciously, with full awareness of what we are doing and what we are doing about the response to what we are doing—feeling what we are feeling and thinking about it, not hiding from it, feeling it. Consciously suffering the pain of being alive.
14. Around Price Lake 02 HDR — Julian Price Memorial Park, Blue Ridge Parkway near Blowing Rock, NC, October 9, 2013 — This is what I have to say to John Boehner, the Koch Brothers, the Tea Party, the Republican Party, and all human beings everywhere:
    
    Do not allow your principles or your ideology prevent you from seeing and doing what is important.
15. Boone Fork Cascades 01 HDR — Boone Fork Overlook, Blue Ridge Parkway near Blowing Rock, NC, October 9, 2013 — James Hollis says (In “Hauntings: Dispelling The Ghosts Who Run Our Lives”), “Families are healthiest when they serve as launching pads for each person in route to his or her separate journey; they are most pathogenic when this project is subverted by its most narcissistically needy members or by the collective timidity of others to grow up, show up, and strike off on their own separate journeys.”
    
    You could replace the word “families” with the word “churches,” or the word “schools,” or the word “communities,” and his paragraph would be equally true.
    
    We are here to grow up and to assist one another with the process of growing up. Any other aim misses the mark, which, in the Bible, would be called a sin—no matter how holy and righteous the aim might appear to be.
16. Carolina Lakes 17 — Bass Lake, Moses H. Cone Memorial Park, Blue Ridge Parkway near Blowing Rock, NC, October 8, 2013 — Settled into South Carolina and between photo excursions, I am reading what I have written over the course of my life. This comes from March 24, 2007:
    
    Everything flows from acceptance. We can’t say NO! until we can say YES!
    
    NO! without YES! is angry, belligerent, insistent and demanding—and increases resistance, deepens resistance and creates a counter force to oppose change and maintain the status quo. True revolutionaries don’t appear to be revolutionary at all.
    
    True revolutionaries reject nothing, forces nothing, insists upon nothing, does nothing. But. It is a special kind of noting that is done.
    
    It is a nothing that transforms everything by exposing everything, by disclosing everything, by revealing everything to be just what it is.
    
    When it is seen that the emperor has no clothes, the emperor dresses appropriately. When the dead horse on the dining room table is made apparent, the Dead Horse Removal Team is called in and the house becomes livable.
    
    True revolutionaries are mirrors reflecting the way things are, making it impossible to ignore, dismiss, deny that things are what they are, waking people up and opening the door to the possibility of change.
    
    Once things become apparent, transformation is inevitable. When the way things are are recognized for exactly what it is, it moves toward what it ought to be.
17. False Kiva Revisited — Canyonlands National Park near Moab, UT, May 2010 — The Dali Lama is as awake as he can be. Jesus and the Buddha were as awake as they could be. We only have to be as awake as we can be.
    
    It is exactly what we make it out to be, and it isn’t going to change until we make it out to be something else.
    
    Everything has to be set aside for the sake of what needs to be done in the situation as it arises. Every. Single. Thing.
    
    Everyone has to see and serve what needs to be done in the situation as it arises. Every. Single. One.
    
    The only sweeping, absolute thing that must be done in every situation no matter what is whatever needs to be done in each situation. Do. What. Needs. To. Be. Done.
    
    Each moment is a fresh moment. What needs to happen there may never have happened before, or may never need to happen again.
    
    Your moments are as unique as you are. You make each one unique by the quality of your response to it.
    
    So “get in there and do your thing, and don’t worry about the outcome!” (Joseph Campbell)
18. Used in Short Talks On Contradiction, etc., Around Price Lake 16 HDR — Julian Price Memorial Park, Blue Ridge Parkway near Blowing Rock, NC, October 9, 2013 — The antidote and cure for whatever ails us is tenderness, kindness and compassion.
    
    Forcing our way, compelling others to do what we want, punishing them when they do not, insisting that everyone do it our way or else, etc. creates its own opposition and results in polarization and contradiction which freezes everything in place like a good neck cramp and prevents anything like life from ever happening.
    
    Sound like Congress to you? Or, maybe your family at Thanksgiving? Or your family any time?
    
    The solution, of course, is to explain the situation to them and get out of the way:
    
    ”The antidote and cure for everything, including a good neck cramp which stifles life entirely, is tenderness, kindness and compassion. Now, I’ve told you all you need to know—what is happening, what is going to happen, and what you can do about it. That is all I am responsible for. At this point, it is strictly up to you. You have to decide what you are going to do about it. You are on your own. I cannot be held accountable for anything that happens from this point on. You have to do what seems good to you and suffer the consequences.”
    
    Jesus would say that from here, you shake the dust off your sandals and live your own way to tenderness, kindness and compassion—which is exactly The Way everyone keeps talking about, the way of life, light and peace everlasting, world without end, amen.
19. Around Bass Lake 03 HDR — Moses H. Cone Memorial Park, Blue Ridge Parkway near Blowing Rock, NC, October 8, 2013 — When the door opens, we have to walk through! The door is always opening and we are always walking by with out eyes on some other prize, complaining because the door never opens for us.
    
    The door we WANT to open doesn’t open. We’re standing before the wrong door.
    
    To stand before the right door, we cannot allow what we want to blind us to other possibilities.
    
    When we say we want this or that and do everything we can think of to have it, but keep shooting ourselves in the foot, we have to wonder about the mixed messages. We want it but we keep ourselves from getting it. It’s time we have a talk with ourselves.
    
    Call a meeting. Make it mandatory. Sit down with them all. Ask them what they want from you. Ask them how you could better represent the best interest of all concerned with your choices and actions. Ask them how you could be better aligned with the needs of the whole. Ask them to tell you everything they have to say while you listen and take notes.
    
    Take notes. Listen. Don’t let them go until everyone has said what they need to say. Thank them. Take a long walk. Then read your notes and reflect on what you heard and how you live, and what you can do to change your living to take what you heard into account.
    
    The door is always opening. If you aren’t seeing it, we have to look at what you’re looking for, and make changes where changes need to be made.
20. Sailboat Mooring 02 HDR — Bath Harbor on Bath Creek, Bath, NC, October 12, 2013 — There is nothing like the aloneness of living our own life, yet, what are we going to do, not live it? Let someone else tell us how to live it, what to do?
    
    And, if we give ourselves over to someone else, to Those Who Know Best And Must Be Pleased, say, we discover too late that there is nothing like the agony of having failed to live our own life. Who is going to give us a second chance? Another life? This. Is. It.
    
    It is our call to seize the opportunity and live our own life, or not.
    
    We should receive more in the way of encouragement to do right by ourselves. People should be lined up from birth throughout our life, cheering us on, saying, “Yeah! Go be you! You can do it! Go for it!”
    
    Every child should have a cheering section urging her, urging him, on every step along the way.
21. Sunset 01 HDR — Pamlico Sound, Cape Hatteras National Seashore, Ocracoke Island, NC, October 13, 2013 — We have such tender souls. It is not without meaning that the Savior is described in the Bible as one who does not crush a bent reed or extinguish a dimly burning candle.
    
    Take that image and compare it to all of the would-be saviors you have ever known, destroying the you that you are and replacing it with the you they would have you be—all in the name of the highest good, of course, which would be getting you to heaven and away from hell at all costs. Even at the cost of your own tender soul.
    
    That is not the way to do it.
    
    Here is what I have to say to them—and to President Obama at this moment in the nation’s history, because the principle applies across the board, around the table:
    
    What is best for the country (or the individual, or one’s own soul) is not best for the country (or the individual, or one’s own soul). Do not sell out the country (etc.) in the name of what is best for the country (etc.). Bear the pain! Pay the price of not paying the price (of what is truly best for the country, of sacrificing one’s own tender soul)! Do not sell out the country (or one’s own tender soul) for a bowl of porridge, even though the odor is compelling and it seems as though a bit of soup is exactly what the situation is crying for.
    
    “The way out is the way through,” and we have to trust ourselves to ourselves even when it seems as though we are lost, without hope in the world and do not know what we are doing or where to turn. When that is the case, the rule is simple: Be still, breathe slowly and deeply, and listen for “the still small voice.” And take a chance. On you!
22. Louisiana Sunset 01 — Lake Concordia, Concordia Parish, Ferriday, LA, ca 1975 — We have such tender souls, and we are their keeper, their steward, their ally and aide. Not their owner.
    
    The soul we keep is not ours to do with as we will. We guard, protect, consult, serve, attend, and befriend. We are our soul’s own soulmate, solely responsible for its health and well-being.
    
    How are we doing?
    
    Are we strong in our soul’s behalf? Faithful, loyal, true and brave? Is our allegiance unflagging and our devotion beyond doubt? If not, why not?
    
    Who knows better than we do what our soul requires, asks, needs? What do we mean living to please someone else, to do what others tell us should be done? Whose side are we on? If not our soul’s own side, why not?
23. Two Pelicans — Pamlico Sound, Cape Hatteras National Seashore, Ocracoke Island, NC, October 14, 2013 — We feel our way along the way with soul the way we feel it’s time to go for a walk, or time to have another cup of coffee, or time to invite a friend out to lunch. How do we know any of these things? We sense them. Feel them.
    
    But. This kind of feeling has nothing to do with emotions. It is about pace and timing, direction, preference, inclination or disinclination… Some people are horse people, some people are beach people. How do they know? That’s the kind of knowing we need to encourage, develop. It has nothing to do with thinking.
    
    We do not think our way to the life that is our life to live. We know it and we know what it is not. But we don’t know how we know—and it doesn’t matter.
    
    What matters is knowing what we know, and acting on it like a sailor adjusts her course to be aligned with the compass’ direction.
    
    It is not a moral course we follow out of some guidebook of ethics and values. Jesus was called a glutton and a wine bibber, a blasphemer and a son of Satan because he followed the lead of his soul against the current of the morals of is day—eating with tax collectors and sinners, associating with women, and with Samaritans, and claiming to be one with God.
    
    The way of soul is not the way of the culture or the way of the popular understanding of God, or the way of the popular understanding of a follower of soul. Soul cuts a new path through the heart of the wilderness and invites us to come along. Our place is to heed the invitation and become a sidekick on the adventure with soul.
24. Used in Short Talks On Contradiction, etc., Running — Ferriday, LA, August, 1974 — Everything goes on the table. Everything. Nothing is held back. Kept safe. Held close. Nothing.
    
    It’s like this: We. Are. Going. To. Die. What do you think will be left then? Nothing. So, we hold onto nothing now, because to hold onto something now is to pretend that we can hold onto something. Is to deny that we hold onto nothing. Is to lie to ourselves about the most important thing: Growing up.
    
    Growing up is to hold onto nothing. Is to put everything on the table. Is to let everything go.
    
    When we let everything go, we receive everything. Everything becomes our teacher in the art of growing up.
    
    Everything is grist for the mill, we say. We are milling maturity. Maturation. Growing up. To work the program, develop the art, everything has to go on the table. Everything.
    
    What are you holding back? Protecting? Keeping for yourself? The last things to go? Put. Them. On. The. Table.
    
    Feel the resistance? The resistance is conflict. You are conflicted over what goes on the table. You don’t want everything to go, even though everything is going. You want to kid yourself. Fool yourself. Lie to yourself. Pretend you can hold something back.
    
    Another word for conflict is bind. You are in a bind when you are conflicted. When you want this and want that and this and that are mutually exclusive. When you want to grow up and want to hold something off the table. When you want to have your cake and eat it too.
    
    Dig in at the point of resistance, conflict—at the point of being in a bind. Sit bound. Tied in a knot. Unable to move. Or breathe. Because you want mutually exclusive things.
    
    Search out your binds, your conflicts, your contradictions. These are growth thresholds, openings, apertures.
    
    It looks like the opposite. What is closed cannot be opened. What we are closed off to cannot open us up. That in itself is a contradiction, a conflict, a bind. Dig deeply enough into your binds and they open to life and light and peace.
    
    We grow through our binds. Everything happens at the point of conflict, contradiction. People who deny their binds, run from them, hide, have no hope of growing up. They are forfeiting their one chance at doing what they are here to do, which is grow up.
    
    So, notice what you are dismissing, discounting, denying. There is conflict there you don’t want to face. What you are not facing is your bind. Put it on the table along with everything else. Consider the table. Find your binds. Get to work coming to terms with your conflicts, your contradictions. Square up to them.
    
    It will wake you up to you. We cannot wake up to how things are without developing the art of maturation. Without growing up.
    
    A closed door is still a door. Is the best door there is. Sit before it. Become aware of it. Wait for it to open. Walk through. Do it again with the next door.
    
    That’s how it works. Growing up.
25. Comorants 02 — Pamlico Sound, Cape Hatteras National Seashore, Ocracoke Island, NC, October 14, 2013 — You didn’t get here by thinking your way along. You are just lucky to be here. Luck is another way of speaking of grace. Grace is as lucky as it gets.
    
    Some people like to say luck has nothing to do with it, that it is Providence all the way. I like to say aren’t we lucky that God is so providential.
    
    Our life turns on fortuitous openings and chance happenings. No one could design the course our life has followed. It’s grace all the way.
    
    Expect to be lucky. Count on being lucky. Trust your luck. But don’t push it. Pushing your luck is taking grace for granted. And the gods don’t like it when we presume on their grace.
    
    There is a difference between counting on grace and presuming grace will be there when you need it. No presumption allowed!
    
    The difference between counting on grace and presuming on grace is the difference between trust and arrogance.
    
    Do not give up on grace. Do not say, “Well, this is it! This is the end of the line! It’s all over now!” Trust yourself to grace at all times. See what grace can do.
    
    Throw yourself into living your LIFE, the life that is yours to live, the life that needs you to live it, and count on grace to show the way.
26. Mothball Fleet 02 — Swan Quarter Mooring, Hyde County, NC, October 13, 2013 — The agony goes with the way—goes with us all along the way—goes with us all, along the way. Ulysses never escaped it. Neither did Jesus. Nor will you. Gethsemane and Golgotha and the Cyclops await us all.
    
    Enlightenment doesn’t do a thing for us. The agone—the Greek word that is translated “race” in Paul’s two statements regarding what is before us on the hero’s journey: “I have fought the good fight—I have finished the race, the agone.” And, “I have run with perseverance the race, the agone, that was before me”—the agone is the price we pay for being alive, for living the life that is ours to live, for doing what is ours yet to do.
    
    Sitting under the Bo Tree was hell for the Buddha, and the path of enlightenment, of waking up, of realization.
    
    When we wake up, we do not see the path to escape and delight in strawberry fields forever. We see how it is, know what is being asked of us, pick up our cross and step into the work of reconciling opposites and harmonizing polarities and doing what needs us to do it—what only we can do.
    
    There is nothing in any of that about liking it—about enjoying a soft and easy life, having it made, with nothing but relief and relaxation, accolades and gentle breezes through long years of smooth sailing.
    
    Ulysses sums up what remains of our life for us: “I will stay with it and endure through suffering hardship / and once the heaving sea has shaken my raft to pieces, then I will swim.”
    
    That is running with perseverance the agone that is yet before us in the form of the life that is ours to live.
27. Ocracoke Lighthouse 02 HDR B&W — Cape Hatteras National Seashore, Ocracoke Island, NC, October 16, 2013 — A Zen law states: “The ability of the archer to hit the bulls-eye varies in inverse proportion to the size of the prize for hitting the bulls-eye.”
    
    Or, in the common language of the people: “The more seriously we take things, the less well we do with them.”
    
    In other words: “Lighten Up!”
    
    Play with your life! Dance with your life! Experiment with your life!
    
    It isn’t like we’re being graded. We’re learning to live. And we learn to live by trying out different ways to live until we find a combination that is exactly OUR life in every sense of the word.
    
    Living someone else’s idea of our life is NOT the way to do it.
    
    We learn to live by playing with the possibilities, and laughing a lot.
    
    How will you play with your life today?
28. Sea Oats 02 — Cape Hatteras National Seashore, Ocracoke Island, NC, October 17, 2013 — Take everything personally. It is all about you. Everything you see is a projection of you. A metaphor of you. Everything you dream about is you.
    
    A dream about your husband, your wife, your partner is not about your husband, wife, or partner. It is about you. You are seeing in your husband, wife, or partner what is incumbent upon you to see in you.
    
    Let’s say in your dream, your husband, wife, or partner says to you, “You think you’re better than me.” And, in the dream, you say, “I can do some things better than you and you can do some things better than me, but that doesn’t make either of us better than the other of us,” and you are disgusted and aggravated because your husband, wife, or partner can’t see your point. And you are angry because they won’t grow up and see things like you do. You think you’re better than they are because they refuse to grow up.
    
    It is not about them. It is about you. You will not grow up. You refuse to grow up. You talk about growing up, but you will not grow up—not all the way. There is someone within who will not budge. “You can talk all you want to about growing up, but I’m not coming along on that ride.” And you can’t grow you up any more than you can grow up your husband, wife or partner.
    
    All the grow up stuff about you is just fluff and show, because down deep there is refusal to come out of the darkness into the light. “You think you’re better than me. I’ll show you. I’m not having anything to do with growing up. Without me, you’re just a box of smoke.”
    
    And the work begins. Not growing up that aspect, those aspects, of yourself which will not grow up, but with you sitting with the darkness, in the darkness, that is quite content with, and thoroughly committed to, remaining dark—and you coming to terms with how it is with you.
    
    It will make you humble. It will humiliate you. It will bring you humility. And that’s a lot more grown up than you were back when you were being all sanctimonious and blaming your husband, wife, or partner for refusing to grow up.
    
    It’s you that won’t grow up. Find ways of being compassionate and kind to the dark side within. Grow up and receive well the dark side of you that refuses to grow up.
    
    And know that we walk with a limp all along the way, and carry the burden of that which does not want to go through out the hero’s journey.
29. Hammock Creek 01 HDR — Cape Hatteras National Seashore, Ocracoke Island, NC, October 17, 2013 — There is more that we don’t know than we do know. So stop thinking that this is all there is to it. And stop thinking that what you think you know about the rest of it is as much as 1% accurate. How much of what they thought they knew 10,000 years ago was as much as 1% accurate? So stop thinking that you know anything, and live the mystery!
30. Moonrise 01 — Cape Hatteras National Seashore, Ocracoke Island, NC, October 17, 2013 — Where do you go to be real? You are real when you are expressing who you also are—the other sides of you which are generally suppressed or repressed because they would not be welcomed, received well, honored and understood in the places you generally frequent, with the people you are generally around.
    
    I used to be able to count the people I am free to be real with—who I also am with—who I am in the moment with—on both elbows. It used to be that my camera allowed me the greatest range of being. But, I’m retired now, and am less constrained to one way of life. My circle of places to be and people to be with has greatly expanded—I have you and those like you now—and I relish the joy and wonder of people who are real enough to recognize the importance of and need for being a place where others can be real, and make themselves available for encounters with realness, where realness meets realness, throughout their life.
    
    Being real—being who we are and who we also are—and allowing others to be real is the requirement for entry into the Land of Promise, the Grail Castle, Nirvana, the Elysian Fields, and all places worthy of us.
    
    Practice being real by bringing yourself forth—by being who you also are in places and with people you think might be able to receive you well—and see what happens. You will be changing the world, and creating the atmosphere necessary for being alive in the world.
    
    Go to it! You only have the time left for living to work with!
31. Parker’s Creek 01 HDR — Cape Hatteras National Seashore, Ocracoke Island, NC, October 19, 2013 — We practice feeling what we feel. And when we get that down, we practice seeing what we look at.
    
    When we get seeing what we look at down, we practice hearing what we listen to.
    
    When we get hearing what we listen to down, we practice knowing what we know.
    
    When we get knowing what we know down, we practice sizing things up.
    
    When we get sizing things up down, we practice doing what needs to be done in the situation as it arises.
    
    When we get doing what needs to be done in the situation as it arises down, we practice doing it in each situation that arises.
    
    That’s it.
32. Soundside Panorama HDR 01 — Pamlico Sound, Cape Hatteras National Seashore, Ocracoke Island, NC, October 19, 2013 — We are capable of more than meets the eye, of more than can be imagined. We don’t know who we all are, who we are capable of being.
    
    We live to discover who we are—who we also are. To know ourselves and what we are capable of and where our interests lie. We show ourselves who we are.
    
    The path to discovery is the way of feeling our way along, sensing what is called for, living instinctively, intuitively.
    
    We allow ourselves to show us who we are, who we also are, who we are capable of being in bringing forth what we have to offer the here and now of our living.
    
    We do not manage our life. We do not know what needs to happen and how to make it happen. Our life shows us what it needs from us.
    
    The wrong way to live is to think we know the right way to live and impose our idea of rightness upon this and all future situations.
    
    We live our way into being who we are, and also are. We do not think our way there, as though we know beforehand what there is to be known.
    
    We have no idea of what is going to be asked of us, given to us, by the time and place of our living. We live to see, to know, to understand. To be dumbfounded. Surprised. Amazed. By ourselves. Showing us who we are.
33. The Crack of Dawn 01 — Cape Hatteras National Seashore, Ocracoke Island, NC, October 18, 2013 — Everything is grist for the mill. We are milling maturity here.
    
    Everything is grist for the mill. We are milling awareness here.
    
    Everything is grist for the mill. We are milling wakefulness here.
    
    Everything is grist for the mill. We are milling savvyness here.
    
    Everything is grist for the mill. We are milling aliveness here.
    
    Everything is grist for the mill. We are milling softness, tenderness, gentleness, kindness, compassion, mercy and grace here.
    
    Everything that happens to us is exactly what is needed to bring forth what needs to happen.
    
    Everything is serving something else. There is no getting there. No arrival. No culmination. No quitting.
    
    Everything is grist for the mill.
34. Ocracoke Lighthouse 03 B&W — Cape Hatteras National Seashore, Ocracoke Island, NC, October 18, 2013 — I have a friend who told me he became a sailor when he realized the sea was out to get him. Before that he was just sailing a boat on open water. Recognizing what the deal was put him in a different relationship with his boat and the ocean. It always helps to know what the deal is.
    
    The sea is an old metaphor for the unconscious. The unconscious is out to get you. Do not think for a minute that it is your friend, that you can tame it, that you can trick it into doing what you want it to do (Using “The Law Of Attraction,” say, or “The Power of Positive Thinking”).
    
    The sea has its ways, and we are afloat upon purposes we are not party to. Our life has a life of its own. We may sit on the horse, to mix metaphors on you, but it is unbridled, and follows unseen paths to places we cannot imagine and would never choose for ourselves.
    
    If we can come to terms with The Deal and understand the sea is out to get us—to wake us up to a reality beyond anything we would want for ourselves—to show us in countless ways, “You may have meant it for that, but God meant it for this”—we will have grand adventures unlike anything we ever had in mind, but we will not be in charge, in control, or even in possession of a clue about Who is on first or What game we are playing.
    
    It will be great, but you will have to trust me in that.
35. Stacy Creek Mooring 01 HDR — Stacy, NC, October 20, 2013 — The life that is our life to live—the life that needs us to live it—the life that will not be lived (that no one will live) if we do not live it—has very little to do with the life we are living, or with the life we wish we were living, the life that we long to live, the life we pout about and mourn because we have no chance of living it.
    
    The life that is our life to live is dying it’s own mournful death because we refuse to wake up, wise up, square up, grow up, show up and do what is ours yet to do because we are so dead to our own calling, gift, genius, and possibilities, thinking, as we do, that we are stuck with this old life that we are living and nothing good can come out of our own personal little Nazareth, and this old stone of a life that is such a dead weight weighing us down and keeping us from flying could never become the cornerstone of an unimaginable house of living wonder.
    
    Imagine that.
36. Used in Short Talks On Good and Bad Religion, and in Short Talks On Contradiction, etc.,  Surf 01 — Cape Hatteras National Seashore, Ocracoke Island, NC, October 19, 2013 — Fritz Kunkel says (In “What It Means to Grow Up: A Guide in Understanding the Development of Character”) that our philosophy of life, our, our point of view are ours to work out for ourselves and says “we must seek our own point of view, call our own experiences into council, develop our judgment, deepen and correct it again an again—until in this way we become mature, grow up, gain wisdom” (or words to that effect).
    
    Thomas Kuhn (in “The Structure of Scientific Revolution”) said that science progresses by encountering experiences which contradict theories and force an expansion, or a revision, or a dismissal of the theories in question.
    
    Everything becomes clear with time and experience. We work out who we are and what is important, how things are and what needs to be done about it over the course of our life.
    
    We need the freedom to examine our experience, engaging the contradictions and discordance, and allowing the questions raised to lead us along the way of an ever emerging realization of truth—without ever arriving at The Truth, but always growing in our capacity to imagine a different truth at every transition point in the journey.
    
    May that be the way it is for us all, along the way!
37. Clouds in Our Wake 01 — Cape Hatteras National Seashore, Pamlico Sound, NC, October 20, 2013 — Our life is lived inside the right lines and outside the right lines.
    
    The work of maturation, of growing up, waking up, squaring up, sizing up, standing up, showing up and doing what needs to be done in each situation as it arises, one after another, all our life long, is the work of knowing which lines to honor and which lines to ignore.
    
    It is the work of knowing where to live: Inside which lines and outside which lines.
    
    No one can help us with that. No book can tell us that. We figure it out for ourselves. Gradually. Painfully. Over the entire course of our life.
38. Cormorants 03 — Cape Hatteras National Seashore, Pamlico Sound, NC, October 19, 2013 — Living is the lesson. Life is the teacher.
    
    We experience our way into knowing what is happening and what to do about it.
    
    We experience our way into knowing what is important and what is a Messianic pretender.
    
    We experience our way into knowing all that we need to know to live the life that needs to be lived in the time and place of our living.
    
    We can’t rush any of it.
    
    There are no shortcuts on the road to where we’re going.
    
    We take every turn, including U-turns out of dead ends, and away from cliff edges, and quick exits from places we have no business being.
    
    And build up our experience quotient over time.
    
    And draw on it in creating new experiences.
    
    And modify it as needed.
    
    To use in conjunction with instinct and intuition in sensing what is called for and dancing with our life, laughing, with the wind of the Spirit that blows where it will forever in our hair.
39. Pilings 01 B&W — Silver Lake, Ocracoke Island, Cape Hatteras National Seashore, NC, October 19, 2013 — We are in a fight with our life for our life and our soul. Here’s how it is:
    
    The culture of a place, Apple, say, or Amazon, or Google or Yahoo, is the ethos of the place, the we-ness of it: “We do it this way here.”
    
    Every institution, every corporation, is run in this way: This is the way it is done here. You do it this way or leave.
    
    This is the way it is done here. This is the way to think here. This is the way to act. The way to be. You have to do it like this in order to be one of us.
    
    We take you away from you and throw you away and give you us in place of you. Now, you’re talking! That’s the way to do it!
    
    The military certainly doesn’t want you thinking and acting like you! You have to think and act like you are supposed to think and act there!
    
    
    It isn’t Viet Nam or Iraq that’s the problem. The military kills you before you get into combat. And then expects you to put yourself back together when you are discharged.
    
    And it’s that way with every institution and corporation. The bigger and more important the group is, the smaller and less significant the individual is. But the individual is the hope of the world. And is lost to the world.
    
    I had to leave the church or become the church. There was no place for me, there is no place for an “I,” in the church. Or any business.
    
    No thinking allowed here! Only fitting in here! Only doing it like it is supposed to be done here! Individuality is out of the question here!
    
    No corporation can operate with employees thinking for themselves, doing it like they think it ought to be done. That would be chaos.
    
    You have to be a company man or woman, a team player, with no mind of your own. Do you see the stress that generates? Try not being you! See what that feels like. See what that does to you.
    
    Try disconnecting you from your own life—letting The Company direct your living! Do you know what happens to your soul in that environment?
    
    Your soul disappears in a Puff. You live in a wasteland, empty of life, devoid of soul. They pay you for that. Try buying back your soul!
    
    What do we sell our soul for? We get more for it than a bowl of hot porridge but. We are no better off for it.
    
    What to do? Be aware of it! Wake up to it! Live in two worlds! This is called walking two paths at the same time. “Defect in place.” Do it their way when they are looking. Do it your way in your spare time, on weekends. Make your own breathing room, your own being space, your own sanctuary, oasis.
    
    Make your own place where you can be real. And go there often. Savvy?
40. Ocracoke Sunset Mirror — Cape Hatteras National Seashore, Pamlico Sound, NC, October 17, 2013 — We have to pause on a regular basis to remember who we are and what we are about. Life can knock us off track. We stay on the beam by being centered and focused on the beam. You can’t walk a tightrope with a wandering mind.
    
    So we sit and remember. Or walk slowly and remember. Who we are. What we are about.
    
    We open ourselves consciously to the unconscious—to the invisible world. We reestablish connection. We reflect on last night’s dream. We reorient ourselves in space and time. And consider what is happening here and now.
    
    What needs to happen? What needs to be done about it? How can we meet the moment with the gifts, art, genius that are ours to bestow? How are we being asked to bring ourselves forth even here, even now, to engage our life—the one we are living—with our LIFE—the one that is ours to live?
    
    This is not how to master our life—the one we are living—and make it go the way we want it to go (What does wanting know?). This is about how to live our LIFE—the one that is ours to live, that only we can live—in this here, this now—as blessing and grace upon our situation whether our situation realizes it is being blessed and graced or not.
    
    We have to be one with our LIFE to live it. We have to be who we are, doing what we are about with intention and deliberation. It takes focus and concentration to be alive in any here and now. We cannot live accidentally.
    
    So, we sit and remember. Walk slowly and reflect. Merge with our LIFE and reemerge in our life to be who we are there, doing what we are about.
41. Cormorants 03 B&W — Cape Hatteras National Seashore, Pamlico Sound, NC, October 19, 2013 
    
    Sheldon Kopp said, “We are all born into families and cultures we didn’t choose, given names we didn’t pick, instructed in behavior and values we might not have selected, and too often end up expected to live lives designed by others. Once we realize our assigned identity has no personal meaning, we all have the freedom, the right and the responsibility to work out for ourselves who we are and what we are to be about.” Or words to that effect.
    
    The work required to be who we are, to do what is ours to do, can seem so overwhelming that, like the groundhog seeing its shadow, we duck back underground to ride out what remains of our life in the apparent safety of a prescribed identity.
    
    Living can be like dying. And not living is very much like being dead.
    
    It takes courage to be alive, and we create courage by pretending to be courageous, and stepping into the full light of conscious living, and seeing what we can do with the life that is ours to live in the time left for living—denying the Cyclops another victim, and taking up the path with our name on it to see where it goes.
42. Moonrise 02 — Cape Hatteras National Seashore, Pamlico Sound, NC, October 19, 20137
    
    Sheldon Kopp said, “We must know what we feel, say what we mean, and do what we say.”
    
    We must be transparent to ourselves, and be who we are, and who we also are, in ways appropriate to the occasion, all our life long.
    
    I have lived my life around people who did not have their own mind, and certainly did not dare to speak it. These people have been dead to themselves, saying what they were expected to say, doing what they were expected to do, being who they were expected to be all their life long—never once daring to be who they were by serving interests important only to them—and compensating for their failure to be themselves with too much alcohol, or too much medication, or too much Bible.
    
    Sheldon Kopp said, “The dragon we must slay is no more than the monster of everyday expectations about how we ought to live our life.”
    
    The dragon so rules our life that we don’t even notice its shadow darkening our days, but compliantly follow the path from the barn to the pasture back to the barn in our place in the line of cows, free from the pain of awareness, wondering why anyone would want a different life than this, where all our needs are met and all threats are repelled by the nice fence that keeps us forever safe and secure.
    
    The dead don’t worry about dying, and aren’t plagued by the fear of grief, loss and sorrow.
    
    There is a lot to be said for never taking a chance on life.
    
    And so, Jesus advised leaving the dead to bury the dead and seeking our own way in the land of the living.
    
    We don’t need anyone’s permission to be who we are, or to serve the life that is ours to live. We are the only one who has to be on board that boat as it leaves the harbor, bound for who knows where, but guided by our soul with its unfailing sense of True North.
43. Skinny Dip Falls Detail 01 — Blue Ridge Parkway, Pisgah National Forest near Brevard, NC, October 24, 2013 — The theology of no theology would sound like Jesus of Nazareth. “Don’t talk of God,” he said. “BE God!” Or words to that effect.
    
    Now we’re talking! That’s the way to do it—by DOING it! Don’t talk about it! DO it. Love your neighbor. Don’t talk about loving your neighbor.
    
    And don’t talk to your neighbor about God. BE God to your neighbor. Treat your neighbor like God would treat your neighbor. And quit all that talking.
    
    Now we’re talking!
44. Storm Clouds Gathering HDR 01 — Blue Ridge Parkway, Pisgah National Forest at Pisgah Inn, NC, October 24, 2013 — There is what you can do, and what you can’t do, and what you have no business attempting. It’s up to you to know where the lines lie, and to be right about it.
    
    There is what we want to do, and what we need to do, and what we have no business being involved with. It’s up to you to know what’s what, and be right about it.
    
    We spend our life figuring it out. Working it out.
    
    Knowing where the lines lie—which lines to live within and which lines to erase, breach, ignore.
    
    Knowing what needs to be done and what needs to be left undone.
    
    The books and lectures are no help to us here. Guidelines, standards and norms trick us into thinking we know something when what we need to know is that we don’t know and need to listen to insight, instinct, intuition and the drift of heart and soul—and then summons our courage and take a chance, trusting ourselves to have what it takes to deal with whatever outcome may emerge.
    
    Now we’re talking! That’s the way to do it!
    
    Our life stirs to life thinking we may yet learn to live it, hoping we will throw ourselves into it and see where it goes.
45. Looking Glass Falls HDR 01 — Pisgah National Forest near Brevard, NC, October 25, 2013 
    
    Live toward as much as you know of what is good and see where it goes.
    
    Live toward as much as you know of what is right for you and see where it goes.
    
    Live toward as much as you know of what is meaningful for you and see where it goes.
    
    Live toward as much as you know of what you love and see where it goes.
    
    Live toward as much as you know of what is kind and tender and see where it goes.
    
    Live toward as much as you know of what is just and decent and see where it goes.
    
    Live toward as much as you know of what is compassionate and gracious and see where it goes.
    
    Live toward as much as you know of what is yours to do and see where it goes.
    
    Live toward as much as you know of your heart’s desire and direction and see where it goes.
    
    Live toward as much as you know of what is the essential truth and character of the living being you are and see where it goes.
46. High Falls in Shadow (Aren’t we all?) — DuPont State Forest near Brevard, NC, October 25, 2013 — What’s money for? Accumulating? Amassing? Investing? Guarding? Protecting? Owning? Flaunting?
    
    If you have money, you have someone trying to get it.
    
    Money is only good for paying the bills. If you use money to run up bills, you’re wasting it.
    
    Money is only good for paying the right bills. What are the right bills? That’s your question to answer.
    
    The right bills pay for the tools that enable you to do your work—the work that is yours to do—that enable you to live your life—the life that is yours to live.
    
    To know what the right bills are, you have to know what your work is, of what your life consists.
    
    To know that, you have to wake up.
    
    We use money to avoid waking up. We use money as a diversion/distraction to avoid the work of knowing what our work is and doing it, of knowing what our life is and living it.
    
    We want to live the life we want to live—not the life that is ours to live—and we need a lot of money to take our mind off the emptiness of the life that is not our life to live.
    
    Growing up is the solution to all of our problems today. To grow up we have to change our mind about what is important and do what we do not want to do, which is the thing we were born to do, the thing that no one can do but us, the thing that is dying for us to do it, which we refuse to do because we have eyes for other things.
    
    There you have it, as clearly as I can spell it out for you. What are you going to do about it?
47. Eagle B&W — Swan Quarter, NC, October 13, 2013 — Instead of using money to buy the tools that help us do our work and live our life, we use money to buy props that make it look like we have a life, like we are really living, like we are alive.
    
    We are building four-lane highways through the mountains when we should be rationing fossil fuels around the world. What are we thinking? That the good life will last forever.
    
    The good life is a sidetrack. Is a dead end. Is a hypnotic lie protecting us from the truth of the life that is ours to live. The life we know we are not living and don’t want to live because it asks hard things of us and we like it soft and easy.
    
    We want to live without doing the work of being alive, which is the work that is ours to do, which we are not doing because it doesn’t pay off. We can’t exploit it so we say there is nothing in it for us.
    
    Nothing but life. And meaning. And purpose. And goodness, truth, wonder, beauty, magic and miracle.
    
    We sell our soul for glass beads and silver mirrors and wonder where the emptiness comes from.
    
    Our life is only a perspective shift away, waiting for us to wake up and change our mind about what is important, and say, “Okay. I’m yours. Let’s see what we can do with the time left for living.”
48. Sliding Rock HDR 01 — Pisgah National Forest near Brevard, NC, October 25, 2013
    
    We have to be jolted awake because things are not how we have been told that they are—because things are not the way we have assumed they were—because things are not what we want them to be.
    
    The path to enlightenment, satori, awakening, realization and awareness winds through shock and consternation. We live between Not This! and This Too!
    
    We live within the tension of mutually exclusive polarities. We want to live the life that is ours to live apart from the life we are living. We want to be lifted from this vale of tears and deposited on the yonder shore of life, and light, and peace. We want to give ourselves to Jesus, or any would-be savior, and have our burdens lifted, our sorrows melt away.
    
    Sorry, not really, to be the one to tell you but. We live with how things are and how things also are. That is how things are—and we have to make our peace with it, come to terms with it, grow up about it, let it be because it is, and laugh at the irony and paradox that bring us to our senses by ringing our door bell and inviting us to play.
    
    In AA parlance, we cannot white-knuckle it, but we can fake it until we make it. The difference between the two is waking up, growing up, wising up, facing up, squaring up, standing up, showing up and living the life that is ours to live smack in the middle of the life we are living.
    
    Reality is the bed we sleep in at night and the world we wake up to each morning. THAT is where we get to work, bringing forth who we are to heal, and make peace, and transform with the gifts, and the art, and the genius that are ours to offer in the time left for living.
    
    What? You thought enlightenment would do something for us? Enlightenment asks us to do something with it! Like live it, here and now—where we are, when we are, how we are, why we are, what we are, who we are.
    
    If we can say yes to that, we are what the world has been waiting on, and we will all bless one another, and all living beings, with the beauty of who we are, in the midst of how things are. World without end. Amen.
49. Dry Falls 02 HDR — Nantahala National Park, Cullasaja River, Cullasaja River Gorge, Hwy 64, NC, October 27, 2013 
    
    Put aside your expectations, ambition, hopes, dreams, desires, wants, wishes and fears, and simply sit with your life.
    
    Listen to your life.
    
    Your life is what has gotten you to this place, this here, this now. And it is what will take you on to the next place, the next here and now.
    
    Your life is the mule you ride through your days. It would behoove you to treat it well. To nurture it, nourish it, attend it, listen to it and work out with it what to do in each here and now, and what to do next.
    
    Collaborate with your life about how you will live.
    
    Do not force your way on your life, yanking your mule about as though you know what needs to be done, and how you need to go about doing it.
    
    You don’t know any more about living your life than you did the day you were born.
    
    You know more about how to get what you want, but you don’t know any more about what you ought to want, or how to manage conflicting wants, or how to deal with wants you have no business wanting. Or how to know anything about what your life needs from you.
    
    You could use some help with all this. You could use some discipline, courage, direction. You could start by sitting with your life, listening, feeling your way into an association, and on into a partnership. And see where it goes.
50. Dry Falls 01 — Nantahala National Park, Cullasaja River, Cullasaja River Gorge, Hwy 64, NC, October 27, 2013 — Your soul is the only bible you will every need to read.
    
    Your soul IS the Bible!
    
    YOU are the Bible!
    
    All those Bible studies that people never get enough of are evidence of a hunger unnamed, unknown, unrecognized.
    
    When we live to “study the Bible” and “know the Word,” we are close, but oh so far away.
    
    We are seeking to find our way back to ourselves, to the soul of our beginning, our being, which we have lost in our fascination with the forbidden fruit of the false promises and empty illusions of satisfaction and glory in the world of normal, apparent, reality.
    
    The Bible that we can’t get enough of because we are reading it wrong is about us, is us—and when we read it correctly, it lays us out before our eyes and we see ourselves in every verse, and know, along with David the King, that WE are the one!
    
    Or, as Jesus would put it, “Those with ears to hear, let them hear!”
    
    We cannot find “out there” what is missing “in here”!
    
    All the biblical metaphors are images pointing to the Mystery of Being. We kill them by making them literal.
    
    There are people, still yet, out there even today, looking for Noah’s Ark. That’s missing the point.
    
    And don’t we all miss the point in our own way, every day of our life? Asking Jesus, as did Pilate, “What is truth?” and, looking for it in our own way, ignore the truth welling up, pouring over, splashing out of our own soul—joining the builders rejecting the cornerstone again and again, thinking truth is Jesus when all the time WE are Jesus, condemned and crucified by who we also are.
    
    We play out all of the old themes of the Bible in our own life, cycling through them all again and again, like Christmas and Easter on an eternal cycle, never getting anywhere, never doing anything, repeating, repeating, repeating the old story which is never recognized for what it is: Our life being played out before our unseeing eyes because we think it is about then and there, and not here and now.
51. Used in Short Talks On Contradiction, etc., Looking Glass Falls HDR 04 — Davidson River, Pisgah National Forest near Brevard, NC, October 28, 2013 — Everything is funny from some perspective. Yet, shifting perspectives is impossible without a significant amount of work. The work is sitting with the pain until something shifts.
    
    Helen Luke said, “Unless a man or woman has experienced the darkness of the soul, he or she can know nothing of that transforming laughter without which no hint of the ultimate reality of the opposites can be faintly intuited.”
    
    We have to bear the pain to get to the laughter. We don’t bear the pain in order to get to the laughter. We bear the pain because the pain is ours to bear. It is the way.
    
    The way is painful, and bearing the pain is the way of progressing along the way. The way of life.
    
    Bearing the pain transports us to transcendence—and to the recognition of the impossibility of growing up except by going through the pain.
    
    We grow through the pain—through bearing the pain consciously, intentionally, intensively. The pain of conflict, contradiction, opposition, obstruction, betrayal, negation…
    
    We cry, and crying, we get to the point of laughing at our crying because it is appropriate, and essential, and a wonderful critique of how things are. Tears are necessary. Who could live with what must be lived with without weeping? Wailing?
    
    And laughter is there to mark the rightness of our tears, as a resounding YES! to the fitting nature of our protest against the way things are.
    
    We are doing it right, crying! And we are going on with it, crying! We are not quitting! We are living on toward the goal of goodness, decency, justice, mercy and peace—in spite of all that is arrayed against us, regardless of the odds, who gives a damn about our chances? We are in it for the long haul—no matter what!
    
    And we laugh, celebrating our triumph over all that would stop us. We laugh at the ludicrous nature of the whole show—at the absurdity of giving ourselves wholeheartedly to the work of our life in the conditions under which we live. We laugh at what cannot be said, explained, or understood. Only done. And we do it.
    
    We show up laughing for the work that is ours to do. We take our place in the long line of those who have taken their place before us. We step into our life—the one that waits for us to live it anyway, nevertheless, even so—and take on the day, every day, bring it on!
    
    Now we’re talking! That’s the way to do it! I’m proud to be one of us in doing what needs to be done regardless of the price to be paid!
52. Glen Falls Detail 01 — Nantahala National Forest near Highlands, NC, October 27, 2013 
    
    Ask the questions that beg to be asked!
    
    We are where we are today, on every level, because the questions that begged to be asked, needed to be asked, should have been asked, were not asked.
    
    Who says women, black people, immigrants, the poor, gay people, people with special needs, etc. are inferior and can be treated as though they are?
    
    How do we know the people who say such things and do them know what they are talking about? What do they stand to gain for saying what they say, doing what they do? Whose good is served by the good they call good?
    
    What makes them think that what they think is so?
    
    We suffer the consequences of all the unasked questions.
    
    So.
    
    Start asking the questions that beg to be asked.
    
    And ask the questions those questions stir up.
    
    And ask the questions the answers generate.
    
    Get to the bottom of all things.
    
    Put it all on the table and consider the table. Taking everything on the table into account, the question that begs to be asked then is “What are you going to do about it?”
    
    Don’t forget to ask that one. And answer it.
53. Ocracoke Lighthouse 04 B&W — Cape Hatteras National Seashore, Ocracoke Island, NC, October 20, 2013 
    
    We cannot outrun our life. Our life knows where we live.
    
    We cannot hide from our life, escape our life. We can only deny it, refuse to live it, and pay the price.
    
    Of course, we pay a price to live our life, but. It is a different price than the one we pay for not living it.
    
    When we don’t live our life, but try to hide out in some substitute life, some pseudo life, some faux life, pretending it is the life for us—or resigned to it because we think there is no alternative under these circumstances, with these resources—there is hell to pay.
    
    Hell in the form of symptoms, stone walls, dead ends, nothing working as it should, and the nagging feeling that we are off the beam, out of place, lost with no guiding beacon to lead us to our destination.
    
    When we live our life, there is the price of the struggle to be who we are in ways contrary to the expectations of ourselves and others regarding how we are supposed to be.
    
    People won’t understand. Will think we are strange. Will dismiss us, discount us, and fail to understand what we are about.
    
    And we will have to consciously decide again and again whose side we are on—ours or not-ours.
    
    But, we won’t be lost, wondering what’s what. We will always know the core secret. We. Are. Who. We. Are.
    
    Remembering that will ground us, center us, and focus us on the work to create ourselves one day at at time, one situation at a time, no matter what, for as long as life is possible.
    
    I don’t know how you do that, remember who you are, but I write reminders to myself all the time.
    
    These vignettes which I am privileged to share with you (thank you very much for encouraging me at the work of keeping myself on the beam) are examples of the kind of grounding writing I do. These things are for me. If they help you, that’s fine, but I write them to help me.
    
    We have to do something to pull ourselves into focus, and keep ourselves focused on being who we are, and doing what we are about, moment by moment, situation by situation, over the course of our life.
    
    The writing it out—the effort at articulation, the work to put it into words—creates, expands, deepens our awareness of ourselves and how it is with us, as we struggle to find the words to say what we sense, somehow, regarding who we are and what we are—what it is—about.
    
    The work of articulation, of expression, is what an artist does with a brush. And it brings the artist forth on the canvass for the artist to see, and be astounded.
    
    So, we have to write (or draw, or paint, or etc.) constantly, always, to create ourselves anew—to create more of ourselves each day than we were the day before—receiving the gift of ourselves from ourselves.
    
    It’s work. Requiring discipline. But it’s life for us, and part of the price we pay to be alive.
    
    If you don’t do something regularly to keep yourself focused on being who you are doing what is yours to do, it’s time you started.
54. The Oak at Springer’s Point HDR 01 — Cape Hatteras National Seashore, Ocracoke Island, NC, October 17, 2013
    
    People are saying, “Not this! Not that!” and doing everything they can think of to get away from their life, and into some other, better, finer, life instead.
    
    Look at them. You can see in their body language, and shape, and facial expression everything you need to know that they are not doing well.
    
    They need a heart transplant—as in a complete change of heart.
    
    They are, in New Testament terms, “Harassed and helpless like sheep without a shepherd.” 
    
    Except, they are not sheep!
    
    They are the shepherds of their own inner flock, who have refused the role, and have become lost themselves, and are indistinguishable from the sheep they are supposed to be tending.
    
    Well, that’s ridiculous! Who is in charge here? Who is guiding their boat on its path through the sea? If they refuse to do it, who is to do it for them?
    
    These people need to wake up and become the shepherd they are—shepherding themselves to life by squaring up to the life they are living, and living the life that is theirs yet to live beginning right now, where they are.
    
    The realization and acceptance of what is theirs to do would alone be enough to effect an immediate transformation of their spirit and attitude, which would have a contagious effect on their surroundings and, as they begin to do the work that is theirs to do within the life they are living, their impact would right the world, restore harmony and raise the dead.
    
    And that’s just the beginning.
    
    So what’s with this hopelessly dour what’s the use look? Ask them that, the next chance you get.
    
    I’d like to know what is holding them in place, when life is at their door waiting for them to open it, come out and play.
55. Carolina Lakes HDR 12 — The Lake at Crowder’s Mountain State Park near Gastonia, NC, October 6, 2013 
    
    What do you know of God that you didn’t hear from someone else, or that didn’t come from the Bible?
    
    What you know of God in this way won’t be theological or doctrinal. It will be exclusively experiential.
    
    What has been your experience of God?
    
    Where would you go right now to experience God?
    
    What have you learned of God in the arms of your lover? In the company of children? In the eyes of your dog?
    
    Where are you most often with God?
    
    What is it about the God you know that wouldn’t be said about the God you have been told to believe in?
    
    Which God are you going to go with?
56. Turtle Back Falls Detail 01 — Horsepasture River, Gorges State Park near Cashiers, NC, October 26, 2013
    
    Your life runs through it all—through all you face and must deal with, and hate, and wish with all your being were not in your path.
    
    Your life is there in all that you would avoid, escape ignore, deny—calling you out, bringing you forth, shaping you, identifying you to you, presenting you to you, offering you to you, in ways you would never be you without the experiences you detest.
    
    The whole thing is a gift waiting to be seen, acknowledged, opened, embraced, lived.
    
    The trick is thinking of it that way.
    
    How we think of things tells the tale.
57. Approaching the Viaduct — Blue Ridge Parkway near Grandfather Mountain, NC, October 8, 2013
    
    You have to get out of your way, off your back and on your side.
    
    You have to let you show you what you are capable of.
    
    You have to shut up with the “I can’t do that,” “That’s not me,” “I don’t have the talent, the ability, the skill, the…”
    
    You have to wake up to the truth that you have no idea of what your thing is because you won’t try anything.
    
    You have no idea of what you can do because you haven’t done anything you didn’t want to do, didn’t feel like doing, weren’t in the mood to do to find out if you could actually to it or not.
    
    What is your life aching for you to do that you won’t do because you don’t want to do it and think you can’t?
    
    What does your life keep throwing at you that you keep dodging, ignoring, dismissing, discounting, in favor of the same old, same old, life that you despise, but are comfortable wishing were different without doing the first thing to see how different it can be?
    
    Give your life a chance to show you what you can do.
58. Fall Woods 02 — Six Mile Creek Road, Indian Land, SC, October 31, 2013 
    
    You can think of your life as standing in your way. Opposing you at every turn. Keeping you from really living, from being truly alive. An obstacle to overcome. Resisting you without ceasing, forcing you to compel it to go your way.
    
    You can live out of an adversarial orientation toward your life, going another round every day. A lot of people do it that way. Seems to work for them.
    
    Not really.
    
    And, you can think of your life as pulling you forth, shaping you, creating you, giving you the gift of you, calling you to  use the gifts you have in living.
    
    You can live out of a collaborative orientation toward your life—open to what it has in store, joining it in the work to become what it—what you—might yet be.
    
    There are things about you you would never experience if you lived the kind of life you wish were yours to live. You would die dumb to your gifts, your art, your genius, YOU!
    
    Why not look at your life as a laboratory inviting experimentation? A place to live your way into who you are and what you are capable of doing? Using the challenges ou face, and resources at your disposal, to create yourself in the process of living your life?
    
    What has banging heads with your life ever done for you?
    
59. Carolina Lakes HDR 18 — Lake Crandall, Anne Springs Close Greenway, Field Trials Access, Fort Mill, SC, October 31, 2013 
    
    Too many of us have to get to the end of our rope before we can change our mind about what is important. Some of us are too prideful even then to admit we were wrong, and resolutely pursue our course, clutching tightly our convictions all the way to suicide, or a total psychological disintegration.
    
    Once our mind is made up and we are sure we are right about the way we see things, we gorge on what is killing us until we are quite dead on every level.
    
    It should be easier to change our mind.
    
    Expectation, assumption, presumption and inference—arrogance, hubris and hard-headedness—need to be recognized early on, confessed, repented and expelled, so that we might step fully into what remains of our life in the time left for living.
    
    The key that turns the lock that opens the door for all of this is honest conversation.
    
    Where do you go for honest conversation?
    
    My bet is that you have to talk in cliches, banality and inanity with all the people you know.
    
    You repeat entire conversations about safe subjects, and you never say anything new, anything different, anything honest, straight from the heart, about the things that are dying to be said.
    
    Honest conversation is avoided at all cost everywhere.
    
    It would lead us into unexplored territory. Ask hard things of us. Change our life. We can’t have that.
    
    Comfort and security require things to remain exactly as they are forever. Never mind that it’s killing us.
    
    Victims cling to their abuser, even if their abuser is themselves.
    
    The way out of hell winds straight through the heart of hell.
    
    We have to change our mind about what is important. And that is hell. And, it is the path to heaven, to life like we have never lived it, abundant, resplendent, pouring over, spilling out—ours to have in the time left for living for the small, but recurring, price of honest conversation.
60. Goodale State Park 06 — Adams Mill Pond, Big Pine Tree Creek, near Camden, SC, November 1, 2013 
    
    Lao Tzu said that the way to do anything is to not strive to do it—to not force it to be done—but to let it do itself.
    
    Let your life live itself. Let your life live you.
    
    Be the door through which your life walks into the world.
    
    The window through which the world sees your life.
    
    How would you do that?
    
    By not doing it!
    
    By simply getting out of the way and allowing it to happen.
    
    What are you keeping from happening by trying to make something happen?
    
    Assist what needs to happen by stopping your constant striving, pushing, forcing, interfering, struggling, trying to make something happen.
    
    If you are going to do anything, just do your thing and stop trying to make something of it.
61. Goodale State Park 07, B&W — Adams Mill Pond, Big Pine Tree Creek, near Camden, SC, November 1, 2013
    
    Wholeness, oneness, is not everybody lock-stepping their way through the world, singing the same song on key, voting the same way on the issues and agreeing down the line about how things are about every single thing.
    
    Wholeness, oneness, is living with awareness and acceptance of our differentness without trying to force anybody to see and do it anybody’s way.
    
    Wholeness, oneness is integrating our opposites without erasing them, so that my way helps develop and bring forth your way, and your way does the same for my way, and we grow each other up in ways that are helpful to each of us and beneficial to all of us.
    
    What became of honoring, respecting, appreciating and celebrating each others idiosyncrasies and peculiarities?
    
    When we deny those things about ourselves, and refuse to allow them in others, we destroy our individuality, and theirs, and we all become cookie-cutter people, living a life someone else chooses for us and tells us to live.
    
    We can live together in ways that call forth what is unique about each of us, and in so doing we strengthen all of us.
    
    I am the only one who has to do it my way.
    
    You have to do it your way.
    
    And we help each other do it the way we are best suited to do it—by seeing, hearing, understanding and knowing who each other is, and helping each other come forth and be who only she, who only he, can be.
    
    You can start doing that with the next person who comes your way. You can’t find a better homework assignment anywhere.
62. Goodale State Park 01 — Adams Mill Pond, Big Pine Tree Creek, near Camden, SC, November 1, 2013 
    
    It’s never too late to wake up!
    
    To stand up and square up with how things are and what needs to be done about it.
    
    To step up and live the life that is ours yet to live in the time left for living.
    
    Thinking that it is too late for all of this—thinking that they missed their chance when they were young, and now have no hope—is what turns people to the wall to wait out their years.
    
    That’s a great pity.
    
    We have to live throughout the time left for living, no matter how old we are!
63. November Orchard 03 — Springs Farms peach orchard, Fort Mill, SC, November 2, 2013 
    
    Let’s give our soul as much factual reality as we give our liver or our blood pressure. And, to get soul away from all the trappings of theology and doctrine, let’s call soul, “psyche.” “Psyche” is the Greek word for “soul,” but it doesn’t come packed with the associations that “soul” is burdened with.
    
    Grant Psyche factual, actual reality. Consider Psyche as an invisible, intangible “wider consciousness” that is unconscious—hence, unknown—to us, but seeks communion and collaboration with us.
    
    You know how we are limited in our physical sensory perception to certain wavelengths of light for seeing and certain frequency levels for hearing? Well, entertain the possibility that Psyche is capable of perceiving things, the future for example, that we cannot discern.
    
    Entertain also the possibility that Psyche has a stake in us and can commune with us by way of instinct and intuition, dreams, visions and hunches, etc.—and can guide us in ways that serve Psyche’s interests, whatever they may be, and to some extent, ours as well (In the Old Testament sense of not muzzling the ox, perhaps).
    
    Entertain also the possibility that it is in our interest to “throw in with Psyche,” and live as Psyche’s “side kick” in the world of normal, apparent reality—because that is the way meaning and purpose are realized (though perhaps at the expense of physical comfort, convenience and privilege).
    
    At-one with Psyche, we are at-one with ourselves, on track, on the beam, in tune, in touch, and living our life as only we can live it.
    
    At odds with Psyche, we are on our own, for better or worse—physically, materially, spiritually, emotionally, psychologically.
    
    I’m saying, we would be wise to be attuned to Psyche and follow Psyche’s lead within the terms and conditions of life as we live it.
    
    How to do that is the question we live to answer. We start by opening our eyes and ears—seeing what we look at, hearing what we listen to, sensing what we sense, feeling what we feel, knowing what we know, and being open and receptive to more than meets the eye and more than words can say.
    
    We practice taking Psyche seriously, and see what occurs to us, what calls our name, points the way, and where it goes.
64. Used in Short Talks On Good and Bad Religion — Lake Haigler Fall HDR 01 — Anne Springs Close Greenway, Fort Mill, SC, November 3, 2013 — The test of any belief, of any, of any faith is this: Does It Help You With Your Life? Does it bring you to life? Does it enable you to live the life that is your to live in the time left for living?
    
    Or, does it hand you a life made to order by someone else, some authority, someone who knows what’s best and must be pleased or else? Does it tell you what to do and how to do it, what to think, and what to avoid at all costs?
    
    Does it call you to ask all the questions, or does it tell you to not ask questions? Just take what you are handed and do what you are told?
    
    Does it invite you to open yourself to beauty in all forms—to embrace, experience, relish, adore, exhibit, express and serve beautiful ways of responding to the wonder of who we are, where are, when we are, how we are, what we are, why we are?
    
    Or does it give you a long list of things not to consider, of places not to go, of people not to associate with, of experiences not to have?
    
    Does it open you to life or close you off from life?
65. Lake Haigler Fall HDR 06 — Anne Springs Close Greenway, Fort Mill, SC, November 3, 2013 — Only we can wake ourselves up. No one can do it for us.
    
    We only have to hear what we have to say.
    
    To do that, we have to say what we have to say. And listen to what we are saying.
    
    It’s never more difficult than that. Talking to ourselves. Listening to what we have to say. Waking up.
66. Lake Hagler HDR 02 — Anne Springs Close Greenway, Fort Mill, SC, November 3, 2013 — We all need help with our life. Not one of us can hope to live our life without the right kind of help delivered in the right kind of way.
    
    Our place in the lives of others is to help them with their life. Our spouse, partner, lover? We are here to help them with their life. And they are here to help us with ours.
    
    It is not about how we can exploit them or our relationship with them to get them to do things our way. It’s about how we can help them with their life. And how they can help us with our life.
    
    We all have to know what our life is and what would be helpful to us in living it. What do we need to live our life?
    
    We should talk with each other about our life, what it is and what would be helpful to us in living it. We should make our life our highest priority. Living it well is what matters most. What would be helpful? We need to know.
    
    How are we going to help others if we don’t know what would be helpful? How are we going to know what would be helpful if we don’t know what our life is and what we need to live it? How are we going to know any of these things if we don’t talk about it?
67. Moonrise 07 — Cape Hatteras National Seashore, Ocracoke Island, NC, October 22, 2013 — I don’t know what the smallest degree of adjustment is possible in a mid-course correction, but one half of that applied to our life would be enough to change the world.
    
    How different are we willing to be? How different can we be by this time tomorrow?
    
    If you are casting about wondering where to start, how about silence? Sitting quietly for at least 20 minutes twice a day? Quietly and consciously.
    
    Pay attention to what comes along and how you respond to it. Sit still and watch what happens.
    
    Oh, sitting quietly means no music, no TV, no books or magazines. Sitting. Quietly.
68. Cullasaja Falls HDR 02 — Cullasaja River Gorge, Nantahala National Forest, Hwy 64 near Franklin, NC, October 27, 2013 — Our expectations, ideas, desires, ambition, self-interest, assumptions, inferences, beliefs and opinions (etc.) get in our way. Block our way. Prevent us from being who it is ours to be, keep us from doing what is ours to do.
    
    We think we are here to get what we want, have our way, sit back and relax, enjoy our life, take it easy, have it made.
    
    What we think it is about keeps us from being about what we are here to be about.
    
    We are here to live our life, which is not the life we have in mind for ourselves—and to help others live their life, which is not the life they have in mind for themselves.
    
    This is hard work. We have to walk two paths at the same time.
    
    We have to live the life we are living in order to pay the bills—the right bills—and hold body and soul together while we also do the work of soul, the work soul would have us do, the work that is ours to do, the work we are born to do, the work our gifts, art and genius are uniquely fashioned to do.
    
    And we think we have no gifts, especially no art, and that genius is a word that would never be used in conjunction with us. Our soul has its work cut out for it, getting us to do our work.
    
    Here’s the starting orientation: Open yourself to the possibility that you have a soul with a life for you to live which is different from the life you are living, and it is your place to realize this and to consciously bring your two lives together—experiencing, expressing and exhibiting who you are and who you also are with grace and compassion in the time left for living.
    
    Open yourself to your soul and see where it goes.
69. Dawn’s Light — Cape Hatteras National Seashore, Ocracoke Island, NC, October 21, 2013 — You have your life to live and I have my life to live.
    
    We are here to assist one another with the life that is our life to live—not to interfere with one another’s ability to live her life, his life, but to help the other in becoming attuned to and aligned with her life, his life.
    
    How we do this is by seeing, hearing, and understanding who the other is and also it. And saying what we see, hear and understand, so that the other might also see, hear and understand—or correct our perception—so that we we all see better, hear better, understand better how things are and how they also are.
    
    And we leave it to the other to work out the implications of her, or his, now enlarged perception of her life, of his life and what is being asked of her, of him, and what she, what he, is going to do about it.
    
    We see, hear, understand, know, do, become.
    
    Through conversation with those who are also about seeing, hearing, understanding, knowing, doing, becoming.
    
    No one has the formula. We are all finding our way. Working it out—how to be who we are, how to do what is ours to do, within the life we are living.
70. Carolina Lakes 23 — Stumpy Pond, Anne Springs Close Greenway, Field Trial Access, Fort Mill, SC, October 31, 2013 — Our symptoms are just the conditions within which we bring forth our life. They may wake us up to who we are and what needs to be done, but they may not go away just because we wake up to who we are and start doing what needs to be done.
    
    Do not look at living the life that is your life to live as some kind of escape from the life you are living.
    
    We live the life that is our life to live within the terms and conditions of our other life—of our physical life in this world of normal, apparent reality. That world does not disappear even when we live in tune with the invisible world.
    
    We live with a foot in each world, and make it work.
    
    Don’t tell me, let me guess. “But, what’s in it for us???” is the question welling up in all who read this. Am I right? “What do we get out of living the life that is ours to live?”
    
    We get to live the life that is our life to live within the terms and conditions of our other life. That is the adventure of a lifetime. You would have to be dead to not get a bad case of the happy squeals just thinking about it. But hold those squeals down. What would the neighbors think?
71. Goodale State Park 09 — Adams Mill Pond, Big Pine Tree Creek, near Camden, SC, November 1, 2013 — How we manage our conflicts tells the tale.
    
    We have the idea that we shouldn’t have conflicts, and that when we do, we should get rid of them as soon as possible. Conflicts are to be avoided, denied, dismissed, discounted, ignored, disappeared, escaped…
    
    Those “Happy Pills” that have been around for four generations or so? Conflict Destroyers! “Conflict? What conflict? I don’t even know what the word means!”
    
    When we bury our conflict, we bury our life with it.
    
    Life is conflict. Being alive brings our conflict forth. The Cyclops? Just another term for Conflict.
    
    Oh, but, our little hands are already wringing at the very idea of me talking this way.
    
    It’s YOUR LIFE talking to you through me! Your life has to get you to wake up to the necessity of facing and working through your conflicts in a conscious, deliberate, intentional way in order to be lived in the time left for living, and you just want to turn off, tune out and move to La La Land with it’s rainbows and white picket fences forever.
    
    What do you think “Thy will, not mine, be done” means?
    
    What do you think “If you want to be my disciple, you have to pick up your cross daily and follow me (That is, And do it the way it has to be done)” means?
    
    And you just want to believe in Jesus and wait to be gathered to the heavenly regions (Read: La La Land in the Sky)!
    
    Well. You have a life yet to live and the Cyclops is blocking your path. What are you going to do? Face up to your conflicts and wade into them and do what needs to be done with them, or not?
72. November Orchard 05 — Springs Farm Peach Orchard, Fort Mill, SC, November 3, 2013 — We are into achievement, accomplishment, productivity, getting things done. Soul is into being with, enjoying, experiencing, communing, relishing.
    
    You see the problem.
    
    The culture tells us if we aren’t operating out of the Type A Orientation we have ADD and need to be on medication in order to get with the program.
    
    Soul would say if we aren’t on Island Time we have missed the boat.
    
    This is a conflict we have to work out. How are we going to live soulfully in this culture?
    
    We have to carry consciously the contradiction if we are to walk two paths at the same time, and be servants of soul in a world that scoffs at the idea of doing it as soul would have it done.
73. Goodale State Park 05 B&W — Adams Mill Pond, Big Pine Tree Creek, near Camden, SC, November 1, 2013 — We are pinned down, held in place by, and remain stuck because of, our expectations, fears and desires. Wishing things were different than they are keeps things as they are.
    
    We wish things were specifically different, and because we see no path to that goal, we reject all paths to any goal. We despise all goals that aren’t at one with the goal we desire for ourselves.
    
    Change begins with opening ourselves to possibilities not our own, beyond anything we are capable of imagining, allowing our life to lead us into living in ways we would never choose for ourselves.
    
    Which puts the old idea of “freedom of the will” right out the door.
    
    I hear a lot of talk about “free will,” but I’ve never seen a lived demonstration of it. Sounds like wishful thinking, to me.
    
    We are not free to will ourselves to want what we ought to want instead of what we do want—to think the way we ought to think instead of the way we think—to see the way we ought to see instead of the way we see. To value what we ought to value instead of what we do value—to do what we ought to do instead of what we do—to be who we ought to be instead of who we are…
    
    Let’s see some free willing going on instead of hearing all this talk about it! Show me someone who is free to will something into being that is radically, or even slightly, different from what he, what she, has been trying frantically to will into being all his, all her, life! Anything.
    
    How free are we to embrace what our life is trying to give us? If you want to be free, start being free to be different from who you want to be, from who you think you ought to be, and see what your life can do for you.
    
    Your life’s proclivity lies in loosing the bonds of suppression and letting the oppressed go free.
    
    But the people who left Egypt immediately wanted to return. If you are going to follow your life to the Land of Promise, you have to have what it takes for the journey.
    
    You have to be free to embrace what your life has in store. Whatever your life has in store.
74. Carolina Lakes HDR 25 — Stumpy Pond, Anne Springs Close Greenway, Field Trials Access, Fort Mill, SC, October 31, 2013 — It is all miracle and grace.
    
    You can talk about “the plan of salvation,” if you want to, but it’s all miracle and grace.
    
    You can’t develop a formula or a recipe or a technique or a strategy or a method or an approach or a plan of any kind for waking up, changing your mind about what is important, and giving yourself to the work of living the life that is your life to live within the life you are living in the time left for living.
    
    If you do it, it’s a miracle and solid evidence of grace at work in your life.
    
    If you don’t think it’s a miracle and grace, wake up and get with it!
75. Tree Line Panorama 01 — Jim Wilson Road, Lafayette County, SC, October 31, 2013 — Photography is showing up with a camera and waiting for the picture to appear.
    
    Our ancestors spent a long time waiting between things. The natural world waits a lot and acts when the time is ripe for action.
    
    Are you getting a spoon into what I’m serving up here?
    
    We cannot hurry the big stuff. The sun rises and sets at the time of its rising and setting. We have to be there before hand and wait.
    
    You might be ready for your life to do something a long time before your life is ready to do something.
    
    The journey is a lesson in discipline and patience, persistence, faithfulness and courage.
    
    We cannot hurry sunrise or sunset, or very little in between.
    
    Watch. Wait. When the door opens, walk through. If it becomes apparent this door isn’t going to open (For example, the wind is not going to stop blowing before the light is gone), walk on.
    
    How do you know whether to wait or walk on? We don’t know any of the important stuff. We make a choice and stay or go.
    
    If we choose poorly this time, we hope to choose better next time, or the time after that.
    
    There is plenty of room for grace, compassion and forgiveness on the journey. We’ll get enough of it right. You’ll see.
76. Wood Duck Box Panorama — Goodale State Park, Adams Mill Pond, Big Pine Tree Creek, near Camden, SC, November 1, 2013 — It works like this. I catch a whiff of something, a sentence, or a paragraph, or a thought, and I start writing. I have no idea where it is going, or what I am going to say next.
    
    One sentence leads to another, and the thing is written. I’m not doing it so much as feeling my way along, being led, being drawn out, unfolded, shown what is to be said in the act of saying it.
    
    You don’t think it up and then write it out. You start writing to hear—to see—what you have to say, what you need to hear, what you need to see. You write to be shown what’s what.
    
    If I’m good for anything, if I can take credit for anything, if I can say about anything, “THIS is what I (with the “I” in bold and italicized) do,” it is come up with the right word from time to time.
    
    Something wants to be said, and I’m helping it be said, feeling what needs saying, and getting to the point where we need a word and I (Bold, italics) come up with it. That’s my specialty. Finding the right word.
    
    You think I’m writing these vignettes. I’m just writing them down, and coming up with exactly the right word from time to time. My gift. Glad to share it.
    
    But, I’m saying that you could try this our. Learn to distinguish a good place to start from a not so good place to start. Learn to catch a whiff of something that needs to be said. And sit down and write it out, and see if it hooks you up to a train of associations, and before long you’ve written paragraphs you didn’t know were there to be written.
    
    A word of warning. Don’t try to make anything out of it. Don’t think in terms of becoming a best selling author. Write for the writing, to say what needs to be said, and see where it goes, but don’t have any destinations in mind.
    
    You are along for the ride. And what a ride it will be. Seeing what you have to say. Who would have guessed it!
77. Carolina Lakes HDR 27 — Lake Crandall, Anne Springs Close Greenway, Field Trials Access, Fort Mill, SC, October 31, 2013 — Photography is being there with your eyes open. You can take a better photograph in a wider variety of light conditions with a camera that will allow you to control lens size, aperture, shutter speed, ISO, focus point and frames per second but you can take a really good picture with a camera phone or a point-and-shoot IF YOU ARE THERE. With your eyes open.
    
    Being there is being at the right place at the right time. If you can do that consistently, reliably, you will learn to take better photographs just by taking photographs and learning from your mistakes.
    
    The instructional videos, seminars, books and lectures can be helpful for cutting down your learning curve where composition, exposure, focus, lighting and subject matter are concerned but. If you aren’t going to be there, with your eyes open, you are wasting your time.
    
    You have to show up. Right place. Right time. Consistently. Reliably. Dependably. You can figure everything out on your own over time IF YOU SHOW UP, with your eyes open!
    
    We’re talking about your life here. You have to show up. You have to be where your life needs you to be, when your life needs you to be there, with the attitude required to see what is happening and what needs to happen, and the courage required to do it.
    
    You can’t be distracted. Absent. Unaccounted for.
    
    Living well comes down to being there. You’ll learn what you need to do by doing it.
    
    We all live better over time just by being there with our eyes open.
    
    Be there with your eyes open is the only rule for life you need to apply. Everything else will fall into place around that.
78. November Lane HDR 03 — Faires-Colthrap Cabin, Anne Springs Close Greenway, Fort Mill, SC, November 7, 2013 — Start anywhere. Really. Start anywhere and get out of the way, and see what happens, and what it has to say to you, about you.
    
    Start with a word, just playing around, and see what associations spin off from the word. See how long it takes to get to a word and its impact upon you that you know you need to explore, face, feel.
    
    Or start with a scene. You walking along a beach, riding a horse, walking your dog… Any scene will do. Now, out of the way with you! Watch as the scene unfolds in your imagination. What happens. How much can you take as a spectator before you insert yourself into the scene and forceably take over the direction—and even with you directing consciously the action, see how long it takes before something completely surprising happens in the fantasy you are directing.
    
    Where. Does. This. Stuff. Come. From?
    
    Play along with me here. Let’s pretend it comes from your soul—from Psyche, who is dying for you to play with her, to follow her lead, and come to terms with who you are and also are and what you are about, what life you are being asked to live.
    
    Psyche is waiting for an invitation to lead you to you, and what remains for you to do in the time left for living.
    
    You can start anywhere.
79. Lake Haigler Fall 04 — Lake Haigler Loop, Anne Springs Close Greenway, Fort Mill, SC, November 3, 2013 — You have to have a place apart where your other world does not intrude.
    
    Running or walking might be it for you. Tending your horse. Playing the piano. Sitting with a friend. Roaming around with a camera…
    
    You have to have a physical space in which you can say, “This world is off limits to my other world.”
    
    A world apart that we enter consciously, and leave with a promise to return, is balm for the soul, breathing room for Psyche, where we can be completely real, here and who we are.
    
    You can’t fake anything with a horse, or with some friends, and that puts you in a different mindset. It makes listening/playing possible.
    
    When we are playing properly—that is with complete freedom, without worrying about what is proper and what is not—we are listening well, without knowing or noticing we are listening.
    
    We are fully here, now, open to the moment and what it brings to life in us. That’s listening with our body as well as with the ears of heart. It is knowing how things are with us, and how much more of us is available to us in this world than in that world.
    
    This is essential knowing, and you don’t get it from a book, unless books are your world apart, and then you don’t get it from reading A book, but from the experience of the wonder of books.
    
    The world apart grounds us, centers us, restores us, stabilizes us and equips us to renter our other world and live there as only we can to heal and renew and reclaim that world to the extent that is possible.
    
    The world apart enables us to realize and bring forth the gift, art, genius that is ours—to be who we also are, to assist the emergence of the life that is ours to live within the life we are living—so that the two worlds come closer together in our consciousness, and we live as a blessing and a grace in one world because of the reality and proximity of the other world.
80. November Orchard HDR 08 — Anne Springs Close Greenway, Fort Mill, SC, November 7, 2013 — It’s a good thing to pay attention to our guiding ideas—to know what directs our boat on its path through the sea.
    
    We can be guided by ideas we’ve never examined—that no one has ever examined. We can be led along throughout our life by ideas that couldn’t stand the light of day.
    
    If we called them forth and put them on the table and walked around the table, we would be embarrassed to have any association with them. Or should be.
    
    We have embraced things as so that never were so, and never will be, and we tucked them away without a thought and live as though the people who told us those things knew what they were talking about.
    
    Our task is to pull them forth, our guiding ideas, and make them conscious, think about them, examine them, embrace what needs to embraced, replace what needs to be replaced and discard what needs to be discarded, so that we are led on by ideas that we affirm to be valuable on the deepest—and highest—levels, and can trust ourselves to them and the work that is theirs to do.
81. CSX 5283 01 — Waxhaw, NC, November 7, 2013 — We get to our guiding ideas by paying attention to the way we live our life. Our life is our values.
    
    It doesn’t matter what we profess, what we say we believe, what we think we think is important. What matters is what we do. That’s where we see our guiding ideas at work in our life.
    
    Our guiding ideas are unconscious unless we have done the work of consciously examining them, embracing them, and aligning our life with them. We absorb them from our environment, from the attitudes of our parents, the culture, and the institutions which imprint us early on.
    
    An aspect of growing up is the task of grounding what remains to be lived of our life upon ideas that are worthy of us—that are capable of guiding us to a life of value.
    
    So, we pay attention to the way we are living and inquire of actions and tones of voice and facial expressions, “Where did that come from? What guiding idea is that serving?”
    
    We get to the bottom of us as we are, and sit with that, and think of how we need to be different in order to express and exhibit values that are actually valuable—and work those values into the life we have yet to live.
82. Fall Woods 06 — Edward Lane, Indian Land, SC, November 3, 2013 — Everything is a path to awareness when viewed metaphorically or metapsychicly, that is, when probed for it’s meaning for us on an inner level.
    
    Outward events have an inner meaning. We live in a dream and interpret the dream while we dream it.
    
    Consciousness is conscious of the dream we are a part of and interprets it in light of its meaning for us personally.
    
    Fall does it for me. I love the colors and I love arranging the colors and objects, that would be trees and rocks and water, etc. in a frame. This is the work of peace, wholeness, harmony, integration, reconciliation, oneness, symmetry, synthesis and accord.
    
    That’s my life. That’s what I do. My photography is me, speaking to me about me, and healing me, bringing the fragmented parts back together, learning to dance and play and sing. I’m restoring me with a camera. Bringing me into focus. Seeing me when I look at what I see in the viewfinder.
    
    I take a wrong turn on the way to dinner and trust me to get myself back on track. It isn’t about a wrong turn on the way to dinner. It’s about trusting myself to get back on track.
    
    I’m graced with acts of kindness and compassion and I see it as pointing to a wellspring of tenderness and mercy for me coming to me from beyond me yet within me.
    
    The visible world is evidence of the invisible world, is a threshold to the invisible world, is a portal, an aperture, a window to unseen wonders opening before us every day as an endless blessing for eyes that see.
83. Looking Glass Falls HDR 06 — Davidson River, Pisgah National Forest near Brevard, NC, October 28, 2013 — We have to look at what we see to see it.
    
    Assumptions, presumptions, inferences, arrogance and ignorance stand in our way, and we think we see things that aren’t there.
    
    We see what we look at through the filters of experience and knowledge, and swagger up to the thing saying, “I know who you are. I know your Momma and your Daddy. I learned about you in fifth grade. That’s all that can be said for you.” And walk on as though we are in possession of that thing’s secrets and innermost desires.
    
    The adage, “There is nothing new under the sun,” capsules our attitude perfectly. Nothing is ever new for those who look at the world through old, tired eyes, cynical and sarcastic, who know all they need to know about everything, and can’t be told, or shown, anything they don’t already know.
    
    Deliver us from people who never see anything new! And please, oh please, never let us be found among them! Give us eyes that make all things new by the way we look at everything! Starting right now with the next thing we look at!
84. Lake Haigler Fall HDR 05 — Anne Springs Close Greenway, Hwy. 21 Access, Fort Mill, SC, November 3, 2013 — We never get anywhere thinking about a thing. You can sit thinking about apple pie for your entire life and you won’t be any closer to knowing about apple pie when you are done than you were when you started.
    
    You can read books about apple pie, memorize recipes, talk to cooks and servers. You can recite ingredients and debate the intricacies of cooking temperature and the advantages of a la mode. But, you won’t know apple pie for all the testimonies you hear or the words you use to describe it.
    
    Thinking does not come first where apple pie, or most of life, is concerned.
    
    We have to open ourselves to the experience of a thing and then think about that.
    
    We have to let the wonder of life inform our thoughts, and talk about it with the sense of that wonder still fresh in our mind.
    
    Too many people talk about religion, or sex, for that matter, without the wonder.
    
    They consider themselves experts, authorities, but you can tell from listening to them talk that they have never even caught a whiff of apple pie straight from the oven.
85. Ocracoke Lighthouse 01 HDR B&W — Cape Hatteras National Seashore, Ocracoke Island, NC, October 17, 2013 — Do not think that there is another person whose company will be life itself for the rest of your life, and if you can only find the right person, you will be happy, at peace and fulfilled forever.
    
    This is the delusion of romantic love. It sells books and movie tickets, music and perfume. It’s big business. Those who stand to gain from your business would love for you to believe it is so. It is not so.
    
    We do not find life in another person. We escape from life in another person—in the happy fantasy of true love with another person.
    
    We run from our responsibility for bringing life forth from within ourselves into the loving embrace of Mr., of Ms. Right. We dream longingly of what we would do and how it would be, and wait for the phone to ring, the door to knock, while our life waits, wondering when we are going to wake up and get with the work that is ours yet to do in the time left for living.
    
    Life is ours to live or not. It does not come to us in the form of a handsome stranger or a winsome lass. It lies hidden away in our own soul/Psyche, hoping we will take up the search for the treasure, wrestle it from the dragons (Whose names, according to James Hollis, are Fear and Lethargy) who guard it, and bring it forth as a blessing and a grace upon all who come our way.
    
    We waste our time looking for someone who will do for us what we must do for ourselves: Claim our life and live it. That is the adventure for someone else to hear of and for us to have!
    
    Your life wants to know if you are coming to rescue it and live it out. Is dying to know if you are. Are you?
86. November Orchard 10 — Springs Farm, Anne Springs Close Greenway, Field Trial Access, Fort Mill, SC, November 2, 2013
    
    Your life is your practice. Practice openness to your life. Practice living your life.
    
    Living your life is not accidental. It is focused, deliberate, intentional and conscious.
    
    Living the life you fell into when you stepped out of the womb is accidental.
    
    Oh, there are a few rules to keep about making your mother or your father, and the preacher, happy, but beyond that, you just follow the lead of the company you keep, and go through the motions of living without any life about what you do, and nothing vibrant and compelling to pull you into each day.
    
    Living YOUR life is altogether different.
    
    Living YOUR life is your practice.
    
    What would it mean to live YOUR life? How do you think YOUR life might be different from the life you are living? What are some things you might do to work YOUR life into the life you are living?
    
    Interpret/listen to your dreams. Notice what catches your eye and look closer.
    
    Watch for white rabbits and see where they lead.
    
    Learn to sense when instinct stirs to life, and leads—and intuition guides.
    
    Trust yourself, your inner voice, your sense of what is life and what is death, your feel for where you belong and where you have no business being.
    
    Create places in each day where you sit quietly and listen to you. Go there, sit down, and say “Okay soul,” or “Okay, Psyche,” or “Okay (whatever name fits your sense of the inner core, ground and source of your life and being). I’m here, listening, and open. How can I be of help? What do you need me to do? What now? What next?”
    
    This is the important part: You are not some mindless servant of Psyche/Soul. You are a full partner in the life you create together with Psyche/Soul. You have conscious veto power. You have input. You know how the world of normal, apparent, reality works. You know sequence and order. You’re good at that.
    
    Psyche/Soul knows stuff, and you know stuff about how to do what needs to be done—what is practical, what is appropriate, what is protocol, what the rules are governing life as you live it. And you have to put the brakes on when that is the thing to do—but not when you are just afraid of what might happen.
    
    You have to be fearless, and you have to be smart. Or as Jesus put it, “Be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.” It is very much essential that you play your part in working out with Psyche/Soul what to do when, where and how.
    
    Collaborating with Psyche/Soul, you produce YOUR (joint) life. And save the world.
    
    Someone should explain this to us when we step out of the womb.
87. Shadow Lane Panorama — Lancaster County, SC, November 10, 2013 — We have to do the work.
    
    The work is growing up. Opening up to the truth of how things are and who we are called to be in response to it by applying the gifts, art, genius that are ours to give and living the life that is ours to live in the time left for living.
    
    The work is waking up and being conscious of what is happening and what is being asked of us by soul/Psyche—being conscious of what we need to do differently—beyond our normal response to the circumstances and context of the life we are living—to live OUR life in each situation as it unfolds.
    
    We have to be conscious of OUR life and of the situation that is unfolding before us, around us, and bring OUR life to bear on the here and now of our living.
    
    This is work.
    ’
    It is the work of seeing, hearing, understanding, knowing, doing and being.
    
    We can only do this work out of an orientation, an attitude, of focused, reflective, silence and attentive, caring, presence.
    
    No reading from a recipe book. No following someone else’s orders or recommendations. No listening to some authority for directions. Living in the raw in response to our take on what is being asked of us by the situation and our best sense of the gifts, art, genius that are ours to give in that moment of our living.
    
    This is the work of being human. The sum total of the Hero’s Journey. It’s great once you get the hang of it. You get the hang of it by “getting in there and doing your thing and not worrying about the score.”
    
    Go to it!
88. Around Bass Lake 02 — Moses H. Cone Memorial Park, Blue Ridge Parkway near Blowing Rock, NC, October 8, 2013
    
    We have to do our own work in bringing ourselves forth to meet our life by living the life that is our life to live within the terms and conditions of the life we are living.
    
    And we can only do this from the security and stability of relationships that are loving, understanding, supportive and encouraging.
    
    We are on our own, and we can’t do it alone.
    
    This is one of the contradictions that defines our existence.
    
    Nothing can happen until something else does.
    
    Laughter at the absurdity of our situation keeps us from being canceled out and rendered immobilized and incapable of doing anything.
    
    It’s just ridiculous. Who could possibly take it seriously?
    
    So. We start doing what we can think to do on our own, alone, without a friend in the world—never minding that we cannot do it—and we meet someone, or remember someone, or someone looks to us to be the friend they need, and it takes off from there.
    
    We live toward the best we can imagine in this moment, right now, and we find what we need to make it to the next moment.
    
    This is the meaning of the Biblical story of manna in the wilderness.
    
    Who knows where help is coming from? We have to believe help is coming from somewhere, and live as though it is.
    
    We have to live in this moment as those who know we are going to have all the help we need, and see where it goes.
    
    The last thing we want to to is let our apparent helplessness and hopelessness become facts by treating them as though they are. Treat them as though they are not.
    
    And go meet the moment, wondering what will meet you there.
89. Around Price Lake 13 HDR BW — Julian Price Memorial Park, Blue Ridge Parkway, Blowing Rock, NC, October 11, 2013 — All of our escape attempts are paths along which we meet whatever we are running from.
    
    The trick is to face the monster we fear, call it by name, spit in its eye, have it out.
    
    When we face what we fear, we find ourselves. We run because we are afraid we don’t have what it takes to do what needs to be done—because we don’t know who we are.
    
    Facing our fear pulls forth some aspect of ourselves we didn’t know was there, introduces us to ourselves, births us anew into a life waiting to be lived as a Fear Facer.
    
    Fear Facers are the only ones who have what it takes to live the life that is their life to live, the life that has their name on it, the life that wakes them up from their stupor, calls them forth, invites them to be alive by being who they are.
    
    Gay people talk of “coming out” when they declare themselves to the world saying, “This is who I am!”
    
    We all have to “come out” in one way or another. We are all ashamed of who we are, afraid to find out what we are made of. What if we don’t measure up? What if we can’t do it? What if we don’t have a gift, an art, a genius?
    
    We had better “stay in the closet” and live the life they hand us, and do what Those Who Know Best And Must Be Pleased tell us to do. It’s safer that way, softer, easier. Death is always a warm blanket of denial saving us from our fear.
90. Looking Glass Falls 07 — Pisgah National Forest, Brevard, NC, October 28, 2013 — The work is being open, being honest, being real, being transparent to ourselves.
    
    The work is being conscious of our opposites, our contradictions, our inconsistency and ambivalence.
    
    The work is bearing the tension of the polarities, internal and external, within which we live, integrating mutually exclusive opposites, reconciling contradictions, saying yes to this and to that—neither of which can live in the same world, much less the same person—letting both be because they are.
    
    The work is kindness and compassion, vulnerability, intimacy, mercy, tenderness, grace and good will—for ourselves and for all who come our way.
    
    The work is not “doing something.” Not finding “what is ours to do” and doing it. Not achieving, accomplishing, acquiring, amassing, succeeding…
    
    The work is being someone. Being who we are. And who we also are. Consciously. Reliably. Dependably. Consistently—even with all our inconsistency—within each situation as it arises, meeting what is asked of us with what we have to offer, and letting that be that, in each situation that comes along.
    
    The trick is being able to see all of it for what it is, and laugh at it all—at the very idea of it all—and get in there with it and do our thing, endlessly, relentlessly, laughing at that, too—and loving it all because it is life, our life, and this is our shot at it, just as it is, and it would be so wrong to not love it, to not live it with all our heart and soul, for as long as life is possible.
91. Goodale State Park 04 — Adams Mill Pond, Big Pine Tree Creek, near Camden, SC, November 1, 2013 — Don’t think waking up, being alive, doing your work, honoring your opposites, conflicts and contradictions is all endless delight. They don’t call it the HERO’s Journey for no reason.
    
    It asks hard things of you. Remember what happened to Jesus. And Socrates.
    
    You think you will be well received, appreciated, admired and applauded. It’s a blessing if you’re just ignored, discounted, dismissed, written off.
    
    You think it’s all laid out for you and you only have to show up and follow some invisible orders. You still have to decide what is being asked of you, which is the path among all the possibilities, what is yours to do, what now, what next.
    
    You think it is going to be easy once you make the commitment, leave the nets to follow your heart. The tests keep coming. The Cyclops does not sleep. Over and over, you have to determine whether it’s your heart calling you or a Siren’s song you hear. Is it a White Rabbit, or a Red Herring, or a Wild Goose? You have to go to know. Dead ends, U-turns, and false starts are all a part of the Journey.
    
    Always the work. Looking. Listening. Hearing. Seeing. Waiting. Watching. Trusting. Chancing. Wondering. Doubting. Fearing. Venturing. Asking. Seeking. Knocking…
    
    ”Foxes have their holes, and the birds of the air have their nests, but those on the way to becoming a True Human Being have no place to call home because the path winds on.” Which makes the path home. And the way is life itself. But don’t be expecting a hero’s reward for taking up the hero’s journey. The adventure is the gift. Or, as Baruch came to understand, “You receive your LIFE as a prize of war!”
92. Old Santee Canal State Park HDR Black and White 02 — Moncks Corner, SC, November 13, 2013 — The profit motive is #1 on the list of things that have us where we are today. Another term for “the profit motive” is “Greed.”
    
    Now someone is bound to object, “What’s greedy about the profit motive?” And I’ll reply, “It’s the very foundation of the profit motive. Without greed, there would be no profit motive. There would be nothing more than, “I see you need some help with that. Here, let me give you a hand.”
    
    As it is, we look to maximize our advantage at someone else’s, or everyone else’s, expense. We don’t do anything without running a cost/benefit analysis, determining what’s in it for us, and how long it will take to garner a hefty return on our investment of time and energy. If the numbers aren’t right, we pass.
    
    We do not assess our situations in terms of what is needed and what we have to offer with the gifts, art and genius that is ours to share that might be able to help meet the need.
    
    We look at our situations in terms of how we might exploit what we find there in the service of our best interest.
    
    So, you see how revolutionary it is to think of living our life with a view toward bringing forth what resides within, without a thought for what is in it for us or how we might use our gifts, art, genius for our eternal benefit and everlasting glory, but intent only in offering what we have to give to do what needs to be done, and being glad to help where we can.
    
    That attitude will not be good for the economy.
    
    Living to serve the economy is not good for you.
    
    Viva la Revolucion!
93. Carolina Lakes HDR 20 — Lake Francis, Anne Springs Close Greenway, Field Trial Access, Fort Mill, SC, October 31, 2013 — We cannot have our own perspective without thinking about it—without seeing our seeing, thinking about our thinking, wondering what cants us toward seeing and thinking the way we do and experimenting with different ways of seeing and thinking and evaluating the value of our experience from different points of view.
    
    As long as our perspective is handed to us by someone else, our parents, our preacher, the source of our news and commentary on the news, we are an extension of someone else. To be who we are, we have to look with our own eyes and evaluate what we see in light of our experience and the impact of the way we see on our life.
    
    Here’s my theory: The more conscious we are, the more valuable are our values and the better aligned we are with what is important to us, and the more what is important to us is likely to be actually important in terms of universal values that have proven to be important throughout the ages.
    
    I would like for you to live so as to evaluate my theory and see what you think.
94. Angel Oak HDR 02 — Angel Oak Park, Charleston, SC, November 14, 2013 — Our life comes to us when we aren’t looking for it. When we don’t expect it. When we are going about our business in our other life, not even thinking about our real life—the one we aren’t living. The one we aren’t even thinking about.
    
    Our life comes along calling us like Jesus calling the disciples. We don’t pay any attention to it because we think we already have our life. And we don’t even look up. We just go right on with life as it is supposed to be.
    
    But, we wonder sometimes if there shouldn’t be more to it.
    
    All it takes is listening to our life the next time it comes around calling our name, saying, “Come follow me. I have some things for you to do,” to find out.
95. Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge 01 — Cooper River, Charleston-to-Mt. Pleasant, SC, November 14,  2013 — All of our emphasis upon achievement, accomplishment, acquirement and success is compensation for our vulnerability, impotence, helplessness and insufficiency.
    
    We have to learn to be who we are, what we are, how we are, as we are—with the right spirit, the right attitude—if we are to have a chance at being who we also are, living the life that is also ours to live.
    
    We throw aside the life that is ours to live in an obsessive/compulsive frenzy to live the life that is NOT ours to live.
    
    All of my fantasies are about protection, invincibility, indestructibility, omnipotence, safety… The gods we worship are almighty, victorious, omni-everything. We run smoothly past the insignificant detail that Jesus was born into insignificance, and died there. Born in a manger, died on a cross. You don’t get more nondescript than that.
    
    But we make him King of Kings. We won’t tolerate his Nowhere Manness. He’s The Man.
    
    Well. He’s The Man because he is NOT The Man at all. And invites us to be, as he was, who WE are: Not The Man, Not The Woman. Not infinite, not eternal, not everlasting, nothing special at all. Vulnerable, impotent, helpless and going nowhere too slowly to know he’s already there.
    
    My entire life has been spent doing what cannot be done. Waking people up. Calling people to live their own life. Connecting people with the life that is theirs to live in the midst of the life they are living. I can’t do any of that. Neither can you.
    
    We cannot wake anyone up. It’s an inside job. No one can wake up before her, before his, time. We can only encourage people who are waking up to be as awake as they are. Where the others are concerned, we can only wake up to our inability to wake them up, leave the dead to bury the dead, shake the dust off our sandals and walk on, talking to the people who can hear what we have to say, who don’t really need to be told anything because they already know it.
    
    But. Everybody needs encouragement. A wink. A nod. A little help from their friends.
    
    What we are about is doing what cannot be done, what makes no difference, what has no chance, what will never work, what is completely hopeless, what does no good…
    
    That’s the Cyclops talking. We become the Cyclops when we say these things to ourselves. The Cyclops stands before us in the form of the people who say these things to us. “You’re wasting your time! What do you think you are doing? Nothing you say or do matters!”
    
    Yeah! All right! Now you’re talking! That’s the way to do it! Only a REAL Man or Woman can waste his or her time doing that which must be done and cannot be done. Only a REAL human being an be a fool to that extent and degree. Those are the ones who know what being born in a manger, and being from Nazareth, and being the stone the builders reject, and dying on a cross are about—and can do it all as it should be done, because that’s being true to ourselves in the best possible sense of the term.
    
    Living the life that is ours to live and refusing to be deterred by how little it matters, by how little good it does, by how much of a waste of time it is… Smiling because we know it’s OUR life and we are going to live it anyway, nevertheless, even so!
    
    Changing the world. Transforming the world. Saving the world. Dong nothing. Deliberately. As it needs to be done. Now we’re talking! That’s the way to do it!
    
    ”Get in there and do your thing and don’t worry about the outcome!”—Joseph Campbell
96. Steps at the Gardens of Mepkin Abbey — Moncks Corner, SC, November 15, 2013 — (Mepkin Abbey is a Trappist monastery built on the site of Mepkin Plantation in 1949 which was the hunting retreat of Clare Booth Luce and Henry Luce, who are buried on the grounds of the Abbey) — There are no side trips on the Path.
    
    The Path is always underfoot. When you think you are off the Path, you are on the Path. It only takes a moment of reflection to make the connections that shift your perspective and open you to the moment of your living and it’s relationship with the heart of your life.
    
    The trick is seeing the Path in every moment. It only takes looking to be able to see, if you remember to see what you look at.
97. Magnolia Cemetery HDR 01 — Charleston, SC, November 14, 2013 — The Path is always underfoot. It only takes seeing it to know it is so. We don’t have to go anywhere to find it. It does not lie waiting to be discovered across the ocean, or in the high Himalayas, or in the instruction of some grave spiritual authority. It is always right here, right now.
    
    It only takes thinking differently about where you are to wake up to the truth that you are already there.
    
    Carl Jung said, “There resides in each of us another, whom we do not know.”
    
    That other one within knows all we wish we knew. It only takes openness to what is there, to what is here, now, to know what we need to know to live appropriately in response to the situation as it arises.
    
    When we wake up, we wake up to what is happening and what needs to happen in response to it. Then it only remains to be seen if we have the courage to do it. That’s all there is to it.
    
    What else is there to want, or have, or know, or do?
98. Ghost Trees on Boneyard Beach I — Hammock Island, Botany Bay, Edisto Island, SC, November 16, 2013 — Carl Jung says the test for the depth and quality of your alignment with the drift of the Invisible World is how your life is going. And this doesn’t have anything to do with the way the world would rate your life, or with the ease with which you are living. It has everything to do with the rightness of your life, with the fit and feel of your life, with the degree to which it is YOUR life that you are living, that it belongs to YOU and YOU to it. Hand and glove. You and your life. Your life and you.
    
    And you are the only one who can make that assessment.
    
    There is no objective standard of measure for determining how close you are to the Kingdom of Heaven, the Land of Promise, Nirvana, the Elysian Fields, the Grail Castle, the Hero’s Reward, or however you chose to think of as where you will be when you get there.
    
    The proof is in the pudding, as they say. And you are the one doing the taste testing. What you say, about your life, how it fits and feels, goes.
99. Ghost Trees on Boneyard Beach II — Hammock Island, Botany Bay, Edisto Island, SC, November 17, 2013 — It is essential that we keep faith with ourselves—that we live in good faith with ourselves—that we do not break faith with ourselves.
    
