The Big Mushroom...

...and "Interconnectedness"

I have often tried to see my life in metaphor. Sort of a mile high view thing that instead of taking an aerial perspective takes a perspective as though the viewer is a painter of broad strokes or a poet. Anyway, interconnectedness is the theme because it was prevalent in a big way today. I attended this class at my workplace...an institution of healing... (another metaphor, I assure you) where I work in the Center for Performance Improvement. The class was called "The Magic of Conflict", but it was really about energy or chi... something I just had a conversation with George about at lunch last week. It was about connecting rather than opposing and thus turning conflict into a gift. Could sound cheesy, but it isn't... The energy of conflict is a gift and I work for a dept. that is all about improvement. Then I watched Northern Exposure with Duncan. Dr. Fleischman (sp?) is AWOL in the tundra and he is explaining to Maggie how these honey mushrooms he picks are all a part of one big fungus that exists underground as a whole being but appear on the surface as separate. Then he trips along with a diatribe about how we are all one...

So here I am getting this message twice in one day and it is like preaching to the choir... but it was yet another moment when I could see the metaphor...

My life is not just getting up and going to work... it is broad brush strokes of learning. I used to work at another Center... "The Center on Philanthropy".... at an institution of higher learning. The brush strokes begin to show a pattern when you look at things from the metaphor perspective.

I have so much to learn... I am trying to see with a different lens. I went out to my car last night and there was a raven sitting on the soft-top roof. It looked at me and I looked at it. It didn't move, but crackled at me... I don't know how to characterize it differrently... it crackled and I laughed. I needed to run an errand and I tried thinking that and sending a message that way... it crackled again...finally, out loud, I said "I see you shapeshifter, trickster like coyote, sitting on my vehicle... I am trying to read your message... the vehicle is magick... I understand that. My car, this body... not real. An illusion." It crackled again, hopped onto the hood of my car and down onto the driveway, walked until it was in front of me and laughed. No other way to explain the sound.

This life is an illusion... so much is metaphor. Don't let the vehicle fool you.. don't let it

turned a metaphoric corner today

Lunch with George is always a redeeming moment in my week. I get to have the real conversations. Last week it was George's dream about being hunted by beings of questionable motive and how it turned out his wife Annie had been taking "Yam", some kind of love drug that required an annual fix. Today is was about kundalini and how I shut street lights off wherever I go.

I love that I can sit across a diner table from my brother and discuss "Doubting Thomas", our next foray into the world of short film as well as my reading about the Mental Body and thought forms and their inherent implications on our lives and the lives of those close to us.

To some this may sound like a version of the Twilight Zone gone bad, but in my book, it is the important stuff; the stuff that counts.

I was driving back to work after a discussion about my first meditation experience involving alignment of the chi and how it ran straight up my spine and out the crown of my skull and suddenly something shifted. Now I have been talking about existential crisis and phenomenological paradigm shifts for years, but I have not really been fully cognizant as one has occurred within my own lens... until today. To be honest, it was subtle, but the ramifications are showing already. I am not who I was before lunch, or more aptly, my lens is not who it was before lunch.

I came to the realization that somewhere along the way in this life, I made the mistake of feeling guilty for things that were beyond my control. This afternoon, Camus' myth of Sisyphus that I must have made the mistake of taking on became clearly ridiculous to me.

How lucky am I to have the opportunity to have conversations that shift the very nature of how I see my own life over a bowl of tomato soup with my brother...