NEWLETTER FROM COLIN'S COZY COUNTRY COMFORT SOUL FOOD KITCHEN

CONFUSION WILL BE MY EPITAPH

The wall on which the prophets wrote

Is cracking at the seams

Upon the instruments of death

The sunlight brightly gleams.

Confusion will be my epitaph

As I crawl a cracked and broken path

If we make it, we can all sit back and laugh

But I feel tomorrow I’ll be crying.

But I feel tomorrow I’ll be crying.

Knowledge is a deadly friend

If no one sets the rules.

The fate of all mankind, I see

Is in the hands of fools.

Confusion will be my epitaph

As I crawl a cracked and broken path.

If we make it, we can all sit back and laugh

But I fear tomorrow we’ll be crying.

But I fear tomorrow we’ll be crying. Epitaph by King Crimson

TURN OFF THE SIGNAL: WIPE OUT THE NOISE : The world we live in has turned to noise: loud conversations, loud engines, loud music that speaks with a violent tongue, loud politicians, loud religious leaders, loud everything, the loud thud of a bomb that destroys your home, hospital and your children. It has become so pervasive, we are not even aware of it. We no longer have the capacity of listening to each other, and the person who shouts the loudest is the only one who is heard. The world, in essence, is turning to noise. How do we make ourselves heard above all this noise? More importantly, how do we find peace in silence?

ABSURDITY: The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion. Basically, at the very bottom of life, which seduces us all there is only absurdity and more absurdity. And maybe that is what gives us our joy for living, because the only thing that can defeat absurdity is lucidity. Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.

‘A person who has not been completely alienated, who has remained sensitive and able to feel, who has not lost their sense of dignity, who is not yet ‘for sale’, who can still suffer over the suffering of others, who hasn’t acquired full the ‘having mode of existence’- briefly, a person who has remained a person and not become a thing- cannot help feeling lonely, powerless, and isolated in present day society.

They cannot help doubting themselves and their own convictions, if not their sanity. They cannot help suffering, even though they can experience moments of joy and clarity that are absent in the life of their ‘normal contemporaries’. Not rarely, they will suffer from anxiety and depression that results from the situation of a sane person living in an insane society.’ Erich Fromm.

Find a place inside where there is joy, and the joy will burn out the pain.. Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors where there were only walls. Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world. We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy! .

‘Is the system going to flatten you out and deny you your humanity, or are you going to be able to make use of the system for the attainment of human purposes? Life is meaningless. You bring the meaning to it. One way or another, we all have to find what best fosters the flowering of our humanity in this contemporary life, and dedicate ourselves to it. The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are. It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.’ Joseph Campbell

Somehow, through thick or thin, I did manage to resist this world’s harsh need to make me into everyone else; a part of the human herd!

‘Are you prepared to live in the world with its harsh need to change you? Can you look back with firm eyes saying ‘This is where I stand!’? Inside everyone is a great shout of joy waiting to be born.’ David Whyte

In the darkest winter of my soul, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy, for it tells me that no matter how much the world pushes against me and attempts to turn me into everyone else, within me, there’s something stronger- something better, pushing right back.

“The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.” Marcus Aurelius

Don’t take yourself too seriously. You will soon break the bow if you keep it always stretched. Drop the idea that you are Atlas carrying the world on your shoulders. The world would go on even without you. When the path is clear, why do you hurl stones before you?

‘There exists Only the present instant: a Now which always and without end is itself new. There is no yesterday, and no tomorrow, but only Now as it was a thousand years ago, and a thousand years hence.’ Meister Eckhart 13th

‘Poetry soothes the soul and emboldens the heart to accept Mystery.’ Keats

There is no real aloneness. There is solitude and the nurturing silence that is the relationship with ourselves , but even then we are part of something larger.

