What is Good and Evil

Watching storms appear and disappear on the radar.  Driest October on record.  Hottest too.  When will we wake up and do something serious about climate change? 

Don't know how people cope with stress.  I'm retired, living the dream, our bills are paid, my husband loves me, I enjoy perfect health yet there is anxiety.  Sometimes, when I'm walking the dogs, I feel if I could just walk fast enough, I'd outrun it.  I'd run except I pay in aches and pains and sleepless nights.  So I walk; faster and faster and faster, like I'm trying to break the sound barrier, or disappear into a wormhole to arrive in another place, another dimension.  Fantastical yes, but it feels like that.  Outstriding stress. 

Then I take a series of deep breaths, get centered, accept that I can't save everything, that pain and suffering and death are as much a part of life as joy and peace and birth. 

It's still the great unanswered conundrum that I've never read an acceptable answer to.  Pain and suffering and death.  If we have the concept of goodness and joy and happiness and it seems to be bred into us to seek it, to celebrate it when we find it, and to castigate ourselves when we are the cause of the loss of it to another being, then why is the world so monstrous? 

I love praying mantis'.  When I find one of the inch long brown ones in the house I carry it outside so the cats won't find it.  But that mantis will catch a bug and eat it alive, starting at the head.  Do we accept and celebrate the cruel as well as the kind?  Is it all, in the end, one and the same?  Do we make a choice, coming down on the side of the Fred Wests, ISIS jihadists and Gacys, finding our happiness, our valid happiness there?  Do we not see the big picture and that's why we get mired in morals and ethics and depression? 

It's not theoretical science to say we are just a collection of oscillating waves and fragments of space that disappear as soon as an attempt is made to quantify them.  So if it's all a dream, do I just embrace the dream, mine and everyone else's as having equal value?  Is there really no good or evil except that I have an opinion of it?

Can't accept that.   Almost a physical sensation of revulsion.

 So guess I must accept the stress of knowing how much pain and suffering and death there is in the world.  And, selfishly, try not to think of it too much.  To keep on taking those deep centering breaths and paint pretty pictures.

Found this website through wordpress called American Gallery,   http://americangallery.wordpress.com.  Suzay Lamb, the creator of AG, is passionate about finding and posting for all the world to enjoy, the works of artists from the 1700's up to the present day.  There is such a wide sampling that there is something for everyone.  I've been working my way through the artists alphabetically, starting with the letter H - just to be different. 

Perhaps it's not entirely ethical but when I find a painting I like I use it as a desktop for a day or two so that I may study it.  Don't save them for it is the unauthorized use of someone else's work but I don't think any artist would mind someone adimiring their creation for a few hours or a few days.  The problem is I always find something more beautiful than the last which I must have as a desktop.  

Since writing I've completed a pencil sketch of a galah and have amost finished a pastel drawing of a tiger cat leaping.  It's drawn in such a way that it is as though one was lying on the grass looking at the sky when this cat jumped through your field of vision.  There is nothing but cat, blue sky and a few clouds.  I'm okay with the drawing but am disappointed with my use of colour.  When I look at the Navajo Indian chief I drew back in the 70's I am amazed that I so obviously seemed to know what I was doing.  The nap of his heavy winter coat looks real.  His skin looks like skin.  Granted I was copying from a photo (Natinal Geographic?) but I still had to have some skill in order to pull it off.  This cat I'm drawing from memory and the help of Natalia who can't understand why I keep turning her over to have a look at her abdomen, although she graciously purrs and allows me a quick peek, it being too cold to remain stretched out for more than a minute.  The problem is I've overloaded the paper with pastel.  The real problem is, as usual, I changed my mind partway through.  I painted a brilliant sky using the entire paper.  Perfect gradation of shading from the darkest blue at the top to the paler blue at the bottom.  Then I started to draw the cat on top of the blue thinking the blue would come in handy as shadows on the dark side of the cat.  And it does but the tooth is already so full that any thought of drawing lifelike fur is out of the question.  Even with sharp pastel pencils.