    But. Kidding ourselves is what we do best. No! Telling ourselves what we want to hear is what we do best! No Shooting ourselves in the foot is what we do best! No! Keeping ourselves in the dark is what we do best! No! Selling ourselves a bill of goods is what we do best!…
    
    The drunk who swears that was his, her, last drink is being honest, is telling the truth, believes it is the truth anyway. He, she, is not lying but he, she, is wrong. But try to convince him, her, that he, she, is wrong. Yet, it is only a matter of time—until the scene is repeated.
    
    In order to keep faith with ourselves, in order to live with ourselves in good faith, we have to be transparent to ourselves.
    
    In order to see ourselves as we are and as we also are, we have to bear the pain of the contradictions we don’t want to face. We have to grow up.
    
    Who wants to grow up?
    
    So we light up a cigarette. Gain another pound. Fail to exercise again today. Refuse to put ALL of us on the table and consider the table.
    
    We break faith with ourselves.
    
    It all begins with keeping faith with ourselves—with living in good faith with ourselves. Until we can do that, we are all pose and posturing. No heart. No soul.
    
    Heart and soul come into the picture when we look at ourselves in the mirror and see what’s there—and do what knowing requires.
100. Cotton In The Field — Near Columbia, SC, November 19, 2013 — We do love a parade. We love to parade around. Put on airs. Strut about. Show off.
     
     Money is for showing off. Why be wealthy if you can’t show off? What’s the point of having money if you look like everyone else?
     
     The kick is that with money, we look like everyone else who has money. The trick is to look like yourself whether you have money or not. Looking like yourself is a great way to show off because it doesn’t require any special effort. You don’t have to think about it. What people see is who you are and it’s nothing special—and it makes you one of a kind.
     
     The world is dying for people who are who they are, without fanfare, trumpets, parades and showboating—who aren’t pretending to be someone else. The world is saved, that is, put on the right track, by people who are grounded in themselves and content with being who they are.
     
     But, it sounds so plain-cut, so normal, so invisible. We want to be SOMEBODY! We want to be SPECIAL! And have everybody know it. Which denigrates how special we are, and puts being ourselves on par with being a small fish in a large school of small fish. We have higher aspirations.
     
     We want to stand out. And, we want to fit in. Being ourselves is standing out by not fitting in. We want people fawning over us, gushing, carrying on, while we say, “Oh, it’s nothing.”
     
     Carl Jung said, “Only a life lived in a certain spirit is worth living.”
     
     That “certain spirit” is quite happy being who it is, how it is, where it is, when it is, what it is, as it is, why it is… Enjoying its gift, its art, its genius. Being itself, awash in the wonder of itself, and pleased to be itself in relationship with other selves being themselves in the right spirit, with the right attitude and the right frame of mind.
     
     The most special people in the world have that kind of “certain spirit” about them, and bless the lives of others with vitality and grace—without doing anything more than being who they are.
101. Airbourne Ibis 01 — Shem Creek, Mt. Pleasant, SC, November 15, 2013 — It is only being alive that we are after, that the Unconscious, Invisible, World is after. The Unconscious strives to be conscious of being alive. We are the carriers of the Unconscious, the threshold between the Unconscious and Conscious worlds. We are the door. You can imagine what our being mostly closed to everything does to the Unconscious we carry.
     
     You can imagine what our being mostly dead on every level except that of vital signs does to the Life That Would Be Lived within us.
     
     Is there any wonder that we are visited with symptoms and find ourselves feeling bad about our life and down on ourselves for no apparent reason?
     
     We are disappointing those who depend upon living vicariously through us, through our raunchous openness to the raw experience of life, living, being alive.
     
     We don’t want anything to do with life in the raw. We want our life third or fourth hand, thank you. We want to hear what someone else did from someone who heard it from someone who heard it from someone who wasn’t there but who got it first hand. That is as alive as we allow ourselves to be.
     
     But it is being alive that we are here for. We are alive to the extent that we experience consciously touching, tasting, smelling, seeing, hearing, feeling, loving, wondering, going, doing, being emerged in and engaged with LIFE.
     
     Celebrate spring flowers and the fruit of each season. Sunrise, sunset, moonrise, moonset, snow fall, thunderstorms, color, texture, light, shadow, form, shape, beauty in art, music, nature, good food, drink and conversation. Success, failure, triumph and disappointment, love and loss, victory and defeat. The. Whole. Grand. Experience.
     
     This is not hard. We could start right now.
102. October Orchard 01 — Peach Trees on Springs Farm, Fort Mill, SC, October 29, 2013 
     
     We do what needs to be done in each moment the way only we can do it with the gifts, art, and genius that are ours to offer a world that is dying for the very things we have to give—and let that be that.
     
     Lao Tzu said, “Do your work and step back. Let nature take its course.” But. Your work has to be YOUR work, the work that is as unique to you as your fingerprints.
     
     Everybody has fingerprints, but only you have yours. There may be ten million poets or artists, but no one can poet or artist like you.
     
     Bring yourself, just as you are, to the moment—with nothing to anticipate or fear, yearn for or dread. Just the moment, with its need, and your perceptive gaze, and your gracious presence.
     
     Of course, the moment will not always be kindly receptive, or even notice—and some moments need more than the tender application of grace and presence.
     
     Some moments call for a stout NO! and a summons to accountability.
     
     We stand in the way of some moments and refuse to budge until what is there with us in the moment apologizes, and changes its mind and its direction.
     
     And sometimes, we pay a price for doing the right thing, the necessary thing, the needed thing.
     
     But, we would pay a greater price for not doing it, for looking the other way, pretending not to notice what that moment needs.
     
     So, it comes down to us and the moment, for as long as there are moments.
     
     We see each one. We assess it. We offer it what we deem it needs ,out of our store of gifts to give, and we see where it goes.
     
     It will go right well for all concerned. I’m confident of that.
     
103. Mallard — The new business card series. Image 8/20 —

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 [JD1]Sent to Helen Wolff

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08/01/2013 — 09/30/2013

1. We can rise to any occasion and shoot ourselves in the foot at any moment. When we do what tells the tale that we came to tell.
   
   Eventually we all run out of luck. But, we get to do our thing as long as life lasts. Lucky or unlucky, there is always our thing to do.
   
   When life interferes with my life and I have to be away from the camera for a while, it takes about four days to get back in sync—to learn how to see again—to learn to be with a scene again.
   
   I can’t just walk into a scene and be ready for it—and see it—and be at one with it—and know what I’m doing.
   
   I go to the Bog Garden, but I am not one with the Bog Garden. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m trying to take photographs—I am not there to receive the gift. I have to remember how it works.
   
   Taking photographs is like stealing something, like forcing some image to get into my camera because I say so—muscling pictures into being. You don’t even have to see what you TAKE a picture of.
   
   Receiving the gift is welcoming what is offered with graciousness and gratitude—it is not being choosy or disinterested.
   
   I go to the Bog Garden to receive the gifts of the Bog Garden. Some days there are no gifts. That, too, is a gift—the gift of No Gift.
   
   If I am unlucky and there is no gift that day, that is good fortune. No gift means making my peace with no gift, and that is quite a gift.
   
   Waiting at the Bog Garden for the gifts the Bog Garden offers, it helps to know that I do not know. I do not know what to expect.
   
   I do not know what a bird will, or will not, do. Everything is as though for the first time. It’s all “Wow!” I have to remember that.
   
   I have to remember to be surprised by it all—and to be ready for anything because I do not know what is coming.
   
   I can’t be gone from the Bog Garden for a month and be able to settle into being with the Bog Garden, receptive, waiting, not caring if I will be lucky or unlucky.
   
   It takes a while to get back in the flow. It’s a shift of perspective, a different frame of mind.
   
   You can’t make anything happen in the flow, but you are open to what is happening and what can happen.
   
   You are alive to the moment of your living. How often can you say that about life Out There, where there is no flow, only currents and whirlpools?
2. Mallard Landing — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, July 31, 2013 — Everything depends upon our getting to the bottom of everything. Pulling everything up, and out into the light of day. Seeing, seeing, seeing. Hearing, hearing, hearing, Understanding, understanding, understanding.
   
   No hidden agendas. Nothing buried. Nothing denied. Everything known.
   
   Notice when you dismiss something, no matter how trivial and meaningless. Honor it with your attention. Get to the bottom of the dismissal. Of all that is at stake on all sides.
   
   Those moods you take medication to put aside? Do. Not. Put. Them. Aside. Get to the bottom of them. Feel them to the fullest. Anxiety? Be afraid. Anguish? Agonize. Depression? Be Eeyore. Anger? Look it in the eye.
   
   Sit with all your moods. One at a time. Honor It with your attention. With your attentive presence. Allow it to become an image—a person, place or thing. Enter the dialogue. “What are you doing in my life? What are you here to help me with? What was the initiating event in my past that brought you forth? What do you have to say? Etc.”
   
   Write it out. Renew the conversation over time. Do not try to solve anything or reach a resolution. You are making things conscious. And you are drawing lines.
   
   Set limits on the mood. “Okay. I will grant you my full attention at (set the time and place and keep the appointment), but I cannot allow you to ruin my life around the clock. You need my attention and I need your help. I need you to step into the background of my life while I take care of my responsibilities and duties—I will always know you are there and wink at you from time to time to reassure you that you are not being confined to the dungeon like you have been before. It’s different now. I’m listening, and we will talk again.”
   
   As with moods, so with partners and spouses and children and parents and siblings and co-workers… Talk, talk, talk. Bring it all to the table and listen to all sides.
   
   This is not debate, argument. This is getting to the heart of the matter, to the bottom of all things. Probing, poking around, exploring, wondering, listening, seeing, understanding. You are trying to know everything before you die, trusting the knowing to be transformative, unifying, integrating, miraculous.
   
   And when something resists being known, honor that and know what can be known about the resistance. Make gentle inquiries. See what can be seen. See where it goes.
3. Heron Panorama — The Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, August 1, 2013 — Think of everything we do as compensation for something else we are doing or not doing. Who we are is always balancing, or being balanced by, who we also are. Not one of us is one, steady, dependable, reliable, rigid and constant, way of being. Everyone is a lively blend of opposite urges, interests, needs and desires. We off-set ourselves rather nicely.
   
   Death is the only steady state.
   
   The idea that we should be one way—and only one way—at all times, in all places, puts constraints on us that we will not abide, and Dr. Jekyll shows off (and acts out) as Mr. Hyde.
   
   Bring Mr. Hyde to the table. Introduce him to Dr. Jekyll. Explain one to the other. Invite them to work out their relationship consciously, down to the smallest particle of a detail on all levels, so that each understands the necessity of the other, and the two work together to produce one, less extreme, though nicely balanced, blend.
   
   What are you doing that you think you shouldn’t be doing? Or, are afraid you might do? Bring it to the table. Have a chat. What is it showing you about your extreme otherness? What’s it saying about your need to lighten up, ease off, cut yourself some slack in all areas, and stop trying to be so perfectly pleasing and exemplary according to some standardized idea of how you ought to be?
   
   You are going to have to move toward this Other, carefully, gently, without being yanked into some far extreme that leaves the other Other out of your life, wondering what happened.
   
   When you get to the bottom of things—all things—you live in the center of things—all things. And you discover that you are capable of whatever the circumstances require, and are able to do what is appropriate to every situation that arises, and dance with all your partners in their rightful turn. Amen! May it be so!
4. Wetlands Geese — A new business card series. Image 10/20 — Something is striving to be expressed through us, to be known. Something unknown wants to be known.
   
   The apple in the seed. The head of wheat in the grain. The You in you. The Me in me.
   
   There is more to us than meets the eye. More than words can say. And it wants to be known.
   
   It wants to know itself, see itself, hear itself, perceive itself—and so its yen for self-expression.
   
   Where do we stop and We start? How do we cooperate with what we don’t know, what doesn’t even know itself?
   
   We pay attention to dreams, and fantasies and the rush of life energy when it rises up to enthuse us with some wild excitement—and we see where it goes.
5. Yellow Swallowtail 03 — The Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, July 31, 2013 — Everyone is somewhere at all times. I wonder, in any moment, how many of us would prefer to be somewhere else.
   
   My hunch is that the percentage is high, but. I would like to conduct interviews. I get in my own way often enough that I have to check out my take on things, to see if I’m seeing as well as I think I am.
   
   And, if it turned out that I am quite wrong—that the percentage of people who are exactly where they prefer to be is high, and that of those who would like to be somewhere else is low, I would have to tell them, “You people better wake up and see what’s what! You cannot see the world as it is and like where you are!”
   
   Liking where we are is liking our world as it is, but liking our world as it is is contributing to the world being the way it is—it is certainly not challenging the world for being the way it is (Unless we ARE challenging the world for being the way it is, but that wouldn’t apply to many of us).
   
   Liking where we are is not seeing where we are, not caring where we are. It is leaving “well enough alone.” We are doing “well enough.” And don’t want to bother it. We are thankful “things aren’t worse yet,” and tiptoeing on eggshells, hoping they remain that way.
   
   We have to talk. We have to come to the table, and bring all of us—all of those within us—along with us, so that everyone has his, has her, say, and says it. We have to enlarge our perspective to take everything into account. We have to be conscious of all that is possible to be conscious of—seeing things as they are and as they also are—and then decide, is this the best we can do, or are we selling ourselves way short here?
   
   Settling for too little is selling ourselves—our soul—out, and coming up short. And we cannot let ourselves be happy with that, no matter where we are.
6. Owl Bathing — A new business card series. Image 11/20 — Thinking about sex can keep us from thinking about—from facing—some things, and it can enable us to think about—and face—some other things. So, we have to think about how we think about sex. Distraction or engagement?
   
   Sex as distraction takes our mind off our life. We forget about the realities that impinge upon us and drift off into the world of sensual delight, seeking sex as any addict would seek his, seek her, escape of choice.
   
   Sex as engagement enlivens us to the experience of being alive—of ourselves, our partner, our relationship, humanity, existence…and the deeply spiritual reality of more than words can say—of the sacred meaning of a shared experience of intimacy and vulnerability and the pleasurable warmth of human comfort.
   
   Everything is a threshold to the truth of ourselves as we are and as we also are—when approached with eyes that see, ears that hear, and a heart that understands. Sex is, perhaps, the most common place we meet ourselves meeting another.
   
   Seeing our partner enables us to see ourselves, IF we look with eyes that see.
   
   It takes two to be one. Sex as dialogue—physically and verbally—as communication that is communion—opens us both to the truth of each, and the truth of ourselves.
   
   In the mutual engagement that is sex, we are present with the other to be seen, touched, loved and known. And discover there the truth of more than meets the eye, which is the foundation of all that meets the eye, calling us beyond the physical through the physical, into meaning and purpose and wonder without end.
7. Crow in Flight 01 — The Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 3, 2013 — There is not a Good You and a Bad You—there is YOU. And you are a swirling mixture of urges, inclinations, instincts, ideals, interests, values, desires, motivations… Well. You get the idea. YOU are all that any human being ever was or will be. And YOU decide what to do about it when, where and how.
   
   As you have heard me say, we are all quite capable of rising to any occasion and of shooting ourselves in the foot at any time. So. We have to be aware of what’s what—of what is happening and what we need to do in response, what we need to do about it—in every situation as it arises.
   
   What is appropriate in this time and place? What needs to happen here and now? How can we assist what needs to happen and oppose what has no business happening here and now, but may well need to happen then and there?
   
   Put the Ten Commandments on the table. And put the observation found in Ecclesiastes about “for everything there is a season and a time for every purpose under heaven” on the table. And consider the table.
   
   YOU are the table. And you have to work it out. When to do what. When not to do what. Strive to live appropriately in the time and place of your living. Strive to know “what time it is” in the sense of Ecclesiastes, and live in the moment in ways that consider and serve the moment.
   
   You are capable of everything human beings have ever been capable of, or ever will be. Live with your eyes open, aware of how things are and how things also are—and match your actions with what is needed in the situation as it arises. And in the situation that arises from that one. Throughout the time left for living.
   
   This is called Riding the Bull. When you Ride Your Mule, your mule becomes a bull from time to time. Hang on, and have the time of your life, because that is your life, fully lived.
8. The Pier — A new business card set. Image 12/20 — Who could bear the weight of the full reality of their life, if they were conscious of it?
   
   We can’t handle that truth, and so we become automations, hiding from, denying, ignoring how it is with us—doing what we are supposed to do and believing what we are told to believe.
   
   If we cannot hear the truth we don’t want to hear, why hear anything? There is no alternative to truth. We don’t get the option of some other world in which to live.
   
   The truth is the bed we sleep in each night and the life we wake up to each morning. Our task is to look into its ugly red eye and say, “Come on, you Cyclops you! Show me what you got!”
   
   We go a round with the Cyclops, which is the truth of the life we are living, every day. We do it consciously, deliberately, intentionally—living this life, this day, as well as we can imagine living it. And doing it again tomorrow.
   
   Hiding from nothing. Denying nothing. Pretending nothing is better than or different than it is. Bearing the pain that needs to be borne, and doing what can be done about it.
   
   We have to reconcile/integrate/synthesize the discrepancies between the life we are living and the life we wish we were living, the life we want to be living. We cannot refuse to live this life because it isn’t what we want it to be. Where would that leave us? If we don’t live this life, what?
   
   Live this life with our eyes open to the full reality of how it is, and look for ways to shift it toward what it needs to be, to what it can become. And let our bright wish to play center field for the Yankees go. This is our center field. We have to play it, just as it is. Everything hangs on it.
   
   This is called growing up. It is what most adult human beings refuse to do. And that is the single reason things are in such a mess.
   
   The revolution begins with me and you growing up. Looking our life in the eye each day, and going a round.
9. Old Hammock Creek — Cape Hatteras National Seashore, Ocracoke Island, NC, November 1, 2009 — It’s never more difficult than doing what’s hard: Waking up, standing up, growing up, facing the truth of the life we are living and the life that is ours to live, seeing how things are without looking away or pretending it isn’t so—with everything included, what has happened to us and what has not happened, what our prospects are and what that means for us, what needs us to do it in spite of all that is working against it, who we still yet might be regardless of the odds and the work it will take, and stepping into the time remaining to be lived and living it with all our heart for as long as life is possible.
   
   Are you coming with me or what?
10. Watersnakes — A new business card series. Image 13/20 — Our symptoms are calling us to wake up and get to the bottom of something—to know how it is with us and how we are getting in our own way, how we are getting in the way of the way for us.
    
    Our symptoms are indications that we are either, A) Trying to make something happen that cannot happen, or, Trying to keep something from happening that must happen.
    
    When we treat our symptoms, they never disappear, but play the Gopher Game with us, popping up somewhere else, in a different guise.
    
    Our symptoms are with us, in one form or another, until we listen to what they are saying—until we take everything into account and see what our symptoms are showing us about ourselves.
11. Sail Boats at Sunset — Silver Lake, Cape Hatteras National Seashore, Ocracoke Island, NC, November 1, 2009 — We want some help with our life—with our idea of our life—with what we want our life to be—and cast about looking for something, anything, that might smooth our path, and ease our plight, and make our life just grand.
    
    Well.
    
    I may as well be the one to break this to you: We are going to have to do what we don’t want to do all our life long. If you can get yourself adjusted to that idea, it won’t be nearly so bad as it will be if you buck and snort all the way.
    
    We were born into a mess—and we were born with a cause, a mission, a purpose to serve—and we soon developed ideas of our own. Now we have to deal with the mess, the mission and our wants and wishes. This will not be smooth and easy.
    
    Help is out there for the mess and mission. When we live in the service of our wants and wishes, we are on our own.
    
    We have to decide whose side we are on. Again, and again. Whose side are we on here and now? Whose side are we on in this situation? What does “Thy will, not mine, be done” mean for this context and these circumstances?
    
    We move very slowly along the way to being awake, aware and fully alive. We don’t just understand some concept, some theory, some doctrine and BOOM, Glory Land. Enlightenment doesn’t make anything easy. It only enables us to see what needs to be done. We still have to do it. Enlightenment without courage is just a bad dream.
    
    Let’s say we decide we are going to consciously serve the mission and consciously deal with the mess and consciously recognize when our wants and wishes get in the way. It’s going to change our life. And it is not going to be smooth and easy. But. It will be interesting. And meaningful. And better than anything in the whole world of things for amazement and delight. But. It won’t be easy.
12. Rabbit’s View — A new business card series. Image 14/20 — Willing too much the pieces into place invites karmic reprise. Or, as they say in the deep south, “Push too hard and it pushes back.”
    
    You can’t change anyone by yelling at them. You can’t even change them by pointing out nicely how they need to change. Your best bet is to simply tell them what they are doing. “Your feet are on the table.” “You are smoking in the house.” “You are making that sound again.”
    
    Know what you can do and what you can’t do. Stick with what you can do. Best advice you’ll get before morning.
13. Smoky Mirror — Great Smoky Mountains National Park, NC/TN, November, 2006 — All we need is a place to talk it out. Not argue it out. Not debate it out. Not majority rule it out. Talk it out.
    
    We need a place to say how things are with us, and how they also are, and how that impacts us, and how we feel about it, and what we can imagine doing about it, and what we are doing about it, and what we are going to do about it.
    
    We need a place to talk about our life and our place in it.
    
    We have plenty of places to talk about THEIR life and what THEY should do about it. We spend most of our talking time talking about THEM over THERE.
    
    Gays, Women, Men, Republicans, Democrats, Conservatives, Liberals, Idiots (That is, whomever is not like WE are)…
    
    All of our talk is about THEM over THERE. We never say anything about ME and what is going on with me IN HERE.
    
    And, if we do, we are not allowed to continue. We are hushed, muffled, silenced with a quick, “No matter how bad you think you have it, there is always someone worse off than you are (That would be some of THEM over THERE). So quit complaining and be thankful for what you have.”
    
    The message is clear: “Stuff it! If you start talking about how it is with you, that will remind me of how it is with me, and I do not want to think about that. I want something to take my mind off of me and how it is with me by talking about THEM over THERE!”
    
    We don’t want to make ourselves conscious of our life. It’s too painful to consider—and once we become aware of it, we will have to do something about it, and that would ask hard things of us. So, our life lies unlived, while we talk about someone else’s life throughout the time left for living.
14. Sunrise — A new business card series. Image 15/20 — When our daughters were in elementary school in the 80’s, I wrote out for myself my “guiding principles” on three index cards, which I referred to until they finished college and were on their own. It goes like this:
    
    I want my kids to be perceptive—to be able to evaluate life around them; to pick up on what’s going on; to listen and see; to be astute observers; to be aware; to know what is happening and to have some ideas about what to do about it. I want my kids to have a wide range of experiences; to have a broad sampling of life—and to be able to assimilate their experiences, to learn from them, to handle them as opposed to being overwhelmed by them.
    
    One way of heading off overwhelming experiences is that of creating an atmosphere conducive to open inquiry, where people come together to solve problems, or, at least, to talk about the problems they are having with life.
    
    I want my kids to be clear about their likes and dislikes, and to be comfortable with having likes and dislikes that may be different from the likes and dislikes of those about them. I want my kids to develop their ability to solve problems, and to deal creatively with life’s difficulties; to know their limits, and to refuse invitations (and taunts) to go beyond them. I want my kids to be careful with the feelings of others—to be free from the control of others, but to respect the others’ need for control.
    
    That is, they might have to ignore the feelings of others for the sake of their own integrity, but if that is the case, I would like for them to notice, and care about, the ignored feelings; to be sensitive to the feelings of others, without being shackled by them.
    
    I want my kids to be solid within themselves; to make their own decisions, independent of the efforts of others at controlling their deciding. I want them to be responsible for their own minds, and not bent by every whim of those around them; and to be able to change their minds.
    
    I would want that still, for them and for each one of us, as well.
15. Sunset, 10/19/2012 — Pamlico Sound, on the way from Swanquarter to Ocracoke Island, NC, October 19, 2012 — In every situation two things are true. If you can sit with the situation until you perceive every single way each thing is true, you will transform the situation and your life and the entire world. This is called The Doctrine of the Two Ways.
    
    In every situation “This is a problem.” And. In every situation, “This is not a problem.”
    
    Sometimes, it goes in reverse: “This is not a problem.” And. “This is a problem.”
    
    If you can see all the ways something that is a problem is not a problem—or if you can see all the ways something that is not a problem is a problem—you have it made—as much as you can have it made.
    
    As much as a wild burro has it made, say. Or a Giant Sequoia.
    
    The Two Ways do not cancel each other out. The Two Ways deepen, expand, enlarge each other, and you—and make you who you are capable of being, who the situation needs you to be.
    
    It’s all quite miraculous, and you have to see it to believe it. You have to experience it to know that it is so. That’s a problem because you have to open yourself to the full realization of what is true and of what is also true.
    
    But, that’s not a problem because situations are always coming along, and if you didn’t have what it takes to open yourself to the full realization of what was true and what was also true in the last situation, you have another chance coming in this situation.
    
    Once you get it down, you can’t wait for another situation to practice the art of seeing the situation as it is and as it also is, and transforming the situation into a third thing, which it also is, and changing you, and changing your world, and changing the entire world—just by seeing things for what they are, and also are.
    
    Which is the only way anything ever changes. By seeing it for what it is. And also is.
16. Yellow Swallowtail 01 — A new business card series. Image 16/20 — We are not here to get to heaven when we die. This is not a proving ground for determining our heavenworthiness.
    
    Take the Ten Commandments in one hand, and take the observation found in Ecclesiastes, “For everything there is a season and a time for every purpose under heaven,” in the other hand, and consider the two hands.
    
    ”Thou shalt not kill” goes up against, “There is a time to kill.” Who says what time it is? You say it for you. I say it for me.
    
    We are here to know what time it is, and to align ourselves with what is being asked of us in the situation as it arises. Not to get to heaven, but to do what is needed, to offer what is appropriate to the occasion, in the here and now of our living—by reading the situation, not by reading some script, some recipe, or doing what somebody else tells us we should do—but doing what we feel needs to be done the way only we can do it.
    
    Throw away the rule books and wade into your life. You make the calls that need to be made, and learn to make better ones over the course of your living, so that your living becomes a dance with what needs you to do it in the situation as it arises—to everyone’s delight and amazement, especially your own. That’s the way to do it!
17. Into Arches, 5/12/10 — Arches National Park, Moab, UT, May 12, 2010 —  James Hollis, in his book “Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives,” says:
    
    “It has been my therapeutic experience that most people, even those most accomplished outwardly, lack a core permission to live their own lives: to feel what they feel, desire what they desire, and to pursue what their soul intends. Such permission cannot be granted by another; it must be seized by a person who decides that it is time to show up.”
    
    And, fully understanding the difficulties—emotional and physical—that accompany such a decision, and how it has ramifications for the way life is lived throughout a person’s life, Hollis says, “If we wait (within) the darkness with enough humility, faithfulness and patience, it grows luminous…if we listen to the silence, it speaks, in time, to us.”
    
    We have to work up to doing the work of being who we are in the time left for living, which means working up to “letting the chips fall where they may.” It takes time, but we cannot delay too long and have any time left for living. So we must not put off working ourselves up to doing the work of being who we are.
    
    We are working up our courage, is what we are doing. We are deciding whose side we are on (that would be our own side), and we are deciding to step into the darkness, into the abyss of our own anxiety, fear, uncertainty and lack of courage—which is the primary act of courage: Stepping into our fear and finding out what we have to be afraid of, and seeing what we do about it. Seeing if we are really as resilient, imaginative and creative as we think we might be. Seeing if we find the help we need to be who we are and do what is ours to do in the time left for living.
    
    All the questions have to be answered in the darkness, on the tightrope over the abyss. We cannot know anything about the journey without taking it—without taking the first step and seeing where it leads.
    
    We are working ourselves up to taking that first step. We cannot wait too long, because the real work is waiting to be done, and only we can do it.
18. The Watchman and The Virgin — A new business card series. Image 17/20 — The Tao recommends that we “do our work and step back,” that we “live from the center and let nature take its course.”
    
    We try to muscle our way through life, to wrestle the life we want into being, to finesse our way to having things like we want them to be.
    
    Enlightenment is realization. Is waking up. Is a shift in attitude and perspective. Is growing up. And living to be aligned with the inner sense of who we are and what is ours to do—with the feeling of what is right, with what resonates with us on the deepest level.
    
    James Hollis says, “According to…Emily Dickinson, the sailor cannot see north, but knows the needle can.” He asks, “Can any of us find such a compass within and risk trusting our life to it? Can we afford to really ask questions such as, By what values am I really living my life?” And wonders, “Are we aligned through our attitudes, practices, adaptations against our own nature’s intent?”
    
    We each have to answer for herself, for himself, but answer we must if we are to be a part of the shift from “off center” to “centered and focused, and aligned with the compass within.”
19. Goose Wars 02 — The Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, August 7, 2013 — We spend a lot of time in an “If I do this, then that will happen,” state of mind. Figuring our angles, computing our odds, factoring our advantages, running our cost/benefit analyses, deciding what to do based on the probability of a favorable outcome, exhausted by the effort and about where we have always been.
    
    Got a suggestion for you. A shift, really. Try this for a week: “If I do this, I wonder what will happen.”
    
    Introduce play into your life. Experimentation. Live experimentally. Not knowing what the outcome will be. Not having to have it be a certain way. Not having to arrange your life according to your idea of what it takes to please you. Don’t know what it takes to please you. Don’t know what it means for something to “work.” Be clueless. Say, “Wow! How about that!” a lot. Laugh at the wonder of being surprised. See what happens.
20. owl Yoga — A new business card series. Image 18/20 — All the stuff you hate about yourself, about your life—the things you want to throw away, be rid of forever? The stone the builders reject.
    
    The stone the builders reject is the chief cornerstone. The stone the builders reject is the pearl of great price. You are the stone and you are the builder.
    
    Nothing good came from Nazareth, you know. So, revisit the despised material. Sift through it for the gift. It is part of your preparation.
    
    Everything is grist for the mill. It is all an initiation rite for the rest of our life. Somehow, we will need something of everything that comes our way.
    
    Our wounds heal us and others. We don’t want it to be that way. If we only had what we wanted, we would all be stuck at the stage of the terrible two’s.
    
    Our trials and ordeals prepare us for our trials and ordeals. They call us forth. Require us to be who we are and also are. We become the gift we seek.
    
    By opening ourselves to—and living—the life that is ours to live within the life we are living, we become the gift we seek to save us from our trials and ordeals. We would save ourselves from the very thing required to save us—to wake us up, restore us to ends worthy of us, heal us and make us whole.
    
    Life is funny that way.
21. Yellow Swallowtail 04 — The Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, August 7, 2013 — We talk ourselves into seeing everything we see. There is no seeing anything “as it is.” We participate with reality in the construction of the world in which we live. What we tell ourselves about that world creates the world.
    
    As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. The Word brings every world into being.
    
    We speak, and it is as we say.
    
    The interpretation, the spin, we put on things that happen to us, bring for the world we live in. WE are part of the matrix that makes up our life.
    
    What we say about things—what we choose to believe about things—makes things “as they are.” We talk ourselves into living in the world in which we live. That world meets us as we step into it each morning.
    
    Start looking at it differently—saying different things about it—and it will become different over night. But, it takes your full participation for it to happen. You can’t just “make something up” here. You have to MAKE SOMETHING UP here. You have to be into it. You have to BELIEVE IN—to BE—the difference you want to see in the world.
    
    Here’s an example. My wife and my three daughters and my five granddaughters wanted my wife and I to move to Charlotte when my wife retired. I’d been retired two years in Greensboro and was happily doing by thing—part of which is writing you—saying my world into being—saying “We can be who we are in any situation, any circumstance.” I see shifting life circumstances as a place to put into practice what I preach.
    
    So I began to shift mentally, emotionally, away from Greensboro to Charlotte—and to look for things—to look at things in ways—that would help me make that shift. The shift needed to happen. I needed to make it. I needed to grow up (Something else I preach, say: the importance of growing up). I have to change my world. I have to change to change my world. I have to speak/see the new world into being.
    
    I’ll pick up with this next time.
22. Heron with Turtle — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, August 4, 2013 — We see what we look for.
    
    We hardly ever see anything we don’t want to see.
    
    We cannot see reality—we can only see our interpretation of reality.
    
    What happens to us cannot be separated from what it means to us.
    
    We see the meaning of the event—we do not see the event.
    
    By seeing things differently—by ascribing a different meaning—we change the event. What happened is still what happened, but it is completely transformed.
    
    But. We can’t just make up some meaning. It has to be true. It has to ring true. It has to be real.
    
    Joseph Campbell talks about the importance of “voluntary participation” in life as we live it. We cannot live as spectators, as visitors, as tourists. We have to live as full participants in the heaving boil of “the wine dark sea.”
    
    We have to say “YES!” to life just as it is, and get in there with it, mixing it up, at-one with the experience of being alive.
    
    We can’t be saying “No! Not this!” and “No! Not that!” This is how it is! That is how it is! Our task is to put ourselves in accord with the inevitables (Campbell’s term) of life, align ourselves with how things are, and make the best of it.
    
    Making the best of it has to do with what we tell ourselves about it, with the meaning we make of it. The great stories put us in accord with our life by talking about dragons, and treasures, and destinies, and heroic deeds—not about getting up at 5 AM to stand on the subway platform at 6:30, to ride to our office an hour and a half away, to balance numbers in columns all day, to ride home by 8 PM to get ready to go again tomorrow. That might be reality, but we transform it by giving it a mythic meaning.
    
    We are going to give it some meaning. We may as well give it a meaning that enlivens us and enables us to meet whatever challenges we face—whatever trials and ordeals that come our way—in the spirit of enthusiasm and energy for the experience of being alive.
    
    But, we have to be at one with the meaning we give it. It has to ring true. It has to be real for us. We have to believe it, and believe in it.
    
    If we are really saying, “Oh, woe is me! Oh, poor me!” that’s the meaning that is going to carry weight. So, we have to work to find a meaning we can embrace and believe in. My meaning won’t work for you. You have to find your own.
23. Blue Heron 03 — A new business card series. Image 19/20 — James Hollis says, “If what we are doing is really right for us, the energy is available and supportive. If we continuously override what is right for us, that energy will first flag and then fail us.”
    
    We cannot live at odds with ourselves without paying a price. Every time we ignore the drift of soul, our body keeps score. Over the course of our life, we begin to look like the life we have lived.
    
    Our place is to get on the beam and stay there—to find the things that give us life and do them—to live toward that which is right for us, even if it is difficult.
24. Into the Air — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, August 1, 2013 — You have to know what your inevitables are, and make room for them in your life. You have to accommodate them, acquyiesce to them, adjust to them, let them be—because they are inevitable.
    
    Your husband, partner, lover isn’t going to treat you better in the next ten years than he did in the last ten. Neither is your wife, partner, lover. Are you staying or not? Either way, you have to come to terms with the terms of your decision, and grow up about it. You have to embrace the terms of your decision for what they are—because they are inevitable. They are the terms of your decision. So accept them and get on with your life.
    
    We are always saying, “Oh, we can’t live with this, and we can’t live with that,” when “this” and “that” are inevitable. They are the terms under which we live. 
    
    We live protesting and pouting all our life long because we live under these terms and not those over there. We want better terms, a higher quality of inevitables. But. Here we are. This is it. Now what?
    
    Stand up and step into your life and do what you can with it in the time left for living.
    
    We are going to get old, we are going to die, we are going to run out of luck a little at a time or all at once. AND we have a life to live—within, around, among, through and in spite of all of the inevitables that constitute the terms and conditions of our life. So. Embrace your inevitables! Live your life!
25. Yellow Swallowtail 03 — A new business card series. Image 20/20 — What is so hard about equal rights across the board to every citizen of the United States? Without regard to anything? No freedom and privilege to one that is not granted to all others? Equal Is Equal! What is so hard about that?
26. Tricolored Heron in Flight 03 — The Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, August 13, 2013 — I’ve never known anyone in authority who didn’t know what she, or he, was doing, reflecting the old adage, “Often wrong but never in doubt.” The country is being run by those in authority. When have you heard a politician say he, say she, didn’t know what he/she was talking about? We need more people at the helm who know they don’t know what they are doing—and consult someone other than those with authority to guide them.
    
    When it comes to knowing how to do all of the important things—like living your life—it is crucial that you know that you don’t know what you are doing. AND that you know nobody else knows what they are doing either.
    
    We have to talk it out and feel our way along.
    
    Talking it out is hard because there is always someone in the crowd who is “often wrong but never in doubt.” There is nothing like conviction for swaying the vote. Every politician is elected because she, because he, is able to convince more people than her, than his, opponents that he/she knows what he/she is talking about/doing. If you give someone like that control of your life, you may as well go sit in some cemetery and wait for the grave diggers, because it’s all over for you.
    
    You don’t know what you are doing with your life. Nobody does. Don’t let that stop you from living it. Let that free you up to live it. You can’t do any worse than all those people living their life in the sure conviction that they know what they are doing and are right about it. And you will probably do a lot better. You owe it to yourself to find out.
    
    So, “get in there and do your thing, and don’t worry about the outcome” (Joseph Campbell).
27. Smoky Mirror — A new business card series. Image 21/20 — Our thing will grow us up—against our will—if we give ourselves to it, and do it as it needs to be done, in our life as we live it.
    
    Our thing will bring will bring everything to light, and require us to deal with all of it on every level in order to do our thing, the way it needs to be done, the way it needs us to do it.
    
    Let’s take the camera, for example. The camera requires me to stand long hours waiting for the heron—or the owl—to fly. And to deal with the criticism of those who don’t understand why it takes so long to take a picture.
    
    The camera requires me to read the manual, and do internet searches about techniques I don’t understand, and figure out how to get the camera to do what I need it to do.
    
    The camera requires me to get up early and stay out late. To let disappointment, and frustration, and slow reflexes be part of the process of photography, as surely as the satisfaction of a thoroughly pleasing photograph is.
    
    The camera requires me to be somewhere else when other people (that would be family members) want me to be where they want me to be.
    
    The camera requires me to define myself—to identify myself—as a photographer and let all the other things shake out as they will around that central identity.
    
    For example, I don’t do vacations the way normal people do vacations. I take photo trips. And I’m not available for social engagements—I’m taking pictures.
    
    All of this, and more, comes packaged with the camera, and spills out of the box when I open it, claiming me and sending me off to do its will in my life.
    
    It’s the same with you and your piano, or your bird watching, or your vegetable gardening. Your thing will eat you alive, and give you life—and you would be crazy not to provide what it requires and receive what it has to offer.
28. Tricolored Heron in Flight 06 — The Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, August 13, 2013 — There are people who lived with their doors locked, their shades closed and their lights off, and walk through the world in a state of chronic anxiety, worried about all the things that haven’t happened yet, but could, at any time, break forth to ransack, pillage and burn the empty ruins that remain of their life.
    
    They live their life in possession of the Fear Demon. That’s one way to do it.
    
    They could also dispossess the Demon, but that would require waking up, opening the shades, cutting on the lights, and walking directly into their life, determined to discover if life can give them something they can’t handle with the resources available to them and the gifts they have to bring to bear on each situation as it arises.
    
    It’s all an initiation rite. Everything is preparing us for everything else. Or sending us into hiding. It’s going to be what we make it out to be, make it up to be. How we see things determines what we do about them.
    
    The Fear Demon is a Fear Complex. A Complex is like an apartment complex, or ghetto, with experiences, encounters and memories living throughout it, to constantly remind us of what they have seen and felt and lived with and know to be true.
    
    A Complex is a collection of psychological bruises nested, or clustered around a central idea or theme. Anything remotely reminiscent of the theme can trigger a reaction that is responding to the all of the original events.
    
    Your father was an alcoholic who beat your mother and you every third or fifth time he came home drunk. Now, thirty years later, the odor of beer causes you to throw up. That’s a Complex for you. You could call it an Alcohol Complex. Or an Abusive Father Complex (And you could throw up every time you see/hear a father yelling at his child—or at the umpire—at a Little League Baseball game).
    
    And people have Anxiety/Fear Complexes that keep them from facing their life all their life long.
    
    The cure is as bad as the malady. You have to face the Demon. A little at a time. Feeling the pain. Throwing up. Remembering. Reliving. Helps to have the compassionate presence of someone who understands Demons and knows the process of dispossessing them. You might have to find a good therapist. A good therapist is one who has been where she, where he, is asking you to go. Wounded healers are the best kind.
29. Belted Kingfisher 05 — The Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, August 9, 2013 — Nothing is more important than knowing what’s important. The most important thing in the world, or beyond it, can stand before you, begging for your attention, devotion, loyalty, obeisance, and if you don’t recognize it’s importance, it may as well not waste its time on you. That makes knowing what’s important the most important thing.
    
    So. If you are going to know something, know what’s important.
    
    So. How do you know what’s important?
    
    Start with what you think is important. See what it has to show you about what’s important.
    
    You will learn all there is to know by starting with what you think you know and letting it show you what more there is to know.
    
    The problem is that we generally stop with what we think is important, with what we think we know, and think it is someone else’s fault that what we think doesn’t work. The principle in place here is: “The theory expands to take into account facts that contradict, deny, refute the theory.”
    
    Creationism, for instance, expands to take the fossil record into account by saying, “Fossils are God’s way of testing our faith,” or something equally obtuse regarding the facts of fossils, and carbon dating, etc.
    
    The same thing applies to the opponents/enemies of global warming. Their theory expands to explain the facts that are contrary to their theory.
    
    This is how you never change your mind about what you think is important, about what you think you know. Don’t do it this way.
    
    Let what you think is important show you what IS important, even if that is contrary to what you think. ESPECIALLY if that is contrary to what you think. You will learn to think better about what is important this way. You will learn to know what is important. Then it is only a matter of doing it. That is really the most important thing.
    
    It doesn’t matter what you know if you don’t live like you know it.
30. Great Blue Heron 07 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, August 13, 2013 — It’s all going to hell, and we have to get it back in place—by being in place ourselves. We cannot allow hell to distract us. Our focus has to be on finding the center—our own center—and maintaining its place in our life. We have to be at one with the source of life and being—of what is, of what constitutes, life and being for us, personally.
    
    And don’t give me the “We cannot be at one with what constitutes life for us when our life is snatched from us and nothing worth living for remains!” line. Nothing can take your center from you. You give that up yourself. You say, “Okay. Fine. If this is how it is going to be, hell everywhere I look, I’m just going to hell myself. I’m already there. I may as well be where I am.”
    
    You have to hold the center in place when everything else disintegrates. You are the core piece to your own integration. When you aren’t at one with the core, there is no core. When you let go of the center, there is no center. There is a sense in which YOU are the core, the center!
    
    Jesus could say, “The Father and I are one!” We can all say that, must say that. “The Center and I are one!” What becomes of the Father when there are none to be at one with the Father? What becomes of the Center when there are none to hold the Center?
    
    Always in every generation there are at least “Six thousand knees that have not bent to Baal”! Our knees have to be among them. We have to know our place in the Center and keep it when everything else is out of place. In this way, we restore the harmony. Reestablish the balance. Reinstate the symmetry. Return the synthesis, the wholeness, the unity of all things with themselves and with one another.
    
    Joseph Campbell said, “The influence of a vital person vitalizes.” Life is contagious. You cannot live disconnected from the core. Connected to the core, you become alive, and infect everyone with your refusal to join them in death. And the world comes back together through the integration of those who refused to join it in disintegration.
31. Mallard Landing 11 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, August 11, 2013 — When someone tells you you are selfish, it’s because they don’t want you doing something your way—they want you doing it their way. Now, who is selfish?
32. Tricolored Heron 03 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, August 13, 2013 — It is all useless, pointless, hopeless, futile and coming to a very bad end. Don’t let that stop you, or even slow you down.
    
    Don’t let your outcomes erode your effort. You have a life to live! Live it to the fullest, no matter what! THAT will take the wind out of the Cyclops’ sails! Show him a thing or two! Put you on the right side of what matters most!
    
    “Get in there and do your thing—and don’t worry about the outcome!”—Joseph Campbell
33. Goose Wars 04 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, August 14, 2013 — When you live out of your own core, your own center, your own source of life and being, you live out of the center of what is important to you, of what is right for you—not out of what someone has told you is important or ought to be important.
    
    You live out of your attachment to what matters most to you because it matters to you—not because someone told you it should matter, but because it does matter, more than anything else, including your ease and comfort and everlasting convenience.
    
    If something is important to you only until it gets in your way, and begins to cramp your style, and asks hard things of you, and is a real bother, and you have to shuck it because it just isn’t worth your time and attention any longer, it was not central to your life and being.
    
    It was not important. It was only something you liked for a while, like snowboarding, perhaps. It was something you could put on and take off with the flow of the seasons, or your whim of the moment.
    
    When something is important to you, it owns you. It’s your Daddy. Jesus said, “The Father and I are one.” There you are. Who’s your Daddy? What do you do because you have to do it, because you have no choice in the matter?
    
    The last line in the movie, “On Stranger Tides,” belongs, as it should, to Captain Jack Sparrow: “I have no say in it, Gibbs. It’s a pirate’s life for me. Savvy?” When something is important, it grabs you, and won’t let you go, and compels you into its service for life. That’s what you are looking for. You are looking for what is looking for you. Savvy?
34. Belted Kingfisher 04 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, July 22, 2013 — You can’t make someone skinny by telling them how fat they are. This principle has ramifications throughout your life. And the life of those who tell you how fat you are, or fat’s equivalent.
    
    You can’t make someone listen to you by telling them they should listen to you. Or make someone stop telling you to listen to them by telling them to stop telling you to listen to them.
    
    See how many different ways you can apply this concept in the coming week.
    
    The way to stop someone from telling you to listen to them (or to do what they advise) is to ask, “How much do I owe you for minding my business?” or, “What kind of cake is that you’re selling?” And when they say, “I’m not selling cake.” Say, “It sounded like you were selling something. I was hoping it was cake. I use a piece of red velvet cake.” When they snort and get back to telling you what you should do, say, “I’d like to stay and chat, but I think I’m going to find some red velvet cake,” and walk off.
35. Dragon Fly 07 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, July 22, 2013 — You don’t run out of corners. You turn a corner, and there’s another corner. The path is a journey with endless corners.
    
    A load is lifted, which opens the door to additional loads. It’s great. I wouldn’t take anything for it. Life in the raw. Right here, right now. I’m loving hating it.
    
    My situation is not your situation, yet we have the same situation. We aren’t running out of corners. We deal with this, and then we deal with that, and then there is something else to deal with. That’s how life is.
    
    Life does not exist in some idyllic state of endless bliss. Live is endless corners. Infinite hurdles. If you can square yourself up to that, you have it made. As much as you can have it made with all the stuff you have to deal with.
36. Faux Falls — An artificial waterfall at the Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, August 8, 2013 — There is knowing what’s what, and there is remembering what’s what. Both require distancing ourselves from what’s what on a regular basis—which is, itself, a part of what’s what.
    
    Distance is indispensable. You have to play the part of a hermit, a recluse, an old Taoist poet in a cave on a mountain above the clouds to have a chance at knowing and remembering what’s what.
    
    You have to withdraw, live apart, disappear. But who can do that in this time and place? We have responsibilities, duties, obligations!
    
    One of that Holy Trinity is knowing and remembering what’s what. Fail there, and everything goes to hell.
    
    We have to step out in order to step in. We have to build regular, repetitive retreats into our routine. They can be brief. They don’t have to be Ten Day Silent Refuges (which is overdoing a good thing). They can be ten minutes here, twenty minutes there.
    
    You are building in vantage points, places to reflect, reconsider, review, realize and remember what’s what throughout each day.
    
    The Army has a saying: “Deflect in place.” Leave the world without going anywhere. Seal yourself off from the insanity of your life in order to seep yourself in sanity—in knowing and remembering what’s what. In order to ground yourself, center yourself, focus yourself on what’s important here and now, and live out of that in dealing with what must be dealt with here and now.
    
    Give yourself a Time Out. Go sit in a quiet place. Lock yourself in the bathroom. Create a grounding ritual that carries you back to the Core of who you are and what you are about. YOU are the Core! What’s what with YOU at YOUR core?
    
    You integrate yourself within the disintegration and fragmentation of your life when you step out of that life in order to know and remember what’s what. Living within the chaos as an integrated whole has a transformative effect on everything there. And you didn’t do anything but know and remember what’s what—and live in light of it in the way only you can.
37. Horseshoe Bend Panorama 01 — Page, AZ, May 17, 2010 — There are people who cannot be still because they can’t face the fear, the anxiety, the agony of not knowing who they are and what they are about. They cannot sit in the silence, listening, receiving well all that they hear, that they are aware of.
    
    What they hear is too terrible to bear. Accusations. Questions, Doubt. Condemnation… They don’t know how to respond, what to say. They feel a desperate need to mount a defense they can’t begin to construct.
    
    Compassion and grace, kid. Compassion and grace. Befriend the accuser. Thank him, her, for his, her, astute observations. Give him, her, the “you can’t make people skinny by telling them they are fat” line. Ask him, her, how he, she, means for his, her, approach to be helpful.
    
    ”Who in there has something to say that is helpful?” Ask that loudly, insistently. Wait for an answer.
    
    Take the “I can’t do all of this by myself” approach. Ask for suggestions, not criticisms. Ideas, encouragement, support.
    
    Ask, “Who in there is on my side?” See who comes forth.
    
    Form alliances. Create an inner atmosphere of mutual consolation and collaboration. Show up for conferences on a regular basis.
    
    When you ask for guidance, take it, trust it, rely upon it, follow it. Don’t make sport of the Inner Circle. They are your people. It they are giving you a hard time, it’s because you’ve ignored them, dissed them, repressed and suppressed them.
    
    Carl Jung said, “Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart.” You have to bear to look—and listen—and receive well what you find there. Compassion and grace, kid. Compassion and grace.
38. Goose Wars 01 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, August 7, 2013 — “Strive to do no harm” is a helpful guide to life together. We have to learn to stay out of each other’s way—and out of our own way. We cannot be imposing Democracy, or Capitalism, or Christianity (Whose idea of Christianity would that be?) on the rest of the world, or even our neighbors across the street, or even our innermost selves.
    
    But. How do we create an environment in which everyone honors, respects, and exhibits that understanding? We have been killing people who are not like we are from the beginning. And there are more people who are not like we are than there ever have been. You see the problem. Killing people isn’t working. But. It has the momentum. How do we stop it and “let bygones be bygones,” and start over, striving to do no harm?
    
    That would be like imposing Democracy, or Capitalism, or Christianity upon ourselves and those who are not like we are. So. We have something that isn’t working with no way to change it and we are afraid to stop it—because if we don’t kill those who are not like us, they will kill those who are not like them, and where would that leave us?
    
    What to do? How do we get out of the mess of our own (corporately speaking—“our” is all of us, world-wide) making?
    
    You aren’t going to like this, but it is the best I can do: One by one, we “strive to do no harm.” One by one, we stop imposing our way for the world upon the world, and stop imposing our way for ourselves on ourselves. One by one we start listening to, and collaborating with, the guidance of the inner world, of the core, of the center and ground of our own being—and trust that what is good for us at the level of our soul is good for the world.
    
    One by one, we let soul take the lead. And see where it goes.
39. Great Blue Heron Landing 01 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, August 20, 2013 — We are here to grow up, not to have our way and get what we want.
    
    We think it’s all about having our way and getting what we want. If we can’t have our way or get what we want, why live? Why go on with it? What could life possibly hold for those who are not having their way or getting what they want?
    
    We can think this way because we have not been properly instructed in living in service to our soul. We don’t even know how to attend our soul, how to listen to our soul, how to know what our soul would have us do in it’s service. We have work to do to get to the point of doing our work!
    
    We have to get together with our soul before we can begin to do the work of soul. When we get together with our soul, we understand what it means to say, “Thy will, not mine, be done.” It doesn’t mean what we think it means: “Give us a little red sports car, if it be thy will.”
    
    It means that nothing is more important than doing what needs us to do it—than doing what our soul needs us to do. And it has nothing to do with having our way or getting what we want. Our way and what we want are the first things to go. Duty, Desire and Fear are the next things to go. Then, it is only us and our work.
    
    And our work is not imposed from without. It comes forth from within, as fountain pouring forth the waters of life, in a “What I do is me/for that I came” (G.M. Hopkins) kind of way.
    
    Get that down and you have it made.
40. Green Heron Silhouette 04 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, August 20, 2013 — The unconscious is incapable of discrimination. What something is is what it is, always and forever, eternal and unchanging. It cannot be what it is and what it is not.
    
    Consciousness can discriminate, must discriminate, cannot pretend that something is only what it is, but knows that it is also more than it is, more than it appears to be. Each thing is what it is and what it also is.
    
    Consciousness can hold contraries, opposites, together. Unconsciousness cannot. Unconsciousness needs the discriminating power of consciousness. Consciousness needs the unifying urge of unconsciousness. It is the work of consciousness to make all things one by integrating, synthesizing, reconciling, uniting their opposites. Two (or more) becomes One.
    
    Consciousness tends toward unconsciousness in its refusal to bear the pain of the awareness of contradiction. But consciousness has to do its work, has to BE conscious of the ways This Is Not That in order to integrate the opposites into Thou Art That.
    
    Our symptoms are gifts from the unconscious reflecting a conflict that needs to be recognized, acknowledged and synthesized, or borne within the conscious tension of the polarities.
    
    Our complexes are the source of our symptoms—unconscious psychological/emotional (Where DOES that line lie?) bruises triggered into life by some present experience, and physically we return to the initiating experience as though Now Is Then—and we have to make it all conscious, remembering and discriminating, making the One into Two (or more)–That was then, This is now—and consciously integrating all into I/Me, Here/Now.
    
    There are no shortcuts or quick fixes for making the unconscious conscious and healing the wounds within. Consciousness has to realize the nature of its task and enter into its work with compassion and patience, grace and courage—for the inner world depends upon our being lights in the darkness, to restore and make well.
    
    We serve more than our own ideas of success and security. We are all the saviors of our own inner world.
41. Used in Short Talks On Good and Bad Religion–Mallard Landing 10 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, August 14, 2013 — The Gospel without doctrine or theology is the raw experience of grace at work in our life.
    
    When you try to explain the raw experience of grace at work in your life, and make it available to everyone by telling them exactly what they must do and believe in order to experience it, you get doctrine and theology.
    
    You could talk about grace without becoming doctrinal or theological, but you would have to be poetic and metaphorical.
    
    Sheldon Kopp observed, “Some things can be experienced but not understood, and some things can be understood but not explained.” Grace is one of those things.
    
    The raw experience of grace at work in our life is the ground of all good religion. Explanation and exhortation is the ground of all bad religion.
    
    If you want to be religious in the best sense of the word, put yourself in the path of the raw experience of grace. And don’t try to say what happened.
    
    Grace is the full experience of the right time meeting up with the right place in the right way to stun you with the wonder of the impact.
    
    To put yourself in the path of that kind of experience, you have to try new things, shake up your life, see everything you look at as though for the first time, open yourself to wonder. And delight.
    
    To experience grace, you have to be able to experience your life. All of it. If you are closed off to your experience, grace has no chance.
    
    Grace is more than words can say, more than can be said. You can’t explain right time, right place, right way. You woulda hadda been there.
42. Rose of Sharon 01 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, August 20, 2013 — What you look for determines what you see. If you are looking for spider webs or flowers, you are going to see spider webs and flowers—and you are going to miss the Blue Heron when it flies and the Green Heron when it lands.
    
    If you are looking for sunsets, you are going to miss the owl catching dinner in the woods.
    
    Our looking carries us to what we seek, and past what we are not interested in.
    
    I walk slowly along a boardwalk. My wife walks slowly through clothing stores.
    
    The questions we are asking limit the answers that engage us.
    
    We have to expand our vision if we are to see more than the world of our everyday.
    
    Start looking to see what else—what all—there may be to be to catch your eye, speak to your soul, transform your life.
43. The Web — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, August 20, 2013 — You have observed the life of those whose orientation is toward getting, having, owning, possessing, amassing, controlling, guarding, protecting, defending…
    
    And, you have observed the life of those whose orientation is toward giving, sharing, supplying, awarding, granting, bestowing, conferring, offering, blessing, providing…
    
    Well?
    
    What conclusions do you draw from your observations?
    
    How are you applying what you have observed to the way you are living your life?
44. Goldenrod 01 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, August 22, 2013 — We only have to know what we know and do what needs to be done about it. There is nothing more to it than that. That’s all it comes down to. What makes that so hard?
    
    We are always selling ourselves short. We can’t this. We can’t that. Poor, poor us. All we have are these eyes, and these ears, and these hands, and the world is so big and mean… Wanh, wanh, wanh…
    
    We’re lazy. Undisciplined. Lethargic. We live in search of the right kind of Mama, the right kind of Daddy, who will dote over us, dole out to us, and take care of us the way we want to be taken care of, like the over-grown two-year-olds we are.
    
    Anything but growing up and living our own life within the nature and circumstances of life as it is every day for the rest of the time left for living!
    
    Listen. To. Me. We have to know what we know and do what needs to be done about it.
    
    Knowing what we know means seeing things as they are. It means paying attention. Being attentive. Being aware. Of the outer world and of the inner world in every moment. It means seeing, hearing and understanding. It means being perceptive. It means listening, looking and making inquiries. It means being curious and inquisitive.
    
    It means comprehending our dreams and our symptoms, our daydreams and our fantasies. It means noticing every time we dismiss something, discount something, ignore something. It means reading the world, other people and ourselves like we might read the face of our heart’s true love.
    
    Knowing what we know means knowing all we know and aren’t conscious of. It means making the unconscious conscious to the extent that can be done.
    
    Doing what needs to be done about it means doing what needs to be done about it.
    
    That’s all there is to it.
45. Tricolored Heron in Flight 04  —  Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, August 14, 2013 — Self-reflection is our primary tool. This is different from always second-guessing ourselves, or being self-conscious and afraid to act.
    
    Being self-conscious in the way the term is generally used (in the Deep South) is to be self-critical—it is to engage in self-torture, self-censure, and self-condemnation.
    
    When we are conscious of being who we are, where we are, when we are, why we are, how we are, we are conscious of being self-conscious, and catch ourselves in the act of imposing stern judgment and disapproval.
    
    To be self-conscious in the sense of being self-reflective is to be self-aware—knowing who we are, where we are, how we are, etc., here and now, in the present moment of our living.
    
    To be self-reflective is to see ourselves in relation to all else in our life—to observe ourselves in action without critique.
    
    To be self-reflective is to be curious: “I wonder why I do that? I wonder what would happen if I did something else instead?”
    
    To be self-reflective is to know what our patterns are, and to get to the bottom of them all. What’s going on? Why this and not that?
    
    If we are going to live out of the core, grounded and centered in who we are, we are going to have to get to the bottom of us, which means being interested in what we do and why we do it.
    
    Curiosity, not judgment. Inquiry, not inquisition. Self-reflection.
46. Great Blue Heron — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, August 21, 2013 — Four equals two, two equals one. The dialectic is thesis plus antithesis equaling synthesis. We think it equals war.
    
    Dialectic, to our way of thinking is argument producing a clear winner and a clear loser—as though that settles something.
    
    The dialectic is actually conversation that takes into account the one and the other to produce harmony, reconciliation, integration, synthesis and wholeness.
    
    We are talking about you and yourself, yourselves, here. You and your partner/spouse. You and your friends. You and your parents. You and your in-laws or their equivalent. Democrats and Republicans. The United States and the rest of the world, or any one nation and all the other nations…
    
    Wherever there is a conflict of interest, and what other kind of conflict is there, there is the opportunity for the healing dialogue, dialectic. And the opportunity for war.
    
    We choose war because we’re stupid.
    
    Waking up is waking up to our stupidity and choosing to be vulnerable instead. “Put away your swords.” Beautiful words ignored by those who post armed guards in worship services, and everywhere else.
    
    We catch an aroma of biscuits fresh from the oven and we think we’ve eaten breakfast. We act as though we are not starving. Ignoring the truth that inasmuch as we have done it to anyone, we have done it to ourselves.
    
    Thou Art That, said the old Zen monk.
    
    One is two. Two is four. Four is all there is. If you are One, you are everyone. Ever. Always. And you have no real interest to call your own. And the world is healed by your presence, even though you do nothing out of the ordinary.
    
    But, don’t take my word for it. Try it yourself. You’ll see.
47. Heron with Catch — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, August 14, 2013 — There is what happens to us, and there is how we interpret what happens to us, and there is what we do in response to what happens to us.
    
    We control two out of three.
    
    Our life is in our hands.
    
    We are the only constant in all of our experiences with our life. The other players change over time.
    
    Our life is in our hands.
    
    You would think we would think about the part we play in creating the life we are living. And experiment with different responses to the same old same old, just to see what impact that might have.
    
    Our life is in our hands.
    
    Our opinion of things can prevent us from responding appropriately to things. It doesn’t matter what you think about each hard ground ball. It matters that you field the ball and make the proper play.
    
    Our life is in our hands.
    
    We keep waiting for some external shift in our circumstances to make all things swell. All of the internal switches are within our reach.
    
    Our life is in our hands.
    
    Waiting for us to stand up and do what we know needs to be done in each situation as it arises throughout the time left for living—so it can do hand stands and back flips, and tell us how proud it is of us, and how it was betting on us all the time.
48. Into Zion — Zion National Park, Springdale, UT, May 19, 2010 — Consciousness discriminates and differentiates. Consciousness sees what it sees here and now, without confusing this with that or now with then. Consciousness draws lines. Sets things apart. Deals with this the way this needs to be dealt with and doesn’t continue to split wood and stack it when it moves into a house with gas heat.
    
    Unconsciousness falls short on all of these assignments. It is all one blurry, indistinguishable blob with unconsciousness. Unconsciousness associates explosions with the unspeakable horror of battlefields and cannot go near fireworks displays when peace is declared and celebrations begin.
    
    Then is always now with the unconscious. What happened is always happening. If there is anything about This to remind the unconscious of That—to flash the unconscious back to That—then, This IS That, and we must respond Now as we did Then.
    
    We can live consciously or we can live unconsciously. We can live with consciousness directing our life, or we can live with unconsciousness directing our life. But. We cannot live consciously without making the unconscious conscious—without experiencing the agony of repressed, or suppressed, emotions, and very deliberately acknowledging their impact, and putting them ever so gently in their place, and taking the time to tend them kindly when something brings them to life, igniting old memories and requiring us to consciously tend the wounds and hurts that are with us always, but are very much then and there, not here and now.
    
    If we are going to live consciously, we cannot be in a hurry. We cannot “get over” some of the things that have happened to us, but must bear them well—bear them consciously—to keep them from contaminating our present with continued intrusions of the past.
49. Thinking About Dinner — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, August 23, 2013 — Embrace vulnerability. Practice vulnerability. Dance with vulnerability.
    
    What do you think you have to lose? lose it and you are safe at last.
    
    We put all of our energy into guarding and protecting our interest, which is really nothing more than our way. We confuse having our way with our best interest—ignoring the possibility that having our way may not at all be in our best interest.
    
    It could be that what is in our best interest is learning to live vulnerably.
    
    For one thing, we cannot be intimate until we can be vulnerable. We cannot be compassionate, merciful, empathetic, kind, generous, gracious, etc., until we can be vulnerable. Vulnerability is the hinge upon which a life of true value turns, the ground in which a life of true value is rooted.
    
    Everything rests upon our willingness to be as vulnerable as we are.
    
    I don’t mean be stupid. I mean stop being stupid by trying to live your life while avoiding the blows and wounds of living.
    
    James Hollis says, “Suffering awaits no matter what choices we make. The suffering of authentic choices, however at least gives a person a meaning, which the various flights from suffering we undertake deny. One form of suffering enlarges, one diminishes; one reveres the life which wishes to be expressed through us and one colludes in its sabotage.”
    
    Waking up is waking up to the importance of vulnerability and stepping into our life laughing at the idea that we can be safe from the vicissitudes of time and circumstance.
50. Blue Winged Teal Taking Off 01 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, August 25, 2013 — We have to live out of our own authority. We draw our own lines. We set our own boundaries. We choose our own direction. We decide what we say yes to, and no to. We live our own life. We are responsible for ourselves.
    
    It takes a lot of soul searching to be who we are, where we are, when we are, how we are—to rise to every occasion and respond appropriately to each situation as it arises.
    
    We have to wake up to do that, and waking up is a lot more involved than setting the alarm clock before we go to sleep.
    
    Waking up is showing up. We had rather not. Better to be unaware, unconscious, tuned out, numbed out, not here, not now, somewhere else, anywhere else, but here, now.
    
    James Hollis says, “We are here to be HERE, to go through it all, and to retain our dignity, purpose, and values as best we can. That is all we can do, and all that life can ever ask of us.”
    
    Nobody can do that for us. No one can tell us what to do, when, how, for how long. We listen to our own soul for courage, guidance and direction, and decide for ourselves what it means to be alive, and what we need to do about it in the time left for living.
51. Tricolored Heron in Flight 07 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, August 26, 2013 — We have this idea that there is someone to please, someone who must be happy with us or else. Wonder where that came from.
    
    Bad preaching is the root of all our ills.
    
    Take a baby, any baby. All that baby needs is some guidance regarding how to be who she, who he, is within the terms and conditions of her, of his, life.
    
    How to take ourselves into account to the same degree that we take everyone else into account—how to accord other people the same respect and concern for their unfolding and becoming as we devote to our own.
    
    How to commune with our soul. How to value and develop our sense of what resonates with us and what does not (We know bad preaching when we hear it, but we override our own resistance and submit to misdirection and destructive instruction because we weren’t taught to listen to our inner sense of what is right for us and what is wrong for us, and trade our own personal authority for a bowl of cold oatmeal.
    
    And spend the rest of our life trying to get back to who we were and what we knew when we were born.
52. Great Blue Heron 09 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, August 26, 2013 — I have a friend who says (shouts): “Live without ANSWERS!”
    
    Could be a bumper sticker.
    
    ”Everybody’s looking for answers,” said Ulysses Everett McGill in “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”
    
    We think answers are the ticket to a better life. If we only knew the answers we could find our way to making sense of things and knowing what to do about them to get them to go our way.
    
    We are always thinking about having our way. We never think about changing it, having some other way instead. Never crosses our mind.
    
    We could handle life a lot better if we just had some answers. We could turn things our way if we just had the answer to how to go about doing that.
    
    So, we set out to find the answers and keep multiplying the questions. You’d think we would set that quest aside and take up another one, like how to live without answers.
    
    There is not much to it. Pick up the next thing that needs doing and do it without needing to know why. What’s so hard about that? Don’t even pause to answer the question. Go pick up the next thing that needs doing and do it the way it needs to be done. And see where it goes.
53. Heron Landing 01 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, August 26, 2013 — It helps to have no opinion about anything, but I have an opinion about having an opinion. I certainly have an opinion regarding sickness and health, and lots of other things as well. In-laws, for example.
    
    Having no opinion about anything would be like being dead. But, you would feel no pain. But, you would be dead.
    
    How about this: Have extreme opinions about very few things.
    
    An extreme opinion is one that causes you to lose your peace.
    
    There are things worth losing our peace over, but not as many things as we generally think.
    
    We each have to decide for ourselves what they are—no one can tell us what is worth losing our peace over.
54. Two Ducks Landing — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, August 25, 2013 — When things don’t click into place, we are left with working with them as they are, to see what can be done with these facts, this reality, here and now.
    
    The here and now is persistent and demanding—insisting that we take it into account and deal with it, never minding how we wish it were or want it to be.
    
    You have all the makings of a major league baseball player, speed, talent, power on both sides of the plate, great arm from the out field, but. You can’t hit a curve ball. You may coach baseball at the high school or college level, but you won’t play baseball in the major leagues. That’s how it is.
    
    Just because you have a dream doesn’t mean it will be your life. Doors will not magically open because you have a dream. People will not rush to your side, picking up after you, sweeping the way before you, asking, “Mr. Dollar, how can we be of help to you today?”
    
    You’ll have to face up to and find ways of handling all that stands in your way, forcing detours, U-turns, reversals, and new plans of action, new ways of approaching your life and your future. A thousand manifestations of the Cyclops stretch out before you, waiting their turn. You have to take them as they come. There is no one to step into your life for you to give you a break.
    
    Our life is working our life into being as it can be within the context and circumstances of our living.
    
    Our life is our practice. We live our life taking care of business, dealing with all the things that interfere with, that inhibit, our life.
    
    If we can’t play baseball, maybe we can coach it. If we can’t coach baseball, maybe we can volunteer to help show a Little League team how to slide into second, or throw to the plate from the outfield. Maybe there is a place for us in baseball other than playing.
    
    It is our work to find what we can do, and do it, in living our life as it is able to be lived, in and around the terms and conditions that define our here and now, throughout the time left for living.
55. Tricolored Heron Mirror 01 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, August 29, 2013 — How do you attend your soul? How do you commune with your soul? How do you sense soul’s drift? Know where soul belongs and has no business being?
    
    It takes focus to live at one with our soul. We have to practice being present with our soul—attentive, aware.
    
    Play the game of following your best guess about what your soul would have you do, and see where it goes.
    
    Trust that you will learn to be a better guesser over time.
    
    Remember: No one is taking names, giving grades, calling your parents, handing out citations, making arrests, issuing sentences, hauling you off to jail. You have nothing to lose. Guess away!
    
    Play your way into being your soul’s best friend.
56. Used in Short Talks On Contradiction, etc., Green Heron in Flight 15 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, August 30, 2013 — Our life is a dance with ambivalence and contraries, contradictions and opposites. What we want is blocked by what we also want, and we have to decide what we want.
    
    We live within the tension of polarities. On the one hand this, on the other hand that, and on still another hand, that over there.
    
    It’s a trade-off. We give up this to get that.
    
    The monkey with its hand in the coconut has to let go of the marble in order to be free, but it wants the marble, and sacrifices its freedom in the trees for a life behind glass or bars.
    
    We have to sit down with ourselves and choose what we are going to love and what we are going to let go. Because we are kidding ourselves if we think we can have it all.
    
    This is called growing up. Growing up will break your heart. Refusing to grow up will kill your soul. You have to choose, sitting there in the jungle with your hand in the coconut clutching the marble, what it’s going to be—what sacrifice you are going to make: Your heart, or your soul.
    
    This choice is the ground of every rite of initiation. You leave Mama and step into the world to fend for yourself and find your way on your own. Heart says, “MAMA!” Soul says, “Are you coming or what?”
    
    When we make the choice for soul, we discover that we were only alone in making the choice. Once the choice is made, we are not alone at all. We are in the company of soul and all of soul’s friends, and have only to tend that relationship to find what we need to do what needs us to do it all our life long.
    
    But. The choices keep coming up. Heart or Soul? We grow up again and again all the way.
57. Used in Short Talks On Good and Bad Religion — Pecking Order — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, August 23, 2013 — We are distracted by the 10,000 things. Our life is one distraction after another. We cannot be centered, grounded and focused because of all the things coming at us from every side at all times. The entire culture is suffering from Attention Defect Disorder. We all need what true religion has always offered: Nothing!
    
    How much of Nothing! can you stand, for how long?
    
    Work to increase your tolerance for Nothing! in your life. It won’t cost anything, and you can practice it anywhere. And it will open you to Everything! in ways you have never thought of anything.
    
    But, don’t take my word for it. Discover the worlds awaiting when you sit still and do Nothing!
58. Blue Winged Teal in Flight — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, August 25, 2013 — In waking up, we separate ourselves from our way, and recognize that how we want things to be has nothing to do with how they need to be.
    
    In order to see, we have to see beyond ourselves—we have to see more than meets the eye.
    
    We live best when we get out of the way and allow our life to live itself through is—when we participate in, collaborate with, our life.
    
    Learning to live well is learning to see, hear, and understand what is happening and what needs to be done about it.
    
    The thrust of the culture is toward how to get what we want. The focus of the culture is having our way. Nothing could be more detrimental to us or the culture.
    
    Our life exists apart from us. We do not create it for ourselves. We do not decide what we want and live in light of that.
    
    What wants us is the question—not what we want. What claims us in such a way that we sacrifice everything we thought we wanted to serve it?
    
    What owns us? To what do we belong? Are we owned by the thing which has actual rights to us? Do we belong to that which is our proper owner? Do we know who our Daddy/Momma is?
    
    Who is your Daddy? Who is your Momma? If you don’t know that, you are an orphan, lost and alone in a life you have to make up for yourself.
    
    Look at what you are living for, at what you are living to do, and ask if that needs to be done and if it needs you to do it.
    
    If you are living to be entertained—if you are living to take your mind off your life—you could do with a search for your Daddy, your Momma.
    
    We live the life that is ours to live by being owned by what has an authentic claim to us—by aligning ourselves with and living in the service of the life that needs us to live it.
    
    if you are looking for a mission, finding and living that life is it.
59. Tricolored Heron Silhouette 02 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, August 30, 2013 — We have to suffer the pain. This is called picking up our own cross and carrying it daily. It is the cross of our life—of the life we are living and of the life that is ours to live within the life we are living.
    
    It is the cross of growing up. It is the cross of squaring ourselves up with the difference, the discrepancy, the discordance between the way things are and the way we wish things were, the way we want things to be.
    
    There is no escape from the legitimate suffering that comes with being alive—with facing what must be faced and doing what needs to be done about it.
    
    This is the agony of “The Terrible Twos” which we never outgrow. It is not the child at two who is terrible, but the reality the child has to come to terms with.
    
    The child at two is facing the terrible nature of the way that is not his, is not her, way—and is having to square himself, herself, up with what is being asked of him, of her. That work continues throughout the child’s life.
    
    It is a terrible thing to have to choose between what you want and what needs you to want it. We have to suffer the pain. We have to do what is ours to do. And we have to do it in the spirit, in the way, with which it needs to be done—not all pouty, sour and begrugingly, but fully participating in the rightness of our action regardless of how we feel about it.
    
    Everything rides on our living our life out the way it needs to be lived out—the way it needs us to live it out.
    
    Everyone who has ever known anything has known it comes down to the spirit with which we live our life—the life we are living and the life that needs us to live it within the life we are living.
    
    It’s always only a matter of the spirit with which you get up and do what needs to be done, and do what needs to be done after that. Get that down and you have it made.
60. Mallard Landing 12 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, August 30, 2013 — Spin it! Spin it! Spin it! In ways that serve your peace and well-being!
    
    What something means is what you say it means—THAT’s how it impacts you, and how something impacts you determines what is called forth in you. How you respond to the event depends upon the meaning you ascribe to the event, upon what you say about it, upon how you spin it.
    
    Nothing “is what it is.” Everything is how we understand it to be. How we perceive it. What we say about it. How we spin it.
    
    Spin it in ways that propel you into a liveable future! Spin it in ways that springboard you into meaning and purpose, direction and aspiration, determination and hope—and into a life well-lived.
61. Green Heron Leaving — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, July 22, 2013 — I don’t care what you believe or what you say you’ll do. I care about what you do.
    
    Can you do it? is the question.
    
    Can you deal with the termites that eat away at your life—the life you are living and the life that you are asked to bring forth within the life you are living?
    
    Can you deal with the distractions, and frustrations, and disappointments, and failures, and responsibilities, and duties, and pressures, and, and, and…AND live the life that you are living, AND bring forth the life that is yours to live within the life you are living?
    
    These questions take us to the heart of the matter, and require us to live the answers, not speak them.
62. Owlisthentics 01 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, July 22, 2013 — We don’t want to face what is to be faced.
    
    Col. Nathan R. Jessup, the Jack Nicholson character in “A Few Good Men,” nailed us with his, “You can’t handle the truth!” line.
    
    We. Can’t. Handle. The. Truth. In any form.
    
    The culture and the economy (Where DOES that line lie?) are based on keeping us safe from the truth, and offer us an ever new and improved line of escapes, diversions and distractions—and we, in turn, offer it/them our money and our life.
    
    To take back our life from the Never-Never-Land of illusion, delusion and denial, we have to wake up, stand up, grow up, and face up to the truth of who we are, and how it is with us, and what is ours to do about it. And do it.
    
    It doesn’t get any harder.
    
    All we want is someone to take our troubles away.
    
    It starts right here. Our troubles are ours to deal with, solve, resolve, work out, handle, manage, oversee, and take care of. And we never run out of them.
    
    But, they will lead us, if we let them, into the wonder of who we are—and also are—and force us to bring forth qualities we didn’t know we had, and introduce us to resources we we didn’t know were available, and lead us along a way we didn’t know existed, and serve us as a threshold to a life and a world we didn’t know were possible.
    
    All we want is someone to take our troubles away—and our troubles are the path to life, and light, and peace beyond imagining.
63. Great Blue Heron in Flight 02 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, August 30, 2013 — The culture is no help when it comes to meaning and purpose, to zeal, zest and passion for life. We do those things on our own.
    
    The first step is to stop doing all the things that interfere with our experience of meaning and purpose, and inhibit our living with zeal, zest and passion for life. The culture is good for interference.
    
    To move toward ourselves is to move away from the culture. To be immersed in the culture is to be lost to ourselves.
    
    It is not enough to move away from the culture. We have to move toward ourselves. When we sit, we sit with ourselves. When we listen, we listen to ourselves. When we look, we look at ourselves.
    
    We observe ourselves without censure, without judgement. Just seeing, just hearing, just understanding.
    
    Where do we find our peace? What do we revere? What do we do that we love? How often do we do it? Where do we belong? How often do we go there?
    
    Where are we stuck? What are our excuses? What are the questions we are not asking? What are the things we keep doing that aren’t working? The things we keep saying are true that aren’t so?
    
    it takes paying attention to ourselves to know these things and move toward ourselves and away from the diversions and distractions of the culture.
64. Tricolored Heron Silhouette — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, August 30, 2013 — Detox your life. That’s my best advice. And start with the small things. Salt. Quit adding salt to anything. And commercials. Mute commercials.
    
    Work your way up to people who are not good for you. Get them out of your life.
    
    And the people who are not good for you who you cannot get out of your life, like your boss? When you cannot distance yourself physically, distance yourself emotionally.
    
    We all have to live in a toxic environment on some level, but we all can disappear ourselves from every environment without going anywhere.
    
    Practice disappearing.
    
    But oh! Our responsibilities! Our duties! Our obligations!
    
    That’s what I’m saying. Our responsibilities, duties and obligations keep us in place physically, so we have to disappear in order to fulfill our responsibilities, duties and obligations to our heart and soul.
    
    You are going to neglect some responsibility in order to serve another. Neglect the right responsibility, is what I’m saying. Fulfill it only to the degree that you must, then disappear.
    
    In order to pull this off, detoxing your life, you are going to have to pay attention to what is good for you and what is bad. People who claim to be your family are often the ones who are bad for you. They understand the term “family” on a purely biological level. Jesus puts them in their place: “Who is my mother? Who are my brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, cousins and great-uncles? Those who understand the will of one greater than they are and serve it with their life!” Or words to that effect.
    
    Find who your people are. Hang out with them. Steer clear of the toxic personalities who violate your boundaries and make off with your life. Spend time with those who receive you well and honor your life.
    
    You are already breathing easier, aren’t you, just thinking about it.
65. Green Heron Silhouette — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, July 23, 2013 — If you’re doing whitewater rafting or kayaking, you don’t say, “Where did all this white water come from? What are all these boulders doing in my way? Why do the obstacles and difficulties and problems keep coming at me?”
    
    Your life is a whitewater run.
    
    It will teach you how to stay upright and afloat most of the time—if you settle into where you are and how things are and live with your eyes open.
66. Crow in Flight Silhouette — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, July 31, 2013 — We are not here to be entertained. We are not born to hang out at the mall until we die. We do not belong in lives that are too shallow to splash. There is more to us than meets the eye—any eye.
    
    The more we see, the more there is to be seen. We are infinite with only a lifetime to experience and bring forth—to bring forth and experience—who we are, and who we also are.
    
    We are burning daylight thinking we are tourists wondering what’s for lunch.
    
    Wake up! Tell yourself every time you look into a mirror. Wake up! See what you look at! Feel what you feel! Taste what you taste! Touch what you touch! Smell what you smell! Hear what you listen to! Experience what you experience! Notice what you discount and dismiss! Pay attention to your life—it will teach you everything you need to know!
    
    Living is the lesson. Life is the teacher. Show up and pay attention. Every moment of every day.
67. Green Heron in Flight 13 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, August 9, 2013 — Meet fear with courage. It’s the only thing to do.
    
    Remember the Wizard of Oz. The lion developed courage by acting courageously. He faked it. Pretended. Acted as though. He wasn’t courageous until he behaved courageously.
    
    Get it?
    
    Be afraid. Be terrified. Shake in your boots. Act courageously.
    
    That’s all there is to it.
    
    Pretend you are in a movie, playing a role that calls for you to be courageous, in a situation that horrifies you. Play the role courageously. Convincingly. Win an Oscar.
    
    Now we’re talking! That’s the way to do it!
68. Tricolored Heron in Flight 11 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, August 30, 2013 — People are those who think I should live according to their ideas for my life. My people are those who are quite willing for me to live according to my ideas for my life.
    
    If you compute the number of people in your life and the number of your people, you will find that your people are vastly out-numbered. But, you have exactly the right number to counteract the weight of the vast majority, and to provide you with the support you need in determining the pace and course of your own life.
    
    It is important to know who your people are, and to spend time with them. They are an oasis on the journey, assisting with recovery and reorientation, and say, in effect, “You’re doing fine! Live on! Live on!”
    
    Words we need to hear in order to step back into the work that is ours to do, amid the swell of those who think we should do it differently, or not at all.
69. Heron Landing Mirror — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, August 31, 2013 — When it becomes apparent that nobody has your back, and you are alone with the work of arranging a livable future, you are not alone.
    
    This is where the Invisible World shines. It is filled with—“people” won’t quite do it—characters who are not only on your side, but also are dedicated to the task of assisting you with your task. All you have to do is ask for help with your work—in the spirit of one who is completely committed to the work—and help is delivered, in unexpected, surprising, amazing ways.
    
    Trust that it will be so, and get out of the way. It is already on the way before you ask—waiting for your help in welcoming it into your life and assisting IT in doing the work of helping you do your work. Perhaps, to your own shock and consternation.
    
    When you enter into cahoots with the inner world, you step into a different world—where up is down, and right is left, and wrong is right, and nothing is as you would expect—where, when you are thinking one thing, you find another—and don’t know enough to rule anything out, but have to play along in a “Thy will, not mine be done,” kind of way, and trust yourself to the flow of your life even when it means swimming against the current of how you think things should be.
    
    Welcome to Wonder Land! Let’s play ball!
70. King of the Pond — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, August 23, 2013 — No matter how long we live, we will still be growing up when we die—and we will have longer to go than we’ve gone. That’s what eternity is for, and it won’t be long enough.
    
    Everything is a potential threshold to a larger, deeper, more compassionate, kinder, gentler, more gracious—and more persistently insistent on things being as they need to be—us.
    
    May we live to make it so!
    
    May we miss no opportunities to grow up and be who we need to be in each situation as it arises—whether we want to or not!
71. Bog Buddies — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, August 31, 2013 — Everyone who knows, knows the same thing. Everyone who knows, resonates with the same understanding. Everyone who knows, sees with the same perspective.
    
    For example: A man came to Jesus whining about his brother not being fair with him, and Jesus said, “What business is that of mine? You have to work out your own problems!” or words to that effect.
    
    Everyone who knows knows what their business is and isn’t, and what is theirs to work out and what belongs to someone else to work out.
    
    Or, as the tee shirt slogan says, “Let me drop what I’m doing and take care of YOUR problems for YOU!”
72. Joe Pye Weed — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, August 7, 2013 — Pay attention to the right things! It takes a lifetime, sometimes, to know what the right things are.
    
    We can shorten the time by paying attention to the things we pay attention to—by thinking about the things we think about—and wondering, “Why this and not that?”
    
    Are we interested in the things we think about, or stuck with them—glued to them—as though they are the only things to think about, and we would never think about thinking about anything else instead?
    
    Try thinking about something else instead. What would you start with? What would be on your list: Things to Think About That I Have Never Thought About? Why those things and not some other things?
    
    We are slowly digging around in where your interest lies, stirring things up, turning over the mulch pile, bringing hidden things to light—to life, raising the dead.
    
    We only have the time left for living to pay attention to the things that are dying for lack of attention. The degree to which we do that will tell the tale.
73. Great Blue Heron 06 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, August 10, 2013 — What is called for? Do it!
    
    Whether you want to or not!
74. Mallard in Flight 111 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, August 13, 2013 — What is called for is calling us to grow up.
    
    What is called for is calling for us to do what needs to be done—what needs us to do it—whether we want to or not. Whether we are in the mood to do it or not. Whether we feel like it or not. Whether it is in our best interest or not. Whether…
    
    What is called for is calling for us to lay aside our plans, hopes, dreams, aspirations, desires, aims and ambitions, and give ourselves to its service in a “thy will, not mine be done,” kind of way.
    
    When we get out of our way, we become the Christ. And we know what happened to him.
75. Mallard in Flight 112 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, August 25, 2013 — Can you do it? is the question.
    
    Can you face what is to be faced and do what is to be done about it?
    
    Can you do what is called for in each situation as it unfolds, arises, no matter what, one situation after another all your life long?
    
    Can you put yourself aside in serving what has need of you—in living the life that needs you to live it—regardless of what that might to to the life of your dreams?
    
    Can you stop fantasizing about what is easy, and about how you wish things were, and start squaring up to how things are, and what that means for you, and how you need to respond to it in the here and now of your living?
    
    Will you?
    
    A determined, committed, “YES!” to these questions is the threshold to LIFE beyond imagining. The key is the courage to open the door.
76. Mallard in Flight 113 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, August 31, 2013 — Sheldon Kopp said, “We all have something precious to offer—something that exists in no one else. When we turn lovingly toward whatever stirs our hearts, our personal treasures are revealed…”
    
    We have to trust ourselves. One overlooked aspect of growing up is coming to the place of trusting ourselves at last—finally giving ourselves over to ourselves and saying something on the order of, “Okay! Fine! See what you can do! Just tell me what you need! I’m here to help you every way I can!”
    
    Of course, we have to mean it. We have to get out of the way, and trust ourselves to lead the way, so that we might find the way that has been right there all the while we dismissed it, looking, as we are wont to do, for some other, bigger, finer, brighter way instead. That’s the way it is with ways that are ours and not ours.
    
    We have to trust ourselves to ourselves, and let our life become what it is trying to be.
77. Mallard in Flight 114 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, August 31, 2013 — Sheldon Kopp reminds us that “when we avoid revealing our true selves others,” we often forget who we are—and have a hard time remembering.
    
    Kopp says, “Once we begin to risk living openly and in good faith, we may lose interest in trying to figure out what’s right and what’s wrong, and get on with living a life that is worthwhile (and meaningful) to us, regardless of what it might mean to others.”
    
    We cannot find our way to the path with our name on it without embracing our vulnerability and betting everything on The One Who Knows Within—and trusting Him/Her with our life in a “thy will, not mine, be done” kind of way.
    
    It’s not that we know what we are doing. It is that we don’t have a clue, and know it—in feeling our way forward from one situation as it arises, unfolds, to the next, doing what is right for us—what we feel is called for—in each situation, and letting the outcome be the outcome—which will bring forth our own truth with increasing clarity over time.
    
    The more we live in light of our own truth, the more it will become clear to us, and the way that is our way will open before us, one situation at a time.
78. Mallard Ovation — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, August 30, 2013 — All this “personal growth” we’ve been hearing about, and undertaking, all these years? It’s really only “growing up.”
    
    There is no growth other than growing up. As we grow up, we face things as they are—we see what we are looking at—we listen to what we are hearing—we know how things are and how they also are (which is how they are), and what needs to be done about it with the gifts we have to offer, in each situation as it unfolds, arises, and we do it.
    
    One thing leads to another, and we live out our life, sizing up and responding to each situation as it unfolds/arises—growing up more with each one—becoming more who we are and less who we are not—realizing the truth of Jung’s dictum: “We are who we always have been, and who we will be,” to our surprise, delight and amazement.
    
    So. That’s the paradigm. Where do we start? Exactly where we are!
    
    The path always begins under our feet.
    
    We think, of course, that “nothing good can come from Nazareth,” forgetting that “the stone the builders reject becomes the chief cornerstone.”
    
    We think we can’t do anything with this old sorry life, with these old sorry choices, and this old sorry future. We think we have to have a bigger, better, finer life, with bigger, better, finer choices and a bigger, better, finer future. And sit, helplessly, wistfully, wishing for some fairy godmother, some genie out of a bottle, to appear and give us the right start so that we can finally “be somebody instead of this bum, which is what (we are).”
    
    Well. Who wouldn’t be better off with better choices? With better parents and a better place of origin? But. We are all where we are. And this is where it begins, here and now.
    
    So, start with your attitude, with your perspective. It is never what happens to you. It is always the spin you give it, the way you interpret it, the meaning you ascribe to it, that determines your lot—that opens you up to your future, or closes you off from it.
    
    The truth is the bed you slept in last night and the world you woke up to this morning. How are you going to see it, understand it, interpret it, spin it? What are you going to do with it? About it?
    
    You are the magic. You are the wizard. You are what you have been waiting for to come make your life grand. Stop making excuses. Get with the program. Do your thing as only you can do it with the resources available to you right here, right now, and see what happens.
79. White Heron — Lake Daniels, Greensboro, NC, September 12, 2013 — We all would do better if we had the right kind of help, but until that comes along, we are left with helping ourselves.
    
    We help ourselves by not being stupid.
    
    By not forcing into place the things we wish were in place.
    
    By not expecting things to be different than they are.
    
    By taking our consolation where we find it.
    
    By giving ourselves a time out and closing the door, even it it is only the door to the bathroom.
    
    By recognizing that it is always up to us to step forward to meet what is on the other side of the door, and do what we can with it.
    
    By remembering the Four Rules of Life:
    
    1) Show up.
    2) Be aware of how things are and how things also are.
    3) Be true to yourself.
    4) Don’t take it seriously.
80. White Heron 02 — Cane Creek Lake, Lancaster County, SC, September 16, 2013 — We come to life in the work to reconcile, integrate, make our peace with the opposites, dichotomies, conflicts and polarities in our lives. With nothing to stir us to life, we are mostly dead.
    
    Yet, we live to be conflict free. “All we ever wanted is smooth and easy,” is an AA assessment of where we have to get to work: Coming to terms with that which is fundamentally contrary to our desires: It isn’t smooth and it isn’t easy.
    
    We don’t want anything to do with the path to life. Let us live out our life with “nothing but the dead and dying…in our little town”!
    
    We begin the lifelong work of being alive by grappling with the unwelcome realization that how things are isn’t how we want things to be. Once we make our peace with that, we have it made—as much as we can have it made with things not going our way all the way along the way.
    
    All of our trouble with our troubles can be traced to our refusal to reconcile ourselves to having to do the work of reconciliation from birth to death.
    
    What do you not want about your life today? Step into it and do what you can about it. There will be something else tomorrow, or maybe by lunchtime.
    
    If you can square yourself up to it not being the way you want it to be, the Cyclops will lose its power over you, and it will be a long smooth and easy ride through the bumps, drop-offs, twists and turns—as you become who you are by dealing with all you don’t want to do.
81. Light and Shadow — Virgin River, Zion National Park, near Springdale, UT, May 21, 2010 — People who have no life spend their time calling/texting one another asking, “What are you doing?”
    
    Doing is a substitute for living, and doing nothing is not allowed.
    
    The kind of doing that is an expression of being comes forth from nothing. Every creative act is creatio ex nihilo, creation out of nothing—out of stillness, out of silence, out of reflection, contemplation, meditation. Out of prayer.
    
    We think of prayer as asking for something or as thanking/praising for something so that we can ask for something else. Prayer is perception.
    
    Prayer is perceiving how things are in their allness—receiving well the world and ALL that is therein—and what needs to be done about it.
    
    Appropriate action proceeds from this kind of praying. The seeing, sensing, feeling kind of praying, which is the foundation of doing. We pray by seeing things as they are and what needs to be done about it, and then we act, we do, in response to the prayer.
    
    Prayer is the intentional connection with the Seer within—the first step in the three step, collaborative, process of Seeing, Being, Doing.
    
    At-one with the inner, invisible, unconscious, world, we live and act in the outer world as visible expressions of invisible grace. We incarnate transcendent reality.
    
    We become thresholds, openings, apertures to numinous wonder—to more than meets the eye—to more than words can say—blessing the world with lives that are sacraments to all that is holy, rendering absurd, if not obscene, the question, “Whacha doin’?”
82. Mallard in Flight 115 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, September 9, 2013 — We pay a price for knowing what we know. And, if we don’t pay a price for knowing what we know, we pay a price for knowing what we know.
    
    And if that is all double talk and Dollaresque for you, try this:
    
    True religion is what remains when we remove doctrine and theology from religion.
    
    When we remove doctrine and theology, we are left with the raw experience of what has been called God, but which I refer to as numinous reality—because God has been reduced to the doctrinal orthodoxy of Protestant Christianity and we need to realize that God cannot be constrained to our ideas of God, but is eternally breaking out of prison, so to speak, to startle and confound, and send the people in search of new ways to understand their experience and live in light of it in the time left for living.
83. Great Blue Heron In Flight 04 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, September 9, 2013 — Those of us who don’t pay a price for knowing what we know pay the price of not knowing anything worth knowing.
    
    We know only what someone has told us.
    
    Everything we know about God, for instance, comes out of some old Book of Doctrine, out of some old Catechism—as though the questions and answers it offers are the only questions and answers to be asked and answered—and doesn’t—because it cannot—touch the periphery of Truth, which is beyond words, and incapable of being said by answers or asked by questions.
    
    The Truth of an apple pie is known only in the eating. You can read a recipe all you want, and form denominations and non-denominations built on The Right Way To Believe About Apple Pie, but you won’t know anything about apple pies until you eat a fair sampling and form your own opinion.
    
    The God who is God lives in exile in some forgotten Land of Promise, while the people dance and bow before the latest incarnation of their idea of God—killing and shunning and shaming in the name of their idea of God—and paying the price of paying no price for knowing what they know.
84. Abandoned B&W — Lancaster County, SC, September 17, 2013 — The meandering of the river is no threat to the sea.
    
    Think of the river as your life. Think of the sea as you waking up.
    
    There is no such thing as a mistake when there is nothing but mistakes, and every mistake leads you to a different turn, and each turn wakes you up.
    
    We think it is about our everlasting convenience, comfort and pleasure. It’s about waking up.
    
    The Cyclops is a necessary component in our understanding how things are (which includes how things also are), knowing what to do about it, and doing it in each situation as it arises, unfolds, all our life long.
    
    We can never take everything into account because there is always something we have no way of knowing—there is always something invisible, unknown, that we are unconscious of, completely oblivious to, out of our field of vision—coming along to wreck our plans.
    
    Native Americans could not have seen Columbus coming.
    
    We cannot be smart enough to avoid the Cyclops in all of his manifestations. Staying home under the covers is surrendering to the Cyclops whispering, “Come here, Baby. I’ll take care of you. Just stay here in the dark with me. Don’t open that door and attempt to live your life. You will be safe here.”
    
    A life that is safely unlived is no life at all. The Cyclops wins. We have to go through the Cyclops to live our life—to be fully alive in the time left for living. There is no way to avoid dealing with that which blocks our way—which includes ourselves and those who love us dearly.
    
    ”Whose side are you on?” is always a pertinent question. We start with asking it of ourselves.
    
    We cannot avoid mistakes, false starts, wrong turns and pain, pain, pain. We are quite right to be afraid. We are quite wrong to take our fear seriously.
    
    We have to wake up and be fully alive at all costs. We have to deal with everything that comes our way as consciously as we are capable of being in each moment of our living. That means bearing the pain of being alive. Of being awake. Of being here, now, no matter what. And figuring out what needs to be done. And doing it.
85. Heron Going — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, September 9, 2013 — I’m not interested in what you believe. I’m interested in what you know—and what makes you think it is so.
    
    We either know or we don’t know. What does believing have to do with it?
    
    I don’t believe anything. I know some things, but I don’t know more than I do know. So, I ask a lot of questions and poke around, stirring things up, turning things over, wondering what this has to do with that—if anything.
    
    I much prefer this approach to having to memorize what I believe and ask Those Who Know Best And Must Be Pleased if I have it right.
    
    We don’t believe, or believe in, what is important to us. We don’t think it up, decide, vote on it.
    
    What is important slips up on us, seizes us in the heat of the moment and won’t let us go. That’s how we know what’s important.
    
    We have to put ourselves in positions that disclose, that reveal, what is important to us. We cannot be afraid to find out. We have to go seeking after what is important, daring it to show itself to us, grab us by the neck and force us to do its will throughout what remains of the time left for living.
    
    Or, we could just hang out at the mall or flip through the channels as though we don’t know nothing is there. Heron Going—Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, September 9, 2013 — I’m not interested in what you believe. I’m interested in what you know—and what makes you think it is so.
    
    We either know or we don’t know. What does believing have to do with it?
    
    I don’t believe anything. I know some things, but I don’t know more than I do know. So, I ask a lot of questions and poke around, stirring things up, turning things over, wondering what this has to do with that—if anything.
    
    I much prefer this approach to having to memorize what I believe and ask Those Who Know Best And Must Be Pleased if I have it right.
    
    We don’t believe, or believe in, what is important to us. We don’t think it up, decide, vote on it.
    
    What is important slips up on us, seizes us in the heat of the moment and won’t let us go. That’s how we know what’s important.
    
    We have to put ourselves in positions that disclose, that reveal, what is important to us. We cannot be afraid to find out. We have to go seeking after what is important, daring it to show itself to us, grab us by the neck and force us to do its will throughout what remains of the time left for living.
    