SILENT LUCIDITY: Just remaining quiet, being attentive, requires a lot of courage and effort. Yet, it is in this loneliness that the deepest activities begin. It is here that you discover action without motion, labor that is profound repose, vision in obscurity, and, beyond all desire, a fulfillment whose limits extend to infinity. In the final analysis, the individual person is responsible for living his life and ‘finding himself.’ If he persists in shifting responsibility to someone else, he fails to find the meaning of his own existence. My teacher once told me that sitting in meditation and embracing silence is an act of revolution against a soulless society. Colin Mac Rae

In meditation, it is possible to dive

Deeper and deeper into the mind

To a place where there is no disturbance

And there is absolute solitude.

It is at this point in the profound stillness

That the sound of the mind can be heard.

Silence is like a cradle holding our endeavors and our will; a silent spaciousness sustains us in our work and at the same time connects us to larger worlds that in the busyness of our daily struggles to achieve, we have not yet investigated. Silence is the soul’s break for freedom!

It is like the sea breaking on a far-off reef,

And it lulls the being into extreme calm.

Like the sea, it is primordial

And here is no storm.

Only the silken waves soughing.

When I listen to the sound of this sea,

I sense that I am a voyager

And this sound is a wind in the sails of a ship.

But this sound is not of this world:

For other sounds are heard distinctly

And cause this sound to die-

Though it returns with the silence.

All journeys have a secret destination of which the traveler is unaware. Solitude is the place of purification. Silence is a great source of strength. To the mind that is still, the whole Universe surrenders.

The Wise Person believes profoundly in silence- the sign of a perfect equilibrium. Silence is the absolute poise or balance of body, mind, and spirit. The person who preserves her selfhood, is ever calm and unshaken by the storms of existence; not a leaf, as it were, not a ripple upon the surface of the shining pool. Silence is the ideal attitude and conduct of life. Silence is the cornerstone of character. Silence is the soul’s break for freedom.

Sometimes I think of it as a transcendent sound-

Which speaks of unknown powers,

Of cosmic storms and sun winds

Sighing in the brain.

This is no earthly voyage

And I see visions of ships that

Sail on no earthly sea.

Our ships sail on upon a silent sea;

No wind, there is no sound-

But we move on.

The dream of my life is to lie down by a slow river and stare at the light in the trees - to learn something by being nothing. You must not stop being whimsical and you must not ever give anyone else the responsibility for your life. We shake with joy. We shake with grief. What a time, they have these two, housed in the same body

Silence is a great source of strength

To the mind that is still

The whole universe surrenders Zhuang Zhou

One person’s peaceful presence is the source of an inner strength and calm, and people feel that presence and respond to it. We all have to support and love one another during these chaotic storms in our lives! There is still a lot of good in this world. But we have to look for it. We’re alive!

Tears have a purpose. They are what we carry of the ocean, and perhaps we must become the sea, give ourselves to it, if we are to become transformed.

There is a way that nature speaks, that land speaks. Most of the time we are simply not patient enough, quiet enough to pay attention to the story. There are ways in, journeys to the center of life, through time, through air, matter, dream, and thought. The ways are not always mapped or charted but sometimes, being lost, if there is such a thing, is the sweetest place to be. And, always in the search a person might find that they are already there, at the center of the world. It may be a broken world, but it is glorious nevertheless.

Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. ‘Be still’ they say, ‘Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.

OCEANS

I have a feeling that my boat

Has struck down there in the depths,

Against a great thing.

And nothing

Happens! Nothing…. Silence…. Waves.

-Nothing happens? Or has everything happened?

And we are standing quietly

In the new Life? J.R. Jimenez.

We find ourselves adrift on an ocean of suffering. But if you turn around, you can still see the land. Everyone in the boat may be panicking but can be kept from despair by one person’s peaceful presence, who slowly and methodically rows the boat towards the ‘others’ clinging desperately to what is left of their shipwreck. He then gets everyone on the boat to move to one side, so that he is able to pull the ‘others’ into the boat without capsizing and then slowly and calmly rows everyone back to land, to safety.