I just saw Avatar today and it had me sweating, laughing, in tears and joyfully rooting for the Navi!

I don’t want to spoil the plot or movie for anyone but I do want to say that I was blown away. I am not surprised since James Cameron has yet to disappoint me. I just have to share my feelings while they are fresh.

For a short span of my life when I was a young boy, I believed what the old Hollywood Cine-guard wanted me to believe, namely that the American Indians were blood thirsty savages. When I found out how I had been duped and heard the rest of the story, the real story (and later became friends with some Apaches and Navajos here in Southern Arizona) I was appalled that I had believed such blantant lies. It was the first of many shocks along the way of rising above my raisings – the second biggest shock when I realized that my parents would never share my open mind and shake the “almighty white man” illusion. I was young, I was ignorant and I was naive – but that was 1962. The times changed and so did I.

When I learned the truths about my ancestors I wept. I literally laid on my bed, put my head on my pillow and sobbed in convulsing waves of agony. I felt so betrayed. It took a long time to adjust to the fact after that that I was white and I was stuck in this body with an ugly heritage of atrocities. White Anglo men can be the most fiendish of all of Terra’s creatures! Still that didn’t mean that I had to follow in those foot prints and I have demanded of myself that I not – and quite frankly it has been one of the easier choices I have had to make in this journey.

So… back to the movie. When I saw this huge metaphor in 3-D no less (and yippee on this note: it was made by a white man) for so many human struggles on our planet. I was giddy to root for the Navi and pray that this would go the way it should have in the American west 400 years ago. I will say no more about how it goes in case you haven’t seen the movie yet. It was a fabulous fantasy/metaphor method of shining a light on some of our ugly capitalistic notions and how greed and money can so easily corrupt the human mind.

It never ceases to amaze me how we can use our thoughts to spin things in satisfaction of our fears and desires any old way we wish to make even the worst decision seem okay. Even at times when atrocities are afoot, a human can spin it and believe it and then kill in the name of it.

We are all capable of this, just look at any religion and you will see by its history how revved up someone can get with righteous indignation: bombings, massacres, inquisitions and even something as seemingly benign as ostracization is a form of the same spin. My mother’s religion: Jehovah’s Witnesses spun her in to not associating with me for the last 25 years of her life. As for me, I rely on my ability to get my mind quiet, so I can hear wisdom beyond my own intellect. When I get quiet I can hear my body. I hear my heart beat, i fell the oxygen in my lungs. I hear wisdom from the wind and the trees. And unless you have ever really and truly been quiet, you do not know, you cannot know what I mean, so doubt me not. Rather, spend 5 minutes without thoughts and then leave a comment here.

I am so grateful for the meditative connection I have developed to the creator and the creative energy she has blessed me with, it is this connection and the silent communion that keeps me from spinning too far out of control. I am happy to see a world that – even in its slow evolution – is evolving into a more embracing and loving planet. If you doubt this comment, look back in history just two hundred years at the state of things then and you will see how incrementally, a generation at a time, things get better. I am yours, forever the optimist.

Thank you James Cameron and thank you for letting me share.

Love, Light and Happy Holidays,
Rusty

Just Shut Up For A Second

This life stuff: is it a gamble – or a sure thing?

My first physical moment here on earth and there I was with a 250,000,000-1 chance that I wouldn’t make it; still a wriggle here, a flick there, a couple of backstrokes, a sharp kick down the back stretch and voila: I out swam all those other sperm!

I won the ultimate lottery! No matter what happened next, there I was alive and kicking. We all get here by over coming insurmountable odds – we start off as lottery winners – maybe since there are so many winners, we forget that for every person that’s born there were two hundred fifty million that couldn’t get to the magical sphere in time.

For this winner it seemed like an awful lot of hard work only to find out I was on the bottom rung of a five-boy ladder. Hit the F-FWD button and you will find me in a steamy moment of blind with passionate lust, scattering my silly choices. Then shazam just like magic, I was a high school drop-out with a pregnant wife at sixteen and a father a month after I turned seventeen. It now seems so long ago!

Soon a specific blend of circumstance and reckoning beyond reason or control, spun me into making some down right stupid decisions, and bahd-a-bing bahd-a-boom ad a little cocaine to the equation, ply me with lots of booze and by all rights I should have been dead in my early twenties. But I survived, I got well.

And still I couldn’t see what a winner I was! All I could see were my losses – self-imposed though they were – I couldn’t see past what I missed and over into what I had, right before my eyes. I had long since forgotten that I was a lottery winner. I forgot what a blessing it was to beat the odds straight out of the gate.

Hit that F-FWD button again and hey I joined the fast track, I went back to school, got a degree zoom through a more than a dozen years of functional living but feeling like Sisyphus doing the same thing over and over for the rest of his life. I was positive that my destiny was to swim constantly against the current – I mean, hey: I was the swimming winner earlier in this story, right? Evidentially somewhere in my subconscious I truly believed it was my lot in life to have to swim up stream forever- as I carefully mix my metaphors – I swam my rock to the top of Sisyphus’s hill just so it could roll back down.