    Or, we could just hang out at the mall or flip through the channels as though we don’t know nothing is there.
86. Heron Gone — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, September 9, 2013 — We don’t wait to be invited to be who we are, seeing what is to be seen, hearing what is to be heard, understanding what is to be understood, and doing what needs to be done about it.
    
    We don’t need permission to perceive the situation as it unfolds and respond to it appropriately, taking everything into account that can be taken into account.
    
    Forget tiptoeing on eggshells! Forget who would like it (Your father, for instance, or your mother, or the sister-in-law you know the one I mean). Do what is crying out to be done and pay the price of your indolence.
    
    Being true to ourselves is being true to our take on things, to our perspective, to our perception of how things are and what needs to be done about them—and paying the price of seeing the way we see and doing what we think needs to be done about it.
    
    Or, as Jesus said, “If you want to be like me, you have to pick up your own cross daily, and do your thing, and take your lumps. Forget getting everyone on your side or on board with what you think needs to be done. Don’t live your life by majority vote. Crosses are for those who do it like they think it needs to be done. So, get in there and mix it up. See what you can make of it, do about it, in the time left for living!” Or, words to that effect.
87. Carolina Lakes 01 — Andrew Jackson State Park, Lancaster County, SC, September 17, 2013 — My mother is approaching 90, and lived her life compliant and appeasing, only to discover at the end that she was accruing no merit points, and has nothing to show for her conformity and submission other than the loss of her chance at life. And. She. Is. Not. Happy.
    
    With no one to blame but herself, she blames everyone but herself. Having never taken stock, evaluated her response to her environment, or its impact on her, she is now in no position to “see” anything except that is isn’t fair and she doesn’t like it. Or anyone.
    
    Her contract with life was invalid from the start, but she plugged away at it, certain that if she did what others expected of her it would all work out in the end. Here, at the end, she has to reconcile herself with facts gone awry.
    
    With no practice in the art of awareness and reconciliation, she can’t hope to practice it now, and has no recourse but to rant, and wail, and “take her anger out” on everyone who comes her way.
    
    Consciousness is our only tool. When we bury our awareness of what is happening, and what needs to happen, and what needs to be done about it, and what we are doing about it, and how it’s working—how what we are doing, or failing to do, is impacting ourselves and our world—and what we need to do instead, we capitulate to our circumstances, deny our place in our own life, and set ourselves up for an existence of little value to anyone, especially ourselves.
    
    I learned everything I needed to know about living by watching my parents with their own life, and thinking “These people don’t know a thing about being alive!” So, I turned away from them early on and learned as much as I could from people who did seem to know what they were doing—mostly people I never knew, personally, but met in their books, or as characters in books.
    
    Reading saved me. Tevya. Zorba The Greek. Atticus Finch. Hester Prynne. George Eliot. Helen Keller. Joseph Campbell. Carl Jung. The list is long of admirable people who took their own readings of their world—and took their own responsibility for responding in ways they deemed to be appropriate to their world, and let the outcome be the outcome.
    
    None of them, at the end of their life, had any reason to hate themselves for having failed to be alive in the the time of their living. May their tribe increase!
88. Schoodic Wave — Acadia National Park, Bar Harbor, ME, October 2, 2008 — How do we know that what we think is so is actually so—around the table and across the board? How do we know that what we value is actually valuable? That what we hold to be important is worth our time?
    
    How do we evaluate our values, our perspective, our position? What makes us think we are right? Who are the authorities we look to to confirm us in the views we hold dear?
    
    And what does our behavior declare to be important in spite of our words, and protests, to the contrary? Why do we say one thing and act in ways which contradict what we say?
    
    Who is in charge here? Who is guiding our boat on its path through the sea? Who are we kidding?
    
    And why do we have to kid ourselves? Why don’t we listen to ourselves? Let ourselves tell us what is important, instead of sabotaging us in a thousand ways in an attempt to get our attention and have us align ourselves with its aims and interests?
    
    It wouldn’t hurt to think about these things from time to time.
89. Great Blue Heron in Flight 03 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, September 18, 2013 — We need to say what we need to hear—so we have to start talking, from the heart, of things that need to be said/heard.
    
    And we don’t know what they are.
    
    So we have to start talking—and listening—deeper than usual. Asking questions that beg to be asked, that no one is asking. Saying things that no one has said before. Playing with ideas, and opposites, and contraries, and polarities, and wild notions.
    
    Risking blasphemy. And censure. Rocking boats. Making waves. Allowing one thought to lead us to another. Manufacturing amazement by talking (or writing) of unheard of things.
    
    We have no idea of what depths we are capable of—of what depths we contain—until we start swimming in the sea of ideas we generate by starting to talk, or write, with nothing in mind, listening for what needs to be said.
    
    It is like conversing with invisible friends. Them talking to you through you. Waking you up to more than meets the eye, waiting for you to collaborate with them in living the life that remains to be lived.
    
    And you thought you knew everything, and that your life was boring, and you were at a dead end, with only hopelessness to keep you company.
    
    Ah, the places you’ll go! Even yet!
90. Carolina Lakes 02 HDR — Lake Haigler, Anne Close Springs Greenway, Fort Mill, SC, September 23, 2013 — We are what we seek. Want to know what you need to become? Look at what you find to be attractive in other people.
    
    The people you fall in love with possess the qualities and characteristics that are struggling to come to life in you. You assist their development by shifting your attention from the person you are orbiting around to bringing forth in yourself the traits you admire in him or her.
    
    We see ourselves in other people—particularly those who are emotionally charged for us. They stand before us as mirrors reflecting us back to us. The things we admire in others are latent in ourselves. The things we detest in others are hiding out in us.
    
    Want to know who you are? Take a look at who you love, and who you hate. Then get to work deciding what to do about you!
91. Faires-Colthrap Cabin 01 — Anne Close Springs Greenway, Fort Mill, SC, September 23, 2013 — Everything is grist for the mill. Everything is exactly the thing required at exactly the time required to wake us up, call us forth, grow us up, provide us with the work we need to be who we are.
    
    We say yes to it, or no. And that tells the tale.
92. White Heron 03 — Lake Daniels, Greensboro, NC, September 12, 2013 — We create the environment in which we live by the quality of our participation in our life—by the degree of our CONSCIOUS participation in our life.
    
    Being conscious is the way of collaborating with the unconscious. The more consciously we live, the more aligned with the unconscious we are.
    
    The more conscious we are, the more unconscious we are, in that we find ourselves doing things for no reason, that we don’t understand.
    
    We participate in the production of our own life. We create the karma, the environment, the momentum and direction that brings us forth, or not.
    
    We generate karma, good or bad, by the quality of our participation in our life—by the degree of consciousness with which we live our life.
    
    There is that which is working to bring us forth—which is striving to elicit from us the response required to be who we are.
    
    There is that which endeavors to secure our cooperation, collaboration, participation in the production of the life we are called to live.
    
    Our conscious, deliberate, intentional, willful cooperation is essential. It all hangs on our saying YES! to the life that is our life to live. We have veto power over the gods.
    
    This is the meaning of “Thy will, not mine, be done.” We hand ourselves over to that which knows more than we know, and trust ourselves to it, often against our will.
    
    We cooperate with the process of being alive, of bringing forth who we are within the life we are living. We do not direct it, manage it, control it. We say yes to it, or no.
    
    Our role is to be responsive collaborators, living in relationship with the heart, the core, the ground of life and being, to assist what needs to happen in each situation as it arises—with the gifts that are, the genius that is, ours to offer. And see where it goes.
93. CSX 3011 01 — Waxhaw, NC, September 24, 2013 — Jesus said, “If you want to be my disciple, you have to pick up your cross daily, and follow me by listening to what resonates with you and allowing your spirit, which is like the wind blowing where it will, to carry you down paths with your name on them, which you would never think could possibly have your name on them because they don’t jive with your idea for your own life, and so, you have to lay what you think, expect, hope, desire, dream of and want for yourself aside in a ‘Thy will, not mine, be done’ kind of way in order to keep pace with your heart and your spirit because you never know what they are going to ask of you next, so you have to be light on your feet and sit loose in the saddle because your life will take some turns too sharp, or too subtle, to see if you have your nose buried in some book about how to do it—even the Bible—so you have to trust yourself to know what’s what even when you have no idea of what you’re doing, or what to do next, or where you’re going, or why you are on this path which can’t possibly have your name on it—understanding that is exactly what faith is: Trusting yourself to know what is right for you when Those Who Know Best And Must Be Pleased And Love To Parade Around As Though They Are Religious Authorities And God’s Own Spokespersons are telling you you are going straight to hell, and demanding that you explain to them what you think you are doing, even as you leave the dead to bury the dead and shake the dust off your sandals when you walk away from them because your right hand doesn’t know what your left hand is doing, and you know you have to be cool with not knowing what you are doing in following me by listening to your own heart and doing what resonates with you whether anybody understands and supports you and offers the right kind of help in the right kind of way, all your life long, or not, and if you can dig this, you can put your shovel down, and start dancing to the music of your own soul even though there is a cross included called ‘Dealing with people who don’t have a clue about what you are doing and think they know everything.’ Don’t let them stop you, or even slow you down.”
    
    Or words to that effect.
94. Haigler Loop Trail 01 — Anne Close Springs Greenway, Fort Mill, SC, September 23, 2013 — The cross we bear daily is the weight of our own life, the agony of making our own decisions, of choosing our own path, of being responsible for seeing, hearing and understanding what is happening in each situation as it arises, and knowing what needs to happen, and summoning the courage to do what needs to be done, and doing it with the skills, talents, gifts and genius that is ours to share, without being sure of any of it, but trusting ourselves to our best sense of what is called for, and stepping into the void, and seeing if we fly.
    
    Heroes are those who do what they sense needs to be done in the privacy of their own life and in the moment of their living, without anyone to urge them on and the united chorus of the masses ringing in their ears: “What do you think you are doing? Get back in line! Mind your own business! Don’t make waves! Who do you think you are? Sit down! Shut up! Do as you are told!”
    
    Rosa Parks takes her seat. HER seat. And invites us to take up our cross daily and do it in our moments like we see her doing it in hers.
    
    Now, you’re talking! That’s the way to do it! Not knowing what you’re doing, but doing what you know must be done!
95. Tricolored Heron Landing — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, August 18, 2013 — James Hollis said, “The primary task of the second half of life is the recovery of personal authority, namely, to discern what is true for oneself and find the courage to live it.”
    
    We live to free ourselves from the constraints and compulsions that have dogged our heels throughout the first half of our life, and claim our right to make our own mistakes, decisions and choices—asserting our authority to be who we are, where we are, when we are, how we are, why we are, what we are.
    
    In the second half of life, we aim for freedom of movement—the freedom to perceive and respond appropriately to the here and now of our living, without being constrained or compelled to a particular course of action based on something not here, not now, but a ghost from the past, or a specter from the future, interfering with our life, keeping us from being alive and open to what needs to be done and needs us to do it, right here, right now.
    
    Living this moment as a servant of what is called for in this moment—and doing it again in each moment following this one—and deciding for ourselves what is being asked of us and what constitutes an appropriate response, without wondering what anyone would have us see or do instead, and without having to collect any permission slips before following our instincts and listening to our intuition—this is our calling. May we live to do right by in in the time left for living!
96. White Heron 04 — Cane Creek Lake, Lancaster County, SC, September 16, 2013 — When we know what we know, we know we can trust ourselves to know what needs to be done in the situation as it arises, without having to think about it or reason it out.
    
    The knowing that is true knowing is instinctive, intuitive. When we get out of the way, we find ourselves doing something, saying something, without having any idea that that was the thing to do, to say.
    
    When we get out of the way, we are amazed at our ability to respond appropriately to the situation without knowing what to do or say, and not knowing that we even have the capacity, the capability, of being what the situation needs. We surprise ourselves, and don’t know where any of it comes from.
    
    Whenever I’m in a situation, or can anticipate a situation, where I have no idea what to do or what should be done, I tell myself, “I’ll know what to do when I find myself doing it,” and quit stewing over what to do—quit trying to figure out beforehand what is completely beyond me. I trust myself to come up with the solution when I think there is no solution.
    
    This is the kind of knowing to strive for—by working to get out of the way.
    
    About 2,500 years ago, Lao-tzu, or someone equally astute, said (In chapter 20 of Tao te Ching):
    
    Other people have what they need–
    I alone possess nothing.
    I alone drift about
    like someone without a home.
    I am like an idiot, my mind is so empty.
    
    Other people are bright–
    I alone am dark.
    Other people are sharp–
    I alone am dull.
    Other people have a purpose–
    I alone don’t know.
    I drift like a wave on the ocean.
    I blow about as aimless as the wind.
    
    I am different from ordinary people.
    
    That’s what knowing what we know will do for us. If you are going to know anything, know what you already know!
97. Wildcat Falls 01 — Cherokee Foothills Scenic Hwy, Greenville County, SC, September 26, 2013 — Faith has nothing to do with what we believe. It is exclusively limited to what we trust ourselves to—to what has our allegiance, loyalty, troth, and fidelity.
    
    Trust yourself to know what is good for you and what is not, to know what is right for you and what is wrong, to know what is life for you and what is death, to know where you belong and where you have no business being.
    
    No one knows what is right for us but us. We are all alone in the search for our LIFE, OUR LIFE. No one can find our LIFE, or live it, for us.
    
    No one can tell us which LIFE is our LIFE to live. We have to do the work ourselves. We have to trust ourselves to know what is LIFE for us.
    
    We have to bring forth our LIFE—the life that is our life to live—within the life we are living—the life we find waiting when we are born.
    
    We know when we are alive and when we are dead (though we be 98.6 and breathing). We can trust ourselves to know that—to know our LIFE from our other life.
    
    Our LIFE is what brings us to life, what infuses us with life, what energizes us and sends us forth to LIVE. Our other life supports our LIFE
    
    Our other life enables us to pay the bills. Our LIFE enables us to be ALIVE in the deepest, truest, most vital and vibrant sense of the word.
    
    We have to find, align ourselves with, bring forth and serve our LIFE within the context and circumstances of our other life.
    
    This is our work. No one can do it for us. If we do not do it—do not trust ourselves to do it—it will not be done.
    
    This is the hero’s quest, to find our LIFE and live it within the context and circumstances of our other life.
    
    This is the search for the Holy Grail and the Land of Promise and the Spiritual Journey: Finding and living the LIFE that is LIFE for us.
    
    We cannot trust ourselves to—have faith in—anyone else to know what is right for us, to tell us which life is our life to live. We look to ourselves for guidance. We listen to ourselves for direction. We trust ourselves to find the way with our name on it.
    
    Anyone who would tell us that we don’t know what we are doing, that we cannot trust ourselves, is like Peter standing before Jesus saying, “Surely this must not happen to you!” And deserves to be told, “Get thee behind me Satan! For you are not on the side of God but of Those Who Think They Know But Don’t Have A Clue Because All They Know Is What Someone Told Them!”
98. Graffiti Rock 01 HDR — Greenville County, SC, September 26, 2013 — I have enough to worry about, so I’m drawing a line. I’m not going to meet any more people because I don’t want to worry about remembering their names. I’m not going to get a pet because I don’t want to worry about it’s bladder and bowel movement needs (or it’s Vet needs, or its diet needs, etc.). I’m not going to buy a vacation house because who thinks having a house is a vacation? This is it for me. No additional worries until some of the current ones disappear.
99. Foothills 02, Caesar’s Head State Park (“Caesar” is a corruption of the Cherokee word for “chief”—an unforested peak in the park resembles the profile of a “Chief’s Head”), SC, September 26, 2013 —  Trials and ordeals, kid. Trials and ordeals. Everything hangs on how we view, think of, receive and deal with our trials and ordeals. Without our trials and ordeals we would be adrift on some placid sea in some dreadful wonderland with nothing but rainbows and white picket fences and Big Rock Candy Mountains as far as the eye can see. Sounds like some childhood dream of heaven, without the choir practices with angelic accompaniment.
    
    Trials and ordeals are the ticket to authentic life—to knowing what we are made of because we’ve had to rely on it, had to pull it forth, to manage our life in the wake of being run over, or run through, or both.
    
    But, too often, we refuse the invitation to square off with our trials and ordeals and see what they can show us about who we are. Too often, we sit passively with our hands in our lap, accepting what the Lord in his infinite wisdom has seen fit to deliver unto us, faithfully failing to raise objection, or have it out with God and the Devil and whomever else might be roaming through our life to pillage and plunder at will.
    
    Passive “acceptance” is far from active engagement—the “voluntary participation” (Joseph Campbell) in our life that is essential to bringing life to life there. Saying “YES!” to life—to the full experience of being alive—requires us to see trials and ordeals as initiation rites for the next step in our development, in our growth (which is always “growing up”), on the path to Full Humanbeinghood and a well-deserved place in the ranks of the species.
    
    Our trials and tribulations pull us forth. “It took the Cyclops to bring out the hero in Ulysses” (Joseph Campbell).
100. Shadows 01 BW — Scotland Avenue Fence, Indian Land, SC, September 28, 2013 — We are here, as the carriers of consciousness, to collaborate with Psyche/soul (“Psyche” is the Greek word for “soul”) in living the life that is ours to live in the time left for living.
     
     Psyche/soul doesn’t have all of the answers, and is far from being all grown up itself. We are not the lacky, the handmaiden, of Psyche/soul, without an intelligent thing to say or a savvy word to add to the conversation.
     
     We grow up together, human with Psyche/soul, maturing together in the work of our joint life within the hard world of space and time.
     
     We have veto power. We can override and instinct or an intuition. Bite our tongue. Finesse our way past obstacles in a way that might leave Psyche/soul speechless. We have our contribution to make to the soup we stir together with the Unconscious side of ourselves.
     
     It’s a partnership, a palhood, a counsel of sojourners—visible and invisible—on our way through the trials and ordeals of physical existence, from one another and from the experience of life, how to do it.
     
     We are—each of us is—a mutually dependent collection of perspectives, needs, interests, urges, appetites, memories, feelings, desires, gifts, abilities, skills… with the joint task of working together for the good of the whole, consciousness and unconsciousness coming together to bless two worlds, visible and invisible.
     
     The opportunity to participate in that undertaking should be enough to propel us all out of bed each morning!
101. Used in Short Talks On Contradictions, etc., Carolina Lakes 03 — Lake Haigler, Anne Close Springs Greenway, Fort Mill, SC, September 23, 2013 — The Cyclops grabs us again by the neck and body slams us until he can no longer raise us off the mat.
     
     And we rag-doll it through to the bell, thinking we are earning merit that will be repaid aplenty in the eternal habitations, and never once thinking that we may be missing some crucial aspect of life by not asking the questions that beg to be asked, or working through the contradictions and contraries that swirl about demanding resolution, or getting to the bottom of what is being asked of us—being called forth from within us in response to the demand that we rise to this occasion and do it the honor of making of it what we can, and developing the skills required to meet the next manifestation of a bigger, meaner, Cyclops drooling at the idea of having its way with us when its turn comes.
     
     No one grows up without facing up to her, to his, trials and ordeals. No one wakes up without growing up. And no one is alive without being awake and aware.
     
     Trials and ordeals, kid. Trials and ordeals are the way of the hero’s journey.
     
     Or, to put it another way, the path to the Land of Promise, the Kingdom of God, Nirvana, Heaven and the Holy Grail winds through the heart of Gethsemane and across the face of Golgotha.
     
     The price of resurrection—new life—is dying the right kind of death.
102. Silver Lake 03 — Ocracoke Island, Cape Hatteras National Seasore, NC, November 1, 2009 — James Hollis said, “So many adults, many of them highly accomplished in the outer world, suffer from a lack of permission to really be themselves, to fee what they really feel, desire what they really desire, and strive for the life that really wishes to be expressed through them” (in Hauntings: Dispelling The Ghosts Who Run Our Lives).
     
     We are in our own hands. It is our place to develop our awareness and resolve, and come to our aid when Those Who Know Best And Must Be Pleased presume to tell us what to do—as though they know better than we do about what is right for us.
     
     We have to defend our right to our own life with courage, determination, resiliency, consistency and good humor. If a mistake is to be made, it is OUR’s to make, and does not belong to some intrusive Other calling out directions from the stands.
103. Great Blue Heron in Flight 05 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, September 16, 2013 — Articulating the problem clarifies the problem. Once we see the problem, the solution—which includes recognizing and coming to terms with the fact that there is no solution—becomes obvious.
     
     Carl Jung said, “None of the real problems in our life can be solved, only out-grown,” or words to that effect. Growing up is the solution to all of our problems today.
     
     We facilitate the process of growing up by being clear about what our problems are. Nothing promotes clarity like articulation.
     
     We have to say what it feels like to be who we are, where we are, when we are, how we are, why we are… We have to say what is happening, and what we are doing about it, and how well that is working, and what we can imagine doing that we are not doing.
     
     We have to say it to those who can understand what we are saying without trying to take over the controls of our life by telling us what to do or what we should have done—without condemning, converting, advising, directing—or commandeering the conversation away from us and our problem and steering it to them and their problem.
     
     We have to talk to those who know how to listen. Easier said than done but. That just means we have to be paying attention, noting the people who know now to listen, and spending most of our time talking with them.
     
     We need to be forming our communities of innocence, our council—or circle—of elders (those with enough life experience to know more than what someone else has told them). We need to be finding the people we can talk to about the things that matter, and talking to them.
     
     If you think there is something more important than the right kind of conversation for finding our way in the life we are living and bringing forth there the life that is ours to live, you aren’t old enough to be included in a circle of elders, and need to become more experienced and savvy in order to be worth talking to.
104. The Bog Garden is at the corner of Hobbs Road and Starmount Drive — across Hobbs Road to the east from the Bicentennial Garden. Hobbs road is the western boundary of the Shops At Friendly. Proceeding west on Friendly Ave., you would pass the Shops at Friendly and turn right (north) onto Hobbs Road. Go straight through the traffic signal at the intersection of Hobbs and Northline Ave. and turn right at the next street which would be Starmount Drive. It’s about a 12 acre natural habitat park and about 6 acres of it is Benjamin Lake. A great place to hang out with a camera.
     
     Back up the way a bit, I said in one of these vignettes, “I understand our mule to be that which carries us through life and gets us where we are going. It is what gives us life and provides us with the wherewithal to get up and get back in the game. It is our incentive, our motivation, our joy of life, living and being alive. Our mule is our heart’s true love.
     
     Know what your mule is. Ride it.”

---

 [JD1]Sent to Helen Wolff

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June 15, 2013 – August 01, 2013

1. Our life is like a dream which wakes us up to the life we are called to live—if we look at it with eyes that see. We read our life—interpret our life, what is happening in our life, what we are doing about it—as though it were a dream, that it may show us what there is to see.
   
   We don’t have to do anything more than see what we are doing.
   
   Seeing what we are doing transforms what is done, and aligns us with the soul’s way of doing.
   
   All roads lead to the center, and we can start that journey anywhere, at any time, simply by being conscious of where we are and what we are doing.
   
   Practice being conscious by looking at something—anything—until you see it. Look at it from all sides. What associations come to mind?
   
   The object or image becomes your guide to awareness, to consciousness, to seeing into you as you look at the object or image.
   
   When we see anything for what it is, we see ourselves. Everything mirrors us to us when we have eyes to see.
   
   When we see ourselves, we adjust ourselves, we shift ourselves, we align ourselves with the soul’s way of being/doing.
   
2. Magnolia 02 — Greensboro, NC, June 2013 — How much time do we spend not being where we are?
   
   How much time do we spend being where we are?
   
   What is it about where we are that makes it necessary, and easy, to not be there?
   
   What is it about where we are that makes it necessary, and easy, to be there?
   
   What can we do to reduce the time spent in the places where we are not being where we are, and increase the amount of time spent in the places where we are being where we are?
3. Mallard Light — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, June 2013 — We must bear the burden of our choices and actions—consciously, with compassion. Everything depends on it.
   
   We face courageously this present moment, and step confidently, boldly, into our future, to choose and to do, again and again.
   
   We can do that only in the strength of our willingness to stand by ourselves and bear consciously and compassionately the outcomes of our choices and actions.
   
   We have to have the freedom to live our life as we determine our life needs to be lived in each situation as it arises—and the freedom to bear well the outcomes, no matter what they may be.
   
   Be not afraid to have yourself look you in the eye. Be not afraid that yourself will turn away, refuse to extend a compassionate hand and a warm embrace, and ban you forever to the merciless winds of the frozen tundra.
   
   Be free of that fear, and face together what must be faced, bearing together the burden of your choices and actions—consciously, with compassion. Everything depends on it.
4. Summer Days Panorama 01 — Blue Ridge Parkway near Boone, NC, June 11, 2013 — If you aren’t challenging the way people think, you are thinking the way people think.
   
   If Gay people hadn’t challenged the way people thought about Gay people, people would still be thinking the way they thought about Gay people.
   
   If Black people hadn’t challenged the way people thought about Black people, people would still be thinking the way they thought about Black people.
   
   If Female people hadn’t challenged the way people thought about Female people, people would still be thinking the way they thought about Female people.
   
   Challenging the way people think begins with challenging the way you think. It begins with thinking about your thinking. It begins with thinking again about the things you think about and asking hard questions about your fundamental assumptions about what is good, about what is important, about how you know what you think you know.
   
   Put everything on the table and walk around the table. What is an inference and what is a fact? What is hearsay? What is opinion? What is a supposition? Conjecture? Theory? Belief?
   
   Get to the bottom of what you think. When did you start thinking this way? Where does your thinking originate? Why do you think the way you think and not some other way instead? What makes you think the way you think is the way to think? Who thinks like you do? Who doesn’t think like you do? What makes you think like the people who think like you do? What keeps you from thinking like the people who don’t think like you think?
   
   If you don’t challenge the way you think, you’ll continue to think the way you think.
   
   
   If you think the way you think is perfectly fine and that everyone ought to think the way you think, look at your life.
5. Get in there and do your thing—and don’t keep score, and don’t worry about the outcome!
6. Groundhog Mountain Picnic Tables 02 — Blue Ridge Parkway near Meadows of Dan, VA, January 10, 2013 — We belong to two worlds. The first world is the invisible world which sent us out on our mission “to boldly go where no one has gone before,” and plopped us into the second world—the world of normal, apparent, physical reality.
   
   We think the second world is the only world because it is the conscious world, the world of which we are conscious. We see it, hear it, touch it, taste it, smell it. It is the Real world.
   
   The first world is unconscious because we are not conscious of it. It is not apparent to our senses and therefore, to our way of thinking, “Imaginary,” that is, Not Real.
   
   All primal peoples understood the second world—the world of physical reality—to be grounded in and founded upon the first world. They had it right. The Real world is the unseen world which gives the world of our senses it’s apparent reality.
   
   But.
   
   That’s a hard sell these days. “Seeing is believing.” So, okay, here’s a test to validate the world of invisible reality: “Believing is seeing.” Start believing the invisible world is Real, and start acting as though it is. See for yourself.
   
   Here’s how. See yourself to be on a mission to the physical universe. You have come to explore physical existence and to establish connections between the worlds—to create a synthesis of the polarities of visible/invisible, real/imaginary, true/false, actual/illusory—to integrate the opposites and form a third world where the first two worlds are united into one complete whole.
   
   You are the whole between worlds. The two worlds come together in you. You are the extension of both worlds into the other—the threshold of one world into the other. You make each real to the other.
   
   The next time you come upon a problem in this world and you wonder what you are going to do and think it is yours to solve alone, remember your connection with the invisible world and trust yourself to it, to the world of your origin, and ask for its help and guidance in finding the way forward through the problems of life in this world. And see what happens.
   
   The catch is you have to really mean it. You have to really trust yourself to the invisible world and you have to really follow its guidance—and forget about working things to your advantage and gain. You have to be willing to see what happens, to see where it goes.
   
   This is the adventure, the journey, of life.
7. Summer Days 05 — Blue Ridge Parkway near Blowing Rock, NC, May 21, 2013 — There are five elements to a good photograph: Exposure, Focus, Subject, Composition, and Lighting. You need a camera that will let you control shutter speed and rate (how many frames per second), aperture, ISO, and focus. And the two most important elements of a photograph are your feet for getting you out of the house and into a scene. Play around until you get all of these aspects like you like them, and that’s all there is to it.
8. Watch Out Little Mouse! — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 6, 2013 — Where you place the tripod, or where you stand, squat, sit or lie with camera in hand, tells the tale. And what determines that? How do you know where to put the camera? You cannot think your way there! You have to feel it to know.
   
   Waking up is getting the feeling back into our life.
   
   Getting the feeling back into our life requires us to trust ourselves to what we do not know.
   
   When we trust ourselves to what we do not know, we get a life that is different from the one we would have if we lived in light of the advantages, calculated every step in terms of what’s in it for us and what we stand to gain and lose, figured the pros and cons, and ran a cost/benefit analysis before doing anything.
   
   Which life is the best life? You have to feel it to know.
9. Olena Puckett Cabin 01 — Blue Ridge Parkway near Meadows of Dan, VA, June 10, 2013 — We have a life to discover. This is our New World. We all have the life we fell into upon graduation from high school or college—the life that pays the bills, and votes, and serves on jury duty, gets the pets to the vet and fulfills the responsibilities. This is the Old World.
   
   The New World is waiting to be discovered. It is our place to seek new shores—to find the life that is our life to live within the life we are living.
   
   We get hints in nighttime dreams and daytime fantasies. Yesterday, as I was coming out of my after lunch nap (One of the best things I do for me), I had a vision that had impact. I was conscious and this was not a dream. I was piloting a space shuttle as it came out of orbit and the on board computer indicated a problem with the spacecraft and said the pilot capsule would eject in 5 seconds (I was the only one on board). I had 5 seconds to override the computer. I chose not to, was ejected and parachuted safely to earth, landing in a remote forest and now had the problem of finding my way to civilization.
   
   I read this as a clear call to trust myself to the flow of my life and to not override, or interfere with, how things are unfolding—to stay out of the way. I’ll have work to do but have every reason to believe that I can trust myself to invisible hands to help me in the work of discovering the New World.
   
   We are on a journey to the center of ourselves, to the core of who we are, of what is of essential value—without a guidebook or a map or directions. And can trust ourselves to invisible hands to guide and help us along the way.
   
   The journey to the New World is the thrill of a lifetime. Saddle up your mule and come along!
10. Goshen Creek 12 — Blue Ridge Parkway near Boone, NC, June 11, 2013 — It takes concentration and focus to be conscious, to wake up. You can’t take a pill. Or read a book. You have to practice. Regularly. Constantly. Your life is your practice.
    
    Practice seeing what you look at. With eyes of compassion. You have looked at yourself in some mirror all of your life. How much of you have you seen? How much of you have you seen with eyes of compassion?
    
    It is possible to see the Other World, the First World, through This World, the Second World.
    
    Parker Palmer talks about “the thin places” where the First World is easily accessed. These are the sacred places, the holy places, the places to which people of all religions make annual pilgrimages. Tunnel View, Schwabacher Landing, Vermillion Lakes, Maroon Bells…
    
    But you don’t have to make a long haul to find a thin place—you only have to open your eyes. You pass by them, walk through them, every day. Notice them next time.
    
    Wake up to you. Wake up to the First World shinning through the Second World. To your LIFE struggling to come to life in the life you are living. To more than meets the eye.
    
    You have the rest of your life to become who you are, and you don’ think your way there. You don’t think you up. You get out of the way. You allow yourself to be surprised. To show you things you didn’t know you were capable of. To show you you.
    
    To be awake is to be amazed. To be awake is to be alive. To be alive is to be amazed. Stunned by wonder. Seeing everything for the first time, every time.
11. Golden Ragwort Panorama — Roan Mountain Highlands, Carver’s Gap, TN, June 19, 2013 — Seeing is a function of looking. What we see depends on how we look, what we look at, what we look for. What we see depends upon what we are willing to be shown.
    
    What we see depends on how inquisitive we are, how curious we are, how interested we are in what lies beyond what we think we know.
    
    You can’t show some people anything they haven’t already seen.
    
    Here’s your homework: 1) Look for something you have never seen. 2) Look for something you have never seen about something you have already seen.
    
    This is your daily assignment for the rest of your life.
12. Approaching Jane Bald 01 — Roan Mountain Highlands, Carver’s Gap, TN, June 19, 2013 — You have to start somewhere. I recommend that you start with—you.
    
    Start with what you know and what you need to know, and what you need to know it.
    
    Start with your own sense of balance, of stability, of security and safety. With your own sense of your limits. With what is important to you—with what has value to you.
    
    You didn’t get here by accident, to these words on that computer screen. You’re no dummy. You may have stumbled your way from there (wherever you started) to here, but here you are. You may have fallen flat a few times, run into walls and off cliffs, but here you are. You cannot deny that you are here and that you did it.
    
    An aside beckons. The church of our experience has told us “Jesus saves.” It’s all about Jesus saving us. We are nothing, worse than nothing, sinfully disgusting and hopeless to the nines (whatever they are), until Jesus comes along, dies the death we deserve and ushers us straight past the guards to Glory Land. Yea Jesus! Let’s have a round of applause!
    
    Wait. The church keeps talking. The church tells us we have to “receive Jesus into our hearts.” What? Jesus needs an invitation? Jesus can get us into the Eternal Habitations, but he can’t get into our hearts? He stands at the door and knocks? But we have to open the door? We have to believe all that we have been told about Jesus is true for it to be true? It isn’t effective until we believe? WE hold the cards?
    
    We save ourselves. But the church cannot allow that. If it gets out that we are responsible for our own salvation, what becomes of the church hierarchy? Who pays the salaries, and the mortgages on all the buildings, and the notes on the organs? So the church says we can’t even believe without the Holy Spirit’s help.
    
    It goes straight downhill from here until nobody knows where the line lies between what we do and what we have to have done for us, but we are never off the hook. We are going to hell if we don’t believe but we can’t believe without the Holy Spirit’s help, and we are left dangling in some murky wasteland, left with “taking it on faith” that we cannot do what cannot be done without our willing engagement and participation which we can’t do without the Holy Spirit enabling us to “take it on faith.”
    
    You can do what you want to with all of this, but I say we save ourselves by opening ourselves to the truth of our own experience and trusting ourselves to find the way to the threshold between worlds by relying on the hands that come to help us when we start walking.
    
    You got yourself to these words on this computer screen and you didn’t do it alone. That’s the way it is going to be the rest of the way. You do the work and you don’t do it alone. And my place in all of this is to tell you what you already know, and your place is to take what you find helpful and to leave the rest behind.
13. Used in Short Talks on Contradiction, etc., Rhododendron Fence HDR 01 — Roan Mountain Highlands, Carver’s Gap, TN, June 19, 2013 — I’m here to help connect you with your life, with your work. These are one thing. Your life is your work, your work is your life—lived in the service of your gifts, talents, interests, joy, love, enthusiasm, delight, etc. All of which may have little to do with your job—with what you do to pay the bills.
    
    Finding a job is one thing, finding your work and connecting with your life (Or finding your life and connecting with your work) is another.
    
    People think that if we find a job, our life will take care of itself. The culture’s idea of life is not our life’s idea of life. The culture thinks if we do what we are supposed to do (support the economy) we will be content, because we are supposed to be content if we do what we are supposed to, and if we are not content it is because we are not doing what we are supposed to do.
    
    So I’m here to connect you with your life, and I cannot do it without your full cooperation and participation.
    
    I knew a guy who said he wanted my help in getting off drugs, and the first thing he wanted to know was why he should get off drugs. I told him I was not going to be any help to him, to come back and see me when he knew he had to be drug free.
    
    If the first thing you want to know is why you should worry about being connected with your life, I’m not going to be any help to you. Come back when you know it’s your life or The Void.
    
    Your full cooperation and participation mean you understand it is your life, or your death, that is at stake here, and I am speaking metaphorically, symbolically, not literally. You can be 98.6 and breathing on the physical level, and be deader than dead on the emotional/spiritual level.
    
    We aren’t fooling around here and there is no time to waste. And nothing can be forced or hurried.
    
    This gets us to the place of paradox and contradiction as a part of the basic structure of life. More than one thing can be true at the same time. I want to be the best father in all the world and I don’t want to be a father at all. Both things are true at once. We live within the tension of our polarities. We cannot think in terms of erasing one end (The bad end) in favor of the other (The good end).
    
    This is another thing. Bad is good and good is bad. Things are not one way only. A little sugar is good, too much is bad. So, is sugar good or bad? The right kind of love is good, the wrong kind is bad. Is love good or bad? Life is like that.
    
    Don’t think your life is a matter of doing what someone tells you to do. You cannot live your life keeping the rules, following directions and stepping in the black footprints. Your life is up to you. You make the calls. You feel your way along. We’ll get back to that later.
14. Roan Mountain Panorama 01— Carver’s Gap, TN, June 19, 2013 — When we feel our way toward the life that is ours to live—the work that is ours to do—it is not emotions that are stirred but values. We feel our way to that which has value for us. We know what that is because it resonates with us, it speaks to us, it clicks with us.
    
    We know what is of central value to us the way we know a forgotten name when we hear it: Not Mary, not Beth, not Joan—Lois!
    
    We may have forgotten the core values upon which the life that is our life to live is based, but when we seek them—when we open ourselves to them—they sing to us and we dance.
    
    What is important to us? How do we know? That’s what I mean when I say, “We feel our way toward that which matters to us—to that which has value to us.”
    
    We may have to step back from all that is supposed to be important in order to hear, see, and understand what is actually important to us. We may need to reflect on our life—the life we have lived—in order to see what values keep shining through, keep revealing themselves as central and always present in the way we have lived.
    
    Values lead us, ground us, send us forth, call us on. Values are the heart and soul of the matter. They are our heart and soul. When we live aligned with heart and soul, we live in ways which express the values that are central to our life—the life that we are called to live in the midst of the life we are living.
    
    Find the values that are at the heart of you and you are on your mule, off on the adventure of your life.
15. Used in Short Talks On Contradiction, etc., Rhododendron Fern 02 — The trails of Rhododendron Gardens, Pisgah National Forest (Across the road and the TN/NC border at Carver’s Gap, TN), Roan Mountain, NC, June 20, 2013 — You have three primary roles in finding your way to the life that is yours to live, the work that is yours to do:
    
    1) You have to be transparent to yourself.
    
    2) You have to bring out your contradictions and polarities, make them apparent, experience them fully and bear the pain of integration and synthesis.
    
    3) You have to get out of the way.
    
    Being transparent to yourself is not kidding yourself, not playing games with yourself, seeing how you are and how you also are, and not trying to be better or different than you are and also are. You have to see you with compassionate eyes. This will show you some contradictions and polarities.
    
    You have to be thoroughly aware of your contradictions and polarities, your paradoxes and ambivalence—without rushing to resolve them, disappear them, deny/ignore them and get them out of the way. You are here to make your contraries conscious—and to bear the pain of that transaction. This is the key to growing up, awareness, enlightenment, realization, nirvana… The right kind of pain is the path to peace.
    
    You don’t want to pay the price of peace. You want to save yourself. You have to save yourself by not trying to save yourself—by not saving yourself. You have to get out of the way with your incessant search for solutions, and answers, and recipes, and happiness ever after. You have to not know what to do and be awash in anguish while you wait on the shift in perspective that perceives the opening.
    
    When the door opens, walk through. Until it opens, wait in the darkness you are sure will never end for the light you are sure is never coming. Get. Out. Of. The. Way.
16. Roan Mountain Flame Azalea 01 — Roan Mountain Highlands at Carver’s Gap, TN, June 19, 2013 — I’m floating the idea of communities of innocence here, which are also communities of innocents.
    
    The communities are themselves innocent, and are composed of members who are innocent, in the sense of having nothing to gain or lose at the expense of anyone else. The communities have nothing a stake in their relationship with their members and the members have nothing at stake in their relationships with each other.
    
    All—communities and members—exist to be helpful with no strings attached. They are innocent in that they have no hidden agendas, or ulterior motives, and nothing up their sleeves.
    
    Communities of innocence, communities of innocents, are transparent to themselves. They see themselves as they are and as they also are, and do not promise more than they are capable of fulfilling.
    
    The communities help by being present for good in the lives of their members. The members help by being present for good in the lives of one another.
    
    They are helpful by seeing, hearing and understanding—by looking, listening and inquiring about the quality of each person’s standing with the life that is his or hers to live, with the work that is hers or his to do—and seeing where the resulting conversation goes.
    
    The communities exist without buildings or overhead, and are only as large as we need them to be—2 or 3, 5 or 7. And they come into being as you call them forth. You find one or two, four or six people who have what it takes for form a community of innocents, a community of innocence, and you sit down with them one at a time or all at once and see what they think about the idea. And see where it goes.
17. Fir Forest 01 — The trails of Rhododendron Gardens, Pisgah National Forest (Across the road and the TN/NC border at Carver’s Gap, TN), Roan Mountain, NC, June 20, 2013 — You owe it to yourself to find out if living toward the life that is your life to live is as ridiculous, absurd, hopeless, useless, futile and foolish as you think it is.
    
    Test it. Give it a good faith effort. See if there is anything to it. To the idea that you have a life that is different from the life you are living—a life that utilizes the best of what you have to offer—a life that actually requires you to believe you have something to offer—a life that pulls you forth, beyond what you think you are capable are, beyond who you think you are, to astound, astonish and amaze you and everyone who thought they knew you.
    
    See if I’m not right when I say there is more to you than meets the eye—and that it is the very thing the world around you needs to wake up and become what it is capable of being.
    
    How about it?
18. Cloudland Viewpoint 01 — Cloudland Trail, Pisgah National Forest (Across the road and the TN/NC border at Carver’s Gap, TN), Roan Mountain, NC, June 20, 2013 — Don’t think it is about finding the Golden Egg and having it made, kicking back, coasting along, sitting on a rainbow, idling away your time, hanging out, sipping cocktails, eating chocolate, lolling poolside, etc.
    
    You have work to do. The work is never done. The work is being you in each situation as it arises all your life long.
    
    There is always more to you than meets the eye. More to you than you can imagine. More to you to be brought forth into the life you are living all your life long.
    
    Stop thinking about stopping, propping your feet up, smoking cigars, playing golf, winning another lottery…
    
    Start thinking about living in the service of your gifts and interests—about aligning your life with the life that needs you to live it—about finding out more of who you are and what you need to do about it each day… Start thinking about what you need to do to be who you are—not who you were yesterday, not who you have always been, but who you are becoming, who you need to be here and now—in each situation as it arises.
    
    Surprise yourself. Live to be amazed. At you. Wonder what’s next. Be eager, excited, thrilled to find out.
19. Goshen Creek 09 — Blue Ridge Parkway near Boone, NC, June 11, 2013 — You’re wasting your time with another book study. How many will it take? You’re putting off the work. You keep standing before two doors. One labeled “Your Life” and the other labeled “Lecture About Your Life,” and choosing to attend the lecture and take notes and talk about it in order to understand what you are to do when you at last open the other door, which you never do because there is always something else to understand.
    
    Here’s one for you: Thinking is not the path to living. Living is the path to living.
    
    Get in there and do your thing and don’t worry about doing it right.
    
    Understanding follows living. Understand?
    
    If you are going to talk about something, talk about your life—about your work to live the life that is yours to live within the life you are living. Articulating your experience helps understand your experience by helping you experience your experience. But first, experience. Then, talk. Talking is no substitute for experiencing.
20. Limbs and Branches — Cloudland Trail, Pisgah National Forest (Across the road and the TN/NC border at Carver’s Gap, TN), Roan Mountain, NC, June 20, 2013 — Here’s all the instruction you need for the rest of your life: Replace anxiety with curiosity.
21. Appalachian Trail on Roan Mountain — Roan Mountain Highlands at Carver’s Gap, TN, June 19, 2013 — You cannot think your way into the life that is your life to live. You have to live your way there.
    
    You have to trust yourself to the drift of your life and see where it takes you. You are a cork on the water in the current of your life. You don’t know enough to know what you are doing or where you are going, so you sense what is of value in the here and now of your living and serve that—and see where it goes.
    
    The current of your life is recognized, is felt, by the degree of value something has for you. It’s the hot and cold game of childhood, with you sensing what is important and what is not, what has life about it and what is a cold, black, hole.
    
    Go with life. Your life comes to life as you live toward life. It’s all quite magical and supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. Mary Poppins was completely into it.
22. Used in Short Talks on Contradiction, etc., Day Hiker on the AT — Roan Mountain Highlands at Carver’s Gap, TN, June 19, 2013 — It’s what we do that wakes us up—and what is done to us—and what we see being done around us.
    
    Action confronts us with contradiction. We see, through the work to reconcile, integrate, synthesize, opposites. Polarities are harmonizing.
    
    The blindest people are the ones who see most clearly. Those Who Know Best And Must Be Pleased Or Else don’t know a thing. You can’t tell them anything. They cannot be awakened. Yell at them—they cannot hear. They are standing in their own way. What they see keeps them from seeing. What they know keeps them from knowing. Shake the dust off your sandals, and leave the dead to bury the dead, and walk on.
    
    If your contradictions don’t wake you up, you can’t be waked up. If you think disappearing/denying your contradictions is the path to light, you will live forever in deep darkness.
    
    Pay attention to what you do—to what is done to you—to what you see being done around you. Square that with how things ought to be done. Sit down with what cannot be squared—with the incompatibilities—and see what it has—what they have—to show you. About you, about your life, about life, about the way things are.
    
    Enter the struggle of reconciliation, integration, synthesis. Bear the pain. It will wake you up. Against your will. It will be great. You will love it. And hate it.
    
    “And bit by bit/upon our pillow/comes wisdom to us/by the awful grace of God.” – Aeschylus
23. Price Lake Laurel HDR — Julian Price Memorial Park, Blue Ridge Parkway near Blowing Rock, NC, June 21, 2013 — Live with your arms open to your life—the life that is and the life that is to be (the one that is calling you to live it, waiting for you to live it—the one with your name on it—the one that no one but you can live).
    
    Live to see what you can do with the time left for living.
    
    Live to find out what you are capable of. Don’t die not knowing if you could do the thing you are afraid you might not be able to do.
    
    Climb up on your mule and say, “Let’s go! Show me what you got.” And hang on for the ride of your life.
24. Shaped by Time and Light 01 — Along the trails of Pisgah National Forest (Across the road and the TN/NC border at Carver’s Gap, TN), Roan Mountain, NC, June 20, 2013 — Saying what needs to be said is a step on the way to doing what needs to be done. We don’t do what needs to be done because we are not free to say what needs to be said.
    
    Saying is seeing. Seeing is doing.
    
    When we work to articulate what needs to be said—what is trying to be said—what is dying to be said—the truth is unveiled before our eyes.
    
    Articulation is a form of sculpture. We shape truth to conform to our perception of truth through the act of saying how it is with us. When we settle for saying what we are supposed to say—repeating the blah-blah-yada of yesterday and all days prior to this one—we perpetuate the lie of corporate living.
    
    Then we see like our family sees, like our circle of friends sees, like our church sees, like the primary group that dominates our life sees. And WE don’t see at all.
    
    The work of articulating what WE need to say shows us the truth of our own life, the truth of our own perception.
    
    We have to have a place—find a place—create a place—that allows us to say who we are. This is the work that enables us to do the work that is ours to do.
    
    A community of innocence—of innocents—is a necessary step on the way to the life that is our life to live. It is not composed of any of Those Who Know Best And Must Be Pleased—or even Those Who Must Be Pleased. Just people who know how to listen with compassion and understanding to what we have to say. Viva la Revolucion!
25. Rocks for Sitting — Roan Mountain Highlands at Carver’s Gap, TN, June 19, 2013 — I have lots of bad memories that crowd in to haunt me, and hurl moods at me, which I would prefer not to deal with. These all involve things I have done that I regret doing, or things I didn’t do that I wish I had done. And they go all the way back to the very beginning.
    
    I understand this may be a curse of aging and of retirement. We have more time to ourselves and less that we are having to take care of to consume our attention. So our mind wanders into the realm of regret and remorse.
    
    Joseph Campbell had a similar affliction and spoke of it in one of his lectures.
    
    I’ve found a way to push back the ghosts that may work for you if something similar ever comes your way. It’s worth a try. In the grip of such a memory, I catch myself drifting toward a mood, and say out loud, “I’ll just have to bear it (the memory)! It’s the only thing to do!”
    
    We bear the pain and go on with our life. It’s the only thing to do!
26. Tall Grass — Blue Ridge Parkway near Boone, NC, June 11, 2013 — From my point of view, success is the degree of conscious correlation between who we are and what we do. It is the conscious, deliberate, intentional and willing embrace of ourselves and our life—and the conscious, deliberate, intentional and willing participation of ourselves in our life.
    
    “What I do is me,” said Gerard Manley Hopkins, “for that I came.”
    
    Carl Jung said, “We are who we always have been, and who we will be.” And, “You are what you do, not what you say you’ll do.”
    
    There is a little bit of us tucked away in all we have ever done. The trick is to see that, embrace it and serve it with conscious, willing, intention.
    
    Jung also said, “Anyone who attempts to do both, to adjust to his group and at the same time pursue his individual goal, becomes neurotic.” We cannot be who we are AND make other people happy with us.
    
    And so the need for a small community of innocence, of innocents, which supports and encourages each other in the experience and expression of who each is—for the good of each other and for the good of the whole.
27. Summer Days 06 — Blue Ridge Parkway near Blowing Rock, NC, June 10, 2013 — We cannot live well unconsciously. Living well is no accident—it is the conscious correlation between who we are and what we do.
    
    When we wake up, we wake up to who we are, to how things are, and to what needs to happen—in each situation as it arises.
    
    We have to know who we are—what is “us” and what is “not us.” We have to know what “our thing” is, and do it—as it is called for in each situation as it arises.
    
    This doesn’t mean that we never do anything that is not “our thing.” It means we know when we are doing “our thing” and when we are not.
    
    We have to see ourselves and “our thing” with eyes of compassion. And, we have to be who we are, doing “our thing,” in each situation as it arises with compassion. But. Compassion doesn’t stop us from doing what needs to be done. We do it with compassion, but. We do it.
28. Cloudland Overlook 02 HDR — Along the Cloudland Trail of Pisgah National Forest (Across the road and the TN/NC border at Carver’s Gap, TN), Roan Mountain, NC, June 20, 2013 — Thinking and feeling lead us along, guide us, direct us to the way. We have to work out the right ratio between these potential polarities and have them become colleagues, collaborators, in the service of the life that is our life to live.
    
    Thinking knows what to do by thinking about it, by reasoning it out, intellectually, logically, by running cost/benefit analyses, and calculating the risks, and examining the pros and cons, and computing various scenarios which take into account all the variables and contingencies, and coming up with what is obviously, indisputably, the best course of action.
    
    Feeling knows what to do by feeling it. Feeling is not about emotions, as in being “carried away” by, or “lost” in, depression or anxiety or nostalgia or some mood of the moment. Feeling is our body’s way of recognizing and expressing true value. It is our body’s reaction to what is important. We feel beauty with our body, for instance. We cry or laugh in the presence of truth. We don’t think about doing these things. Our body reacts spontaneously, immediately, unconsciously to what matters to us. We know what is important by the way our body feels about it.
    
    Feeling can drive thinking crazy. Thinking can make feeling want to throw up—or make us actually throw up when we encounter the intractability of logic that is carrying us in what our body knows to be the wrong direction.
    
    We have to make peace between our body and our head, perhaps by feeling in our body what is important, what needs to be done, and giving our head the responsibility for doing it, for getting it done.
    
    My body knows where the scenes are today. My head drives us there. My head doesn’t understand what makes one scene better than another today, or which will be “it” tomorrow, but my body knows. My body can’t be bothered with what is the best route, or the quickest, or the one with the most rest stops. My head is great with the details.
    
    If my head says, “Well we can go this way or that way, they are both equally suited for getting us there,” my body may have a preference. We think and feel our way to the way that is the way for us, here and now, in each here and now that comes along.
    
    We have to work out the right relationship between head and body in order to know what to do and how to do it in order to be who we are and do what is ours to do in the time left for living. There is never a dull moment on the mule.
29. Mabry Mill in the Rain — Blue Ridge Parkway near Meadows of Dan, VA, June 10, 2013 — We have to know where we stop and someone else starts. We have to know what is our business and what is someone else’s business, and we need to tend our business.
    
    A good bit of what is wrong with the world could be quickly reversed if we just knew what our business was and tended it.
    
    Get a group of people together and they talk about everybody’s business but their own.
    
    What is YOUR business? What do you need to help you with it? That’s where your focus needs to be. Not on what other people should be doing or not doing, but on what you need to be doing and what would be helpful to you in order to do it.
    
    What is your business? What help do you need to do it?
30. Cloudland View — Cloudland Trail Viewpoint, Pisgah National Forest, Roan Mountain, NC near Carver’s Gap, TN, June 20, 2013 — You cannot be intimate if you cannot be vulnerable. You cannot be vulnerable if you cannot trust yourself to take care of yourself.
    
    Taking care of yourself does not mean invincibility, immunity. It means resiliency, compassion. There is no resiliency without compassion.
    
    Resiliency without compassion is a rock being gradually worn away by water. Resiliency with compassion is the water giving way to the rock, the evergreen branch giving way to the snow, the earth giving way to the grasses of spring.
    
    You begin to trust yourself when you have compassion for yourself—when you receive yourself well—when you understand yourself as your primary ally, “a very present help in time of trouble.”
    
    You come packed with helpmates. There is a response to every occasion tucked away within you. You are the threshold to an entire invisible world of help without measure.
    
    So, what’s with the adversarial relationship? How come you spend absolutely no time making acquaintances? Why the snobbery? The complete lack of positive regard? The cold shoulder? The refusal to be attentive and receptive to the entreaties of the world within? The staunch determination to do it (that would be your life) alone?
    
    No wonder you can’t be intimate. You can’t be vulnerable. You can’t be helped. You can’t admit your need for help. You are going to will yourself forward. Tough it out. Like a mighty rock against a small stream of water.
    
    You cannot trust yourself to yourself. You cannot trust there is more to you than meets the eye. You cannot relax yourself into your life, or into a relationship with other people.
    
    You have to be alert, constantly vigilant, on your toes, thinking, planning, conniving, controlling… Because it all depends on YOU.
    
    Well. It depends on ALL of you. And THAT depends on your trusting yourself to you—to the rest of you—and seeing where it goes.
31. Green Heron in Flight 02 — The Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, June 27, 2013 — If you are going to know anything, know what is called for in each situation as it arises—and do it if you are able. That’s all there is to it. It is never more difficult than that.
32. Fir Forest 03 — Along the trails of Pisgah National Forest, Roan Mountain, NC, near Carver’s Gap, TN, June 20, 2013 — My point here is to make it clear to you that you have to do the work of connecting yourself with your life—and you can’t do it alone.
    
    The work has nothing to do with what you think or believe. It has everything to do with who you are, what you know and what you do.
    
    To bring this forth, who you are, what you know and what is yours to do, you don’t study, read books, attend lectures, go to seminars and workshops, take classes, earn advanced degrees, interview Gurus and Holy Ones… You say what you have to say in the matter.
    
    You articulate who you are, what you know and what is yours to do. To do that, you have to have people who care enough about you to listen to you in the right way—who know how to listen in the right way.
    
    Those people are hard to come by. That is why more of us are not busy connecting ourselves with our life. But. We can’t let that stop us.
    
    We have to become what we need: the kind of person who knows how to listen. And then we only need to start listening.
    
    We all need a group of 3 – 5 people to talk with—not as a group necessarily. They may not know—and never meet—each other. But they are your community of innocence, of innocents, with nothing at stake in you but their belief that you have everything you need to do what is yours to do, and that it is their place to help you realize that and to tell you to “get in there and do your thing—and don’t keep score or worry about the outcome!”
    
    Your best chance of finding people who know how to listen is to become one, and start listening.
33. Rhododendron & Fern 01 — Along the trails of Pisgah National Forest, Roan Mountain, NC, near Carver’s Gap, TN, June 20, 2013 — The work of connecting yourself with your life and living it is your practice. You don’t read a book and do it. You don’t take a course and do it.
    
    People are always talking computer courses, or photography courses, but they don’t actually use their computers or their cameras. The want to be able to use them when they feel like using them, when they are ready to use them, when they are in the mood to use them. And the courses are completely useless to them because they have failed/refused to take up the practice of computers and photography.
    
    You have to take up the practice of connecting with and living your life. It is a daily ritual, eternal and everlasting. You cannot nod in its direction and go on with your other life—the one you have in mind for yourself, the one you want to be your life, the one you wish were yours.
    
    You have to connect with, and hand yourself over to, the life that is actually your life. You have to grow up and live the life that is yours to live against your will, whether you want to or not, because to not do it is to be deader than dead, and to create a wasteland where a vibrant, thriving, oasis is supposed to be.
    
    So. You have to take up the practice of connecting with and living the life that is yours to live. Start with your resistance.
    
    Sit down with your resistance to the idea of taking up the practice of living your life. Really. Sit down.
    
    Bring your resistance into the center of your attention. Ask it to show itself to you as an image, object, or person. What comes to mind? Address it, him, or her directly. Say that you want to understand its, his, her motivation. What is at stake from its/his/her point of view? Explore its/his/her response to gain a clear understanding of its/his/her position. Work to negotiate a synthesis of its/his/her position and your own—you need to take up the practice of connecting with and living your life and it/he/she is opposed to that, is afraid of that. What can you do to help it/him/her be, not only comfortable, but also assist with that process? Find out. See what you can do.
    
    Congratulations. You have just taken the first step in taking up the practice of connecting yourself with your life and living it.
    
34. Goshen Creek 06 — Blue Ridge Parkway near Boone, NC, June 11, 2013 — We will either accept our adventure or not. We will either live the life that is ours to live or not. We will either grow up or not.
    
    These are all the same thing. Our adventure is our life, and it will grow us up against our will.
    
    The dragons and beasts the heroes all meet on their adventure all arise within. The Cyclops? The Cyclops is an inside job. We stop ourselves at every turn. We shout, “Enough!” and think about quitting. We terrify ourselves with the Dreadful Terrors, and flee from the specters we conjured up.
    
    We know our life is not the one we are living, but this isn’t all that bad, and lethargy saps our energy and exhausts our will. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe when the children are grown. Maybe when the grandchildren are married…
    
    Our adventure is at hand, our life is ready for us, our mule is waiting…
35. Raven Rock — Blue Ridge Parkway near Boone, NC, June, 2010 — If you are not living your life, you are living someone else’s life—someone else’s idea of the life you should be living.
    
    If you are not living the life you must live, you are living the life you have to live to make ends meet, keep others happy and make no waves.
    
    If you are not living in the service of your heart’s deep love, you are dragging through the week and watching the clock until closing time.
    
    Keep living that life to pay the bills, but begin living the life that is waiting for you to live it—the life with your name on it—the life that only you can live. This is called walking two paths at the same time.
    
    One path feeds your body, the other path nourishes your soul. Walking two paths at the same time is the way of life that brings you to life. You have put it off long enough.
36. Rhododendron Gardens Trail — Pisgah National Forest, Roan Mountain, NC near Carver’s Gap, TN, June 20, 2013 — Having to have what we want places us at the mercy of our desires, interests, needs, urges, whims, and wishes—and bespeaks of a greater need: the need to grow up.
    
    Two-year-olds melting down because life isn’t going their way is one thing. A thirty-two-year-old exhibiting the same behavior is another.
    
    Our behavior is a mirror showing us—and the world—who we are. We can cover it up for a while, paint it over, pretend to be who we are not but. The facade wears thin from time to time. Melts down. And there we are.
    
    There are moments when we will be transparent to everyone else, if not ourselves, whether we want to be or not. We have to seize those moments, and sit with them. What?
    
    What is going on? Where does this insistence on having our way come from? Who is in charge of what we are doing here?
    
    And, of course, we ask the compulsion to become an image, person, or object, and invite it to speak to us. And receive well what we hear, and work out the necessary compromises, and see where it goes…
    
    Most clubs and groups of my experience are run by a few people who have to have things done their way and a lot of people who have to have someone tell them what to do. Both groups are getting their needs met at the expense of their growth toward maturity and grace.
    
    Our work is to become aware of what we are doing and what that has to show us about who we are—and who we need to be. Everything we need for our own growth and becoming is before us at all times. All we need to do is look. And listen. In order to see and hear.
37. Used in Short Talks On Contradiction, etc., Olena Puckett Cabin, 04 — Blue Ridge Parkway near Meadows of Dan, VA, June 10, 2013 — It’s amazing what happens when you don’t try to make something happen. The catch is that you have to be open to what happens. You have to be receptive, accepting, capable of being amazed. You can’t be tapping your foot, rolling your eyes, wondering when it is finally going to become what you want it to be.
    
    Your place is to receive well the world. To be a gracious participant in the production of your life without being in charge and in control of that production. You don’t orchestrate a thing beyond the quality of your participation in the unfolding of your life.
    
    Here’s where you come in: You become conscious of, aware of, what is happening—especially aware of the contraries and polarities and opposites and opposition and conflicts among all the participants in the make-up of each situation as it arises. You enfold the situation in your awareness—your compassionate awareness.
    
    This is true and that is true and that over there is true and all of it is mutually exclusive, and that is true, too. This clashes with that, and that, and that, and it’s a terrible mess, and we cannot imagine how it can possibly work out to anyone’s satisfaction… Bear consciously the opposites, the polarities, with compassion.
    
    And when the door opens, walk through. Seize the moment. Say the word that needs to be said. Act in the service of what is called for once the shift occurs. You cannot force the shift, but when it happens, you assist what is obviously the thing that needs to be done.
    
    The result will be a miracle. You can’t claim credit for it, but it would not have happened without you bearing consciously, with compassion, the contradictions, the disharmonies, and acting in the service of shift which things move of their own accord toward harmony.
    
    Conflict works itself out when we are compassionately aware of the conflicting interests and do not try to make everyone happy or force our interest into being realized. Do not try to settle things before their time. Keep things in compassionate solution, suspension, and wait for the miracle.
    
38. Round Bald 01 — Roan Mountain Highlands at Carver’s Gap, TN, June 19, 2013 — Rumi said, “The soul is here for its own joy.” If he is right about that, it means that we are here for the soul’s joy. I take it that this would mean experiencing life in its fullness, as it is, and serving the values at the heart of life.
    
    The soul would live through us. We bring the soul to life by living fully the life that is ours to live—serving the values at the heart of life through the way we live—and experiencing the entire spectrum of experience in so doing.
    
    We save our soul by refusing to save ourselves from any life experience that comes our way. It is as though we are the bull and the soul is riding us for the full eight seconds of geologic time. The soul wants to get its money’s worth.
    
    We break soul’s heart when we recoil from our own life, hold ourselves back, live reclusive, shallow, hollow little lives behind closed doors and draped windows.
    
    Soul dances and sings when we live to be aligned with soul and exhibit the qualities and values of soul through the way we live our life.
    
    Forget all the theology you ever heard and live at one with your soul in the experience of your life—serving the deep values and doing your thing—AND meeting your obligations to the structures of the physical world AND paying the bills. Soul will love you for it, and you will love you for it as well.
39. Green Heron Bathing 02 — The Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, June 27, 2013 — Our place is the easiest thing to lose—as in, “Where am I? What am I doing here?”
    
    We get distracted by the 10,000 things. Lost in the moment of our living by trying to do too many things at once. Multitasking does not make for centered living.
    
    We have to zone out from time to time in order to tune in and remember who we are and what we are to be about.
    
    Give yourself a Time Out. Put yourself in your room and tell yourself you can’t come out for twenty minutes. Breathe.
    
    Slowly. Count your breaths. “One,” inhaling into your belly. “Two,” exhaling by trying to touch your backbone with your navel. “Pause,” waiting between breaths. “Three,” inhaling… For twenty minutes.
    
    BEGIN JULY 2013
40. Used in Short Talks On Contradiction, etc., Roan Mountain Panorama 02 — Roan Mountain Highlands at Carver’s Gap, TN, June 19, 2013 — It won’t hurt anything to think that the dead need us to redeem their lives, to carry them forward, to answer the questions they ran from, ignored, dismissed and left unanswered, to live the life they left unlived, to be for them who they should have been and failed to be. It doesn’t just end with their dying.
    
    In doing our work, we do their work for them—the work they left undone—the work they never touched because they were preoccupied with “living their life” in a way that wasted their life. They missed their chance and need us to make it up for them.
    
    We do that by taking up our life and doing it the way it needs to be done. We live for ourselves and for those who have gone before us. Or, we add to the burden our descendants will carry—or fail to carry.
    
    Our burden—and the burden of those who come after us if we reject it—is to wake up. Be who we are. And do what needs us to do it in each situation as it arises—and do it as it needs to be done.
    
    When we do right by our life and by the situation in which we live, we redeem the life and the situations our ancestors rejected and ignored.
    
    Our situations are not too different from theirs. The eternal themes yearned to be acted out and made conscious in their lives as they do in our own. Guilt and Redemption, Sickness and Health, Disintegration and Integration, Life and Death, Death and Resurrection, Bondage and Freedom, Lost and Found…
    
    The opposites and contradictions confront us as they confronted those who have gone before us. Who will reconcile them? Who will embrace them? Who will make them conscious? Who will bear the agony of mutually exclusive values and interests—until the shift happens, and the transformation occurs, and life can go on?
    
    Our life is not too different from any life. When we live well, we redeem the failures of past generations, and relieve the dead of burdens unborne—and save those yet to be born from the weight of our own failures.
41. Black and White — Dead tree at Pisgah Inn, Blue Ridge Parkway near Brevard, NC, November 1010 — It’s up to us. We are in charge of our own life—of living it or not living it. It is there, right here, waiting for us to give it the thumbs up, wondering what we are waiting for, but nothing is going to happen until we commit ourselves to the project.
    
    We demur. We hesitate. We balk. We stammer. We hem and haw. We look away. We change the subject. Maybe later. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe some other time.
    
    ”We cannot come to the banquet/don’t trouble us now/we have married a wife/we have just bought a cow/we have fields and commitments that cost a pretty sum/pray hold us excused/we cannot come” (Medical Mission Sisters from the sixties).
    
    Our primary contribution is getting out of the way. If we but get out of the way, our life will take it from there. We stand blocking the path, blocking the way to the way. It all hangs on our standing aside, on our giving way, on our trusting ourselves to the current that will carry us to who knows what but why die not knowing?
42. Path Along Goshen Creek — Blue Ridge Parkway near Boone, NC, June 11, 2013 — We can only be so smart. Then, we have to be lucky. Eventually, our luck runs out. It’s how we live in the meantime that makes all the difference.
    
    We have to live in the meantime as though we have all the luck in the world and it will never run out.
    
    We have to see how much of who we are we can be in the time left for living.
    
    We have to do as much as we can do of what is ours to do.
    
    We have to wear our mule out.
    
    Back up the way a bit, I said in one of these vignettes, “I understand our mule to be that which carries us through life and gets us where we are going. It is what gives us life and provides us with the wherewithal to get up and get back in the game. It is our incentive, our motivation, our joy of life, living and being alive. Our mule is our heart’s true love.
    
    Know what your mule is. Ride it.”
    
    We don’t have time to waste grousing about how unfair it is, and how it’s like “rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic,” and how the inevitablities have us surrounded, and how useless, pointless, hopeless and futile it is.
    
    We have a life to live yet! See how far into it you can go while there is still light! You will be creating ripples of good in your wake that will impact eternity! And you owe it to yourself to find out if I’m right about that.
43. Round Bald Panorama — Roan Mountain Highlands at Carver’s Gap, TN, June 19, 2013 — Carl Jung said, “It may be that in all the garbs, shapes, forms, modes and manners of life offered to a person, he or she does not find what is peculiarly necessary for him or her,” or words to that effect.
    
    I take that to mean that the world cannot pay some of us to not be who we are. Some of us have to find what is “peculiarly necessary” for us and do the thing that is ours to do, no matter what, in a “Thy will, not mine, be done” kind of way.
    
    The quest for what is “peculiarly necessary” for us is the only quest worth taking up. If we aren’t going to do that, whatever we do will be the equivalent of hanging out at the mall or going bowling all our life long.
44. Summer Days 01 — Blue Ridge Parkway near Boone, NC, June 11, 2013 — You reach a stage in life (you may have to take my word on this) where good company is more important than good sex—where good sex becomes a loving embrace, fully clothed or not.
    
    With good company being so important, eventually, I don’t know why we spend so much time thinking it’s all about good sex. Early on, we forsake company for sex. We throw company out of the window. “Whatever you say, honey, can we just go to bed now?”
    
    I wonder how early we could entertain the idea of finding good company, or, more to the point, of being good company. I wonder how much energy we could invest when in the pursuit of becoming good company. Of being worth talking to. Of being able to receive each other well on every level of life. Of engaging each other in conversation straight from the heart about things that matter.
    
    Where do we go to talk about aging? Oh, we talk of our aches and pains, and forgetting where we put the check book, and say, “It’s hell getting old.” But. Where do we speak of our unlived life, of the things we have failed to do, of things we hope yet to do, of how to truly LIVE on dwindling resources and diminishing physical abilities?
    
    The people I know change the subject or laugh it off if I bring up any of these topics. I need to meet some new people. I’ll bet you do, too.
    
    Our life would be so much different with a few more of the right kind of people in it. We have the best chance of attracting the right kind of people by being the right kind of person. We should receive more in the way of instruction about being good company. Of course, up to a certain point in our life, if we went to the lecture at all, it would be in hopes of finding someone to have sex with.
45. Green Heron in Flight 03 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, June 27, 2013 — In the fairy tales, there is always someone who stands alone. The Fairy God Mother leans on no one. Merlin, Gandalf, Albus Dumbledore, Yoda, Obi wan Kenobi… are all without need of a guide. Guides need no guide!
    
    Well.
    
    That’s a joke. Never has there ever been more misguidance about guides! A true guide is always talking it over with her fellow guides. A true Council of Elders is an ongoing walkabout with one another in an atmosphere of imagination and creative thinking. The right kind of regular, recurring, conversation is at the heart of wisdom!
    
    No one stands alone! We all need help with seeing, hearing and understanding! We all need the right kind of community to ground us, center us, focus us and remind us of what is important, of what is of true value, of what it is that we are overlooking, assuming, forgetting about this time.
    
    Woe be the wizard or wizette without the support of the right kind of community!
    
    Which gets us to who our confidants are. You have to pay attention to whom you pay attention, to whom you talk. You will never be wiser than the group you turn to for wisdom. Choose your inner circle well, but don’t think you can get by with out one. They don’t call them “fairy tales” for nothing.
46. Roan High Bluff Viewpoint — Pisgah National Forest, Roan Mountain, NC, near Carver’s Gap, TN, June 20, 2013 — We know what our life is and what our life is not. And, if we don’t know, it is because we don’t want to know.
    
    All of our blocks are in place because we do not want to do what we would have to do if the block were not there. Or, because we are trying too hard to do what we know does not need to be done.
    
    Our blocks indicate a war within. We are at odds with ourselves over how we are to live our life, and cannot go on with our life until we work out a settlement, negotiate a compromise, and come to terms with our differences over how to live it.
    
    We begin to come to terms with our differences by being clear about—becoming conscious of—what they are. On the one hand, what? On the other hand, what?
    
    What are the polarities within? What we want is being blocked by something else we want. What are the conflicting wants?
    
    Place yourself in the middle of the tension between the opposites, and bear consciously the pain, the agony, of wanting mutually exclusive things, and wait for the shift. You don’t cause, or produce, the shift. You wait for it. Patiently. Painfully.
    
    When you have a problem that cannot be solved, become intently, and intensely, aware of the problem. And wait for the shift.
47. Price Lake Reflection Panorama 01 — Julian Price Memorial Park, Blue Ridge Parkway near Blowing Rock, NC, October, 2011 — One thing we know: Here we are. One thing we need to know: Now what? There are a lot of other things we know and need to know, but keep it simple—start with these two, and always come back to them. They are the Grounding Realities.
    
    Here we are. Now what? Where do we go from here? How do we know? How do we decide? How do we make up our mind? What are we going to do, now that we are here?
    
    We waste a lot of time, not asking and answering these questions. We engage in a lot of behavior to avoid them. Everything depends on what we do with them.
    
    It’s up to us—and we don’t know what to do.
    
    As a species, we have always been in this position. And here we are. As a species, we have made it to this point without knowing what we were doing. You and I don’t have to be in a panic to know. We all have gotten this far, not knowing. We did it trusting ourselves to instinct and intuition.
    
    We followed our hunches, our inclinations, our interests, our inspirations, our dreams. We aren’t as alone as we are afraid we might be. Sit down. Be quiet. Listen.
    
    We have plenty to work with. Guidance is available. We can trust ourselves to more than words can say—to more than meets the eye. After all, here we are. That should tell us something. All we need to know, really, to trust ourselves to sense where we go from here.
    
    Whenever you find yourself at the end of your rope, up against it, at the bottom of a solid rock wall, not knowing what to do or where to turn, come back to the Grounding Realities. Here we are. Now what?
    
    It will settle you down, enable you to trust yourself to more than meets the eye—than words can say—and listen.
48. Big Creek 01 — Great Smoky Mountains National Park, NC, November 2007 — Everybody who walks their own path with their eyes open (That is, conscious, with awareness), comes out at about the same place.
49. Green Heron Bathing 03 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, June 28, 3013 — You can’t wake anyone up—including yourself—before their time. You can’t give anyone—including yourself—anything that is truly important. We all have to pay the price of awakening, clarity, consciousness, awareness, realization and peace.
    
    The peace part comes with making our peace with the things we become aware of as we wake up.
    
    None of this is delivered by the fairies, with rainbows and sparklers, and a cake for celebration. We work it into our life, bit by bit, over the course of our living.
    
    There is always more to see.
    
    We are always starting anew with where we are. What is happening? What needs to be done about it? How can we respond appropriately to the situation with the gifts that are ours to give?
    
    There is never a script. We have never done this moment before. Forget applying what you did yesterday or last year. Live awake to each moment—spontaneously, extemporaneously, making a fitting response with what is uniquely yours to offer.
    
    And all you want to do is read a good book, with no worries in the world.
    
    Your life needs you to live it in each moment of your living, in each situation as it arises, all your life long. You never put your mule out to pasture. You never retire from your Real Life. You have the exact combination of gifts that each situation needs. It’s your place to make deliveries in the right way, at the right time.
    
    Keeps you on your toes. Brings you to life. Wakes you up. Over the full course of your life.
50. The Shape of Time 24 — Antelope Canyon, Page, AZ, May 18, 2010 — Robert Johnson, in his book “Inner Work”—which I cannot recommend too highly or too often—said, “You must find your own path. Go your own way, which is both terrifying and exhilarating. No one can any longer tell you THE way, because there is no longer one prescribed way, but only A way—your way, which is as valid as any other as long as you live it honestly.”
    
    ”Your way is merely A way—one way among many, yet unique and distinct from all others, springing from your own nature, a way that is inborn, not made, and waits to be discovered.”
    
    ”For each of us, that path is a solitary one, for ultimately we must walk it alone. No one else can tell us which final direction it should take, and no one else can walk it for us.”
    
    I’ll take that as a starting place and say, it’s like this: I stand before you and say one thing, and John Calvin says something different, and Billy Graham says something different, and the Buddha says something else, and every one who has something to say in the way of guidance and direction to the life that is your life to live says something different—and you decide to whom you are going to listen, or you decide that you are not going to listen to any of them. But, YOU decide.
    
    You are in charge of choosing your way, or of choosing it not. What leans you in one direction or another? What makes it easy for you to say Yes to this and No to that? As you explore these questions, you become reflective and introspective, and something stirs within and begins to wake up.
51. Mesa Arch Sunrise 02 — Canyonlands National Park near Moab, UT, May 11, 2010 — Carl Jung said, “No one comes to consciousness without pain.” He means, no one grows up without pain. To grow up is to step into your pain—which is experienced as fear, as loss, as sorrow, as disappointment, as failure, as difficulty, as unknowing, as aloneness, as isolation, as all the ways that make things hard.
    
    To refuse to grow up is to step back from your pain. “No pain, no pain,” is the motto of those whose life stops at sixteen no matter how long they live, whose day consists of a rerun of yesterday, last week, last money, last year, with the same conversations about the same topics with the same people and the same conclusions, and nothing is ever new under the sun.
    
    Your pain is the Cyclops standing in your way. What are you going to do?
52. Through the Window — Arches National Park near Moab, UT, May 14, 2010 — In one of my pastorates, there was a ninety-two year old person who expected me to bring her the latest gossip when I visited her. Her life consisted of inspecting the lives of others in order to find things worthy of her disapproval. That had been her life for ninety-two years. She had lived vicariously—one might say, predatorily—on the lives of those about her, and never had a life of her own.
    
    In another congregation, there was another ninety-two year old person who read widely, kept abreast of current events, had an active presence in political and social issues, maintained a long-lived and on-going relationship with her Jungian therapist, and engaged me in lively conversation about her ideas, activities and her thoughts on life and death when I visited her. She had lived a life uniquely her own for ninety-two years.
    
    We turn the first person toward being more like the second person only with her permission and her willing participation in the process of transformation. She has to see what she is doing and be interested in doing something different. Where does that willingness and interest come from? What instigates the urge to transformation, realization, awakening, and becoming who we have the capacity to be?
    
    Some, it seems, turn to the light, and some turn away from it. All are called, but few answer the phone. And those that do, can claim no credit for doing it. And those that don’t cannot be blamed for not doing it. The difference between the two groups is just how it is.
53. Wetlands Geese 16 — Guilford County Wetlands near Summerfield, NC, February 7, 2013 — God is who we understand God to be. If we never question, examine, deepen, expand our understanding of God, God remains for us who God was when we were six years old, or in the sixth grade, or when we quit going to Sunday school.
    
    Whatever we say about God, locks God in place until we get to the point of being able to say something different about God. God is who we say God is. If God is ever going to be more than we have said God is, we are going to have to become capable of saying more than we have said.
    
    We are going to have to open ourselves to the experience of life, and allow our life to lead us into the questions, and doubt, and “dark night of the soul,” which are necessary in order to change the way we think about God.
    
    We have to grow up, or remain forever stuck with a view of God that was handed to us as children. But, growing up requires us to grapple with the disconnect between what we were told of God and what we experience of God as we live our life with our eyes open to how things are and how things also are.
    
    To do so is to risk losing everything we have thought and to take a chance on gaining everything we will think. Where do you think you might be better off?
54. Nesting Herons 01 — Audubon Swamp Park, Magnolia Plantation, Charleston, SC, May 13, 2013 — We are on our way, and we have to be on our way. We can’t be dallying, dawdling, lingering, and lounging around. We have to be on our way.
    
    We find a comfortable place and we want to stay a while. We know how it is “out there,” on the trail, the path with our name on it. We know how it can be. And we want to huddle here by the fire, out of the rain and cold, and enjoy the pleasure of one another’s company.
    
    We had rather talk about the way than be on it. We prefer to look up terms, and research the ways of the ones who have gone before us, and tell our stories…
    
    We discover what to do by doing it. The pioneers weren’t trained. They hit the trail and learned what they needed to know along the way.
    
    If you are going to talk, talk about what you are doing—just long enough to say what you need to hear—and get back to doing it, to living the life that is yours to live, to being on your way.
55. Geese on the Wing 08 — The Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 12, 2013 — We can opt out of living our life. Happens all the time in 10,000 ways. Dependency has a nice ring to it for some. When dependency meets co-dependency, everybody is happy going nowhere for life. This is the kind of thing Jesus had in mind when he advised, “Leave the dead to bury the dead.” And, “When they don’t receive you in one town, shake the dust off your sandals as a sign against them and go on to the next town.” He’s saying, “Don’t waste your time.”
    
    Sounds harsh, but if you have ever come up against determined self-destruction or neglect, you know he knows what he’s talking about. But. They are your children, or your spouse, or your grandchildren, or your parents. You can’t abandon them. And you can’t save them. Now, that’s a spot to be in.
    
    And, there is nothing you can do to ease your pain—so, bear it. This is the way they are, and it’s breaking your heart. You can’t reach them, and you can’t stand it. Stand it. Without protecting them from the reality of their choice. They have to help you help them. Require something of them. Insist on it.
    
    And live the life that is your life to live—to the extent that’s possible—within the context of life with the King or Queen of Dependency. Do your thing—and don’t let them get by with telling you that their thing is doing nothing. And don’t let them stop you from doing your thing, from living your life. One refusal to live is enough.
56. Geese on the Wing 08 — The Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 12, 2013 — Go where you belong, stay away from where you don’t belong—to the extent that either are possible. If neither is possible, do what you can do to make your situation tolerable while you wait for something to shift.
    
    We spend a lot of time waiting for the shift to happen. In the meantime, we pay a steep price to stay in some situations—and we would pay a steep price to leave those situations. We pay a steep price to wait for some shifts to happen.
    
    We are going to pay some price. Pay the one with the best chance of a liveable future—with the best chance of giving you a positive return on your investment.
    
    What do we need to survive the situation? What will make it possible for us to tolerate the intolerable? To outlive unlivable conditions?
    
    When we are “up against it,” where do we turn? What do we do? How do we stand it, waiting for things to turn to the good? Where do we find our consolation, courage, resiliency, tenacity, determination, peace? Look around. Look within. Send out the relentless calls for help. Watch. Wait. For the shift to happen.
    
    Who knows when the shift will come or what form it will take? We all know everything changes in time. When we have done all we can think to do, we wait it out. Like a seed in the ground waiting for spring.
57. Owl Bathing 03 — Barred Owl in the Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 17, 2013 — Photographers live from moment to moment—from one moment that is exactly right to the next moment that is exactly right—and work to put themselves in the right place at the right time. The wonder of it all is that the right time can happen in any place, so you can’t be thinking nothing much is going to be going on here, now because this certainly isn’t the right place.
    
    Boom! As John Madden would say. The next step carries you into the right time, and there is the photograph in the grocery cart coming to meet you in the form of a one year old in the child’s seat, giving you the eye. And, like that, it’s over. Mom has wheeled the baby on past you to the frozen yogurt section, and the moment is gone. But, you got it, even though you didn’t have a camera handy to prove it. And you celebrated the moment as it should be celebrated, with joy and gladness everlasting, delighted that the camera has taught you to see.
58. Goose With A Problem 08 — The Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 23, 2013 — We think it’s about doing this, this, and this, so that will happen. We have life plans and career tracks in order to achieve our personal goals. That’s ridiculous. We don’t know where it’s going—or where it needs to go. All we know is what we want. And don’t what. What does wanting know?
    
    I’ll tell you what wanting doesn’t know. Wanting doesn’t know the first thing about growing up. We grow up against our will. We grow up by being thrown into the ring with what we don’t want. But, instead of growing up, we spend all our time trying to tag out, or trying to get out of the ring, or trying to get away from the thing we don’t want.
    
    It doesn’t matter. Whatever we do to escape the trials of this ring simply opens the way to a different ring. A bigger one. With more of what we don’t want in it. Drooling. Grinning. Waddling toward us from all sides.
    
    We may never grow up, but we will never outrun what we don’t want. We do the Personal Growth that we are always talking about by turning around and facing all there is in our life that we don’t want to face, and grinning ourselves, and wading right into it, saying, “I’m going to wipe that smile right off your face. Show me what’cha got!”
    
    Doing what we don’t want. Dealing with what we don’t want. Grows us up. That’s all there is to it. Growing up. We don’t live long enough to be Grown Up. We are always growing up. That’s the idea. To be always growing up. To be always dealing well with what we don’t want.
    
    Living well is living well with what we don’t want. Refusing to let it have its way with us. Taking it in stride, and figuring out what to do about it, without losing our composure or flipping out or melting down. Just doing what needs to be done with the gifts we have and the resources at our disposal, knowing that after this, something else, and not letting it get to us because we understand the nature of the game, and are here to do well with what comes our way, allowing it to open our eyes, so that we might see what needs to happen and do it with the right attitude in each situation as it arises all our life long, and grow up along the way.
59. Price Lake Reflection 02 — Julian Price Memorial Park, Blue Ridge Parkway near Blowing Rock, NC, October 2010 — We embark on the Hero’s Journey when we engage the trials of life consciously, realizing what we are doing, and voluntarily participating in the process of living our way into human beinghood.
    
    The Hero’s Journey is growing up. It is becoming who we are. The trials of life call us forth and require us to be who we are—who we don’t know we are until we see ourselves doing things we didn’t know we could do in response to this ordeal or that one.
    
    The trials of life evoke, kindle, awaken, arouse, stir up, call forth the gifts that are ours, which lie latent until required by the situation which brings out the best in us. The trials of life elicit our response and make us be who we are.
    
    Joseph Campbell said, “It took the Cyclops to bring out the Hero in Ulysses.” The “Cyclops” is another term for all that comes at us in a day. Our days bring out the Hero in us.
    
    The next time you come up on something that makes you want to run away, stand tall and step toward the thing. You are Ulysses on your way to Ithaca, and nothing is going to stop you.
60. Great Blue Heron 07 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 29, 2013 — Wait a minute! I hear objection! “We are not heroes for mowing the lawn, changing diapers, staying awake with sick children, taking the car in for repairs, cooking dinner, washing dishes… WE are not heroes for living OUR life! We would have to live some other, some heroic, life in order to be heroes!”
    
    James Bond has never changed a diaper. Cannot change diapers, one after another through the long years of diaper changing for one child, much less three children and certainly not five! Those of you who do that, have done that, have it all over James Bond!
    
    I was a minister for 40.5 years, serving five congregations (two at one time) and have a friend who said, “I wouldn’t do what you did for five times what you made!” How many would? How many would do what you do, what you did? How many could live the life that you have lived? How many could you find to take your place for a while?
    
    We get up every day and do what we do and think nothing of it, or, worse, think disparaging thoughts of it—dismiss it, discount it, despise it—because it doesn’t measure up, it doesn’t meet the standards of a heroic life, of a life worth living.
    
    It’s time you had a talk with yourself. It’s time you saw yourself. It’s time you took yourself out to eat. And apologized.
    
    You are doing, and have done, heroic stuff. You are your children’s hero, whether they know it or not (Nobody thinks of themselves or of anyone they know personally as heroic, because a hero is someone who does some great task, but what’s mowing the grass every week, every summer, for your whole life long? We have to re-think heroic in order to see the everyday heroes all around us).
    
    Daily tasks, done the way they need to be done, makes us all somebody’s hero. Where would they be without us? Where would we be without them?
    
    We are all on the Hero’s Journey. It’s time we realize that, and live consciously aware of the path we are on. Our life will take on a different tone as we see ourselves slaying dragons and dealing with the Cyclops and all the other obstructions and barriers that have to be overcome for the Journey to continue. Yea YOU! Ride on!
61. Crabtree Falls Panorama 03 — Blue Ridge Parkway near Little Switzerland, NC, May 21, 2013 — We are to live our life as a true human being. Human beings are set apart by their consciousness—their being conscious of being conscious—their values, their heart, their instinct and intuition, and their ability to reason things out—to find the ground and center of their life and to live in light of it throughout their lifetime, working out the conflicts and integrating, synthesizing, reconciling the opposites in ways that take everything into account, and treat everyone with respect, and find the way together to solving the problems that impact us all. That was one of my best sentences ever.
    
    To be human is to be aware of what we are doing, and to embrace consciously the task of being a human being—not a robot—not an automation—not an extension of some system or tradition or puppet of Those Who Know Best And Must Be Pleased—but a living, breathing, thinking, feeling, sensing, intuiting, seeing, hearing, knowing, doing, human being who is self-directed and self-reflective, and aware of how things are and how things also are, and what is happening and what needs to be done about it in each situation as it arises all our life long. That was another one.
62. Summer Days 07 — Blue Ridge Parkway near Boone, NC, May 21, 2013 — Think of reason as more than logic—more than thinking. Think of reason as thinking about thinking—about awareness—about feeling. Reason is thinking about thinking and feeling. Reason puts it all together.
    
    Consciousness is one thing. Flowers and leaves are conscious of the sun as they turn toward it. But. They are not conscious of being conscious. They are instinctively, thoughtlessly, doing what they know to do.
    
    Human beings bring something new to the table. Human beings are, or can be, conscious of being conscious. We can be conscious of everything—and be conscious of being conscious of everything. The word for that kind of mega-awareness is reason.
    
    Reason sees everything that is capable of being seen, inside and outside the human body—sees everything that is happening—and thinks of what to do about it, of how to respond to it.
    
    Reason is the integrative tool of the human mind. Reason reconciles, synthesizes, coordinates, collaborates, blends, merges, makes One. Reason brings it all together.
    
    The world has been waiting for reasonable people for a long time. We come along with the gift that saves, redeems, transforms, makes peace… And throw it away.
    
    It gets in our way. It’s too hard. It asks difficult things of us. It keeps us from having what we want NOW regardless of the outcome—never mind the outcome!
    
    Greed takes over. Greed is guiding our—humanity’s—collective boat on its path through the sea. Reason doesn’t have a chance when greed enters the room. We have the intellectual skills to figure out how to get what we want. We refuse to think about whether we should have it.
    
    And here we are. Now what? More of the same stupid behavior? We can do better. If we will.
    
    The turnaround starts with me and you. Practicing rational awareness. Thinking about our feeling. Taking everything into account. Putting it all on the table. Being aware of the table. Seeing what needs to happen never mind what we want to happen. And giving ourselves to the service of that which needs to be done. No matter what. What do you say?
63. Mr. Snapper — Loggerhead Snapping Turtle in the Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, June 2013 — The Adventure turns on the slightest thing. You go looking for a table to set your coffee cup on and find yourself in the Himalayas—and you would have never considered the Himalayas, of all things, if it hadn’t been for that table!
    
    That’s how it works. We don’t sit in our recliner, and think up an Adventure. We go out for a walk and bump into one.
    
    We mean this and find ourselves over there doing that! We’re just doing what the moment requires and turning the key that unlocks our destiny!
    
    So. Forget about your destiny, and give yourself to doing what the moment requires. And see were it goes.
64. Orange Flame Azalea 03 — Roan Mountain Highlands at Carver’s Gap, TN, June 19, 2013 — Joseph Campbell says our role is to humanize the systems that would rob us of our individuality and make cogs on wheels in a machine of all of us. He sees the world, and the cultures of the world, as a wasteland where everyone is living a life that is not authentically, genuinely, their own life, the life that is truly their life to live, but a life that they have been handed and told to live.
    
    The challenge in that situation is to live as mavericks within the systems governing life in the world—to revolutionize the way things are being done by “defecting in place,” and living out of our own value system—living in light of and doing what is important to us as the unique and irreplaceable individuals we are—and transforming the world by refusing to buy into what the world is selling.
    
    We walk two paths at the same time, and bring our own authentic life to life within the context and circumstances of our living. As “the influence of a vital person vitalizes” (Campbell), we rock the cultural boat, beach the ship, and create a new world by doing nothing more revolutionary than living our own life within the structures and systems of the old world—which is the only truly revolutionary thing in the catalog of revolutionary things.
65. Mabry Mill in the Rain 01 — Blue Ridge Parkway near Meadows of Dan, VA, June 10, 2013 — There are inner voices we must submit to and follow, and there are inner voices we must denounce and deny. How do we know when to do which?
    
    There are no infallible guidelines, but the surest one I know of is this: Go with uncertainty! The more convinced you are that you are right, the more you have in common with paranoia and schizophrenia.
    
    If you are beset with self-doubt, you are likely to be on much safer grounds than if you are sure you are in the rock solid center of where you need to be.
    
    If you are scaring yourself, you are probably okay, and good to go. But, if you think everybody is an idiot for opposing you, you might read that as a sign to cease and desist.
    
    If you don’t blame them for saying you’re crazy, see why they would, and even agree with them, you’re probably on course and should see it through, or, at least wait a bit longer before deciding to take a different route.
    
    There are no rules or recipes. When we take up the Journey, we take a chance, and hope for the right kind of help along the way.
66. Maple Leaves — The Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 18, 2013 — My life as a photographer is a date with time and place. I walk around, looking for a place where the time is right. Every photograph is a flash of synchronicity—me arriving in the right place at the right time—and knowing it.
    
    I’m amazed each time. Honored. Who woulda thought it? That I would be here, now, with a camera?
    
    Every time is the right time for some place. The photographer’s obligation is to find the place this is the right time for, before it’s too late.
67. Duckie 11 — The Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 13, 2013 — Reverence is not a bad thing. Mothers deserve to be revered. And children. And fathers. And presidents. And queens. Immigrants. Workers. Life…
    
    The list is long. Why the contempt? The impertinence? The rudeness? The disrespect? That is everywhere, these days.
    What is revered (other than money)? What is honored, these days? Cherished?
    
    Turn the tide. Live with reverence and deep appreciation for those you meet along the way. You will be presenting them with an experience of grace that has long been absent from their life. And transforming the world.
68. Pink Lady Slippers — Blue Ridge Parkway at Crabtree Falls Trail Head, near Little Switzerland, NC, June 11, 2013 — There is no model for the way to do it. Live your life, I’m talking about. There is no model for the way to live your life. YOU are the prototype! Get in there and live it!
    
    The people who keep handing you models, saying, “Jesus!” “The Buddha!” “The Dali Lama!” “Pema Chodron!” “Swamiguru Knowsitall!” are just slowing you down, delaying—or preventing entirely—your own awakening, your own coming forth, in your own life.
    
    Nobody can hand you the way to do it. Live your life, I’m talking about. Nobody can hand you the way to live your life.
    
    Never mind how someone else would do it. How would you do it is the question. Nobody else can live your life. They should be living their life. You have to live your life, as well as you are able, with the gifts and resources you have at hand.
    
    So. What’s the problem? Really. What. Is. The. Problem? What is keeping you from living your life?
    
    The Big Three Barriers have been traditionally identified as Fear, Desire, Duty. You might have a different take on things. That’s your forte, you know. Your own take on things sets you apart, identifies you as you. Seeing the way you see things, doing things the way you do things, is you, is who you are.
    
    You might identify The Problem—that which is keeping you from living your life—as something other than The Big Three. Fine. Just know what it is. And decide what to do about it. And do it. And evaluate the results. And decide if something else needs to be done. And decide what it is. And do it. And evaluate the results… Like that until you get it down, and your life is yours from the ground up and the inside out.
    
    Now we’re talking! That’s the way to do it!
69. Green Heron On The Hunt — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, July 2, 2013 — In order to find the right answers, we have to ask the right questions. The rule applies generally, across the board, in all fields and disciplines, but particularly with regard to our inner development, to what we need to do to be who we are, doing what is ours to do.
    
    If we don’t know what the right questions are, or hesitate—fail—to ask the questions that beg to be asked, it is an indication that we are not ready to hear the answer—to know what is being asked of us. When we come to a dead end and don’t know where to turn or what to do next, it is a sign that we need to wait until we are ready for what comes next.
    
    We develop, unfold, emerge, at our own pace, in our own time. We cannot hurry ourselves past where we are. We have to sit with what we want—with how we want things to be—with how we wish things were until something shifts, and we are able to face how things are—in opposition to our preferences and desires.
    
    The prophetic pronouncement of Col. Nathan P. Jessup (The Jack Nicholson character in A Few Good Men) bears down upon us all at certain points in our life: “You can’t handle the truth!” When that is the case with us, we would be wise to be aware of the situation and not press the issue.
    
    We can arrest our development by trying to push ourselves beyond were we can be. When we give our bodies more than they handle, they give it back. We throw up, tissue is inflamed, our eyes become red, we have an allergic reaction, and learn the hard way to not do that any more.
    
    As with us physically, so with us psychologically. We have to be ready before we can hear the answers to the questions that need to be asked. In the meantime, we have to know we are not ready. And wait—knowing what we are waiting for: To be ready to hear the answers to the questions that need to be asked. When we are ready for the answers, the questions will appear.
70. Raven Rock Fog — Blue Ridge Parkway near Boone, NC, May 2007 — Our work is always waking up to the time and place of our living, squaring up with how things are here and now, coming to terms with the facts of our life—with what is happening and what needs to happen in response, standing up and doing what needs to be done about it with the gifts we have and the resources at our disposal.
    
    This simple process brings us forth to become who we are in the time left for living.
    
    Our life calls us out, asks us to be present and accounted for, and to present ourselves with our gifts, talents, genius and do what needs us to do it right here, right now.
    
    As we do that, we grow up. We face what is ours to face and do what can be done with it, using the gifts that are ours.
    
    That is the Hero’s Journey, the Search for the Land of Promise and the Holy Grail.
    
    We want some kind of magic to transform our life and give us what we want without requiring us to change. We block our way and want nothing to do with what waits to be done. We wait for some fairy godmother, some handsome young stranger, to deliver us. We’ll pray the prayer of Jabez, visualize what we want, and engage the power of attraction by thinking positively. We will do anything but the one thing it takes.
    
    We refuse to grow up.
71. Croaker — The Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 2013 — The trials which bring one person forth to meet their life, send another person packing. Some move so deeply into withdrawal that they disappear entirely, never to be seen again. Joseph Campbell would say, “Mystics swim in waters where schizophrenics drown.” Some of us meet our life experience in one way, and others of us meet our life experience in another way.
    
    Victor Frankl observed people reacting quite differently to the same prison camp experience. There were people who lived compassionately and vibrantly in helping relationships with their fellow prisoners, and there were people who turned their faces to the wall, gave up and died.
    
    Some people heard the Buddha and the Christ and became, in their own way, the Buddha and the Christ, and others walked by unhearing, unseeing.
    
    People are different in these ways, and others. Why? How? What gives? We will never get to the bottom of it. Our work is to be as awake as we can be, and to share what we can share with others about the work to be awake—realizing that all are not where we are, nor will be, and let that be because it is.
    