 And that's another thing.  I'm quite disappointed with the Faber Castel pastel pencils.  Compared to the cheap Montmarte they are difficult to apply and the colours are insipid.  Perhaps the Montmarte pastels show up their inferior quality by not staying fresh, by losing their colour over time.  I don't know but I know when I want vivid true pigment that goes on even over pastel sticks, hard and soft, I reach for a Montmarte.  I should send this blurb to their advertising department.  I paid big bucks for the Faber Castel and don't like them.  Paid $24 for 36 Montmarte colours and enjoy using them.   Maybe I'm just a victim of artist snobbery. 

Took the cat outside yesterday afternoon and 'fixed' hell out of it.  I like the way fixative makes the colours darker.  Haven't done anything to it today except look as I go past.  If I'm very careful I may be able to salvage it.  If not I've even thought of having another go.  I never do a picture more than once.  Succeed or fail, once I've had a go it's lost its allure.  But the cat?  I like the whimsy of it (isn't whimsy just a wonderful word?).  To pull it off really well would be lovely. 

In other news - haven't had a trace of dizziness or vertigo for over a week now.  I breathed  through it.  Breath has become of vital importance since I quit smoking.  I'm frequently filling my lungs as full as they can get and giving thanks for that breath.  Sounds funky but there you go.  Without breath, we're dead.  Probably one of the most substantial gifts one can give thanks for.  Naturally after 44 years of smoking my lungs are not instantly restored but I do notice a micromillimeter of improvemet week by week.  And breathing through things, breathing to heal, breathing to calm, breathing to love.  It's all one and the same.  Breathing to remember who I am.  I had reason to write to someone this week who is going through emotional hell.  I asked that he remember who he was, who he really was.  We teach best that which we most need to learn - or relearn.  I need to remember who I am too.  I get caught up in the trivia of day to day living and forget that I'm here because of a divine spark animating this collection of proteins - and that divine spark is renewed every time I breathe. 

When I take that huge breath, especially during a section of my yoga practice which is devoted to breath, I sometimes feel that connection, that divinity.  So what happens when we die?  I think we take that final breath, which is both physical and metaphysical, and it feels that we keep taking it, that we become so imbued with breath that there is finally no separation between the inhale and exhale but the breath is All.  Physically we take that final breath and the breath leaves the body taking the divine spark with it.   Well, that's my guess for today.  Tomorrow I may have another theory.

Sulawesi Breath

I often listen to a CD of birdsong from Sulawesi while doing yoga. On the last track there is a recording of a bird singing near dusk or night as there is a frog chorus in the background. I suppose you couldn't really call is singing, more of a calling, in a breathy descending minor key, of two and then three notes. It is the loneliest sound I have ever heard. There is no answer to that yearning hello. Just this waiting for a reply that never comes. The bird finally stops, the frogs chirp on but the silence and the infinity of the night is deafening.

I don't know what kind of bird this is and knowing it's name would not make it any dearer to me. It's all tied in with 'if a sparow or a leaf falls, would God know'? This bird symbolizes, for me at leat, all that we've lost, all that we could lose, if we don't clean up our act. What sound did a Dodo make? A Carolina parakeet. It's wretched that we will never know, that those sounds are lost forever. And this bird sings in the wilderness for a mate that never replies. Is that how it feels to know yourself to be finally and forever alone?

While I was meditating today and concentrating on my breath I could hear Tony the budgie talking to himself on the verandah (I love you, The Regurgitator, pretty pretty PRETTY bird). In the poinciana outside this room Felicity was lamenting her (to my mind at least) on off again relationship with Suki. Her calls didn't sound like contact calls but more of a lament. Suki came home yesterday but is gone again today. As I hovered in the indescribably state which may be a percursor to mditating it occurred to me that the breath which was the focus of my concentration and which was starting to define that oceanic feeling I sometimes get while meditating, was the very same breath Tony and Felicity were using. We were united by breath. In and out, no matter the rate, the air flows from one through another.

Listening to Words of Peace the other day, Prem Rawat spoke of how this planet, this Earth, is as far as anybody knows the only place with life on it for millions and billions of miles. He spoke of the miracle of meeting another who is alive and breathing This Day, and how we should greet each other with that shared miracle in mind. No one from 150 years ago is alive. No one today will be alive 150 years hence (barring medical miracles). And this Earth? A teeming, violent, buzzing, symphonic, fragile, resilient, chaotic yet ultimately precious place is the only place like it anywhere. This tiny tiny little light, this soft soft little sound in an infinity of empty space yet we live as though there are billions of Earths just a footstep away.