Is it more than redundant to say: After I had acquired cars, a mortgage, furniture, things, stuff and cash, I wasn’t getting anywhere in my life! I was stuck in a digital loop swimming up stream with my rock, then doing it all again and again day after day. My life had no gleam, glisten, or sparkle not even a dull glow.

Then there came a day, a day that started like every other. At least it appeared that way at first. In retrospect I can see what made this day different: it had scores and hundreds of days just like it, all piled up, one on top of the other, like an elaborately balanced house of cards. I was heading toward the curb again to grab my stone and start swimming when I stopped.

I don’t mean I stopped moving – though I mean I did quit moving, I stopped dead in my tracks – but more than that I stopped thinking. I heard a bird call, I felt the breeze on my skin, I watched a leaf fall all the way to the ground. Just for a split second, I had no thoughts. It wasn’t until that moment that I realized I had been living with an endless stream of chatter rattling around my brain constantly day in day out! Do this, pay that, go here, make this deadline, hurry, hurry, hurry! An endless stream of chattering drivel.

It is hard to believe even now, looking back, that so many things could change because of something so simple: “Just shut up for a second.” Wow! I remember my brothers and mother saying that to me all the time when I was little. I know for a fact, they had no idea then, how profound and how life changing it would have been for us all, if my whole family could have “just shut up for a second”.

My life changed in the flash of a moment. I didn’t know it then but the course, direction and end result of my life was completely and irrevocably rearranged. All because my mind stopped its chatter just long enough for me to know I was there: I felt the current of my life flowing in, through, and around me, just a flutter at first; it started with soft a tug then a firm pull; I stepped up to the curb like always, but suddenly I no longer had the energy to swim up stream. I was too tired to go against this heretofore-unnoticed current of my life.

Once I noticed it, I was quite amazed at how much energy it took to swim in the wrong direction every day carrying that awful stone. So, I quit and I surrendered to the pull and tug. It was a weird feeling at first, very scary, sort of like plunging into an inky black ocean of void with nothing but metaphorical surfboard. I closed my eyes and let the current have its way with me – all the while I was afraid that any second the wave was going break over a bottomless abyss and suck me endlessly down into nothingness. That sensation was quickly replaced by the euphoric sensation of “now that I have given up all hope, I feel so much better”. Then little by little, I began to see there was no danger – quite the opposite really – there was nothing but hope and I began for the first time in my life to truly enjoy the ride.

Then in no time at all, seeing that I was making progress with almost no effort by going with the flow, I realized I had more energy because I wasn’t working so hard at swimming up stream. And the stone? It was nowhere to be found! Then I had a real epiphany: If I go with the flow and use that lottery winning wriggle/flick/backstroke that got me here in the first place, I could make some real progress here.

That was when I began to surf through my life, loving the ebbs and flows of the currents surrounding and engulfing me. All the while, getting a clearer and cleaner picture of who I was and where I might be going. I began to see a real difference between who I am and who I think I should be. Now it is musical the way the current bobs me to and fro while the buoyant energy of my life carries me along without a worry in the world. Well, there are worries, but as it turns out they are always pointless exercises in habitual futility.

So here I am amazed that it has been over fifteen years since the day I stopped the chatter in my mind at that crucial moment. Nowadays the journey of my life is so exhilarating that any plan, goal or destination is completely secondary to the blissful chatter-free moments I make time for in my charmed existence. An existence that in a physical sense is more than half over, still, this morning as I write this, the river of my life seems into stretch out into a vast and spacious valley so wide that the perspective blends into a mere pinpoint on the horizon. As far as I know my life is an endless stream before me. Who knows how long I get to ride? Really and truly I don’t have time for too many ponderings of when and where it ends, all I have time for is this moment, and in this moment I am so vibrantly alive, I can actually feel the earth spinning on its axis, and it makes me F-in’ giddy!

I have walked many roads, worn many hats, done a great many things and still here I am: nowhere at all. As Don McLean once wrote: “There’s no need for turning back. All roads lead to where I stand. And I believe I’ll walk them all, no matter what I may have planned.”

All I know for sure is, I am just another lottery winner, looking at my life as it is today, and I am filled with a breathless wonder at the bounty and blessings that are pilled at my feet. No not material abundance, though I never want for anything. I mean the bounty of love in my life, the friendships and people I hold dear, I am talking about an awakening that gave me the right to be me; an appreciation for my own autonomy, so clearly present that I finally know beyond any thought of knowing that all I do and all I will strive to do for the rest of my life is just be me, doing what I love! I have no special powers or talents, it is just me being me. Finally being me, doing what I love to do: that is enough. It just so happens that I love bringing joy to those around me – now that really lights me up!

What a life, what a journey, what a ride… thank you for being apart of my life, even if only by reading this!


Revised December 15, 2009

Happy To Be Here,
Rusty