    Striving “to do no harm” is as helpful as we can be in some situations, with some people. Living as a compassionate presence recognizes the limits of helpfulness, and understands that noninterference is not the same as abandonment or neglect. Leaving alcoholics where they lie can be a way of waking them up, if they can be waked up.
72. Dragon Fly 01 — The Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, June 2013 — Elizabeth Warren is my hero. And Tammy Baldwin. And Wendy Davis. And Michelle Obama. And, well, the list is long of people who are doing it well, who are doing it right, bringing themselves forth with integrity and courage to meet the challenges of their time and place.
    
    Who aren’t reading out of some book, or following some script, or doing what someone else would have them do, or imposing some ideology crafted in some think tank and embraced as God’s Way of Standing Our Ground And Taking Over The World.
    
    My heroes are all individuals living in light of their own idea of what is important, and in behalf of thousands of people who are at the point of being moved past “marginalized” into “disappeared.”
    
    The heroes are not fictional characters or mythical figures of a time long past, but living, breathing, awake and fully present human beings who see is happening, and what needs to be done about it, and do it in each situation as it arises—calling us to take our place alongside them in doing what we are capable of doing to work our way through the mess and make things livable and good for all.
73. Black Crowned Night Heron (Juvenile) In Flight 02 — The Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 15, 2013 — What do you think about? What do the things you think about keep you from thinking about? Think about your thinking. See where it goes.
74. Black Crowned Night Heron (Juvenile) in Flight 01 — The Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 13, 2013 — Eventually, we run out of luck. It’s how we live in the meantime that tells the tale.
    
    Don’t let running out of luck eventually slow you down. Don’t be thinking it’s all hopeless, pointless, useless and futile because eventually we run out of luck. Live with the windows down and your hair blowing in the wind. Glad to be you doing what you love to do. So what if your luck runs out in the end?
    
    It’s what we do with the meantime that makes all the difference.
75. Fir Forest 05 — Rhododendron Gardens, Pisgah National Forest, Roan Mountain, NC near Carver’s Gap, TN, June 20, 2013 — Conviction, certainty, certitude and confidence are compelling. It is an easy thing to come under the influence of Those Who Know Best—and a difficult thing to defy their directions. They have reason, logic and a persuasive list of why things must be done their way on hand at every turn. Everyone would be crazy to not do it their way.
    
    But, there is the dictum: “Often wrong but never in doubt,” to take into account.
    
    Sounding like you know what you are doing and knowing what you are doing have different outcomes.
    
    Before you hand yourself over to someone else’s direction, inspect their outcomes. Never mind what they say about themselves, about their achievements, accomplishments and successes. Don’t read their résumé—look at their life.
    
    They don’t have a life. Their life is telling other people what to do. They sound convincing. That’s what they do.
    
    The people who know what they are doing didn’t get there by knowing what they were doing. They got to the point of knowing what they are doing by not knowing what they were doing, but doing it until they figured it out.
    
    They will tell you they don’t know how you should live your life, and they will encourage you to get in there and live it until you figure it out. Those are the people you need in your Inner Circle.
    
    Give the Authorities On All Thing Life Related a wide berth. When they track you down, tell them you have to go feed the horses, and walk away.
76. Bluets and Blackberry Leaves — Roan Mountain Highlands at Carver’s Gap, TN, June 19, 2013 — The intuitive in me likes to explore new territory and hates to be bound to the map. Hates to be bound to anything—a schedule, a routine, dinner with the Mays on Tuesday. To be bound is to be in bondage, in prison. What if I get a notion to go look for photos?
    
    A cruise ship or a tour bus are out of the question. Going on a trip with another couple on the back seat—or worse, driving—would be torture. My intuitive side knows what it needs to do when it needs to do it, and doesn’t want to get permission, or to have to return by someone else’s idea of when to be back.
    
    My sensate side loves shapes and forms and textures. Rocks and feathers, rope, landscapes, seascapes, cityscapes, shadows, silhouettes… We have to touch things, stand, or sit, looking at things. Odors and tastes are show stoppers.
    
    My feeling side wanders around in what is important, and favors compassion and grace over the overbearing imposition of codes, rules and laws.
    
    My thinking side looks for contraries and contradictions and exceptions to codes, rules and laws, and admires things that make sense.
    
    My introverted side likes silence and solitude.
    
    My extroverted side likes striking up conversation with strangers and talking with people about things that are important to them.
    
    We all seem to enjoy rocking chairs and lemon meringue pie.
77. Heavy Seas 18 — Otter Point, Acadia National Park, Bar Harbor, ME, September 29, 2012 — I hate movies where the question that begs to be asked is not asked. Where the scene switches at exactly the moment when the thing that needs most to be said is not said. Of course, to ask the question and say the thing would transform the outcome and change the movie.
    
    But. Everything turns on the question that begs to be asked, on the thing that needs most to be said.
    
    Become aware of those things in everyday conversation. Ask the question. Say the thing. The outcome depends on it.
78. Orange Flame Azalea 02 — Roan Mountain Highlands at Carver’s Gap, TN, June 19, 2013 — We separate soul from body by teaching our body to crave stuff not good for it. Tobacco, drugs and alcohol, food often and in large quantities… When our body goes off on its own, our soul retreats, retires, withdraws, disappears.
    
    Living cut-off from soul is a tough life. Loss of Soul is the primary symptom fueling all of the culture’s other symptoms. Getting our soul back is our first order of business.
    
    Talk about a life-style change! Whoa. That’s a 180 wide open on a dime. It’s a shock to everyone’s system. Better slow down first. Give yourself time. Let your body get adjusted to the idea of having your soul back.
    
    Your body wants its ice cream and potato chips, and all the other items we inhale, eat, drink and do as soul substitutes. Your body isn’t going to like it.
    
    Better ease back into it, one day at a time.
    
    Start with looking and listening, seeing and hearing. Look at what you’re doing and at what you need to be doing. Don’t do anything yet. Just look. See. Listen. Hear. Get to know your soulless situation. Live in it with your eyes open. The path begins where you are. Here. Now.
79. Summer Days 02 — Blue Ridge Parkway near Boone, NC, June 11, 2012 — How symbolically do you live? What are the symbols that connect you with life—and with your life, with the life that is yours to live?
    
    Your symbols find you. You can’t think them up, reason them out, declare them to be yours. You realize what they are. You wake up to them. You experience them. Boom! There they are!
    
    Symbols express what cannot be said. Symbols are thresholds, doorways, windows, portals, flash points to realization and awareness.
    
    When you see one of your symbols, you see who you are—you remember who you are. Our symbols ground us in the truth of our own being—they show us who we are.
    
    To recognize your symbols, you simply become aware of the things, items, objects, images that have always attracted you, caught your eye.
    
    You may have them sitting around your house. You may carry them in your pocket, wear them around your neck, on your hat.
    
    Sit with them. Open yourself to them. Allow them to show you you. Let them speak, reveal, declare, make plain, bring forth.
    
    Exploring the objects that have always meant something to us opens avenues to other worlds. We never say everything a symbol means.
    
    No symbol can be dismissed with an “Oh, that’s just thus-and-so.” There are no definitions/explanations for a symbol. Only experiencing it.
    
    You can tell when a symbol is not, or is no longer, a living symbol when you can explain it, define it, say what it is.
    
    The cross? The bread and the cup? The baptismal font or baptistery? We can say what they all are in a short sentence or two. Dead symbols.
    
    We are satisfied with the explanation and do not experience the mystery residing within the symbol that once was alive, but now is dead.
    
    What more is there to the cross, for example? What else might be said, understood, experienced, felt, known, intuited, imagined, known?
    
    Of course, when you go beyond the common understanding of a symbol now dead, you run the risk of stepping into heresy and blasphemy.
    
    Heresy is the living offspring of a dead symbol. Every step forward is a step into heresy. All growth is heretical from some point of view. If you can’t bear them calling you a blasphemer and a son, or daughter, of Satan, you might just keep mending the nets.
80. Sunrise, 10/20/12 — Cape Hatteras National Seashore, Ocracoke Island, NC, October 20, 2012 — If we are going to grow up, we are going to have to come to terms with money. Money is a substitute for growing up. It’s a diversion, distraction, deflection. With enough money, who needs to grow up.
    
    Money is the Cyclops, standing our path, with a wad of big bucks in hand, asking, “And, how much for YOUR soul today?”
    
    The catch with money, of course, is that it is very handy for paying the bills—we have to make sure they are the right bills. We have to incur only those bills that are necessary for doing the work that is ours to do.
    
    Money is good for paying people to do things we can’t do, or don’t want to do, or don’t have time to do because we are doing our thing and re-roofing the house is not it. But we have to keep good faith with our thing and use money to do it, or money will quickly become a source of fascination and endless delight—like the Forbidden Fruit in the Garden of Eden—that keeps us from doing our thing.
    
    So. We have to know what we need money for—and not be fooling ourselves. How much money do we need to do our thing and pay the right bills? Spend your money in the service of the right bills, and see where it goes.
81. Mosquito Hawks — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, July 22, 2013 — We are at war with ourselves. This is the foundation of all our trouble. Once we are at-one with ourselves, integrated within, the world and life are a snap. It is not as easy as it sounds.
    
    Our approach to dealing with The Other Side is denial, suppression, repression, ridicule, shame, condemnation rejection, isolation, excommunication, shunning and abandonment. Not exactly the ticket to peace and harmony.
    
    We have to talk. With ourselves. We need each other.
    
    Twoness is essential for oneness. One alone cannot be whole, only half. Takes two to be one. You could look it up.
    
    We have something at stake in The Other. The Other has something at stake in us. That’s grounds for a negotiated settlement.
    
    It starts with our becoming conscious of The Other. The easiest way to do this is to be aware of our conflicts—our ambivalence. We have to catch ourselves dismissing a conflict as “not a problem” because it “shouldn’t be a problem.” That is to say we feel that because we “shouldn’t feel the way we feel” (Like not wanting to go back to our family of origin, for example, for Thanksgiving) it isn’t a problem. So we go back home for the turkey dinner and suffer in ways beyond counting—often without knowing what the problem is because we have dismissed it as a problem.
    
    We have to pay attention. We have to pull our contraries into the room, sit them down at the table, and listen as their air their grievances and state their case—WITHOUT TAKING SIDES! Without talking anyone out of feeling the way they feel! Listening, listening, listening, until we get to the bottom of how both—or all—sides feel.
    
    Then we bear the pain of realization. We carry the conflict consciously. One the one hand this, on the other hand that. Without trying to find a solution or a resolution. We just bear the pain consciously in our body—feeling what it feels like in our body to be conflicted, ambivalent, at odds within.
    
    That’s it. Consciously bearing the pain is going to—by itself—create an opening for the problem to shift, and things will change. Consciously bearing the pain that is ours to bear is transformative both within and without. The agony carries with it the seeds of its own release from suffering. I don’t know why no one has ever told you this before.
82. Live Oak 03 — Magnolia Gardens, Charleston, SC, April 29, 2013 — What we fail to make conscious—be intently aware of—we trip over chasing after whatever it is we think we want. The things we ignore trip us up.
    
    We eat things that don’t agree with us too close to going to bed and can’t sleep. And take pills to sleep which have their own side effect, which we treat with more medication, and, like that, our life spins out of control all because we failed to note that we have aged past rare steak at 9 PM.
    
    Our body does not belong to us. We belong to our body. Things work fine as long as we remember our place in the order of things and live to serve ends that are not our preferred ends, and do the work that is ours to do—which may not be our idea of the work that ought to be done.
    
    We live too loudly to listen. So. We have to stop from time to time and take stock. Look. Listen. See. Hear. Be aware of what we are ignoring.
    
    Make being attentive your practice. Allow it to change your life.
83. Green Heron Silhouette — The Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, July 2013 — We are corks on the water of life. The main current has us and will have its way with us and our place is to trust ourselves to it and to all that resides within, knowing that we have what it takes to do what can be done with whatever comes our way.
    
    We are corks on the water. It’s hard to sink a cork. We can be taken under, but we pop back up again, like one of those cartoon characters that keeps getting run over by steam rollers and boulders, and smashed beneath falling pianos and anvils. We find a way as our life carries us along.
    
    And within that overall scheme, we direct the flow of our own life energy toward—in the service of—the things that matter most to us. My camera and computer get most of my attention now that I’m retired and our children are grown.
    
    We have different points of focus at different stages of life. We are not just a cork on the water. We are also a child playing with a hose, directing the water of our life toward experiences and outcomes that hold joy, delight and meaning for us.
    
    The two metaphors are true at the same time, a cork bobbing on and a child playing in the waters of life. Be both at once, and enjoy the wonder!
84. Sunrise, 10/31/09 — Cape Hatteras National Seashore, Ocracoke Island, NC, October 31, 2009 — There are no rules for determining what you should do when. You make the call based on your experience and your sense of what is happening and what needs to be done about it.
    
    You could be wrong. Oh well. You’ve been wrong before.
    
    The same thing applies to changing your mind about doing something once you have done it or not done it. Maybe you shouldn’t have done it. Maybe you should do it. Get off the fence! Make a choice! Either do it or don’t do it! Or wait it out!
    
    Waiting it out is one of the most underrated of all our choice possibilities. I recommend it highly. When you don’t know what to do, wait to see what you are going to do. You’ll know what it is when you find yourself doing it. Get out of the way. Stop fretting about it. And wait to see. How cool is that for always knowing what to do? “I’ll know it when I see it.”
    
    We don’t know whether we are going to like something, or what is going to happen, or where we are better off. Stop trying to figure the angles and come out on top. Stop playing the percentages and living with your advantage guiding your way. Some things you cannot think out. You have to wait them out. Other things, you know.
    
    What is happening? What needs to be done about it? What are you going to do? Waiting to see what you are going to do is one bright option. Not knowing. Just doing. Surprising yourself.
    
    I’m NOT taking a boarder. I’m NOT having a pet. I’m NOT inviting one more responsibility into my life. I don’t care what you say.
    
    We are all very clear about some things. It is what we are not clear about that ties us in knots. We solve the Gordian Knot by slicing through it—by reframing the problem—by understanding it differently—by allowing our perception to shift—by growing up. Some problems require us to grow up. That’s waiting a long time sometimes.
    
    Everything clears up with time. Waiting to see is what I like to do best. “I’m waiting to see what I’m going to do about photos in the fall.” A plan will develop over time. In the meantime, I’m not worrying about it, wringing my hands, throwing up.
85. Great Blue Heron 05/01/2013 — The Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 1, 2013 — I am loving selling our house. It is absolutely hell. Just exactly what I need at this point in my life. I am so proud of myself for giving it to me.
    
    We need our trials and ordeals. Trials and ordeals are the best things in the world. They are what it’s about. Our trials and ordeals show us who we are—require us to be what the situation needs us to be. Grow us up.
    
    We would never volunteer for a trial or an ordeal. They are thrust on us from the outside. First Grade. Whose idea was First Grade? Yanking us from the comfort of our own little world and thrown into a room full of little tyrants who don’t care one thing about us. And told to be nice.
    
    It all flows from there. A life filled with trials and ordeals. Dating. Calling girls. That was such an agony for me. Agony is the best thing in the world. We would never get anywhere without agony. Oh, how I agonized, looking at the telephone, sweating, forcing myself to do the thing I most dreaded. Good for me. I did it.
    
    I took all the appointed steps into a different rendition of agony—into increasingly difficult rounds of trials and ordeals. Marriage. Parenthood. The Church.
    
    Up until I met selling the house, parenthood was my outstanding accomplishment. Three daughters in four years through all their growing up and out of college, married and into lives of their own. My wife and I met every turn in that road as well as we knew how, and here we are. Selling a house.
    
    It’s another round of trials and ordeals and agony. And I’m good for it. I read what I write here and take notes, and am doing what is needed in each situation as it arises. You would be proud of me.
86. Sand Dunes, 10/29/2009 — Cape Hatteras National Seashore, Ocracoke Island, NC, October 29, 2009 — People say, “We have so much to be thankful for!” to ward off the steady press of all we have to be afraid of, all we have to be anxious about, all we have to wrestle with, worry about, figure out, avoid, escape, contend with… It’s a mixed bag, at best, and Brooks Vance’s advice to his wife hits the mark, “Don’t add up the liabilities, Louise, it’ll only depress you.”
    
    Try not to think about it. Or, better, change the way you think about it. Don’t take any of it seriously.
    
    The title of Paul Watzlawick’s book, “The Situation Is Hopeless But Not Serious,” carries the day.
    
    ”It’s all in a day.” Anything can happen a day, things to be thankful for and things to hate from the heart. How we see it, what we say about it, tells the tale.
    
    I recommend keeping it close to the center. Don’t allow either the good or the bad to carry you away. Whatever it is is just what it is, and it is going to require things of you and have implications for your life, and you are going to have to take all of that into account, and make adjustments, and maybe live differently. So pick yourself up and step into it and do what the situation requires, what is appropriate to the situation, in each situation that comes along without having to have this and avoid that. Do what you are asked to do today and get ready for tomorrow.
    
    Oh, but where is the JOY? Enjoy what is to be enjoyed without holding onto it past the time of its lasting. I enjoy the daylights out of sunsets, but the sun is going down. Let come what’s coming and let go what’s going. Because that’s the way it is.
    
    Oh, but we don’t WANT it to be the way it is! There you are. The heart of the problem. I call that refusing to grow up. Having to have what we want and have nothing to do with what we don’t want. What do you call it?
87. A new buisness card—one of twelve images — We think of living the life we have in mind for ourselves. Where do we want to go? What do we want to do? How can we be happy? How can we make more money? The questions about how to live our life revolve around what we want and how to get it.
    
    All of this disappears instantly in the grip of what Joseph Campbell calls “a mythic vision” (That would be a vision of mythic proportions).
    
    When we are picked up, spun around and slammed into the ground by an experience with what needs us to do it, nothing else matters beyond doing the thing. We know we have to be a teacher, or a writer, or a dancer, or whatever it is that is ours to be/do—and everything else falls into place around that. Everything else serves that.
    
    Now, of course, no one we know has experiences like that. So we are left with looking at each other, saying, “What do you want to do?” “I dunno. What do you want to do?” Or, “Let’s go bowling, Dude.”
    
    We have to put ourselves in the path of a mythic vision.
    
    Native Americans would go on Vision Quests. We have to do something along those lines—but we don’t have to leave home to do it. We only have to be quiet on a regular basis, and pay attention at all times.
    
    We have to mine our memory for what was a mythic vision that we discarded as a wild notion. We may have been gripped and allowed ourselves to be talked out of it.
    
    Mythic visions can slip up on us, wink and disappear like a White Rabbit. If we don’t know what is happening, we can busy ourselves with getting our life to line up like we want it to and miss life when it taps us on the shoulder and calls our name. So we have to remember when we might have had a mythic encounter and dismissed it—and go back and try to recover a trail that has grown cold and overgrown.
    
    Or, we can sensitize ourselves to the possibility of mythic visions coming to us even now, even yet, and spend quiet time attending what might be calling our name. It is never too late for the adventure to begin.
88. The Watchman — Zion National Park, Springdale, UT, May 20, 2010 — We could immediately reduce the level of suffering in the world by simply bearing our own pain. Bearing our own pain means assuming responsibility for the things we are responsible for and doing what needs to be done about it. It means doing what is ours to do. It means growing up.
    
    It means getting up and doing what needs us to do it whether we want to or not. What does wanting to mow the lawn have to do with mowing the lawn? We are perfectly capable of mowing the lawn—and mowing it well—without wanting to. And so on, down the entire list.
    
    ”But What About US? When Is It OUR Turn?” Does that sound like the Terrible Twos to you? “But I Don’t WANT To Mow The Lawn!”
    
    Bearing our own pain means doing what needs to be done, when it needs to be done, the way it needs to be done, and trusting that things (the joy and the love and the good times, etc) will come our way in time. In the meantime, we bear the pain.
    
    And reduce the amount of suffering in the world instantaneously.
89. new business card series. 2/20 images — There are three things that separate photographers from snapshooters:
    
    1) Photographers read the manual. And re-read it. Carry it with them in their camera bag. Know what their camera will do and how to get it to do what it will do.
    
    2) Photographers practice, practice, practice. Photographers do not leave their camera on a shelf until they are in the mood to take a picture. What does mood have to do with anything? Pianists don’t wait until they are in the mood to play the piano. Dancers don’t wait until they are in the mood to dance. And they don’t put their piano or their ballet shoes on a shelf until they feel like playing or dancing.
    
    3) Photographers wait. Wait on the light. Wait on the wind to stop, or start, blowing. Wait on the clouds to come or go. Wait on the tourists to get out of the scene. Practice, practice, practice, wait, wait, wait. That’s all photography amounts to. You can read the manual while you’re waiting.
90. Used in Short Talks On Contradiction, etc., Green Heron in Flight 07 — The Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, July 26, 2013 — If we were aware of our contradictions, we would have to change the way we live to take our contradictions into account.
    
    If we were to integrate, reconcile, synthesize our contradictions, we would be more loving, generous and gracious—and less hostile, insufferable, biased, prejudiced, racist, belligerent, malicious and unkind.
    
    If we were to recognize the incompatibility between what we say and what we also say—and between what we say and what we do—we would shift everything toward the center, and cut everyone more slack, and push no one beyond the margins of civil society, or over the brink of human decency, and out of the circle of our protection, benevolence and good will.
    
    If we were to see ourselves as we are and as we also are—and sit with ourselves as we are and as we also are—until both were welcome in our presence, we would be better company, and all would be blessed by our place in their lives.
91. A new business card series. 3/10 images — We act out what we do not know. It is as though we are shadow boxing ghosts from our past, or our parents’ past—ghosts long dead and buried and very much alive, taunting us with their subliminal reminders of things long ago, yet present always—haunting us with their grim humor, laughing and living on in the world of which we are unaware, though it intrudes constantly into our life in this world of normal, apparent reality.
    
    James Hollis’ new book, “Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives,” addresses these issues and offers helpful insight into ways we can reclaim our life and live as an integrated and consciously whole human being. Not a bad goal for the time left for living. It is available as a Kindle book on Amazon, or as a hardback, if you prefer.
92. Price Lake Panorama 10/2011 — Julian Price Memorial Park, Blue Ridge Parkway near Blowing Rock, NC, October 2011 — I’m working on getting consistently sharply focused images of birds flying, owls, herons and ducks. My camera isn’t built to do that—it’s forte is a single, still, shot, like a sunset or a waterfall. So, I accept the challenge and step forth to meet the day.
    
    I don’t ask why. It doesn’t matter why. I have a mission—that is enough.
    
    My work is practice, not achievement, accomplishment, success. I practice taking photos of flying birds. I don’t TAKE photos of flying birds. Occasionally, I get a photo that is sharply focused—often enough to encourage me in the work, in the practice.
    
    It is not drudgery. I do not dread it. I look forward to it, enjoy it, relish it. I AM my work, it is ME. I don’t ask why. I do my work with pleasure.
    
    I imagine Sisyphus approaching his day in the same spirit. It isn’t punishment if you embrace it, delight in it, voluntarily participate fully in its execution. Do it well. Do it right. Love it.
    
    I forget, sometimes, where I am. I lose my place. I think I’m there to capture the perfect image, to cast it before you for your delight and amazement, and strut around the ring, showing off, taking bows.
    
    When I rise up to take over the work for my own aggrandizement, the work rises up to wake me up, reminding me it’s about the practice—not a sharply focused image, but consistently sharply focused images. One after another. So that it becomes boring and I can do it thinking about something else, and have to quit and find something I can’t do and learn to do it in the time left for living.
    
    Why? Don’t bother wondering. Trying to figure the why’s keeps you from doing what is yours to do. It’s a lazy person’s out. Your work is waiting. Shoulder to the stone now, laughing.
93. A new business card series. 4/20 images — Zen is about direct experience. Eat the apple and you know that apple. Talk about the apple and you know about the apple. Maybe. Zen the thing!
    
    Want to know God? Zen God.
    
    When you Zen something, you know it without understanding it, without changing it, without tampering with it. Knowing something changes you.
    
    Zenning is the way to do everything by doing nothing. It was originally called Taoing. When Buddhism met Taoism we got Zen.
    
    The trick with Zenning is to have an outcome in mind without having to have it. Work toward the outcome without willing it.
    
    All will be well with no will getting in the way.
    
    You work the process with the outcome in mind. The outcome guides the process but it’s the process that matters. Plant the seed well. Wait.
    
    Maybe it rains, maybe it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, haul water. If there is water. Maybe the seed doesn’t sprout. Maybe the plant doesn’t produce. You did your part. Let the part you don’t control be as it is.
    
    You leave the harbor with a certain destination in mind. Comes up a wind that blows you to a different port. Be cool with it. Zen it.
    
    Zenning something is doing what needs to be done—doing it well—without having to get it done.
    
    The second baseman plays his position perfectly and his team loses the game. That’s the way it is. Play your position well. Let the game go.
    
    This gets us back to my sharply focused photos of flying ducks, owls, and herons. The work is teaching me to do the work. Zen and the art of archery is also Zen and the art of photography. Zen and any art.
    
    There is a lot of time between photos of flying birds. Long enough to forget what I learned the last time. It is all good practice.
94. Green Heron with Tadpole — The Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, July 27, 2013 — I’m amazed that ruthlessness, viciousness and violence continue to set the tone and carry the day. The headlines haven’t changed in 10,000 years.
    
    In spite of the fact that insight, intuition, awareness, compassion, good will and good faith have been steadily showing themselves to be in the best interest of all concerned. Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan still ride roughshod over us all.
    
    That being the case, we are still called to be Jesus the way only we can be Jesus in the face of all that is Anti-Christ in every minute of every day. We are not to be Jesus the way Jesus was Jesus—he’s already done that. We are to be Jesus the way only we can be Jesus. That is our work—to bring Jesus forth in our life, and do Jesus the way we would do Jesus in the here and now of our living.
    
    Or the Buddha. Or Gandhi. Or any of those who have known how to do it and have done it the way it ought to be done, the way it needed to be done, in the minute details of their life, in every situation as it arose, all their life long.
    
    You can’t be Jesus (or Buddha, or Gandhi…) the way I would be Jesus (or Buddha, or Gandhi…). You have to be Jesus (or Buddha, or Gandhi…) the way YOU would be Jesus (or Buddha, or Gandhi…). And if you don’t know what that would be, they didn’t either. We have to live our way into it just as they did—living through the uncertainty, fear, disinclination, difficulties, hardships, trials and ordeals just as they did. Unless you can find someone who did it right easily, like eating cake, and laughing.
95. Owl 01 — A new business card series. 5/20 images. — Moods are mirrors. In the grip of a mood, sit with it, explore it, get to know it, find out where it comes from, who its Daddy is, and Momma. Wonder why here? Why now? Why this mood in this situation?
    
    Moods generally reflect the degree to which we are getting our way or not getting our way. What’s the deal with Our Way? How did Our Way become the be all and end all of our life? Since when has Our Way worked out all that well?
    
    Why does Our Way have the power to determine our demeanor, frame of mind, state of soul? What does Our Way think it knows?
    
    Our Way gets in the way, blocks the way—keeps us from being about what we need to be about, the way we need to be about it.
    
    Our Way would dispense with all difficulties and have nothing but a free and open, bumpless road to glory as it defines glory.
    
    Our difficulties bring us forth, calling us to rise to the occasion, against our will. We grow up against our will. Our Way is to not grow up.
    
    Life calls us forth, grows us up, enables us to become who we are by doing what needs to be done the way it needs to be done.
    
    Life is difficulties, trials and ordeals. What we call “really living,” isn’t living at all. That’s how much Our Way knows about the way—and is something else for us to contend with along the way.
96. Yellow Swallowtail — The Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, July 29, 2013 — If you don’t develop an inner life, you are going to be dependent upon the things, people and experiences of your outer life to nurture and nourish you, reassure you and encourage you along the way. That’s a lot to ask, particularly if you are terminally insecure.
    
    Ego-strength is an inner achievement. You have to be able to “stand on your own two feet,” and face the difficulties, trials and ordeals of your life by yourself before caring presence in the outside world can help you to reconnect you to the ground and source of your being in order to step back into your life and do what needs to be done there.
    
    The ground and source of your being is not to be found in the outer world. I don’t live to take pictures. I live to see. The scenes work with me to develop me, but I will be okay when the aging process forces me to rely exclusively on inner seeing, because the outer is developing the inner, not substituting for it.
    
    The outer world is not a distraction to keep us from facing and finding our way around in the world of inner being. The outer world is a mirror showing those who look, who and how they are and what they need to do to become more like they are in the time left for living.
    
    Those who don’t do the inner work never grow up, and die having failed to live, though they be old and wrinkled.
97. Emerald Isle Sunrise — A new business card series. Image 6/20 — We have to contain our own anxiety. We cannot allow it to spill out, to run over, contaminating our environment and ruining life for countless people. The anxiety we do not contain, the pain we do not bear, spreads out around us like a communal toxin for which there is no balm.
    
    We reduce the amount of corporate pain and upheaval in the world by bearing the personal pain which is legitimately ours to bear.
    
    We have to bear the pain of our panic, of our frantic, frenzied need for reassurance, for safety and security, of our desperate search for the comfort of Mamma’s lap, the protection of Daddy’s arms.
    
    We have to stand alone in our own life, and face the realities that have to be dealt with, and live it. Everything rides on that.
    
    In order to grow up, we have to stand up and step into our life just as it is, and do there what must be done, in each situation as it arises, all our life long.
    
    In order to grow up, we have to do what we don’t want to do. No one ever grows up doing what he, what she, wants to do.
    
    We need someone to save us from ourselves. No one can save us from ourselves. That work is ours to do alone.
    
    What we do need, that we cannot supply ourselves, is the perspective of the right kind of company who can listen to our complaints and grievances, receive us with compassion and grace, and say to us what I am saying here.
    
    ”Yes. It is a bad old sorry world and unfair on many levels. Now, get in there and do your thing the way only you can do it, and don’t give up or quit just because it’s hard. All you have to do is what is hard. Now go to it!”
98. Dragon Fly 04 — The Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, Juy 30, 3013 — It takes the Cyclops—it takes trials and ordeals—to bring out the best in us. And the worst.
    
    As long as things are sailing along smoothly under light winds and balmy skies, we are nice as can be—good company, extremely pleasant, and fun to be around.
    
    Let the sail rip, the rudder stop responding, the wind pick up, the waves swamp the boat… Let’s see how you do under pressure—in the tension and heat of your trials and ordeals, when fear and anxiety have you by the throat, and you see nothing but hopelessness and despair in all directions. Then, who guides your boat on its path through the sea?
    
    We do just fine with everything going our way, but let us encounter the end of our way—let us come up against desperation, torment and agony—let us experience the complete loss of everything important to us, the end of life as we know it.
    
    Then, we discover sides of ourselves we didn’t know we had—for better or for worse. Where does the little, spiteful, resentful, cruel, sarcastic, vindictive, vicious SOB, or B, come from? Where has he, has she, been hiding during the good times? How did he, did she, take over the ship so easily, without so much as a threat of mutiny?
    
    He, she, is just a glimpse of ALL we are capable of—of who we also are—come to light in the darkness and gloom of things not going our way.
    
    There is also the gallant side, the big, gracious, kind side, and a ton of others as well. Here be the conflicts and contraries within that I talk about so often.
    
    Invite them to the table. Hear them out. Bear well what they have to say. Your wholeness rides on your ability to attend well the divisions within, respect their voices and hear what they have to say.
    
    Get to know them. They are you, too. And have a rightful place in your life. There will be a time when each has the response needed for—and appropriate to—that time and place. But their cue for action can’t hang on things going your way, or not. There has to be more at stake than your idea for your life.
    
    All of you together have to be serving your life’s need for all of you. Get on board that ship and you can handle whatever comes along.
99. Crabtree Falls — A new business card series. Image 7/20. — I don’t know the difference between accepting something, and making our peace with something, and coming to terms with something, and being okay with something, and talking ourselves into something that is inevitable and is going to happen whether you want it to or not.
    
    Going to first grade. Seeing your first child go to first grade. Having to go to work. Having to work out your own problems. Aging… The list is long.
    
    This is how things are, and this is what you can do about it, and that’s that. The people who wail in protest and take to their beds with their face to the wall are not going to fare very well.
    
    Life requires shifts, adjustments and alterations on the part of those who are living. And what we call it isn’t important. That we do it is essential for everything that follows (that would be the rest of our life).
    
    So, call it what you want to, but do it. Accept it, make your peace with it, come to terms with it, be okay with it, talk yourself into it. Make the shifts, adjustments, alterations that are necessary to continue making shifts, adjustments and alterations.
    
    It’s called paying the price to ride the ride.
100. Heron Overhead 01 — The Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, July 31, 2013 — There are no shortcuts to truth—to the truth of who you are and what you need to do about it.
     
     James Hollis, in his new book, “Hauntings: Dispelling The Ghosts Who Run Our Lives,” said: “The primary task of the second half of life is the recovery of personal authority, namely, to discern what is true for oneself and find the courage to live it.”
     
     You cannot take an occasional hit of truth on the side, when no one is looking, to settle you down and enable you to live with all that is not true about you and your life.
     
     You have to dive into truth—into the truth of who you are and what needs to be done about it in the time left for living—all the way to the bottom—all the way to the heart of who you are—and allow it to transform your life from the inside out.
     
     But. You aren’t sure about that. You aren’t ready for that. It’s easier to take your pills, or drink two six-packs a day, or do whatever you do to take your mind off your fundamental conflict with living the way you are living. You have to wait until the pain is so great that you will do anything to be free of it, even go to the trouble of being who you are.
     
     Quoting Hollis again, same book, “Without suffering, there is no call to consciousness, no showing up for the appointment we have with life… How unpleasant to realize that finally we all have to face what we fear.”
     
     We have to be in pain before we have what it takes to embrace the pain of transformation, of reorientation, and take up the work, the journey, of becoming who we are.
     
     The essence of that work is coming to the table with all that you currently are and all that is waiting to come to life in you and through you, and see what stays and what goes. You have never done anything harder. Or more necessary.
     
     But, you may have to wait to have what it takes to see what all you might yet become. You might have to suffer a bit longer before you have what it takes to die to your old life and be reborn in the life that is yours to live.

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05/13/2013– 06/16/2013

1. No Theology! It ought to be a bumper sticker. No Doctrine! This is called the doctrine of no doctrine.
   
   Bad religion looks for something beyond the experience of life to justify the experience of life—and to look forward to once “this vale of tears” is left behind through death.
   
   The experience of life is more accurately a “veil of tears,” concealing the wonder, beauty, goodness and joy of life just as it is—which can be seen only by those with eyes to see, ears to hear, and a heart to understand.
   
   The experience of life is an optical illusion, now you see it, now you don’t and sometimes you never see it—with the “it” being the foundational truth of meaning and purpose lying beyond the apparent truth of meaninglessness and absurdity.
   
   The experience of life is an ink blot—reflecting the interior orientation of those who look at life and declare it to be as they see it.
   
   For example: Synchronicity is an encounter with more than meets the eye—which cannot be denied. A chance conversation changes our life. We have a brief exchange with a person in line with us at a checkout counter, whom we never see again and cannot forget.
   
   Synchronous experiences buoy us up and carry us along, and are available to all who are available to them. It takes a certain perspective, outlook, orientation, receptivity, to be able to see what is before us—and what is also before us—in each situation as it arises.
   
   That which transforms the life of one person is invisible to another. Look for yourself and see what you look at.
2. Duckie 07 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 13, 2013 — The stream flows both ways. The disciples pull the master forth as much as the master pulls the disciples forth. Who is the master? Who is the disciple?
   
   The disciples become like the master in following no master and in seeing everyone as their master. The master who thinks she, he, is the master is no master.
   
   A true master takes instruction from every experience, each encounter. Is always learning. Is embarrassed to talk to others as an authority on any subject. Walks through her, through his, life in the spirit of play. Is at home with children. Delights in the gifts of the day. Laughs in her, in his, sleep.
3. Great Blue Heron May 07 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 13, 2013 — Blue Herons come into the world knowing how to be a Blue Heron. Baby ducks come into the world knowing how to be a duck. You can imprint a baby duck with a cat, say, or a tarantula, but, put it in the water and it will swim like a duck.
   
   Elephants don’t try to be giraffes. You can’t trick a parakeet into thinking it’s an orangutan. A pine tree doesn’t imitate a Barrel Cactus. I could go on.
   
   Human beings like to cast about because they don’t know who they are. That’s ridiculous.
   
   All human beings with vital signs intact knows what they like and don’t like, love or hate, what fits or doesn’t fit, what their business is and isn’t. And none of them would let me sweeten their coffee or their tea.
   
   They could pick themselves out of a line-up.
   
   We know who we are. We just wish we were someone else. Until we get to know them.
4. Owl Flies Two — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 11, 2013 — Do it because you love doing it and not to become rich and famous. Do it because there is nothing you had rather do. Don’t do it to exploit it. Do it to do it.
5. Coming At You One — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 14, 2013 — Don’t try to make something happen. See what is happening and what needs to happen, and do that.
   
   The art of life is waiting for the time to be right—for the right moment to act—and being ready to walk through the door when it opens.
   
   Be there when the owl flies, ready.
6. Coming At You Two — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 14, 2013 — You have to live with singleness of purpose to live on the beam, aligned with that which is deepest, best and truest about you—in synch with the life that is your life to live.
   
   Singleness of purpose cannot coexist with multitasking. You see the problem.
   
   We have to know what our business is and do our business. The closer we can come to that, the closer we are to True Human Beinghood.
   
   We all suffer from Attention Deficit Disorder. We have too much to think about, too much to do, too many responsibilities, obligations and duties—too much clutter in our life.
   
   To do photography, I have to be, pardon the pun, focused on photography. Nothing is quite as distracting for me as photography with a group of photographers. If I am with a group, I am not with the scene.
   
   I see from solitude, out of solitude, with solitude, through solitude—the kind of solitude that fosters singleness of purpose and oneness with the scene—oneness with my life, the life that is my life to live.
   
   In long-ago Japan, spiritual deepening and self-realization and expression were reserved for the second-half of life when one had made one’s way in the world and the children were grown and settled into lives of their own. When one could be focused on the one’s on business, and do the work that was theirs to do.
7. Coming At You Three — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 14, 2013 — Singleness of purpose is knowing what your business is and what it isn’t and doing what is your business to do.
   
   ”Stay Out Of My Business!” “Mind Your Own Business!” These are two watchwords of the way, with the second being something we say to ourselves as well as to others.
   
   We cannot be casual with our business, flip, nonchalant, indifferent. Our business is our heart and soul—apart from our business our soul dies and we lose heart because there is nothing to serve us as “the still point of the turning world.” Without that, we fly off in a thousand directions, with no center to ground us, identify us, stabilize us, orient and direct us.
   
   What’s your business? Where does your soul come to life and your heart start beating? Where are you when you cannot think of a better place to be? What are you doing when you had rather be doing that than anything you can think of? How often do you go there? Do that?
   
   Are you picking up what I’m laying down here?
8. Over the Boardwalk 06 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 15, 2013, Too close to focus, but you get the idea. — Five ducks are coming in, you pick a duck. How do you know which duck to choose? You pick a duck.
   
   We are overwhelmed with choices and don’t know which choice to choose. How do we decide?
   
   The worst decision is to be immobilized by the number of choices. You could stand before the orange juice section of your grocery store for a long time. Too many choices. So make one and go on to the next one.
   
   Get out of the way and let the Chooser choose. The Chooser cuts through all of the pros and cons, advantages and disadvantages, reason why and reasons why not, and picks a duck.
   
   If it turns out to be a poor choice, what of it? Three ducks are coming in now. Your odds just got better.
9. Heron Silhouette 04 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 15, 2013 — The path opens before those who start walking. Who walk with awareness. Who collaborate with the inner guide in determining direction and pace. Who trust themselves to the journey without maps or guidebooks. Who have no need of timetables or schedules. Who have no destination in mind.
10. Watch out Squirrel! — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 15, 2013 — How hard would you play, or work, with everything on the line? How hard would you play, or work, with nothing on the line?
    
    Why the difference? Why allow what’s on the line determine the quality of your playing, or working, or living?
    
    Live to be passionately involved in your life with nothing at stake in the outcome.
11. Osprey Goes Fishing 01 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 14, 2013 — What do you enjoy about your life?
    
    Enjoy the things you enjoy about your life with greater frequency and longer duration.
12. Catch of the Day 01 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 15, 2013 — I think nothing would help us with our life quite like having a sounding board—quite like being able to talk things out, talk things through.
    
    The problem with writing in a journal is the problem with talking to ourselves. If we do that, we have to develop the art of seeing things from the other side—from the side opposite our own. Otherwise, we just express our point of view over and over, and never come to see things differently from the way we see things.
    
    A sounding board offers a different perspective, sees things from a different point of view, and can ask questions of us that we cannot ask of ourselves—because it never occurs to us.
    
    It is possible to develop an inner sounding board that does call us into question but, we have to be open to what we hear. Practice by making a statement about how you feel about your life—about how things are going with you—and listen to what occurs to you. It may not be words. It may be a picture or an image. An object may come to mind.
    
    Practice listening this way to the things you tell yourself, the things you say to yourself about what is happening in your life. You’ll be helping yourself get to the bottom of you, to the heart of the matter, and figuring out what response you need to make.
    
    In this way, you can create your own sounding board and carry it with you wherever you go.
13. Spring Panorama — Blue Ridge Parkway near Boone, NC, May 9, 2013 — All of the values that life proves valuable come together to form one perspective, orientation, outlook, attitude toward life.
    
    Patience is compassion. You cannot be patient if you are not compassionate. You cannot be compassionate if you are not patient.
    
    You cannot be compassionate if you are not vulnerable and capable of intimacy, of trust.
    
    It goes on. It’s a circle of oneness—of one thing being necessary for all the others—of one value being the foundation of every other value.
    
    And they also conflict. A values conflict is the best kind of conflict. How do we choose between equally important values when they are mutually exclusive?
    
    We die in working it out. That’s the nature of crucifixion. Giving up this to get that, making the necessary trade-offs required by life (Life eats life, you know), grows us up and makes us humble, heartbroken, and of real help to one another along the way.
14. Green Heron in a Cypress Tree — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 16, 2013 — Things can change without anything being different.
    
    You can divorce one spouse and marry another. You can leave one job and take another. You can move from one part of the country to another. Somehow, your life stays the same.
    
    Churches regularly change ministers and regularly remain the same. Restaurants change their menus. The food remains the same. You can put the entire contents of your refrigerator and pantry on the pizza. It’s still pizza.
    
    What makes things different? What is the key to transformation? How can we change our life from the ground up, inside out?
    
    How different can you be? How alterable are you at the core? If you were going to be different, how would you be then that you aren’t now?
    
    What remains the same no matter what you do?
15. Owl Flies Through The Tangle—Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 16, 2013 — We need those who would be the right kind of community for us to serve as a sounding board and a balancing agent. Alone, we are off, over the edge, out of sight in no time at all.
    
    The craziest people you know are loners. The next craziest people you know are leading some mob off some cliff. We have to find the middle ground.
    
    The healthiest community does not act as one. Does not think the same way, believe the same things, does not live according to the same idea of how to live except the idea of surrounding ourselves with those who can hear us out, pull us forth, and provide the balancing ballast to keep us stable and centered in the path to maturation, awareness, enlightenment, insight, realization, peace and good citizenship.
    
    (Good citizenship is providing what we need to those who also need it—offering compassionate presence and good company to one another around the table, across the board, with no stipulations or requirements beyond, “Can you use what I have to offer?”)
    
    The healthiest community is the source of honest conversation straight from the hear about things that matter.
    
    Honest conversation is balancing, stretching, expanding, deepening conversation. It is not debate or argument There is no room for “the dialectic” in honest conversation, with it’s pros and cons, good and bad, right and wrong, logical and rational approach to truth.
    
    Honest conversation is exploratory, experimental, imaginative. No one tries to convert anyone through honest conversation. Everyone tries to see better what is to be seen, what may be seen, and to share what she, or he, sees with those who are looking.
    
    The right kind of community is good for this kind of thing, and it doesn’t come ready-made for us when we step into our life. We spend our life creating the right kind of community in order to live our life. It’s one of those wonderful ironies of existence, where nothing can happen until something else does. So, we wait for it even as we work to make it happen!
16. Trumpet Vine 01 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 5, 2013 — I can be at-one with the owl and the ducks, or not. There is a perceptible shift—a felt shift—that happens when I move from one way of perceiving the world to another way of perceiving the world. It’s the move from the world of appearances to the such-as-it-is-ness of that which is before me. It’s the move from seeing to, well, seeing. And it can be gone in a snap.
    
    It takes focus to enter into “seeing mode,” and it takes focus to regain it when it is lost. I cannot be in two worlds at the same time.
    
    Being in the world such-as-it-is is a communion, a being-with, that has no preferences, no agenda, no timetable. It is being open to and present with what is before me. It is prayer.
    
    Being in the world of appearances is yada yada yada. It is where we look without seeing, talk without hearing, live without being alive to and present in the moment of our living. Multitasking is not living. It is doing a lot without being present with any of it.
    
    The quality of a life is as much the quality of the awareness, of the consciousness, with which that life is lived as anything. If you want to improve the quality of your living, pay attention to time and place of your living. Beginning now.
17. Mates for Life — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 21, 2013 — Find the interface between you and your life. Live there with your eyes open.
    
    Without nerve endings to tell us when something is hot, we would stand too close to the fire and drink coffee that was too hot to handle. Our nerve endings are the interface between our body and our environment.
    
    We are similarly equipped to sense our emotional/psychic impact upon the outer world within which we live and its emotional/psychic impact upon us. We are generally unconscious of the emotional/psychic interface that exists between us and the context and circumstances of our living, and blunder about, crashing and thrashing our way around in our life, wondering why it is such a mess.
    
    Well. Wake up.
    
    The spiritual journey is the way of making ourselves conscious of all that is right here with us, unseen, unexperienced, unknown.
    
    We think life is something that happens to us, and we are unconscious of the part we play in the arrangement and production—the creation—of the things that happen in our life.
    
    This is not to say that we can design our own life—that we can have the life of our dreams—by being aware of the influence we have upon our life. It is to say we can have the life that is our life to live by participating in its development as full partners in its realization.
    
    We can move from a life that is not working on any level to a life that is purring along. We have to change the way we think about what our life should be. We have to be open to possibilities different from our idea of the perfect life. We have to allow ourselves to grow up in the way that only we can grow up. We have to stop interfering with who we need to become and creating all this mess which takes our mind further off our business and obstructs our way to the way that is our way.
    
    We have to wake up and find the interface between ourselves and our life, and live there with our eyes open.
18. Solitary Sandpiper Reflection — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 8, 2013 — There is what happens to us and there is how we respond to what happens to us, which, together, set us up for what happens next. In two ways.
    
    They set us up for what happens next by putting in motion a certain configuration of factors that create what happens next—that precipitate what happens next—that determine what happens next. We produce our own fate by the way we deal with what comes our way.
    
    This can be though of as karma if you think of karma as momentum, as the weight of the past swinging forward into the future—in the sense of what you have done being the best predictor of what you will do—in the sense of how things have been being the best predictor of how things will be.
    
    They also set us up for what happens next by fixing us in a pattern of response, where when this happens, we do that.
    
    If you want what is happening in your life to change, respond to it in completely different ways. Do not do anything in response to what is happening that you have ever done before. Things will change. Maybe not for the better, but, sometimes, any change is better.
    
    I recommend that you think through what is happening and how you typically respond, and how you might respond differently. Here’s the trick. When you respond differently, what is happening will happen with greater vigor in an effort to get you back into your typical response pattern (The law of inertia and of karma is that a body at rest will remain at rest and a body in motion will remain in motion. You are breaking the law and must break it completely if things are to be different). You must hold the line and continue to respond atypically, unpredictably. Surprise even yourself.
    
    You only have to come up with one more unique response than the thing that is happening can trump. Your life will change. Maybe for the better.
19. Owl Shakes It Out — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 11, 2013 — Let’s say you build a house and decide to landscape it yourself. You take into account the area of the country, the amount of shade and rainfall, the direction the house is facing, the amount of time you want to spend tending your landscape, and every other little detail, put your plants in and enjoy the fruit of your labors.
    
    You do not say, “I like barrel cactus, and am going to plant them all over the lot. My Maine neighbors will be sooo envious!”
    
    You consider the such-as-it-is-ness of your location and adapt yourself to the limitations and possibilities of the flora of your area—and live within the boundaries imposed by your context and circumstances—to create a yard that delights you through the years.
    
    The yard is your life. You don’t tell it what it is going to be. You create what it can be within the restrictions placed on you by the time, place, nature and conditions of your living to produce the wonder of you.
    
    You square yourself up with what you have to work with, work with what you have and see where you go. See?
20. Boone Fork Cascades 02 — Blue Ridge Parkway near Blowing Rock, NC, May 9, 2013 — The Hero’s Journey’s other name is Growing Up. We grow up into who we are, not into who we wish we were, or who we want to be. The proper answer to “Who do you want to be when you grow up?” is “Who I am.”
    
    We grow up into who we are by looking ourselves in the eye and not turning away from what we see because it doesn’t match up with our wishes, desires and expectations.
    
    We look at ourselves with eyes of compassion, accept what we see and welcome every aspect of ourselves into the good company of us—engaging the strengths and gifts that each part of us brings to the whole in living the life that is ours yet to live in the time left for living.
21. Northern Watersnakes — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 12, 2013 — I find myself talking to those who can hear what I have to say, which is always more than I think it will be—and less than I wish it were.
    
    Those who know, know one another, like alcoholics can pick out other alcoholics across a room.
    
    Those who know, know what we think isn’t as important as what we feel, and that what we believe is more on the order of what we know than intellectual assent to some statement or theory (which is sometimes called “doctrine”).
    
    Those who know, know it’s a matter of being on the beam or off it, in the flow or out of it, with the moment or against it, invested in, and in sync with, the life that is ours to live or lost and at loose ends in the wasteland.
    
    Those who know, know it takes a lot of living to be able to hear what needs to be heard, to be able to see what needs to be seen, to be able to understand what is there all along, waiting.
    
    Those who know, know we grow up consciously, not accidentally—that we have to embrace the process, assent to it, join in it as full participants in the work to wake up and become who we are.
    
    Those who know, know the truth when they hear it, when they see it, by the quality of its resonation with the tuning fork of realization within us that guides each of us to the path with our name on it, the life that is our life to live.
22. Maple Leaves — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 18, 2013 — Everyone thinks they are awake. It’s everyone else who is asleep. Everyone thinks, “If all you people would just wake up and get your act together, everything would be just fine!”
23. Mallard in Flight 108 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 6, 2013 — We are the interface, the threshold, between worlds. We are the boundary between worlds. We integrate visible and invisible reality. Or not.
    
    We have to know what we are doing to do it. Otherwise, it’s a mess. As far from integration as a psychiatric ward is from a think tank—which is only a perspective shift away from being the other. We are always only a perspective shift away from being who we are needed to be, who we are born to be. We may as well be separated by years and miles, given that perspective shifts are the hardest things to manage.
    
    We can’t just order up a perspective shift because this is Monday and we haven’t had one in a while. They happen all the time, but not because we say, “I’m in the mood for a perspective shift today.”
    
    Anyway. We are the threshold between worlds, but it takes being awake to unlock the door and let the interchange begin, in us and through us, which transforms both worlds. And it takes ego strength to be egoless enough to swim in the currents between worlds.
    
    Schizophrenics were shamans in another time and place, but the clash of colliding worlds is/was too much for them, and they aren’t/weren’t the kind of explorers the rest of us need.
    
    We need those who have what it takes to be a threshold without being carried away. Carl Jung had it, and Joseph Campbell, and Marie-Louise von Franz, and James Joyce, and Alberts Schweitzer and Einstein … The list is long, but not long enough. And those on it were/are ignored by too many, and dismissed by too many others, to have the kind of impact this world needs to receive that one well. But, they kept the door open, and encourage us to do the same.
24. Crabtree Falls — Blue Ridge Parkway near Little Switzerland, NC, May 2007 — We need a sounding board. We need to be well received by compassionate presence that doesn’t let us get by with kidding ourselves about the way things are, but helps us square up to them, look them in the eye, and do what we can do about them.
    
    We need to be reminded that even though it may be hopeless, useless, pointless and coming to a bad end, how we live in the meantime makes all the difference—as evidenced by the good company of those who care about us and do not leave us desolate and alone.
    
    May we all have that kind of company when we need it most—and be it in the lives of others who need it—all our life long!
25. Owl Yoga 03 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 11, 2013 — What does the invisible world need from us? My hunch is that it has been there a lot longer than we have been here. There was nothing but the invisible world for the longest of times. Then there was a shift, and here we are.
    
    That’s the short version, and it makes as much sense as anything else. I recommend that you save yourself some time and stick with it, but you’ll do what you want to—which is exactly as it should be. Where were we? Oh.
    
    What do we have that the invisible world could use? I’m guessing here, as if you couldn’t guess. I’m guessing we have conscious awareness and articulation going for us. Consciousness is a form of structure. It’s a path through the mess—and a means of arranging the mess, of draping the mess with meaning and purpose. We dance to the music of the invisible world so the invisible world might see it and sing.
    
    Well. Maybe not. But it’s a nice way to think about our place in the invisible world.
26. Crabtree Falls, May 2013 — Blue Ridge Parkway near Little Switzerland, NC, May 21, 2013 — You don’t have to think up your life. You only have to live it. You don’t have to know what you are doing. You only have to do it.
    
    Everybody wants to make a splash, have an impact, make a difference. YOU are the difference. You can’t help but make a difference when you are being you—the you only you can be.
    
    You, right now, without doing anything other than what you normally do, have contacts, niches, routines that no one else has. Nobody can do you but you.
    
    Now, if you do you the way only you can do you—sharing the gifts that only you have in the way that only you can—bingo, as they say at the Moose Lodge, we gotta winna here.
    
    Ah but, you say, how do you do that? You don’t have a thing to worry about. You only have to get out of the way. You only have to take instruction, follow directions, listen to your dreams and to your intuition and to your sense of what needs to happen in each situation as it arises, and let yourself fly, or dance, or walk on water. You can do all of those things, you know, if you just trust your inner partner and let yourself show you what you are capable of.
27. Crabtree Falls Detail 01 — Blue Ridge Parkway near Little Switzerland, NC, May 21, 2013 — Dear God, For What? The question hammered into the wall of an abandoned New England subway station opens the door to a room full of responses.
    
    From one point of view, it is encouraging. Someone has taken the time to bang it out and into smooth granite. The work was fueled with emotion, with passion. For what?
    
    The work was it’s own reason for being. The work called itself forth, demanding to be done. The work itself is the answer to the question that called forth the work.
    
    From another point of view, the question carries us to the heart of the matter. Do we need a reason for being here? For doing what we do? For doing what is OURS to do?
    
    Do we need to believe in someone who knows why, who knows the purpose, and is busy “working it out as year succeeds to year—and the time is drawing near” when we will all know the majestic glory of the answer that dispels the absurdity and makes all the agony so worthwhile?
    
    Do we need to believe in reasons? What is more valuable, important, beautiful: Believing in a reason for it all or believing in it—in the value of the experience of life, in the value of the work we are doing, the work that is OURS to do—beyond all reason, in the absence of reason, for no reason?
    
    Can’t we love it all—all of it, the absurdity and the emptiness along with the joy and the wonder—so much that we would do it for nothing—and do it again, and again, and again?
    
    Can’t we believe in the value of the such-as-it-is-ness of our life, of all of life, to such a depth and degree that nothing can keep us from giving our all to the expression of our belief in the value of what we are doing—living, being alive—past all objection, obstacles, opposition and the Cyclops standing in our way asking “For what? Why are you even trying?”
    
    Next time that happens, grin right back at him and ask, “Why do you do what you’re doing, Dumbass?”
28. Goshen Creek 03 — Blue Ridge Parkway near Boone, NC, May 21, 2013 — If we cannot agree about what is good and how to do it, or what is harmful and how to avoid it, where does that leave us?
    
    If there is not a good faith agreement among us to see what we are doing, are trying to do, want to do—and what it’s impact is for good or harm—where does that leave us?
    
    The world is in our hands. WE are the responsible agents in charge of its care and tending. We have no business acting out of some ideology, some theory, about how we should behave, and turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to the actual effects our actions have on the people and the world around us.
    
    But, how do we get those in the seats of power to understand this fundamental principle of power? How do we get those who do not care, to care?
    
    When the disconnect between the rulers and the ruled is complete, there is trouble enough for everyone.
29. Sunbathing Owl 01 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 22, 2013 — We have all the help we need to do the work that is ours to do. The trouble is, we want to do the work that will land us in fame, fortune and glory while we are young enough to enjoy it.
    
    We have to grow up enough to hand over our idea for our life in a “thy will, not mine, be done” kind of way.
    
    Once we get out of the way—get out of our way—the fun begins.
    
    We get out of our way by taking up the work of taking the invisible world seriously—by consulting the guide within and cooperating with the invisible world in constructing a life—building a life—that is our life to live in the time left for living.
    
    Some of us have no time to waste, hem-hawing around, trying to make up our minds about throwing in with invisible and maybe imaginary cohorts when it is our real life on the line.
    
    So, we can’t do this until we are old enough to have seen what we can do on our own, and know we can’t do any worse with even an imaginary friend offering guidance along the way.
30. Sunbathing Owl, 02 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 9, 2013 — If we are going to contact the other side, we have to be willing to do our part. The deal really is, “Thy will, not mine, be done.” We talk it over and work out the details together, and we find the help we need to do what needs us to do it in each situation as it arises. But we have to jump into the deep blue sea. We can’t splash in the shallows and think we are doing anything. We’re in or we are out. The deep blue sea, I mean.
31. Meditating Owl — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 22, 2013 — We all have to go somewhere else from time to time—to drift off, float away, into reverie and woolgathering. We all have to take a walk in the Dream World, visiting with the ghosts who live there, grounding ourselves again in the flow of life that is more than our life—that is past and future mingled together with possibilities for the present that would be unimagined without drifting off from time to time, walking about.
    
    The visible world of normal, apparent, reality can consume us—can eat us alive. We have to regularly, intentionally, step out of that world and into the other world to have a chance. We do this naturally. We are built to do it. We have to do it. It’s called “looking out the window” by Those Who Know Best And Must Be Pleased, in a disparaging tone, accompanied by body language of pure disgust. It is not encouraged but. It is essential for LIFE.
    
    We have to walk about, away from mass think, away from the culture’s values and ways of doing things, which is thinking about things, reasoning things through, living logically and intellectually, and knowing what we are doing at all times.
    
    To be alive, we have to not know what we are doing a lot of the time. We have to walk about. Reconnect with the spirit world, the invisible world of our ancestors and descendants, and take our instruction there for how to live in the normal world of apparent reality. The Dream World informs life in the visible world.
    
    Want to know what to do when you don’t know what to do? Look out the window. Take a walk.
32. Black Crowned Night Heron (Juvenile) With Duckling 01 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 23, 2013 — When you are ready to jump into the deep blue sea, there are two books to start you on your path. I’ve recommended them before, and will recommend them again. You should read them each time I recommend them.
    
    The first is “Inner Work,” by Robert A. Johnson. Read it slowly, meditatively. Absorb it. Understand it. It is foundational.
    
    The second is “The Power of Focusing,” by Ann Weiser Cornell. This introduces the process by which we read the signs and signals of the inner world, the inner guide, in healing the breach between inner and outer, reconciling, integrating and living with integrity within the polarity of the two worlds. It is a worthy tool for your work.
    
    Do not go without the right kind of help into the adventure of your life!

In reply to comments regarding the preceding photograph, made by Diane Dollar Harris and Sandy Bundgarrd: I certainly agree with you and with Sandy Bundgaard, and all those for whom you speak. I’ll say three things in response.

1) This is not nearly as agonizing as watching the 3-inch long turtle, bite and pull under water a duckling, who struggled to keep its head above the surface for 30 minutes while its mother quacked in circles, finally, exhausted, was pulled under and drowned.

2) This Night Heron was followed by the mother of this duckling for a short distance, quacking in protest, who turned and returned to her remaining clutch. All of this was witnessed by another Mallard mother of 16 fresh from the egg ducklings feeding on a mud flat nearby.

This mother took off in hot pursuit after the Night Heron, abandoning her own brood to whatever might happen in her absence. She followed the Heron around the corner of the lake shore, out of sight quacking furiously. The Heron headed for the brush of the bank before disappearing from my view. The Mallard hen followed. I could hear the confrontation I could not see.

Presently, the heron, still with duckling in its beak, came out of the brush and flew over the lake with the enraged hen on his tail, engaging him in air-to-air combat, body slamming him in flight.

The heron dropped the duckling, which fell 30 feet or so into the water and moved enough for me to know it was still living at that point. Then the duck and the heron broke off contact with him landing on a second mud flat and the hen returning to her charge. The duckling continued to move about for a few minutes and then became still. End of story.

3) Our place is that of the mother Mallard, protesting the way things are, even though it is hopeless, pointless and coming to a very bad—and predictable—end. Our place is to exhibit and express values worthy of us all the way, who cares what the end is or what difference it makes! We will NOT resign ourselves to things because “that’s the way things are”! We will play the game under protest, and make what points we can make, even though we are going up against Wilt Chamberlain, Shaquille O’Neal, Michael Jordan, Larry Bird and LeBron James. Never mind the odds. We live to express the values that are at the heart of the matter, no matter what.

We take the attitude of the other mother duck, who put everything she had on the line to stop the natural process—“nature’s way”—“how things are.” We say NO! nonsensically, opposing that which ought to be opposed out of our sense of how things ought to be, the facts be damned. We live to transform the facts—to move things away from how they are to how they ought to be if only for one brief moment. We fly with the other mother duck in the service of our sense of how things ought to be, no matter what.

1. Crabtree Falls Panorama 01 — Blue Ridge Parkway near Little Switzerland, NC, May 21, 2013 — We have to do the good we know to be good, and change what we do as our understanding of the good changes.
   
   Values change over the course of our life. What once was bad becomes good, what once was good becomes bad. Our view of what is important is one thing at 15, another at 35 and another at 60. But. We live in the moment in light of what is important in that moment. We live to serve the good we understand to be good—and allow experience to impact our understanding of the good, deepening, enlarging, expending our idea of the good, so that the good we serve becomes better with time.
   
   We get to better by serving what we understand to be good here and now and allowing our idea of the good to be transformed by our experience with life.
   
   The worse thing is to read some ideological, some theological, some scholastic, some philosophic theory of the good and rigidly comply with that all our life long. The good is as alive as we are, else slavery would still be fashionable, and heretics would still be burned at the stake, and witches would still be drowned.
2. To the above post, Caroline Webb replied: Try telling this to the 57 countries which are members of the Organization of Islamic Countries (OIC). Millions of people do not have the luxury of this kind of thinking and indeed face horrible fates if they step out of line.
   
   To Caroline Webb’s reply, I replied: If those who are hearing me heard me the same thing would apply to me in my situation here and now. This is as subversive as it gets. Jung’s Individuation is a radical threat to the “right order of things.” When we travel consciously the road to who we are, the foundations crumble. It is not good for the economy to think for oneself, to live the life that is our individual life to live. You should not be here, reading this. You should be shopping or watching TV.
   
   While I’m on a roll… We are all the duckling in the Night Heron’s beak. We are all the Other Mother after the Night Heron. On the path to who we are, we are on a course that takes us into the heart of Gethsemane and across the face of Golgotha. We go up against the Powers and Principalities, or, as we prefer, “The Way Things Are.” Waking up is a threat to the status quo, to the systems and people who benefit from having things in place, “As They Are.” We cannot be an I without transforming every We we are apart of. We’s don’t cotton to transformation. Those who have ears to hear, let them hear.
3. Dwarf Crested Iris — Along the path to Crabtree Falls, Blue Ridge Parkway near Little Switzerland, NC, May 21, 2013 — Listen to your symptoms! Listen to your life! Do not try to force your idea of your life onto your life! Do not try to make happen what you want to happen—what you think ought to happen! Let happen what happens in response to your being true to your core, your center, your Self! Let the life that is your life to live emerge in the life you are living! Let yourself come forth, bloom, transform the life you are living and life as it is being lived! Surprise yourself! Shock yourself! Enthrall yourself! Be amazed!
4. The Other Mother — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 24, 2013 — The story of The Other Mother can be found in one of my replies to comments under the photo of the Black Crowned Night Heron With Duckling—The Revolution is being yourself—being the you you are built to be, doing the work that is yours to do, sharing the gifts that are yours to give, living the life that is yours to live. If you do that, you will transform the world. And all you have to do is get out of bed each morning and live the day as only you can live it. Viva la Revolucion!
5. Owl — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 24, 2013 — When Native Americans go on a vision quest, they go alone. They don’t take a congregation along with them. How alone can you be? How often do you go there?
   
   When Native Americans go on a vision quest, they don’t take their iPods and iPads and laptops with them. How long can you be without listening to music, checking your text messages and your email, phoning your friends, playing video games (including solitaire)?
   
   We have created a culture to insulate ourselves from the invisible world. We do everything as a WE, nothing as an I, and are cut off from ourselves, isolated, and alone. The congregation, the group, the community does not protect us from emptiness and loneliness. It is the company of ourselves we seek—but cannot find because we are encased in the castings of the culture.
   
   The old Zen hermits lived a solitary life most of the time, but gathered, when the time was right, in convents and monasteries, to enjoy the good-faith company of like-minded people, and share experiences and stories of their pilgrimages—to say what they had learned and articulate what it meant to be who they were. They swapped poems and sang songs, played their musical instruments, laughed and danced. And then returned to their hermitage.
   
   They could be together in a way we are rarely together because they could be a part in a way we are rarely a part.
6. Blue Ridge Morning—Blue Ridge Parkway near Blowing Rock, NC, May 21, 2013 — We get beyond being a rookie when we aren’t bothered by being a rookie. We are always making rookie mistakes. Don’t let it stop you. Do what you need to do about it and keep going.
   
   The pros play the game through their mistakes. The rookies let their mistakes take them out of the game. That’s the biggest difference between rookies and pros. Rookies try to be pros. Pros are what the moment needs them to be—and when they are not, they don’t lose their place in the moment and become what the moment needs them to be now.
7. Crabtree Falls HDR 02 — Blue Ridge Parkway near Little Switzerland, NC, May 21, 2013 — If you want to improve your photography, take more pictures. Take pictures more frequently. See pictures all the time. Think about how you would take them.
   
   Examine the scenes you walk through when you walk the dog, drive through on your way to work or to the grocery store, Imagine how they would look at different times of the day, different times of the year, different weather conditions.
   
   Where would you go on a foggy morning? To get a sunrise or sunset? When it’s snowing? Go there at those times. Get the photographs that are there.
   
   Don’t buy a camera and put it on a shelf. Let the camera show you the world you live in and what you can do with it. Photography is not learning the tricks of the trade. Photography is taking pictures. The tricks you discover that way will stay with you for life. And the pictures will be with you, too.
8. Zen Maple Leaves — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 2013 — We have to square up with the such-as-it-is-ness of each situation as it arises—which includes our reaction to the such-as-it-is-ness of each situation as it arises. We have to resist what must be resisted. Oppose what must be opposed. Assist what must be assisted. Defend what must be defended. Support and encourage what must be supported and encouraged. Etc. No. Matter. What.
   
   We don’t have to win. We have to fight the good fight. We don’t have to prevail. We have to be what the situation needs us to be. We have to do right by the situation, regardless of the odds, the chances, or the outcome.
   
   We have to square up with all of that and do what needs to be done, anyway, never the less, even so, no matter what.
   
   That’s the way to do it. Loving every minute of it. That’s what we are here for: Doing what needs to be done—what needs us to do it—no matter what, regardless of the outcome, all our life long. Wow, what a ride!
9. The Search for the Holy Grail — Blue Ridge Parkway near Boone, NC, Spring 2007 — It takes time. Lots of time. More time than you want to allow. More time than you think you have. It takes all your life—all that is left of your life.
   
   Waking up, I’m talking about. Coming to your senses. Literally. Feeling what you are feeling, what you are sensing, and knowing it, and deciding what to do about it.
   
   Deepening your relationship with your unconscious—with the part of yourself that you are unconscious of, that you know nothing of, that you don’t know. Knowing that part of you that you don’t know. Takes time. Takes the rest of your life. Better get cracking.
   
   Get cracking paying attention to your nighttime dreams and your daytime flights of fancy and the meandering, wandering, drift of your imagination. Where do some of these things come from? Why now? Why here? In this moment? What is happening here and now that brings that to mind? Get to the bottom of it.
   
   Get cracking getting to the bottom of these things. Waking up. Listening to your senses and to the symbols and images coming to you from the unconscious world, calling you to wake up, pay attention, and collaborate with the Guide Within who needs your cooperation and is there to cooperate with you in living the life that is yours to live in the time left for living.
   
   All of this takes time. Why waste a second of it in some other pursuit, in some other direction?
10. Duckie 08 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 2013 — Sometimes, no matter what you do, the outcome is going to be the same and it isn’t going to be good. Don’t let that stop you. Do what needs to be done the way it needs to be done, the way only you can do it, and let that be that.
    
    It doesn’t make any sense, but it makes as much sense as anything else could make in an absurd, nonsensical, situation. Some things don’t make any sense. Don’t tangle yourself up trying to make sense of things that make no sense. Do what you feel is appropriate, what is right in the situation, and let the outcome be the outcome.
    
    What is right in some situations has to be felt, intuited, it cannot be reasoned out, thought up, known for sure to be the right thing to do. Five ducks come in to land, you have to pick your duck and focus on that one duck, holding down the shutter all the way to landed. You have no way of knowing which duck will be the best duck, will give you the best photograph of a duck landing. The right duck is the one you choose to be right in the moment of choosing. You would never reason it out and you don’t have time to think about it anyway. Pick your duck. Do right by it with your camera. No second-guessing, lamenting, bemoaning your choice. More ducks are on the way. You’ll get to choose again.
11. Cardinal Leaving — An oil painting filter applied, Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 26, 2013 — I use the oil painting filter with photographs that are out of focus but cool and unrepeatable. — There is no hurry. There is only paying attention. We aren’t getting somewhere. We are waking up. When we wake up, all we wake up two is the moment we are living and what needs to happen there—to the gifts we have and how they are being called forth in this here and now to do what needs us to do it.
    
    We aren’t setting ourselves up to reap some great reward or be recognized as the greatest human being who ever has been or will be. There isn’t something we are going to get out of all this work to wake up beyond being awake.
    
    It isn’t a competition. We aren’t here to see who can wake up first, or be the most awake of anyone who has ever claimed to be awake. We are just here to wake up, look around, see what is happening and what needs to happen in response to it, what needs to be done about it, and do it, with the gifts we have been given, in each situation as it arises, all our life long.
    
    And there is no hurry. And no time to waste.
12. Great Blue Heron May 08 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 13, 2013 — It helps to be of one mind—to know what is of the path and what is not, and to stay on the path. The Dali Lama would not follow me through my life, because that would not be on the Dali Lama’s path. I would not follow Beyonce through her life because that would not be on my path.
    
    It helps to know what your path is, and isn’t—what your business is and what it isn’t. Walk your path. Tend your business.
13. Blue Ridge Morning 02 — Blue Ridge Parkway near Boone, NC, May 21, 2013 — When we are living the life that is our life to live, invisible forces assist us along the way. We find what we need to do what needs us to do it. The other world works with us to do what needs to be done in this world. It’s magical. And real.
    
    And we cannot turn it to our advantage. We cannot exploit it, profit from it, use it to our everlasting benefit, gain anything from the principle at work in the experience, which is “We will have what we need to do what needs us to do it.”
    
    The only good it does us is the encouragement and assistance it provides us in doing what is good. When we depart from doing what is good to serving our own personal good, it leaves us to our own personal devices, schemes and scams. When we move away from doing what is good we move into playing politics or becoming warlords.
    
    Politics is the game where everyone is trying to get a larger piece of the pie at everyone else’s expense without looking like they are pulling a fast one. Warlords just run over everyone in their way to get what they want. Warlords are politicians who have no patience with the game.
    
    And then there are those who do what is good because it is good and not to gain anything from it. My recommendation is that you hang out with those people and endeavor to become one yourself. They know what’s what.
14. Goshen Creek 04 — Blue Ridge Parkway near Boone, NC, May 21, 2013 — When you do what you do and I do what I do, it gets done. I can’t do what you do. You can’t do what I do. We can’t do what Those Who Know Best And Must Be Pleased tell us to do. You have to do what you do, and I have to do what I do—not to please anyone, but to do what we do for no reason beyond it’s what we do. Individually.
15. Four Ferns — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 7, 2013 — You could do a lot worse than meandering through your life trying to see what you look at, trying to hear what you listen to, trying to understand what is before you. You can start with anything—a measuring cup, a house key—it doesn’t matter. Seeing it leads to something else. Whatever you hear carries you to something else waiting to be heard. Whatever you understand transports you to something you don’t yet understand. We are moved through our life to the life that is ours to live—to the things that are our thing—as we see, hear, and understand what is to be seen, heard and understood.
16. Fog in the Valley — Blue Ridge Parkway near Boone, NC, May 21, 2013 — Evil is easy. Good is hard. Good goes easily over into evil. Evil becomes good with much suffering.
    
    Evil cares only for its own good. Good cares for the good of all.
    
    Evil will do anything, say anything, promise anything, in the service of its own good—in the service of evil. Good draws lines and will not do some things no matter how much apparent good might be done.
    
    Evil’s good can become the pain, suffering, agony and death of innocents. Good’s good is not that flexible.
    
    Evil is opposed to good. Good is opposed to evil. They are polar opposites, inseparably at odds within every living thing.
    
    Suffer the conflict consciously. Bear the pain. Do not think you are better than you are, or be worse than you have to be. Live toward the center. Extreme good is easily confused with extreme evil. The old saw is on the mark: “It is easier to be a Saint than to live with one.” Evil is easy. Good is hard.
17. Mallard Hen Detail 02 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 28, 2013 — Imagination is the critical factor in our response to life. If you are going to improve your chances of bringing your LIFE to life in the life you are living—and of living with balance, focus, insight and a sense of humor upon the heaving roll of “the wine dark sea”—improve the quality of your imagination.
    
    How to do that is the question. Imagination requires perception and inquiry—two things that are prohibited by the culture.
    
    The culture is fueled by the economy. Advertisers don’t want you thinking about what they are saying and questioning what you are hearing. Advertisers want you sitting stupidly and being dumb, and doing what you are told to do. Advertises want you reacting to the stimulus they provide, not responding thoughtfully and imaginatively to your experience of life.
    
    You begin to improve your imagination when you start thinking about your thinking, seeing the way you see things and wonder how else you might think and see. Play with the possibilities. Do things differently. Imagine new ways to wash the dishes and drive to the grocery store. Shake up your life with imagination. Imagine your LIFE and bring it to life in your life.
18. Sandpiper Reflection—Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 2013 — We all look at the same world. Why do we see it so differently? It’s amazing. How can you not be amazed at Liberal Democrats and Tea Party Republicans? How can that be?
    
    How can people look at something like, say, the beginning of the physical universe, and see such different things? Amazing. Or homosexuality? The list is long that contains every single thing.
    
    I don’t care what you look at, there are different ways to see it. Dramatically different ways.
    
    So.
    
    How can any of us say, “This is the way things are!”?
19. Spring Panorama 05 — Blue Ridge Parkway near Blowing Rock, NC, May 9, 2013 — When you don’t know what to do: Get. Out. Of. The. Way.
    
    Not knowing what to do is having some want, some desire, some interest that is being blocked. You know what you want, you just don’t know how to get it. When you are being blocked, it is time to take stock.
    
    Taking stock means listening to the other side.
    
    The other side exists on at least two levels. The other side is the invisible world, the world we are unconscious of, the world we don’t know anything about. It is the other side—the foundation actually—of normal, apparent reality.
    
    To see things from the other side, from the standpoint of the invisible world, to get the invisible world’s take on things, we have to get out of the way.
    
    The other side is also the opposite of our typical take on things. We tend to look at the world the same way all the time. We see something once, size it up, box it, label it, tie it with a bow and put it on the shelf it belongs on with all the other things just like it in similar boxes and bows.
    
    The other side would have us see what else it is, how else it could be seen, sized up, boxed, labeled, bowed and shelved.
    
    We have to look at things from all sides, upside-downside, inside-outside, this side-that side… Nothing is only what it appears to be. See. What. You Look At.
    
    To do that, we have to get out of the way.
    
    When we get out of the way, our interests, wants, wishes and desires get out of the way with us. With nothing to interfere with the reception, what needs to be done stands plain before us, saying, “It’s about time, honey. Let’s get going!”
20. Boone Fork Cascades 03 — Blue Ridge Parkway near Blowing Rock, NC, May 9, 2013 — We know what we want and we live to make it happen. We know what we don’t want and we live to keep it from happening. We are not interested in what needs to happen—in what needs us to assist and serve its happening. We have bigger fish to fry.
    
    The truth is that we DO have bigger fish to fry, and they are not the fish we think are the big ones. The really big ones are the ones we aren’t interested in, the ones we don’t know anything about, the ones that need us and only us to fry them.
    
    We live a life that is too small for us. We live in the service of small little clothes, and small little shoes, and small little houses, and small little futures. We are stuck in a small little world that is the biggest thing we can imagine, want, wish for and desire.
    
    It’s time we let ourselves show us what we are capable of—by laying aside the quest for our next greatest desire, and listening, looking, instead for what desires us.
    
    We are all over what we need. What needs us is the question. All we can come up with are the people and pets who want us to tend and care for them all our life long. We’re thinking too small again. We have to think bigger.
    
    What needs us? Do not look outside, look inside. What is stirring in us that needs us to bring it to life? What would love for us to give it attention, listen to its needs, devote ourselves to its service? What are we ignoring about ourselves? What are we discounting, dismissing about ourselves? What are we aborting by refusing to give it a chance at life?
    
    (The people who would refuse a woman’s right to abortion are missing two crucial factors. 1) There are women who are pregnant who cannot carry their pregnancy to term for whatever reason. They. Cannot. Carry. Their. Pregnancy. To. Term. 2) They are aborting aspects of themselves that need to be birthed into being—which they ignore by focusing on bringing an end to literal, actual, external abortion by others. We see in others what we cannot see in ourselves. We are doing what we cannot tolerate in others or allow them to do. The mirror stands before us at all times. We only have to open our eyes to see ourselves when we look at others.)
21. Table Rock — Blue Ridge Parkway near Little Switzerland, NC, May 21, 2013 — We have to carry our own burden, bear our own pain. This is called growing up, facing up to how it is with us, picking ourselves up and stepping into our life just as it is in order to do what can be done about bringing forth the life that is ours to live within the life we are living in the time left for living.
    
    Pain not borne, burdens denied and laid aside, haunt us as symptoms, as self-sabotage, as fate—demanding that we wake up and give them their rightful place in our life. What we refuse to face consciously becomes an unconscious presence clouding our life.
    
    They do not make enough alcohol, illicit drugs, and prescription medication to erase the truth of what has happened to us, what we have done (or failed to do) about it, and how that continues to interfere with our life. Nothing is more burdensome than the burden of the burden—more painful than the pain—unborne.
    
    This is what happened. This is what I did, or failed to do, about it. This is how it has impacted my life to this day. Now, what I am going to do about all of that is: square up to it, face it, bear consciously the pain of its impact and the contradictions that may exist between then and now, and let it be because it is—and step into each day knowing the truth of how things are, living, nevertheless, in light of how things need to be as I take up the work that is mine to do and find ways of living the life that is mine to live within the terms and conditions, nature and circumstances, of life as it is for as long as life is possible, with kindness and compassion, mercy and tenderness for my self and all who come my way.
22. In response to a comment on Duckie 03, posted on May 10: We participate fully—and consciously—in that which we oppose completely—and consciously. This is the paradox, the polarity, at the heart of our existence. We have relaxed the tension to the loss of soul. Native Americans honored and gave thanks to the bison they killed. Their meals were sacrificial and sacramental offerings and gracious receptions of life to life. They did not kill and eat without recognizing their participation in the mystery of Life Eats Life, and were more alive than we are because of it,
23. Nesting Herons — Two juveniles and an adult, Audubon Swamp Garden, Magnolia Plantation, Charleston, SC, April 27, 2013 — The corner stone of all the religions (And Buddhism has prayer flags, a pantheon and a merit system—which means somebody is keeping score—and that’s a religion in my book) is “one God.” One source from which life, meaning, purpose and values spring. The fight breaks out over whose version of God is the real thing. Dumb religions.
    
    We could bring peace to the religious world with one simple rule: Don’t believe in God, BE God. BE the God you declare to be God—don’t argue for that God’s supremacy. Be one with the God you call God. Whatever is good about the God you call God, exhibit it, express it, exude it, BE it.
    
    If everyone were living to be at one with the God they say is The One, what a world it would be.
24. See You Later, Owligator! — Barred Owls in the Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April, 2013 — Being conscious of our conflicts without having to arrive at a mutually satisfying conclusion for all sides—just being completely aware of our conflicts and waiting to see what happens—would do as much to restore peace and harmony to our life as anything else we might imagine. It’s amazing what bearing the discomfort of conflict will do.
25. The Shape of Mallard — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 30, 2013 — Truth lies beyond the scope, outside the bounds, of the norms, standards, mores, conventions, preferences and good tastes of its day.
    
    Truth is scandalous, obscene, heretical, disgusting, immoral, unheard of. You cannot approach truth with the methods and means of traditional examination and inquiry.
    
    So much for passing truth down through the ages, handing it along from one generation to the next, enshrining the teachings of the Ancient Ones, immersing ourselves in the ways of the gurus…
    
    Truth, like the good (And where DOES that line lie?), is as alive as we are. You have to be alive to know the truth, to recognize it when it comes tearing through the times, taking corners on two wheels, turning over apple carts, making waves, rocking boats, stomping on egg shells, flattening everything in sight.
    
    Jacob Bronowski said, “If you want to know the truth, you have to live in certain ways.” You have to live truthfully. You have to be ready for truth when it comes along by being already there ahead of it, wondering why it’s taking so long.
    
    The more you see things like they are being seen around you, like they have always been seen, the less able you are going to be to recognize truth when it rings your doorbell and asks if you want to come out and play.
    
    If you’re going to say, “Yeah, Baby!” to truth, you have to be weird.
    
    And so, when Jesus said, “You have heard it said, but I say unto you…” They killed him. The Ancient Ones were anything but weird. They didn’t cotton to weird. So. Who was dead, and who was alive? Who rose from the dead? Who couldn’t be killed?
    
    Truth can’t die. That’s as weird as it gets.
26. Magnolia Plantation Bridges 01 — Magnolia Plantation, Charleston, SC, April 27, 2013 — We can’t do anything about our perspective. It’s like our fingerprints. It happened to us. We didn’t pick it out of a pile, and can’t sent it back where it come from. And when it changes, it won’t be because we made it happen.
    
    Try to get an alcoholic to change the way he/she looks at a drink. Even alcoholics who are 100% behind the idea can’t do anything to occasion the shift. Yet, the shift happens for a lot of alcoholics. But not for all of them.
    
    Smokers? Same story.
    
    I didn’t grow up thinking the way I think. The way I think has changed a number of times over the course of my life. Each time my thinking has changed, it happened to me. It changed on its own. Of its own accord. I didn’t arrange it.
    
    If you are an ocean person or a mountain person it’s because you are an ocean person or a mountain person, not because you said, “I think I’ll be an ocean person (or a mountain person).”
    
    The way you perceive things, think about things, value things is the most idiosyncratic thing about you and you don’t have anything to do with it. It changes without your instigation, or even, your permission.
    
    Now, we can resist the alteration of our perspective, and we can assist it—but even that, the resistance and assistance, is part of our perspective, and we can’t claim to be responsible for even that much. Which leaves us helpless and at the mercy of the way we see things.
    
    It can change, but it will change in its own time, if it changes at all.
    
    Which raises the question, “How different can we be?” And, “What is in charge of the process of transformation?”
    
    I speak to only those who can hear what I have to say because it’s a waste of our collective time for me to do anything else.
27. Red October — That’s his name. Fourteen feet long. Audubon Swamp Garden, Magnolia Plantation, Charleston, SC, April 27, 2013 — We would be different if we could be. More like we ought to be. More like we will be one day. In the meantime, we have to hold on to the idea, belief, conviction that change is coming. Slower than we would like, but faster than we think.
    
    We have to trust ourselves to the process and be conscious of everything we can be conscious of. And wait. For the magic to happen.
    
    We are already more like we are than we were. And we didn’t do anything to make it happen. It’s working. Give it time. Change is a-coming.
28. Goshen Creek 04 — Blue Ridge Parkway near Boone, NC, May 21, 2013 — A mob cannot change its mind. Mobs often come disguised as well-dressed masses. It is difficult, sometimes, to distinguish a mob from Those Who Know Best And Must Be Pleased.
    
    If you want to think clearly, you have to separate yourself from the noise of the crowd—or the congregation—or the convention—and sit for a while in some quiet corner of the natural world until you can hear “the still, small, voice” of your own heart, and be washed in the wonder of life from time immemorial.
29. Magnolia Plantation Bridges 02 — Magnolia Plantation, Charleston, SC, April 27, 2013 — When “the world is too much with (me),” I lose my place. I forget where I am. I forget what I’m doing.
    
    We think the external world of normal, apparent, reality is the only world. We think it is the source things of all things good and wonderful. We live to arrange things like we want them to be in the physical world.
    
    We think if we marry this person, have this job, pay these bills, etc., we will have it made. We live to have it made according to our current idea of what constitutes having it made. It is all out there, to be done out there, to be made right according to our idea of what is right out there. And we strive endlessly to get things in place out there so that we can, at last, enjoy the fruits of our labors, relax and be glad.
    
    Well. Things keep going against us and we have to work harder to be happy with how things are because they don’t stay that way long if we ever get them there. We are hamsters in a cage, spinning, spinning and going nowhere.
    
    There are three statements which, when understood and applied, will transform our life and the world in which we live. “Know thyself.” “To thine own self be true.” “Thy will, not mine, be done.”
    
    The thy’s and the thine in these three statements are the same. Throw away everything you have heard and thought about the “thy” in “Thy will, not mine, be done,” and explore the possibility that the “thy” there is the grounding center of your own heart and soul. Align yourself with your own center and you have it made.
    
    All the wisdom you need is found in the center of your own heart.
    
    What you need most to do intersects with what some situation needs most to have done. You only have to be awake to the intersection when it comes along.
30. Owl Playing Dead 02 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, June 1, 2013 — An accurate assessment of ourselves and our place in life is difficult to come by. We over-inflate or under-inflate with ease. Inflation and deflation are the poles between which we plot a position for ourselves determining the quality of our life and how we are doing in it. Quickly shifting between the poles in extreme fashion is called bi-polar disorder.
    
    Our assessment of ourselves and our place in life is completely subjective and wholly arbitrary. We have no idea of what we are doing and shouldn’t be in the business. We think too much of ourselves, or too little. We would do well to get out of the way.
    
    Stop with the grading! Believe this: Everything that has happened in our life, for good or for ill, has uniquely positioned us to offer exactly what the rest of our life needs us to bring forth.
    
    I don’t care if you spend your time thinking you are great or worthless or somewhere in between. I’m asking you to stop thinking of yourself as great, worthless or somewhere in between. The instant you catch yourself feeling good or bad about yourself, feeling high or low, STOP IT! Get. Out. Of. Your. Way.
    
    You are uniquely positioned to provide exactly what the rest of your life needs you to bring forth. Get out of your way and trust that to be the case. The truth of my position will be borne out in your experience IF you trust it to be so and stop looking for evidence to refute it.
    
    You are perfectly, beautifully, wonderfully YOU! No one else could do it the way you can do it. No one else could live your life the way you can live it. No one else fills the niche you fill, has the opportunities to bring forth what you have to give where, and when, and how you do. You are unique and irreplaceable.
    
    Let that be so because it is so. Get out of your way. Get out of your head, with it’s judgments and evaluations, and start listening to your heart and its leadings and guidance. And trust that you have exactly what you need to offer what is needed in each situation as it arises throughout the time left for living. Because you do.
31. Wing Span 02 — Barred Owl, Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, June 1, 2013 — All of us go to sleep. None of us can make ourselves go to sleep. We can assist sleep by not drinking alcohol, or caffeine, or eating chocolate (caffeine), or citrus fruit, etc. before going to bed, but we cannot force sleep before its time.
    
    If we get out of the way, sleep will come, though perhaps not on our schedule.
    
    How else can we interfere with our life, trying to force what cannot be forced?
    
    We are here to attend, assist and serve—our life. Not coerce it into contortions at odds with its spirit and direction.
    
    If you are going to listen to anything, listen to your life—and be what it needs you to be—in the time left for living.
32. Francis Beidler Palmettos — Francis Beidler Forest, Charleston, SC, April 26, 2013 — You have to decide what you are going to keep and what you are going to throw away. This is the choice that determines everything about you, what you keep and what you throw away.
33. Magnolia Plantation Bridges 03 — Magnolia Plantation, Charleston, SC, April 27, 2013 — Carl Jung said, “I have frequently seen people become neurotic when they content themselves with inadequate or wrong answers to the questions of life.”
    
    We don’t think in terms of neuroses these days but give neurotic symptoms their own names: depression, anxiety, obsessive/compulsive disorder, obesity, violence, drug abuse, addiction, etc. These symptoms are characteristic of the culture of the world! Of a world that has contented itself “with inadequate or wrong answers to the questions of life” for generations!
    
    Chunk your answers! Get busy digging into the questions of life! The valuable answers are the ones you have to dig out on your own. The cheap glass ones are handed out in tracts on street corners, and preached from the pulpits of the churches, and bound up in the volumes of books lining the shelves in the self-help section of bookstores, and lip-synched by gurus, therapists and counselors.
    
    The real jewels are guarded by dragons deep in the center of mountains hidden in regions long forgotten, waiting for those who have what it takes to dig them out.
    
    You don’t go there in tour buses or on spiritual retreats. It’s an individual journey you make alone with your mule. A spirit quest for those with the heart for soul searching and the resolve to find answers that are our own.
    
    That’s what you will do with the rest of your life, if you’re game.
34. Beacon Heights Panorama — Blue Ridge Parkway near Grandfather Mountain, NC, May 21, 2013 — What motivates you? Moves you? Enlivens you? Connects with you on the deepest level? Brings you together within yourself, focused on—and at one with—this one thing? Heals you, restores you, makes you whole?
    
    Maybe it’s a camera, or writing, or both. Maybe it’s reading and underlining passages. Maybe it’s horses, or drumming, or digging in the yard. The world is filled with possibilities. But do not think that any of them is the end of the line for you, that any of them is all the world of possibility has to offer you. Whatever it is, it is only your mule.
    
    You and your mule are on a journey to the heart of who you are. Ride your mule as far as it goes. When it plays out, look around for another mule. Our mules pass us from one to another because it’s a long trip, and we are carried along by the things we love—by the things that interest us, the things that catch our eye, that click with us, that are life itself for us. Life is carrying us to life by way of our interest in life, our love of life, our deep affinity for life itself.
35. Sunbathing Owl 03 — Barred Owl, Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, June 1, 2013 — Our symptoms are indications of divisions within. We are divided against ourselves. We want what we know we have no business having. We are at war with ourselves over how we will live, what we will do—over what is important—over what deserves our highest allegiance.
    
    All of this is, of course, underground and quite unconscious. As far a we are concerned, we think things are just fine, and can’t understand where these symptoms come from. And, we have no intention of getting to the bottom of it. Of stirring things up. Of discovering what our conflicts are and doing the work of reconciling them consciously.
    
    Carl Jung said, “Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment, and especially on their children, than the unlived lives of the parents.” And, “The greatest tragedy of the family is the unlived lives of the parents.”
    
    Guess what is unconscious in the lives of the parents—and perhaps in the family as a whole. The unlived lives of the parents lives in the shadows, unknown, unacknowledged, unconscious—and cast a long shadow over the future lives of the children.
    
    We do our children and ourselves the biggest favor in the whole display case of favors by being aware of the things we don’t want to think about. Our work is to integrate the opposites, heal the divisions, expose the conflicts, and get to the bottom of how it is with us and what we need to do about it. Our symptoms are a good place to start. Our dreams and our fantasies are not far behind.
36. Still Life With Log — Haw River State Park, near Brown’s Summit, NC, May 31, 2013 — You know what you like and what you don’t like, what you love and what you detest, what is good for you and what is bad, what is right for you and what is wrong, what is life for you and what is death…
    
    With what do you spend your time? How much for one and how much for the other? And when there is a conflict between one and the other, which takes precedent? Which goes on the back burner until a more convenient time?
    
    It is at the point of conflict between what is life for you and what is death, etc. that you have to stand up and step into the fire—that you have to take the heat and work things out in a way that takes your benefit and your deficit into account each time there is a conflict. And, you have to begin siding with your benefit, or working your benefit into your life, and taking the heat for doing that.
    
    Everything about your life in this world would disappear everything about your LIFE in the other world. Everything about this world thinks this world is the only world and you have to forsake your connection with the other world to prove your allegiance to the things of this world.
    
    Well. Your allegiance lies with the other world. This world just keeps our body going in the service of soul. This world is not the Be All And End All it is reputed to be. This world is just a feeding station that nourishes our body for its work with the other world.
    
    But. This world has developed a degree of self-imposed importance that is out of proportion to its design. We are born into obligations, responsibilities and duties that obscure, or obliterate, our relationship with the other world. It is easy for us to think that our primary concern should be for this world. We have to work to reorder our priorities.
    
    We have to work the other world into our life in this world—often having to “choose this (moment) whom we will serve,” on a situation-by-situation basis, recognizing that we “cannot serve two masters.” And we constantly have to work it out, which world we serve with our life here and now.
    
    We have to make it conscious, our relationship between the worlds. We have to stand up and step into the fire and take the heat. Situation-by-situation. All our life long.
37. Free Falling Owl — Barred Owl in the Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, June 2, 2013 — You have to work your way back into a living relationship with the other world, the invisible world, which is the source of life and being, meaning and value. Start with what you love.
    
    You have to work to love what you love because this world of normal, apparent, reality will do its best to separate you from it. This world stands like a Cyclops, blocking our way to the other world. Who do you love? The Cyclops or you?
    
    My current metaphor for what we love is a mule. Ride your mule! Stay on the mule! Your mule will take you to where you need to be! Your mule knows the way! Trust your mule! Trust yourself to your mule!
    
    This world would insert itself between you and your mule—would have you bury your mule, forget about your mule, become the mule for this world, working in its service, being good for the economy, not rocking any boats or making any waves, all your life long. You have to work it out—paying the bills and your dues in this world while maintaining a healthy relationship with your mule and with the other world.
    
    Now, your relationship with this world has corrupted your ability to evaluate what is truly good, truly important and what truly needs to happen in a situation. We come to our situations burdened with a lifetime of shoulds, oughts, musts, and have-tos, and cannot get outside of how we have been taught to appraise things in order to see things for what they are.
    
    Learning to live soulfully is the hardest thing you’ll ever do. And the most essential. The work requires us to maintain our relationship with our mule—to love what we love—AND pay our bills and our dues in the world of normal, apparent, reality. We do the work by bearing the conflicts between the worlds consciously, with full awareness of the pulls in opposite directions in each situation as it arises—and working it out, situation-by-situation, all our life long.
38. Crabtree Falls 04 — Blue Ridge Parkway near Little Switzerland, NC, May 21, 2013 — We are not born under the curse of Adam’s sin, having to be relieved of our burden by the death of God’s Only Son Jesus Christ Our Lord, The Second Adam. We ARE Adam. And Eve. And we are The Second Adam. And Eve. Here’s the deal:
    
    Our view of the good, of what is important, of what matters most, is skewed by our investment in what is good for us. What is good is what is good for us. What is good is what we can exploit to our advantage. What is good is what we can bend to serve us, improve our lot, deliver us from what we don’t want and land us on the happy shores of what we do want.
    
    Sound like the Garden of Eden to you—where we sacrifice everything for the sake of what is pleasing to us? It should. This world is the Garden of Eden. The work is to live in this world as those who belong, heart and soul, to the other world, the invisible world, the world of the spirit who is like the wind that blows where it will, with no regard for the implications its blowing has upon those who live under the banner of “Thy will, not mine, be done.”
    
    This world is also the Garden of Gethsemane, where we enter the struggle, again and again, in each situation as it arises, to be who we are, to see things as they are, to do what needs to be done as it needs to be done, no matter what the implications are for us personally, for no reason beyond it needs what we have to offer and there is no one to do it but us.
    
    Eden or Gethsemane. We stand with a foot in each garden and make a choice regarding the nature of the good we will serve in each here-and-now of our life.
    
    Here is the test Jesus faced in the wilderness and again in Gethsemane, and the test that is ours to face again and again throughout our life: We have to stay on the mule by being who we are and doing what we love—without trying to exploit it to our advantage in any way.
    
    We just do what we love. We just stay on the mule. And see where it goes. It will go through the heart of Gethsemane, and across the face of Golgotha, and to the Empty Tomb, again and again. We pay the fare and ride the ride. And what a ride it is!
39. Wing Span 03 — Barred Owl in the Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, June 4, 2013 — We have to reflect on our life experience and draw our own conclusions about what is important and what we are going to do about it. No one can be coerced into embracing The Truth.
    
    I don’t care what it is, it isn’t true until it is true for us. It isn’t meaningful until it means something to us. It isn’t good unless it is good for us. And we have no business saying what is true, meaningful and good until we have experienced it first hand and know that about which we speak.
    
    Which means we have to open ourselves to our experience, reflect on it, and draw our own conclusions about what is important and what we are going to do about it. And do it.
    
    Nobody can do it for us.
40. Owl Playing Dead 03 — Barred Owl sunbathing in the Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, June 1, 2013 — The owls are teaching me to photograph owls. That’s the kind of teacher you need. You don’t take a course in owls at the local university. You don’t sit at the feet of One Who Knows All There Is To Be Known About Owls. You don’t seek out Owl Gurus and wait for them to reveal the Great Secret About Owls Photography. You just find an owl and start taking pictures. You’ll learn all you need to know by doing what you want to know how to do.
    
    If you want to know how to be married, find a spouse. If you want to know how to be a parent, have a child or two.
    
    Do not think you know how to be married before you find a spouse. That will ruin your chances.
    
    Do not think you know about being a parent (after all, you had parents) before you have children. That will ruin their chances (like your parents ruined your chances).
    
    Do not think you know anything about anything until you do the thing over time.
    
    You know about milking cows by milking a herd of Jersey’s.
    
    You know about playing second base by suiting up and taking the field—and chalking up the errors.
    
    You know all those things you don’t do (dancing, for instance) because you don’t know how to do them? If you want to do them, start doing them. If you don’t want to do them, just start saying you would do them if you wanted to.
    
    Which gets us to your mule. I don’t care how poorly you are currently riding your mule (That is, doing the things you love to do). Do not give it up because it is hard to work mule riding into your life. Keep climbing back up on your mule. Aim to ride it longer each time you get on.
    
    Riding your mule is the only way to learn to ride your mule.
41. Boardwalk Panorama 02 — The Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, June 4, 2013 — You do your thing AND pay the bills, AND change the diapers, AND do the laundry, AND go to work, AND mow the lawn, AND… You do your thing along with all the other things that comprise your life. But. You do your thing.
42. Cardinal in Flight — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, June 5, 2013 — We have to know what our thing is, and honor it. We have to do what we love to do. We have to be who we are.
    
    We cannot just live the life that was handed to us—the life we fell into—the life that was the course of least resistance—the easy life—the one we could live without effort because someone was telling us what to do and how to do it and by when to have it done.
    
    We cannot play the part we were told to play.
    
    What do they know who did, who are doing, the telling about who we are? Those Who Know Best And Must Be Pleased would have us live in ways that are convenient for them. What do they know of us? What do they care about us?
    
    That’s our place—knowing ourselves, caring about ourselves. If we don’t do it, it won’t be done.
    
    When you stand up in the life you are living and take a step toward the lift that is your life to live, there will be opposition. Resistance. Discouragement. They want you being who they want you to be. They are not on your side.
    
    Begin cultivating relationships with those who are on your side. Who let you—who encourage you—to be who you are. Who are good for your soul, your heart. Who you can be with without being on guard, defensive, anxious, fearful, careful.
    
    You’ll need some buds to keep you on your mule, to help you recover from the Cyclop’s mauling, regain your balance, stand back up and take another step toward the life that is your life to live, toward the you you are.
43. The Outing — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 28, 2013 — Living well is the lesson. Living poorly is the teacher.
    
    You miss the point, and remain where you are, when you take living poorly as evidence of your inability to live well.
    
    You look at these photographs and you think I do photography well. I do photography well because I do photography poorly, well.
    
    When you live your life poorly well, you sit with your poor performances and your poor outcomes and you mine them for the gold. You see what they have to show you. You take what they have to give you. And thank them for their kindnesses.
    
    Every dream you dream is about you. And, if you don’t dream, that is also about you. Mine them for what they are worth. See what they have to say to you about you. Receive it well.
    
    Every dream is saying, “Look! This is the way things are with you! This is how it is with you! What are you going to do about it?”
    
    If you dream of someone you know driving too fast and running off a cliff, reflect on how fast you are living your life and how many red lights and warning signs you are running through.
    
    Treat your life as though it were a dream. When you live poorly, listen! Look! See! Hear!
    
    Look into every aspect of your poor behavior, choices. See all that is to be seen, from every side.
    
    Two days ago, I missed the owl flying at me. Seven photos were out of focus because the camera settings were not what I thought/assumed they were. I’m still getting the good out of that disappointment, and will for some time yet. It is showing me me like a bad dream would.
    
    My actual daytime life and my nighttime dreams are mirrors reflecting me to me, asking me to adjust my ways so that I might live well in the time left for living. Beautiful help for one who can use all the help he can get. Perhaps you know someone like that, too.
44. Spring Panorama 04 — Blue Ridge Parkway near Boone, NC, May 21, 2013 — We are running out of time. We cannot be throwing time away, spending time on the things that take our mind off our business, that serve as escapes, distractions, diversions, from and compensations for, the life we are living. The life we are living gets too much of our time, while the life we are called to live—that is ours to live—that waits to be lived—languishes for lack of time and attention.
    
    We have to find our thing and do it. We have to attend our dreams and the life we are living—including the escapes and diversions—for hints and clues about the life that is ours to live.
    
    We have to be on the track of the life that is ours to live like hounds after a fox. We have to be single-mindedly devoted to task of being who we are, of doing what is ours to do while are still capable of functioning purposefully, and know what “clicks” with us when we see it.
    
    We have one thing to do in the time left for living: Find our life and live it. Anything that detracts from that is in our way.
45. Goshen Creek Cascade — Blue Ridge Parkway near Boone, NC, May 21, 2013 — I remarked about a photo of me a friend had taken, with my camera duds on and camera in hand, “I look like a man who has lost his mule, wondering what now.” The comment immediately flashed me back to the observation that “Searching for Zen is like a man sitting on his Ox, looking for his Ox.”

I’m holding my mule, looking for my mule.

I understand our mule to be that which carries us through life and gets us where we are going. It is what gives us life and provides us with the wherewithal to get up and get back in the game. It is our incentive, our motivation, our joy of life, living and being alive. Our mule is our heart’s true love.

Know what your mule is. Ride it.

1. Straight On 01 — Barred Owl in the Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, June 3, 2013 — Don’t let that it’s useless, pointless, hopeless, futile and coming to a very bad end stop you, or even slow you down!
   
   Geese that start out with four goslings and end up with one keep going as hard as if they had all four. Ducks that start out with sixteen and end up with seven keep at it as though they still had sixteen.
   
   Do you think if you explained it to them, food chain, turtles, owls, hawks, chances, odds, and how it is to them they would all OD on bread and there would be no more geese and ducks?
   
   They have their business—their work—their thing—to do and they do it, no matter what their chances are.
   
   I believe in me and I believe in you and I believe in me-and-you-together. More than that, I believe in More To Me Than Meets The Eye Even Mine and I believe in More To You Than Meets The Eye Even Yours and I believe in More To Me-And-You Than Meets The Eye Even Ours.
   
   If I can get you to join me in believing this, nothing can stop us. Then, we aren’t doing it because it make sense—we are doing it because that’s what we do, it’s who we are. We don’t care about the chances.
   
   We are in league with each other and with More Than Meets The Eye—for what, we do not know and do not care. We are here, we know that, and we have business, work, a thing to do, we know that. And, we are here to help each other remember and do what is ours to do in the time left for living no matter what because there is More To It All Than Meets The Eye—and we have no business looking at any of it and deciding that’s all there is to it and it isn’t worth it so we’re quitting.
   
   So get on your mule. We’re going for a ride. Even if it rains.
2. Sunset at Reedy Fork — Lake Brandt Greenway, Bur-Mil Access, Greensboro, NC, December 8, 2012 — We do better with the right ratios of nutrition, hydration, exercise and rest. And nothing is easier to neglect and ignore. If you were to ask me to help you with your life, I would say, “Get your ratios right, and then we’ll talk.”
3. Hydrangea Blossoms — Bass Lake, Moses H. Cone Memorial Park, Blue Ridge Parkway near Blowing Rock, NC, October 11, 2012 — We are constantly working it out—the conflict, opposition, contraries within and without. We cannot eradicate dissent, though we try mightily, though it would be to our demise if we could.
   
   Vitality and life depend upon polarities which respect and honor the other. We sit down and talk. We expand, enlarge, deepen each other with ways of seeing that take into account what the other is missing, overlooking, ignoring. But. We do not convert, change, disappear the other. We have conversations. We do not win arguments.
   
   And rising, we do what we determine needs to be done, after we have said and heard all there is to say and hear. Over the course of a lifetime of conversations with our opposing sides, within and without, we grow, we change our minds about what is important, we become richer, deeper, increasingly open and compassionate with ourselves and each other—because we have talked with respect and honor for each other and the views we hold.
   
   We have not gone to war. We have not made dissent illegal. We have not converted or expelled the opposite views and those who hold them. And the world is blessed for it, as are we all.
4. Wing Span 01 — Barred Owl in the Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, June 1, 2013 — We are always growing up, never grown up. We are capable of infinite expansion, enlargement, realization and depth. We have unlimited potential in the area of bigness of heart and mind, compassion, understanding, comprehension and understanding.
   
   Why die small and narrow, tight and constricted?
   
   Why not go to sleep bigger than you were when you woke up?
   
   Why take pride in thinking like your parents thought, or like people thought 2,000 years ago?
   
   Why say, “The Bible says,” as though that is all there is to say? All that needs to be said? Why not wonder what the Bible should have said, or would say if it were being written today?
   
   Why be bound to a worldview that requires us to not know, not look, not ask, not see, not hear, not wonder, not imagine, not care, not explore, not experience, not be more than those who have told us what to think and what not to think?
5. Pamlico Sound Sunset Panorama — Cape Hatteras National Seashore, Ocracoke Island, NC, October 2011 — Not one of us has been as old as we are. We are entering a new world. Do not think we can get by there on the strength of our experience in the world we are leaving as we step into the Unknown. We will need more help there than we can be to ourselves.
   
   We will do well to rely on the help ourselves can give us.
   
   We have to cultivate a living, vibrant, relationship with the unknown knower within as we enter the Unknown Regions of our life, and deal there with what waits for us, drooling.
   
   The unknown knower and her, his, aides, have seen it all, several times, before. They have access to the collective wisdom of the species—and beyond. And stand ready to assist us in finding our way through the encroaching realities.
   
   Do not think you have to do it alone. When The Panic seizes you, relax into the presence of those inner aspects of you residing in the unconscious-because-we-are-not-conscious-of-it-world. As we make them conscious—by working with our dreams, fantasies and the spontaneous images that appear in our imagination—we take comfort in their company, and find what we need to manage our life with the things we find waiting.
6. Owl Bathes II 01 — Barred Owl in the Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 31, 2013 — What kind of help do you need with your life? Where do you go to get it?
   
   I need a sounding board. I talk things out with myself. I carry on an inner dialogue at all times. I’m constantly surprised at what I have to show myself.
   
   When I’m able, I carry on the same kind of conversation with those who are capable of hearing what I have to say in the external world of visible, physical, reality. There aren’t many who take the time to listen, to hear me out.
   
   There are many who would apply some culturally approved nostrum, some popular salve, to my wound or problem, to dispense with me and get the focus of the conversation back to them.
   
   I need to talk with people who have experienced their life and thought about it, reflected on it, and come to their own conclusions about how things are. I need to hear their insight and perspective. I need to know what they see and how they see it.
   
   I don’t need people who talk to me of what they have been told. I want to know what they have seen and what they think about it. I want them to tell me what they think, not what they have been told to think.
   
   The culture, and the church of the culture, needs people who don’t think, thinking what they are told to think and doing what they are told to do.
   
   We cannot live our own life until we are able to think about the life we are living and the life that needs to be lived, and find ways to live the live that needs to be lived within the life we are living. This is the revolution. It is carried out by those who see, hear, reflect, understand, and live in response to all of that, in light of all that.
   
   What kind of help do you need to do that? Where do you go to get it?
7. Owl Bathes III 01 — Barred Owl in the Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, June 9, 2013 — There is a saying in the Deep South (and maybe everywhere else), “It is so loud I can’t hear myself think.” If you don’t want people to think about what you are saying, yell at them.
   
   Think of the places you go where it is too loud to hear yourself think. Where it is too loud to think.
   
   Rock concerts. Nobody is thinking at rock concerts. Everybody is into the spirit of the concert. Who needs to think?
   
   Political conventions. Nobody is thinking at political conventions. The speakers are amplified and saying what everyone expects to hear and no one has to think about anything.
   
   Revivals and some church services, particularly those built on the rock concert theme. Same as political conventions. They are telling us what we expect to hear so who needs to think about it?
   
   Where else do you encounter an environment where it is too loud to hear yourself think?
   
   It’s a tool of propaganda and a torture technique for prisoners of war.
   
   And it underscores the importance of silence in seeking the grounding center of ourselves. We find our life unfolding, emerging, in the silence of reflection and awareness. If we hope to be who we are, we have to have quiet places in our life where we can hear ourselves think. And go there often to listen.
8. Jennette’s Pier Panorama — Nags Head, NC, October 2011 — I think of the soul as the seat of meaning and value. It could the the threshold to meaning and value. The doorway, the portal, the channel, the… The precise relationship between the soul and meaning and value is not mine to determine. “Seat” suits me.
   
   Soul comes alive in the presence of meaning and value and dies when we live our life in the direction opposite, and opposed, to meaning and value. Soul thirsts for meaning and value, lives for meaning and value, lives on meaning and value. When meaning and value go, soul is not far behind.
   
   Soul loss is loss of meaning and value.
   
   How meaningful is the life you are living? How valuable is your life to you? Where is meaning and value lodged in your life? Where are they to be found? What do you do that has meaning and value for you?
   
   Soul is your built-in guide to meaning and value. It is a compass pointing to meaning and value. It is a barometer measuring the degree of meaning and value in your life.
   
   If you are empty, depleted, joyless, hopeless, too long devoid of meaning and value, it’s time to do some soul work.
   
   Sit facing an empty chair—as empty as your life is. Imagine your soul in that chair. Tell your soul you know the chair is not empty and that your life is capable of being filled to overflowing with meaning and value. Ask soul to help you restore meaning and value to your life by pointing you in the direction of that which is, or will be, meaningful and valuable, and by encouraging you in its service.
   
   Now you have to fully cooperate with soul to infuse your life with meaning and value—you have to be a willing partner with your soul in producing a life worth living, but you have exactly what you need, waiting for you to give it the go ahead. So. Go ahead.
9. Great Smoky Mountains Sunset Panorama — Clingman’s Dome Parking Lot, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, NC & TN, November, 2011 — We have to live aligned with—be true to—what we know to be good. NOT to what someone else tells us is good.
   
   Of course, there is a price to be paid for living this way but. There is a price to be paid for living any way. Who do you want to be able to live with is the question. The answer better be your Center-most Self.
   
   You live aligned with your Center and the entire world will be better off for it, never mind what They (The Ones Who Know Best And Must Be Pleased) say. Regardless of the price you have to pay.
   
   One of the prices you will have to pay is that you will have to change your idea of the good. What you know to be good will not be the same throughout your life. Your life will impact, form and shape your idea of the good.
   
   There are people who have a better idea of the good than we do. There are people who know a better good to be good than the good we know to be good. Our idea of the good, what we know to be good, shifts in the presence of a better good than the one we perceive to be good.
   
   Women, gay people and people of color continue to struggle toward—and call us to serve—a better good than the one most of us over 60 (and a lot of us under 60) thought was good in our childhood and youth.
   
   The good is as alive as we are. As we grow closer to our Center, we recognize a good to be good that is different, that is better, than the good we called good when we were arrogant enough to think we knew what we were talking about. We have to deep the door of our heart open to a better good than the good we call good, even as we serve that good with all our heart.
   
   Changing our mind about the good is one of the prices we pay in serving the good we call good. It is not the only one.
   
   Jesus, the Buddha, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Rumi and a host of others lived out before us—modeled—what it means to live in the service of the good we know to be good. They didn’t kill anyone over whose idea of the good was the right idea. They lived out of their idea of the good with kindness, compassion, gentleness, reverence and good will for all, friends and enemies alike. And they were open to changing their idea of the good as their life opened their eyes to a better good than the good they once called good.
   
   May we all be like them in our own way.  Amen! May it be so!
10. Duckie 10 BW — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 2013 — I am interested in getting you together with your life, with the life that is your life to live, the life you are built to live, the life that only you can live—not the life someone has handed you and told you to live, but the life that fits you from the ground up, from the inside out.
    
    That’s all there is to it: Getting together with your life. Living your life—the life that fits you—the life that is exactly right for you.
    
    This is where you come in. Only you know what fits you, clicks with you, resonates with you, is exactly right for you. No body can look at you and tell you what shoe fits. You have to try the shoes on. My wife won’t let me order a pair of jeans for her online. She has to try them on. Only she knows what is right for her—jean-wise and every other-wise.
    
    So you have to say what is right for you, and you have to hold the line against all comers. They will try to talk you out of what fits and give you what does not fit. They will try to take your soul away from you. Those Who Know Best And Must Be Pleased are soul killers. You are your first line of defense. You have to say no to those who try to take your life from you and give you some other old life instead.
    
    You have to live your life. You have to be one with your life. You have to live from the center of you. There is nothing beyond the center. When you live from the center you are at one with God. When you live your life you are one with God. You stand with Jesus when he said, “The Father and I are one.”
    
    Of course. And you are fulfilling the commandment that didn’t make the top 10: You must be holy as I am holy. You must be at one with your self as I am at one with myself. Says the Lord, or words to that effect. That’s what you do when you find your life and live it over all objection and opposition.
    
    And only you know how to do that. Only you know when you are on the beam and when you are off the beam, when you are on your mule and when you are off your mule.
    
    Get on your mule and ride!
11. Groundhog Mountain Picnic Tables 01 — Blue Ridge Parkway near Meadows of Dan, VA, June 10, 2013 — We live at odds with ourselves, at war with ourselves. We are not on our side. And we have the symptoms to prove it.
    
    We prefer knee surgery to losing weight. We prefer eating ice cream to a walk around the block. We know what a healthy lifestyle is and live the way we are living.
    
    Our health problems would take a quick turn for the better if we just got our ratios right (Nutrition, hydration, exercise and rest).
    
    What?
    
    Why aren’t we on our side? Why do we live against ourselves? Against the flow of our life—the life that is our life to live?
12. Dugger’s Creek HDR 01 — Blue Ridge Parkway at Linville Falls, NC, June 11, 2013 — What thrills you these days? What do you enjoy about your life? What do you love about living?
    
    What are you doing with your life that you believe in? What are you doing that you don’t believe in?
    
    Usually, when we feel bad about our life, we think rearranging external factors would do the trick. Change our spouse or partner, say, or jobs, or neighborhoods, or areas of the country. It goes deeper than that.
    
    Our life is a reflection of our relationship with our life—of our involvement, engagement, investment. It isn’t a screen concealing us from the world through deceit and duplicity, presenting a pretend us for all to see—an us we wish we were, while we live on the admiration and envy we get for not being who we are.
    
    Our life is who we are. Who we are is our life. “What I do is me/for that I came”—Gerard Manley Hopkins.
    
    What are you doing that is you, that is what you came to do, that flows from the center as naturally as spring of cold water flows up from the earth?
13. Silhouette 01 Black & White — Blue Ridge Parkway near Meadows of Dan, VA, June 10, 2013 — The Wasteland can be anywhere, everywhere. It’s whereabouts is entirely determined—and easily predicted—by the presence of those who have eyes but don’t see, ears but don’t hear, hearts that don’t understand.
    
    The Wasteland is always a slight perspective shift away from the paradise of The Promised Land. All it takes is seeing to see that it is so.
    
    Jesus came from Nazareth. Nothing good comes from Nazareth. He was the stone the builders rejected that became the chief cornerstone. He lived from the center of his being and transformed, by his simple presence, the lives of all of those who could be transformed—who had eyes to see, ears to hear and hearts that understood.
    
    Seeing Jesus is being Jesus. Seeing the Buddha is being the Buddha. In an “Oh, NOW I see” kind of way.
    
    When we see, we see. We get it. We do it. We become it. We are it. We see that we are it all along.
    
    When we live from our center, we transform the world, without doing anything.
    
    This is the Taoist/Zen (Zen is what happened with Buddhism met Taoism) principle of Wu Wei—doing by doing nothing.
    
    It all comes together in the center. All is one there.
    
    All is many in The Wasteland, at odds, competing, striving against each other to be the best, to have the most, to be #1.
    
    In the Center, there is no #1. All is One. There is no conflict at the center—it is all complimentary there, with opposites reconciled and at peace with their polarity.
    
    Helping the other be who she, who he, is, helps us be who we are. We are all one in the work of becoming ourselves with no threat to anyone, at the expense of no one.
    
    Seeing is laughing, doing, being. Like that, Poof, The Wasteland becomes The Promised Land.
14. Mabry Mill in the Rain 02 Detail — Blue Ridge Parkway near Meadows of Dan, VA, June 10, 2013 — No book can tell you where to place your tripod or where to stand, squat, or lie with camera in hand.
    
    No book can tell you what the right exposure is for any scene (My Duck Landing and Wild Geese and Geese In Flight series’ are all woefully over-exposed and make me happy).
    
    No book can tell you what is pleasing to you.
    
    No book can tell you how to do it.
    
    You know how to do it by doing it, reflecting on and evaluating what you did, and doing it again until you get it right according to you.
    
    YOU are the one who must be pleased with your photographs and with your life.
    
    No book can tell you how to be YOU. And nobody can either. Except, of course, YOU.
15. Goshen Creek 10 — Blue Ridge Parkway near Boone, NC, June 10, 2013 — We have to set ourselves aside in order to consider what our life—the life that is our life to live, not the life we have fallen into—is asking of us, needs of us.
    
    We have to take seriously the world we know nothing about, the invisible world, the unconscious world—and we have to work to make it conscious. We have to align ourselves with it and enter into a partnership with it, collaborating on what we do, how we live.
    
    We belong to that world, and are alive in this world of conscious, physical, reality in service to that world. We have to establish a working relationship—consciously—with that world, with the unconscious world.
    
    We do this by feeling the connection, not by thinking about it.
    
    When we feel at peace, at ease, at-one with what is happening, at home with where we are, as though we are where we belong and everything is right with us and our life, we are in synch with the invisible world.
    
    When we feel as though something is missing, as though something is not quite right somehow, as though we are out of rhythm with our life, we are disconnected from the invisible world.
    
    We are looking for flow, harmony, resonance, congruity, accord… And how that feels in our body.
    
    Dreams and fantasies, symbols, metaphors and images that stir us emotionally are contact points with the unconscious world, inviting us to reflect on and examine what is trying to come to consciousness in these experiences. We make the connection between the experience and our life—the live we are living and/or the life that is ours to live.
    
    The unconscious world has an investment in us, has something at stake in us, needs something from us. When we cooperate with the unconscious world, we discover a sense of meaning and value and purpose that affirms the track we are on, the direction we are taking, and we know we are not alone in this experience we call life.
16. Summer Fence 01 — Blue Ridge Parkway near Boone, NC, June 11, 2013 — There are no external possessions, acquisitions, relationships, gains, or advantages that can provide us with more than an internal shift does.
    
    The shift from out to in is the turning point marking the time and place of our true birth. That is when life begins.
    
    When we take out and make it conscious, see it as it is, we bring it in and transform our relationship with it, which transforms it. Out is transformed when we bring it in. So is in. That is the process which makes all things new.
    
    Things mean one thing to us before we become conscious of them, and a host of other things to us as we make them conscious. Nothing is as it appears before we see it. Nothing means what we think it means before we become conscious of it.
    
    Consciousness changes the world. Both of them, visible and invisible.
    
    Living with awareness is the revolution that gives life and kills no one. Except, of course, those who die to what they once thought was important.
17. Belted Kingfisher 01 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, June 13, 2013 — Our life will teach us everything we are capable of knowing—show us everything we are capable of seeing.
    
    Our life—the life we are living, the life we fell into—is an inkblot. We see “out there” things that need to be seen and made conscious within. We have to understand the “out there” as a mirror of sorts, showing us the “in here” if we take the time to see what we are looking at.
    
    If our life, the life we are living. the one were born into, the one we fell into, doesn’t wake us up, we cannot be awakened!
    
    We have to wake ourselves up. No one can do that for us. If we don’t do it, it will not be done—and we think we are wide awake just as we are.
    
    When we wake up, we wake up to the disparity between the life we are living and the life we are capable of living, that is our life to live.
    
    When we wake up, we wake up to the difference between our life as it is and our life as it should be.
    
    The life that is ours to live, that we are built to live, that only we can live, is the life we would live if we were awake.
    
    How awake can we be in the time left for living? We owe it to ourselves to find out!
18. Magnolia 2013 01 — Greensboro, NC, June 2013 — When you fall in love with someone, that person is a carrier of you, bringing you to you. You are falling in love with yourself. Wake up to that!
    
    Bring forth in yourself the qualities and characteristics and values and way with life that you find attractive about the other person. He/she is you in this regard. Become him/her.
    
    If you want to spend the rest of your life with him/her, that’s fine as long as you become what you attracts you and as long as he/she helps you with your life—the life that is your life to live—by helping you find your center and be who you are.
    
    If he/she tries to make you some kind of stupid love slave, forget it. You should wear a tee shirt: I Am Not Your Love Slave!
19. Dugger’s Creek Falls — Blue Ridge Parkway at Linville Falls, NC, June 11, 2013 — We reside in a culture that neither nourishes our body or our soul. We have to take those matters into our own hands.
    
    We are responsible for the care and tending of ourselves. We cannot fall in with the crowd and go where they take us, where they tell us to go, and find what we need.
    
    Who directs your life? To whom do you look for direction? With whom do you check before you do anything? How much do you do that doesn’t have someone else’s stamp of approval? Who is in charge of your life?
    
    The right of the people to self-determination shall not be infringed! The right to self-direction is the birthright of every human being! And we sell our birthright for a bowl of porridge—or, in today’s terms, a trip to the mall.
    
    We treat ourselves and our life lightly, frivolously, flippantly, without consideration—certainly without the consideration we deserve and require. We think we can go just anywhere, do just anything—that it doesn’t matter how we live.
    
    Make no waves, rock no boats, tip-toe on eggshells, go along to get along, whatever THEY say is fine with us…
    
    Our allegiance is to ourselves. We are here to nourish our body and our soul. It matters how we live.
20. Olena Puckett Cabin 03 — Blue Ridge Parkway near Meadows of Dan, VA, June 10, 2013 — We have the idea that the invisible world is ours to ransack and plunder to our benefit, advantage and everlasting satisfaction.
    
    We read our horoscopes to get a leg up on the day. Tea leaves, chicken bones and the stars, when interpreted correctly, will lead us to victory in war and love—and provide us with an abundance of wealth and happiness.
    
    Well…
    
    Go and learn what this means: “Thy will, not mine, be done.”
    
    The invisible world is not here for our profit and gain or our comfort and convenience. It does not serve us. We serve it.
    
    When we place ourselves in the service of the invisible world and get out of the way, strange and wonderful things happen through us and around us—which we cannot begin to predict, anticipate, explain or control.
    
    They are just there—to amaze and confound us, and to keep us wondering and alert to what may happen next.
    
    It is LIFE unfolding, emerging, coming forth, dancing before us, laughing.
    
    Our left hemisphere is dizzy and can’t keep up. Our right hemisphere is wiping away the tears, thinking, “At last! At last!”
21. Early Light — Blue Ridge Parkway near Boone, NC, June 11, 2013 — You get things in place and wait for the owl to fly. For the ducks to take off. For the door to open.
    
    There is a lot of waiting. Nothing seems to be happening. Nothing is moving. Wait. Watch.
    
    Things don’t happen in a timely fashion, according to our schedule and convenience. Want a homegrown (which is quite different from “vine ripe”) tomato? You have to wait for it. “Vine Ripe” tomatoes came in vogue because people don’t want to wait.
    
    Things don’t line up all neat and orderly with sequential steps to the goal. They unfold in strange ways, a little at a time, on all sides, at once, just doing what’s next until the thing is done, like a rose bush blooming or a homegrown tomato ripening.
    
    You can’t plant a row of tomato plants and know which one is going to have the first ripe tomato, or when. You have to get things in place and wait.
    
    Things happen in their own time, in their own way, and surprise us with their suddenness and their perfection. The owl flies and we forget what we are doing. The ducks rise and we forget where the shutter button is. We were waiting but we weren’t ready. We were thinking it would be some other way, different somehow. We were ready for that, for the way we thought it would be in our mind.
    
    Don’t think it will be a particular way at a particular time. Wait. Watch. Be ready. To walk through the door when it opens.
22. Summer Days Panorama 02 — Blue Ridge Parkway near Blowing Rock, NC, June 11, 2013 — My whole point can be summed up with: “See what is good and do it.” When you see what you are looking at, you see the good and do it.
    
    To see the good is to do it. It’s the height of dysfunction to know what is good and not do it. I don’t know anybody who is that out of line.
    
    All the dysfunctions I know of are an aberration of the good—they call what is not good, good. They serve a good that is not good.
    
    Hitler, for example, was wrong about what was good. It wasn’t that he saw what was good and was intentionally evil. He did not see.
    
    If you want to change the world, just see the world as it is. Seeing what you look at transforms everything. Seeing is the revolution.
    
    If you want to change the world, show it itself. Mirror the world to the world. But know that it will kill you to avoid seeing. Just saying…
23. Goshen Creek Cascade 02 — Blue Ridge Parkway near Boone, NC, June 11, 2013 — When we wake up we see reality. We see the way things are, which includes seeing the way things also are. We integrate the opposites—we do not dismiss, discount, ignore one polarity in favor if the opposite one.
    
    We see polarities—the way things are and the way things also are—and create within our bodies a synthesis that takes everything into account. This is the work of consciousness, of awareness, of seeing, of being awake.
    
    When we can see things as they are without having to have things be different than they are, we are seeing things as they are.
    
    The natural world helps us in the work to see things as they are by being just what it is.
    
    If you spend time with the natural world—enough time to see it as it is, beyond your desires for it—it will open you to yourself.
    
    When we see, we see things as they are, we see ourselves as we are, we see what is happening and what needs to be done about it.
    
    The moment carries us deeper into our life, into ourselves. We birth ourselves by responding to the moment’s need of what we have to offer. Seeing is the way of life—the way to life—the way of being alive in the life we are living.
24. Summer Days 04 — Blue Ridge Parkway near Boone, NC, June 11, 2013 — Our life is like a dream which wakes us up to the life we are called to live—if we look at it with eyes that see. We read our life—interpret our life, what is happening in our life, what we are doing about it—as though it were a dream, that it may show us what there is to see.
    
    We don’t have to do anything more than see what we are doing.
    
    Seeing what we are doing transforms what is done, and aligns us with the soul’s way of doing.
    
    All roads lead to the center, and we can start that journey anywhere, at any time, simply by being conscious of where we are and what we are doing.
    
    Practice being conscious by looking at something—anything—until you see it. Look at it from all sides. What associations come to mind?
    
    The object or image becomes your guide to awareness, to consciousness, to seeing into you as you look at the object or image.
    
    When we see anything for what it is, we see ourselves. Everything mirrors us to us when we have eyes to see.
    
    When we see ourselves, we adjust ourselves, we shift ourselves, we align ourselves with the soul’s way of being/doing.
25. Magnolia 02 — Greensboro, NC, June 2013 — How much time do we spend not being where we are?
    
    How much time do we spend being where we are?
    
    What is it about where we are that makes it necessary, and easy, to not be there?
    
    What is it about where we are that makes it necessary, and easy, to be there?
    
    What can we do to reduce the time spent in the places where we are not being where we are, and increase the amount of time spent in the places where we are being where we are?
26. The Bog Garden is at the corner of Hobbs Road and Starmount Drive — across Hobbs Road to the east from the Bicentennial Garden. Hobbs road is the western boundary of the Shops At Friendly. Proceeding west on Friendly Ave., you would pass the Shops at Friendly and turn right (north) onto Hobbs Road. Go straight through the traffic signal at the intersection of Hobbs and Northline Ave. and turn right at the next street which would be Starmount Drive. It’s about a 12 acre natural habitat park and about 6 acres of it is Benjamin Lake. A great place to hang out with a camera!

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03/22/2013 — 05/13/2013

1. Well. Here we are. What can we do with it? Sometimes, it takes waiting to see.
   
   I travel to a distant location to photograph a particular scene, but the light isn’t there when I arrive. Maybe it’s raining. Maybe it’s overcast. Maybe it’s snowing. You get the idea. Now what?
   
   In my photography and in all of our lives, we find ourselves asking more often than now, “Now what?”
   
   It is important that we ask it looking—and waiting—for the answer.
   
   We are a balled-up burst of creative vision hoping we will get out of the way, with our expectations and disappointments and insistent demands that things go like we want them to NOW, and our pouts our dismay—so that we might actually allow our creative vision to show us what it sees and come forth. In other words, we have to shut up and wait to see.
   
   It takes letting go of what we had in mind and allowing our creative self show us what we can do with what is before us. Our creative self is waiting as much on us to listen as we are waiting on it to speak.
   
   We only have to take the “Okay, it’s here, I only have to find it” attitude to see the treasure in the situation, the gold in the bog full of swamp gas and slime. But. We have to wait to see. We cannot hurry the time of realization. We wait. Looking. Wondering. Standing aside so the light can shine through.
   
   We look at our life and think, “No creative genius can do anything with this!” And believe it is so. Give your creative genius a chance. And don’t rule out any nudges. What we want often stands in the way of what we can have—really, of what is right for us, if we only had eyes to see, looking, as we do with eyes for what we wish we could have.
2. Carolina, Of Course, Wren — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, March 1, 2013 — What are you waiting for? The question is not a push to get you going. The question is see if you know what you are waiting for.
   
   As a photographer, I wait on 10,000 things: The light, the wind, the clouds, the sky, the reflection, the tourists to get out of the way… I wait for the time to be right.
   
   I wait for the right time to act. In the meantime, I have a sense of the action I need to take and a sense of what needs to happen first, when things start happening.
   
   In your life, what are you waiting for? What has to open up, fall into place, for you to act? What action will the right action when it is time to act? What do you need to do to be ready when the time for action comes?
3. Goose in Flight 07 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, March 1, 2013 — Second-hand experience is killing the soul of us all. We do not live our life. We live someone else’s life. All those Paparazzi magazines on the racks at the grocery store are purchased by people who find other people’s lives more interesting than their own—who have to read about someone else’s life because they don’t have one worth reading about—worth talking about—worth thinking about. We live to escape the life we are living.
   
   Because we have never lived our own life. From the beginning we have been living the life we were told to live, or the life we felt like we had to live because we had no choice. We live as good, company, men and women—and the culture is the company. We live lives that are good for the economy. We buy what they tell us to buy (that would be the ad agencies).
   
   When George Bush told us to “Go shopping,” he spoke as voice of the culture. He didn’t say, “Pray.” He didn’t say, “Think of how you can change the way you are living to embrace the values that will stand the heat of any fire because in your heart you know they are right for you, and true, and good.” He said, “Go shopping.”
   
   ”Serve the economy!” “Serve the beast that got us to the point of not knowing where we are, or who we are, or what our business truly is.” “Just do what you are told. Live lives that are good for the economy, and let someone else worry about the rest of it.”
   
   We live second-hand lives and wonder what is wrong. We think our way through the day, and can explain, defend, justify and excuse everything we do. We can answer for our deeds like good company men and women. We haven’t done what we felt like doing, what felt right, what felt like the thing to do in the situation as it arose in forever.
   
   We watch Reality TV trying to feel something if only disgust and revulsion. What are we disgusted with? What revolts us? What is killing our soul?
   
   Look in your refrigerator and your pantry and where you keep your snack food (Comfort food we call it). Look in your liquor cabinet, in your drug drawer (Call it your medicine drawer if you want to) and ask yourself, “What is this stuff doing in my life?” And wonder what your life would be without it. And live to find out what your life would be if you lived it.
4. Barred Owl in Flight 01 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, March 2, 2013 — Alcoholics Anonymous emphasizes the importance of “working the program.” You don’t have to be an alcoholic to have to work the program. We all have to do that.
   
   You have to work the program—work YOUR program—the one you have to work to be aligned and in tune with the core, the heart, the center of who you are, and express it, exhibit it, in the way you live your life.
   
   The particular elements in the program are unique to each person. Maybe playing the drums does it for you, or making biscuits, or fast dancing. What grounds you, centers you, brings you into focus, restores your soul? Make it part of your program. Do it regularly.
   
   My program includes the Bog Garden, photography, writing, sitting quietly, walking, woolgathering, cooking and reading.
   
   When Alan Watts asked Joseph Campbell, “Joe, what form does your yoga take?” Campbell replied, “I underline passages.”
   
   We find our own way to the way, and we have to be conscious of it and devoted to it—and we have to practice it regularly. You cannot underline passages once every two months and call that your practice.
   
   You have to work the program. The program is your practice. It connects you with the heart of who you are and enables you to express that in your life. Find what constitutes your practice and practice it. Daily.
5. The Hooded Merganser Gang — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, March 2, 2013 — How are you going to live your life in the time left for living? What is going to guide you?
   
   Forget what you want. What you want is just another barrier between you and the life that is yours to live. What you want is just another Cyclops standing in your way, coming between you and what is right for you.
   
   What you want is a creation, a fabrication, of the culture in service to the economy. Madison Avenue can make you want the damnedest things, all of which are good for the economy, very few of which have anything to do with the life that is yours to live.
   
   What does wanting know? You wanted your first marriage, remember? And your second.
   
   What is right for you is the question. How do you know?
   
   Here’s a hint for you: You will never know what is right for you by thinking about it.
   
   How are you going to live your life in the time left for living? What is going to guide you?
6. Owl with Dinner — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, March 3, 2013 — It doesn’t take much to rob me of my peace, and it doesn’t take much to restore it again. A walk around the block, a visit to the Bog Garden…
   
   The center is always there. The ground is underfoot. It only takes remembering. But it takes remembering.
7. Owl Dinning — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, March 3, 2013 — It’s living on a piece of roofing tin with someone shaking it like a rug. Life. There is no steady state. It’s a heaving roll.
   
   It’s just ridiculous. We need someone who knows what to say saying what we need to hear from the first. The very first, I mean.
   
   We need someone who knows what would be truly helpful offering help to us all along the way.
   
   What we get are people who are as dazed and shell-shocked as we are saying things and helping in ways that make things that have no impact or make things worse.
   
   By the time we figure out what’s what and try to tell someone how it is and what to expect, we are too old to be taken seriously, and they roll their eyes like the deck of the ship we’re all on.
   
   Here’s the plan: Leave it alone. Don’t try to smooth it out. Don’t change a thing. Enjoy the ride. It’s a doozy.
8. Missed It! — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, March 3, 2013 — You do your thing, and don’t let what happens stop you.
9. Owl Thinking About Dessert — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, March 3, 2013 — The owl leaves his roost generally between 4:15 and 5:15 each afternoon, sometimes later. He doesn’t have a watch. How does he know when to go? He feels it.
   
   The entire natural world feels its way through each day, each year. Instinct and intuition, kid. Instinct and intuition.
   
   Instinct and intuition flow as freely through our veins as through the owl’s or the pussycat’s, but we have lost the connection. The right time is when we want it to happen, not when it is time for it to happen. And if some things are so wrong for us that it will never be the right time, we don’t want to hear of it.
   
   Our fingers are in our ears. “Nah nah na NAH nah!”
   
   With us one time is as good as another. Ain’t so in the natural world. In the natural world there is the right time and the wrong time. If it isn’t right, it’s wrong. The natural world waits for the time to be right.
   
   The owl knows when to go, and doesn’t go one minute early or late. He carries an internal clock with him wherever he goes (And I’m confident it is a he we are talking here—female Barred Owls are larger than males, and this guy is big in his own way, but not the largest I’ve seen), and doesn’t need to wonder what time it is. He knows: If it isn’t the right time, it’s the wrong time.
   
   That’s the kind of time we need to be able to tell.
10. Duck Work — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, March 1, 2013 — We have to design and work our own program for being aligned with the ground and core of our being, with that which is deepest, best, and truest about us.
    
    That doesn’t just happen. We have to work the program daily. We have to live in alliance with our own heart and soul, and let everything else fall into place around that.
    
    We have to know what is important and be right about it—and live in ways which honor than, and exhibit it.
    
    ”Who’s your Daddy?” “Who’s your Momma?” Who or what is the chief aim, the number one priority, of your life?
    
    We have to know who or what that is and design and work a program to remind us their, of its, place in our life and to align ourselves with it. We have to make ourselves conscious of the invisible world, submit to its service, align ourselves with it.
    
    Here’s an exercise I recommend becoming a part of your practice: When you are in a situation where you don’t know what to do—either because you really don’t know what to do, or because you are damned if you do and damned if you don’t and can’t decide—get out of the way and listen.
    
    Stop trying to think of what to do and listen for what needs to be done. Listen for instructions. Listen for direction. Wait, listening, to know what is being asked of you.
    
    We do not live our life thinking what to do and doing it. We live our life in the service of what needs us to do it, of what needs to be done—and we don’t think what that is. We feel it.
    
    We feel our way into what is right for us, into what is right for us to do here and now, in each situation as it arises.
    
    We live awaiting instruction, direction, guidance—which comes to us as revelation, as an urge to act in this way or that because the time is right for it and our action is required. For what or why, we do not have to know.
11. Barred Owl in Flight 04 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, March 3, 2013 — Planetary systems organized themselves by crashing into one another over a long period of time. It was a real mess in the early days.
    
    The idea of a Grand Design with everything humming smoothly along, a place for everything and everything in its place, is quite out of place.
    
    Reality is anything but organized and smoothly flowing. The Grand Design is simply one way of looking at chaos. Keep looking and you see chaos.
    
    Life is wild, uncivilized, reckless. There are no self-imposed limits to life. Life gets by with what it can get by with.
    
    Consciousness comes along and limits unconsciousness, invents rules, lays down the law, restricts the natural, the untamed, flow, imposes regulations, invents civilization, makes life liveable. But the conscious, rational, logical world isn’t the only world, and must honor the other world.
    
    Consciousness must consult, collaborate, confer, cooperate with unconsciousness. Negotiation and compromise, kid, negotiation and compromise.
    
    The visible world is built upon and is an extension of the invisible world. Consciousness makes the world visible. There is much yet unseen! There is more that we don’t know than we do know!
    
    Consciousness works with unconsciousness to bring forth the unseen, unknown, and to make visible what is invisible. Physical reality is invisible until consciousness sees itself seeing and knows that it knows and names what is known.
    
    Unconscious reality is as real as conscious, physical, reality. It’s invisible because it is not conscious, but it exists.
    
    Our place is to treat it as though it is real, because it is, and assist its coming to life in us and through us. As a by-product, we come to life as we bring the invisible (unconscious) world to life. It’s the only path to having life and having it abundantly.
12. Carolina Of Course Wren 01 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, March 1, 2013 — We will do anything to live as long as we can. To do what? Watch more TV? What are we living FOR? What will we DO with a long life?
    
    The people who worry about dying are the people who haven’t lived. Jesus said, “Get in their and do your thing. Everything else will fall into place around that.” Or, words to that effect.
    
    We are alive to the extent that we are living in light of the needs and interest of the invisible world, making conscious what is invisible/unconscious, and trusting ourselves to what we do not know.
    
    We live prophylacticly, being careful, staying safe, thinking everything through and having a good reason for everything we do. A sure recipe for being dead long before we die.
    
    In being alive, we feel our way from one thing to the next, not knowing what we are doing, unable to make sense of anything, having no idea of what lies ahead or what we will do about it when we come upon it, but trusting, trusting, trusting ourselves to the process of divining our life, of dowsing our way to the treasure, which is nothing short of our own heart and soul—who we are, brought forth for all to see and be graced by in the time left for living.
    
    Hallelujah! May it be so!
13. Mallard in Flight 16 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, January 29, 2013 — Jesus said, “Get in there and do your thing and don’t worry about those who are with you or about those who are against you!” Or, words to that effect.
    
    Jesus said, “Get in there and do your thing and take your lumps and don’t let anything stop you.” Or, words to that effect.
    
    Jesus said, “Get in there and do your thing and don’t worry about the outcome!” Or, words to that effect.
    
    Jesus said, “Get in there and do your thing and don’t hide your light under a basket!” Or, words to that effect.
    
    Jesus said, “You have everything you need to find what you need to do what needs to be done. Now, go do it!” Or, words to that effect.
    
    Jesus said, “Look. It’s like this. They can kill you but they can’t touch you, if you know what I mean. Now, what’s the problem?” Or, words to that effect.
    
    Jesus said, “Find the self within worth being true to and be true to that self—to your own sense of what is right for you (not what is right for someone else) regardless of what you want or what the culture expects of you!” Or, words to that effect.”
    
    That Jesus knew what he was talking about!
14. The Shape of Time 11 — Antelope Canyon, Page, AZ, May 2010 — All we want is a world in which everyone is free to do his or her own thing without interfering with someone else doing his or her own thing. That’s simple enough. How are we going to work it out?
    
    When things conflict, what? When my good is your bad, what? Or your good, my bad? At what point does my thing have implications for your thing—or yours for mine? What’s to keep me from pursuing my thing at the expense of your thing, or vice versa? Who is going to enforce the Rule of Things? What penalties will they be allowed to enforce?
    
    Who is going to decide when an individual thing is a threat to the things of the whole? Is it right for people who do not smoke marijuana to tell people who do smoke marijuana that they can’t do that thing?
    
    How can we limit people to doing what is right for them without telling other people what is right for them—or forcing the second set of people to do what the first set of people think is right for them?
    
    If people would only do what is right for them without messing with the right of other people to do what is right for them, what a great world it would be.
    
    We could call it Fantasy Land.
    
    In this world, we are stuck with working out the conflicts among us regarding what is to be done and not done. In this world, we live in two worlds at the same time. The world in which we are free to do what is right for us and the world in which we are not free to do what is right for us.
    
    In my growing up years, I was free to do what was right for me in the woods, and on the lakes, and in the fields of the natural world. I was not free to do what was right for me in the world of my adult supervisors. There was my world and there was their world, and I escaped to my world at every opportunity.
    
    Time in my world enabled me to survive time in their world. Things haven’t changed over time. I’m still escaping in order to recover, readjust, and step back into the other world and do what needs to be done there to enable my retreat to my world. Being retired helps a lot.
15. There are four things you can do to improve your photography dramatically and instantaneously. 1) Use a camera that suits your purposes. Do not try to make it do what it cannot do. If you are happy with your camera phone, read no further and enjoy taking pictures.
    
    2) If you are not happy with camera phone photos, buy a camera that allows you to control focus, exposure, aperture, shutter speed, and ISO. If your current camera will “get out of the way” and allow you to do that, you probably have all you need in a camera.
    
    3) Read the camera manual and learn how to get it to do what you need it to do in each situation as it arises.
    
    4) Do not show up in a scene at a time that is convenient for you and expect the photographs to be there waiting on you. The first law of photography states: The moment does not last and rarely returns. You have to be where the photos are likely to be at a time that is not convenient for you, at a time that is too early or too late for your satisfaction, and you have to wait on the photograph—on the light, on the time to be right.
    
    If you get these four items down, everything else will fall into place and your skill will improve beyond all hope and expectation. You can tell them I said so.
16. Lake Millinocket — Millinocket, ME, October 2012 — Don’t change anything. Don’t force anything. Don’t make anything happen before its time. Wait for the shift. And walk through the open door.
    
    They should tell us these things while we are still in the womb.
17. South Pond 01 — Baxter State Park, Patten, ME, September 24, 2012 — It’s all practice. We are figuring things out here. All those people who are chiding us for being slow? They have slow places in their lives, things they haven’t figured out. They ridicule us so they don’t have to think about themselves.
    
    The owl flies at me and I forget what I’m doing. So I go back, hoping the owl will fly at me again. I have thought about throwing the camera in the pond and taking a blanket and my thumb to some warm corner and waiting it out, but so far, sanity has prevailed.
    
    I’m teaching myself to take photos of the owl. Coming at me.
    
    We are teaching ourselves to live our life—as it needs to be lived, not with our thumb and a blanket (or any of the addictive equivalents) in a corner.
    
    When you think you will never get it, get back out there and hope to find an owl. Coming at you.
18. Reedy Fork Sunset H Panorama 02 — Lake Brandt Greenway, Bur-Mil Park Access, Greensboro, NC, January 24, 2013 — The longer we look at something, the more likely we are to see it in different ways. Sit with something long enough and it becomes more than you ever imagined it could be.
    
    I’m thinking here of you. Look at you long enough and you will change your mind about you. Several times. “Will the real you please stand up?” They all rise. They all are really you.
    
    But the same thing applies to everyone. Your parents, your siblings, your friends, your enemies… The whole circus.
    
    The longer you look, the more you see. The more there is to take into account. The more there is to consider when weighing judgment and issuing edicts.
    
    The old rhyme applies: “There is so much good in the worst of us and so much bad in the best of us, it doesn’t behoove any of us to talk about the rest of us.”
    
    It’s another way of saying, “Give folks—including yourself—the benefit of the doubt and see where it goes.”
19. Barred Owl in Flight 07 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, March 8, 2013 — We want it to all fall into place so we can quit worrying about it, and quit working with it, and quit trying to make it out, and just enjoy it before we die. We think we can’t enjoy it until we get everything taken care of and in its place.
    
    Here’s Jim’s Tip of the Day: ENJOY WHAT CAN BE ENJOYED ABOUT IT JUST AS IT IS!
    
    Start with your morning coffee, or whatever its equivalent is in your life. Spend some time enjoying your coffee.
    
    Next time you’re in the grocery store? Stroll through the fruit section. Something is in season that you enjoy. Buy it. Enjoy it.
    
    You have things you enjoy doing that you haven’t done since you-can’t-remember-when. Well?
    
    Unleash your joy dog! Let it run all over the place, sniffing, licking, rolling in the grass…
    
    What do you gain by being all stiff and withheld? If you are waiting on all of it to be just right before you like any of it, you should buy a soft chair and take a seat. May be a while.
20. Trout Lily 01 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, March 9, 2013 — How are we going to live our life in the time left for living? How is your life calling you to live it? How is your life calling you?
    
    One way our life calls us is through what we enjoy doing, through what we love to do. We answer the call by giving ourselves to it and seeing where it goes, being led along by what “tickles our fancy” and pulls us along.
    
    Another way our life calls us is through the people we fall in love with. Our falling in love with someone has absolutely nothing to do with the person we fall in love with and everything to do with the person our life needs us to become.
    
    Think of the people you have fallen in love with. Let one stand out from the rest: “Your heart’s true love,” we’ll call him, her. What are the qualities you love about him, her? The characteristics you find to be overwhelmingly wonderful? Make a complete list.
    
    What would the person bring to life in his, her, relationship with you? What would you do, who would you be, with the person that you would not be on your own? Make a complete list.
    
    You have two lists now before you. Begin the long, slow, painstaking work of incorporating each item on the list into your life, into the way you live, becoming who you imagine the other person to be. Becoming what you love in the other person. Becoming what you find so attractive in the other person, whom you would do anything for, make any sacrifice in order to be with for the rest of your life.
    
    Do it now. Do anything. Make any sacrifice. In becoming who you imagine that person to be.
21. Barred Owl in Flight 06 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, March 8, 2013 —  Nothing beats listening/hearing and looking/seeing for finding the path with our name on it.
    
    We waste a lot of time on paths that do not have our name on them. Those who make it to the path with their name on it learn to listen/hear, look/see along the way.
    
    I don’t know why some figure it out and all don’t. I call it the Luck Factor.
    
    ”There’s no such thing as luck.” I hear it all the time. “It’s God’s Providence and Grace that gets us through!” they say. When I say, “Aren’t we lucky that God is so providential and gracious?” there is a pause, and then, “Luck has nothing to do with it!” End of conversation.
    
    Well. At least four golfers and a business wizard are credited with saying, “The more I practice (Or, the harder I work), the luckier I get.” Just showing up has a lot to do with it. If you show up enough with a camera, you’ll get your photos.
    
    If you keep picking yourself up, saying, “I know I can do better than this!” You’ll be more apt to find the path with your name on it than if you just lie there, marinating in your misery.
    
    So, maybe luck has nothing to do with it. Maybe it’s the Tenacity Factor, or the Perseverance Factor, or the Determination Factor. Whatever it is, some have it and some don’t. And I don’t know of any way to give whatever it is to those who don’t have it. I don’t even know what it is.
    
    But, I do know that listening/hearing and looking/seeing are basic requirements for finding our path and walking it. If you are going to practice anything practice those things.
22. Trout Lily 08 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, March 10, 2013 — Our interests will guide us along the way. Our interests ARE the way. We cannot become who we are—and who we have yet to be—without being interested in what interests us—without loving what we love, enjoying what we enjoy, and doing what is ours to do.
    
    What is ours to do is not some odious (I have to start using that word more. What a great word. I never work it into a conversation. How odious of me!) task that is imposed on us from the outside, as a punishment for past wrongs or a requirement for residence in the eternal habitations.
    
    What is ours to do is ours to do because we are built to do it—because we are incomplete and much less than whole until we do it. And when we do it, we do it with all our heart, not begrudgingly, looking at our watch, wondering how much longer, and why do we have to do this old thing.
    
    The saddest people I know are the people who have no interests—who have been separated from their interests for so long that their interests have dried up and disappeared—who have not allowed themselves ever to follow their interests or enjoy anything about their lives because they are always being graded and don’t want to appear to be having fun because that would be a mark against them for sure and they can’t risk any more marks against them because all the ones they have already accumulated are surely going to carry them straight to hell unless they manage to be miserable enough in the time left for living to pay off some of their debt and maybe get to live on the fringes of heaven in the afterlife. Or something like that.
    
    So. Find an interest and follow it. It will lead you straight to the Promised Land, I promise. Of course, it may lead you to other interests along the way that is the way for you to the Promised Land. Just keep following your interests. It will be so delightful you may forget all about the Promised Land, and then realize you’ve been living in the heart of the Promised Land all this time, and laugh at the whole idea of the Promised Land being somewhere far off when it is right here with us all our life long just waiting for us to open our eyes and see where we are and what is ours to do and enjoy.
23. Don’t “Yo Mama” My Mama! — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, March 10, 2013 — You are up to you. You are in your own hands. You make the calls that lead to life or death. If you fail to be alive in the time left for living, look no further than in the mirror.
    
    We know what is right for us and what is wrong—we only have to take the time and go to the trouble of knowing what we know. Too often, we prefer not to know.
    
    Knowing asks too much of us. When we know too much, it puts us crossways with Those Who Know Best And Must Be Pleased. Then comes the showdown and we lose either way. Better to sacrifice ourselves again than to risk the displeasure of the scornful others who wield power over us and hold the reins.
    
    This line of thinking sells ourselves short and, never knowing what we know, we fail to experience—to know—the power that resides within, that is the source of all creative imagination, courage, determination, vision, purpose, meaning, and life.
    
    Allowing the Scornful Others “take care of us,” we never know the power that is ours to take care of ourselves when we live in the service of what is right for us, never mind the outcome.
    
    So, here’s your homework: Know when you are overriding what is right for you in favor of what serves the status quo, maintains the peace, does not rock the boat, and keeps things exactly as they are forever and appeases the Scornful Ones. Know at least that much of what you know. And see where it goes.
24. Avalanche Lake — Glacier National Park, Apgar, MT — We help each other along the way, in two ways in particular. We provide encouragement and caring presence. That’s one way. We serve as a sounding board. That’s the other way.
    
    People hear what they are saying when they say it to us. Our role is to keep them talking.
    
    Notice how often in a conversation you start talking about yourself, your experience with a recent illness, or loss. And you don’t make three statements before the other person takes the focus away from you and your experience and starts talking about themselves and their experience. This is not being a sounding board. It is also not providing caring presence, and is not encouraging.
    
    Listening to what is being said, and past what is being said to the feelings that are being expressed through what is said, and receiving both well, in ways that communicate having heard what has been said on the face value level and on the feelings-beneath=the-surface level is perfect sounding board behavior.
    
    It isn’t easy. But it’s important. Important enough to be aware of its importance. To practice it. To be good at it.
    
    Listening saves the world one person at a time. Nothing is more grounding, centering, focusing, and integrating than being heard. Being heard all the way to the heart of who you are is transformative—and essential to our waking up.
25. Trout Lilies 09 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, March 12, 2013 — Eyes that see. Ears that hear. A heart that understands. If you are going to wonk on anything work on these things.
    
    The way to work on them is looking until you see, listening until you hear, and asking until you understand. And do not assume you see, hear, or understand until you do.
    
    Carl Jung said that belief for him was a strange concept—either you know something or you don’t know something, and if you don’t know a thing, then you don’t know it.
    
    Religion these days is based on believing what someone else says is so, without going to the trouble of knowing ourselves if it is so. We take someone else’s word for it and go on with our life.
    
    Eyes that see, ears that hear and a heart that understands are the heart of religion which is grounded on direct experience with the invisible world. No doctrine can take us there. No theology can substitute for our own raw encounters with More Than Meets The Eye. But, who is up for that these days?
    
    We think we have a life to live and just want the basics in our religion. We don’t understand that life hinges on what we know to be so out of our own experience. So we believe what we are told to believe and go on with our life, which is no life because it is disconnected from its heart and soul.
    
    If we want to know, we have to look, listen, inquire and get to the bottom of every little thing. We wake up that way, and come alive to the world that is waiting on us to see, hear and understand.
26. Mesquite Dunes 01 — Death Valley National Park, CA — It’s our work, aligning ourselves with the invisible world, living out the life that is right for us. This is our business. We have no business pursuing anything else. It is our highest priority.
    
    Well. You know about that. A stupid Pomegranate (My personal choice for the Forbidden Fruit. What’s yours?) distracts/untracks us—which means anything can. It doesn’t take much. Our highest priority is whatever we fancy now.
    
    But. The prize waits for us to wise up, to wake up, to take up the business that is ours from the start. It does not tarnish, evaporate, or waste away. It is always ready for us to say, “Oh, THERE you are! I’ve been looking all over for you. Let’s see what we can do with the time left for living!”
27. Mallard in Flight 34 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, March 13, 2013 — There is a downside to waking up, you know. You have to bear the pain of realization. Seeing shows you stuff you had rather not know about. Awareness requires action. You cannot grow up and enjoy the numbed-out bliss of ignorance.
    
    There is something to be said for not-seeing, not-hearing, not-understanding, not-knowing. It isn’t the most wildly popular state of being ever for no reason. It pays to be tuned-out. It costs to be present with all that is present with us.
    
    Do we have what it takes, is the question. Will we trust ourselves to the presence of the inner guides? Will we fulfill our role as point person in the encounter with the full wrath and power of physical reality—countering the dismay and disenchantment that comes with eyes to see and ears to hear—with the compassion and resiliency of a heart that understands more than can be seen and heard?
    
    The physical world is great for producing the hopeless, pointless, meaningless, useless illusion that “this is all there is.” Leaving us with nowhere to turn but the numbness of escape and denial. So. We have to remember what we also know: This is not all there is.
    
    We carry the banner of the invisible world and swear allegiance to the service of more than meets the eye. It is squarely up to us to have the strength of our own convictions in the encounter with that which purports to be “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”
    
    All of the temptations, tests, and contests—whether the hero is Jesus, or the Buddha, or Ulysses, or any of the champions of myth and fairy-tale—come down to what is real. Come down to what we are going to believe—our eyes and ears, or our heart.
    
    What does our heart say is right, and true and good? The facts be damned! We have a cause to serve! A life to live! We bring what else is true—what all is true—to bear upon what claims to be the whole, hopeless, truth. And see what happens. And see where it goes. This is the Hero’s Journey. It’s yours if you are up for it.
28. Trout Lily 10 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, March 13, 2013 — Measure yourself by where you’ve been and where you are—by where you started and how far you’ve come—by who you have been and who you will be. And stop trying to be somebody else.
    
    Be you. To the best of your ability. Become more like you every day. Until you get it down and are perfectly, wonderfully, delightfully you in every respect.
29. What A Hoot Looks Like (Or, a “Who Cooks For Yoouuuu”) — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, March 14, 2013 — The facts don’t mean what we think they mean. Thinking the facts mean it’s all useless, hopeless, pointless and coming to a very bad end leads us to depression, disenchantment, despair and dismay.
    
    Who is to say what the facts mean?
    
    ”You have no education, so you can’t be smart.” Who is to say that education equals intelligence and is required for brilliance?
    
    ”You are not rich, so you must be stupid or ignorant or bad or worthless. You are definitely worthless if you are not rich.” Who is to say money is an indicator of character?
    
    ”The suffering and misery in the world proves that life is not worth living.” Who is to say life is best when it is pain free? That suffering has no place in a well-lived life?
    
    The facts have no business determining feelings. Feelings have to be free to access the situation apart from exclusive reliance upon the facts. Feelings can lead us to choices and behaviors that transform the meaning the facts have had for generations. Feelings can show the facts a thing or two. Feelings can say to facts, “Who made you the Boss of me?” and go on with what needs to be done in spite of the fact that it will never work, that it can’t be done, that it is contrary to nature and God’s eternal, unchanging, immutable will.
    
    Don’t let the facts dictate your feelings. Let your feelings transform the facts.
30. Early March Morning — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, March 13, 2013 — Growing up means changing our mind about what’s important. It means waking up. But not “Finally waking up.” Or “Finally realizing what’s important.”
    
    There is no “Finally” to it, to anything. There is always waking up again and changing our mind about what’s important.
    
    What’s important is called “values.” We change our values over time. Or not. To not change our values over time is to be deader than dead.
    
    When we fall in love, what we are falling for is not the other person but the values that are reflected in, by, the other person. What is important to that person shines through and grabs us, because it is important to us, but we don’t know it, and have to see it in someone else to get a sense of what needs to come forth in us, but we think it’s about the other person when it is really about us, and think if we can’t have the other person forever we will die, when it is actually if we don’t exhibit what we see in the other person we will die—we will be deader than dead—because we aren’t espousing values that are actually important.
    
    Falling in love is a wake up call, which we miss, thinking only about him or her, but we have other chances to wake up, grow up and change our mind about what’s important. Conflict is a great chance.
    
    All conflict is a conflict of values. What we think is important comes up against something else that is important, and we have to work it out. If working it out includes changing our mind, great. If it only means going to war and winning, smashing the other side’s values to smithereens (How long has it been since you heard that word? It used to be all the rage. It used to be important, say, in 1950. Somebody or something was always being “blown to smithereens.”) so that what’s important remains just what we always said was important, we drift on into being deader than dead, in the Wasteland, where there is no hope and no chance for those there who know what’s important and aren’t about to change their mind for anything.
    
    So get to the bottom of all of it. When you fall in love, get to the bottom of what draws you to the other person—of the qualities you want to live with forever (which isn’t what we think it is—nothing is—but just the next stage of life, which we will leave when we change our mind again about what’s important, or not leave at all when we lock ourselves into what is important and never change our mind, living out what remains of our life deader than dead) and live to exhibit them in your own life.
    
    And when you have conflict, find the values that are at odds and work to integrate them, reconcile them, so that what is important meshes with what is also important and transforms perspectives on all sides of whatever the issue is before us, by waking us up, growing us up and changing our mind about what’s important. Again.
31. Trout Lily 08 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, March 12, 2013 — I had to leave the Deep South to have a chance. In the Deep South I would have always been who I was.
    
    In the Deep South, I’m still Jimmy. I still like homemade vanilla ice cream, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and hunting and fishing. In the Deep South I will always be who I was.
    
    In the Deep South the norms are firmly in place and no threat to contentment is tolerated. How it’s supposed to be is how it’s always been. No change allowed.
    
    Life is movement. Life is in flux. In transition. Unfolding. Emerging. Becoming. Who knows what?
    
    And “There is nothing but the dead and dying/Back in my little town.”
    
    So we escape or succumb. You can’t live with a foot in some worlds. You “move far away and visit seldom” to have a chance. And don’t try to explain it, justify it, excuse it, defend it, make sense of it, or make anyone happy with it. You couldn’t anyway.
    
    Who could say what all needs to be said to those who would be saying it themselves if they could hear it, and who don’t have the foggiest notion as to what you are talking about? You have to know what I mean in order to understand what I’m saying. If you know what I mean.
32. See The Owl? 03 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, March 14, 2013 — The Owl comes at me and I forget what I’m doing. You have to do something, and do something, and do something, in order to be able to do it.
    
    It’s called practice. It’s where playing the piano comes from. Or doing anything worth doing.
    
    You can’t write without writing. A lot.
    
    You can’t play first base without playing first base. A lot.
    
    We want to—think we ought to—be good at things we never practice. “Oh, I can’t talk in front of people!” Or we play golf a couple of times a month and are disgusted with our game.
    
    I’m practicing with the camera, and having a wonderful time. I’m really playing with the camera. Playing the piano starts with playing with the piano. Playing first base starts the same way. Hopefully, with nobody yelling at you because you can’t do it yet.
33. The Real Decoy 01 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, March 16, 2013 — You have only one question to answer: How are you going to live what remains of your life?
    
    What are you going to do with the time, in the time, left for living? How are you going to live your life? How aligned can you be with the life that is yours to live? How much of that life can you bring forth in the life you are living—within the context and circumstances of your life as it currently is?
    
    How much can you learn/know of the inner world and your place in it—your relationship with it—in the time left for living?
    
    Do not think time is short so you must hurry. Hurrying, rushing, running around trying to find your life and live what you can of it is exactly the wrong thing to do. The time to take your time is when time is short. Because you don’t have any time to waste, and must be careful with what you do with the time you have.
    
    The most important thing to do in answering the questions above is nothing. Be quiet. Be still. Get out of the way. Look. Listen. Be fully present with what is present with you.
    
    The answers you seek are all plain before you. All you need are eyes that see, ears that hear, and a heart that understands. You know all you need to know. You only have to know what you know. And you know that, too.
    
    So, what do you need me for? To tell you to sit down, shut up, get out of the way, and pay attention.
    
    The life that is yours to live is dying for you to live it. Literally. It is not playing with you. Hiding from you. It’s right there in your heart’s true joy. In your heart’s true love.
    
    It’s time you got together with your heart. What a team you will make!
34. Mallard in Flight 35 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, March 17, 2013 — One aspect of our practice is remembering who we are and what we are about—remembering to live aligned with the intents and purposes of the invisible world.
    
    This does not come naturally with us. While lions and humming birds have to be who they are, we can put on airs and have aspirations. We can build great walls between ourselves and who we are. We never once have to be who we are. So, we have to remember to be.
    
    A remembering place, or ritual, or both, would help. Every time we stop what we are doing for a cup of coffee, we could remember to ask, “Okay, who am I? What am I about?” And sit with the questions and the cup of coffee.
    
    We recall ourselves to the task that way, regain our perspective and our focus, our center and our ground. And step back into the day.
    
    The day has its ways of stripping us of our intentions and our resolve. So, we have to remember them and get back on track.
    
    It’s hard work being who we are. All a lion has to do is wake up and he, or she, is who he, or she, is. Of course, that’s really all we have to do, too. It’s just that waking up on that level isn’t as easy as waking up on the lion’s level.
35. Two Down — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, March 17, 2013 — Ducks, geese, owls—all living things in the natural world—act in the moment in light of what needs to happen in the moment. They don’t make lists, maintain schedules, consult calendars and clocks, have motives and agendas.
    
    They all have their own business and are about it, and it is constantly being disrupted by the 10,000 things, but they don’t pout about it. The goose with the broken leg, the duck with a broken beak, the ducks and geese with only one foot, all manage to be about what business they can be about given their present state of affairs. But they don’t think about it. They “just do it.”
    
    They don’t get in their own way.
    
    We come along figuring things out. Scheming, planning, staying ahead of the game, exploiting our position, pursuing our advantage, manipulating our outcomes, seeking to maximize our profits and minimize our losses… None of which has any connection with our business, with what we are doing here, with the life that is our life to live.
    
    My idea for us is to use our feeling function—the way we know what is right for us and what is wrong for us—to find our business, and use our thinking function—the way we find the best way to do something given all of the impinging conflicts and contradictions, barriers and impediments—to do what is genuinely ours to do within the context and circumstances of our life.
    
    We think our way to doing what feels right for us without being distracted and untracked by interests and concerns that have nothing to do with our business.
    
    We stay out of our own way.
    
    That would be my gift to us, but I’m going to continue testing it out on me before I put the hard-sell on you.
36. Mud Wrasslin’ — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, March 14, 2013 — There is one problem, arrogance, which manifests itself as two problems, inflation and deflation. Solve those two problems and we would have no problems.
    
    Inflation is thinking too much of ourselves. Deflation is thinking too little. Inflation and deflation make themselves problematic in 10,000 ways. It’s all arrogance outdoing itself.
    
    What’s needed is a humble respect for what needs doing and for how things are to be done. No sooner do we touch humility than we begin to think how significant it is that we are so humble, off we go into a humility based inflation.
    
    I’m saying there is no fix for the problem of arrogance or the problems of inflation and deflation. There is only me being aware of how the problems creep into my life and you being aware of how the problems creep into your life, and all of us hoping that awareness of their presence is enough to bring us back to being respectful of what needs doing and of how things need to be done.
    
    May we all live out of this respectful orientation without being impressed with how well we are living. This is called not letting the right hand know what the left hand is doing. The closest we can come to this is catching the right hand in the act of showing off by being all meek and humble, call the foul and say, “I see what you are doing! Cut it out!”
37. Geese on the Wing 01 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, March 9, 2013 — The degree to which we live the life that is ours to live depends to a large extent on the way we respond to the life we are living—to life as it comes at us like some wild, howling, owl from hell so that we forget what we are doing and everything we ever thought was good, and suitable, and right. What we do then tells the tale.
    
    You better write yourself a script and memorize the thing. You better rehearse the scene 10,000 times, until you can recite your lines like you mean them, until you can remember you have a camera in your hands, and you are here to take photographs of howling owls from hell and anything else that looks interesting—until you can do the thing that is yours to do no matter what life throws at you all your life long.
    
    When you can respond to your life without taking your eyes off your LIFE—without forgetting who you are and what you are about—without casting about all hopeless and forlorn, looking for meaning and purpose and hope, as though those things live somewhere outside of your own heart and soul—and can remember your business and be about it no matter what is going on in your other life, then your LIFE knows it has a keeper in you, and snuggles right up to you and says, “Lets me and you go show them what we’re made of,” and the fun really begins.
38. Geese on the Wing 02, B&W — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, March 9, 3013 — Learning to see is learning to see with the heart. It’s different, whether we see with our eyes or with our heart. The difference is that between life and death.
    
    The eyes see what is pleasing, and displeasing, to the eyes, The heart sees what is pleasing, and displeasing, to the heart.
    
    The eyes can be taken in. The heart is a hard sell.
    
    The eyes are caught by sheen and glamor, by how things look, by the shimmering beauty of glass beads and silver mirrors, the bright plastic and flashing lights of Gay Paree.
    
    The heart sees into the heart of the matter. The heart looks past appearances and promises, past hints and suggestive packaging to the unalterable truth of how things are.
    
    The eyes know what looks good. The heart knows what’s what.
    
    Learning to see is learning to see with the eyes of the heart.
39. Mallard in Flight 43 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, March 2013 — Is it a side track or the right track? It takes going to know.
    
    Side tracks can lead us back to the right track if we receive them well and refuse to take wrong turns more seriously than necessary.
    
    It’s all grist for the mill, and we make of it what we can, using the experience of living to lead us in the way of life—by living with our eyes open and learning as we go.
    
    It’s amazing what we can know just by seeing what we look at.
    
    So, don’t be down on yourself for not knowing more than you know. Learning what the way is not will lead us eventually to the way. Side tracks are the right track for those who see them for what they are and don’t kid themselves about what they are doing.
40. Geese on the Wing 02 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, March 9, 2013 — If you want to find God—the God who IS, I’m talking about, understanding full well that our idea of God is not God—find your life. God will be there tucked away in your life wondering what took you so long, and why you wasted so much time trying to make sense of someone else’s idea of God.
    
    Your life is as close to God as you will ever get. Your life and God are one. But. You have to be living your life to know what I’m talking about.
    
    God also can’t figure out why we spend so much of our time—live so much of our life—not living our life, our LIFE. Chalk it up to the Five Barriers to Authentic Living: Fear, Ambition, Greed, Stupidity and Arrogance.
    
    We have a lot to work through to get to the work that is ours to do. Better get started.
41. Northern Shoveler Hen — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, March 18 2013 — I have known a number of local singers who had big time talent and never made it to the big time and didn’t let that stop them from doing what was theirs to do—from doing what they loved to do.
    
    There is a local bluegrass group that is the best in the world, but only a few of us know it because they are doing their thing and their thing doesn’t require international recognition.
    
    Doing your thing does not call for celebrity status. Celebrity status has been the death knell for the thing of a lot of people.
    
    We put stipulations on our thing. Insist that it pay off. Demand that it be to our advantage. Require that it serve our ends. Make us happy.
    
    We can be happy, but we cannot make ourselves happy. We cannot be made to be happy. We find happiness like a coin on the street. We are happiest when we are living in the service of our gift, our genius, our art.
    
    We cannot squeeze our gift, our genius, our art for the gold. It is gold, but it does not produce gold. It IS the gold we seek. Those who know that know all they need to know.
42. Mallard in Flight 49 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, March 20, 2013 — I’m amazed at how little it takes to break my concentration.
    
    I can be alone at the Bog Garden and fully present with it—aware of, and attuned to, what is happening and what is likely to happen. I’ve been there often enough to know the patterns of the ducks well enough to sense when one is likely to take flight, and I’m fully into the scene unfolding before me. And someone walks up.
    
    You’d think I could exchange pleasantries about the weather and water level without losing my place in the scene. Not! I cannot do two of some things at once, this being one of them.
    
    And it takes a few minutes after they leave for me to settle back into where I was.
    
    Now, this is a lesson in Business Maintenance. We can be About Our Business or we can be Not About Our Business, but we cannot be A Little Bit About Our Business and A Little Bit Not About Our Business.
    
    When it comes to our Business, we are all ADD’s. The least little thing can knock us off the path. Some things can make us forget everything about the path—can make us forget there was a path.
    
    There is a reason Buddhist monks all the way up to the Dali Lama maintain a strict schedule around their meditation times. They have to be about their Business on a regular and steady basis to remember they have a Business to be about.
    
    You see, I’m sure, how all of this pertains to you. You can’t be about your Business the way you would be about a Sunday stroll or making oatmeal cookies. You can’t just take it up and put it down and get back to it in a few days when the mood strikes.
    
    Our loyalty and allegiance have to be to our Business, our LIFE, our path. We cannot work the program when we feel like it. We have to WORK the program.
    
    We have to know when the work has been disrupted and what to do to pick it back up. We have to know when we lose our concentration and how to find where we were before the distraction came along.
    
    Our business is our BUSINESS. It is who we are, what we are about. If you think there is something more than that, something other than that, something besides that, think again.
    
    We belong to our business. Our business does not belong to us, to pick up and put on when it suits us. Savvy?
43. Geese on the Wing 03 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, March 9, 2012 — If we are going to walk together, we cannot stipulate where we go. We have to allow each other the latitude to determine his or her own direction and trust our relationship to be flexible and fluid enough to grant each other the room that differences require—and not be so If You Loved Me You Would Like Brussels Sprouts with each other that we all tip-toe on eggshells to keep from rocking the boat or turning over the apple cart or making waves and have absolutely nothing but a box of smoke where a helping, loving, relationship could be.
    
    You have to admit I’m great for sentences that could be six or fifteen sentences. And you’re still walking with me. I’m grateful, too.
44. See The Owl 05 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, March 16, 2013 — Is it your business or none of your business? Is it your work? Does it help with your work? Does it have anything to do with your work? What are you doing, doing something that has nothing to do with your work?
    
    How focused is the Dali Lama? Was the Buddha? Was Jesus? “If your eye causes you to walk off the path, pluck it out! (Or words to that effect)!”
    
    A bit extreme, perhaps, but precisely the point: Know Your Business, Your Work. Do Your Business, Your Work.
    
    Life is too short to be frittered away in pursuits and undertakings not worthy of our time and attention. Only our work and that which pertains to our work is worthy of our time and attention.
    
    We have to draw our lines around what we will do and what we will not do, around what our business is and around what is none of our business.
    
    We cannot live any way that suits us and be about our business. We have to be clear about what the journey requires and whether we have what it takes to take it. Do we have the heart for the journey of heart? If not, what are we thinking?
    
    Jesus had lots of stories about starting out and not completing the journey, and about not going at all. He was talking about doing our work and not doing what is not our work.
    
    He would be quick to say, “There is only one thing: Your work. Do it!” And he would be right.
45. Geese on the Wing 04 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, March 9, 2013 — What do you love to do? Do it for the love of it. Do it for the joy of doing it. Don’t look for wealth from it. It is peace and well-being that we need.
    
    Steer your way to what you value most and live a life that expresses it, embrace a good that serves it.
    
    Carl Jung says that in today’s culture—and it’s the world culture he is talking about—we don’t need to hear the message, but need to hear the message explained. When we are so far removed from our sense of what has true value that we need to be told what is valuable, we are in a bad way.
    
    When someone else has to tell us what is valuable, we have lost connection with our own sense of value, which is our sense of direction to purpose and meaning.
    
    Jesus said, “Do your thing, and don’t worry about those who are with you or against you,” or words to that effect.
    
    Most of us are free to have a life that is free within the life that is not free. We can live in two worlds at the same time.
    
    I check out of this world all the time and retreat to my world. I close the door to my office, for instance, and write what I need to write. I can do what I know to be important, to have value to me, in that world.
    
    I drive to a scenic location and walk amid the photographs waiting to be taken, with on one telling me which ones to take or not take.
    
    I have no control over a lot of things in my life. I have to do a lot of things I don’t want to do, don’t enjoy doing. In the other world.
    
    But. In my world, I am free to do what needs to be done, when it needs to be done, as it needs to be done, as I determine those things.
    
    I am living my life in my world in ways that are completely right for me, and you can’t stop me. Nah na nah NAH nah.
    
    And you can do the same thing in your world. What’s stopping you?
46. Goose Coming In — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, March 2013 — Money cannot buy a world fit to live in. Only the heart can create that world. Money has cut us off from our heart. We sell our heart for money, thinking money is the answer to all of our problems with life.
    
    Living a life of true value is the answer of all of our problems with life. Only the heart knows what is valuable.
    
    Without heart leading the way, the world becomes a wasteland, where we work for money to be content, and are not content, so we work for more money to finally be content, and are not content…
    
    It’s like my idea of bad religion where we go to church to hear the preacher tell us we are going to hell if we don’t come back and hear the preacher tell us we are going to hell if we don’t come back and hear the preacher tell us we are going to hell if we don’t come back…
    
    A life without value is a life in search of value. Here’s a tip: We cannot use money to buy it. More money is not going to do it.
    
    The heart knows what is valuable. Let heart lead the way.
    
    We have to build a life of value within the wasteland or our other life. We have to live in two worlds. We have to create a world worth living in within a world that is not worth our time.
    
    The older ones of you have already done this and just need a little affirmation and encouragement. You’re on the right track—you are doing the right thing with your life. Do it consciously. Keep it up.
    
    The younger ones of you know already that your life isn’t working and you found your way hear by casting about, grasping at straws, hoping to find something to help you construct a life worth living. I hope you’ve found it. You have to build a world worth living in based on what your heart knows to be truly valuable. This is your work. Do it.
    
    No one can tell you what is valuable to you. You have to listen to your heart. Silence is valuable to me. Solitude. Writing. Listening. Seeing. Inquiring. Walking. Conversation that is more than News-Weather-Sports-Politics-Religion-Gossip (See how much you have to say that doesn’t fall into one of those categories—It’s all we know how to talk about!). My list is not long but I find the things on it to be intensely valuable to me. I would hate to have to live without them.
    
    See what’s on your list. Incorporate the items there into your other life. Create a new life for yourself—a new world. Live in two worlds, knowing clearly which one you belong to.
47. Geese on the Wing 05 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, March 09, 2013 — At the level of the heart, we all speak the same language. If we cold get at that level and stay there, we would have it made—worldwide. Ah, but. There are Fear, Greed, Ambition, Arrogance and Stupidity blocking the way.
    
    Another name for the Big Five Barriers to the Promised Land (Enlightenment, Nirvana, the Kingdom of God, or wherever it is we think we are going) is the Cyclops. We get up and go a few rounds with some manifestation of the Cyclops every day—a regular routine on the Hero’s Journey.
48. See TWO Owls? — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, March 23, 2013 — Seeing what you look at will carry you a long way.
    
    To see what you look at, you have to get out of your way.
    
    You have to lay aside your assumptions, inferences, prejudices, arrogance, all you think you know, everything you have ever heard and approach each seeing moment with eyes so fresh they sparkle and shine with interest and wonder.
    
    Get that down and you have it made.
49. Star Flower — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, March 23, 2013 — Work with what you have. Don’t be saying you can’t do anything with this old life and these old resources. Stop making excuses.
    
    We can put off forever the work of living the life that is ours to live within the context and circumstances of the life we are living.
    
    The problem is that we want it to be profitable. If our work were guaranteed to bring us our heart’s desire (which has no connection whatsoever with our HEART!) instantaneously, we would do it without hesitation, no matter what the initial cost. Our work is not profitable the way the world reckons profit.
    
    We cannot take the gift we have been given and exploit it for our own good. We can only serve the gift—not exploit it. Our work is serving the gift, bringing forth the gift within the context and circumstances of our life—the time and place of our living—here and now, for the good it can do, the blessing it can be, in the lives of others.
    
    The gold we seek is found in our devotion to, our love for, the gift, the genius, which is ours to serve and to give away.
    
    The gift may pay for itself—helping us pay the bills that serve the gift—or not. It is a source of well-being, not wealth.
    
    We think wealth is the everlasting source of well-being, and throw everything into being wealthy, and well-being languishes, and dies.
    
    All it takes is seeing what we look at to know what needs to be done and do it. In order to see what we look at, we have to change our minds about what we think is important. We have to grow up. We have to live in light of values that are worthy of us—worth our life in their service.
    
    The length of the spiritual journey—the Hero’s Journey—is the distance from our head to our heart (our HEART).
50. Mallard in Flight 39 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, March 18, 2013 — It is important that we help each other do what is important to the other, that we help one another find what is right for each—for all—of us.
    
    It is important to not say things like: “Why are you doing THAT?” Or, “Why do you care about THAT?” Or, “That’s crazy!
    
    It is important to not put a premature end to someone’s ruminations—wander around with them amid the possibilities. We imagine our way along the way. We need sounding boards to help us hear what we are saying. We can talk our way to clarity if those who listen to us will just keep us talking!
    
    We have to listen to each other to know what is important to the other and help them find their way to it.
    
    The path is always at our feet, waiting for us to discern it. Waiting for us to be open to it. Waiting for us to know what is important, what needs to be done. And do it.
    
    We need one another to help us see what is before our eyes—not by telling us what is there, but by listening to us say what is there.
    
    People are always telling us what they want us to know instead of listening to us to help us know what we know.
    
    How will we ever know what we know without people who listen lovingly to us? To whom do you listen lovingly?
    
    Being listened to lovingly is what we all need. Why do so few of us do it?
51. Mallard Mirror — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, March 23, 2013 — What stops us from doing what needs to be done? We need to lose weight. We need to exercise. We need to cut things out of our life (Empty calories and TV) and incorporate things into our life (Silence and reflection), and we don’t. What stops us?
    
    What cannot be stopped? Organized crime, drug cartels, the gun lobby, injustice against women and immigrants… The list is long. What stops what needs to be stopped from being stopped?
    
    What is going on? What can we do about it? Why can’t we stop what needs to be stopped and do what needs to be done?
    
    What needs to be stopped in your life? What needs to be done?
    
    What’s stopping you from answering the questions?
52. Carolina Of Course Wren 03 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, March 1, 2013 — We are here to serve the gift. This is the heart of “Thy will, not mine, be done.” Serving the gift soon carries us into the realm of “not my will.”
    
    Nothing is more quickly inconvenient and in the way, aggravating, bothersome, grating, and, eventually, painful, than serving the gift—than making the gift and its delivery our highest priority—than being at the “beck and call” of the gift. Particularly, when there is—as there usually is—nothing in it for us beyond the experience of the gift and its offering.
    
    This is the province of God’s will. Are we going to serve the gift or not?
    
    Am I going to get up at 2:30 AM to write what needs to be written or not?
    
    How often do we dismiss something that catches our eye—and how often does something catch our eye that is not gift-related—and go on in the service of our agenda, with no awareness of the gift and the opportunity we missed to serve it?
    
    How often do we think, “What gift? I don’t have a gift!” ?
    
    We think God’s will is about morality, about obeying the Ten Commandments, living a “pure, righteous and sober life.” Not so. God’s will puts us at odds with the moral precepts of our day. Jesus is the perfect example of what God’s will requires.
    
    Healing on the Sabbath. Associating with the outcasts, with the untouchables. Rocking every ecclesiastical, doctrinal, theological boat he could get his hands on. Putting himself in the position of being called “A glutton and a wine bibber” and “a Son of Satan.” All required in the service of the gift, and the direct result of doing God’s will.
    
    But you will never hear that in a Sunday School class or in a sermon.
53. Oops — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, March 23, 2013 — We serve the gift, share the gift, bring forth the gift, produce the gift—ARE the gift, the work, the life that is ours to give, do, live.
    
    The gift we have to give, the work we have to do, the life that is ours to live takes precedent over every other concern.
    
    This is what it means to pray, “Thy will, not mine, be done.”
    
    From the standpoint of this understanding of this prayer, religion is a lived experience of those who are engaged in the work of unfolding the gift they are called to be within the life they are living—and it has nothing to do with, no connection with, believing what someone else has said is true about God. It is knowing what is true about God first-hand.
    
    When we are living our life—the one that is ours to live, giving our gift—the one that is ours to give, doing our work—the work that is ours to do, we know God the way Jesus knew God, and can say along with him, “The Father and I are One,” because, then, there is no space between who we are and who God would have us be.
    
    When we find our life and live it, there is God—beyond theology, beyond doctrine, beyond dogma, beyond faith and belief. A rock-solid presence that cannot be doubted or denied.
    
    And so, when Carl Jung was asked if he believed in God replied, “I do not believe—I know!”
54. Mallard In Flight 58 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, March 25, 2013 — Bringing the Christian perspective into the present means understanding sin as being wrong about what is important—as wanting what we want and not what we ought to want because it is right for us to want it and wrong for us to not want it. Understanding repentance as changing our mind about what is important. Understanding salvation as being right about what is important and living aligned with it—wanting what we ought to want, not because it is forced on us from outside of us, but because it is genuinely, authentically, who we are and right for us in the truest sense of the word.
    
    Hell is being lost to ourselves, adrift in a world of our own making, a wasteland of emptiness, hopelessness, meaninglessness because nothing is as we thought it would be, and is not what we wanted—and we have no one to blame but ourselves, but we cannot face the truth of our responsibility for our plight and blame everything—everybody—but ourselves.
    
    Heaven is being restored to ourselves and living authentically aligned with what is deepest, best, and truest about us—being who we are, doing what is ours to do, being about bringing ourselves forth into the world.
    
    Our work is to get ourselves on the right track—the track that is right for us, the life that is our life to live in the time left for living. The afterlife will take care of itself.
55. Mallard in Flight 001 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, March 2013 — Look for living symbols that are alive for you. Water and stones are ancient ones that have worked in every age to connect the age, the people, to purposes quite beyond them—but each age, and each person within each age, must re-work the symbol to make it relevant and meaningful to that age, to that person.
    
    The Tao is Valley Water and baptism represents the water of birth—the embryonic fluid of our new beginning.
    
    We have to work the symbol, and work ourselves into the symbol, and see ourselves reflected by/in the symbol, and be reminded of who we are and what we are about.
    
    We have to have grounding, stabilizing, centering, focusing symbols to reorient us to the way that is our way, the truth that is our truth, the life that is our life—because there is much at work in our other life to strip us of the vitality, meaning and purpose that our symbols represent.
    
    So. Find your symbols and make them real. They are your life and connect you with your life and bring you forth and make you real. In making your symbols real, you are making you real, which is our real work. Being real.
56. Wild Goose B&W — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, March 26, 2013 — We have to live in two different worlds, The world that feeds our body and the world that nourishes our soul.
    
    What feeds our body is not necessarily what nourishes our soul. What we do to feed our body can deplete and exhaust our soul.
    
    And yet, body and soul are one thing, not two. Physical and spiritual are one experience, not two. Soul is nourished physically, through touch and sound, taste and smell and sight. We cannot know soul except through body.
    
    And body can be soulless, empty, barren, dry, dead, deader than dead—and is, when it does not take soul into account.
    
    Our life in the physical world has to nurture our life in the spiritual world, and vice versa. It is one world.
    
    And yet, it is two. What we do to pay the bills that enable us to feed (and warm, and cool, and wash, and dry) our body can deny and dismiss our soul. We have to also pay the bills that replenish our soul.
    
    We have to honor the second world and consciously, deliberately, willfully reconcile it with the first world—with the apparent world, with the visible world, with the world that takes itself to be the only world.
    
    We begin by creating the second world and living in it—when and where and how we can. And once we have established for ourselves the validity of the invisible world, the world of soul, we integrate it with the visible world, the world of body—bringing soul intentionally to life through the way we live in the physical world.
    
    We cannot just talk about soul and live soulfully. We have to experience soul—to be soulful—in order to live soulfully. We do that by creating for ourselves a world apart, and then bringing the two worlds together. The two become one in the hands of those who know what they are doing.
    
    But they are not automatically, spontaneously, easily one. The work is to make them one over the course of our life in each. They become one through those who do the work of oneness—the work of reconciliation, integration, harmony, wholeness—consciously, painstakingly.
    
    Two worlds plus one life lived consciously equals one world.
57. Mountain Magnolia — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, March 2013 — There are two worlds: The world of normal, visible, physical, apparent reality and the world of abnormal, invisible, spiritual, ephemeral reality. By living consciously in both worlds, we bring the two together in our life and make the two worlds one world. This is our work.
    
    There is the world of that which meets the eye and there is the world of more than meets the eye. We have to live in this world as those who never loose sight of that world, of that invisible world. Do not lose sight of the invisible world!
    
    We have to find ways of living in this world which make that world apparent, and present, and real. We do that through our physical senses, tuned into the world beyond the physical world.
    
    Every physical act has a spiritual component. Every physical experience is a threshold into more than meets the eye. Some physical experiences are so packed with the spiritual, with the numinous, with the More Than Words Can Say, that we are stunned into silence and remember it always, though we cannot say what it was that we remember.
    
    We must not discount those experiences. They are the ground of our work to see that world in this world, through this world—and to make that world apparent by the way we live in this world.
    
    That world is REAL—is more real than this world. We sense it through the impact of our experience with this world. This world drains us, depletes us, exhausts us—enthralls us, enchants us, bewitches us, delights us. What happens in this world has an emotional component that we cannot put into words.
    
    We dismiss what cannot be said, explained, described, told, counted, quantified, locked-up, fenced-in, seen, weighed, measured, touched, tasted, smelled. Weird, isn’t it that what we taste—lemon ice box pie for example—can transport us to a world apart, and we are back in our childhood, in our grandmother’s lap, eating her lemon ice box pie, and are brought to tears? Now, you tell me which world is the REAL world.
58. Geese Coming In 01 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, March 22, 2013 — When you don’t know what to do, don’t try to think your way forward. Feel your way there.
    
    Be quiet. Be still. Listen. Look for what is stirring within, Fear and desire get all the press and attention, but look beyond them, see past them to the deeper feelings capable of guiding your boat on its path through the sea.
    
    The owl drops out of his roost as evening comes and goes looking for dinner. Where will he go today? His feelings guide him. Not his thoughts. Maybe he feels like this, maybe he feels like that.
    
    It’s like you when you walk through the cafeteria line. What’s for dinner? Surely you don’t think your way there. What looks good? What are you in the mood for? You go in thinking about salmon, but the baked spaghetti catches your eye. Suddenly, you feel like spaghetti. That’s how it works.
    
    Feelings have directed us through thousands of years of living. Thinking is a Johnny Come Lately, taking over the operation, acting like it knows what its doing. When you don’t know what to do, thinking just starts shooting from the hip, try this, try that, no that.
    
    Geez. Sit down. Shut up. Stop. Look. Listen. Feel.
    
    We feel our way to what is right for us. We do not think our way there. And if we feel our way to what is wrong for us, keep feeling. Feeling got us in the mess, feeling will get us out.
    
    What say your feelings? Listen to them!
    
    And if you feel incensed that I would say such things, what does that say? Are you going to listen to your feelings or not?
59. The Chase Is On! 01 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, March 26, 2012 — Everything that comes, goes (Joseph Campbell). If you are not coming, you’re going. The enlightened life is to let come what’s coming and to let go what’s going.
    
    And, some of us think, “Oh, boo-hoo, boo-hoo! Nothing lasts! Nothing is worth it! It’s all emptiness and sadness! It’s just a box of smoke wrapped in pretty paper! Why have anything to do with this life? I’m just going to pout and cast about until I die!”
    
    But not all of us. Some of us “get in their and do our thing, and don’t let the outcome stop us” (Joseph Campbell). Some of us live the life that is ours to live, “and when the birds of the air—or the way things are—plaster us with their droppings, don’t even pause to notice, or wipe it off” (Joseph Campbell). Some of us are too busy with the things that matter to us to bother with how long it lasts or why bother with something that is going away.
    
    How long does sex last? Or an ice cream cone? Or a glass of wine? Doesn’t stop us from enjoying the experience, relishing the memories, and signing up for another round.
    
    What’s with this hanging on to things? What’s with this saying, “If my babies are going to grow up and move away, I’m not going to have children!”?
    
    If we are going to be alive in the time that remains, we are going to have to jettison the sorry attitude that keeps us from living.
    
    Look. It’s like this. This is how things are, and this is what we can do about it, and that’s that. Are you coming or not? You’re burning daylight, pouting and casting about!
    
    The challenge for everyone is to jump right in there and do what is ours to do as well as we possibly can and let that be that.
    
    We are called to join in the dance of life as full participants in how things are—loving what is to be loved, enjoying what is to be enjoyed, delighting in what is delightful, mourning what is to be mourned, grieving what is to be grieved, saying hello to what’s coming and good-bye to what’s going—as though the whole thing is all our idea and the best one we have ever had!
    
    We are to join right in as though the joy is all ours, and we are going to climb onto the big, snorting, pawing, beast of a bull and tell them to open the chute—and enjoy what we can of the ride.
    
    Doing what needs to be done as though we want to do it—letting things be what they are and doing what we can do about it—is the transition point, the turning point, from immaturity toward maturity. Making the decision to play the game on the game’s terms is the most important decision of our life.
    
    You’re burning daylight here. Are you coming or not?
60. The Shape of Time 18 — Antelope Canyon, Page, AZ, May 18, 2010 — Where do you find your peace? What are the sources of encouragement for you? What do you do to regain your balance, find your center, reorient yourself to what is important? Where do you find your strength for dealing with what you have to deal with—for doing what is yours to do?
    
    Do not hurry past the questions. Sit with them. Answer them. The answers cradle your heart. If you take care of your heart, your heart will take care of you.
61. Mallard in Flight 59 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, March 28, 2013 — We have to know what interests us and we have to be interested in what interests us—past all resistance and opposition from any source.
    
    Jesus said, “Who is my mother? Who are my brothers and sisters? Not those who are my blood relatives, but those who perceive the will of God calling to them through their interests, urges, gifts and abilities and do it—regardless of the price or who stands in their way!” Or, words to that effect.
    
    We have an interest and begin to pursue it, or perhaps just to entertain ideas of pursuing it, and people close to us say, “Why on earth are you interested in THAT of all things?” and we turn back to doing the things we are supposed to be interested in, even though our heart isn’t in any of them.
    
    We have to fight for what interests us.
    
    The relationship we have with our interests is that of the medieval knight with his Lady. We wear her colors and swear allegiance to her to the death. She is the epitome of our heart’s truest love—and we honor and revere her above all else, trusting ourselves to her service for life, not knowing why we do it or where the road will lead.
    
    The spiritual journey (Hero’s Journey) is this way to the core. It is a journey of our unfolding, of our emergence, of our evolution from who we were to who we have it within us to be. We have no map. We have only our interests to guide us. We have to trust ourselves to them and serve them faithfully as they lead us to who we are.
62. The Chase Is On 02 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, March 26, 2013 — Joseph Campbell said, “If a person doesn’t listen to the demands of his own spiritual and heart life, and insists on a certain program, you’re going to have a schizophrenic crack-up. The person has put himself off-center. He has aligned himself with a programmatic life, and it’s not the one the body’s interested in at all. And the world’s full of people who have stopped listening to themselves, or have listened only to their neighbors to learn what they ought to do, how they ought to behave, and what they values are that they should be living for.”
    
    What holds us down, what holds us back, is our idea for our lives, our idea of how our lives, of Life, ought to be. We have to get out of our heads, so to speak, out of our idea of how things should be, in order to participate in—in order to engage—things as they are. We do that by allowing ourselves to love what we truly love instead of loving what we think we should love.
    
    The biggest risk you will ever take is the risk of loving what you love—of giving yourself to your heart—of allowing your heart to have the reins, trusting yourself to your heart, and seeing where takes you.
    
    If you are up for it, you have started on the Hero’s Journey. Hang on. It’s the best ride there is.
63. Caterpillar Hill — Overlooking Deer Isle and Penobscot Bay, ME, September 28, 2012 — What is the central focus of your life? If you are casting about, looking for something good, let me suggest living aligned with your heart, and through it, with the drift and direction of the invisible world.
    
    When you are grounded in your heart—and through it, in the invisible world—you are a rock. More than a rock. You are life itself, alive in you.
64. Compass Pond 02 — Golden Road at the lower end of the 100 Mile Wilderness near Millinocket, ME, September 25, 2012 — The quick stopper to my “live aligned with your heart” advice is, “But what about all the times I’ve followed my heart and lived to regret it—like my first marriage. And my second. My heart doesn’t know anything!”
    
    My reply is, “If you live aligned with your heart and it leads to trouble, keep following your heart—it will lead you out of trouble. And you will learn things about yourself in the trouble that you would never have known otherwise. Your heart isn’t as stupid as you think.”
    
    Joseph Campbell said, “Consciousness is transformed by trials and revelations. Trials and revelations are what it’s all about. The trials are designed to see to it that the intending hero should be really a hero. Is he really a match for this task? Can he overcome the dangers? Does he have the courage, the knowledge, the capacity, to enable him to serve? The adventure (evokes) a quality of his character that he (didn’t know) he possessed. It took the Cyclops to bring out the hero in Ulysses.”
    
    If you give yourself a bad marriage, fine. Work out for yourself what you are going to do about that. It will evoke qualities you didn’t know you had. And keep living to be aligned with your heart. It will carry you straight, in a round-a-bout way, to the heart of who you are.
65. Fog on Cadillac Mountain — Acadia National Park, Bar Harbor, ME, September 29, 2012 — Joseph Campbell said, “Where you stumble and fall, there is the treasure.”
    
    We think our failures, mistakes, screw-ups and flame-outs are shameful, tragic, burdens that we will forever kick ourselves about because we were so stupid and should have known better—and DID know better but ignored every warning sign we put in our way.
    
    Our failures have called us forth in ways our successes and triumphs could not touch.
    
    We have within the ability to rise to every occasion—but we don’t want to have to rise to any occasion. We want, as my friend Ogi Overman reminds me, “smooth and easy all the way.”
    
    Smooth and easy will not—cannot—bring us forth, grow us up, produce in us the qualities of character and spirit that we develop in dealing with and recovering from our bad choices and wrong turns.
    
    Here we discover the spiritual conundrum/paradox: Bad is good. Wrong is right.
    
    And the treasure is this discovery and all the others we make about ourselves in handling all of the things we would like to avoid.
66. Mallard in Flight 60 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, March 29, 2013 — We do not impose the solution onto the big problems. The solution emerges from the big problems.
    
    Carl Jung said, “The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown.” Growing up solves all of our problems.
    
    We create problems solving problems. When the problem solves the problem, the problems diminish.
    
    One of the 10,000 laws of photography and problem solving states: Wait long enough and something will happen. If we sit with a problem long enough, a shift will occur. We don’t have to find a solution. We have to wait for the shift.
    
    When the door opens, walk through. Seize the moment. Act when the time for acting is upon you. Do when needs to be done when it needs to be done the way it needs to be done. Poof. No problem.
    
    A leaking roof is not a big problem. Call the roofer. A stopped up drain is not a big problem. Call the plumber. When we make a big problem out of a problem that is not a big problem, we have a big problem. That would be us. We have to sit down with us and allow the solution to emerge. We have to get out of our way and let the shift happen.
    
    How do you get in your own way? How do you make big problems out of small ones? How are you refusing to grow up? Hmmmm?
    
67. South Pond 01 — Baxter State Park near Patten, ME, September 24, 2012 — I have two pieces of advice that I consider to be all you need to do to be on the way. Everything else falls into place around these two things.
    
    1) See what you look at.
    
    2) Be interested in what interests you.
    
    That’s it. Spend your time in the service of these two things and you’ll be in the center of the way the rest of the way.
68. Grackle in Flight 01 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, March 29, 2013 — We don’t have to change the way we are. We have to see the way we are—with compassionate eyes.
    
    Seeing with compassion changes everything.
69. The Mates Meet — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, March 31, 2013 — How many times in a week are you are where you can’t think of any place else you had rather be? Doing what you can’t think of anything else you had rather be doing? How long are you there?
    
    What can you do to increase the frequency and the duration?
70. Mallard in Flight 67 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, March 31, 2013 — We are here to help each other with our life—to help each other find our life (the life that is truly ours to live) and live it.
    
    It does not help to exhort, berate, harangue, expound, proclaim, preach, condemn, chastise, ostracize, expel, evict… I’m sure you get the idea.
    
    It does help to listen with compassionate ears, see with compassionate eyes, understand with a compassionate heart. Compassion helps a lot. And interest. And authenticity. And playfulness.
    
    It helps to know we don’t know what we are doing trying to help someone else with her, with his, life when we aren’t exactly in the saddle of our own life—but to laugh at ourselves and do what we can imagine doing in each opportunity to be helpful as it comes along.
71. Mallard in Flight 66 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, March 31, 2013 — We want to feel better RIGHT NOW!
    
    Getting better requires us to bear the pain of our past over time. Facing the truth of how it is with us. Doing what needs to be done about it. And letting that be that. Trusting that healing and recovery and genuine acceptance of our false starts, and wrong turns, and life’s Big Juicy Wet Ones Right On Our Kisser will come in its time. And we will grow up to be the kind of people people are glad to have in their company.
72. Mallard in Flight 64 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, March 30, 2013 — There should be some effective way of neutralizing mass hysteria and prevent it from sweeping the country—or the entire civilized world—up in a frenzied rush into insanity. Individuals grounded in and remaining true to, themselves are the only defense against communal madness I know of.
    
    Listen to your heart. Center yourself in what you know to be valuable, important, worthy of your allegiance. Stay away from crowds—even virtual crowds—and maintain your grounding connections.
    
    Avoiding psychic infections is one of the tricks to master on the Hero’s Journey.
73. Pier in the Fog — Lake Brandt Watershed Park, Greensboro, NC, January 11, 2013 — As physical beings, we have mass, take up space and are capable of movement.
    
    As emotional beings we make a feeling response to our environment—and to more than our environment.
    
    As mental beings, we can think about—be conscious/aware of what we are experiencing and decide what to do about it.
    
    And as spiritual beings we can bring it all together—integrating physical, emotional and mental aspects of our experience in light of qualities and characteristics we find to be valuable, and connecting us with sense of meaning, purpose and direction beyond anything we could extrapolate from the world of space, time and matter.
    
    Sheldon Kopp said, “We can experience more than we can understand and we can understand more than we can explain.”
    
    There is more to us, and to all of it, than meets the eye. Live in ways that honor the realization that there is more to know than we do know—more to know than can be known—and don’t act like you know all you need to know and that if everyone thought like you did the world would be a wonderful place.
74. Songbird — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 1, 2013 — Everything at the Bog Garden has its business, knows what it is, and is about it. And everything else by and large stays out of its way. Nothing there is lost and without purpose. So much for the supposed inferior nature of the non-human world.
    
    We moan about our lack of purpose and direction, not because we lack purpose and direction, but because we lack those that will do. We want some kind of purpose and direction. The kind that will make the neighbors sit up and take note. Perhaps because we think that is what it will take to get our neighbors off our back.
    
    My current purpose is learning to take pictures of flying ducks. That is to say, learning to keep flying ducks in focus. It is nothing to take a picture of a flying duck. I take plenty of pictures of them. They are just out of focus.
    
    People would have me have a better focus than taking a better focused picture of a flying duck. They don’t think that’s much of a purpose.
    
    ”Do you spend every day at the Bog Garden?” they inquire, as though there is a better place to be.
    
    If I let them take my purpose from me, I would be lost and without purpose. But, as it is, I know my business, and am about it, along with everything else at the Bog Garden. Everything else, though, has the advantage of not having to justify their business to everyone who comes along.
75. Two Owls on a Limb — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 1, 2013 — What is suitable in a situation may not be what is desirable—may not be what you want. It is what the situation calls for. A coat and tie, for instance, and shoes that pinch a bit. Maturation is doing what the situation calls for—what is appropriate, suitable, for the situation—no matter how much you would prefer to be in the Bog Garden.
    
    Our priorities float in a sea of situations. The highest priority is what the situation calls for—to be set aside in favor of what the next situation calls for. We cannot always do anything and hope to be living in accord with what is appropriate and suitable in the here and now of our living.
    
    The situation determines what is appropriate and suitable, not your mother’s Book of Rules, or the Church’s Official Decrees. We cannot impose an ideology upon our situations and have a livable life. We have to live in each moment, alert to the moment, guided by the moment. The moment will show you what needs to happen in the moment. Listen to the moment!
    
    The scene will show you what photographs to take. Stop trying to impose your idea for the scene upon the scene! Stop trying to impose your idea for your life upon your life! Cooperate with what is trying to come forth—assist what needs to happen—do what is appropriate and suitable to the occasion, regardless of how much you had rather be somewhere else, doing something else.
    
    This is called growing up and understanding that what you want is not the highest good.
76. Creekside — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 2, 2013 — One of the 10,000 laws of photography states: If you want to be there when something happens, you have to be there.
    
    If you want to walk up and take a picture, that’s fine. Millions of people do it that way and are perfectly happy with the results. They have a camera. It’s different with photographers. The camera has them.
    
    But, there is a connection between this law of photography and your life (As it is with all of them). You can’t order up your life and have it ready for you at the drive-through window. You can’t expect it to unfold before you like a magic carpet ride. Your life will work you over, just like your camera will if you are a photographer.
    
    Your life is work, just like your camera is if you are a photographer. And you have to work it, just like you have to work at being a photographer. You belong to your life, your life does not belong to you, just like you belong to your camera if you are a photographer.
    
    You have to tend your life—that means you have to pay attention to your life and do what it needs you to do. What does it want from you? What do you have to do for your life to come alive? For you to live aligned with the life that is your life to live?
    
    Your life has a life of its own, and it’s your place to be open to that and let your life live you. If you are going to practice anything, practice that.
77. Through the Trees — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 2, 2013 — Joseph Campbell said, “The influence of a vital person vitalizes, there’s no doubt about it. The world is a wasteland. People have the notion of saving the world by shifting it around and changing the rules and so forth. No, any world is a living world if it’s alive, and the thing is to bring it to life. And the way to bring it to life is to find in your own case where your life is, and be alive yourself.”
    
    ”The influence of a vital person vitalizes.” The only influence worth having is toward LIFE. If you want to influence the world for the good, you are going to have to be alive to do it. You can’t give away something you don’t have. You can’t tell someone how to get something you don’t have.
    
    We all come with it. Puppies have it. Children have it before they run head-on into Those Who Know Best And Must Be Pleased and haven’t been alive once since they were five years old, and now live only to take life away from others and hand them some rule book which is really a manual for going to hell before you die.
    
    Your task is to take your life back. This isn’t a hard thing. Where is your joy found? Go there. Often. Do things you love to do. How long has it been? Don’t let another day pass without working in some things you love. Hot showers count. And music. But don’t let my list get in your way. Make your own list. It’s a path to life.
    
    There are paths to life all over the place, just waiting for you to walk them. One of the 10,000 laws of photography applies here: “You’ll never know what you’ll see if you don’t go looking.”
    
    Go looking for life. Let it surprise you in all the places it’s hiding.
78. Cherry Blossoms 03B — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 2, 2013 — A variant of one of the 10,000 Laws of Photography is, “You’ll never see anything if you don’t go looking.”
    
    The camera is for more than birthdays and trips to far away places. The camera is for seeing. For seeing what you look at. For looking.
    
    Take your camera along and be alert to what catches your eye. Over time, you’ll marvel at what is always there beyond your vision because you aren’t/weren’t looking.
    
    The camera is also an invitation to take your time with what you see. Shift your perspective. How is it begging to be seen, photographed, shown? Is there a better time to see it, better light in which to see it? Do you need to come back when it’s cloudy, or earlier, or later?
    
    Your life is changing here. Who is to say that your life doesn’t need to change? Doesn’t need to be directed to something else? Directed by something else? Who is to say you know all about living your life and everybody and everything needs to get out of your way because you know where you are going, what you are doing?
    
    Who’s to say that the camera can’t show you a thing or two about your life—about life—and living—and being alive?
79. Songbird 02 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 2, 2013 — There is your work and there is that which distracts you from your work. It’s important to know which is which.
80. Narcissus Reflection — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 2, 2013 — Joseph Campbell says, “The real dragon is in you…it’s (you) holding you in…it’s what I want, what I believe, what I can do, what I think I love, and all that. What I regard as the aim of my life and so forth. It might be too small. It might be that which pins you down. And if it’s simply that of doing what the environment tells you to do, it is certainly pinning you down. And so the environment is your dragon, as it reflects within yourself…And we slay the dragon within us by following our bliss.”
    
    Our bliss is our joy—it is our heart’s true love. What we are born for. Where we belong. It is our thing.
    
    It takes courage to give ourselves to our thing. We have to have heart to follow our heart. There is much to overcome. Resistance within and without. Objections. Opposition. Barriers…
    
    This is where faith comes in. Faith in ourselves. In our own heart. We trust our heart to know what it’s doing, and throw in with it, and see what we can do together. Or not.
    
    There are plenty of people who don’t. You can see it in their eyes. They opted out of service to their heart. And paid the price. Loss of heart. Loss of soul. Empty eyes. Empty life.
    
    The wonder is that nothing is more forgiving than heart and soul, and it is never too late to start believing in our heart.
    
    It’s ready right now to carry us into the bout with the dragon. Why not? There is nothing much on TV. The real fun is found in living our own life, giving our heart the reins and saying, “Let’s see what we can do.”
81. Sans Songbird 01 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 3, 2013 — The most important photographic equipment are your feet for getting you out of the house to where the photos are.
    
    The most important piece of photographic advice is: “Go! Go! Go!”
    
    You can’t photograph what you don’t see, and you can’t see what you aren’t looking at. So, Go! Look! See!
    
    See?
82. Mallard Landing 03 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, March 30, 2013 — People with no life meddle in the lives of others. Tell other people how to live. Call it religion. Say God told them to do it. It’s a lie.
    
    The Bible—that would be, according to those who use it to their own ends and purposes, the Very Word of God—says, “Thou shalt not remove thy neighbor’s landmark.” And Jesus said, “Man, who made me a judge of you?” and “Don’t be judging one another now, you hear?” (Or words to that effect). God clearly means, “Keep your nose out of other people’s business.”
    
    If it were only so simple! There are people who think everybody ought to be like they are and will stop at nothing to force their way on everyone else. Which leaves everyone else with the problem of how to be safe in a world that is out to get them.
    
    The first rule of survival is Be Neither Offensive Nor Defensive. Just live your life. Just mind your own business. Just do what is yours to do. “When the birds of the air plaster you with their droppings, don’t pause even to wipe it off.”
    
    The second rule of survival is: Know Who Your Friends Are. There is nothing like mutual encouragement and the joy of shared compassion to keep us going. We create small circles of trust where people can be who they are and be honored and respected for it—communities of innocence that have no agenda beyond being a good place to be together for the simple joy of being together.
    
    The third rule of survival is: A Life Grounded In And Lived From The Heart Is Immune To The Turbulence And Heaving Turmoil On The Surface Of The Wine Dark Sea. Return to the source—to the center, the core, of who you are and what you are about—and live from there in responding to each situation as it arises in ways that are suitable and appropriate.
    
    The fourth rule of survival is: Remember To Breathe. Breathing slowly, deeply and consciously is an ever-present path to the core—a return to the truth of who you are, and the still point of the turning world.
83. Cherry Blossoms 07 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 3, 2013 — Joseph Campbell said, “One thing that comes out in myths is that at the bottom of the abyss comes the voice of salvation. The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light.”
    
    We have to lay everything we have thought to be true on the altar of truth. This is the essence of “Thy will, not mine, be done!” We give up our interpretation of how things are and live to see if they are as hopeless as we think. And then comes the shift, the transformation, the transcendent experience—which can be seen as a turning point or the next step in the work of growing up and realizing how things are is not how we have been told they are, or though, or expected, them to be—which has been called “Enlightenment.”
84. Cormorant Migration — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 3, 2013 — We have our work to do. It comes down to seeing things as they are and responding to them as only we can.
    
    We have to live soulfully to see and respond in that fashion. Living soulfully is living beyond the boundaries of conventional norms and standards. Seeing how things ARE and doing what needs to be done about them as only we are able, sets us apart from the way things are said to be and are supposed to be done.
    
    You have to be somewhat untamed and outlandish to live like that. That’s why it’s called soulful. Because the soul is like the spirit which is like the wind that blows where it will, when it will, moving through us, transforming the world.
85. Bamboo Leaves B&W — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 2, 2013 — You cannot be intimate if you will not be vulnerable. You cannot be present if you refuse to be open. Vulnerability is the key to life.
    
    And we think in terms of guns. Too many of us do. Guns are an extension of fortress. Of a castle. Guns keep threatening possibilities at bay. ICBM’s keep them far away.
    
    Give us guns and ICBM’s! Give us impregnable (As if!) fortifications! Give us protection! Arm us all!
    
    Well.
    
    We have to make a choice. Life is vulnerability. We want invincibility.
    
    What do we want?
86. Mallard in Flight 65 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, March 2013 — Know what your work is—and know what it is not. I’m not talking about your job. Your job is what you are paid to do. Your work is what you love to do. Your work is what they couldn’t pay you enough to do if you didn’t love it. Know what that is, and do it.
    
    Your work will lead you to you—which is the destination of all the Heros’ Journeys. We are here to meet up with ourselves and be who we are. Our work is the way to The Way.
    
    Know what you love, and what interferes with what you love, what ridicules what you love, what trashes what you love and shames you for loving it. And, between what you love and what shames you for loving what you love, choose what you love.
    
    Trust what you love. This is the kind of faith that will get you to heaven. Loving what we love is all the heaven we can bear. See how much you can stand.
87. Common Grackle — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, March 30, 2013 — Rich people hang out in different places of the world and call that living. Poor people dream of hanging out in different places of the world and think of that as living. Living like rich people live is thought to be living. What is the difference between hanging out and being alive?
    
    I understand the part money has to play in being able to afford to hang out. What part does money play in being alive? Does money have any connection at all in being alive? How alive can we be with no money at all?
    
    What will we do with our life in the time left for living? How will we live what remains of our life? How will that be different from hanging out?
    
    What does it mean to you to be alive? How alive can you be in the time left for living? Upon what does your being alive depend?
88. Used in Short Talks on Contradiction, etc., Sparrow 01 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 5, 2013 — Hell is where people try to make things work like they want them to work. Heaven is allowing things to work the way they work.
    
    We confuse what we want to happen with what needs to happen and cannot tell one from the other.
    
    There is no peaceful, contented, serene, happy, tranquil, harmonious steady state of being. There are ephemeral, transient, temporary, passing, short-term experiences which confirm the reality of the good, but the good itself is always coming and going.
    
    Let it come. Let it go. Do your work.
    
    Our work includes bearing the pain of the contradiction of our work, our life, within the context and circumstances of our other life—the life in which we bring forth our LIFE and do our WORK. The contrast can be staggering, overwhelming. Do not let it stop you from doing your work.
    
    We live with dichotomies, polarities, incompatibilities—some of which we can integrate, reconcile, resolve, and some of which we have to live with, bearing the pain of the tension of mutually exclusive truths, and letting it be because it is.
    
    Ah, but. What’s the point? What’s the use? Why try? What good does it do? What are we getting out of it?
    
    This is the truest test of faith. Will you trust yourself to your work? Will you do what needs to be done—what needs you to do it—in the stark absence of profit, payoff, benefit, success or difference? Will you do what is good when it does no good? Whether it does any good or not? Will you believe in your work and do it no matter what?
    
    Will you say to your work, “Thy will, not mine be done,” and do it?
89. April Reflections — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 1, 2013 — My first three rules for becoming a True Human Being are: 1. See what you look at. 2. Be interested in what interests you. 3. Know what you are talking about.
    
    People are always talking about things as if they know what they are talking about.
    
    What do you know about God that you didn’t get from some other source—including the Bible?
    
    Are you more apt to trust what you know about God out of your own lived experience or what someone tells you about God?
    
    Most of what we hear about God comes from those who heard it from someone else, who heard it from someone else… We have no idea how many times what we hear about God has been passed along by those who didn’t, or don’t, themselves know it to be true, but “took it on good authority.”
    
    It would help if people only passed along what they know to be so out of their own experience—and offered it to their hearers, not as something that should be believed, but as something that might guide them in their own experience.
    
    If you are going to believe anything as an article of faith, believe that your work is valid and worth doing—notwithstanding all apparent evidence to the contrary. If you find your work and stick with it, it will teach you everything you need to know out of your own experience. God things included.
90. Osprey 07 — Hovering at the Bog Garden pond, looking for lunch, Greensboro, NC, April 6, 2013 — Know what your business is, and be about it. We are as scattered—as fragmented—as disoriented as our understanding of our business, what it is and what it is not.
    
    When we are grounded, centered and focused, we are grounded in, centered and focused on, our business.
    
    A cat watching a mouse hole knows what its business is. An Osprey circling a pond or cruising a river knows what its business is. Where are you so concentrated—so at one with what you are about?
    
    We live in two worlds: The world of our business and the world of what we do in order to afford to do our business. The world of our work, our life, and the world where we earn what it takes to pay the bills.
    
    The idea is to live in only two worlds, Too often we live in 10,000 worlds—all of which are important, all of which demand our time and attention, none of which can we do without. And we medicate our children because of their ADD. Their parents are as scattered, fragmented and disoriented. It’s just normal where they live. They would be making failing grades if they weren’t that way.
    
    Who is grading us? Why do we think we have to live with a foot in 10,000 worlds? Who are we kidding?
    
    Two things matter, our business and what we do to pay the bills that allow us to do our business.
    
    In long-ago Japan, people put off their business until they got their children established in their lives and had stabilized their own life to the point where they could narrow their focus to the two important things. They were well past middle age before they could devote themselves to their business and paying the bills their business required. The last half of their life was when they came alive to their business. Part of the first half of their life was spent weeding out the possibilities until their business became clear and they knew what was theirs to do.
    
    It’s a model we would do well to adopt.
91. The Day! The Day! — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 7, 2013 — Be true to the route! Detours and side trips are always required, and the main road is always the main road. Know what it is, and return to it.
    
    Even when you are off the beam because circumstances require it, remember the beam—and let the new beam be getting back to the beam. And let nothing detract you from that, no matter how winding the trail may be.
92. Used in Short Talks on Contradiction, etc., Goose Landing 02 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 7, 2013 — I have spent my entire life, and expect to spend the rest of it, trying to get away from my father—to escape He Who Must Be Yet Cannot Be Pleased. The closest I come to freedom is in the realization that I’m running. When I realize that I’m running, the best I can do is laugh and say, “Yeah, I am.” And keep running.
    
    I would be kidding myself if I stopped running. I have to get away from my father. That is what my life consists of. To stop running would be to, what? I must run with awareness, conscious of the conundrum, laughing at the contradiction that claims my way with life.
    
    Joseph Heller’s masterpiece, “Catch-22,” wonderfully captures the paradox at the heart of my life. Yossarian’s pal Orr, escaped by practicing crashing his plane into the sea—the very thing Yossarian feared the most. There were “Catch-22’s” on all sides throughout Heller’s book. Need I say it? We all find ourselves there. Can we all laugh, say “Yeah,” and go on with our life?
    
    I learned early on that there was no pleasing my father, and stopped trying, but I did not run out of people who had to be pleased yet could not be pleased. My father became a metaphor for all those no one can please, and, in a sense, my savior, because I could say, “Merde (forgive my French), these people can’t be pleased!” and do what I could with my life.
    
    But my life was blocked on every side (Just like Yossarian’s) by people who had to be pleased but could not be, so my life became an escape from my father—who cannot be escaped. It’s great, if you can see the humor in it. Paradox, contradiction, mutually exclusive incompatibilities, etc., form the foundation of our life. Our life is a koan!
    
    We solve the koan, to the extent that it can be solved, by laughing and going on with our life—with our LIFE. We live our LIFE in spite of the mess our other life is. Our art is our salvation.
    
    I escape my father and all of his surrogates when I am taking pictures. The only one I have to please there is me. I live there to please only me—And I can be pleased. With me. With my art. With my work. With my LIFE.
    
    When your life becomes unlivable, instead of opting for suicide, or the slower death of addiction, take up your LIFE and live it—in the midst of the mess your life is. It will amaze you, what a difference your LIFE will make in your life. But don’t take my word for it. Know what you are talking about when you say, “If it weren’t for my LIFE, I would be dead, no deader than dead!”—and come alive in the time left for living!
93. Owl in Flight (April) 01 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 8, 2013 — There is you and your life, your LIFE. And there is you and the life you were born into, the life that was handed you at birth. You were born into such-and-such a culture, into such-and-such religion, into such-and-such family—all with standards and norms and ways of doing things, and thinking about things, and believing things. And all the while there is this LIFE that you were born to live, that is dying to be brought to life within the life that awaited you at birth.
    
    Now, as you age, you begin to experience the conflict between the LIFE that is dying to be lived and the life that you are expected to live—between the person you ARE and the person you are expected to be. How do you work it out? How do you live in ways that honor your LIFE, that express who you ARE within the life you were born into and expected to live? This is your problem.
    
    You have to approach it consciously, with awareness, by FEELING your way along. Don’t go blundering about, knocking down walls, desecrating the norms and standards that the world you were born into considers to be sacred and holy. Bear the pain. Be aware of the difference between who you ARE and who you are expected to be. See what occurs to you.
    
    You are the seed in the earth. The seed finds its own way. You don’t have to think it up. Listen to the seed. See what it needs from you. You are here to assist its birth, its emergence, its coming forth—not to just step out of some phone booth (You have to be a certain age, or to have been to the movies, to know what a phone booth is) as some fully developed YOU. You grow into who you are, slowly, over time, by nurturing and nourishing the seed that you ARE within the “earth,” that is the world you were born into.
    
    Bear the pain of living in two worlds at the same time. You grow into who you ARE by being aware of who you ARE and seeing how you can be true to that and bring it forth into the life you were handed at birth. This is the adventure of being alive—of coming to LIFE in the life we are living. Don’t miss it for the world!
94. Two Owls on a Limb 02 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 8, 2013 — Being with the pond at the Bog Garden (Officially known as Starmount Farm—or Farms—Lake, but earlier called, I have reason to believe, Benjamin Lake) is like being with the Tao.
    
    Being with anything is like being with the Tao—if you understand “being with” the way I understand being with.
    
    Being with is seeing what you look at. Seeing the thing as it is, which always includes how it also is. Seeing into the way of the thing you are with. Understanding what is before you in the deepest sense, on every level.
    
    When I can be with the Bog pond that way, I am at-one with the pond and with the Tao. It lasts until I become aware of being at-one with the pond and with the Tao, and begin to think, “Isn’t this cool? I have achieved oneness with the Tao. I could do this any time I wanted. I have the power. Wow.” That does it.
    
    The light goes out with the realization that it is on. I am no longer at one with the pond when I begin to admire myself for being at one with the pond—when I begin to think highly of myself. Inflation and deflation—thinking too much of ourselves and thinking too little of ourselves—keep us from being with ourselves, or anything else.
    
    What to do? Nothing. Knowing when to do nothing and how to do it is essential knowing. When to sit with a thing and be with it.
    
    We sit with the inflation. Smile at it. Chuckle. Laugh. Call its game. “You got me again! You are so good at that! But I’m catching you catch me faster than I used to—and I’m even catching myself thinking I’m something special for catching you faster than I used to! You’re still catching me, but you aren’t carrying me off like you once did. So I’m just going to sit here and be with you and see what you have to show me about me…” And we sit with our propensity for inflation (or deflation), opening ourselves to it, becoming aware of it, seeing it, receiving it well, letting it be because it is, becoming one with it, and with the Tao.
95. Mallard in Flight 85 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 8, 2013 — If we look even occasionally for a very brief period at our life, you will understand clearly our need for something to offset, counteract, neutralize, soften something else in our life. None of us can make it without a compensating presence to buffer the howling furies that destroy our peace and erode our stability and sanity.
    
    Compensation easily becomes addiction. Escape becomes soulless wandering with empty eyes and an empty life. We have to balance our ballast.
    
    We do it with awareness. We do it by being with our need for an oasis, for a time-out, for time away, for compensation and restitution.
    
    We sit down with how we are on a regular basis and listen. Take stock. Pay attention. To how it is with us.
    
    We put it all on the table. Everything. Again. And consider the table. Again. Listening. Looking. Hearing. Seeing. Knowing the full truth—feeling the full weight—of our life. And trusting our LIFE to come to our rescue.
    
    LIFE saves life. Restores life. Heals life. Nurtures and nourishes life. Brings life to LIFE. We run from our life into our LIFE. And LIVE our way to balance, stability and sanity.
    
    The people who help us offset our life are the people who help us find and live our LIFE. Those are the kind of people we need in our life—the ones who know about LIFE. To live well—to LIVE well—we have to associate with the right kind of people. We have to find the right kind of compensation.
    
    It’s hard. So. We have to do what’s hard.
    
    We do what’s hard or we do it the hard way. That’s the way of The Way that is LIFE.
    
    I’d make it soft and easy for you if I could.
96. Owl in Flight, April 04 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 8, 2013 — Being at-one with Benjamin Lake is a matter of being present with it with no preferences, presumptions or opinions—with no ideas of how it should or should not be—interfering with the experience of how things are.
    
    Seeing the pond is being with the pond, and vice versa, without imposing our idea of “pond-ness” on the pond. The just-so-ness of the pond is apparent to those tho observe the pond with no bias, leaning, or penchant for how it ought to be. The such-as-it-is-ness of the pond is there to be seen in any moment by eyes that are not looking for something else.
    
    In tune with the pond, we read the signs that are apparent to anyone who is interested, who cares enough to look with eyes that see—and are able not only to be aware of what is happening, but, based on that, anticipate what is about to happen.
    
    In a group of eight Mallards quacking and swimming around which one, or ones, if any, are likely to fly in the next ten seconds? If you see, you know. If you know, you see.
    
    It takes a lot of looking to see like this—to know what is going to happen because you know what is happening, because you are present with it, and see it. And it takes a certain quality of relaxed concentration, which is easily disrupted by someone wanting to know how long your lens is, or where the Blue Heron is.
    
    It is this “disturbance of the flow,” this “interruption of the Tao,” that makes it impossible for me to go on a photographing safari with someone. Photography, as I practice it, is a solitary preoccupation. It is as much feeling—as much sensing—as seeing. it has nothing to do with imposing my will for the moment on the moment, but everything to do with listening to the moment to see what is trying to come forth there—or is there waiting to be seen and photographed.
    
    All of which is to say, the world is waiting to be seen by those who don’t have a preference or an idea of how it ought to be.
97. Mallard in Flight 48 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, March 20, 2013 — Joseph Campbell said, “We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us to live it.”
    
    He says, “The ultimate backing of life is chance—the chance that your parents met, for example! Chance, or what might seem to be chance, is the means trough which life is realized.”
    
    We have plans and something interferes. We have an accident or an illness, or we meet with some tragedy or disaster, and are forced to lay our plans aside. How do we deal with that? How do we meet it? We might see it as an opportunity to find the life that is waiting for us to live it—the life we would have never imagined if our plans had all fallen into place.
    
    Campbell says, “The problem is not to blame, or explain, (or try to understand why), but to handle the life that arises…The best advice is to take it all as if it had been of your intention—with that, you invoke the participation of your will.”
    
    We become the active force seeking ground and direction for our new life that now is completely unplanned and in the control of pure chance. We seek to find the way through the chaos that is our way, that is calling us, that is whispering our name.
    
    Campbell says, “You learn to recognize the positive values in what appear to be the negative moments and aspects of your life. The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure—the adventure of being alive.”
    
    And, “You’ve got to say yes to this miracle of life as it is, not on the condition that it follow your rules. Otherwise, you’ll never get through to (the life that is yours to live).”
    
    He says, “Voluntary participation in the world is very different from just getting born into it.” Voluntary participation is stepping into the life that chance appears to deliver to us—the fact that we were born when and where we were born, to the parents we were born to, with the qualities that are ours from birth, and all that has happened to us—and live it as it needs to be lived, in ways that we determine to be suitable, in the active service of the gifts that are ours to give, seeking to take what we have and see what we can do with it, for the good of whomever can benefit from what we have to offer.
98. Owl Perched 01 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 9, 2013 — We know more than we know we know. Part of our work is knowing what we know. This does not mean going back to school, listening to lectures, reading books. It means going to sleep. We wake up by going to sleep in the right kind of way.
    
    We put the left hemisphere of our brain to sleep in order to be awake to the right hemisphere. Certain types of meditation can do this. Taking a shower can do it. Long walks can do it.
    
    The Aborigines call the place of sleeping wakefulness “Dreamland.” It is the border between being awake in the sense of carrying out our business in the world of normal, apparent reality, and being sound asleep and snoring.
    
    Dreamland is the threshold between consciousness and unconsciousness. It is where the unconscious world can “breakthrough” to the conscious world—where we can know consciously what we know unconsciously—where we can hear what we have to say.
    
    It takes practice to be there—conscious, intentional, deliberate practice. We have to consciously make ourselves available to the world that is just beyond seeing and hearing, so that we might see and hear what “the other side” would have us know.
    
    This is not a way to exploit the other side to our personal advantage. This is the way of placing ourselves in the service of the other side in a “Thy will, not mine, be done” kind of way.
    
    We collaborate with the other side in producing the life—the LIFE—we are capable of living. Since we have no idea what that is, we have to open ourselves to what the other side knows, and do what the other side needs to be done.
    
    You see how this process could lead to the development of religion, with its theology and doctrine and incense and chants and prayers—but that’s another story. We have to know what we know, and to do that we have to be quiet and listen—we have to quieten the left hemisphere and listen to what the right hemisphere has to say. And then, do what we know needs to be done in order to assist the emergence of our LIFE within the life we are living. This is the adventure of LIFE and LIVING that constitutes the Hero’s Journey.
99. April Morning 01 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 10, 2013 — We live in a culture, which has become the predominant culture of the world, that values thinking, reason, logic and cognition over instinct, intuition, sensing and feeling. The left hemisphere of our brain has triumphed over the right hemisphere, to the loss of all. We have to get the right side of our brain involved in our life.
    
    Here’s your homework assignment: Do an internet/Google search for information about the right side of our brain, particularly about how to activate the right hemisphere and utilize it in the day-to-day business of living. Think your way into feeling!
    
    It’s the critical key to bringing your LIFE to life in your life in the time left for living.
100. Goose Landing 03 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 7, 2013 — It’s like dying—No, it IS dying—to hand over your idea for your life, your plans and dreams and happy fantasies, and take up instead, your LIFE’s idea for you. We can’t just do that because somebody tells us to. It has to be taken from us.
     
     We have to hit the wall, or several of them. We have to suffer losses. We have to amass defeats and be steamrolled by tragedy and despair. Here’s what Joseph Campbell has to say about this:
     
     ”Igjugarjuk was the shaman of a Caribou Eskimo tribe in northern Canada, the one who told European visitors that the only true wisdom ‘lives far from mankind, out in the great loneliness, and can be reached only through suffering. Privation and suffering alone open the mind to all that is hidden to others.’”
     
     Suffering strips us of our idea for our life so that we might be open to our LIFE and take up the adventure that is ours. Here’s what Campbell says about that:
     
     ”The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure—the adventure of being alive.” And, “The adventure that the hero is ready for is the one he gets. The adventure is really a manifestation of his character…The adventure (evokes) a quality of his character that he (didn’t know) he possessed.”
     
     We have to “voluntarily participate in”—say YES to—the way life is—NOT the way we wish life were. Yet, we cannot volunteer our participation in life on life’s terms until our back is against the wall and it is only us and the abyss. THEN we can take a chance on life, on our LIFE, if we have the heart for it.
     
     The greatest trial the hero faces on her, on his, journey is at the beginning—with the decision to take it up: “Thy will, not mine, be done.” It’s like dying—NO! It IS dying! Remember, Jesus didn’t say these words lightly, at the end of some prayer for a new pair of shoes, “If it be thy will.” He said it from the depths of agony, handing over his idea for his life and taking on his life’s idea for him. As it was with him, so it is with everyone who has the heart to trust themselves to the abyss—with their hand in the hand of their LIFE.
101. Floating in Air B&W — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 8, 2013 — The single most important step in the direction of the way that is your way for you is learning to feel your feelings. Your feelings express your instinct and intuition, and are your contact point with the other world. And your feelings are a squirming mass of crazy impulses and chaotic reactivity. It takes thinking about it to know what to do. And it takes feeling your feelings—knowing what you know—to know what to think about.
     
     Is there any wonder that people throughout the ages have opted for easy religion (even that brand of easy religion that required hard things of them, like the sacrifice of their first born sons), with priests and parsons telling them what to think and do, and saving them the trouble of figuring it out for themselves?
     
     The Hero’s Journey is in the hero’s hands. She doesn’t take orders from someone else. He doesn’t carefully obey the norms and standards of his day. The hero listens to her, to his, feelings and thinks about which are the white rabbits and which are the red herrings and which are the wild geese. Regular people don’t have time for this kind of nonsense. That’s why there are so few heroes.
     
     Are you going to learn to feel your feelings, or not?
102. Osprey Silhouette B&W — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 7, 2013 — Salvation is restoration, is being restored to ends worthy of us.
     
     We save ourselves by submitting to the work that is ours to do—to the work that must be done and only we can do it. It’s the work, of course, that saves us, but our role is to acquiesce, to participate, to join in as full collaborators in the production of who we are.
     
     We save ourselves when we stop trying to have it our way, and get out of the way, and affirm the rightness of the way that is our way but nothing like anything we would dream up on our own. We save ourselves when we allow ourselves to be saved by that which can restore us to the truth of who we are and what is ours to do.
     
     We save ourselves when we cooperate in the realization and actualization of the gifts that are ours to give and the work that is ours to do.
     
     We save ourselves when we square ourselves up with the way things are and do what we can do about it and let that be that.
     
     We save ourselves when we wake up, grow up, get up and do what needs to be done with the gifts, interests and abilities that are ours to bring forth—even as they bring us forth—as a blessing and grace upon all of life.
103. Geese on the Wing 06 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 11, 2013 — The spiritual journey, quest, begins with the need to know more than the physical world can tell us. Where is meaning to be found? Who am I?
     
     The physical world can provide the wherewithal for life, but it cannot provide us with a zest and passion for life, purpose, direction and the will to live.
     
     The physical world can feed our bodies but not our souls. Soul is invisible, yet real. When we loose heart we have lost something that is more real than anything that has mass and takes up space, can be weighed, measured, counted and shown off.
     
     The ground of life is the invisible world! We need more than money can buy! There is no consolation for those who have lost connection with that which cannot be seen, touched, smelled, heard or tasted.
     
     What feeds our soul? What speaks to our heart? We need to increase our level of association with these things.
     
     We live to be who we are! How does what we are doing enable us to be who we are? Keep us from being who we are? Start doing more of what brings you to life and less of what prevents you from being alive.
104. DUCDB? SICDB! — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 11, 2013 — The physical world points to the invisible world. You cannot live in this world long, with your eyes open, and be unaware of the other world. You cannot see anything as it is and not know there is more to everything than meets the eye.
     
     In all of the primal societies, the invisible world was understood to be the foundation of the visible world. Then came “man come of age,” and it all went to hell. “Man come of age” is man obsessed with his own importance, so that even woman is relegated to the category of insignificance.
     
     You can’t think you are the foundation of anything and have any sense of the foundation of everything.
     
     Money, and the quest for money, is the great buffer, the great source of static, jamming the signals coming to us from the invisible world, interfering with our awareness of the More that is the basis of our life.
     
     Wealth and the aspiration for more wealth is the basis of our life. With enough money (Which is an article of faith with out any actual, quantifiable, reality. There is never Enough money), all our needs will be taken care of and our problems will be solved. We will buy whatever we want.
     
     We look at everything and wonder how much it costs, and don’t see anything more than its price tag. As the culture of prosperity, we have lost the ability to see beyond buying, spending, amassing and consuming. We have lost our soul.
     
     The way back to soul is the way of knowing our desolation and realizing our place in the right order of things. Of course, this is like dying—No! It IS dying to the world we have created in order to be alive to the world that created us—and it is easier by far to turn back to thinking about how happy we will be with our next major purchase, or the ones we will make when our ship comes in.
105. Mallard in Flight 91 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 12, 2013 — It’s important to know where the lines are—the ones you can live outside of and the ones you can’t—the ones you draw and the ones that are drawn by the circumstances within which you live.
     
     It is important to know where the lines are and to say about them, “These are the constraints within which I live.”
     
     And live there as a voluntary participant in the unfolding, in the expression, of your life there, within the constraints which bind you and hem you in.
106. Tulip Magnolia 01 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 12, 2013 — The problem with listening to ourselves is that we develop interior anti-us voices that encourage us to take chances and then condemn us for being reckless. There are inclinations within which are not on our side, but are impossible to distinguish from the guides who would lead us to being who we are.
     
     Here’s the work-a-round: All roads lead to the center, the core, “the still point of the turning world”—when followed in the spirit of taking what every experience has to offer and using it as grist for the mill that grinds the wheat that makes the flour that produces the loaf we are.
     
     There are no dead ends—nothing is wasted—for those who see everything as offering the very thing that is most needed at that particular point in our life. “Where you stumble and fall,” said Joseph Campbell, “there is the treasure.”
     
     Nothing can happen to us that cannot be used in the development and expression of who we are. So, get in there and do your thing to the best of your ability to discern and express it—and let every experience improve your ability to discern and express who you are until there is nothing but you as you are for all to delight in and enjoy.
107. Mr. Owl 01 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 9, 2013 — There is an inner world that is as real, deep and varied as the outer world of normal, apparent reality. Soul, or psyche (the Greek word means “soul”), is the truest thing about us. It’s as true as it gets. We stray from that truth when we think we can create a better life, an easier life, a life that is more pleasurable and less work using the materials found in the outer world.
     
     We know what we are doing. We don’t have to listen to soul, or psyche. And so, we create the wasteland that has become the world we know as the only world. We escape the wasteland by entering the wilderness.
     
     The wilderness is alive with soul, but we do not know the way of soul, the way to soul, and so it seems like a jungle to us. We turn back in panic and terror to the wasteland, and live lives that are empty but safe, meaningless but manageable with enough of the things that entertain us for a while but do not satisfy—distracted from the need to find our way on our own to the heart of life and being.
     
     The first test is the test of faith. Will we trust ourselves to soul to lead us to soul? Will we take a chance—no, will we risk everything to find something of value, which, of course, would be ourselves, our own life, our own gift, our own genius and destiny?
     
     We are the gold we seek, the treasure the dragon guards, and it is our task to get what is ours and become who we are. That is the spiritual quest, the hero’s journey, through the wilderness to the Grail Castle, the Promised Land, our own doorstep, our own house.
108. Two Owls K-I-S-S-I-N-G!!! — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 13, 2013 — We come into the world knowing that we have an “inner personal life” (The quote marks enclose the words of Marie-Louise von Franz, though I am using them out of context, but in the spirit of what she actually said)–that we trust explicitly and entirely “rely on (our) personal inner psychological knowledge”—and on “anything (our) objective soul might tell (us).”
     
     We are separated from this innate knowing by the culture’s preference for facts and logical, rational, approaches to orientation and direction in the world of normal, apparent, reality—and it’s complete distrust of anything akin to instinct and intuition.
     
     We have to get back to “the face that was ours before we were born.”
     
     Begin to honor the inner world with kindness, compassion and attention. Consult the inner knower/guide and learn to read on bodily shifts (the part of your body that lets you know when something is right or wrong) as signals from your deep self. Attend your dreams over time and see how they may be complimenting or compensating for your tilts and drift in your waking life. Initiate an ongoing conversation with your inner partner, and allow your life to become a collaborative effort between you and the other you. And see where it goes.
109. Owl Perched 02 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 13, 2013 — The Dali Lama is as awake as the Dali Lama can be. You have to be as awake as you can be. The Dali Lama does his own work. You have to do your own work. The single greatest impediment to our own development is our propensity to want someone else to do it for us.
     
     We want to read books about the way, listen to lectures about the way, watch movies about the way, copy someone else’s way. We do not want to find our own way through the jungle of the wilderness that is alive with the wonder of life and being—where even wrong turns turn out to be right. We just want to be there, now.
     
     We just want somebody to tell us what to do—and we do not want to hear “Blaze your own trail through the wild places!”
     
     Alan Watts asked Joseph Campbell, “Joe, what form does your yoga take?” Campbell replied, “I underline passages.”
     
     You can’t do it like Alan Watts did it and have a chance. You can’t do it like Joseph Campbell did it. You have to do it like you do it.
     
     The disciples must become like the master in following no master.
     
     You cannot go hang out with the Dali Lama and have anything transfer from him to you. You would be following someone else’s black footprints. You cannot reject the black footprints the culture hands you and accept the black footprints the Dali Lama hands you. “No Black Footprints!” has to be your mantra. “I’ll stumble around on my own and make my own way, thank-you!”
     
     Jesus did it the way Jesus would do it. You have to do it the way YOU would do it. The best authorities say nothing. The second best authorities say, “Here’s what I have to say but don’t listen to me past getting ideas for how to do it on your own.” The worst authorities tell you how to do it.
110. Mr. Owl 02 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 13, 2013 — The push to get it right, do it right, be right is wrong. The idea is to be awake, not to be right.
     
     What’s right is always changing. Wine was out and butter was in with my grandmother. Little did she know how time would alter the in’s and the out’s.
     
     If you are awake and take a wrong turn you can find things that are right about it, in Campbell’s sense of “Where you stumble and fall, there is the treasure.”
     
     This isn’t to say that being awake is about turning everything to our advantage—exploiting whatever comes our way. It is to say that when we are awake, we fit into the situation as it develops for the good of the situation—which also includes our good, but not as the determining, limiting, factor.
     
     Our good flows with the good of the whole, and it can surprise us. We never see some good coming. We resist it, avoid it, run from it—and it is the very thing we need most.
     
     Waking up opens us to the good of the most outlandish possibilities. Things that were so wrong become right when seen with eyes that see.
     
     When we see things as they are, we are able to live with them in ways that are right because they come forth from the situation—not because we impose them on the situation in serving some artificial, disconnected, notion of how things should be.
111. Ms. Owl 01 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 14, 2013 — We are playing to some crowd. We are always looking to please some of those who are looking at us. It is essential that we play to the right crowd—that we please the right crowd!
     
     A lot of times in my 40+ years of ordained ministry (Presbyterian Church U.S.A.) I was preaching to people who weren’t there. I was preaching to a different crowd. I was preaching to those who could hear what I was saying.
     
     Jesus did the same thing. And the prophets. And the Buddha. And Lao Tzu. And every poet worthy of the title.
     
     What’s the point of telling people what they expect to hear? They could do that well themselves. Say what’s worth saying, I say—what needs to be said. To do that, you have to talk to those who aren’t there. You have to play to a different crowd.
     
     Playing to the right crowd pulls the best out of us—requires us to speak of the truth of our experience. We can’t just parrot what someone else has said and get by with it if we are playing to the right crowd. We can’t just do what everyone agrees is the right thing to do if we are playing to the right crowd.
     
     The right crowd requires more than the fat center of the normal distribution curve. The right crowd is out there on the fringe, cheering you on. Play to them. They will call you forth and require you to be who you are.
112. Owl in Flight A 09 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 13, 2013 — Don’t have to know what you are going to do about every detail of life. “If that, then this,” will consume you, and you are no better off for working out all the scenarios, because there is always some hidden factor that cannot be taken into account.
     
     Surprise yourself. Wait to see what you will do—wait until you find yourself doing something and say something on the order of, “Aha! So this is what I’ll do!”
     
     This tendency of ours to worry what we will do into being has its roots in our wanting to be right, get it right, do it right—AND to be free of it hanging over us, what to do. To disappear it, we think we have to decide what we are going to do. Here’s the solution to that: Decide that you will wait to see what you will do when the time comes for action. THAT’s what you are going to do about it.
     
     Spend the time you freed up not worrying about what you are going to do, looking and listening. Paying attention. Noticing what is happening and what happens in response to what is happening. Become an acute observer of life as it happens all around you. Walk through the world seeing the world.
     
     Seeing is the foundation of action. When we see what is happening and what needs to be done about it, we know what to do. When we see what is happening, we know what is likely to happen, and we know what to do about it—if there is anything to be done about it.
     
     In the Bog Garden, seeing what the ducks are doing tells me what the ducks are about to do. Seeing/hearing is knowing. Knowing is doing/responding. If you want to know what to do, learn to see/hear by looking/listening.
     
     If you want to know what to do about anything, observe everything. It is the sure path to enlightened living.
113. Mallard in Flight 95 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 2013 — We bear the murder and maiming of innocents in Boston with sadness and grief—and ache for ways of being with one another that ensure safety and well-being for all. Would that it were so! May we do what we can imagine doing to make it so!
114. The Owl’s Bath 01 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 16, 2013 — We live within the constraints that constrain us. We can erase those that can be erased (Like gay marriage, for instance), and shift those that can be shifted (Like Daylight Savings Time, for instance), but we have to find ways adjusting ourselves to, and living with, the rest.
     
     We all have to accommodate ourselves to the disparity between how things are and how we want them to be. A relatively successful accommodation is called “growing up.” A relatively unsuccessful accommodation is called “neurosis,” and “addiction.”
     
     Everything is a compromise, a trade-off. We give up this for that. We can’t live in this world without paying a price. Jim’s rule here is: Pay the fare and ride the ride!
     
     We live with constraints. So, LIVE with constraints. Do not let the constraints keep you from living!
     
     Enjoy everything that is to be enjoyed in your life right now, just as it is. Relish everything that is to be relished. Love everything that is to be loved. LIVE. Your. Life. Right here. Right now.
     
     Do not hold it against life that things are not as you wish they were. So far as we know, this is your one chance at being alive—do not throw it away because it isn’t what you wanted. LIVE the life that can be lived within the constraints and limitations of the life you are living.
     
     Starting now.
     
     Do not put it off. Do not fail to do what you can do to be alive within the context and circumstances of the life you are living. See which constraints can be erased. See which ones can be shifted. See what you can do with life in the time and place of your living while time lasts.
115. Pink Dogwood 06 — Greensboro, NC, April 16, 2013 — Your life is an ink blot. Everything is projection. Your relationship with your sister-in-law is your relationship with you. Your relationship with your lover? It also is your relationship with you. Your horse, your skillet, your dust cloth? Your relationship with you.
     
     We see in others what we fear, hate, love, need in ourselves.
     
     Our relationship with ourselves is our primary relationship. The logical, reasoning, realizing, understanding, thinking-knowing, seeing, hearing, doing (the left hemisphere) side of us is here to tend, serve, guard, protect, defend, honor, respect and care for the sensing, intuiting, instinctive, feeling-knowing (the right hemisphere) side of ourselves.
     
     We forget what we are here for. We think we are here for our own joy and pleasure. We are here for our soul’s (the right hemisphere’s—whether the right hemisphere IS our soul or the threshold, the connector, to our soul is a mute point and doesn’t matter. It makes no difference since we cannot tell the two apart) joy and pleasure—and go off in pursuit of our own delight.
     
     But, soul will not be put off, and spends the time it could be doing its thing through us, trying to wake us up to its need of us and our responsibility to it. We owe our soul our allegiance and loyalty, and soul will die trying to get us back in right relationship with it.
     
     So, soul sends us messages in the form of nighttime dreams and daytime fears and passions—all about what we need to bring to life in our relationship with soul. True to form, we misinterpret the messages and think our sister-in-law is our sister-in-law and our lover is our lover, etc., and do not see what is at stake between our thinking self and our feeling self.
     
     You like your lover for his/her tenderness, attentiveness, authenticity? Because you can be safe, vulnerable, intimate and real? Your soul needs those things from you. You must become the lover of your soul.
     
     You hate your sister-in-law’s invasive, self-centered, obnoxious insistence that everything revolve around her? That’s how your soul feels about your relegation of soul to the back burner of your life.
     
     Begin to look at everything you feel strongly about as a doorway to your soul—as a message from your soul to you regarding your relationship with your soul. It will change the way you look at things. And restore essential harmonies. And put you on the right track to you.
116. Owl Drinks 01 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 16, 2013 — We have to tend the side of ourselves we are unaware of, unconscious of, if we are going to be reconciled and at-one with ourselves. Part of the work of the Hero’s Journey is making the unconscious conscious—by paying attention to the things that bring the unconscious to life.
     
     Strong emotion suggests unconscious connections. Our place is to wake up to what those connections might be. To get to the bottom of things. When we get to the bottom of things, there we are.
     
     Whenever we feel stirred, moved, the unconscious is trying to get our attention. Sit with the situation and see what comes to light.
     
     Whenever there is a block—a place we are stuck—encounter something we cannot bring ourselves to do, sit with the situation and see what comes to light.
     
     Whenever we feel iffy, ambivalent, uncertain—or when we get the Uh-oh Feeling—sit with the situation and see what comes to light.
     
     As we attend our soul, we learn to read our soul, we know how things are with our soul and how we need to adjust our living to be in synch with soul. But don’t think that means we have it made. There is a Cyclops at every turn. And, on most of the straight ways.
117. Owl Sees Owl — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 16, 2013 — Carl Jung said, “The reason for evil in the world is that people are not able to tell their stories.”
     
     We have to tell our story. We cannot tell our story without hearing our story as we tell it—without saying what happened and what happened in response and what impact it had on us and how we felt and what we thought and what was important and who we became in response to what was happening in our life. Or not happening.
     
     We have to tell our story. We have to say what is ours to say—because we have to hear it. An untold story is a life that was lived but not experienced. We have to articulate our life to experience it. We have to say it to see it. Feeling the impact of our life without words to tell what happened and what we felt is like carrying a secret—a terrible, heavy, secret—which we cannot remember, but we carry its weight and the ache of its presence.
     
     When we tell our story, we interpret our experience. We say what happened and what it meant to us—what it means to us—that it happened. And we do not have to use words.
     
     We can act it out. Dance it out. Paint it out. Sculpt it out. Sing it out. Piano it out. Drum it out… We have to express our story. We have to tell it in some fashion. We have to bring it to life.
     
     In bringing our life to life in story, song, dance, drawing, etc., we save our life and our life saves us. It brings us to life as we bring it to life, and know what it is that we have lived.
     
     Tell your story. Express your story. Connect with your story. Know what it means that you have lived.
118. Used in Short Talks on Contradiction, etc., Rabbit’s View — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 17, 2013 — We are not one we are two. We are not two, we are many. We are legion. We are a mixed bag. A real mess. And, it is up to us to straighten us out—not in a dominating fashion, but in way that is characterized by compassion, mercy, grace and peace.
     
     We see, hear, understand, reconcile, integrate, make whole—as we uncover conflict, expose contradiction, reveal discrepancies, detect polarities, engage opposition, meet with resistance, and make all of it conscious.
     
     We bring the healing light of awareness to bear upon all that is discordant, chaotic, unsynchronized and out of alignment about us.
     
     Rumi’s poem “The Guesthouse,” epitomizes the work that is ours to do. The internet will bring it to you. Read it. Reflect on it. Incorporate it into your way with you.
     
     Our work is to live together with ourselves for the good of the whole and for the good on one another. Our idea of good is going to be transformed. And of evil.
     
     Forget everything you have heard about good and evil. Good is what needs to be done in light of what is suitable for the whole—within and without. Evil is what needs not to be done.
     
     Good people cannot be ignorant people, asleep people, unaware people. “Father forgive them, they know not what they do,” enables them to go on being blind, deaf and dumb. “They are good people—they just don’t know what they are doing,” is no excuse. Good people know what they are doing—and know more about what they are doing as time goes by.
     
     Good people wake up, see what they are doing, and do something else instead. Bad people have no interest in waking up. They are here to serve their own agenda no matter what. How good, and how bad, are the best of us?
     
     We sit with how things are, with us and without, until we see into the heart of the matter, all matters, and know how it is with us, and how it also is—and do the work of bringing peace and healing, and making whole.
119. Owl Bathing 03 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 16, 2013 — My bud Chris and I are thinking our way through creating a Circle of Elders to counterbalance the drift of the culture, and provide a grounding connection with meaning, purpose and focus for those who are lost amid bewildering options.
     
     Our idea of a Circle of Elders would be composed of those who are immune to the culture’s fascination with wealth and privilege by virtue of a life experience which has awakened them to true value, disclosed to them what is important, and enabled them to live in light of what matters most through all the claims and promises of the religion of commerce, advertising and economic development.
     
     Two of our initial requirements for membership in the Circle would be the ability to answer three questions, “What do you know to be of value that you did not hear of from some other source? What experience(s) led you to understand the importance of what you know to be valuable?”
     
     And, “Can you provide the names of three people who can verify that you have a loving relationship with at least one living thing?” In other words, “What evidence can provide to establish that you care for something that is alive in ways that are loving?”
     
     The Circle of Elders would have a lived knowledge of heart and soul—would understand the necessity of living in ways that express one’s allegiance to heart and soul—and would know that heart and soul are not for sale, and could not be bribed to forsake heart and soul for anything that money can buy.
     
     The Circle would gather as small groups of three or four on a regular basis—though not necessarily the same three or four—to tell their stories and remind each other of what they all know to be so in a culture that would have them forget that, would distract them from it and have them dismiss it in 10,000 ways.
     
     In sustaining and encouraging each other to live in light of what they know to be important, the Circle would help to call us forth into the life that is truly our life to live—and call into question all of the false values the culture espouses as worthy of us—and serve, in some small way, as the conscience of the nation and the world.
     
     We would love for each of you to join what is not yet a movement by drawing together your own Circle of Elders and see where it goes.
120. Light, Limbs and Leaves 01 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 18, 2013 — Life is lived on a level apart from what we can buy, spend, amass and consume. Life consists of seeing, hearing, understanding, knowing, doing, being.
     
     The world we live in requires us to not-see, not-hear, not-understand, not-know, not-do and not-be. We live in a world of denial and entertainment, of techno-gizmos, texting and video games—a world that keeps us from seeing by showing us exciting stuff.
     
     How do we grow up in a world that doesn’t recognize the need for life past adolescence? Where everybody is sixteen forever? Where nobody thinks anything that isn’t thought by everybody else?
     
     Where do we go to wake up?
121. Owl Sees Owl 02 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 16, 2013 — The owl is a feathered Buddha. If the leaf blower comes along blowing pollen from the boardwalk, or a photographer’s flash becomes intrusive, the owl flies away without losing its composure or moaning, “Poor me! Poor me!”. If its current perch lends itself to no meal, it flies to another perch, without lamenting its plight or wondering “Why me? Why me?” No Eeyore here.
     
     Here is the situation. This is what I can do about it. And that’s that. No energy wasted on castigating itself for not being a better hunter, or a better mate, or a better owl.
     
     I’ve tried to apply the owl’s approach to my own life. If I wander away from the owl or the hope of flying ducks to photograph blooming things in the Bog Garden, I switch the settings on my camera to adjust for still, shady shots. More often than I like to admit, when I walk back to the owl or ducks, I forget to change the settings to accommodate owl and duck shots. I press the shutter and get one click and not a series of 4.5 clicks a second. It makes a difference.
     
     The owl would just change the settings and hope for another opportunity, with no remonstrations or protests about my shortcomings and failures as a photographer and a person. I pretend I’m the owl and The Mood doesn’t have an opening.
     
     You know The Mood I mean. The one that would fling the camera in to the mud at the bottom of the lake and sulk its way to an early grave. Humans do that kind of thing to themselves, not owls.
     
     The next time you go to the grocery store and forget the milk and eggs and have to go back? Just go back. Be the owl.
122. Lift Off — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 19, 2013 — Nothing is only what it is. Everything is more than we can imagine. There is more to all of it than meets the eye. The call, the challenge, to us from everything we see is: “Look deeper!”
     
     The deeper we look, the more of ourselves we see, looking back at us.
     
     When we explore the numinous, we meet ourselves. We are numinousity awaiting recognition. There is a depth to each of us that matches the depth of all things. There is a symbolic aspect of matter which carries the awakening traveler on a sacred journey to the heart of things. The physical world is a threshold to spiritual reality—which is beyond concepts and doctrine, and lives to smile and wink at us in a realm of more than words can say.
     
     The closest we come to saying what’s what is in music and poetry, dance and the arts. Mandalas do it as well as it can be done. Photographs are rectangular mandalas, probing a truth beyond words, beyond realization, yet thoroughly capable of being known. But then, everything does the same thing for eyes that see, that look beyond the obvious, beyond the surface, to what all is there, looking back. Smiling. Winking.
123. Red Shouldered Hawk 01 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 19, 2013 — Taking stock, assessing our situation, is more about feeling than thinking. We have to feel the rightness or the wrongness of and act and the time for it to be done.
     
     One time is not as good as another. The most important skill is the ability to tell time. The most important thing to know is what time it is. Not in terms of clock and calendar, but in terms of what needs to happen in the present circumstances of our life.
     
     What is it time for? What fits? What does not belong? You know when it is time for cup of coffee, and you know when you have had enough coffee. What is the equivalent of a cup of coffee in each moment of your life? What is needed here, now? What is out of place?
     
     We do not think our way to the answers. We feel our way there.
     
     Practice becoming conscious of what you are feeling. Give your feelings the reins. See where they take you. How does it feel to think about trusting your feelings? If you are afraid to trust your feelings, you are trusting your feelings about not trusting your feelings. So, since you are going to trust your feelings either way, trust them with the reins.
     
     You know more than you know you know. Spend the rest of your life finding how much more you know than you know you know. I promise it will be a very interesting and meaningful way to spend the time left for living. Where are you going to go to beat interesting and meaningful?
124. Showy Orchid 01 — Forsyth County, NC, April 20, 2012 — We have everything we need to live the life that is ours to live—the life that needs us to live it. We waste our time and the resources available to us trying to live some other life instead.
     
     When we wake up, we wake up to the gap between what we are doing and what we need to be doing—and do the things necessary to close the gap.
     
     A life that is interesting, meaningful and fulfilling is only a perspective shift away.
     
     What are we waiting for?
125. Cooper’s Hawk 01 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 21, 2013 — I think the term “prayer” means the same thing as the phrase “one with the Tao.” To pray is to be one with the Tao, to be one with the Tao is to “pray without ceasing”—it is a way of life, a way of being. If you are going to make anything your practice, make it this.
     
     Ah, but. It will change your life. Not what we have in mind.
     
     We would like a little spiritual flavoring in a life that runs like we want it to run. We do not want to know what it means to pray, “Thy will, not mine, be done” (It means to be one with the Tao). We want to ask for something and get it, instantly would be preferred—next day delivery would be acceptable. Anything else is out of the question.
     
     We want to pray to be healed when we get sick. We don’t want to alter the way we are living to avoid being sick.
     
     We want to pray for our knees to stop hurting. We don’t want to lose weight.
     
     We have no intention of being one with the Tao ever. We just want our life to run like we want it to run. None of this “Thy will, not mine, be done” for us!
     
     We are standing in our own way, blocking the way to The Way With Our Name On It, to the Life That Is Our Life To Live—to Meaning, Fulfillment, Wholeness and Oneness with the Heart of Life and Being.
     
     We think prayer is ordering up life like we want it to be. Prayer is transforming life into what it needs to be—whether we like it or not.
126. Cooper’s Hawk 02 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 21, 2013 — Our life is our work, our art, our gift—the gift we bring forth and offer to the world. Our life exhibits and expresses—makes real, makes plain—who we are. “What we do is who we are,” said Carl Jung, “not what we say we will do.”
     
     It takes reflection, introspection, examination, attentive presence, to align our living with our values, so that how we live is who we intend to be.
     
     A well-lived life is no accident. We become who we are by meaning to be who we are—by being aware of who we are and aligning our life with what we know of who that is.
     
     We have to sit with ourselves, listen to ourselves, see ourselves, know ourselves, love ourselves in order to live aligned with ourselves and bring ourselves forth in the life we are living.
     
     Who we are is not ours to wish into being. It is ours to see, hear, understand, know, do, be. We do not get to write the script of our life. We do not choose to be who we are—except by choosing to be who we are with no say in the matter, in a “Thy will, not mine, be done,” kind of way.
     
     We have to have what it takes to step into the life that is waiting for us to live it—and live it with all our heart, and soul, and mind and strength. In that, there be miracles, and wonder, and magic beyond imagining. But, you have to chance it to know what I’m talking about.
127. Love Birds 01 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 21, 2013 — I’ve watched owls and ducks closely and regularly for four months. I see them make decisions about where to fly when it’s time to fly. I know when they are going because I know the cues that tell me they are deciding where to go.
     
     They aren’t thinking, weighing advantages and disadvantages, adding up the pluses and minuses, the pros and cons. They are feeling: Yes? No? Right? Wrong? They are guided by feelings, not logic and reasoning.
     
     This doesn’t mean they are always right. When they feel wrong about what they felt was right, they make corrections all along their flight—guided by their sense of what is suitable.
     
     Feelings are a way of knowing things we cannot possibly know. So, when you come upon a problem you cannot possibly know how to resolve, feel your feelings. You could do worse. You’ve done worse. See what your feelings can do when your brain doesn’t have a thing to say.
128. Mallard In Flight 97 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 18, 2013 — If it hadn’t been for me showing up regularly at the Bog Garden to photograph flying ducks, I would never have met the owl. This is the way of things. We stumble onto the treasure on the way to the treasure. The treasure that calls us forth from the normal routines of life is not the only treasure, and we are expanded, deepened, transformed by finding more than we were seeking.
     
     It all starts with some white rabbit winking at us and hopping round a corner or down a hole. Will we follow? The answer to that question tells the tale.
129. Cardinal A 01 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 22, 2013 — It is important to believe in what you do. It is also important to know it if you do not believe in what you do.
     
     We may have to do what we do not believe in. I had to take Organic Chemistry and Algebra. I had to file new library books in a card catalog. I had to mow the lawn. The list is long.
     
     Knowing that we do not believe in what we do frees us to do what we have to do and look for the things we can do wholeheartedly. I got through Algebra thinking about fishing.
     
     We have to know where our heart is—what it is in and what it is not in. And we have to give our heart what it loves—as often as we can, for as long as we are able.
130. Great Blue Heron A 01 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 22, 2013 — We are here to assist one another on the way from death to life. The trick with that trip is that we have to die to make it.
     
     Waking up is dying. Seeing is dying. Hearing is dying. Understanding is dying.
     
     Back when I was doing Easter sermons (And this one is in the collection of pod casts on my web page. It would have been Easter of 2010. You’ll have to look it up if you want to listen. Just remember: Hearing is dying), I used a large ceramic egg with a dragon breaking out as a metaphor for Easter.
     
     No more happy bouncy Easter Bunnies with their brightly colored hard-boiled Easter Eggs for the little children to find under leaves or laying about on the lawn. Easter is for dying. First death, then resurrection.
     
     The New Life In Christ (I prefer “As Christ” because that’s what is required—Christ didn’t do anything FOR us except show us the way that winds through Gethsemane and across the face of Golgotha, get it, to death, then life) will eat our old life alive. It’s a dragon in the Easter Egg. Don’t be hatching the thing if you don’t have what it takes to take what comes when it comes out of the shell, drooling, with its eyes on you.
     
     In order to assist one another on the way from death to life, we begin with death. We invite one another to die. To wake up and die.
     
     The way we have been told things are is not the way things are. Realizing this is the worst kind of dying. No. It gets worse. Handing over all we have been told is important, of value, is the worst kind of dying. No. It gets worse. Giving up our idea of how life is and should be is the worst kind of dying: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” We have to know in our bones what that means. Our idea of God has to go.
     
     And then, out of the crumbling ruins of how we thought things were, we have to put together a new way of life. Call it “Living at one with the Tao.” With the Tao that cannot be said, told, explained, indoctrinated, conceived, understood, concocted. We have to live with the wind of the Spirit that blows where it will forever in our hair, not knowing where we are going or what we are doing on the road to life. And, that too, is like dying.
     
     And we are here to assist one another on the way from death to life, because none of us has what it takes to make the trip alone.
131. Heron Landing — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 22, 2013 — The best trick to master in the whole book of tricks is that of being present with what is present with you. There is a psychic-spiritual-soulful-field of which we are mostly unconscious that connects every living thing, maybe everything (What do I know? Or any of us?)–which we can sense, glimpse, intuit, divne, discern with the right frame of mind.
     
     The right frame of mind is called “being one with the Tao.” Master that and you see things that are invisible to the rest of the humans in the room. The cats are onto it, and the dogs.
132. Heron in Flight 03 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 23, 2013 — When we see what is happening, we see what needs to happen in response to what is happening.
     
     An old psychological law states: It takes two people to have a fight, but one person can prevent a disagreement of opinion or perspective from degenerating into a really awful mess.
     
     That person is the one who sees what is happening and what needs to happen, and offers that to the situation.
     
     It takes emotional distance to take everything into account and see what is happening in each situation as it arises. Emotional distance equates to having little at stake in the situation—nothing to gain or lose—confident in our ability to be just fine no matter what happens.
     
     If you are going to believe in anything, believe in yourself—in your ability to rise to any occasion and deal successfully with whatever comes your way, by offering what is needed in each situation as it arises.
     
     This is the attitude that is the fulcrum that levers bad situations away from becoming total meltdowns. The work to achieve it transforms ourselves and the lives we touch with our living.
133. Used in Short Talks on Contradiction, etc., Goose with a Problem 12 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 23, 2013 — The gift I would give you first, from the great pile of gifts that would help you along the way, would be an awareness of, and an appreciation for (that might be two gifts), the polarities which define our life and within which we live.
     
     It is not “Good or bad,” “Right or wrong.” It is “Good and bad.” “Right and wrong.”
     
     Our life is a trade-off, a compromise. We give up this to get that. Good and right come with bad and wrong attached. Somebody’s good is somebody else’s bad (and sometimes it is the same person’s bad).
     
     Darkness is also light (Rumi said, “Darkness is the cradle of the light”). Light is darkness (The “dark night of the soul” was occasioned, not by an absence of light, but by an over-abundance of light. Light can be blinding, which is its own form of darkness).
     
     There are polarities, contraries, contradictions, opposites, discordances, etc. everywhere. And we are oblivious to them. We emphasize one side of the equation and dismiss it’s “evil twin.” We do not have a realistic view of things. In our world, things are how we want them to be.
     
     Waking up, we realize that our world is part of another, larger, world where everything is counterbalanced and evened out, and where harmony is not the absence of opposing sides but the realization of the importance—even necessity—of opposition.
     
     William Blake, in “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” said “Without contrary is no progression.” Is no life. We are alive to the degree that we are aware of and appreciate—respect and honor—the polarities within which we live.
     
     We are alive to the degree that we live consciously within the polarities that define our living—and accommodate ourselves to them. This is the very essence of the way to peace, harmony, oneness, wholeness and bliss. One is two. Sometimes, more.
134. Green Heron in Flight 01 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 23, 2013 — Eight ducks are in the air, soon to land. The Great Blue Heron is in great golden light and is about to make a catch. Two geese are having a territory dispute. And a Cooper’s Hawk is tangling with a crow. All within easy photoing distance. The photographer’s dilemma.
     
     All of our dilemmas are solved with a decision. Pick one and let the others go.
     
     Four ducks come in to land as a group. Pick one and let the others go.
     
     Maybe you pick the wrong one. Live with it. You’ll get another chance soon enough. Perhaps your luck will improve. Pick one and let the others go.
     
     How do you know which one to pick? How can you avoid being wrong, again? How can you finally get it right—and know you are getting it right?
     
     Your odds improve dramatically when you get yourself out of the way, with your ridiculous fear of being wrong, again, and your obnoxious obsession with being right at last. Just pick one and let the others go. For better or worse.
     
     Don’t have to be right. Give yourself the freedom of making a choice without the pressure of making the RIGHT choice. That’s the RIGHT choice—to choose without fear, without pressure, without having to please anyone with your choosing, even yourself.
     
     Pick one and let everything else go.
135. Green Heron in a Tree — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 23, 2013 — The Presence is always present with us—the work is to be present with The Presence. I think how we do that is individual and personal. I’m sure there are no recipes to follow, no black footprints to step in.
     
     How would you open yourself to more than meets the eye? How would you become receptive to communing with what you do not know? How would you become aware of what you sense on a feeling level?
     
     Take this as a practice regimen: Spend the next half hour not deciding but following. Following what? Your sense of what needs to be done. Your feeling of what to do and not do. No thinking. No deciding. Just feeling. Just sensing.
     
     This is the Star Wars scene with Luke Skywalker in the helmet and Obi wan Kenobi saying, “Feel the Force, Luke!” See how you do with it.
     
     Put yourself in the helmet from time to time. Practice feeling the presence of The Presence.
136. Great Blue Heron A 03 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 24, 2013 — “Oh but!” comes the objection. “My Uncle Buddy thought he could feel the winner before the race and lost huge sums at horse and dog races before Aunt Caroline left him!”
     
     ”Gambling is sure-fire proof that we cannot trust our feelings to tell us what to do! So is marriage for a lot of people. We better stick with cost/benefit analyses and Consumer Reports for guidance about what to do.”
     
     There are two counters to proofs that feelings cannot be trusted. The first is that feelings can easily be influenced if we have a stake in the outcome. We tilt the table by wanting or not wanting something to happen. If we have something to gain or lose, our hand is on the scales. We have to have no interest in the matter. If we are trying to exploit the situation by positioning ourselves to reap the rewards, we interfere with the process and trick ourselves with counterfeit feelings.
     
     The second consideration is that feelings call for input from our logical/reasoning faculty. The right hemisphere and the left hemisphere collaborate in making choices and decisions—one does not rule the other.
     
     There are photographs I will not take. I don’t care how much I feel the need to stop to photograph the sunset, I refuse to pull over on the shoulder of an interstate highway to set up the tripod and click away. I will not put myself in harm’s way—or gamble away the family fortune (Airfare to Vegas would do that)–to satisfy the feeling that something is right and I need to do it.
     
     I sit with the feeling and think about the nature of the situation and whether there are circumstances which modify or negate the urge to act. We do not set thinking aside when we feel what needs to happen. We consider the allness of the moment and decide what to do.
     
     I didn’t take up photography until the daughters graduated from college and were set up in lives of their own. I had been in love with a camera since I was 18, but didn’t follow the feeling until circumstances allowed it at 48.
     
     We have to work it out. We sense. We feel. We think. We reason. We choose. We decide. We do. Throughout our life. With as much consciousness/awareness as we can bring into play all along the way.
137. Lost in Thought — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 24, 2013 — We all need to drift off from time to time. Walk-a-bouts keep us oriented even if it appears that we are aimlessly wandering. Being anchored requires us to drift about. Too much focus on what we are supposed to be doing drains our energy and depletes our soul. We have to fly away from time to time in order to be grounded in the things of true value. The world is in the mess it is in because it dismisses day dreaming and has no time to look out the window.
138. Owl Flies 05 — A rare appearance in an open space at Benjamin Lake, the Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 25, 2013. Note the missing wing feather(s) due to molting or to battle with hawks or crows. — Walk around with a camera and you will see something worthy of being photographed. The unexpected propels itself upon you. Just go walking, looking, and you will see amazing things. At the very least, you will see, which is, itself, amazing.
     
     Why do we so often walk, not looking?
139. Duck’s Wake — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 25, 2013 — If we got off our backs and out of our way, we would fly. Or not. But it would be great having us on our side for a change.
     
     ”Get out of my way, off my back and on my side!” If our soul could talk, that’s what it would say. I’m sure of it. Well, I’m sure that’s what mine would say to me anyway.
     
     I take courage in that. Of all the suggested sins that are levied on us, these three are not to be found among them. We are taught to be against ourselves early on. Those Who Know Best And Must Be Pleased have a large volume of things we must do and must not do in order to be pleasing, and they hold all of it against us, and urge—Nay! Compel!–us to do better.
     
     The only thing our Self/Soul has against us is that we are against Her/Him/It. We should throw in with Her/Him/It just to see where it goes. Cohorts on the journey to the heart of who we are.
     
     Those Who Know Best And Must Be Pleased won’t be pleased. All the more reason to get out of our way, off our backs and on our side!
140. Owl Yawns A 01 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 24, 2013 — What do you do with all your heart? Do more of it. Do it with more frequency and longer duration.
     
     How much would it take for your heart to have enough? To say, “Let’s don’t do this any longer”? When would your heart quit?
     
     Our heart is a three-year old on a swing saying, “Do it again, Daddy! Do it again, Mommy!”
     
     We shrivel our heart when we tell it to grow up, act its age, like only the things it is supposed to like. In moderation.
     
     We kill our soul when we withhold what it loves, or parcel it out like crumbs of bread to the birds, dribbling what it loves over the top of its cold porridge as a pretend reward for doing its duty.
     
     Our soul is no fool. Our heart knows when we are absent without leave from service to our heart—chasing after the glass beads and silver mirrors we are sure are the very thing.
     
     We are here for our soul’s own joy, said Rumi All he could do was tell us, and dance his own dance, while his soul laughed and his heart called out with delight, “Do it AGAIN!”
141. Yellow Trillium 01 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 13, 2013 — I know people who think they are not to love the things of this world—who think that attachment to “worldly pleasures” is sinful and an affront to heaven, and they will be written up in the Book of Life, which, so far as I can tell, is actually the Book of Death, in that it records all of the things about us that are worthy of eternal damnation which will be read out for all to hear and hiss at the Last Day when the Roll Is Called Up Yonder and our name won’t be on it because we loved too much the sights and sounds, tastes and textures, thrills and odors and stuff the world has to offer.
     
     Stupid people.
     
     Turning up their noses at the wonders and beauty of their one chance at life in order to live forever when they die, not knowing they are already dead and buried and too far gone to ever be awakened and resurrected.
142. Windows — Charleston, SC, April 26, 2013 — Where do you block your way, refusing to allow yourself to do what you love because you think you should not love it? You are damming the flow of your own life energy. Which is another way of saying you’re killing yourself. And you have symptoms to prove it. Don’t you?
     
     Whose side are you on? Really, whose side are you on? It’s clear that you are against yourself, but who are you pleasing by being against yourself? That’s whose side you are on. What makes them more important than you?
143. The Meeting Tree — Francis Beidler Forest, Charleston, SC, April 26, 2013 — We have to explore the things that pique our interest. We have to be interested in the things that interest us. Not in the things that are supposed to interest us. Not in the things someone else is interested in—or the things someone else thinks we should be interested in. The things that interest us.
     
     Cut off from our interests, we are cut off from life. Our interests are our lifeline, connecting us with the Heart of Life and Being. When we shelve our interests—dismiss, discard, ignore our interests—because they are inconvenient, unpopular, or out of the question, we dig our own grave.
     
     In each moment, each situation as it arises, we stand at the threshold between death and life—and make a choice. Interests are life. Expediency, convenience, smooth and easy are death.
     
     We are in charge of our own life, of our own coming to life, of our own being alive. We have to be strong in our own cause, true to our own heart, inflamed with our devotion to our own purpose and direction. Our allegiance is to life—to what brings us to life. Our interests lead the way.
144. Zen Iris 01 — Magnolia Plantation, Charleston, SC, April 27, 2013 — A flower is just a flower. You are just you. I am just me. And. It is important that a flower be seen and appreciated for the flower it is. It is important that you are seen and appreciated for the you you are. It is important that I be seen and appreciated for the I I am.
     
     In our case, the seeing and appreciating begins with us, seeing, appreciating ourselves.
     
     Not good enough, right? Not smart enough. Not mature enough. Not good looking enough… The list is long.
     
     You wouldn’t tell a baby she, he, wasn’t good enough. At what point in that child’s life would you say, “I’m sorry. You’re just not working out. You aren’t—and you never will be—good enough to be seen and appreciated for who you are”?
     
     The flower-ness of the flower, and the baby-ness of the baby alone make them worthy of being seen and appreciated for what/who they are. The you-ness of you, the me-ness of me makes us worthy of being seen and appreciated for who we are.
     
     Don’t be trying to deserve it. Just be trying to get out of the way and let it shine through. Zen essence shining through you and me, dazzling the eyes of all who glance our way.
     
     Believe it. Embrace it. Be it. May it be so!
145. Live Oak 01 — Magnolia Plantation, Charleston, SC, April 27, 2013 — Abraham and Moses left home and walked until they found home. Jesus left home but stayed in place and they killed him for being different.
     
     We pay a price if we leave home without going anywhere. We can either go away or pay the price of staying. The price of staying is death in one form or another.
     
     They have a variety of ways of killing us if we leave home without going away. They say, we are “different,” as a way of excusing, discounting, dismissing, ignoring, patronizing who we are. They disappear us that way. We become invisible to them in our differentness, and they treat us as though we are who they want us to be.
     
     Jesus formed his own community who became his new family, his new home, to counter the move to disinherit him for being different. He refused to disappear. Would not become invisible. Did not do it the way they insisted it be done. They totally disappeared him for his insolence.
     
     If you are going to leave home, it will be easier on everyone if you also go away without trying to make them like you want them to be. “Leave the dead to bury the dead,” or they will kill you in one way or another.
146. Live Oak 02 — Magnolia Cemetery, Charleston, SC, April 28, 2013 — Nature has no preferences. Whatever needs to happen, happens. When the Yellowstone caldera has to blow, it blows—never mind what the repercussions might be worldwide. If a planet, or a moon, crosses the path of a speeding asteroid, there will be a nice little smack up, no matter what.
     
     Baby ducks are born and become turtle food or an owl’s fine breakfast. The early bird gets the early worm. Life lives on life.
     
     We have to bring ourselves into accord with the way of things—living wholeheartedly in the heartless midst of it all.
     
     This is the fundamental, foundational, dichotomy. We are nature’s heart—nature’s conscience—nature’s soul. We bear the anguish of nature’s way—and soften, with kindness, gentleness, compassion and grace, the horror of natural catastrophes.
     
     We are nature’s way of caring for the things nature doesn’t care about. Our place is to fulfill our role—caring, caring, caring. No. Matter. What.
     
     The best thing about us is compassion. We cannot put that on a shelf and refuse to bring it to bear upon the way things are. Compassion and grace, gentleness, kindness, mercy, peace, empathy and the capacity to suffer with another are what we bring to the party.
     
     It’s a much better party when we play our part. It’s our thing and we have to do it if it is to be done. To not do it deepens the madness, and what’s the good of that?
147. Shem Creek Panorama Line Drawing — Charleston, SC, April 28, 2013 — When we live to be aligned with—in allegiance with and service to—the Core (In a “thy will, not mine, be done kind of way), we are transformed, and we transform everything our life touches.
     
     When we do it the way it needs to be done, everything changes.
     
     No planning, no scheming, no contriving, no forcing, no pushing, no striving, no having to have anything, no having to avoid anything, no manipulating, no controlling, no arraigning, no meddling, no converting, no condemning, no preaching… Just living as our life needs us to live it in each situation as it arises.
     
     From the standpoint of this orientation, of this perspective, we rarely know what to do before we find ourselves doing it. We do not think our life out and then carefully follow the recipe, stepping in the black footprints, to some predetermined outcome. We follow our internal guidance system and find out where we are going when we get there.
     
     Living aligned with the Inner Guide is quite the trick. We have to set ourselves aside and trust ourselves to What We Do Not Know. We would prefer bull riding. We know what is going to happen there.
     
     We don’t know what is going to happen with the Core in charge. We know only what is happening and what needs to happen in response to what is happening, but where that goes, we have no idea.
     
     This doesn’t mean our life is unstructured. The structure is internal, organic—not imposed from without in a “how life is supposed to be lived” way. Diet and exercise and how we spend our time become important. We develop regimens, patterns, ways of being in the world, ways of being with each other. We are less crowd-centered and more Self-centered, Self-directed, Self-defined, Self-pleased-and-pleasing.
     
     And it doesn’t just happen. We grow into a new way of living by living consciously, with awareness, in light of our Core, in service to our Core—and see where it goes.
148. Frances Beidler Forest 02 — Charleston, SC, April 26, 2013 — We live with an external orientation as though what happens in the outer world is what matters. That is not what matters.
     
     As we align ourselves with the inner world, making conscious what is not conscious, becoming aware of what all is with us there, and understanding—and honoring—the right order of things there, we live in the outer world as extensions, expressions, of the inner world, and everything is transformed.
     
     It is a perspective shift that changes the way life is lived—and the greatest adventure we could imagine.
149. Great Egret 04 — Swamp Garden, Magnolia Plantation, Charleston, SC, April 27, 2013 — How would you connect with your Core? Attend your Core? Listen to your Core? Commune with your Core?
     
     Ask your Core for suggestions/directions. Your role is to be attentive and responsive.
150. Arthur Ravenel, Jr. Bridge — Charleston, SC, April 28, 2013 — You have to do your own work. This is bad news. We do not want to do our own work.
     
     We want to give God some fruit as a votive sacrifice and let that stand for the work that is ours to do. We want to pray some prayers, burn some incense, make an offering, believe some beliefs, keep a few—say 10, no more than 10, maybe fewer—commandments, and let that be that.
     
     We want to live like we want to, and get God’s help in achieving goals we set and acquiring the things we think would be nice to have, and not getting in our way. We think there is God up there and us down here. God over there and us over here. God there, us here. That’s wrong.
     
     Hold up an index finger. That’s God AND you. You and God are one thing. Now, who calls the shots? Who is in charge? This is what is at stake in the “thy will, not mine, be done” thing.
     
     If we and God are not aligned, we are in each other’s way. The work that is ours to do is the work of aligning ourselves with God. Cooperating with God. Collaborating with God. Being in cahoots with God. Being God’s cohort.
     
     When we listen to the Core, we listen to God. Turn your ears on, and pay attention.
151. Great Egret 06 — Swamp Garden, Magnolia Plantation, Charleston, SC, April 27, 2013 — All that can be known can be known. All it takes is eyes that see, ears that hear and a heart that understands. So what’s the problem? Why spend all your time knowing what you know and not poking around in what you don’t know?
     
152. Zen Azalea 01 — Swamp Garden, Magnolia Plantation, Charleston, SC, April 27, 2013 — I don’t know of anyone who doesn’t have to be sharp. Who doesn’t have to pay attention. Who doesn’t have to practice being aware, awake, conscious and present in each moment, in each situation as it arises.
     
     I don’t know of anyone who can tune out. Who can drift off. Who can go to sleep at the wheel. Who can coast. Who can slide by without being invested in the experience of the time of her, of his, living.
     
     This isn’t study hall. Or recess. Those who know, know you have to be awake even in study hall and at recess.
     
     Those who know, know you have to be awake when you are napping. You have to be awake when you are asleep.
153. Magnolia Cemetery 02 — Charleston, SC, April 28, 2013 — I don’t know how you connect to the Core but I have to be quiet. That may not mean what you think it means.
     
     I have a friend who tells me he can’t be quiet unless he’s playing the drums. And another who tells me he can’t be quiet unless he’s fast dancing. I don’t know what quietens you, but it may not be sitting in a lotus position going, “AUM.”
     
     And I have to distance myself from myself—aware of what’s going on but not directing any action, aware without thinking. I call that being receptive, open, waiting. Maybe a phrase will come to mind that has some energy attached to it. I pay attention to that and see where it goes.
     
     Or, maybe, an image comes to mind—a pecan in its shell, say, or a plastic bucket of sand on a beach. I work with the image, playing (This kind of play is work) with it, turning it over in my mind, seeing what it connects with, reminds me of.
     
     Now I have a phrase or an image and I spend time during the day reflecting on it, seeing what it turns up and what response I need to make.
     
     I call this attending the core. Somebody else may call it something else. They have their own core to tend, and I wouldn’t want them to think they have to do it like I do.
154. Anhinga Feeding Young 01 (Or: Pureed Fish The Hard Way) — Audubon Swamp Garden, Magnolia Plantation, Charleston, SC, April 27, 2013 — We spend our lives looking for people who can hear what we have to say. Don’t waste your time arguing your point, explaining yourself, or trying to make converts. You’re looking for conversation that deepens all participants, and that begins with people who know what you mean before you start talking.
     
     The flip side of this is: Evaluate everything you hear in light of your own experience. Does it click? Resonate? Connect? Make sense? Evoke a “Yes!”?
     
     Do not buy anything you have to be sold on. Walk away. You are looking for someone who can say what you can hear, what you can listen to without engaging your fight or flight response.
     
     Your experience is your teacher. You articulate the impact of your experience—saying what happened and what you make of it—and formulate a life around your understanding of the impact of life experience. Do not take anybody’s word for it. Think yourself forward in partnership with your core—sensing whether your conclusions are helpful and suitable in the work of adjusting you to your life and your life to you.
     
     And ask all the questions. Have nothing to do with answers that stem the flow of questions. An answer only opens the door to more questions. Follow the questions—they will lead you to the heart of the matter.
     
     And do not quit! It will be hard, make no sense, and hurt in ways unimaginable. Bear the pain! Ask the questions! Seek accommodation to and an affinity with how things are. It will open your eyes and grow you up. Enlightenment works that way.
155. Eye on the Prize! — Barred Owl Goes Fishing, Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 30, 2013 — What we serve with our life has to be bigger than our appetites and desires, our interest in pleasure and entertainment. Of what does our LIFE consist? What is within that if we don’t pull it forth in the time allotted for living we will have wasted our life?
     
     In light of what do we live? What are we bringing forth? Expressing? Doing with our life? If you don’t know, dream on.
     
     Dream on on two levels—on the level of daydreams and fantasies and on the level of your nighttime dreams. What is at work on both levels? What are you saying to yourself through your dreaming?
     
     Your nighttime dreams may be compensation for your daydreams and fantasies—offsetting them in a grounding kind of way, calling you to wake up and get to work and stop the escapist ruminations about what you will do when you win the lottery. And, your nighttime dreams may be ratifying and validating the substance and direction of your daytime aspirations and reveries.
     
     Your work is to get to the bottom of what you are saying to yourself through your dreams, day and night—and to find there the thread to what is calling you beyond settling for too little, challenging you to be about what is yours to be about in the time left for living.
     
     There is more to all of us than meets the eye. We have to live so as to express as much of it as possible before our time on earth is done.
156. Great Blue Heron A 04 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 30, 2013 — When we are in sync with our Core, we know it. And, we know when we are out of sync.
     
     Our life works when we are in sync, and doesn’t work when we are out of sync.
     
     What we have to be about is seeking sync-ness. How would you do that? Do it!
157. Going Fishing 02 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, April 30, 2013 — Everything that can be said has been said. There have been people in every age who knew what was what, and said it. And there have been more people in every age who knew what wasn’t what and used it to their advantage in marginalizing or excommunicating or executing those who knew what was what.
     
     What isn’t what serves the economy. What’s what serves the soul. Therein lies the popularity of what isn’t what and the confusion over what is what.
     
     In order to know what’s what, you only have to separate from the crowd and pay attention. It’s the path everyone who has known what’s what has taken.
     
     The voice we need to hear cannot be heard with all the other voices shouting directions, issuing decrees, making proclamations, and announcing who is going to hell for failing to heed their directions, decrees, proclamations and announcements.
158. Mallard in Flight 103 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 1, 2013 — All of us are the way we are. And all of us are not the way someone else wants us to be. That is the conflict that tells the tale.
     
     From birth we are commanded not to be who we are because someone wouldn’t like it. Parents, church, school, society and culture are sworn to task of getting us to be who we ought to be. But. Something within each of us knows it isn’t right. Call it the Core. The Core knows.
     
     You can get the periphery to wear pink tights and jump through hoops, but the Core knows.
     
     You can get the periphery to pretend to be who it isn’t, and to like what it doesn’t, but the Core knows.
     
     And the Core will not be mocked, dismissed, discounted, set aside. The Core will spend our life working to overturn the misdirection and redirect us to the experience and expression of who we are—against all that would have us be someone else.
     
     The Core sends us dreams, and feelings, and symptoms—calling us in a thousand ways to wake up and be alive in the life that is our life to live.
     
     This is the work of becoming the Christ. The Christ is the Anointed One of God. We are all anointed of God to be who we are—not who Jesus was, except to the extent that Jesus was who Jesus was, and we are to be who we are. The Christ is exactly who God has anointed him, anointed her, to be—to the everlasting chagrin of those who have a better idea for him, for her.
     
     The Core is the image of God within us, and knows what’s what. Our role is to know what the Core knows and to do what the Core knows needs to be done. So, when they come to you with the pink tights and the hoops, tell them you have your own thing—and do it.
159. Spotted Sandpiper Landing—Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 1, 2013 — The hands know what the head doesn’t. Don’t sit thinking about it. Go do it. Then you’ll know.
160. Shem Creek Panorama, Black & White — Charleston, SC, April 28, 2013 — Every age needs prophets and seers (And where DOES that line lie?) to articulate for that age the symbols and grounding truths of previous ages—to translate for that age all that was meaningful to previous ages—to say in the idiom of that age the things of value that were said in the idiom of previous ages.
     
     Nothing worthy can be passed along “as is” (Which is “as was”). Everything worthy has to be said anew, as though for the first time, in every age.
     
     John A. Redhead, a past pastor at First Presbyterian Church in Greensboro, said, “God doesn’t have any grandchildren.” Meaning each generation has to find its own way to God. Nothing substantial can be passed along without being revised to suit the needs of the present generation in “The old has passed away, behold the new has come,” kind of way.
     
     Old wineskins are not fit for new wine. The old teachings are not suitable for new ears. We have to say again, and then again, what is at the heart of things—reinterpreting, re-translating, rethinking, reforming what once was “plain as day.”
     
     A living symbol always means more than it once meant. A living symbol does not mean what it once meant, what it “used to mean.” Nothing vibrant and alive can be locked into the conceptual framework of the past. Nothing vibrant and alive is literally what it is said from ages past to be. Everything vibrant and alive is changing, growing, unfolding, emerging, transforming itself before our eyes.
     
     Nothing is deader than a truth unaltered through the ages. Every age needs people who can breathe life into that age by saying what’s what in ways the people of that age can hear. A prophet is someone who says what has never been said in ways the prophet says it so that the people who an be awakened wake up and say, “Amen! Ain’t it so!”
161. Spotted Sandpiper Reflection—Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 1, 2013 — Each age has to re-imagine God in light of its own experience—has to re-formulate its idea of God in light of how it knows things to be. Each age has to re-think God in order to accommodate the incompatibilities it knows to exist with other ages’ idea of God.
     
     The failure to do this is a failure of hermeneutics.
     
     Hermeneutics is derived from the Greek word hermes. Hermes was the Messenger of the Gods in the Greek pantheon. In the Roman pantheon, his name was Mercury. Mercury is quicksilver, changing form, slippery beyond belief, incapable of being nailed down, defined, frozen in place, passed on from generation to generation “as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end, Amen.”
     
     Hermes/Mercury has a message of God that is new and different in every age. But. The priests have to deliver the message.
     
     Hermeneutics is the art of preaching as it is taught in Christian seminaries. The failure to re-imagine God in each age is a failure of hermeneutics—a failure of preaching. Preachers tell the people what the people expect to hear. And God is nailed to the floor, or the cross, incapable of being anything God has not already been.
     
     We talk of “the freedom of God,” but God is not free. God has to be who God has been said to be through the ages. The failure to re-imagine God is a failure of preaching—a refusal to re-interpret God in light of all that has been experienced since God was spelled out and said to be at the time of the Reformation. There hasn’t been a new idea about God allowed into the Christian church in 500 years.
     
     We cannot find our way to the God Who Is, bearing the burden of how God was thought to be 500 years ago. Or 1,000. Or 2,000.
     
     We are back to Jesus’ question: “Who do you say that I am?” “Some say this, and some say that, but who do YOU say that I am out of your own experience and the experience of the species over time?” Each age has to answer the question out of its own experience—out of what it knows to be so based on all it knows—for its answer to have any meaning and life at all.
162. Black Crowned Night Heron (Immature) 01 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 1, 2013 — Run everything by the Inner Advisor, the Guide Within. Everything. Practice bringing her/him in on your life. It is not all up to you. You have a source of help and collaboration at the ready. Ask for guiding dreams, for a felt-sense of Yes or No, for direction through the morass of choices, decisions, conflicts, obligations and duties. It may sound crazy, but what do you have to lose?
163. Black Crowned Night Heron (Adult) 02 — Audubon Swamp Garden, Magnolia Plantation, Charleston, SC, April 27, 2013 — Living is the lesson—our life is the teacher.
     
     As a follow-up on the last post about consulting the Inner Guide, if you ask and get nothing in response, or if you ask and get really bad guidance, you are asking the wrong question.
     
     The Inner Guide is a joker at heart. She/he will not hesitate to lead you down the wrong path if you are asking guidance to places you have no business being. It’s what you get for being out of touch with the heart of things. The lesson is wake up and ask better questions.
     
     Ask questions that have to do with the Guide’s interest in the life you are living—not questions that have to do with maximizing your gains and minimizing your losses.
     
     Your personal advantage and prosperity are not your Guide’s concern. You cannot exploit the guidance of the Guide to serve your own ambition and desire. You can take the Guide to Las Vegas, but your odds will not improve.
     
     Your life is not as much your life as it is the Guide’s life and the Guide is stuck with living it through you. You have to make yourself available to the Guide in order to bring forth your gifts and genius, which are more of a blessing to the world around you than to you, though you get to enjoy the process of being you in your life, but you don’t get to kick back and smoke cigars while somebody else does the work that is yours to do.
     
     You do your work. The Guide helps you figure out how.
     
     If your life isn’t working, it may be because you are trying to make it work for you. When it works, it works for the Guide. You get to enjoy the experience, but it may not be what you had in mind.
164. Northern Rough Winged Swallow 03 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 2, 2013 — You have to be asking the questions for the answers to make any sense—and we live in a culture that discourages questions. You see the problem, I’m sure. But there is a solution: Ignore the culture! Ask the questions that beg to be asked! Now, you’re talking! That’s the way to do it! Don’t quit until you get to wherever it is we are going!
165. Northern Rough Winged Swallow 03 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 2, 2013 — You have to be asking the questions for the answers to make any sense—and we live in a culture that discourages questions. You see the problem, I’m sure. But there is a solution: Ignore the culture! Ask the questions that beg to be asked! Now, you’re talking! That’s the way to do it! Don’t quit until you get to wherever it is we are going!
166. Goslings 01 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 2, 2013 — Knowing what to do is one thing, doing it is practicing it. If I put the camera aside for two days, I’m a rookie again. The secret to any art is practicing the art. You cannot pick up your camera and go take a photograph unless you pick up your camera regularly and go take photographs.
     
     Know what to do and practice doing it. That’s the key to success anywhere.
167. Great Blue Heron M 04 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 2, 2013 — There is the life that is yours to live—the work that is yours to do—the gifts that are yours to give—and the tools that are yours to use in the living, working, giving. within the terms and conditions, nature and circumstances, time and place of your living. That’s it.
     
     There is nothing here about entertaining, distracting, ignoring, denying, dismissing, escaping yourself to death. There is nothing here about hanging out until you die.
     
     There is only living your life, doing your work, giving your gifts with the tools that are necessary for the tasks to be completed.
     
     Hugh MacLeod, in his fine little book “Ignore Everybody,” says there are tools and there are props. Props are like stage props, facades, fabrications, costumes which help us pretend away our life.
     
     A computer can be a tool if we use it to do our work, or a prop if we use it to pretend to do our work.
     
     I have known of people who quit their day job and bought the best camera equipment available and a fine four-wheel drive vehicle to haul it around in in order to become a famous photographer, take wonderful photographs, make millions and smoke cigars. They didn’t realize the work involved and the time required to turn their happy fantasy into lived reality. They had a lot of fancy props and no tools. They wanted to be seen as a photographer without doing the work that being there when and where the photos are requires.
168. Great Egret 05 — Audubon Swamp Garden, Magnolia Plantation, Charleston, SC, April 27, 2013 — Do not waste your time believing in God. Do not spend your time talking about God, telling people about God. Put all your time into being God.
     
     Be God. Be who God Is. Now we’re talking. That’s the way to do it.
     
     Be as much as you know of God starting right now and don’t say a word about God.
     
     Bring the qualities you know to be Godly qualities forth in your life—in each situation as it arises—and let that be it.
169. Great Blue Heron M 06 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 1, 2013 — When Jesus told the paralytic, “Rise, take up your pallet and get on with your life,” (or words to that effect), all we see is a healed paralytic. We have to look deeper.
     
     Jesus is saying to us all, “Stop using excuses! Stop letting whatever is stopping you stop you! Stop bellyaching! Stop moaning, complaining, whining! And get into your life—the life that is your life to live—and live it as fully as you are able to live it within the terms and conditions, nature and circumstances, time and place of your living!”
170. Magnolia Cemetery 04 Black and White — Charleston, SC, April 28, 2013 — It is important to be transparent to yourself—to have nothing hidden from yourself. Symptoms are an indication of something hidden within, of our playing tricks on ourselves, fooling ourselves, playing games with ourselves, lying to ourselves, not seeing ourselves.
     
     The minute we approach ourselves with our guard down, saying, “Okay, let’s talk,” from the heart, ready to hear everything we have to say to ourselves—everything our Self has to say to us—a shift happens and the world is transformed. Out world, anyway.
     
     Once we declare allegiance to ourselves—declare our loyalty, dedication, devotion, faithfulness and service to ourselves—and commit ourselves to being on our Self’s side, we join our Self in collaborating fully on the life we are living together.
     
     No more unilateral decisions. No more striking off on our own in the service of goals we say are valuable. No more independent decisions, choices, actions. No more commandeering the wheel and taking the ship off on a course of our own devising.
     
     Everything is mulled over, talked out, worked through. We become a WE in the fullest sense of the word. We consult our Self, we attend our Self, we intuit our Self, we seek the guidance and direction and input of our Self, we listen to our Self, and don’t do anything without our Self’s support and encouragement.
     
     If you think this won’t make your life instantly meaningful, interesting and filled with amazing wonders, you are in for a big shockeruskie.
171. Goslings 02 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 2, 2013 — We spend our lives looking for vicarious life. We want to be alive, but we don’t want to do the work required to be alive, so we associate with those we think are life-giving others. We fall in love. We join clubs and churches. We hob-nob with those who seem to have what we want, hoping it will transfer like a beneficial contagion, infecting us with vitality, purpose, enthusiasm and delight. Well.
     
     We have to do our own work.
     
     The work is, all together now, Waking Up, Facing Up, Squaring Up, Growing Up, Standing Up, and Doing What Needs To Be Done In Each Situation As It Arises Exactly As It Needs To Be Done All Our Life Long.
     
     When we Wake Up, we wake up to the discrepancy, the discord, between how things are and how we want them to be—and to the conflicts, contraries, opposites and antagonisms that exist within ourselves and among us all with ourselves, each other and all of life.
     
     Facing and bearing the pain of irreconcilable and mutually exclusive conflicts is the essential and on-going task in growing up and being who we are (and also are), which we strive to avoid by associating with those who seem to have what we want/need or who can help us forget our lack of alignment for a while.
     
     We do not find what we seek by associating with those who seem to have it.
     
     We have to do the work ourselves.
     
     The work of alignment, of reconnecting with the Core, the Heart, the Center, and being at-one with the Source of Life by living the life that is our live to live, never mind the life we have in mind.
     
     Of course, we don’t want anything to do with that. So we seek vicarious satisfaction and wait to be saved from the work that will save us.
172. Entrance to Magnolia Plantation — Charleston, SC, April 27, 2013 — Our symptoms—we are overweight, we have headaches or backaches, we drink too much too often, we are over-medicated on prescription (or over the counter, or illicit) drugs, etc.—point to unconscious internal conflicts and/or denied external conflicts.
     
     We have to wake up to what we are not seeing—to what is readily apparent but invisible to us. We have to know what is there to be known, but is not known—is not known to us but is obvious to everyone but us.
     
     We have to sit down, shut up, open our eyes and see.
     
     Of course, we think we do see. We have to look at what we think we see until we can see all that is to be seen.
     
     Behold your symptoms.
     
     Behold your emotional reactions. You know the individuals, or the groups, or the nationalities that send you over the edge? You are projecting on them what you cannot admit and do not want to face in yourself.
     
     The same thing goes with the individuals, groups, or nationalities that you love and adore. You are projecting onto them qualities that are latent in yourself, which you wish were true about you, which you deny about you.
     
     We see ourselves when we see the people we react emotionally to. We project onto those people qualities we deny in ourselves. Let them become mirrors showing you to you.
     
     Of course, we have conflicts with that. Our conflicts heal us when we make them conscious and work with them in a straight-forward, honest and open way. On the one hand, this. On the other hand, that. And then, there is that over there.
     
     Don’t try to resolve anything. Simply be intensely aware of the polarities, then tension, the agony, and bear the pain. And wait for things to shift. The shift is growth, transformation, realization, awakening, enlightenment. But don’t think it’s one and done. This is the model for the rest of your life. Growth, conflict, pain, realization, growth… Forever. And you become increasingly alive with each step along the way to full humanbeinghood.
173. Mallard Landing, One — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 3, 2013 — When I say, “Do what needs to be done,” I don’t mean according to some rule book, some “Mama Said” book. More often than not, I mean, “Do what you find yourself doing.” Or, “Do what you do without thinking about doing anything.”
     
     Your body knows more than you do. Your body takes care of you on all levels. Digesting food, or directing you toward one dish on the menu and away from all the others, taking you to bed, or to a nap, when it’s time for that, waking you up when it’s time for that…
     
     When I’m leaving the house to meet the day, sometimes I find myself tarrying for no apparent reason at the door to my bedroom, or the kitchen. When I take the time to get to the bottom of it (because by now I know it means something), I remember something essential that I’ve forgotten, like my money clip or the checkbook or the letters to be mailed. My body stopped me until my mind could slow down enough to know what’s what.
     
     We are often doing what needs to be done without knowing what we are doing—without intending to do anything worthwhile—and discover some time later it was the very thing that was needed to fit into a greater design or picture.
     
     I’m saying, “Just get out of the way and stop trying to think of what to do, of what needs to be done, and let yourself do what it knows to do whether you know it or not.”
     
     This is hard. It is Jesus’ recommendation: “Don’t let your right hand know what your left hand is doing.” That certainly applies with playing the piano, or the alto sax. The more we think about what to do and how to do it, the bigger mess we make of things. Just play! That way, your left hand doesn’t care what your right hand is doing, but trusts it to be enjoying itself, having the time of its life, knowing nothing about anything.
     
     Now we’re talking! That’s the way to do it!
174. Mallard Landing, Two — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 3, 2013 — The work is to align the inner you with the outer you. This is called “making the unconscious conscious,” or, “knowing what we know.” This is the absolute foundation to peace and well-being.
     
     When I find myself tarrying on the way out of the house, I have to make the unconscious conscious in order to know what is known on a deeper level than my thinking, rational, logical level.
     
     When we have a symptom, we have to get to the bottom of it. Do not ignore your symptoms. A symptom unheeded is a symptom disrespected, dishonored, and it will call all of its friends and invite them to make their home with you.
     
     If you “treat the symptom” without getting to the bottom of it, you are not doing yourself any favors. If you hear what the symptom is saying, you will discover a buried, hidden, denied conflict of interest. If you open yourself to the conflict without trying to force a solution or resolution, but bear the agony consciously, something will shift somewhere in your life. The unconscious will be honored, and the outer you will be better aligned with the inner you, and peace and well-being will make THEIR home with you for as long as you attend your symptoms and know when there is something unknown nudging you to bring it to light.
     
     This is the path of awakening that we walk throughout our life, aligning outer with inner all along the way.
175. Live Oak 04 — Magnolia Plantation, Charleston, SC, April 28, 2013 — People sometimes ask me to tell them how to take better photographs. The question is too general. It invites an introductory course in photography—and that would be a waste of our collective time.
     
     If you want to take better photographs, read your camera manual—over and over—until you clearly understand what your camera will do and how to get it to do what it will do. Now you only need to know which scenes and situations require what settings on your camera. At that point, you are in an area where someone who knows photography can help you with your questions about scenes and settings.
     
     Until you can ask the questions, the answers are going to be senseless. For the answers to be worth anything to you, you have to be asking the questions. No one can give you answers to questions you aren’t asking.
     
     Sound a bit like life to you?
     
     It isn’t going to help to hear someone tell you how to find what you aren’t looking for. It’s a waste of your collective time.
     
     We will have a better chance of finding the answers we need if we are clear about the questions we are asking. What do you need to know to help you with your life? The clearer you can be, the greater your chance of finding what you are looking for.
176. Mallard Landing, Three — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 3, 2013 — There is the life you are living, and the life you wish you were living, and the life that is yours to live. Our problem is to set the life you wish you were living aside and bring forth the life that is yours to live within the life you are living (Unless the life you wish you were living IS the life that is yours to live!).
     
     We have to get your LIFE together with your life.
     
     This is not easy. It is not easy to sell you on the idea that you have a life apart from your life—that you have a life that is yours to live that is different from the life you are living.
     
     And, it is not easy to get you to do the things that are necessary to align your life with your LIFE. That would be difficult even if the life you wish you were living didn’t keep winking at you and transfixing you with glimmering possibilities.
     
     The odds are stacked against us. That’s why you have to be old to give it a second thought. You have to have been around the block a time or two, been up against it, seen through the false promises and sweet nothings of the world as we wish it were, and be ready to take a chance on the life that is yours to live because you are running out of time and what do you have to lose?
     
     So, what’s the first thing you do to get your life aligned with your LIFE? Nothing. Do nothing. Wait. Watch. Listen. Look. See what happens. I’m not kidding. That’s all it takes. You’ll know what to do next when the time for doing it comes along.
     
     (This is great, isn’t it? You have to be crazy to listen to me. And you have to be really crazy to not listen to me. What kind of crazy are you going to be?)
177. Magnolia Cemetery 01 — Charleston, SC, April 28, 2013 — We have to be fed up with our behavior in a situation for the situation to change. It’s easy enough to be fed up with someone else’s behavior—with everyone else’s behavior—and to declare, “If he/she/they would only change everything would be fine!” Not to be mentioning anyone’s name here, but somebody else could change…
     
     Nothing is going to change in a situation until somebody changes. Who is going to be first to be fed up with what he/she is doing? It takes being fed up to change enough to have an impact.
     
     Just saying…
178. Mallard in Flight 104 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 3, 2013 — We make better choices when we live transparent to ourselves. We don’t have to know what we are doing if we know who is doing it and what is prompting the action.
     
     With nothing about us hidden from us and everything on the table, we are free to walk around the table, consider the table, know what’s what, and choose what to do about it.
     
     If you are ever going to know anything, know you. Make your peace with yourself, with where you have been and what has happened to you and what you have done in response and how you wound up where you are.
     
     Understand that your future is more important than your past, that where you are going is more significant than where you have been, that the life you have yet to live is more valuable than the life you have lived, and that beginning here and now, you have more of a chance to be yourself on the way to becoming yourself than you have ever had.
     
     So, what’s the problem?
179. Owl Flies Ma 02 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 4, 2013 — How do you sell change? Don’t bother trying to get everyone on board. Gandhi said, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” Joseph Campbell said, “The influence of a vital person vitalizes.” Campbell also said, “Do your thing and don’t worry about the outcome.” That’s all we need to know about selling change.
180. Far Away — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 6, 2013 — The foliage has changed the way photographs are to be made in the Bog Garden. More portraits. Less action. It’s dark these days—a green cave. Makes for slower shutter speeds. But the owls fly as fast as they used to. You see the problem. We don’t get to do it the way we want to do it. We have to do it another way instead.
     
     Sound like life to you?
     
     Adjustment and accommodation, kid. Adjustment and accommodation.
     
     It’s what we do best—and what we like to do the least. We want it the way we want it, and do not like to change course to accommodate pesky obstacles. “Damn the shoreline! Full speed ahead!” has been an order we have issued more than once. We are slow to grant reality its place in our life.
     
     Adjustment and accommodation are what growing up is all about. We take a picture of the owl perched on a limb when she is only a blur flying about.
181. Used in Short Talks on Contradiction, etc., The Angel — Magnolia Cemetery, Charleston, SC, April 28, 2013 — It is important that we wrestle consciously with the polarities that define our existence without submitting to denial or despair.
     
     In the church of my experience, it was not permissible to say anything about God the people hadn’t already heard. As their minister, they paid me to talk about God but I had to say the things they expected to hear.
     
     This is an example of a polarity that binds our life. I could not do what I was paid to do because I really wasn’t being paid to do what everyone said I was paid to do—and no one will talk about it, make it conscious. So I lived between what I saw as needing to be said and what I was allowed to say.
     
     I worked it out by A) being conscious of the conflict and B) pushing the limits by seeing how much I could get by with.
     
     We are all constrained by polarities, conflicts, contradictions, ambivalences, and Catch-22’s. We have to make them conscious—I don’t care how painful and agonizing that is—and see how much we can get by with.
     
     We cannot sink into despair at the absurdity of how things are, or embrace denial and refuse to consider the absurdity of how things are. We have to bear the pain of the absurdity by being acutely aware/conscious of it, and understand that there is no way out of it, and that we cannot do what must be done because it must not be done. And say, “This is ridiculous.” And see how much we can get by with.
     
     The seeing how much we can get by with is the monkey wrench in the gear case, and things are changing that don’t look like they are changing because we are conscious of their need to change and we are changing them by refusing to pretend that they don’t need to be changed.
     
     Wade with awareness into your polarities. See what you can get by with.
182. Mallard in Flight 106 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 4, 2013 — We think a fact is a fact, that reality is reality, that the way things are is the way things are. Well.
     
     Facts are transformed by our interpretation of the facts. Reality is rearranged by what we make of it, how we understand it to be. The way things are is subject to the way we translate it, the meaning we make of it. No matter how trapped we are, we are a perspective shift away from freedom.
     
     The impact of facts, reality, the way things are upon our life is strictly dependent upon what we say they mean. We are as limited, bound, oppressed and hopeless as our imagination requires us to be.
     
     What do we tell ourselves about our situation—and then say, “That’s the way it is!”? And then get all hopeless, despondent, woe-be-gone and suicidal because it is obviously pointless to go on? We talk ourselves into quitting every time. Why not talk ourselves into banging away—and see what happens?
     
     We owe it to ourselves to see if it is as hopeless as we know it is.
     
     What do we tell ourselves about our situation? Say it out loud. Write it down. Describe the way it is in no uncertain terms. Get it all out. Use a five subject spiral binder if necessary.
     
     Now imagine what else you could tell yourself if you were free to take a different take on things. See how many different ways you can say how things are. Why take one—generally the worst one—for the TRUTH?
     
     I knew a guy whose image of his situation was that he was hanging on to one small tree root on the side of a sheer cliff, descending into oblivion, worn out with the effort, losing his grip, giving up. He had not considered that letting go could mean flying as easily as it could mean dying. We all have wings we don’t know we have because we never give them a chance to show us what we can do.
     
     We limit ourselves by failing to see all there is to see in all the ways there are to see it. We need to know what else—what all—we know if we would only listen before we make decisions based on what we “know.”
183. Francis Biedler Forest 01 — Charleston, SC, April 27, 2013 — Trust yourself to your life—to the life you are living and to the life that is yours to live. Do not have to know where it’s going, or what you are going to get out of it, or whether it will be worth it.
     
     If you are going to believe in anything, believe in your life. Trust your life. Hand yourself over to your life.
     
     The life you are living is the very thing you need to find the life that is yours to live. The life you are living is the doorway, the threshold, to the life that is yours to live. There are elements of the life that is yours to live already at work in the life you are living. You are already living the life that is yours to live—the trick is to live it with increasing consciousness, moving away from the things that interfere with the life that is yours to live over time, as you are able, becoming increasingly aligned with, centered on, the life that is yours to live.
     
     The motto for what remains of the time left for living is: Know your business and do it!
     
     There are things you have no business doing. Know what they are and don’t do them. There are things that, and people who, are wet blankets. Avoid them. There are toxic situations and personalities. Have nothing to do with them. Find the people who, and the situations that, are good for you. Hang out with them. Live to become increasingly focused on, aligned with, who you are, living the life and doing the work that is yours to do.
     
     It’s a slow process, becoming who you are. It’s taken you this long to be where you are. There is no hurry from this point on. Walk slowly, with your eyes open, through each day, all along the way, and, like that, you’re there.
184. Owl Jam — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 7, 2013 — There are people—toxic personalities—in our life who we need to avoid. We are kin to some of them. And you know who I mean.
     
     You have to sit yourself down and think through what you are doing when you make yourself available to them only to pay a high price in terms of depleted energy and loss of peace and soul.
     
     You do yourself no favors living on a toxic waste dump and exposing yourself to toxic personalities. If you aren’t going to protect yourself, who is?
185. One Fern — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 7, 2013 — I delight in sports teams (and individuals) that (who) play beyond themselves. A good coach is someone who can get more from her, or his, players than they have.
     
     Bum Phillips, an NFL coach with the Houston Oilers said “A good coach is someone who can take his’n and beat your’n. And then take your’n and give you his’n and beat his’n with your’n.”
     
     We are all born with a coach like that within us. We are capable of more than we can imagine. We can rise to any occasion. It takes turning ourselves over to the “coach” within to do that within the day-to-day sameness of our life.
     
     We give up too easily. We quit too soon. “We can’t do this!”, we whine. “It’s too hard!” We are constantly swooning before the Soul Killer questions: “Why try? What good will it do? What difference will it make? Who cares? What’s the use? What chance do we have?”
     
     There are teams (and individuals) that (who) constantly play beyond themselves—who don’t care what their chances are—who think odds are just some fool’s way of feeling confident about throwing his, or her, money away—who throw themselves into what needs them to do it, and do it with everything they have, and get up tomorrow and do it again.
     
     Now you’re talking! That’s the way to do it! We’ll show that Cyclops a thing or two!
186. Owl Yoga 01 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 8, 2013 — It is not easy. You can do what is hard or you can do it the hard way. It is hard however you do it.
     
     There is no such place as Easy Street and enlightenment is not the way to it.
     
     Here is what Marie-Louise von Franz said: “…the deeper and closer people get to the Self within themselves, the more confused and complicated the situation becomes. It does not become easier.”
     
     When we live to make the unconscious conscious—which is what enlightenment, awareness, realization and waking up do—we make conscious the conflicts, ambivalence, polarities and paradoxes that are at the heart of the way things are. “Life eats life!” What kind of sense does that make?
     
     The world of the unconscious is not a rational, logical, reasonable, sensible world. We can feel strongly in opposite ways about the same thing. Good is bad and bad is good. Right is wrong and wrong is right. What kind of sense does that make?
     
     If you are waiting for things to make sense, you are standing in the wrong line. Sense is not what enlightenment and waking up are about. When we wake up, we wake up to the contrariness at the center of truth. If you can be cool with that, you have what it takes to continue the journey.
187. Duckie 02 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 8, 2013 — We have figured things out for ourselves and gotten this far over thousands of years. When we started, we didn’t know what a piano was. Now we have electronic pianos, of all things!
     
     We sell ourselves short. No one told us nothing. Okay. Anything. No one told us anything. We started with nothing on all fronts. Look around. Everything you see came from us. We brought it all out from within ourselves.
     
     If you are going to ever take off your hat to someone, take it off to us. Tell us to take a bow. Parade us around the room. No! Parade us down some main street behind a band (We made bands, too) and ahead of the floats (I don’t know where floats came from. Probably from the same person that thought up high fructose corn syrup. We’ve come up with some doozies to go along with everything else).
     
     We’ve done all this starting with nothing!
     
     So don’t be dismissing yourself and talking about what you can’t do and how you’ve never done anything and will never do anything so why try, or whatever you say to put yourself down and keep yourself from tackling anything like, say, for example, your life. You come from good stock. Your ancestors handled Wooly Mammoths and life without toilet paper. Don’t be thinking you can’t do anything.
     
     You are part of a species that has done everything you see when you look around, without an instruction manual or a tool box. That’s something. You are something. You should get out of your way and let you show yourself what you can do.
188. Two Sandpipers — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 8, 2013 — A Solitary Sandpiper and a Spotted Sandpiper is my best guess. — We aren’t stupid. We know what fits and what does not fit, where we belong and where we have no business being. We know what’s what.
     
     Ants find the picnic, flowers turn to the sun, and we know what works and what doesn’t. So what’s the problem?
     
     We have a better idea. We have big plans. We will not be saddled with what works, what fits, and where we belong. We have bigger fish to fry. It takes a long time to come down off of our high horse.
     
     We cannot wake up without growing up. Growing up IS waking up—realizing how things are regardless of how we wish they were or plan on them being, and squaring ourselves up with what works, what fits, and where we belong—aligning ourselves with the life that is ours to live and bringing it forth in the time left for living.
     
     We could get there quicker if we weren’t so sure we had it figured all out.
189. Goshen Creek 01 — Blue Ridge Parkway near Boone, NC, May 9, 2013 — We have to bring our conflicts forth. We have to open ourselves—and wade right in—to our conflicts. We have to make our conflicts conscious, and bear the weight of the agony of mutually exclusive wants, desires, obligations, responsibilities, duties. We have to embrace our polarities, and our paradoxes, and our conflicts of interest. We have to make our peace with them all.
     
     We do not make peace among them. We make our peace with the fact of them. We are torn, divided, at odds within and without. Yet, we spend our time and energy denying that it is so, pretending all is well, declaring unto all—and believing it ourselves—that we are “just fine.”
     
     We must bring our conflicts forth and work them out.
     
     Conflict made conscious will bring us forth. Will define us. Will show us, and others, who we are.
     
     Only the conscious struggle with conflict will expose our loyalties, will make known our allegiance, will disclose what is important, will reveal our heart and make known our identity.
     
     Apart from that struggle, we are all talk. We say this is important or that is, that this is who we are and that is who we are not, and yada-yada-yada… We don’t know nothing, okay anything. We don’t know anything about who we are until we make the unchooseable choice. Again and again.
     
     And we are back to the Jung quite about it getting harder as we get down to the heart of the matter and begin to know a thing or two about who we are. It is agony being whole. Being One. Being integrated—awake, aware, alive.
     
     Being dead is so painless, so smooth and easy. But. You’re dead.
190. Used in Short Talks on Contradiction, etc., Duckie 03 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 10, 2013 — Nature is heartless. The concept of Justice is foreign to the natural world. Life eats life. Nature requires fecundity—more life than is needed—more than enough to go around—to keep life going.
     
     People are always taking a peek at nature and saying, “How can anyone look at all this beauty and not believe in God?” Well. The beautiful little duckling is turtle food. The little turtle is Great Blue Heron food. The helpless little worms have the last laugh, feasting on what is left of everything else. It is easy to look at nature and not believe in God at all.
     
     The God of Life and Being is quite beyond, and other than, the natural world. We, you might say, are God’s gift to nature. We are the conscience, the consciousness, and the source of values sorely lacking among the birdies and beasties.
     
     Our place in the natural order of things is to say Yes! to it, and No!
     
     This is the conflict at the heart of things. We have to say Yes! to it because this is the way things are—this is the world we are born into. To reject it would be the height of arrogance and presumption. We are of that world. When given a chance, we have done no better than the rest of nature. But, to our credit, we are justly appalled by our own behavior.
     
     We recognize a higher ought-to-be than the Law of the jungle. And so, we say Yes! to No!
     
     We say this is the way things are and they ought not be that way! And, if someone should object that we cannot oppose God, I would reply that is exactly what we are here for: To oppose God if God is as heartless as the natural world. To call God to wake up and do better!
     
     Of course, I think God is not as heartless as the natural world. I think God stands apart from the natural world, and calls us to oppose it ourselves—even as we participate in it!
     
     This is a grand contradiction that we are asked to embrace and live out—being sources of all that is lacking in nature: compassion and grace, justice, mercy, peace, kindness, generosity, etc., without cutting ourselves off from nature or holding ourselves aloof.
     
     We bear in our own bodies the tension of the polarity between the way things are and the way things ought to be, and do not relax the burden of that tension even though it bears down on us like a great cross that we carry throughout our days.
191. Two Ferns — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 7, 2013 — We think there is somewhere to go on this journey, somewhere to get to. We think we are moving from were we’ve been to where we are going to be when we finally get there.
     
     We are not going anywhere. We are waking up. When we wake up, we will be right here. Awake. Aware. Alive.
     
     And we will be who we are.
     
     There is a sense in which we are already who we are, we are just asleep and don’t realize it. Who we think we are is not who we are, but when we become who we are, we will say, “Oh sure. This is who I have always been.” And we will be right.
     
     Who we are is who we always have been—and who we will be when we wake up and consciously—and conscientiously—align the outer us with the inner us, and deliberately live the life that is ours to live within the life we are living.
     
     That will change things—in ways that will awaken everyone who can be awakened.
192. Trumpet Vine 02 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 5, 2013 — There is always something else to be aware of—always the possibility of seeing what we see from a different point of view.
     
     I step into old scenes and see new ways of seeing them. I go through old photo files and see new ways of presenting them.
     
     You think you have something all wrapped up, maybe in butcher paper, and stored away, maybe in the freezer, where it will never change on you and always be what it was when you put it there. Well. The joke’s on you.
     
     We waste our time nailing things down. Hammering things out. Putting things to a vote. Unanimously agreeing that THIS is the way this thing is and it will never be anything but what we say it is. Thinking we’ve done something.
     
     We will never see everything, and we will never see anything all the ways it can be seen. All it takes is a little more looking to know this is so.
193. Roaring Fork Falls 01— Pisgah National Forest near Little Switzerland, NC, May 9, 2013 — Stepping stones along the way…
     
     1) Our idea of God is not God.
     
     2) It takes a lot of looking to be able to see.
     
     3) We can do what is hard or do it the hard way. It is not easy. Ever.
     
     4) We experience things we don’t understand. We understand things we cannot explain. The left hemisphere of our brain is not the seat of Real Knowledge. The task of the left hemisphere is to know what the right hemisphere knows.
     
     5) When you don’t know what to do, sit down, shut up, and listen to what you feel. Feel for what you know. When we know what we know, we know what we need to know. If you don’t know what to do, what do you know?
     
     6) Practice seeing what you look at, hearing what you listen to, knowing what you know.
     
     7) Who do you know that you admire the most? What do you admire about them? Practice being like them in those ways.
     
     8) We know what we like and we know what we don’t like. We know what fits and what does not fit. We know where we belong and where we have no business being. We know what we love to do and what we detest doing. We know what fills our hearts and what kills our soul. We know what is good for us and what is bad for us. We know what energizes us and what depletes us… So. What’s the problem?
     
     9) Ask the questions that beg to be asked. Ask the questions that beg you to ask them, not the questions someone else tells you to ask. You can ask your own questions—and must!
     
     10) Don’t think answers are going to do anything for you. An answer is just a step on the way to a better question. Question the answers.
     
     11) Probe. Poke. Play around. Wander. Wonder. Explore. Experiment.
     
     12) Everything worth knowing comes about by playing imaginatively, creatively, with what is known, or thought to be.
     
     13) Playfulness, imagination and creativity are the same thing. Do not think you can think your way into new ways of thinking. You have to play your way there, imaginatively, creatively. Generally, you have to do something and think about what you did to see things—to think—differently. Playfulness leads the way.
194. Owl Flies Panorama — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 10, 2013 — Think about the people you hang out with. How many of them are able to help you with your life—with the life you are living and with the life that is yours to live? How many of them distract you from your life—either or both of them? How many of them interfere with your life—are an obstacle to living your life? Think about the people you hang out with.
195. Floating Princess Tree Flower — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 10, 2013 — Your primary obligation is to the life that is yours to live. You have to find it and live it—within the context and circumstances of the life you are living. There is nothing easy about it. But it can be fun. And meaningful. And interesting. And it can save your life—physically and emotionally/spiritually.
     
     Being connected with—living aligned with—in service to—with loyalty and allegiance to—the life that is ours to live revitalizes our life—physically and emotionally/spiritually. It heals us. Makes us well. And turns out to be all that was ever missing in our life—the life we are living.
     
     We are at loose ends, adrift, aimlessly wandering, going through the motions, with our heart not in what we are doing because we are not on the beam, not on track, out of sync with ourselves and living a life that is not ours to live.
     
     All of that changes when we take up the work that is ours to do—which has nothing to do with the work we do to pay the bills. We come to life and are alive when we align ourselves with the life that is our life to live.
     
     Our primary obligation is to find that life and live it. How are you doing with that?
196. Three Ferns — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 7, 2013 — Authenticity is a function of transparency—not that we are transparent to others, but to ourselves. We cannot kid ourselves, play games with ourselves, be blind to ourselves, and have any chance of living an authentic, genuine, really us life.
     
     So, when you look at yourself in the mirror, see who is there. Not to condemn, berate, shame, despise! Just to see. Just to know.
     
     The rule is simple: No holding anything back from ourselves. No hiding anything from ourselves. No pretending that things are different than they are.
     
     To be who we are, we have to start with who we are—just as we are, right there, in the mirror.
197. Going — The Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 11, 2013 — We think a high standard of living is a substitute for being alive. What are we doing with our life, is the question. What is a high standard of living for?
     
     We live to serve the economy. But what does the economy serve? What is the goal of the culture? What is the culture here to help us do?
     
     I was a minister for 40.5 years. In order to be paid, I had to not do my job, or one of them. Of course, I cheated where I could get by with it, but it was always a question of where I was going to cheat, here or there?
     
     As a minister, my primary job was to take care of the church. Serve the church. That would be the building and the grounds and the bank account of the church. The organization. The paraphernalia.
     
     My secondary job was to care for the people and help them get together with their life.
     
     What’s a church for? Well, practically speaking, a church is here to grow the church, develop the church, have more programs this year than last year. Have an increasingly large budget. Be opulent. Obese. Everlasting.
     
     The people who come to the church are there for the church. They have to be involved in the church, which means doing what the church needs them to do, wants to have done.
     
     Well. Where in that scheme are people helped with their life, with the life that is theirs to live? The church just tells them what to do. It doesn’t help them find what is truly theirs to do. It doesn’t invite them to stop giving their money to the church and start spending it on the things and the experiences that will bring them forth and serve them well in their individual lives. They have no individual lives. Their life is the church.
     
     The same principle is at work in the economy. We are here to serve the economy. “Go shopping,” was George Bush’s great line. That was the best he could do. All he knew. And we elected him twice. It’s where we are as a culture, as a country.
     
     It’s easier to just not worry about it, about our life, about what is ours to do, about our work, our genius, our talent, our gift. A high enough standard of living takes our mind off the emptiness of our life. And we can always go to church and hear them tell us it will all come together for us in heaven when we die. But we are already dead. Why don’t they do something about that?
     
     The church ought to be raising people from the dead—helping them transform the culture from a wasteland into a vibrant source of life for everyone.
198. Owl Flies, One—Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, May 11, 2013 — We have to work it out. Working it out is living within the tension, within the conflicts, within the polarities, within the opposites, that define our life.
     
     How much for them, how much for me? Always the question. We have to work it out again and again in each situation as it arises. Sometimes, we decide for them. Sometimes we decide for ourselves.
     
     There are no global, eternal, everlasting, once and done for ever and ever amen decisions about how to do it. We always have to work it out.
     
     We can be overwhelmed with the business of living—changing diapers, getting the dog to the vet, mowing the lawn, unstopping drains, etc.—to the point where we have no time to consider the life that is ours to live.
     
     And we can drift so far into escapism, dreaming of the life we wish were ours to live that we neglect, abandon, and betray our responsibilities, duties and obligations to the here and now needs of the life we are living.
     
     We have to work it out.
     
     Working it out starts with waking up. When we wake up, we wake up to the allness of it all. We wake up to everything that has a claim on us. It’s too much. We want to hide. That’s why we were asleep in the first place. Being awake is agony. It starts with the anguish of realization, the suffocating fear that it’s too much for us and we cannot possibly work it out. The fear is part of the allness. Put it on the table with the rest of it. Something else to work out.
     
     The German word “weltanschauung” points to a world-view that takes it all into account. Asleep, we have a very narrow weltanschauung. Awake, it encompasses the whole banana. We have to see it all. And work it out.
199. Boone Fork Cascades 01 — Blue Ridge Parkway near Blowing Rock, NC, May 9, 2013 — The busy-ness of our life can interfere with our business. “Stay Out Of My Business” could be a bumper sticker or a tee-shirt slogan because life intrudes. The flow of our life is redirected by the tsunami of our other life.
     
     And we are back to the Odysseus quote from the Odyssey: “I will stay with it and endure through suffering hardship / and once the heaving sea has shaken my raft to pieces, then I will swim.”
     
     We can’t let the rolling waves of “the wine dark sea” of life deter us from “our business”— even though we might have to set it aside while we deal with the disruption, disarray and disorder of the way things are.
     
     We have to remember what our business is even when we cannot get to it for a while, like until the kids get out of college. There isn’t an expired by date on our business. Swimming through the heaving sea is doing our business, just in the very early stages.
200. Blue Ridge Spring 01 — Blue Ridge Parkway near Boone, NC, May 9, 2013 — Life is a mixed bag, blessing and curse, good and bad, bad and good, good going over into bad, bad going over into good. It’s complicated. It’s complex. It’s chaos. Don’t let it stop you!
     
     We get as far forcing ourselves to move—willing ourselves to get back up and see what we can do in “the winter of our discontent”—as we do dancing merrily through the lush meadows of spring.
     
     A friend talked with me about her experience with postpartum depression, saying she had to force herself to dust the end table in the morning and the coffee table after lunch. “Just one thing like that a day was insurmountable and all I could do for too many days.”
     
     For what? We do not know.
     
     We believe in more than meets the eye. We trust ourselves to a purpose beyond our power to conceive. We sense that we are here for more than ourselves—that we serve LIFE in ways we cannot imagine. And deal with death doing it.
     
     Death comes in all forms. We carry the banner of LIFE. The Cyclops is death standing in our way, grinning. We must not die before our time.
     
     Why? Why do I say that? What evidence do I have suggesting that it matters? What can I put forth in defense of my position? In asking the questions, we take the side of the Cyclops. We become the voice of the Soul Killer, the Life Eater, and take sides with them against us.
     
     Whose side are we on? The side of LIFE, or the side of DEATH? It’s the fundamental choice. Are we here to be alive or to die—to live while we are alive or to die before we are dead?
     
     I’m betting on life, on LIFE. I’m betting we carry, somehow, the hope of the species—the hope of more than the species, of that which is beyond the species—the hope of that which we do not know, but serve, with loyalty and allegiance and courage and determination for as long as we are alive.
     
     And I’m looking for the good company of those who are willing to be traveling companions, supporting one another in the belief that we are here to be alive and will be, by God, for as long as life is possible. You sign on for the journey by sauntering up to the Cyclops in his most recent manifestation and spitting in his ugly red eye.
201. The Bog Garden is at the corner of Hobbs Road and Starmount Drive — across Hobbs Road to the east from the Bicentennial Garden. Hobbs road is the western boundary of the Shops At Friendly. Proceeding west on Friendly Ave., you would pass the Shops at Friendly and turn right (north) on Hobbs Road, straight through the traffic signal at the intersection of Hobbs and Northline Ave. and turn right at the next street which would be Starmount Drive. It’s about a 12 acre natural habitat park and about 6 acres of it is Benjamin Lake. A great place to hang out with a camera!

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12/27/2012 — 03/22/2013

1. We are all Leaving Egypt—the land of bondage, the house of oppression, the place of enslavement to someone else’s idea of who we ought to be.
   
   Egypt is the Wasteland, where everyone does what they are told. Where no one thinks for herself, for himself, or lives a life that could be mistaken for their own.
   
   In the Wasteland, no one lives authentically. Everyone pretends, fakes it, follows orders or the crowd from the barn to the pasture and back to the barn, every day, all their life ling.
   
   The Wasteland is the dwelling place of those who have lost their soul, who have no heart, who are the walking dead, stumbling through their life without direction, or purpose, or interest, or vision.
   
   We have to leave Egypt to have a chance. We have to take a chance to have a chance. We have to turn our backs to the Wasteland and step into the Wilderness.
   
   The Wilderness is where we come alive. In the Wilderness, we find our own way by seeing what we see, and hearing what we hear, and thinking what we think, and smelling what we smell, and tasting what we taste, and liking what we like, and knowing what we know, and doing what we can do the way we can do it…
   
   In the Wilderness, we find ourselves, our soul, our heart, our vision, our interest, our enthusiasms, our life. In the Wilderness, as “in the desert, we can remember our name, ‘cause there ain’t none there for to give us no pain.”
   
   But, there is pain. The pain of awakening. The pain of birth. The pain of realization. The pain of contradictions and conflict and choice and decision. The pain of growing up.
   
   We grow up or we go to hell. And create hell for all of those about us when we refuse the task of growing up, which is also hell. The difference is that growing up is hell with hope and life at the other end—the Promised Land. And refusing to grow up is just hell and a return to Egypt.
   
   The Wilderness forces all of this upon us, and we discover who we are and what we are made of and whether we have what it takes to live the life that is our life to live and prepare the way of the Lord—the coming one who is hidden away in our own Self, struggling to come forth in our own life, there in the Wilderness between Egypt and the Land of Promise.
2. Reedy Fork Sunset Panorama B 01 — Lake Brandt Greenway, Bur-Mil Park Access, Greensboro, NC, December 14, 2012 — It takes time. We cannot hurry our arrival in the Land of Promise—The full realization/expression of who we are, of the Self we are asked to be. We grow into that Self, gradually, over the long course of our life and, perhaps, beyond.
   
   How long before I become a photographer. Of course, I already AM a photographer, just as I am, and you are, already who I will, who you will, be. But, how long before I become accomplished, complete? The—my-ideal photographer? The road is long.
   
   There are two words which describe equally well, one might say, “Precisely,” what I do when I go out with the camera looking for photos—looking for something to catch my eye. The words are: Play and Practice.
   
   I play with the camera. I practice with the camera. I learn as I play and practice. I forget what I learned and learn it some more as I continue to play and practice.
   
   Us with our life is like me with my camera. We step into our life to play and to practice. To play at living, at being alive, at being who we are within the context and circumstances of our life. We learn, forget, learn some more.
   
   There are no grade books, no grades, no hell in the wings for those who don’t make the grade, just more play, more practice, more seeing how things work, more understanding our gifts, our art, our business, where we belong, what we are about, how best to be about it. Play. Practice. But.
   
   It is not to be discounted, dismissed, taken for granted, ignored, treated lightly, with contempt and disdain. I honor the camera and my relationship with the camera. To me, it is a sacred thing. Same with my life. Same with you and your life.
   
   We honor our life by living it lovingly, caringly, with consciousness, awareness and consideration. We cannot live any old way. I cannot take a photo of something that hasn’t caught my eye. I cannot close my eyes and snap away and claim to be playing, practicing. It matters how we live. Nothing matters more.
3. I feel the need to explain. The 10,000 (eventually, if I live long enough) Reedy Fork sunsets.
   
   There is enough of a difference at the same location each time I go to stir my interest. And it is the same location because it is the best—actually, the only acceptable—sunset location I know of in Guilford County. And it is thirty minutes from my back door to taking a photo at Reedy Fork.
   
   I am not selling photographs for a living. I am learning to take photographs by playing, by practicing, with the camera—and Reedy Fork is a great place to play and practice.
   
   Frequent, steady, reliable, continuing and on-going camera play/practice is essential to developing photographic skills. You cannot not play a musical instrument and be a musician. Michael Jordan practiced basketball all the way to the end of his career. We can’t put the camera on a shelf between trips to exotic locations and scenic wonders. Yet, most of us do not live with a backyard that excites our eye. We can snap the shutter but we cannot take a photograph if we don’t feel it first.
   
   So, when we find a few places a short drive from home where we “feel it,” we have to go there a lot. To play and practice. To honor the muse, revere the art, to be becoming as good as we can imagine being at what we love to do.
4. Reedy Fork Sunset B 06 — Lake Brandt Greenway, Bur-Mil Park Access, Greensboro, NC, December 15, 2012 — “There is no competition in music (Or words to that effect),” saith Daniel Dareus (The Michael Myquist character) in the Swedish film, “As It Is In Heaven.” We don’t do music to be the best there’s ever been, or will be. We do music because we must, and we do it as well as we can imagine doing it because we must.
   
   What must YOU do is the question. What is YOUR art, your ART, is the question.
   
   An aside inserts itself: That’s two questions claiming to be THE question. If you have been with me for a while, you know that I am all over getting to the bottom of it, of all of it, of it all, and that questions are the beasts we ride to the core, where we will meet, of course, more questions.
   
   We ask all the questions that beg to be asked, and question the answers. Every question is THE question. So I say that a lot. This is THE question and that is THE question. Well, which is it? Which is THE question? That’s the question.
   
   Back to the question. What is your art? What must you do? You don’t decide, you know. Our art chooses us as surely as “the wand chooses the wizard.” And, our art is as magical as any wizard’s wand—transforming us and all those we touch with it’s wonder and grace.
   
   We are all graced by our art. The community is graced by the art of each member of the community, which is why we have no business asking each person to leave their art at the door if they would belong to the community, if they would be a part of the family.
   
   How many families or churches or fill-in-the-blank have excommunicated their members for being themselves? For being true to themselves? For practicing their art the way their art demanded to be practiced? Because it wasn’t kosher? Acceptable? The right kind of art done the way it is supposed to be done?
   
   Those Who Know Best And Must Be Pleased have abandoned their art, forsaken it, betrayed it and have become art critics, in the worst sense of the term. Don’t let them stop you from doing what you must do or die!
   
   “When you leave home to follow your heart, the birds of the air will plaster you with their poop. Don’t even pause to wipe it off.”—Native American wisdom from Joseph Campbell
5. Reedy Fork Sunset D 01 — Lake Brandt Greenway, Bur-Mil Park Access, Greensboro, NC, December 30, 2012 — It takes a lot of looking to be able to see. If you don’t look, how can you expect to see? If you want to see you have to look.
   
   What do you look at? What do you look for? How we look, as in what we look at and what we look for—not as in “Don’t I look sharp in this turtleneck?”—determines what we see. If we want to improve our seeing, we have to improve our looking.
   
   We have to look consciously, intentionally. We have to look in ways that take our looking into account. We have to look at our looking if we want to see.
   
   I’ve suggested this before—show of hands here, how many took me up on it? Google “uncritical inference test” and take a half-dozen or so as a way of opening up the way you look at things, particularly your inferences and assumptions.
   
   We have to look at our inferences and assumptions in order to see them. There isn’t much space between an inference and an assumption and a projection. It’s all cooked up between our ears and then “seen” as though it is “out there” in the world of objective—as in measurable, weigh-able, countable, smell-able, touchable, taste-able reality. It isn’t. It’s all in our head.
   
   In order to see what’s “out there” and what’s “in here,” we have to look at what we think we see. We have to inspect it, examine it, poke it, prod it, sniff it, bite it and see if it is as real as we think it is. We have to look at our looking. See?
6. Reedy Fork Sunset D 05 — Lake Brandt Greenway, Bur-Mil Park Access, Greensboro, NC, December 30, 2012 — There is nothing in it for us beyond the living of it, beyond the experience of it. If you can understand that, accept that, embrace that, you have it made, and are as enlightened as you need to be.
   
   What do you think Jesus got out of it? Or the Buddha? Or the Dali Lama? They are revolutionaries who transformed the world by the way they lived in the world without deriving any benefit from the revolution they led. They all lived with pain, suffering, injustice, stupidity and death.
   
   What do you think there is to get? What benefit would make it all worth your time and effort? What’s the payoff you think would be acceptable? What do you think being enlightened would do for you?
   
   It would enable you to make your peace with the pain of life, of your life, of living, of being alive. Period. It would enable you to live the life that is your life to live within the conditions and circumstances that define and limit your life, your choices, your options. I hope that’s what you have in mind because that’s all there is to it: Being alive in the time and place of our living.
   
   I know when the Blue Heron at the Bog Garden is about to fly. I’m learning to read the clouds and gauge the quality of the quality of the sunset. I know these things by going often to the Bog Garden and watching the Blue Heron, by going often to Reedy Fork and watching the sunset.
   
   The discipline of opening myself to the time and place of my living is bringing me to life there, enabling me to be alive there, providing me with the experience of life in the time left for living. I’m seeing things I would never have seen if I had not gone looking.
   
   We all have to look at the things that catch out eye. It wouldn’t do for all of you to gather at the Bog Garden, or at Reedy Fork. But you all have something that needs you to look at it, to see it, to appreciate it, revere it, honor it. In so doing, you bring life to life in your living. You become alive. And, seeing, you live in ways that transform the world—your world, all worlds.
7. Wood Duck 02 — The Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, December 31, 2012 — A stream doesn’t know where it’s going but it doesn’t quit. It trusts itself to its guide—that would be gravity—and doesn’t let anything stop it, flowing over, under, around and through obstacles and obstructions on its way to wherever it will be when it gets there.
   
   So much for having a goal and a plan and a strategy for effecting the plan and achieving the goal. Trust yourself to your guide—that would be your instinct and intuition and feelings—and go!
   
   Trouble is is it instinct or addiction? Cocaine, alcohol, tobacco and sugar (the list is long) create competing urges within and we do not know what is directing our path or guiding our boat on its path through the sea. When we do not know whether to trust our feelings or where they are coming from, two things help us sort things out: Time and our dreams.
   
   Time will tell. All it takes is time. It all comes clear with time. If we don’t know if the voice is “of God” or “of the Devil,” we wait to see. We wait it out. We wait for a sign. We wait. And attend our dreams.
   
   Our dreams are the language of the Unconscious. Learning to listen to our dreams is the most direct way of attending the other world. Dreams are context and person centered. That is to say your dreams are YOUR dreams and the same dream dreamed at 20 and at 60 would mean different things. There is no blanket, one size fits all, method of dream interpretation.
   
   Start simply by paying attention to your dreams. Keep a Dream Journal. Write them down when you wake up. Pay attention to dream themes that recur over time (that word again). See what you make of them.
   
   A general rule for understanding dreams is to see them as compensation for our conscious attitudes and behavior. A dream that has you showing up for a test without being prepared, for example, may be telling you to loosen up, let some things go. You tend toward perfectionism, obsession and compulsion. If you dream you are driving in a car with breaks that don’t work, you may be living recklessly, ignoring “stop signs” in your relationships or at work.
   
   Taking your time and listening to your dreams are the best ways I know of evaluating your feelings and your sense of what needs to be done. Look for confirmation, affirmation, direction if you are not sure your feelings can be trusted. There is no hurry. You have the rest of your natural life, and perhaps eternity to work it all out.
8. The Landing — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, December 31, 2012 — We’ve got rhythm. Or, if we don’t, we know we don’t got rhythm. We know when we are in tune, in sync, in harmony, aligned and at one with our life—and when we are not.
   
   Why do we push ahead, keep doing, the things that are off key for us? The things we have no business doing? What is our business? What isn’t our business? Who knows better than us?
   
   There is being on track, on the beam, at-one with our life, and there is being off the track, off the beam, at-odds with our life—and we know which is which and where we are at any point in our life.
   
   How to get from off the beam to on the beam is the question. To do that we have to quit doing what we are doing and do something else instead. What do we quit doing? What do we start doing? What’s our best guess about the quitting and the starting?
   
   Most of the time we know what to do, we just don’t want to do it. We don’t want to do what is hard, what asks hard things of us. We want to do what is soft, easy, trouble-free.
   
   “We only want two things, Jim,” says my bud Ogie Overman, “soft and easy.” The Cyclops loves that about us. It makes his job soft and easy. He doesn’t have to show up for work most days. We do his work for him, keeping ourselves off the track, off the beam, at-odds with our life.
   
   The only thing standing between us and the Promised Land, where we live fulfilling our mission to apprehend, bring forth, express and experience who we are, is us. We are the Cyclops—“the marble and the chisel.” What are we going to do about us?
   
   It’s time to pull up the chairs, don’t you think? Sit down? Talk things through? Work it out? Here’s a hint for you: If we could will ourselves past the Cyclops within, we would have done it long ago.
   
   Negotiation and compromise, kid. Negotiation and compromise. And, ask for the help you need—if you are serious about taking the help that is offered. If you are not serious, what’s it going to take for you to be serious? About living the life that is yours to live? In the time left for living?
9. Reedy Fork Sunset B 07 — Lake Brandt Greenway, Bur-Mil Park Access, Greensboro, NC, December 15, 2012 — The freedom to have an opinion, a perspective, and express it without having to defend it, justify it, explain it or excuse it is one of the hallmarks of my idea of the right kind of community—the right kind of company.
   
   The questions we would be asked would be the right kind of questions, questions for clarification, exploration, rumination—questions with more of a walkabout in mind than probing for weaknesses or scoring points for the prosecution.
   
   The freedom of our own perspective is the hope of the world. It was the cornerstone of the American Revolution, the driving force behind colonization, and is solidly ensconced in the Bill of Rights. But it isn’t widely encouraged or practiced.
   
   People are told what to think and inhibited from thinking for themselves at every turn. Commercial advertisement does not want us thinking for ourselves. It wants us buying what it is selling.
   
   I see the arts as the last holdout for individual expression. The culture would make mass consumers of us all. The arts are counter-cultural to the core. Of course there is a merry dance. Artists have to market their work. Franklin W. Dixon, the creator of the Hardy Boys mysteries hated what he did for a living, writing what he thought of as “pulp fiction,” instead of the masterpieces of literature he thought he had in him.
   
   We have to work it out, that word again, individually, in our own way, knowing that the individual expression of one’s own perspective is the hope of the world in every age.
10. Two Mallards — The Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, December 30, 2012 — It’s a mess, and we find the way through—a way through. THE way may exist. THE right way. THE optimal way. THE way with the best outcome for everyone concerned. But. Trying to be sure the way we find is THE way expands the mess to completely unmanageable proportions and we collapse in total surrender, which is just another way of dealing with the mess. But. Not THE way for sure.
    
    We are digressing here, and digression is just another way of dealing with the mess. Wander around in a digression and a way appears in the wilderness. Things open before those who walkabout among the options and possibilities, and they find a door where they would never have thought there would be a door, and things shift, and they feel better, and are strengthened for the journey and are able to go on. I already feel better, and I’ve only digressed twice in two paragraphs.
    
    Back to the first digression. Finding THE way is like finding THE college major or THE career choice or THE job or THE spouse or partner for life. Just find one that will do and see where it goes. You will never make a decision that you couldn’t have made better with more time and more information. But. We do what we do and then deal with having done it, and it’s a mess. And we are back where we started.
    
    It’s a mess. And we find a way through by stepping into it and looking around, wading around, slogging around, swimming around, sometimes round and round. But. After a while or two in the mess things begin to come into focus. Begin to click into place. Begin to make sense in a messy sort of way. But. That is better than nonsense any day, and we begin to find a way out of the mess just by being immersed in it for a while or two.
    
    Jim’s rule of thumb here is “Just go live it and don’t try to figure it out. Don’t try to think up what to do to avoid that and make that happen. It will all become clear with time. Step into it and see what you can do with it. Every mess becomes somehow manageable with time. Sometimes it’s a long time, but no mess lasts forever. There is always another one waiting to take this one’s place. And we’ll do just fine there, too. Dive in and see if I’m not right about this.”
11. Barred Owl 01 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, January 02, 2013 — I dreamed I was setting a snapping free from a tight box. I think I am the turtle and my task is to set me free. To get out of the box.
    
    I dreamed I was eating a chocolate cake what wasn’t tasty. I thought as I dreamed it, “Why am I doing this?” I see a connection with the turtle here.
    
    Based on these two dreams, I would say my goal is to be free by allowing myself to do what is needed in the here and now of my living.
    
    No boxes. No eating things, no doing things, that don’t taste right, that don’t suit my taste, that aren’t me.
    
    Dreams are great this way. Dreams come in tandem, or in groups, flocks, herds until we see what they are saying, until we get it. Then it’s something else.
    
    How can we set ourselves free from our fear in order to live in ways that are right for us?
    
    Sit with the question. Meditate on it. Commune with it. Ask for guiding dreams to help you explore it. Do not hurry an answer.
    
    Live with the question. “How can we set ourselves free from our fear in order to live in ways that are right for us?” Become friends with the question. See where it leads, what it stirs up, what occurs to you as you ask it, wonder about it, play around with it.
    
    Or, better, dream your own dreams—and play with them.
12. Bur-Mil Moon 02 — Bur-Mil Park, Greensboro, NC, December 14, 2012 — The contrast, or contradiction, between who we are and what is being asked of us can become so great as to be noxious and intolerable. There is some pain we cannot stand. It might appear to be as nothing to other people, with different perspectives, points of view, ways of accessing reality—but it is our world and only we live in it.
    
    My wife can take things I cannot bear. Enjoys things I detest. We are different that way. And it works in reverse. I can handle 6 AM with delight. She sees it as punishment and drudgery.
    
    The rule is simple: Stay away from where you do not belong. I have to stay away from cigarette smoke. My father was a smoker and I had enough of that early on.
    
    Know what you cannot handle and do not handle it. You have boundaries, borders, landmarks. “Thou shalt not remove thy neighbor’s landmarks,” is a bit of Old Testament wisdom not found in Proverbs. It can also be read as, “Honor your own landmarks and keep them from being overrun or overgrown.”
    
    Know what you cannot do, and don’t do it. Know what you can do for only three days at a time, with a long time between times, and never do it for more than three days at a time.
    
    Seeing clearly begins with seeing yourself clearly. The more visible you become to you, the more visible you become to everyone else. It’s a step in bringing yourself forth in the time and place of your living. It is not easy and you may not be well received but. You may be pleasantly surprised to discover the full wonder of you, wondering why it took so long.
13. Banks Presbyterian Church B&W — Marvin, NC, December 24, 2012 — I’m making bread. After a long hiatus. Bread of any kind hasn’t been on my diet for nearly a year, and homemade bread has been off for twenty years. Carbs. Cholesterol. Calories, calories, calories. There’s a small loaf in the oven along with 8 large cinnamon rolls.
    
    Two reasons. I love cinnamon rolls. I can make a better cinnamon roll than I can buy.
    
    The advantage of buying them is that I can buy them one at a time with a long time between times. So. It will be a long time between this bartch and the next one.
    
    The rule here is: Sin boldly and do penance equally boldly. And don’t kid the kidder, which would be ourselves.
14. Reedy Fork Sunset C 03 — Lake Brandt Greenway, Bur-Mil Park Access, Greensboro, NC, December 28, 2012 — I dreamed a Russian General was naming the three most influential men in Russian history and Dwight Eisenhower was one of them. I wondered “Why Dwight Eisenhower?” but didn’t ask the question because I was interested in the flow of the General’s remarks. All I can remember about the dream is that I did not ask the question.
    
    Ask the question that begs to be asked! I don’t care how it disrupts the flow of the conversation or or life! Belong to the questions! Ask the questions! All of them! Every one you can imagine asking! Be impertinent enough to ask the pertinent questions—the one you think are pertinent, that seem important—every time.
    
    Parsifal, in the story of The Search for the Holy Grail, did not ask “What ails thee?” “What’s the trouble?” “What’s the problem here?” And missed his chance to heal the Grail King (by enabling him to talk about his plight, explore his problem, find his own solution?), and spent the rest of the story in the search for redemption.
    
    Questions are redemptive, transformative, and, of course, disruptive. Questions are thresholds opening the way to the future, to the Land of Promise, to Life. Refusing to ask the questions that need to be asked is death. Sealing us into a life of the living dead. Keeping things as they are: stifling, rigid, frozen in place.
    
    What questions need to be asked that you aren’t asking?
    What questions are you afraid to ask? In what other ways is your fear of living keeping you from being alive? Who holds the key to life? You do. Well?
15. Barred Owl 04 — The Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, January 4, 2012 — It’s the sidetracks that get us there. All those mistakes you have made? Critical steps in your development. Every one. Even that one. You know the one I mean. That one. Crucial to your being here, now. Where would you be without having made it, all of them? You wouldn’t be here, now—and we are glad to have you with us. And I am glad to be with you all.
    
    We are here because of where we have been and what has happened to us and how that impacted us—and one thing leads to another, and here we are. And we wouldn’t be here without the sidetracks, the missed signs, the wrong turns that turned out to be exactly right in a strange, inexplicable, kind of way.
    
    So ask all the questions—the ones that don’t seem to fit, but are begging to be asked, even though you know know why and it doesn’t make sense. And all those asides I throw at you—they are not without their own sense of direction, and they usually wind their way back to the point, after making other points, maybe related, maybe not, to the main point, but important all the same.
    
    Don’t mind being sidetracked, distracted, drawn off, away, for a while. Go! Go! See what gifts lie down those roads off the beaten path! See what gold might be found there! it’s all apart of the trail, of the journey.
    
    Yogi Berra said, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it!” See where it goes. It may make all the difference.
16. January Blossoms — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, January 4, 2012 — We adjust our stride to accommodate the terrain. We don’t get to dial up the terrain. “Make mine firm and flat, would you—and straight, with nice places to eat along the way, and no surprises I’m not ready for.”
    
    I particularly dislike the surprises I’m not ready for—not in the mood for. Surprises out of the corral, running wild, trampling down hopes, dreams, plans and wrecking lives at will.
    
    If your phone is like mine, it rings with a bad to good news ratio of about 4 to 1. Maybe higher. And we adjust our stride to accommodate the terrain.
    
    Adjusting our attitude is another thing. It helps if people don’t try to hurry us along. It takes time, getting ourselves adjusted to a day, a world, a life different from the one we had our eye on.
    
    ”Okay, now what?” When we get to the place of being able to ask the question, we know we are on the way. But. It cannot be rushed. We have to square ourselves up with how things are in order to step into the gap between how they are and how we wish they were—how we want them to be—and do there the work that has to be done, the way it needs to be done, the way it needs us to do it.
    
    We don’t just snap back in place and pick back up where we were before the terrain changed. We sometimes drop a stitch or two. We sometimes have to lie there a while before we can come to terms with letting come what’s come and letting go what’s gone.
    
    We should give ourselves time. “A period of adjustment,” call it. “I’m adjusting myself to a terrain change.” “I’m getting used to a new world, Golda.”
    
    In the meantime, we give ourselves to the things that calm our core, and restore our souls, and recover our peace. It helps to make a list of those things to help us remember what they are when the terrain changes radically and the ground drops out from under us.
17. Northern Shovelers 01 — The Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, January 5, 2012 — I feel better just driving down the driveway with the camera in the car going to look for photos. Fortifies my soul. Restores my peace. Grounds me in that which is good, at least for me.
    
    You have to know what does these things for you, and do it often. If it’s playing the drums, play the drums. Loudly. If it’s riding a horse, ride a horse. If it is sitting with a book and your favorite music…
    
    You are in charge of the care and tending of you. The world is a tough gig. If you’re looking for someone to take care of you and treat you right, look in the mirror. And get with the program. Taking care of you the way you need to be taken care of.
    
    I walk and write every morning and make lunch for me and my wife and take a nap after lunch and go to the bog garden and to Reedy Fork in the afternoon when it isn’t raining, and have coffee with a bud when it is. Those things are my gift to me. I’ll make exceptions for the doctor and dentist, but otherwise, you take a number and wait for me to get around to you.
    
    I can get by with this because I’m retired and the kids are on their own. But, I’ve known what needed to be done for years, and I made timely gestures all along the way, caring for me, tending me, driving out of the driveway, even then, with the camera in the car looking for photos.
18. Used in Short Talks On Contradiction, etc., Two Geese Flying 01 — Lake Brandt Greenway, Bur-Mil Park Access, Greensboro, NC, December 18, 2012 — All we are doing here is waking up. Seeing. Making connections. Allowing the contradictions to work their magic on us and bring us to our senses, enabling us to live amid them as those who know the wonder of living amid the contradictions as sources of life, and light and peace anyway, nevertheless, even so.
    
    It isn’t going to all fall into place. We aren’t going to one day see why things happen as they do and be thrilled. Stop wondering why this, why that, why things like this or that are always happening to me. Why something happens isn’t nearly as important as what we are going to do with it, about it, now that it has happened.
    
    “Everything happens for a reason” isn’t nearly as helpful as “Nothing is wasted by those who are looking for how they can use what they have to do what can be done to make things more like they ought to be than they are for themselves and the entire commonwealth.”
    
    We step into the mess and make things better than they would be without us. We redeem, atone, transform, heal, restore, replenish, make whole. We interpret, spin, clarify, illuminate, perceive, center, reconcile, integrate, make peace—in each situation as it arises, for as long as there are situations. We order chaos to the extent that it can be ordered.
    
    We do it by bearing the pain of seeing, hearing, understanding and bringing what we have to offer to bear on how things are—no matter what they are. And, when we get tired of it, worn down by it, we put the camera in the car and go look for photos, taking pictures which themselves are healing for those who have eyes to see—which need be only the person taking the pictures.
19. January Shoreline 02 — Lake Brandt, Bur-Mil Park Access, Greensboro, NC, January 6, 2013 — What, exactly, do you have to lose? What, exactly, do you have to gain? Your answer to these two questions tells the tale.
    
    Our answer to these two questions says what we are willing to put up with and what we are willing to put up with to do something about what we are not willing to put up with. When what is to be gained overshadows what is to be lost, we move—we act—we do what needs to be done, no matter what.
    
    Knowing what we are willing to put up with, and what we are not willing to put up with, and what we are willing to do to do something about what we are not willing to put up with is the matrix within which we live.
    
    What do we have to gain? What do we have to lose? What do I think the answers should be?
    
    Why should you care what I think about what YOU have to gain or lose? Who am I to do your thinking for you? What do YOU think, is the question, and what do you think about your thinking?
    
    “Oh, we don’t want to think! Don’t ask us to think? We aren’t going to think! Just tell us what to think!” Well. If that’s what you think, what do you think about what you think?
    
    Thinking about what we think and going where that leads us is taking up the Quest, and we don’t have to physically go anywhere to do it. But. It can be agonizing just sitting in our recliner, or laying in our be.
    
    There is no growing up without sacrifice, without the right kind of pain, suffered in the right kind of way.
20. Pied Bill Grebes at Sunset 04 — Reedy Fork, Lake Brandt Greenway, Bur-Mil Park Access, Greensboro, NC, January 06, 1013 — When we give ourselves up—hand ourselves over to—the way that is right for us, that is life for us, things happen that serve the way. Joseph Campbell says there will be doors where we thought there were no doors, and hands to help us when we thought we were all alone. But. Don’t think this is easy.
    
    Things also tend to happen which test our resolve, our resiliency, our loyalty, our allegiance, and our faithfulness to the way that is right for us, to the life that is life for us. The Cyclops meets us at every turn.
    
    So we cannot be too quick to declare ourselves to be on the right track when things go our way, and we cannot be too quick to declare ourselves to be off track and lost in the wasteland when things don’t go our way. It’s tricky knowing whether to keep going and ride it out, play it out, see it through, or quit, turn around and try a different course.
    
    We have to persevere for a while. Time will tell, so take it, our time, that is. Look for the signs. Listen to our dreams. Trusting ourselves to intuit, divine, what is good for us, what is right for us, and what is not, in the time left for living.
21. January Shoreline 01 — Lake Brandt, Bur-Mil Park Access, Greensboro, NC, January 6, 2013 — There is no competition in art. We all are artists in our own way, doing what we do for the joy of our soul.
    
    Rumi said, “The soul is here for its own joy.” And, we are here to serve our soul. When we are doing our thing—the thing that we do, that only we can do the way we can do it—our soul comes to life and is alive.
    
    Mostly, our soul is dormant, dying, dead waiting for us to bring forth the gift that is ours to give and serve it upon the earth. Our gift is of soul and is soul, and exists to be expressed and exhibited and waved about.
    
    Mostly, what we express and exhibit and wave about is our own excess and lack of respect for limits of any kind. We call it “having fun,” or “having a good time.” We like to party as compensation for being mostly dead throughout our life—for having no life—for being alive only when we are drunk, high, and acting out. Our soul is rolling its eyes, wondering what is it going to take to wake us up.
    
    Waking up is growing up is squaring up to the difference between how things are and how they ought to be is standing up and doing what needs to be done about it (that difference) in each situation as it arises with the gifts that are ours to give is bringing forth our art in the service of soul, never minding what the critics have to say.
    
    We cannot bring soul to life without playing, laughing and having the time of our life—a time that is good in the best sense of the word, and more fun than we ever thought was possible. We are artists living for the joy of our soul. And, if we are not, we ought to be.
22. Barred Owl 05 B&W — The Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, January 4, 2013 — We have to help people help us. The helping hands that are there when we thought we were alone can only be helpful if we receive the help offered. No one can help us against our will, against our willingness to be helped.
    
    People are bad to say (That might be a deep south phrase, “bad to do this or that.” It means they do it well and often. A person who is “bad to drink” is drunk a lot) they want help and that they will do anything to change their situation for the better—except, of course, the one thing that is required. For the alcoholic to stop drinking, for instance, or the obese person to stop eating and start exercising, etc.
    
    To help people help us means being willing to change—to stop doing what is not helpful and to start doing what is helpful. I knew a woman once who wanted a job “in the worst way,” but she wasn’t about to wear hose to the bank job offer or put up with kids who didn’t do their home work with the school job offer. Makes me wonder what “in the worst way” meant to her. Not what it means to me.
    
    All of which begs us to ask the question, “What are the characteristics of good help-ee candidates?” Sit with the question and see what comes to mind for you—and work those attributes into your way with life as you take up the way that you will not walk without being able to receive the help you need all along the way.
23. Earth Shadow Panorama 01 — Lake Brandt, Bur-Mil Access, Greensboro, NC, January 7, 2013 — We are not awake to the things we don’t want to face. Another way to say this is, “We see (or hate) in other people the things we (take your pick of ways to finish the phrase: fear, deny, can’t accept, would be appalled at, etc.) in ourselves.”
    
    When we wake up to how things are, we wake up to how things are in ourselves, to how things are with us.
    
    We can come at it in reverse. We can use other people as mirrors to our own soul. The things we love in others are things we value in ourselves but don’t believe are there, or things that actually aren’t there as often or as much as they need to be. The things we hate/fear/don’t like in others are things that are present in ourselves but which we deny, dismiss, discount (As in, “I am a bit over-weight, you are somewhat bulging at the waist, and he/she/it is obnoxiously obese.”)
    
    So. We read how we are seeing others—how we are reacting to others—and allow that to show us what is true about ourselves. Then we can become acute observers of our behavior and catch ourselves in the act of being more loveable than we might hope and more detestable than we imagine or believe.
    
    And then begins the process of transformation. When we wake up, we reclaim our positives and we rehabilitate our negatives—turning the things we are ashamed of into strengths and servants of soul.
    
    It’s important to not try to get rid of our negative capacities, but to wake up to them, be aware of them. On one level, they make us one with all people in a Thou Art That kind of way, disappearing our judgmental distance and the Superior/Inferior game instantly. On another level, they have their rightful place in our repertoire of responses to the situation as it develops. “Everything in its own time.” There will be a time and place for our Jerk Side to shine. We wouldn’t want to be bereft of the very qualities that are needed to serve the common good, no matter how bad we think of them as being.
    
    Be awake to your capabilities, and draw on them as necessary for the good of soul and of the whole.
24. Used in Short Talks On Contradiction, etc., Reedy Fork Sunset F 02 — Lake Brandt Greenway, Bur-Mil Park Access, Greensboro, NC, January 8, 2012 — Sometimes, what is good for us is bad for us. This is called a conflict of interest. We have to work it out. Conflicts of interest, within and without, are unavoidable. We have to work them out.
    
    We like a simple yes or not, good or bad, right or wrong, and think there is something wrong with us for our oppositional take on things. I’m here to sell you on the importance of contradiction in our life.
    
    “Without contraries is no progression,” said William Blake (In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell). Conflict, discord, discrepancy, disharmony, ambivalence, etc. are essential to our growing up, to our waking up, to our standing up and doing what needs to be done about seeing value in all sides. We have to choose, to decide—and therein lies the agony that is at the heart of life.
    
    Jesus in Gethsemane is every one of us in the critical moments, at the turning points, of our life. In bearing the pain—the agony—of decision, we grow up, wake up, and act.
    
    Opposition exists on all levels of life. Opposition to the experience and expression of the unfolding of the Self in our life runs deeply, runs to the core, perhaps of the Self itself and certainly within the psyche. And it is the place of consciousness to bring the conflicts to light, and bear the agony of our own depths.
    
    I have used the word agony three times, not counting this one, now. Paul uses it in his letter to Timothy: “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race…” The word translated “race” is the Greek word agonae, agony. “I have run with perseverance the race that was set before me.” Again, “race” is “agonae,” agony.
    
    Agony is the path to the Promised Land, called “the Kingdom of God” in the New Testament. It is the price we pay for bringing ourselves forth—and for bringing the life we are called to live, built to live, forth—in the life we are living. It is nothing we cannot do. It’s just a matter of working it out.
25. Mallard in Flight 01 — The Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, January 8, 2013 — Practice being alive today. Move toward life. Live toward life. Make a gesture—a symbolic act—toward life. Today.
    
    No one knows how much time is left for living, so no one has any business wasting a minute of what we have, a second of it. It is the most precious of all that could claim the title. How can we live with having failed to be alive in the time left for living?
    
    All of which begs the question: What to do?
    
    Don’t do anything in panic mode. Being alive is being consciously alive—not being frantically, unknowingly, reactively alive. Being consciously alive is being conscious of our unconscious leanings and lovings. It is knowing what we know. It is being aware of—and consciously, deliberately, willfully trusting ourselves to—the drift of our soul. Here’s the catch: This takes time.
    
    We move toward life by not doing anything.
    
    We move toward life by simply sitting and being open to what needs to come to life within us and through us in the life we are living.
    
    We move toward life by opening ourselves to the stirring of soul.
    
    We move toward life by noticing what catches our eye and looking closer—and seeing what happens.
    
    We are not in charge of our living. We are not “the captain of our ship, the master of our fate.” We are just along for the ride. We are the roadie, packing the luggage and carrying the equipment and waiting for directions to the next gig.
    
    We begin to live by sitting quietly and listening—and moving slowly in the direction of what calls our name. And seeing where it goes.
26. Reedy Fork Sunset F 01 — Lake Brandt Greenway, Bur-Mil Park Access, Greensboro, NC, January 8, 2013 — Self-confidence can easily go over into inflation, and arrogance and contempt for the opposition, or just those with whom we are living. It’s hard to keep the ratios just right.
    
    I’m practicing taking flying duck photos. I could practice taking flying Kingfisher photos, but that would be ridiculous. The Kingfisher is to little, too fast, too up and down and too far away. Ducks are easier to manage. I have a chance with ducks.
    
    To take a flying duck photo, I have to have one point of focus active in the center of the frame, and keep the duck in the center of the frame, and I have a beautifully focused flying duck photo every time. Except but only.
    
    There is a stick in the water at the Bog Garden about 50 yards from where I stand. The stick does not move. I cannot keep it in the center of the frame. I move. My heart beats and the camera moves. My arms tire of holding the camera and the camera moves.
    
    A beautifully focused flying duck photo is an accident of grace at work in my life. The duck flew itself into focus at precisely the right time.
    
    This is what it is like trying to balance the ratios at work in our life. Enough self-confidence to step us forth into our life without going over into inflation, arrogance and contempt.
    
    Lay out any value you aspire to on the table. Compassion, empathy, kindness, joy… Fill the table. Every one of those admirable qualities has an equally appalling extreme. How to be just enough the right way without being any of the wrong way is like trying to keep a flying duck in the center of the frame.
    
    in order to have a chance, we have to take it not seriously. We have to laugh, and shake our heads, and try again. And hope that sometimes the duck flies into focus at the right time.
27. Clouds at Sunset — Reedy Fork, Lake Brandt Greenway, Bur-Mil Park Access, Greensboro, NC, December 16, 2012 — When the Buddha named desire as the root of suffering, he was saying we wouldn’t suffer if we didn’t care about what is important to us.
    
    An inscription upon a New England tombstone says the same thing: “It is a terrible thing to love what death can touch.”
    
    I’ll take caring with suffering over being immune to, and untouched by, the impact of life upon love.
    
    Caring about—loving—that which is important to us is life. Take that away from us and we may as well be dead, and are dead—just waiting for the coroner to make it official.
    
    Suffering is the price we pay for being alive. If the Journey weren’t important, didn’t matter, the Cyclops would be nothing. That which stands between us and what matters most would be unable to find where he belonged—but it would be an empty victory.
    
    Artists suffer their art—they pay a price to serve their art, working at it to get it right long past where any normal human being would have quit and gone to bed. Edward Hicks painted “Peaceable Kingdom” over fifty times trying to get it right. Think that didn’t matter to him? Think he didn’t suffer his art? Think he didn’t care? Think he and the Cyclops didn’t go round and round every day? Think he would have given it up for a nice job with good pay that was free of pain?
    
    The life that needs us to live it is not free of suffering. The life that needs us to live it will take us into the depths of Gethsemane and across the face of Golgotha. And, believe it or not, we will be glad to go—because it is LIFE, and we will be dead long enough.
28. Wetlands Geese 01 Panorama — Guilford County near Summerfield, NC, January 11, 2013 — Trust yourself to the drift of your soul. Do what you can imagine doing to align yourself with—to live—the life that is right for you.
    
    You are in good hands. Those hands would be your own. You know what is good for you and what is not. What is life and what is death.
    
    What do you enjoy? What do you do for the sake of doing it? How often do you do it? How much time do you spend doing what you enjoy?
    
    Your deep joy and your soul’s deep joy are likely to be the same joy. You and your soul should share the experience of joy more often, and see where it goes.
29. Lake Jeanette Fog 02 B&W — Greensboro, NC, January 11, 2013 — Do not try to think your way to the life that is yours to live—to the life that needs you to live it—to the life that only you can life. Live your way there!
    
    Your life is an experiment in living, in being alive. You will know all you need to know about living your life by living your life. You will know what works and what does not work but. This is where thinking comes in. You will have to think about what isn’t working about what does not work.
    
    Does it not work because it isn’t right for you or because it isn’t right for someone else? Is it that you better not do that again because you hated every minute of it or because it made someone else really unhappy? Think about why it didn’t work and adjust your living accordingly.
    
    Maybe you don’t ever do that again. Maybe you do it again differently. Maybe you move far away from the person who is trying to direct your life. You have to think these things through. You have to work them out.
    
    Working it out is a thinking thing. Finding your life and living it is a living thing. You live your way to your life and then you think out the details in enabling you to live it.
    
    Knowing what your life is and getting things in place that will allow you to live it require two different skill sets: Feeling and Thinking. You have to develop your abilities in both areas to have a chance at having a life you enjoy living. Oh, and courage. We don’t get far from Those Who Know Best And Must Be Pleased without courage.
30. Wetlands Geese 01 Detail — Guilford County near Summerfield, NC, January 11, 2013 — Help comes from strange places sometimes, from unexpected origins. We cannot predict who, or what, will be helpful and who or what will not be. Some of the best trained and most educated can be the least helpful. So, be looking for help at all times, from all directions, in all weather conditions.
    
    Be particularly alert when things are at their darkest, hope is lost, and you are sure that you are beyond any chance of being helped. Of course, the help you get may not be the help you have in mind—so it helps to have nothing in mind.
    
    Be open to help in all forms from all sources. And be ready to receive what comes imaginatively and apply it creatively instead of measuring it by conventional standards of what is helpful and what is not.
    
    Help is often what we make of it, of what is offered—how we take it, and what we turn it into. Which means we are not as helpless as we think, and have a part to play in our own recovery.
31. Grebes at Sunset/Reedy Fork Sunset G — Lake Brandt Greenway, Bur-Mil Park Access, Greensboro, NC, January 12, 2013 — The owl has his/her (It’s hard to tell about owls unless you are an owl) flow, the geese have their flow, the rabbits and the coyotes have their flow, you and I have our flow. Of all the things that experience flow, who is most likely to be out of sync with theirs?
    
    It is part of the owl’s flow to disrupt the flow of the mouse. It is part of the coyote’s flow to disrupt the flow of the rabbit.This is part of the larger flow of the natural world, which has evolved in a way that supports both the flow of the parts and the flow of the whole. When the flow is disrupted, there is upheaval for a time while the flow waits to resume again—and does so, on a different stage, but in ways similar enough to be recognizable.
    
    Every living thing has its flow and lives best in synch with it. Of all living things, which disrupts their flow intentionally, deliberately, with their eyes on better things? Or which gives up theirs completely, irrevocably, hoping to avoid worse things? Which neglects or abandons what is right for them in pursuit of what they think they must have?
    
    Our flow may be disrupted but it cannot be denounced, betrayed. No one lives long—certainly, no one lives well—cut off from their flow, regardless of the glory and glamor of their life style.
32. Wood Duck 05 — The Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, December 31, 2012 — Live as much in the flow of your life as you can manage, given the nature and circumstances of your living. And let that be that.
33. Used in Short Talks On Contradiction, etc., Trees in the Fog B&W — Laurel Bluff Trail, Reedy Fork Access, Greensboro, NC, January 11, 2013 — Conflict is a wonderful thing. Where would we be without it? In a world where everything always went our way, we would never grow up, confront opposition, or be aware of anything contrary to the prevailing idea of how things should be. “Our way” would just be the commonly accepted way of doing things.
    
    It is hard for me to imagine individual Amish having their own, personal, unique way of doing anything. “The Amish Way” is the way things are done. Tribal thinking is incapable of expanding to think things the tribe has never thought. Innovation, invention, alteration, improvement, transformation, change are all out of the question. One cow follows another from the barn, to the pasture, back to barn forever.
    
    Carl Jung said, “There is no coming to consciousness without pain.” We grapple with contradiction, opposition, conflict. We live in the “field of action” between the way things are and the way things ought to be (or just the way we want things to be)–and bring ourselves forth in the process, being birthed by the process of being alive—becoming who we would have never been apart from the process of the Hero’s Journey (the Spiritual Quest, the Search for the Promised Land and the Holy Grail) and the hope of “laying down our burden down by the riverside.”
    
    Our burden is our glory, our hope and our life. Without the burden, we are as good as dead—no better than dead, deader than dead! So, Jesus could say, “If you want to be my disciple, pick up your cross daily and follow me.”
    
    The bread of life is the bread of affliction. The cup of salvation is the cup of suffering. So, step consciously into the field of action and do your thing—and see what happens. You will participate in the making of a miracle, which will be you!
34. Picnic Table 01 B&W — Lake Brandt Watershed Park, Greensboro, NC, January 11, 2013 — If you are going to do anything, do YOUR thing and see where it takes you and what it has to teach you along the way.
35. Bur-Mil Park Pier B&W — Lake Brandt, Greensboro, NC, January 11, 2013 — Try making someone, yourself, say, care about something they don’t care about. Your best best is trying to make them pretend they care about what they don’t care about—to fake it, to act the part as though they, or you, were playing a role in a movie that had Oscar potential for you if you played your role really well. That’s as close as we can come to caring about things we don’t naturally, spontaneously, straight from the heart care about. We’re kidding ourselves if we think otherwise.
    
    We may come to care about something we don’t care about if we act as though we do over time. I didn’t care about tennis the first few times I picked up a racket. My wife didn’t think much of me after the first date. Some things take a while. And, some things don’t have a chance. But, we can rise to any occasion for the short term. But, we can’t make happen what isn’t going to happen long term.
    
    Knowing what we can ask for from ourselves and others—and what we have no business asking for—sets us up for a better relationship over time than we would have if we gave ourselves, or others, down the river for not liking whatever it is we don’t like no matter how many times it comes our way.
    
    After a while, we have to say, “Okay. You don’t have to eat your green beans.” And let things be what they are.
36. Fog Silhouette B&W — Piedmont Trail, Lake Brandt, Greensboro, NC, January 11, 2012 — Carl Jung says, “Get out of the sheep and shepherd game. The shepherds are sheep looking for a shepherd—which means there are no shepherds. There are only sheep, gradually waking up over the course of their lives, helping one another with the process of seeing, hearing, understanding, knowing, doing, being.” Or words to that effect.
    
    The upshot is that we are all in this together. There are no authorities. No Know It All’s. The early Zen practitioners nailed it with, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!” Because the Buddha out there keeps us from finding and being the Buddha in here, and that ruins everything.
    
    You are the one who knows what is right for you and what is wrong, what is good for you and what is bad, what is life for you and what is death. Sure, there are compromises and trade-offs, but you are smart enough to know when to make them and when to walk away.
    
    So stop traipsing off in search of the latest guru with the shortest cut to the Promised Land. Sit with yourself until you get an inkling of what you need to do and do it, and see where it goes.
37. Wetlands Geese 01 Detail B — Guilford County near Summerfield, NC, January 11, 2013 — You have to pay the bills and you have to feed your soul. What you do to pay the bills probably won’t feed your soul but. Some of the bills you incur could feed your soul if you incur the right bills. Make sure you incur the right bills. Working in the service of the wrong bills is no way to live—no way to be alive anyway.
38. Fog-Bound Grebe — Reedy Fork, Lake Brandt Greenway, Bur-Mil Park Access, Greensboro, NC, January 11, 2013 — You know what is right for you and what is wrong, what is good for you and what is bad. What is right for you now, good for you now, within your present context and circumstances? Well?
39. January Shoreline 03 — Lake Brandt, Bur-Mill Park Access, Greensboro, NC, January 8, 2013 — Don’t think in terms of achieving, accomplishing, acquiring, amassing, having, owning, going, doing—think in terms of reconciling, integrating, accepting, receiving, understanding, seeing, hearing, communing, being with, healing, making whole.
40. January Shoreline 07 — Lake Brandt from the Piedmont Trail, Greensboro, NC, January 11, 2013 — How much of your life are you enjoying? There are legitimate restrictions which inhibit our being able to enjoy our life, and there are illegitimate restrictions which inhibit our being able to enjoy our life. “If I can’t eat as much ice cream and chocolate syrup as I want to, why bother with eating any? It would just be torturing myself!” Do you see how a legitimate restriction can easily go over into an illegitimate restriction?
    
    Your have to be strong in your own service, in your own cause. You have to take care of yourself, look out for yourself, treat yourself with tender, loving, care. Treat yourself.
    
    Or, maybe, you think the world is going to come by your house today and invite you to come outside and enjoy your life.
    
    Every day that you fail to deeply enjoy some aspect of your life is a day that is wasted on you. A day your soul shrivels like a grape on its way to becoming a raisin.
    
    Don’t give me the innocent, helpless, victim of circumstances defense. If you are not working overtime to enjoy what can be enjoyed about your life, you are a wimp in your own service, a wienie in your own cause, and your soul is a raisin wasting its time hoping for rehydration.
41. Fence Row — Guildford County near Summerfield, NC, January 11, 2-13 — There is nothing wrong with us that growing up won’t fix.
    
    Face it! Face it! Face it! Face it! That’s all the mantra we’ll ever need.
    
    The ache of living has its source in our resistance to the experience of life.
    
    We are what we love and we are what we hate. When we integrate what we love and what we hate with who we are we are ready for the next step, which is understanding that we are not one, we are two.
    
    Inflation is thinking we are the Big One. Deflation is thinking we are the Little One. We are not either one. We are both.
    
    Living in the world as it is—as we are—makes True Human Beings out of all of us.
42. Flight 01 — Barred Owl, Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, January 16, 2013 — The wisdom of the natural world—that would be instinct and intuition—is integrated with the light of human consciousness in True Human Beings, who bring forth the reconciliation of these opposites as a blessing and a grace for the common good.
    
    Neither the wisdom of the natural world nor the light of human consciousness is ours to exploit for our own, personal, advantage. We do not live for ourselves. We live best when we live in the service of that which is greater than we are—which would collaborate with us for the good of the whole of which we are a part.
    
    Each of us brings forth our gift, our art, our life as an addition to the “primal soup” which is the matrix from which we spring and to which we return—which is made richer by the contribution we make to it during the time we are alive.
43. Wetlands Geese 06 — Guilford County near Summerfield, NC, January 11, 2013 — Step consciously into your life each day. Allow it to bring forth what you have to offer in rising to every occasion and doing what needs to be done as only you can do it. Mix it up with your life. See what you can do with it. Make it show you what you got. Do your thing without having a stake in the outcome or anything to lose (Because what’s to lose except your chance to show your stuff and do your thing in the time left for living?). See where it goes. I’d bet you $20 if I still did that kind of thing that you’ll be amazed.
44. Mallard in Flight 09 — The Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, January 15, 2013 — We need each other to connect with ourselves. The quality of our relationships with other human beings improves the quality of our relationship with ourselves. Alone we just get crazy.
    
    Together, we prop up one another, encourage one another, goad one another into giving it our best, why not, come on now, you can do better than that, show me what you can do, that’s the spirit, I knew you could do it.
    
    And when we get old and lose ourselves reminiscing about the sorrows we have lived through and seen others living through and it takes our breath and we have to sit down under the weight of life remembered, it’s good to have someone sit with us and say, come on now, you can do it, I’ll help, and some hot chocolate and a cinnamon roll will help us both.
    
    And we make another day, sorrows and all. That’s what I call being good for one another. May we all know what I’m talking about and practice being the right kind of presence in each others’ life!
45. Flight 02, Barred Owl — The Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, January 16, 2013 — Live your life. Not the life someone else tells you to live. Not the life that is most likely to smooth your way and ease your living. Not the life that requires the least amount of effort, the least amount of trouble, the least amount of rocking the boat, making waves, turning over apple carts, and stomping on eggshells. Your life. The life in which you come alive. The life you relish, enjoy, love, delight in. The life in which you are you all the way to the core. You know the one I mean. Live it.
    
    And when there are conflicts between it and all the other lives you could be living instead, work them out.
46. Bur-Mil Pier 02 — Lake Brandt, Bur-Mil Park, Greensboro, NC, January 11, 2013 — You are what you seek. Everything we seek “out there,” in the world of external, actual, tangible, apparent reality is a projection of what is “in here,” in the world of psychic, unconscious, apparently-not reality, and is striving to come forth through us in our life.
    
    This is to say, if you are seeking love, become more loving. If you are seeking acceptance, become more accepting. If you are seeking justice, become more equitable and fair-minded. If you are seeking security and stability, become a secure, stable, emotional shelter for those who come your way. Get it?
    
    Become aware of what your hunger is and feed the world.
47. Greenway Bridge at Reedy Fork — Piedmont Trail, Greensboro, NC, January 11, 2013 — Being who we are in response to how things are—in light of how things need to be—is the act that transforms the world. Joseph Campbell said, “The influence of a vital person vitalizes.” The life of an alive person enlivens—and all the alive person does is live in relation to what is happening and what needs to happen in the time and place of her, of his, living.
    
    When we live with integrity—in ways that are integral with who we are, what is happening and what needs to happen—our life resonates with the souls of others, and the spark of one ignites another and LIFE comes alive in the land.
    
    It all starts with individuals being awake to how their life feels, to how it feels to be living the life they are living—and moving toward what feels right and away from what feels wrong—from what doesn’t fit to what does fit.
    
    There is no instruction manual for this shift from where we are to where we need to be. No one can tell you when your shoes fit, or when your hat fits. Some things you have to trust yourself to know, and, if you don’t know, trust yourself to learn by living and seeing what happens, and living differently and seeing what happens, and deciding for yourself what works best in what situations.
    
    We feel our way into who we are. We live our way there. We do not think or way there, or follow the black footprints laid out by our parents, or our religion or some ideology to who we are and how we need to be in each situation as it arises.
    
    We “trust the force” arising within us, carrying us to who and how and where we need to be. We trust ourselves to the drift of our soul. We trust ourselves to know what is right for us and what is wrong—to know what needs to happen and what does not need to happen.
    
    Just as leaves and flowers find the sunlight and ants find the picnic, we find our life and live it, and bless the world.
48. Wetlands Geese 12 Panorama — Guilford County near Summerfield, NC, January 11, 2013 — A friend said, “Jim, I’m on track on one level and the conditions under which I live are not the right conditions.” My life is right on one level and wrong on another.
    
    This is called walking two paths at the same time. It is also called living with a foot in different worlds. It is also called working out the contradictions.
    
    What we do to pay the bills is not good for us. The bills we incur enable us to do things that are good for us. We do what is good for us allows us to keep doing what is not good for us in order to do what is good for us. Sounds crazy until we try to do only what is good for us. Doing only what is good for us is bad for us. Try it. See how long you last.
49. Two Trees — Guilford County near Summerfield, NC, January 14, 2013 — What is your pain? What do you live to avoid facing? What is the agony that you will not bear? The ache you will not carry? And cannot escape?
    
    We have to come to terms with our pain and make room for it in our life. We cannot grow up without facing what must be faced and doing what can be done about it and bearing the pain of what cannot be done.
    
    Facing what must be faced is the rite of initiation for all who would grow up and live their own life within the terms and conditions of living. Gethsemane and Golgotha bar the way to life. Life waits for us to understand that—and accept it as how things are. Shouldering the crosses that are ours to bear is the price we pay for being alive.
    
    Squaring ourselves up with this fundamental reality is one of the crosses that is ours to bear.
50. Reedy Fork Sunset G Panorama — Lake Brandt Greenway, Bur-Mil Park Access, Greensboro, NC, January 12, 2013 — Living aligned with our center, our core, heart, soul, Self keeps us grounded and whole in the press and craziness of our life. Our focus has to be on maintaining the connection with the inner guides—with the essential values which declare who we are and what we are about—and letting nature take its course.
    
    We are not here to accomplish our goals or achieve our ends or make happen what we want to happen. We are here to exhibit, to express, the truth at the center of who we are by living in ways that are integral with that which is deepest, best and truest about us—and let the outcome be the outcome.
    
    We have to practice finding the center, learning to read the inner signals, trusting ourselves to our sense of what is being asked of us, and learning how to be who we are over time.
51. January Shoreline 06 B&W — Piedmont Trail at Lake Brandt, Greensboro, NC, January 11, 2013 — Be aware of your conflicts. There is nothing like conflict for creating symptoms. People who are awash in symptoms are awash in unacknowledged conflict.
    
    Conflict is always a conflict of interest and values. It’s going home for Thanksgiving, perhaps, or having our parents, or our partner’s parents, visit us for Thanksgiving. It’s a Situation, either chronic or acute, which you have to endure and cannot avoid. It’s a good that is not good for you. It is wanting what you have no business having. It’s being damned if you do and damned if you don’t. It isn’t something we can do something about.
    
    We can’t disappear our conflicts. Conflict is pain that has to be borne consciously. They are angels/demons we wrestle with for the blessing (that would be growing up), or dismiss, discount, deny, ignore for the blessing (that would be symptoms).
    
    The only way to transform a conflict is to face it, square up to it, bear it consciously over time. We cannot be rid of them without growing beyond them. Remember, there is nothing wrong with our lives, or with us, that growing up won’t fix. The only thing that grows us up is facing diligently the pain we have to outgrow.
    
    Make your conflicts conscious. Do not hide from the pain. Things will shift in time. But. You cannot hurry the time of your deliverance—you can only be conscious of your need to be delivered. You can delay deliverance indefinitely by refusing to be aware of your need to be delivered. It’s your choice. A conflict about what to do with conflict.
52. Barred Owl 08 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, January 13, 2013 — The measure of every doctrine or belief is the impact for good it has on our life—the degree to which it enables us to live a life we would be proud to live—to live the life that is OUR life to live. NOT someone else’s idea of our life, but OUR heartfelt certainty that we are one with the life that is our life to live.
    
    If a belief or a doctrine doesn’t impact our life for the good in this way, it needs to be on the next stage out of town. Living aligned with the life that is our life to live is hard enough without the distraction of beliefs and doctrines that don’t help with the work that is ours to do.
    
    Find what you need to help you live your life, and live it—and let that be enough, because it is.
53. A Natural Still Life — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, January 11, 2013 — We follow our own heart to the path that is ours to walk. We are our own guide to the good. But it isn’t what we want that leads the way. It’s what we know needs to be done.
    
    We are at odds with ourselves. The guide is at the mercy of followers with minds of their own. Whose side are we on? There is that which needs to be done, which needs us to do it, which we are perfectly suited for and equipped to handle, and we don’t want to do it. We have bigger ideas. Better ideas. Fancier ideas for ourselves. We have a finer life in mind.
    
    Our heart is not the seat of guiding desire, that would be our eyes. We have eyes for other things. The fruit in the garden was a delight to the eyes. The lights and action of Gay Paree thrill and enchant all those who see them. Seeing is believing and our eyes lead us spellbound to Glory. Only not really.
    
    Lost sheep wake up at nightfall. And follow, not their eyes, back home, but their hearts—their inner sense of direction—listening, finally, to The One Who Knows within, past all the turns their eyes are sure are IT to where they belong, which they knew all along, but dismissed as not worthy of them, beneath them, not their style, with their eyes focused on other things.
54. Black-capped Chickadee — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, January 5, 2013 — Know what your business is and what it is not. Ask yourself, “What’s it to you?” at the right places during your day. Jesus said, “Don’t judge.” Same as asking, “What’s it to you?”
55. January Blooms 03 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, January 22, 2013 — If I could get all of you together in a room, and remove from you your insecurities, and uncertainties, and your need for the rest of them to like you, and have you tell me in front of all the rest of them what you know to be true that you haven’t heard from some other source, and have the rest of them receive that with compassion and appreciation, without thinking they have to refute it or improve it, I’m thinking that would make a difference for the good in the lives of all of us.
    
    Just in case we ever get that opportunity, start practicing by thinking about the things you know to be true that you haven’t heard from some other source, and by listening to what others have to say with compassion and appreciation. I’m thinking that will make a difference for the good in the lives of all of us.
56. January Shoreline 07 — Piedmont Trail, Lake Brandt, Greensboro, NC, January 11, 2013 — Who has your best interests at heart? The answer better be you. It would be nice to have a buddy, or a partner, or a spouse you could count on to be on your side, watching your sheep, guarding your coffers, protecting your borders, but. No one has quite the investment in you that you have.
    
    You cannot be casual with you. “Whatever” will not do. You have to rank at least as high as everyone else in you life. You get every bit as much of your kindness and consideration as anyone else does. Do not neglect what is important to you in favor of what is important to someone else all of the time, or even most of the time.
    
    Who is going to take care of you, and your interests, and your life if you don’t? Your life needs YOU to live it—with out waiting for the rest of them to grant you permission or to ask how they can help.
    
    What can you do in the interest of you today?
57. Wetlands Geese 15 — Guilford County near Summerfield, NC, January 11, 2013 — We spend our lives growing up to be who we are. These are not two things. These are one thing. When we grow up, we are who we are. We cannot be who we are without growing up. When we are who we are, we are grown up.
    
    But, because there is always more to us than meets the eye, we are always becoming who we are—we are always growing up. There is no end to it. There is no steady state of being. We are always becoming, always a work in process, in progress.
    
    And the work is done in the form of developmental tasks. We crawl, we walk, we cut our teeth and talk—and every stage of life has its tasks that are unique to that stage. We cannot skip a stage or fail to work through the tasks that are imposed by that stage. We cannot grow up without completing the tasks required for maturation.
    
    The tasks produce maturation. The most immature among us are stuck in a stage (16 – 18 seems to be a favorite time to not grow beyond), and act as though they still are there.
    
    As we age the work becomes making our peace with the life we lived, saying our good-byes (Not literally, but letting go of the things that have meant so much to us—consciously, intentionally, releasing our hold on what was life, giving away favorite items, perhaps, relinquishing our place—letting the daughters and sons-in-law prepare Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners, etc.) and preparing to die. And, of course, no one relishes doing any of these things, so we resist the tasks and do not grow through the final stage of life.
    
    But the work is to grow up to be who we are, and we cannot quit the work prematurely, just because we don’t like the tasks of a particular stage of development. We do the work until it is done, like it or not.
58. Grebe Moon — Lake Brandt, Bur-Mil Park Access, Greensboro, NC, January 23, 2013 — We each have to work out our own life. We each have to make it work. We each have to become who we are within the time and place—context and circumstances—of our living.
    
    Some of us are luckier than others. None of us has it easy. The truth of our life is the bed we sleep in at night and the world we wake up to each morning and what we do with it between the waking and the sleeping.
    
    Being awake is the hard part. Part of being awake is waking up to how soundly we are sleeping as we go through the day.
    
    The work of working out our own life begins with paying attention. Seeing what we look at. Hearing what we listen to. Knowing what we know. If you think that’s easy, take your seat and tell them to open the chute.
59. Mallard In Flight 13 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, January 13, 2013 — Do not reject, dismiss, disregard, disrespect, your current life. Your life will lead to your LIFE when lived with compassion, acceptance and awareness.
    
    The path to the Promised Land begins under your feet, right here, right now. You are standing on it. Start where you are and open your eyes.
    
    Aligned with the Center, with the Inner Self, we are aligned also with nature. Dancing with nature, we are often in the right place at the right time.
    
    Aligned with the Center, the power of the realm—the Force—is with us in the work that is to be done. The Force is not with us for any work, but for the work that is ours to do whether we want to or not.
    
    We cannot trick or manipulate the Force into being with us in work that is off-center, out of sync with the Core of Being and Life, about what we want, and wish for, and dream of, and adore.
    
    The idea that the Universe will throw open it’s arms to welcome and assist you if you think certain magical thoughts has no basis in reality. You will find what you need to deal with the stuff that comes at you when you take up the task of doing what needs you to do it whether you want to or not—but that’s as much as you can expect.
    
    An act that is good, that is exactly what the situation requires, what the moment needs, doesn’t do anything for us, doesn’t return anything to us. What we send out does not come back to us. It goes out beyond us, on and on, indefinitely, creating ripples of good past all reckoning. But to expect anything for ourselves is to miss the point entirely.
    
    We are called to live our life, to apply our gifts, to exercise our art, in the service of the Center and Source of Life and Being. It is a great adventure and we get to experience the full wonder of it when we give ourselves to the work that needs us to do it. It’s called being alive. You can’t beat it with anything, anywhere. It’s waiting for you to say, “Okay. Here I am. I’m all yours. How can I help? Let’s go!” and mean it.
60. Hitting the Ice — “ICE? Nobody said anything about ICE!” The Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, January 23, 2013 — We are here to do what we can with it. To see what we can do with it. To be as good for it as we can imagine being.
    
    If you wanted something different, something better, something more it isn’t surprising. Everyone does.
    
    Getting over what we thought it was about and being about what it is about takes most of our life.
    
    You’d think things would be more efficiently run—that we wouldn’t spend our life figuring out what we are to do with our life. That’s baseball for you.
61. Reedy Fork Sunset H Panorama 03 — Lake Brandt Greenway, Bur-Mil Park Access, Greensboro, NC, January 24, 2013 — There is no straight path to the Promised Land, or the Grail Castle, or the Kingdom of God, or Nirvana, or the Elysian Fields, or Paradise, or the Tao, or wherever it is we think we are going. And no shortcuts.
    
    My best advice is to stay far away from those offering a map and a guidebook and a ready list of Do’s and Don’t’s and a fat promise to get you there quickly if you will just sit down, shut up, ask no questions, believe what you are told to believe, and do what you are told.
    
    You gotcha inner sense of what is good for you and what is bad, what is right for you and what is wrong, where you belong and where you have no business being. You got an inner way of resonating with the outer world, or not. You got the “Uh-Oh Feeling.” And you got your looks. That’s all it takes to find the way that is The Way for you.
    
    You may stumble around some, make some messes, have to figure your way out of some blind canyons, and spend a fair amount of time not-knowing what to do next but. You have all the ingredients to live aligned with the Center, the Core, the Ground of Life and Being.
    
    What do birds know about flying, or kids know about riding bicycles, that can be learned from some guidebook, or lecture, or explanation? You learn to live by LIVING! So, stop worrying about making mistakes and get in there and mix it up. Do your thing until you figure out what your thing is and then give yourself to it whole-hog all the way to wherever it is you will be when you get there.
62. Reedy Fork Sunset H Panorama 01 — Lake Brandt Greenway, Bur-Mill Park Access, Greensboro, NC, January 24, 2013 — This isn’t hard. Would you trust me to sweeten your coffee for you? How many of you don’t drink coffee? Show of hands. YOU certainly wouldn’t trust me to sweeten your coffee for you! What if I brought you a cup of coffee sweetened just the way you ought to like it? How many of you would drink that and smile, and thank me, and ask for a second cup?
    
    People you wouldn’t trust to sweeten your coffee for you are telling you how to live your life. If you are going to take charge of your own coffee sweetening—your own coffee drinking or not drinking—what do you mean handing your LIFE over to the spiritual masters, wizards, whizzes and gurus? If they don’t know, or care, about your coffee, what are they doing with your LIFE?
    
    You trust yourself to be in charge of your coffee drinking, or not drinking—to be responsible for making your own menu selections and clothing choices. What do you mean giving your LIFE over to someone else? If you are going to give something away, give away your sock preference. Give away something that doesn’t have implications for your LIFE. Ask the gurus and the whizzes what color socks you should wear. Do your own living.
    
    Make your own mistakes. Figure things out for yourself. Decide for yourself what to do and what to leave undone. And, if you decide you just have to have some authority to tell you how to live your life, look theirs over really carefully before you hand yourself over to them. Make sure they are living a life you would be proud to call your own, right down to the color of their socks.
63. Reedy Fork Sunset H Panorama 02 — Lake Brandt Greenway, Bur-Mill Park Access, Greensboro, NC, January 24, 2013 — Cooking is a simple matter of getting the ratios right, and who is to determine what “right” is? That would be the cook.
    
    You are cooking up your own life. A recipe is only good for offering suggestions of ingredients and proportions. Each cook has to modify or transform the recipe to suit the cook’s tastes and interests.
    
    You have to get the ratios right for yourself over time. This means life is an experiment in living, or living is an experiment with life. Get in there and stir something up. See what you think. Try it again with different ratios and ingredients. You will get it right—as you determine right—over time.
    
    And then it will be on to another dish, or aspect of life and living. May you die with cookies in the oven and crumbs on your plate.
64. Reedy Fork Sunset H Panorama 04 — Lake Brandt Greenway, Bur-Mill Park Access, Greensboro, NC, January 24, 2013 — The Way is the way it is and not some other way instead. Now, my deep hunch is that The Way is different for each of us, idiosyncratic for each of us—The Way is Our Own Way, perfectly suited for us but. It requires us to be true to ourselves.
    
    This is a significant limitation for those of us who think there are no boundaries and we can do anything we want to. We can want what we have no business having. And to traipse off after some wants is to leave The Way that is our way, abandon the calling that is our calling, neglect the responsibilities and duties that are our responsibilities and duties and wander without bearings or landmarks in a wilderness of our own making. Insisting on having OUR way, we depart from the way that was ours before we were born and deny the truth of our own soul and inner guide.
    
    This is a problem. And it takes us to the heart of the matter. That would be heart. We have to have the heart to remain true to our heart in spite of delightful enticements and promises of fortune and glory unequaled in the annals of time or anywhere else.
    
    We have to be faithful, loyal and true to the truth of our own heart. We cannot be discarding The Way in favor of some more enchanting way, or following The Way as long as the going is easy and we are in the mood for a stroll.
    
    This is our life’s work that we are engaged in. The Way for us is The Way for us and we can’t whistle up some alternative way, some surrogate way that we would prefer or wish were ours. That isn’t how it works.
    
    When some interesting invitation comes along, we have to evaluate it in light of The Way that is Our Way and what it requires and allows. If The Way is not clear, that’s that. “I’d love to, but The Way is not clear,” is as much as we need to say. If they say, “But wouldn’t it be nice if the way WERE clear? Why don’t you see what you can do to move things out of the way?” You have to respond, “Whose way would that be?” Clearly not yours. Your Way is not clear, and to clear it would be to betray your Way in favor of their way for you, which you cannot do and be on Your Way.
    
    Whose way is Your Way? The answer better be Your Way is Your Way. Be true to it no matter what. Being true to Your Way is being true to yourself, to your own heart. It’s the only Way to be.
65. This is great, isn’t it? It is for me anyway. I’m iced in, so I eat cinnamon rolls and drink hot chocolate which I made with 100% cacao (to feel righteous) and laced with a tsp of bourbon (to compliment the bourbon-brown-sugar glaze on the cinnamon rolls) instead of vanilla, and write. I call that making the most of the opportunity afforded by being closed off from taking photos.
    
    The subject is sunsets. There are now four Reedy Fork Sunset Panoramas posted, which are actually three. Numbers 02 and 03 are really the same shot, just taken in two different ways. So, 01, 02/03, and 04 represent the range of sunsets available in yesterday’s sunset. I could have started before the sun went down and added several more sunsets to the one sunset on January 24.
    
    In every phenomenal sunset there are a dozen sunsets. The word “phenomenal” is the key. What makes a phenomenal sunset are clouds. The sun goes down every day, but without clouds, it just drops out of sight. I call these “naked sunsets” because there is nothing to “deck it out,” “dress it up,” make it memorable.
    
    Clouds are the key. They have to be high enough, heavy enough, and interesting enough to reflect the sun’s light as the earth turns. A sunset is nothing without clouds, so watch the clouds. Learn to tell when they are right and when they are wrong. And when they are right stay with them until the light goes out—generally about 30 minutes after the sun sets.
    
    Yesterday, the sunset was at 5:36. The show was over about 6:05. And the sky changed significantly and beautifully three or four times during that “going down” of the sun. And the water reflecting the sky changed as the wind shifted and died. Things were different over time. So, don’t think you’ve seen a sunset when the sun disappears under the horizon. Stay with it. Dance with it, as our ancestors have done for tens of thousands of years.
66. Cardinal 01 Detail — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, January 23, 2013 — To say, “Everything is grist for the mill,” is not to say, “There is a reason for everything.” The things that happen to us do not happen for a reason, as a part of the unfolding of some plan that is gradually falling into place, piece by piece, immutable, invariable, indisputable, click…click…click… over the full course of time.
    
    The things that happen to us are the matrix, the medium, the “cosmic soup,” out of which the future comes, where more things happen and more futures are formed and shaped.
    
    We form and shape our future by the way we respond to what happens in our present. The future we had is transformed by the impact of the things that happen to us, and we shape that transformation by the nature and quality of our response. What happens to us is “grist for the mill,” which we take and use in making the “flour” which makes the “bread” that becomes our life in the aftermath of the life-altering event.
    
    Nothing has to be what it is. Anything can happen at any time. What we do about it shapes what becomes of it, and us, over the course of our life. What happens is not nearly as important as what happens next.
67. Mallard Reflections — Lake Brandt, Bur-Mil Park, Greensboro, NC, January 23, 2013 — Do what you have to do with such a willing spirit that it—and anyone watching—cannot tell whether you want to do it or not. This is called squaring up to your life.
    
    It is quite different from being compelled to mow the grass because your father commanded it. It is mowing your own grass when you don’t want to because it needs mowing and it is your grass. It is feeding the baby at 2 AM, or changing the baby 25 times a day. We stand up and do the thing that needs us to do it exactly as it should be done
    
    You can even tell the baby exactly how you feel about changing all those diapers if you do it in a sweet baby-talk tone of voice. The baby knows tones, not vocabulary. You can get by a lot with the baby if you use the right tone. Same thing goes with your dog. Your cat might catch on.
68. Used in Short Talks On Contradictions, etc., Sassafras Leaves — Guilford Courthouse National Military Park, Greensboro, NC, October 27, 2012 — Robert Pirsig, in “Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” said, “The only Zen you find on tops of mountains is the Zen you bring there.” He could have said the same thing about enlightenment. Or religion. Or The Way.
    
    Pirsig also said, “Truth comes knocking at your door and you say, ‘Go away! I’m looking for truth!’” Whatever you are looking for is standing right before you and goes with you wherever you go.
    
    My recommendation is that you sit with your life—with all of them. There is the life you are living. The life you are expected to live by Those Who Know Best. The life you wish you were living. The life you truly ought to live—the life that is yours to live—that no one but you can live. The life you think you have to live to pay the bills. I don’t know how many other lives there may be, but this is a reasonable start.
    
    Sit with all of these lives. Listen to them all. Converse with them all. Explore them. Investigate them. Walk among them. Get to know them in depth. See all there is to see about them. Do not allow them to hide anything from you. This may take a while.
    
    My idea is that we spend our life running from our life. Our life comes knocking on our door and we say, “Go away! I’m looking for my life!”
    
    Religion is a favorite way of hiding from our life. Religion as it is generally practiced consists of listening to someone else, or perhaps The Bible—but it is always the Bible as someone else interprets it, as someone else tells us what the Bible says and what the Bible means—listening to someone else tell us what to do with our life and expecting to like the life they tell us to live, or thinking we ought to like the life they tell us to live, and thinking there is something wrong with us when we don’t.
    
    Stop hiding from your life! From any of them! Square up to them all. Look at them all and see what you are looking at! Listen to them all. Get to know all of them very well.
    
    This will bring your conflicts to life. Your contraries. Your contradictions and oppositions. You get to wherever it is you think you are going (Paradise, etc) by squaring up to your conflicts—to the truth of your life in all its forms.
    
    No one can do this for you. Some of us can help you bear the pain. Therapists are supposed to be good at this, for instance. But. You have to do the work. The work consists of seeing, hearing, understanding, knowing, doing (What needs to be done about what you see, hear, understand and know), and being (Who you are within the context and circumstances, terms and conditions, of your life. All of them).
69. Used in Short Talks On Contradiction, etc., Reedy Fork Sunset H 03 — Lake Brandt Greenway, Bur-Mil Park Access, Greensboro, NC, January 24, 2013 — We need to take a life inventory every two weeks, which is a completely arbitrary time frame, but it has to be often and it has to be carefully considered. We cannot run through it or check it off in an absent-minded kind of way.
    
    At least two questions need to be asked, and followed up with all the ones they generate: How do you feel about your life? And, Everything is just fine except for what?
    
    In exploring the questions, Three things need to be borne in mind: 1) We are here to grow up and become who we are. 2) We do that by facing, reconciling and integrating our conflicts and contradictions. 3) We avoid that by focusing on what They are doing that makes our life difficult and how They need to change—for example, “My life is fine except for the people in it who will not grow up!”
70. Sunrise — Cape Hatteras National Seashore, Ocracoke Island, NC, October 20, 2012 — The test is to live in the outer world aligned with the inner world. Our ideas for ourselves have to be in line with our Self’s ideas for us. Inner alignment is the heart of a well-lived life.
    
    Working to be aligned with ourselves is a life-long task. The more aligned within we are, the more grown-up we are, the more integrated we are, the more whole, complete and at peace we are.
    
    There is much that would distract us from the work of living aligned with our inner Self, so we have to make the work conscious, and check in with ourselves from time to time by attending our body and looking for the “clues and cues” that might suggest we are out of sync and need to get back on track.
71. Sunset — Pamlico Sound, Cape Hatteras National Seashore, Ocracoke Island, NC, October 19, 2012 — It isn’t what you know, or what you believe, or what you think, or how well you can articulate it, argue the point, win the debate and the day. It’s how you live your life. The life you are living and the life that is yours to live within the life you are living.
    
    Living your life, both of them, will grow you up. Wake you up. Wise you up. And enable you to be good company.
    
    If you are going to be anything, be good company. Be a good place to be. Be the kind of person people are glad to see coming and sorry to see going.
    
    The only value of a belief is the degree to which it enables you to live your life—both of them—the way it needs to be lived in the time and place of your living. That does not mean keeping the rules. It means reading the situation and offering what is needed in the situation—what is appropriate to the situation—even though it might give your mother palpitations and your grandmother would never understand.
    
    Live your life—both of them—the way it needs to be lived in the time and place of your living. And if you don’t know how it needs to be lived, bet it all on what resonates with you, on what brings joy to your soul, never mind what your mother or grandmother might think.
72. Yellow Leaves 02 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, November 02, 2012 — We are spiritual to the extent that we are who we are. We cannot be who we are without being spiritual—without being aligned with the Core of Life and Being—without being at one with and intensely, and intently, loyal to the life that is our life to live and the invisible guide to that life and guardian of that life.
    
    So, rather than give us the lingo, the religions of the world would do better by enabling us to find and live the life that is at the heart of each of us, waiting to come forth in the world of space and time.
    
    We each have a life that is unique to us, so what are we doing living bland little cookie-cutter lives that look exactly like everyone else’s? “The spirit is like the wind that blows where it will,” remember. And those who are of the Spirit, that is, spiritual, will be like chips off the old block, following their own course to outlandish adventures and wild arrivals that are peculiar to each.
    
    If you want to be spiritual, be you. To. The. Core.
73. Mallard In Flight 14 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, January 27, 2013 — There are two questions you need to answer: 1) What do you need to be who you are? 2) What do you need to buy to be who you are?
    
    We need to buy the things that will enable us to come forth into our life, practicing our art, serving our gift, applying our genius to benefit the common good. I need a camera, for instance, and a computer. Not the most expensive, but costly enough to do what I need to do.
    
    I need food, clothing and shelter. I need transportation. And after a while I get to the end of the list of the things I need to buy to be who I am.
    
    The other question is trickier to answer and satisfy. I need the right kind of company. You don’t just whisk that up. I need encouragement. I need to listen, to look, to hear, to see. I need to ask, seek, knock. I need to believe in myself, in the validity of my gift, in what I do that is me. I need to be strong in my own cause, loyal to my colors, faithful to the inner core that bets everything on all of us.
    
    This list is long, and I keep thinking of things to add to it when I begin to think I’m about to wrap it up. And were do we go to find the items listed? It’s up to us to find what we need, but where? How?
    
    It helps to know what we are looking for without being too particular about what we want to find. Help comes from the strangest, most unpredictable, places. We have to be open and receptive with few restrictions regarding the type of help that is acceptable. We have to help them help us.
    
    Helping them help us begins with our thinking through what we need to be who we are, and actively seeking the things that are crucial to our development as a True Human Being.
74. Mallards In Flight 15 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, January 27, 2013 — There is a story that I will attribute to Joseph Campbell to the effect that at one period of Japan’s history, spiritual development—that is, the work to become a True Human Being—was postponed until the second half of life, because the first half consisted of too many competing responsibilities: Making a living, raising a family, tending your position in family and society, etc.
    
    When we retire we struggle to find things to fill our time. Then we go to the Home, they play Bingo with us. Giving ourselves to the adventure of True Human Beinghood would be the salvation—in more ways than one—of our later years.
75. Bog Gull — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, January 27, 2013 — Carl Jung said, “Get out of the sheep-shepherd game!” The shepherds are sheep and the sheep are shepherds. Stop thinking of yourself as someone else’s disciple and start thinking of yourself as a collaborator with all those who are engaged in the work of growing up and becoming who they are.
    
    We help each other along the way that is our own unique and particular way. We do not talk anyone else into doing it like we are doing it, except to say that when we do it like Jesus did it, for example, we are doing it like WE would do it.
    
    Jesus did not come laying down black footprints for us to step into. He said, “Who made me judge over you?”—or words to that effect. We have to grow up ourselves. We have to decide for ourselves what is to be done with our life, and do it.
    
    And it helps to talk things over with those who know how to listen—who know how to listen us to the truth of our own life, to the Core of our own being. We speak in order to hear what we have to say, and it helps to have those who know how to listen so we can hear.
    
    It helps to have the right kind of company, the right kind of companions, who collaborate with us in the task that belongs equally to all of us: Seeing, hearing, understanding—knowing how things are and how things ought to be—doing what needs to be done to make things more like they ought to be in each situation as it arises, and being who we are within the terms and conditions, nature and circumstances of the time and place of our living.
    
    We have to work all of this out, and it helps to have the companionship of those who are working it out in their own way along with us—respecting each other’s work and honoring each other for doing it.
76. Sunset Mirror 01 — Reedy Fork, Lake Brandt Greenway, Bur-Mil Park Access, Greensboro, NC, January 24, 2013 — The most radically counter-cultural realization we can make, embrace and live out in the world is: There is nothing in it for us beyond the experience of being alive.
    
    Every New Agey strategy to come along comes down to “How to get yours without doing much for it.” We think the right thoughts and attract prosperity. We pray the right prayer and revel in fortune and glory. The Secret is really The Trick for Getting What You Want By Manipulating the Universe into Paying Off Big Time. “We give to get.” “What you send out comes back to you a hundred-fold.”
    
    When the early settlers moved to North Dakota, they knew they were going into a barren wilderness, but were told by preachers preaching the gospel of the culture, “Rain will follow the plow.” It didn’t but the railroads did, and the economy won even though the farmers lost.
    
    When someone tells you what you want to hear, look for what’s in it for them.
    
    We are here to serve ends that are not our ends. We fulfill our destiny when we live aligned with the drift of our soul, trusting it to be all that we need to do the work that is ours to do. Learning to be so aligned is learning to feel, to sense, what is right for us and what is wrong, what is good for us and what is bad. It is learning to live by instinct and intuition—bringing the rational, thinking, aspect of our intellect into play to solve the problems of working out the details of giving concrete existence to soul’s drift within the world of facts, social norms and codes, and repercussions.
    
    It is not a simple matter to be who we are in a world with it’s own ideas of who we ought to be. Our conscious mind is what we count on to work it out. Our unconscious mind is what we count on to guide us in the work that is ours to do. And, what we get out of it is doing it, having done it, and the experience of being alive, of becoming who we are.
    
    It’s heroic stuff. The Hero’s Journey. Me becoming me. You becoming you. In the time and place of our living.
77. Ducks In Flight 01 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, January 27, 2013 — Make the Hero’s Journey the entire focus of the second half of life. You don’t have to read Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell—you only have to do what you have always wanted to do, what you have always loved to do, and couldn’t do it, or couldn’t do it enough, because all those obligations, responsibilities, commitments and duties that abound in the first half of life kept getting in the way.
    
    Now your life can be YOUR life. You can live it the way you know it needs to be lived. And, if you are not yet in the second half of life, you can work it in as you are able right now, and plan your Escape From Egypt once you are able to make the stirring, bold, soulful proclamation: “Free at Last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty I’m Free at last!”
    
    The life that is ours to live, that needs us to live it, is the life we need to live—and it is adaptable to all climates, income levels and conditions of life. The most unexpected people are capable of the most astounding things. “The stone the builders reject,” remember, “becomes the chief cornerstone.”
    
    So, none of your whining, moaning, poor mouthing and complaining about not having what you need to do what needs to be done. Take the first step toward what needs to be done, toward what needs you to do it, and see what happens.
    
    You have to believe in your life, swear your loyalty and fidelity and devotion to your life, and imagine what you need to do to live it as fully as possible in the time left for living—and do it.
78. Hay Rake — Mountain Glory Farm, Patten, ME, September 24, 2012 — Here’s an easy way to practice restoring your connection to, what? Your Inner Guide? The One Who Knows Within? The Source of Life and Being? The Core, Heart, Center of our Soul/Self? Our Invisible Friend?
    
    Jung said, “There is within each of us another whom we do not know.” But we must know. We cannot live the rest of our life as unconscious of this very present Presence For Good in Our Life as fish are of the ocean in which they swim!
    
    We can practice restoring our connection with this Presence by simply asking “Yes? Or no?” before every choice we make and listen for the drift or pull to one or the other.
    
    We open the cabinet for a mug for our coffee and see which one pulls us today, or the clothes we select to wear in meeting the day. Practice sensing, feeling, an attraction to this, an aversion to that—and go with the feeling, without trying to understand, explain, justify, excuse or defend the practice.
    
    We are opening ourselves to the “other whom we do not know.” We are placing ourselves in the service of more than meets the eye. We are taking seriously the invisible ground of existence. And seeing where it goes.
79. Big Creek 02 — Great Smoky Mountains National Park, NC/TN, November 7, 2007 — Living is not a matter of doing it the way we see it being done around us. It’s a matter of listening to our own Core and doing it the way it needs us to do it.
    
    It is strange that we are not taught to do that early on—that we are cut off from the Core early on and told to do what we are told to do—never mind how it feels to do it. And we spend the rest of our lives finding our way back to living in sync with the Inner Guide.
    
    How does it feel to live the life you are living? How do you feel about your life? More on the beam than off? More off the beam than on?
    
    We aren’t likely to live the life that is our life to live by living as we see it being done around us. It’s like learning to walk all over again. We have to trust ourselves to know when we are in sync and well balanced and when we are not, no matter what those around us might think.
80. Linville Falls 01 — Blue Ridge Parkway, NC, July 13, 2012 — Just being open to the possibility of an invisible other within whom we do not know—just being curious about the possibility—just being willing to play with the idea that there may be something to it—just being receptive to the notion that our way may not be the best way for us and that there is another’s way that might be better suited to serve our destiny and bring forth our life… helps with the shift from running things with flow charts and five year plans and an inviolable reason for everything we do to placing our intellect, our reason, our rational mind in the service of making the unconscious conscious and collaborating in a thinking/feeling way to create a life that is more whole, integrated and alive than one that either might produce alone. That’s a great sentence isn’t it?
81. Big Creek 07 Panorama — Great Smoky Mountains National Park, NC/TN, November 7, 2007 — Brain Andreas says, “Everything changed the day I figured out there was exactly enough time for the important things in my life.”
    
    Of course, those are the things we think are important and not the things other people think are important.
    
    We cannot wait for everybody else to grow up before we do. We have to serve what we understand to be important over their resistance, opposition, objection. That will grow us up. Whether they ever do is up to them.
82. Reedy Fork Sunset H 04 — Lake Brandt Greenway, Bur-Mil Park Access, Greensboro, NC, January 24, 2013 — Marie-Louise von Franz said, “We have to solve our own problems and find out for ourselves what is right for us.”
    
    Part of the work of growing up is trusting ourselves to our own sense of what is right, of what needs to be done in the situation as it arises, and taking what comes as the price we pay for learning to find our own way through our life.
    
    We can hand ourselves over to our family or our spouse or partner or Those Who Know Best And Must Be Pleased, and never have to make another decision. Or. We can pick up our own cross every day and go where we think the path is taking us—and, of course, pay the price of our stubborn independence.
    
    This is as difficult a call as there is to make. It is hell being self-determined and self-reliant. And we are afraid to take the chance of finding out if we can do it and survive. Those of us who go that route must have compassion and understanding for those of us who do not, and be a soft presence in our life, for it may be that we may even yet take our chances with the life yet to be lived.
83. 
    The Sound — Pamlico Sound, Cape Hatteras National Seashore, Ocracoke Island, NC, October 21, 2012 — Take Marie-Louise von Franz’ statement: “We have to solve our own problems and find out for ourselves what is right for us,” and make it your mantra.
    
    This is the work of maturation. We don’t grow up without doing this. Without becoming skilled at this. Without “solving our own problems and finding out for ourselves what is right for us.” And living in its service all our life long.
84. Big Creek 06 Panorama — Great Smoky Mountains National Park, NC/TN, November 7, 2001 — In each moment, we have to work out the proper ratios between what is us and what is not us. Jerks and SOBs are about 100% toward the what is in their favor end of the spectrum, wimps and wusses are about 100% toward the what is to their detriment end of the spectrum. The rest of us fall out somewhere in between.
    
    It’s a trick being true to ourselves without the sensitive limits of what some situations call for. My recommendation is that you play the role—you play the part the situation requires you to play, and you play it with aplomb, kindness, compassion and grace, and end it when it’s over and exit when you can.
    
    You can play the part the situation calls you to play without violating your integrity or selling yourself out. Hollywood actors are constantly playing parts, assuming roles, that are not who they are. They do not lose themselves doing it. They don’t sell themselves out doing it. They don’t prostitute themselves doing it. They are actors acting a part.
    
    Life calls for the actor in all of us from time to time. We are handed a part by the situation as it arises—a role which calls us to do that which we would never wish for ourselves with a million wishes and 10 left over that we couldn’t imagine what to do with. We hand ourselves over to the actor within and go do the part with aplomb, kindness, compassion and grace. And end it when it is over, and exit when we can.
85. False Kiva — Canyonlands National Park near Moab, UT, May 14, 2010 — Our current approach to situations as they develop is two-fold. To exploit them to our personal advantage is our first priority and to prevent others from exploiting us to their advantage is our second priority. How can we hold on to what we have and get more is the question that fuels our way through the world.
    
    That is a question that can come to life in the absence of any grounding, guiding, sense of purpose. When our mission is to have and get instead of bringing forth out gift and serving our art, we have narrow little lives that gauge their value by the size of their house and their bank accounts.
    
    I have a landscaping crew doing some stone work on a patio and a low wall coming up our driveway. These three guys are artists with stone but they work for people who don’t appreciate their artistry—who want “something nice” for the lowest possible price. We should want their best and pay for it.
    
    Instead of trying to exploit the other, or seeing the other as a utilitarian functionary in the production of the grandest life we can manage, we have to think in terms of doing right by the other and the other doing right by us. Even if it does not produce a fundamental cultural shift in how things are done.
86. Hooded Merganser in Flight 05 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, January 28, 2013 — We cannot will ourselves to grow up. We grow up against our will. Against ourselves. We see what is right and accede to it. We yield. Stand aside. Say “YES!” to that which is the way it must be, like it or not.
    
    Every time we do that in our life, we pass a test, turn a corner, take one giant step toward the Promised Land, which doesn’t get any closer, and if we studied that for a while, we would realize that arrival doesn’t bring us anything that the Way doesn’t provide.
    
    Growing up is a process without end, but with gifts and wonders unceasing.
    
    We think it would be easier if someone would give us the map and tell us what to do, and so the popularity of Orthodox Religions worldwide. No one can give us what we want and have it work. We have to not want it. But no one can give us what we don’t want. And so, we have to live our ways into dead-ends and stone walls and sudden drop offs from high cliffs.
    
    “Boom!”, as John Madden would say, what we don’t want blindsides us and steamrolls us and slams us to the mat with a Choke Hold, a Torture Rack, a Back-Breaker Horizontal and a Belly-to-Belly Piledriver—finishing off with a Rude Awakening. Leaving us with no where to turn but in.
    
    So we turn ourselves in. We hand ourselves over. We say, “This is all my fault. I’m so sorry. I will not do that again ever.” And we don’t, but that doesn’t save us from all the other arrogant assumptions we don’t catch until it’s too late and uh-oh here we go again.
    
    We grow up one missed sign at a time. Can’t do it any other way. Can’t read a book. Listen to a lecture or a testimony. See a movie. Believe all the doctrines of organized religion, or have weekly sessions with people who know everything. We live our way there. One missed sign at a time.
    
    We will get to “I’m sorry,” quicker though, and that will help.
87. Big Creek 04 — Great Smoky Mountains National Park, NC/TN, November 7, 2007 — We wouldn’t write it up like this. Our circumstances, which keep coming at us in ways that require us to grow up and be who we are, bear no similarity to the things we would write into the script.
    
    In living our life, we become a different person from who we would be if we lived life according to our idea of how life ought to be lived.
    
    We cannot grow up apart from encounters that grow us up. We couldn’t write up The Truth, any more than we can “handle it.” We cannot imagine reality as it comes to us right out of the blue, blindsiding us with things we couldn’t possibly think up and prepare for.
    
    We have to make up what we do with it on the spot, as well as we know how, learning how to be be better prepared for that if it ever comes again, which sometimes it does, or close enough. Then we can smile and say, “I’ve seen you before, or maybe it was your Daddy. Tell him hi for me when you see him next. He might remember me, but he might not recognize me now.”
88. Green River Canyon — Canyonlands National Park near Moab, UT, September 23, 2007 — Freedom is way too much responsibility. We want freedom FROM responsibility, which amounts to bondage. It’s all in how you spin it.
    
    We don’t seem to be able to be any more mature than we are but. And here’s where the hope of the unknown enters the picture. There is more to us than meets the eye. And we are capable of rising to meet any circumstance that comes along. Where does that come from? How is it that some of us can take to hiding the Jews? Or constructing the Underground Railroad?
    
    Joseph Campbell said, “It took the Cyclops to bring forth the Hero in Ulysses.” Circumstance grows us up—against our will—by calling us to stand up and do what must be done. “Face it! Deal with it!” And some do. It is absolutely, beautifully, unaccountable and yet dependable. We cannot predict who will do what needs to be done and who will look away, but some will do the right thing.
    
    I find that to be ground for trusting ourselves to That Which We Do Not Know, which is what we are unconscious of, which, for all I know is The Unconscious that is just on the other side of Consciousness.
    
    Anyway, I feel encouraged to think we are not alone, and that we are being called beyond ourselves—to grow beyond ourselves—to grow up and do what needs us to do it. I wish the way were clearer to being clear about what is being asked of us.
    
    Which leaves it up to us to clear the way between us and The Way, to learn the language of the unconscious, to see what we look at, to notice what catches our eye, and to be receptive to signs and wonders of the most insignificant variety. We’re back to responsibility.
89. Silver Lake 01 — Cape Hatteras National Seashore, Ocracoke Island, NC, November 1, 2009 — Look. It’s like this. We cannot be prepared for the next situation as it arises. We cannot practice for it. We cannot rehearse. We cannot memorize our lines and step into it with confidence knowing what we must to do be exactly what it needs. AND we can rise to any occasion.
    
    What we need is the equivalent of the helmet Luke Skywalker put on to practice feeling his response to a developing situation he could not see. “Trust the Force, Luke!” We need to practice trusting the Force, the nudge, the sense of what needs to be done here, now—and not thinking, but doing it.
    
    Luke made a lot of mistakes. Mistakes are the price we pay to know what we need to know. No one ever found their way to The Way, or stayed on it, without screwing up. You have to be okay with missing signs. We learn to see them that way. And you have to hold out for the possibility that your read was the exactly correct one and that the mistake belongs to those who are laughing at you.
    
    Happened that way with Jesus. Who knows? It could happen again.
90. Used in Short Talks On Contradiction, etc., Ocean Isle Sunrise — Ocean Isle, NC, May 2, 2008 — We are here to grow up and be who we are. The only thing that can grow us up is the impact of life experience. How we respond to the experience of being alive grows us up or shuts us down, arrests our development, and keeps us running from diversion to distraction, losing ourselves in a life of escape and denial forever.
    
    Here is the truth we cannot handle: What we want keeps us from having what we want. Or, to put it another way: We can have what we want but we have to give up what we want to have it.
    
    We grow up when we face up to the truth of this basic contradiction, and wade right into it, and give it a big juicy wet one right on the kisser, and have what we want, and give up what we want in order to have it, and let that be the way it is because that is the way it is, and we get no choice about some matters.
    
    How we deal with being stuck with the choices that are ours—We don’t get to choose our choices—tells the tale.
91. The Shape of Time 01 — Antelope Canyon near Page, AZ, May 18, 2010 — There is what we have to do, like homework or going to work, and there is what we want to do like sleeping in or going for a stroll, and there is what we ought to do, like clean the shower, and there is what must do, like whatever it is we know needs to be done in the here and now of our living and we are right there so we say, “I’ll do it!” before we know what we are doing.
    
    Pay attention to the Musts when they come along, to the things that you must do and you get no say in the matter. The things we do in the grip of some force greater than we are—not guilt, or shame, or fear, but benevolent goodwill out of the blue—are the things that know our name. They show us who we are.
    
    Listen closely to these things. There may be a theme to be found among them. It may tell you something about the way that is your way, and give you a clue or two about what to do with your life, at least for the short term.
92. Mesa Arch 02 — Canyonlands National Park near Moab, UT, May 11, 2010 — We keep it all in solution, waiting for the solution to emerge. We make all the conflicts conscious. Yes, that is true, and that is true, and that is true as well. And they are all mutually exclusive truths. That’s true, too.
    
    Stand—live—in the tension of competing, contradictory truths, and wait. Do not think you have to make it work—negotiate all the agreements—get the signatures on the newest treaty—make everybody happy… You only have to be aware of the problem, bearing the pain of the conflict, holding it to the light of consciousness, and waiting to see what happens.
    
    A shift will occur. Something you could never predict or imagine. Make a conflict conscious and it will drift toward solution on it’s own. Maybe not in your time frame. Oh well.
93. Horseshoe Bend Panorama 03 — Page, AZ, May 18, 2010 — Some people can need to be loved so much that no one is capable of loving them to their complete and everlasting satisfaction. “I just want to be loved!” or “I only want someone to love me!” can mean, “I want somebody to do my bidding 24/7/12/FOREVER!” Well, yeah. Take a number and get in line.
    
    I have never in all of my years of listening to people tell me what they want have heard anyone say, “I just want to grow up!” They want someone else to grow up. Their kids, their spouse, their parents, their… The list is long that doesn’t have their name on it.
    
    We are here to grow up and be who we are and we just want to be coddled, and cuddled and taken care of the way we want to be taken care of. And if anyone has a chance of ever waking anyone else up and turning them onto the way of becoming an independent, self-reliant, self-determined, responsible for themselves and their own life human being, he or she is going to have to look them in the eye and say, “We all have to solve our own problems and find out for ourselves what is right for us. We have to see what needs to happen in each situation as it arises and get up and do what needs to be done about it, whether we want to or not, every day for the rest of our life. That’s all there is to it. Now, go do it.”
94. Used in Short Talks On Contradiction, etc., Bryce Afternoon — Bryce Canyon National Park, Bryce Canyon, UT, May 15, 2012 — We throw ourselves into the breech between what life in the world of normal, apparent, reality requires of us and what living in synch with the Source of Life and Being requires of us. This is called living with a foot in different worlds, or walking two paths at the same time.
    
    We negotiate and integrate, make compromises and concessions and find ways of working things out, of making it work.
    
    You can lose your temper, become frustrated or/and depressed, moan, pine, and think it’s hopeless but it all rides on your doing the work of making it work. So, sit with the conflicts, contradictions, opposition and resistance and see what can be done. Ask for a guiding dream. Ask for help from the inner world. Tell them it is not so easy making things fit out here and to see what they can do about sending some instinct, insight and intuition your way.
    
    We can help ourselves simply by being conscious of the clash between worlds. The external world is in constant motion where multitasking is a way of life. The internal world requires meditative stillness for perception to become clear and still, small, voices to be heard.
    
    We blend the opposites, soften the harsh reactions, and see what we can do to make peace and ease relations between the worlds.
95. The Shape of Time 02 — Antelope Canyon, Page, AZ, May 18, 2010 —  As we grow up, we grow in wisdom and grace. We grow in compassion, kindness and understanding. We grow in drawing lines the way they need to be drawn, and doing what is appropriate in the time and place of our living, like it or not.
    
    We grow in saying “No,” when “No” should be said, and “Yes,” when “Yes” should be said. In being what the occasion calls for. In seeing into the heart of things, and knowing what’s what, and what to do about it.
    
    As we grow up, we develop eyes the see things as they are, ears that hear what is being said and what is not being said, hearts that respond to the all-ness of each moment in both worlds, inner and outer, in ways that respect and honor the needs of each, and integrate/reconcile both, without violating the integrity of either.
    
    Nobody can do any of these things straight from the womb. It takes a lot of living to be alive. I hope you aren’t in a hurry to get wherever it is you think you’re going. Nothing slows us down like trying to hurry things up.
96. Dome Sunset — Clingman’s Dome Parking Lot, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, NC/TN, November 2006 — We were praying for millions of years before prayer became rational, logical, vocal. There were the prayers of labor and delivery. The soft prayers of sexual pleasure. The prayers of the dance and the hunt. The prayers of preparation for war and the prayers of battle. The prayers of mourning and grief. The prayers of thanksgiving and gratitude.
    
    They were all prayers of the heart, not the head. Then the head got involved, took over, and no one remembered how to pray. We wrote prayer books to help us out, and developed doctrines and theology to make sense of it. To make sense of it.
    
    Once prayer became sensible it became sterile. What kind of prayer would make sense? Prayer speaks of experience at the edge of life and death. Make sense of that if you dare, then explain it to us as we laugh and walk away, leaving you to make sense of that.
97. The Shape of Time 03 — Antelope Canyon, Page, AZ, May 18, 2010 — Who is behind The Pose is the question. The Pose being the way we present ourselves to the world. Our Public Face.
    
    Who are we when no one is looking? Who would we be if no one were looking? What’s it to us who is looking?
    
    What do we think we are getting by with? What do we think we are arranging for ourselves by keeping them fooled? Who are we kidding?
    
    Do we think our fortunes ride on hoodwinking the world? That if they found out about us it would be all over, but if we keep up the pretense, and bamboozle them all, we’ll have nothing but “cottages and columbines and room to do handstands when we feel like it” forever?
    
    We are so funny. The ones who care enough about us to see what they are looking at know who we are, and care about us anyway. The others are just trying to get us to dance to the tune they whistle, and have no interest in our fortunes at all.
    
    We want it to be easier than being who we are and working out the rubs. We want to pretend to be someone else and have it pay off. Big time. It isn’t about the pay off.
    
    It’s about, all together now, growing up and being who we are. Focus on that. Let your life take shape around that. Let what you do serve who you are, express and exhibit who you are, reveal and reflect who you are—to the extent that’s possible within the context and circumstances, terms and conditions, of the time and place of your living.
    
    Work you into your life over time. That’s a Life Plan for you worth having.
98. Goose Wars 01 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, February 6, 2013 — I’d bet you $20 if I still did that kind of thing that you think the way to the good is the way of being rational, logical and reasonable. That finding the good is as simple as making a list of pros and cons, deciding where you want to be in five years and creating a flow-chart with carefully plotted sequential steps to that destination.
    
    If I’m right about you, you don’t have a chance. The left side of your brain is choking out the right side. You are taking heavy doses of prescription medication in order to tolerate what you are supposed to be loving. You’re telling yourself things like, “My life is so perfect, why do I hate it?” And you hope a promotion with a few more perks and one or two major purchases will do the trick.
    
    You are waiting for your life to start working for you like you know it will, and you are standing in the wrong line.
    
    You do not do your life. Your life does you. Go sit quietly with this until you see what I’m saying. Then get up and see what your life needs from you—what your life has in mind for you—where your life will take you in the time left for living. If you can make the transition, it will be well worth the work.
99. I should say something about the Geese in the Wetlands series—because it wants to be said. It wants to be articulated, interpreted, understood, by me. I talk to you so I can hear what I have to say. You could take offense, being used this way, or you could be honored that I take you into my confidence. Your call to make.
    
    The Geese in the Wetlands series of photographs goes back to my six-to-twelve-year-old-period. I am sure, though I have no distinct recollection, that I saw a picture in an outdoor magazine—Outdoor Life, Sports Afield, Progressive Farmer and Ladies (yes) Home Journal are the only magazines that I remember from my childhood. Says a lot about the people who lived with me, and that’s the shadowy background of all of the stories of my youth.
    
    I’m sure I saw a picture in one of the magazines of a scene of Canada Geese rising from the water of a wetlands, and I was taken by it. Captured. Held captive all these years.
    
    The picture spoke to me then of things words cannot say, and in taking similar photographs in this here and now of my living, I am recapturing being captured and held captive, because it was not, is not, a tortuous experience, but one we long for, live for.
    
    Healing photographs are mandalas, healing circles in rectangular form, speaking to us on levels beyond words, bringing comfort, harmony, peace, unity, wholeness, integration, reconciliation, and oneness of body and soul. Art does this kind of thing for us.
    
    Photographs of wildlife and natural landscapes do it for me, speak to me on the deepest levels, restoring me to my soul and my soul to me. And I take this particular photograph of Canada Geese rising from the waters of a wetlands in the rain and fog, reconnecting with the child who found what he needed there all those years ago, and still finds it there, and always will.
    
    I take the photographs, and look at them, because I feel better when I do.
    
    I recommend that you notice when and where you feel better, and give yourself often the gift of those times and places. Without having to know, or understand, or explain what is going on there, then. If it is a good place to be, go there.
    
    Cow pens also do it for me, but that’s another story.
100. The Shape of Time 04 — Antelope Canyon, Page, AZ, May 18, 2010 — We all are fragmented, fractured, shattered, dis-integrated on our way back together, to wholeness, harmony, integration, peace. The path is the way of consciousness, awareness, realization, maturation and bearing the pain of our own rebirth—as those who are “both the chisel and the sculptor.”
     
     And, of course, we don’t have to do any of it. Long lines of human beings have opted out of the process since its beginnings. We don’t have to ask the first question, spot the first contradiction, make the first connection, withdraw the first projection… It can be all Their Fault. If we can just get rid of enough of Them, WE will all be fine.
     
     My recommendation is that we stop thinking about Them and Their shortcomings, failings and deficiencies—and simply start doing our thing. It will teach us all we need to know. If we do it with our eyes open, being awake, paying attention. Seeing, hearing, understanding. Knowing, doing, being.
     
     What do we need to be awake? Where do we have to go to wake up? What do we have to be shown in order to see? To be told in order to hear? What needs to be explained in order to understand? What is preventing our progress in the process of being awake, aware, alive? What is the problem?
     
     Doing our own thing with our eyes open will answer all these questions and take us speedily to wherever it is we think we are going.
101. Hooded Merganser 12 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, February 7, 2013 — There ought to be a law: Everyone has to spend a minimum of 1 hour a day attending, serving, in communion with his or her creative spirit, and giving expression to that spirit in a manner that is appropriate to his or her heart and soul.
     
     That would make as much difference for good in the world as I can imagine making.
102. Wetlands Geese 15 — Guilford County near Summerfield, NC, February 7, 2013 — There is not a more counter-cultural (in any culture, across all cultures) act of defiance than the act of being oneself—than the act of seeing what you see, feeling what you feel, thinking what you think, knowing what you know, sensing what you sense and deciding for yourself what needs to be done about it, and doing it in each situation as it arises.
     
     People who do that are called Free Thinkers, Individuals, Rebels, Renegades, Revolutionaries by other people, but, to themselves, they are just being themselves.
     
     Nothing is more of a threat to the status quo than individuals being themselves.
103. Goose Wars 02 —  Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, February 6, 2013 — The natural world has its own rhythms and flow, and we have ours. Aligning ourselves with our inner rhythms and with the flow of our life are two of the tasks of the journey, the path, the way to maturation, wisdom and grace.
     
     The tasks require us to pay attention, to listen within, to notice what is stirring, to trust ourselves to it and to work it into our life—the life required by the context and circumstances of our external world.
     
     We walk two paths at the same time, and must tend the affairs of two worlds, external and internal. How do you honor the rhythms and flow of the internal world? How often do you sit quietly, listening? Follow whims that you do not understand and cannot explain? Live a day without imposing a structure or a schedule? Allow the Inner Guide to determine what to eat, when and where?
     
     Establishing and deepening our relationship with the Inner World is a matter of making the unconscious conscious—of becoming aware of the ways and rhythms, the direction and flow of our own nature, and serving our own instinct and intuition within the field of space and time. Integrating reason with instinct and logic with intuition expands the possibilities of life in the physical world, and opens us to wonders unimagined along the way to who we are.
     
     We are here with the tools at hand—why pass up the central feature of the experience of being alive?
104. Lake Brandt Dusk Panorama —  Bur-Mil Park, Greensboro, NC, January 23, 2013 —  How much money do we need to be who we are? How much money does it take to compensate for the emptiness that comes from refusing to be who we are?
105. January Shoreline 09 —  Lake Brandt, Piedmont Trail, Greensboro, NC, January 14, 2013 —  We just live the moment as the moment needs us to live it, the situation as the situation begs to be lived. What’s hard about that?
     
     Of course, it requires us to live without a script, to ad-lib every scene, to never do similar moments the same way, to have no stock replies, no standard responses, no formula rejoinders, no predictable reactions. No one knows what we will do when, where or how, not even us.
     
     But, we will develop a style. We will characteristically be ourselves, acting “just like” ourselves. No one would take us for someone else. We don’t confuse Groucho Marx with Jimmy Cagney, or take Hillary Clinton for Oprah Winfrey.
     
     We cannot impose our will for the moment on the moment, our idea of what the situation needs to be on the situation. What needs to be done will tell us what to do. What needs to be written will tell us what to write. We just show up, pay attention, see things as they are, stay out of the way, and the way will open before us.
     
     As we learn to trust ourselves to it, things begin to fall into place.
106. The Shape of Time 05 —  Antelope Canyon, Page, AZ, May 18, 2010 —  The treasure is within. What we seek has been with us from the beginning. We are the stone the builders reject. We are the builders.
     
     We bring forth from an inexhaustible storehouse, an infinite well, exactly what is needed to rise to every occasion and grace and bless the times and places of our living. It only takes waking up to know that it is so.
     
     You hear it and laugh, or roll your eyes, because it is outrageous, or you change the channel because it is not what you want to hear, but why discount your own gifts or sleep through the times that are calling you to see what you can do?
     
     There is, tucked away in each of us, the very thing that is most needed and most precious, and we do not believe it. We do not believe in our own gift, or treasure our own treasure. We are not strong in our own cause. Are not loyal to our own colors. Are not allies of our own heart’s purpose.
     
     We are only waking up away from being what we need—from finding what we have to be more than we need to grace and bless the times and places of our living. Yet, we dream we are awake, snoring.
107. Fisherman —  Cape Hatteras National Seashore, Ocracoke Island, NC, October 23, 2012 —  There is tolerable and there is intolerable, and there are good reasons for tolerating the intolerable up to a point. That point might be death. The intolerable can become deadly. Death can be physical, and it can be emotional/spiritual (Where DOES that line lie?).
     
     Why die tolerating the intolerable? Why not die making a run for it? Fighting for life? Doing what we can think to do in the service of life?
     
     Tolerate the intolerable just long enough to make a plan, lay the groundwork, pack your bags, dig the tunnel. It’s amazing how the intolerable becomes tolerable once we start digging the tunnel.
     
     The tunnel to freedom and self-determination, self-development, self-reliance, self-expression, self-hood. Freedom isn’t freedom unless it is the freedom to be who we are.
     
     We cannot just be living to escape the tyranny of our oppressor. We have to be living to embrace the glory of who we are—to bring ourselves forth—to experience the shape of unencumbered emergence. We have to be living to serve the Self within.
     
     We live in someone’s service, that of the tyrant without or of the, well, tyrant within. The Self as Tyrant Within. Now, there’s one for you.
     
     We have to accommodate ourselves to a will that is not our will. We cannot think life is ours to do with as we please. Life is ours to do with as we must. “I have no say in it, Gibbs. It’s the pirate’s life for me.”
     
     We have to square ourselves with the reality that we do not call the shots. We collaborate with the One Who Knows Within in the unfolding of who we are in our life, but we do not get to live the life of our choosing.
     
     Anybody can dig a tunnel. Do we have what it takes to step out of it at the other end? To step into the life waiting for us to live it? To solve our own problems and find what is right for us and do it every day through-out the time left for living?
     
     It is not enough to want to leave Egypt. We have to have what it takes to live in the Land of Promise. We have to have what it takes to be who we are.
108. Big Creek 05 —  Great Smoky Mountains National Park, NC/TN, November 7, 2007 —  We waste a lot of time talking about free will. We are not free to will what we want or to choose our choices. How free is that? We want what we want and not what we want to want. And our choices are our choices. Give us better choices and we’ll give you better decisions.
     
     Enlightened as we can be, we still have the choices we have. Our life is still our life and we still have to live it—“solving our own problems and finding out for ourselves what is right for us.” Most of us are not deliberately, willfully, mean, evil or stupid, and those of us who are were mean, evil or stupid before we deliberately willed it.
     
     We did not deal the hand we are playing, and we are doing what we can think to do with the world we woke up in, with the terms and conditions, context and circumstances, we found waiting for us when we stepped forth from the womb.
     
     There is very little free about the entire enterprise. And we could use more help than we get. A friend to listen us to the truth of ourselves would be a great assist. A friend to listen without advising, directing, condoning, condemning, converting, saving, shaming, etc—a sounding board to help us work things out for ourselves—and just by listening enable us to say what we need to hear. What a wonder that would be, and we are lucky if we have something that even comes close!
     
     So we need to get off our back about all of this being our fault because of “free will,” and just see it as a mess that can be helped to become as good as it can be with a touch of compassion and grace, kindness and generosity, and giving people the benefit of the doubt and an encouraging word. We are all dealing with more than we know what to do with.
109. Heron at Sunset Panorama —  Reedy Fork, Lake Brandt Greenway, Bur-Mil Park Access, Greensboro, NC, January 25, 2013 —  We reform the culture and the world by reforming ourselves. We reform ourselves by seeing ourselves, hearing ourselves—by growing up and being who we are.
     
     The culture doesn’t want independent, self-reliant, self-defined, self-determined, true human beings as members of the culture. The culture doesn’t want anyone thinking for herself, himself. The culture distracts us from the tasks of seeing, hearing, and understanding with entertaining pastimes.
     
     The Roman strategy of “Give them bread and circuses” (That would be gladiators fighting lions, tigers and each other to the death in the Colosseum) prevails today. The culture hands us the internet and iEverything and tells us to go play. Go do anything but see how things are, and what needs to be done about it, and do it.
     
     We transform the culture when we see things as they are. And that is not good for the economy. The culture has a lot at stake in keeping us mindlessly unaware of the emptiness of our life.
     
     When we stare into the face of meaninglessness, we begin to look for meaning. Where did we last see it? Where did we put it? What did we do with it?
     
     The culture flashes us with mesmerizing quick-takes of glass beads and silver mirrors—It worked with the Purchase of Manhattan, and has been working ever since—to get us back in tow. But. Once we marry meaning, we are immune to the culture’s tricks of diversion and distraction.
     
     What has meaning for you? Where is your meaning to be found? Go there! Find it! Follow it throughout what remains of your life. It will lead you to the heart of truth and value, and change the world.
110. False Kiva Panorama —  Canyonlands National Park, Moab, UT, May 14, 2010 —  We have to work it all out. It’s just a bit ridiculous. No super hero ever had as much on her or his plate.
     
     The invisible world has a stake in our life, and we have to align ourselves with its ideas for us—getting “on the beam,” so to speak, and staying there.
     
     The visible world has a stake in our life. We are supposed to be good company people, not rocking the boat, maintaining the status quo, thinking what we are supposed to think and doing what we are told to do—and we have to keep things reasonably stable there to keep the wrath of Those Who Know Best at bay and give ourselves a chance to bring forth who we are within the context and circumstances of our life for the true good of the visible world.
     
     And we make it work, integrating, harmonizing, reconciling, mediating the conflicts, making peace. We are paving the way here, making a way in the wilderness, if you will, for the one who is coming, that is, for who we are to come into being in the life we are living.
     
     We are bringing forth who we are within the world of space and time. We are envoys of the invisible world within the visible world. So stop thinking of yourself as the child your parents, the partner or spouse of your partner or spouse, the parent of your child or children, the owner of your dog and cat, the employee or owner of your place of employment, etc. You have bigger fish to fry.
     
     You stand between worlds and make it work.
111. January Shoreline 08 —  Piedmont Trail, Lake Brandt, Bur-Mill Park Access, Greensboro, NC, January 13, 2013 — Meaning is a white rabbit, catching our eye, winking at us, calling our name, leading us a merry chase, passing us off, in time, to other white rabbits the way “one book opens another,” showing us a bit more of who we are with each exchange, until, by the end of a life filled with meaning found by following what caught our eye, struck a cord, clicked, resonated, rang true, we realize the wonder of being who we are.
112. The Shape of Time 06 —  Antelope Canyon, Page, AZ, May 18, 2010 —  It’s going to be just fine. Why not believe that? Why believe it’s hopeless, pointless, useless and coming to a very bad end? Even if it IS hopeless, pointless, useless and coming to a very bad end, how we live in the meantime makes all the difference. Why not live like it is going to be just fine?
     
     And look for the help we need? And look for how we can make use of what we have until we get the help we need?
     
     What form does your creativity take? You’re not sitting on it are you? Your creativity? You didn’t put it on some shelf in some closet did you? Not in the attic! It will dry up for sure in the attic! When is the last time you used it? Pull it out of storage! Dust it off! Shake it out! Put it on and get to work!
     
     Here you are whining about how hopeless, pointless, useless it is and what a bad end its coming to and you haven’t given your creativity a chance at it! Turn your creativity loose on it! Let your creativity show you what its got to offer! Give it an opportunity to demonstrate what all you can actually do in the meantime if you put your game face on and say, “Give me the ball!”
     
113. Reedy Fork Sunset H 02 —  Lake Brandt Greenway, Bur-Mil Park Access, Greensboro, NC, January 24, 2013 —  Our work is to find the grounding center—the heart—of our life, and live out of that heart. Scratch what we think. Think about what we feel.
     
     What feels right, good, true, real? What clicks with us? Resonates with us? Works for us? Calls our name? Where do we belong? How often do we go there? How long do we stay?
     
     Is it clear to you that you need to reduce the time spent not doing what is life for you and increase the time doing what is life for you? That you need to live in sync with the grounding center—the heart—of what is life for you? And if there is a problem with your other life, you have to work it out?
     
     Pull your creativity out of storage and tell it to work it out. And tell it you are not going to return it to storage because you are going to need it a lot from here on out. And tell it you are going to show it a really good time. And keep your word.
114. Schoodic Point, Acadia National Park, near Bar Harbor, ME —  You know what is good for you and what is bad. What is right for you and what is wrong. What works and what doesn’t work. Where you fit and where you don’t belong.
     
     Think of this kind of knowing as an emotional/spiritual (Where DOES that line lie?) vital sign. It’s all the guidance and direction you need to find your way. So what’s the problem?
     
     You are afraid. You are afraid to stir things up. You are afraid to upset the balance. You are afraid to tamper with your life.
     
     What if, in trying to make things better, you make things worse? What if you incur the wrath of Those Who Know Best And Must Be Pleased? What if your lose your marriage or your relationship, your job, your kids, everything you ever loved and wind up lost and alone in the world? Better just be smart and play it safe and pray for a miracle.
     
     A miracle would be things getting better with nothing much changing.
     
     What I’m saying is the problem is you. You are the only thing standing between you and what is good for you. We have to get you on your side. If we ever get the two of you together, you will be an unstoppable team. Until then, you’re just immoveable.
     
     Who are you going to trust if not yourself? Where are you going to look for a creative genius to straighten out your life and put it on the right track without it exploding all over the place if not in the mirror?
     
     Do me a favor. Just tinker with your creative imagination. Just play around with it. DON’T DO ANYTHING! Just wonder. Just pretend. Just imagine. Different scenarios, different approaches, sly but significant ways to move from what’s bad for you to what’s good for you—from what’s wrong for you to what’s right for you. Small gestures toward life.
     
     Then, when you’re ready, do something very slight but symbolic and see what happens. You are teaching yourself to be courageous—learning to trust yourself to be creative and self-reliant, alive and who you are.
115. Wetlands Morning Fog —  Guilford County near Summerfield, NC, January 12, 2013 —  What do we need to be who we are? Well. We need to get out of the way, for one thing. And off our back, for another.
     
     We have our ideas, you know. We know who we want to be. And we want to hurry up and be there. It takes growing up to get past what we want, and when we want it, and into who we are, and we cannot grow up before our time.
     
     We need time to be who we are. And a good bit of luck. And a sense of humor won’t hurt a bit.
116. Goose Wars 03 —  Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, February 14, 2013 —  I sit and watch the stream. The stream has its own direction and flow. The days come and go, and bring what’s coming and take what’s going.
     
     And our role in the play of time with place seems to be that of compassionate witnesses. We are not unmarked by the passing of time, by the impact of event and circumstance. It matters to us what happens. We care about what comes and what goes.
     
     It’s what I like best about us. We have a stake in it. An investment. We are here to tilt things toward the good—to make things better by our having been here.
     
     We feed the birds, and house them, and give them water to bathe in and drink. Say what you will about us, we wash out bird baths and fill them with fresh water—and there is more to us than that. We all should be proud to be one of us, and a part of the stream in its comings and goings.
117. The Shape of Time 07 —  Antelope Canyon, Page, AZ, May 18, 2010 — We are here to do the work, not to get the work done, not to lay it by, not to finish anything. We are polishing silver here. When has silver ever stayed polished?
     
     We’re cleaning out a cavernous warehouse with a concrete floor and dust and gunk and crud everywhere, and lights that don’t work properly, and tools that would be better fitted to some other job, and when we clean the warehouse, we have to do something with it, sell it or give it away, and who is going to want to buy it or take it off our hands? But it’s ours to clean and manage.
     
     Responsibility without control is one of those demonic schemes haunting humankind, hanging over us, laughing. Sisyphus rolls his stone, we play it out. PLAY it out. Make a game of it. Get the last laugh. “The situation is hopeless but not serious” (Walzlawick).
     
     What lasts? What matters? Compassion is high on my list. And humor. Kindness, tenderness, gentleness, mercy, peace, art, music, dance, beauty, seeing, hearing, understanding, a smile on your face and a twinkle in your eye… Make your own list of the things that have mattered, that do matter, to you, in your life. Practice those things as you do the work, smiling and twinkling, winking and laughing, transforming your world and ours, through the quality of your living in it.
118. January Shoreline 04 — Lake Brandt, Bur-Mil Park, Greensboro, NC, January 14, 2013 — The work is growing up and being who we are. We have to be doing the work. We have to be doing our own work.
     
     Psychotherapy is a great idea for helping people do the work but. Too many psychotherapists are not doing the work themselves. Organized religion is a great idea for helping people do the work but. Too many paid clergy are not doing the work themselves.
     
     You can’t help someone with their work if you aren’t doing your work.
     
     There is a problem with doing the work of growing up and being who we are. We don’t want to grow up. We don’t want to be who we are.
     
     We have a better idea. Hanging out with our friends drinking beer, popping pills, having sex, letting the good times roll, really living. You know. Like that.
     
     Who do you know that is working on growing up and being who they are? Who do you know that is working on NOT growing up and being who they are?
     
     How do you get people to want what they don’t want? To do what they don’t want to do? What other people want or don’t want is not our problem. We have our hands full with ourselves, with getting ourselves to do our own work, growing up, being who we are.
119. Mallard in Flight 17 —  Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, January 29, 2013 —  Thinking does not replace instinct and intuition. Thinking serves—implements—instinct and intuition. Thinking collaborates with instinct and intuition, takes its direction from instinct and intuition.
     
     Life gets complicated. Increasing complexity is the way of evolution. In the beginning, instinct and intuition could carry the day, as long as tomorrow could be counted on as being a simple extension of yesterday. When we began to create possibilities we had never encountered, we had to devise something more elaborate than instinct and intuition to help us along. We came up with thinking.
     
     Thinking stole the show. Thinking thought it WAS the show. Director, producer, actor, audience. Thinking is great at figuring out how to get things done. it isn’t so great at figuring out what to do—and when to do it. Instinct and intuition are great at knowing what to do when, but need help in how to get it done.
     
     We have to coordinate the effort. Thinking has its place. Instinct and intuition have their place. We have to see to it that they work together for the good of the whole. We begin by paying attention to instinct and intuition. We have to learn to feel what we feel, to sense what we sense, to know what we know—and to trust ourselves to More Than Meets The Eye.
     
     This is not easy. But. It is essential. Start with the small stuff. What are you “in the mood for” for lunch? Go with it. Practice your “in the mood for” sense of direction. Think about how to carry it out. See where it goes.
120. Bryce Morning 03 —  Bryce Canyon National Park, Bryce Canyon, UT, May 16, 2010 —  Those of you who have been with me for a while have heard me say, “Fooling ourselves is what we do best. No! Kidding ourselves is what we do best. No! Telling ourselves what we want to hear is what we do best. No! Shooting ourselves in the foot is what we do best!”
     
     We could save ourselves a lot of grief if we would only stop lying to ourselves. Self-deception is the root of all of our recurring problems. We cannot grow up without looking ourselves in the eye—without seeing what we look at. The terminally immature will not square up with who they are.
     
     I’m after honest, objective, self-evaluation. Inflation is the result of weighing what we see toward the good. Deflation is the result of weighing what we see toward the bad. Stop spinning you for good or ill. Just know who you are and who you also are. Stop pretending that you are better or worse than you are.
     
     Sit with you. All of you. This is the biggest test. What of you is not welcome? What of you is compensation for the unwelcome part? What of you is hiding, concealing, denying the unwelcome part? You aren’t going anywhere until you all can go together, on good terms. Your relationships with other people will be no better, no more honest, no more intimate, no more vulnerable than your relationship with yourself.
     
     It all starts with, and hinges upon, your sitting with you until all of you is welcome, listened to, heard, understood, received with compassion, reconciled to, and integrated with, the rest of you. We have to work out our differences with ourselves before we can work them out with one another.
121. Used in Short Talks On Contradiction, etc., Bridge Over Glen Canyon —  Page, AZ, May 18, 2010 —  There is where we belong and where we have no business being. Sometimes where we belong is where we have no business being. Life is great that way. We have to work it out.
     
     We work it out by being intently aware of our conflicts. On one hand this, on another hand that, and on another hand, that over there. Ambivalence, discord, conflict, opposition, disharmony, contrariness… It’s a wonder we ever keep anything down, living as we do on the rolling waves of the heaving “wine dark sea.”
     
     Placid waters are out of the question. We work with what we have. It helps to have the mindset of Odysseus: “I will stay with it and endure through suffering hardship / and once the heaving sea has shaken my raft to pieces, then I will swim.”
     
     ”The heaving sea” is the turmoil of our life amid the conflicts and contradictions of living. It is the nature of things to be torn, fragmented, at odds, feeling very strongly both ways, or all possible ways, at the same time.
     
     The worst thing to do is to take a pill or have a drink (or a six pack or two) to numb the pain of dis-integration. We have to do the work of integration, I don’t care how awful it is.
     
     The work consists of being conscious of our conflicts and feeling the disorientation and upheaval all the way to the heart of our anguish. This is called keeping your feet in the fire. It is knowing—bearing the weight of—the full reality of contradictory truths, and reconciling yourself to the fact of that is the way it is with you. You. Are. Torn. So be torn without tearing. Bear the pain. Consciously.
     
     As you sit with the pain, something will shift. This is called healing the breach (Or bridging the canyon). Bearing the pain consciously changes things. This is the work—the magical work—of integration, reconciliation. It is coming to terms with how things are and what can be done about it.
     
     What can be done about it does not necessarily mean disappearing the conflict, as in deciding for one side against all others. It may mean accommodating yourself to the fact of conflict and making it work. Living in two or more worlds at once, for example. Accepting that that’s the way it is. Swimming through the heaving sea.
     
     Maybe you just make your peace with the heaving and swim on, maybe even enjoying the crashing of the waves, relishing the delight of being alive to the complexity and joy of life as it is. You work it out in a way that works for you, there on the rolling wonder of the wine dark sea.
122. Green River Canyon —  Canyonlands National Park, Moab, UT, May 13, 2010 —  The unconscious world is simply the world we are not conscious of. It is everywhere and we don’t see it. We walk through it on our way to check the mail but our receptors don’t pick it up. We are awash in the unconscious world, and no more aware of it than a Blue Fin Tuna is aware of the sea.
     
     But. We know something is wrong. Something is out of kilter. Something is just not right somehow.
     
     What’s right about your life? What is not right? Don’t answer these questions with your head. Answer them with your body. Your body knows. Your body will tell you what is right and what is not right, what is good for you and what is bad.
     
     Our body is our link to the unconscious world, not our head. Our head is largely unconscious of our body. If we are going to become increasingly conscious, we begin with becoming conscious of our body, its signals, what it knows, what it can tell us if we listen.
     
     Even when we fool our body and addict it to sugar or to cocaine or alcohol, there is a “deeper body” that knows the craving is a lie. The “deeper body” knows. Our task is to know what the Deeper Body knows and to align our living with its knowledge of good and bad.
     
     What is good for us and what is bad? What is right for us and what is wrong? Takes listening to know. Deep listening. We cannot hurry here. We have to foster a cooperative spirit in league with, aligned with, loyal to what the Deeper Body knows.
     
     We feel what we know. We do not think it. The knowing that is the heart of knowing, the Heart of Life and Being, is felt knowing. We feel it in our body.
     
     So. Here’s your homework. Feel what your body feels. Listen to your body. Feel what “No!” feels like and what “Yes!” feels like. Let your body be your guide the rest of tonight and all day tomorrow. Check everything with your body. Your body leads the way. You follow.
123. Goose in the Mirror —  Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, February 15, 2013 —  See what you can get by with. Take small steps in the direction of who you are. If they catch you at it, feign ignorance and innocence.
     
     They may accuse you of not being yourself when you begin to live toward who you are. Promise to do a better job of being you.
124. Used in Short Talks On Contradictions, etc., Daffodils —  Bicentennial Garden, Greensboro, NC, February 15, 2013 —  We don’t need a Guru to tell us the truth of our own heart’s leanings, our own soul’s deep joy. No one else can tell us when we are centered in the life that is right for us, that is where we belong. Only we know that.
     
     We only need the courage to align ourselves with the life we know is right for us, to do the things we know are ours to do.
     
     It is not all or nothing. There are trade-offs and compromises all along the way. We do things that are ours to do mixed in with things that are not ours to do. The dance is to pay the bills while doing the fewest things that are not ours to do and mostly the things that are ours to do.
     
     There is no plan for your life. There is only your life and not your life. You have to make that choice in each situation as it arises. We make up the form and shape we take as we go. The Plan is to be who we are. The particulars will take care of themselves.
     
     There is that which is right for you and that which is wrong for you. Sometimes that which is right for you is wrong for you, and vice-versa. Taking everything into account, all of the conflicts and contradictions, interests and influences, what will you do?
     
     You have to make the call about what you do in response to what is happening in the present moment of your life. Our life comes into focus, or drifts out of focus, takes shape and form, in the choices we make about what to do in response to what is happening here and now in each situation as it arises.
     
     It isn’t about believing true beliefs about the afterlife and how to get there, it’s about living aligned with a life that is right for us. If we live aligned with the life that is right for us in each situation as it arises, the afterlife will take care of itself.
125. Leaves 01 —  Bicentennial Garden, Greensboro, NC, February 15, 2013 —  The head does not know what the body knows. The body does not know what the head knows, but the body is quite willing for the head to take the lead in the areas of its expertise.
     
     The head, on the other hand, in its profound arrogance, is unwilling to grant the body any area of expertise. The head thinks it knows, and does not know what it doesn’t know, and is not interested in knowing.
     
     Our role is to mediate the relationship between body and head, to ask the body what it knows and hope the head is listening.
126. Used in Short Talks On Contradictions, etc., The Shape of Time 08 —  Antelope Canyon, Page, AZ, May 18, 2010 —  What would help us with our life? This is one of the essential questions. Answer it, and you have it made. On my list are:
     
     Squaring ourselves up—making our peace—with our contradictions and conflicts. This is also called facing up to the truth of how things are and also are. This does not mean getting rid of contradictions and conflicts. In means letting them be. This is true, and this is true and this is also true—and if this is true, then that cannot be also true, and that, too, is true. We bear consciously the pain of mutually exclusive contradictions—and in bearing the pain, we wait for the shift to occur and something to change. It could be us that changes.
     
     A place apart where we can collect ourselves, sort things out, regain our perspective, find our peace, remember what is important, return to the grounding center of our life and reorient ourselves toward who we are and what is life for us in order to step back into the fray and do what needs to be done there.
     
     A listening room where we can hear what is going on in our life, see what is happening and what needs to be done about it.
     
     A vibrant connection with The One Who Knows, the Invisible Other Within, the Heart of Life and Being, the Source of Gifts and Calling that are ours to give and to do. We are not alone. There is more to us than meets the eye. We have an inner colleague ready to collaborate with us in doing the work that is ours to do within the time and place of our living. We foster that relationship by treating it as though it is real and entering into dialogue with our Inner Guide—a dialogue which will remain constant throughout our life.
     
     The right kind of company. A small community—which may never know each other—we depend on for balance, stability, and caring presence. The right kind of friends who can listen us to the truth of who we are without advising, directing, controlling, preaching, criticizing, meddling, interfering and getting in the way. It takes work to build and maintain this kind of group, but it is work that makes it possible for us to do our other work, the work of growing up and being who we are—doing what is needed in, and offering what we have to give to, each situation as it arises.
     
     Create your own list. Add to it as things occur to you that would be helpful to you in living the life that is yours to live. The more conscious you an make that life—and the more conscious you can be of the help you need to live it—the more likely you are to live it and the more likely the world will be blessed by your presence in it.
127. Wetlands in the Rain Panorama — Guilford County near Summerfield, NC, February 7, 2013 — We live as though it is “out there” for us to achieve, do, acquire, amass, accomplish, see, master, manipulate, manage… It is “in here” for us to bring forth, serve, assist, know, love, become.
     
     The meaning we seek “out there” in our buying, spending, amassing and consuming is found “in here” when we align ourselves with what seeks us—with what seeks to be realized, actualized, made real in us.
     
     Listen! What calls your name? Look! What catches your eye? Why are you overlooking the important things in your quest for what is important? Why are you trying to be Somebody when the task is to be who you are?
128. Bass Lake — Blue Ridge Parkway, Blowing Rock, NC, October 5, 2012 — We wonder what we should do with our life. We should love what we love and see where it goes.
     
     We should find ways of paying the bills which allow us to love what we love. We should not worry about getting ahead. Staying even is good.
     
     We stay even with the bills that allow us to love what we love. If you can do better than that, have at it!
     
     What do you love? How often do you do it? How often do you love what you love in tangible, concrete, present and accounted for ways?
     
     We spend all our time paying the bills and none of our time loving what we love, doing what we love. We mean to, but.
     
     Whatever we think we are buying with the bills we pay is money wasted if it keeps us from loving what we love and doing it.
     
     As Linda Cohn would say, “Are you picking up what I’m laying down here?”
129. Used in Short Talks On Contradictions, etc., Mallard in Fight 23 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, February 15, 2013 — Take care of the babies! The babies would be the inhabitants of the invisible world. We are the caretakers of psyche/soul, and bring it forth in our life like a babe born in a manger, tending and caring for it, aligning ourselves with it, merging with it, so that, at the end no one can tell where it starts and we stop.
     
     Do not think of the unconscious world—that would be the world we are not conscious of—as all together and wise and good and perfect. It’s a mess in there, as the old Romans well knew.
     
     We bring consciousness to bear upon the inner world—growing it up and growing up ourselves in reconciling opposites, integrating conflicts and contradictions, and working out the differences between spiritual and physical reality.
     
     We are all changed by the engagement with the other. The incarnation of transcendence impacts both worlds, which is exactly what we do when we bring forth invisible reality (that would be the life that is ours to live) in the world of space and time.
     
     And people are bored with their life to the point of watching Reality TV. That is not taking care of the babies!
130. Cloud Bank — Lake Brandt, Bur-Mil Park, Greensboro, NC, January 23, 2013 — Love what you love. Do your thing. This is not hard. It gets hard when it gets tangled up with ambition, competition, success, who and how we are supposed to be.
     
     You successfully eat an ice cream cone when you eat an ice cream cone. It doesn’t matter who finishes first or who eats the most.
     
     What do you enjoy about your life? Enjoy it. What do you like to do? Do it.
     
     When people intrude, interfere, and get in your way, be kind to them and, as soon as it is appropriate, get back to doing what you like to do, enjoying what you enjoy—with awareness.
     
     When you do what you like to do and enjoy what you enjoy with awareness, you will find yourself being passed along from what you like to do to what you also like to do, from enjoying what you enjoy to enjoying what you also enjoy.
     
     An entire life will develop from following two basic strategies. And you will be a lot more pleasant to be around than if you had diligently pursued being who you were supposed to be and never loved what you love or did your thing.
131. Owl Goes Fishing 05 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, February 20, 2013 — Talk about synchronicity (We WERE talking about synchronicity, weren’t we?)! My life has been uniquely suited to me. It probably wouldn’t have done at all for you. Or yours for me. Funny how it works out that way, don’t you think?
     
     My life has been exactly what I needed it to be exactly when I needed it to be that. If it had been much different, I wouldn’t be here, now. If we change anything, we change everything.
     
     What we have to deal with is what we have to deal with. How we deal with it tells the tale. It is not too late to start dealing differently with things. If you wish things were different in your life, start dealing with them differently. That will change things up right smartly. It’s pretty much the only thing that will.
132. Owl Goes Fishing 06 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, February 20, 2013 — It all has to work together for the good of the whole. WE all have to work together for the good of the whole that WE are. The WE here is both personal and individual AND corporate and communal. We cannot be a part of a community until we can be the individual we are. We have to work together on all levels for the good of the whole on all levels.
     
     You have to be centered, focused, grounded on—aligned, allied, in sync with—that which is deepest and best and truest about you—integrated with who you are and what you are about on the level of heart and soul. You have to live with complete integrity of being, that is, in ways that are integral to the truth of who you are.
     
     If you put your hand over your heart in the Pledge of Allegiance posture, and then close your hand into a fist so that your knuckles are against your chest and at the center of your chest just above your sternum, that is a gesture of connection with the center of your life and being. When we live out of that center, we are at-one with who we are.
     
     The gesture wakes you up to your need to be aware of who you are and what you are about on the deepest level—and of what you are doing in the present moment of your life—and whether the former is aligned with the latter. It is a grounding, centering, focusing, self-adjusting, course-correcting gesture. A way of taking stock and re-orienting ourselves in light of what is truly important and serves the good of the whole, on all levels.
133. Owl Goes Fishing 04 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, February 20, 2013 — I have known people who are constitutionally inhibited from being able to express kindness, tenderness, compassion, consideration or even interest in others. They can’t help it. They just don’t get it. It has never occurred to them that they are not kind. They never think about it.
     
     We cannot worry about THEM. We have our own work to do. A portion of that work entails developing our own ability to be kind, tender, compassionate, considerate toward, and interested in, other people and the world around us. That includes compassion, etc., toward those who are not compassionate—loving our enemies, so to speak. At least, loving those who are working the other side of the street.
     
     Working our side of the street means caring for those who work the other side—without giving them more of ourselves than would be appropriate for us to share. We aren’t their servants, and will need to draw a line, but. We can draw it with kindness and compassion along with firmness and finality.
     
     The work is on ourselves—seeing, hearing, understanding how things are, within and without, and what to do about it in each situation as it arises, and doing it. If we get this down in the time left for living, then we can work on those who don’t have a clue about any of it.
134. Owl Goes Fishing 03 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, February 20, 2013 — A parishioner in one of the churches I served, speaking for a lot of parishioners in all of the churches I served, asked me, “Jim, why don’t you talk to us about things we can understand?” I replied, “I don’t know, Marlene. I wish I could.”
     
     I understood her question to mean, “Why don’t you tell us what we have always heard? What we expect to hear?” Maybe she was asking, “Why are you so totally incomprehensible?”
     
     My reply applies to either possibility. But. Somebody has to hold the door open to things that haven’t been said enough. We can’t just settle for what we have been told or what we are capable of understanding. We have to be pushed, pulled, beyond where we are if we ever hope to be anywhere else—and if we don’t hope to ever be anywhere else, well, why not?
     
     There is more that we don’t know than we do know. We don’t know half of all there is to know. We have to be thinking things that haven’t been thought. Asking questions that haven’t been asked. What kind of adventure is it that keeps everything as it is forever? We wouldn’t go to a movie or a play or read a book like that. Why would we want to live a live we wouldn’t want to read about?
135. Owl Goes Fishing 02 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, February 20, 2013 — We have to dance with our fear. We have to see if we have as much to be afraid of as we are afraid we do. We have to see if it is as bad as we think it will be. We cannot take our word for it.
     
     We would tell ourselves, “Keep your head down and your nose to the grindstone, do what you are told and don’t ask any questions, and you’ll be just fine.” Our ancestors handled Saber Tooth Tigers and Hairy Mastodons. Their genes are dying for an opportunity to step forth into our life and show us what we can do. We cannot keep them in a dark corner with us, under a blanket, hoping that nothing bad happens—that nothing happens—ever in our life.
     
     We have to go looking for trouble. We cannot be running from trouble. We are made for trouble. We are evolution’s crown jewel when it comes to handling trouble.
     
     We are afraid, though, it isn’t so. We owe it to ourselves to find out if it is—if we can rise to any occasion—if we do have what it takes to live our life, the life that is our life to live, the life that only we can live, in the time left for living.
     
     We spend our living time being afraid of life. Being afraid of taking a chance. Being afraid of the unknown. The horse that is our life, that is our life to live, grows sway-backed and feeble out in the pasture while we cower in the bunk house, afraid to come outside because there might be dragons or something worse.
     
     It’s like this, see? We have a life and we have one chance to live it. We have to take the chance. We have to live toward the life that is ours to live and see what happens. How will we ever explain to our life that we didn’t have the courage to let it show us what we could do?
     
     Do something, some small thing, today to live toward your life. See what happens.
136. Owl Goes Fishing 01 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, February 20, 2013 — We are here to love what we love and to offer what we have to give to the situation as it arises.
     
     The situation as it arises calls forth what we have to give and shows us what we are made of. We wake up to who we are by being confronted with situations we would never write into the script.
     
     The life we are living calls for the life that is ours to live. And we think we cannot live the life we are suited for in this old context and these old circumstances. We think we have to have a bigger, better, finer, different life in order to be who we are.
     
     We are waiting for the engraved invitation to the life of our dreams and our life is waiting for us to give it a chance in the here and now of our living.
     
     We each have a life that is our life to live—that only we can live—that needs us to live it. Well?
137. Owl Goes Fishing 00 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, February 20, 2013 — “How am I going to live my life?” “How am I going to be alive in the life I am living—in the time left for living?” These questions are waiting for us to ask, and answer.
138. Owl Goes Fishing 07 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, February 20, 2013 — Finding our way to the life that is our life to live is a matter of listening to our body for direction, not to our head. Our head can figure out how to get there, but our body knows where to go, and what to stay away from.
     
     We come equipped with an internal guidance system that got the species from where we started to where we are, but it cannot work if we ignore it, wishing we knew what to do.
139. Green River Canyon A — Canyonlands National Park, Moab, UT, May 11, 2010 — All we need is a Clearness Committee. A Clearness Committee is all we need.
     
     A Clearness Committee is a creation of the Quakers whose purpose is to help individuals find their way through the difficult decisions (What job to take, whether to marry, etc.) of their life. I would modify it to helping individuals find their way through their life.
     
     We all need a group of trustworthy people—the right kind of listeners—to help us find our way through our life by enabling us to hear ourselves. It takes an external person to help us hear—to connect us with—internal reality. We are that disconnected. We can only hear ourselves through someone else. So we need a Clearness Committee.
     
     If we all lived in the same town, we could divide ourselves up and be what each other needed. That not being the case, each of us is going to have to collect our own Listening Team.
     
     Parker Palmer lays an excellent foundation for the process in his book, “A Hidden Wholeness.” You don’t need as much structure as he suggests, just a group of 3 to 5 people who know how to listen and ask you “How are you going to live your life?” and wait to hear what you have to say.
     
     We have to explore the question of how to live our life, of how to be alive in the time left for living, from all angles. What is inhibiting us? What is the opposition, the resistance, within and without? What are our resources, our aids? What is calling us? What do we need to do what we need to do?
     
     We explore the questions. We experiment with the possibilities. We experience all that is to be experienced and make it conscious by talking about it, articulating it, giving voice to it. And to do that, we need someone, some group of people, who know how to listen.
     
     Listening is an art that few people have mastered. If you can find 3 to 5 who have it down, you have it made.
140. The Shape of Time 10 — Antelope Canyon, Page, AZ, May 18, 2010 — Our body senses what (Instinct and intuition), our head figures out how (Logic and reason). Head cannot do body stuff. Body cannot do head stuff. When body and head work together, we hum right along. When they are at odds, or when head attempts to take charge, we jump the rails and plunge into the deep darkness.
     
     Ann Weiser Cornell’s book, “The Power of Focusing,” is an excellent guide for learning to listen to our body and feel our way to the way that is our way.
     
     Now, this is work. We are having to learn to navigate your life and the world in a way that is quite different from the way we have been doing it. We are looking for what is right for us, not for what we want to do, or what sounds exciting, or what looks like fun, or what promises to be a good time.
     
     Our body knows what is right for us. Our eyes can be fooled into chasing after anything that looks (or sounds) good. Our head sits around weighing the pros and cons, the advantages and disadvantages and sends us into Organic Chemistry in our freshman year because that would satisfy any science requirement once we decide on a major. Stupid head. I had no business in Organic Chemistry, and my body knew it instantly, but my adviser had all these reasons and what was I going to say, “But it doesn’t feel right”? To date, the Organic Chemistry “F” is the only one on my undergraduate and graduate record. I wasn’t about to retake the course.
     
     Just saying. Our. Body. Knows.
     
     Our place is to know what our body knows and let our head figure out what to do about it.
141. Mallard in Flight 25 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, February 19, 2013 — How do we decide how we are going to live our life? At any point, multiple futures are possible. What guides our choices?
     
     In light of what do we live? What influences us toward one possible future over all the others? What determines what becomes of us?
     
     Who do we consult in the matter of choosing a future, of choosing a path to a particular future? We have to choose our consultants carefully.
     
     Choosing our consultants is choosing our future. Who are the people we listen to? Who are the people who listen to us, who hear us to the truth of who we are?
     
     I had a bevy of poor consultants growing up. They were not the kind of guides I needed to the future I was designed for, cut out for.
     
     I found the helpful guides in the books I read. “One book opened another,” and I was led to myself by those who were transparent to themselves.
     
     To be “transparent to ourselves,” we have to see ourselves, hear ourselves, understand ourselves. To do that we have to love and accept ourselves, on every level, all the way to the heart of who we are.
     
     We cannot think that we are a good self and a bad self and that it is the role of the good self to get rid of, or convert (same thing as getting rid of), the bad self.
     
     We cannot be who we are until we can be who we are. To do that, we need people around us who can allow us to be who we are.
     
     We need mirrors of the soul that we can stand before and see into the depths of our own possibilities and know which future to live toward.
     
     The kind of mirror we need are human beings who care enough about us to see us when they look at us and help us to see ourselves.
     
     Who sits with us, sees us, listens to us, knows us and helps us know ourselves buy helping us be conscious of who we are?
     
     Carl Jung said, “We are who we always have been, and who we will be.” We are the future we seek. To find our future we have to see ourselves, know ourselves, listen to ourselves, love ourselves, be ourselves—in the company of those who can do that with us.
142. Midnight Hole — Big Creek, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, NC/TN, November 7, 2007 — I have four stones in my office that I selected from the pile of stones being used to build the knee-high retaining wall by our driveway.
     
     The four stones represent the foundation of the world, no, the universe—and all that is beyond the universe. Everything!
     
     You can take four stones—or anything—and see everything in them if you look at them in the right way. The stones remind us to look beyond the stones, past the stones, to what the stones MEAN.
     
     This is the place of symbols in our life. Symbols don’t mean anything in themselves (a stone is just a stone)—they remind us to look beyond them to what they stand for, represent. There is their meaning.
     
     We are the architects of meaning in our own life. We make the meaningful connections. We find the threads of meaning—that have meaning to us—and follow them.
     
     No one can tell us what is meaningful, just like no one can tell us whether the water in the pool, lake, ocean or stream is warm or cold.
     
     “Come on in—the water is fine,” doesn’t mean the same thing to you as it means to me. We will decide for ourselves if it is fine or not.
     
     Just so, we will decide for ourselves if something is meaningful or not. It is meaningful if we say it is, if we find it to be meaningful.
     
     It is meaningful if it means something to us. Otherwise, it is just a stone, or a chalice, or a stream, or a series of words.
     
     We find our own meaning. We have to find what is meaningful to us. We have to look at our life with eyes that see meaning there.
     
     We give our life meaning by the way we interpret our life, by the things we say about it, by what we tell ourselves about living.
     
     What life means is what we say it means. The meaning of life is the meaning we say it has. We make it up.
     
     Our life is as meaningful as we imagine it to be. When I say the four stones in my office are the foundation of everything, I’m making it up.
     
     I am imagining the four stones to be meaningful, to symbolize the actual foundation of everything, but there is no ACTUAL, literal, foundation.
     
     Just to talk about “the actual foundation of everything” is to ascribe a meaning to things that does not exist in actuality. It is imaginary.
     
     Nevertheless, the four stones in my office ARE the actual foundation of everything, and “the still point of the turning world.”
143. Mallard in Flight 28 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, February 24, 2013 — We cannot just fall into any old life. We cannot just live the life that is handed to us, or the life we are told to live, or the one that is easy.
     
     We have to find the life that is seeking us, the life that only we can live, the life that was ours to live before we were born.
     
     I have to listen, and see. I have to have a life that calls for, that calls forth, listening and seeing. I cannot have a life that forbids listening and seeing, probing, inquiring, exploring, looking, poking around, investigating, going beyond what is said and exhibited to what else there is, what all there is. I cannot live the life that is generally required of us all. Can you?
     
     We are cut out for some futures but not for others. The things we could not be are legion.
     
     When we are stuck with having to be who we cannot be, something has to give.
     
     Suicide or addiction sometimes seem to be the only way out. I recommend that we die to something else—not to life.
     
     Die to wanting it to be easier than it is. Die to wanting life delivered to you, wrapped in a bow. Die to what you are told you cannot do.
     
     Die to believing you cannot do what you know you are born to do. You owe it to yourself to find out if you cannot do it. Find out. Be sure.
     
     Homer was a blind poet. Beethoven was a deaf composer. The work finds a way when we devote ourselves to being who we are anyway. Any way.
144. Mallard in Flight 21 — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, February 17, 2013 — How are you going to live what remains of your life? How are you going to become alive in the time left for living?
     
     I recommend asking for a guiding dream. Seriously. Before you go to sleep tonight, ask your Inner Guide for a dream pointing you in the direction of how to live your life, of how to be alive.
     
     You will have to interpret the dream. Dreams come from the right side of our brain and are dreamed by the left side of our brain. It’s FM talking to AM.
     
     You ask for direction in how to live your life and you get a dream about a polar bear taking a hot shower. What sense does THAT make? The problem is compounded by the fact that no one can make sense of it but YOU. That’s YOUR polar bear and YOUR hot shower. YOU have to understand your own dream.
     
     You may have to work with it over a period of days, or weeks, or the rest of your life. You honor the dream by working with it. By asking for additional dreams to help you find the interpretive thread. By letting it simmer while you wait to find the connection between what you asked for and what you got.
     
     When you get it you will know it. Your body will resonate with your awareness. It will be like remembering the forgotten item at the grocery store. Not cheese, not toilet paper, not salt, COFFEE!
     
     So, ask for a dream and do not throw away what you are given. Receive it well. Turn it over. Walk around with it. Work with it. See what becomes of it. It is the threshold to a new world of possibilities—for the rest of your life.
145. Cone Manor Porch 02 — Blue Ridge Parkway, Blowing Rock, NC, October 5, 2012 — It’s all practice. Why aren’t you practicing? Rehearsing your scenes? Trying on different roles? Crafting your art?
     
     What is your art, by the way? Carl Jung said, “Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument.” Our art will not leave us alone until we have done the thing and done it well. We practice our art. Our art perfects us.
     
     Art chooses the artist the way the wand chooses the wizard. We cannot say, “Oh, I’m going to be a poet,” when our art is cutting down trees, or making pancakes, or receiving people well.
     
     It is all practice. It is all art. We practice our roles, our scenes, in order to excel at the art of life, to master the art of living well.
     
     The scene is visiting your mother in the nursing home. How many different ways can you play that scene? Practice, practice, practice. Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. Then play it and see how you do. How can you improve your performance? How can you play it differently next time?
     
     All those scenes that repeat, repeat, repeat themselves forever unchanging, always, always, always the same? Play them differently. Stop reading from the script. Ad lib your lines. Practice being a different character in the same scene.
     
     The scene keeps recycling, keeps coming around. The sister-in-law is coming again. You get to practice as many different ways to play the scene as you can imagine. You don’t have to do anything the same way.
     
     Art makes the artist. Jung said, “It is not Goethe who creates Faust, but Faust which creates Goethe.” You have an art. You become an artist by practicing your art. As one devoted.
146. January Shoreline 05 — Lake Brandt, Bur-Mil Park Access, Greensboro, NC, January 14, 2013 — I go looking with a camera. Sometimes, I see something. More often than not, what I see is something I did not expect to see.
     
     You have to go looking if you want to see.
     
     You cannot wait until you are in the mood. You have to go looking whether you are in the mood or not.
     
     It takes self-discipline to be an artist. If you are an artist of looking, you have to go looking. It’s the looking that makes an artist of you. It’s the practice that pulls you forth.
     
     Your have to practice looking if you want to see.
     
     Do not have much to do with people who tell you how to see. Who tell you how things are. Who tell you what’s what. Who spell it all out for you. Who give you the answers. All of them. About everything.
     
     Go look for yourself. Decide for yourself what is right for you. Pursue it. With your whole heart. All your life long. If you can find better advice, take it.
147. Duck on Ice — Bog Garden, Greensboro, NC, January 23, 2013 — May you see what you look at. May you hear what you listen to. May you understand what is happening in each situation as it arises and know what to do about it, and do it. And, in so doing, may you always weigh the best interest of yourself along with the best interest of others and the best interest of the situation, and act in light of all things considered. That should do it quite nicely, don’t you think?
148. Lake Jeanette — Greensboro, NC, January 11, 2013 — Our life—the life that is ours to live, that is—the life we were born to live—is always waiting to be lived.
     
     It is never too late to start being who we are. We generally settle for depression, despair or rage for having not been who we are—and continue to fail to do the work of being who we are.
     
     To begin moving toward who we are at any point in our life, we start loving what we love and doing the things that bring us to life.
     
     What do you enjoy about your life? What do you do that you love? How long has it been since you enjoyed it? Did it?
     
     Be who you are. That’s the most important thing. And, if you cannot do that, be who you say you are. That’s the second most important thing.
     
     Being who you are means loving what you love, not what you are supposed to love. Thinking what you think, not what you are supposed to think. Believing what you believe, not what you are supposed to believe. Feeling what you feel, not what you are supposed to feel. Seeing what you see, not what you are supposed to see—or supposed to not see.
     
     Being who you are means asking the questions that beg to be asked, even if you are not supposed to ask questions. And doing the things that need to be done, even if you are not supposed to do anything.
     
     Being who you are frees you to live your life the way you would live it. You’ll do a lot better with it than Those Who Know Best And Must Be Pleased. Or my name isn’t Rocky.
149. Used in Short Talks On Contradiction, etc., Katahdin 17 — From the Abol Bridge on Golden Road overlooking the west branch of the Penobscot River at the lower end of the 100 Mile Wilderness near Millinocket, ME, September 25, 2012 —
     
     The Buddha spent most of his life in a deep funk, suffering over the suffering he had witnessed in the world, and finally grew up enough to say, “Well, isn’t that just the way it is, though?” He called it enlightenment and stepped back into his life to free people from suffering about having to suffer.
     
     Suffering got him to the place of being free from suffering and he tried to give people a short-cut to freedom from suffering by telling them how to think about it. It is a wonderful inconsistency, contradiction.
     
     His experience was the path to his own release, but he figured he could save people the pain of that path by telling them about his experience. If you had pointed out the discrepancy between experiencing something and hearing someone talk about experiencing something, he would have said, “Yes! That’s right! I’m trying to save people the pain of waking up by telling them to wake up!”
     
     ”Growing up” is another term for “waking up.” No one can grow anyone up by talking to them about growing up. And no one can stop trying to do that.
     
     We think if we just tell people to grow up, to wake up, enough, they will.
     
     My wife wishes I would remember things, like where I put the checkbook. She thinks telling me to remember things is going to flip some switch and I’ll remember them. Last night I dreamed she told me to remember the church’s new address and I told her in the dream, “Telling me to remember something is like telling me to turn green.”
     
     There are no shortcuts to turning green. Or to growing up. Or to waking up. Or to seeing, hearing, understanding. If we get there at all, we live our way there. But. That doesn’t stop us from telling people how to do it. From trying to give them a short-cut. To save them the pain of finding out for themselves.
     
     There are no short-cuts to the realization that there are no short-cuts. We all have to live our way to wherever it is we are going.
150. Lake Jeanette Fog 02 Detail, B & W — Greensboro, NC, January 11, 2013 — We have to have the audacity to live toward the life that is ours to live, not wait for it to be delivered.
     
     We numb ourselves to the painful reality of this life by day-dreaming of THAT life—the one we would have if we won the lottery, or the one we could have had if it hadn’t been for whatever it was that forced this life on us.
     
     We are not to waste our time dreaming of some Neverland Life. We have to live the life that is ours to live, beginning right here, right now, with these resources, in this context and these circumstances.
     
     We cannot put things off waiting to be delivered from this life by winning the lottery, or stumbling upon a fairy godmother, or a Prince (or Princess) Charming, or a genie in a jar to whisk up for us a life worth living. That isn’t how it works.
     
     We can’t wait to be delivered! Odysseus didn’t wait for deliverance from the Cyclops. Jacob didn’t wait for deliverance from the angel.
     
     Step into your life and live it—live toward the life that is yours to live beginning now. You may take your lumps but you will get better at it. Better at living your life and at taking your lumps.
     
     That’s a lot better than dreaming forlornly about Neverland.

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