What a broken body taught me about broken ideas.
Category Archives: Granola: Musings
Limits or Limitations?
I am finally learning to stop calling limits limitations. These are not the same.
Applied Intuition: Consciousness is Collaborative!
Intuition is that capacity of consciousness to understand, communicate, and connect the parts to the whole of creation. Intuition permits individuation and emanation from the formless whole. It renders possible the co-creation of our bodies, our minds, our worlds, and our infinite potentiality.
Count Me In!
The morning was filled with politics. What are we for, what are we against? What matters? What could touch the heart of any individual anywhere on the planet? What slogan could unify a divided country, a divided world, a divided self? At the end of a recent local political meeting the phrase “Count me in!”Continue reading “Count Me In!”
My Teacher Was a Cottontail Rabbit
I was literally propelled from the chair where I had been sitting. NOW!!! Release Teacher now! I jumped up, took Sam the cat’s kennel, stuffed it full of goodies and water, and took this tiny creature outside on a hill near the house.
Optimism
I continue to be an optimist. I continue to believe that human nature is fundamentally good, regardless of evidence to the contrary. After all, judgment and interpretation are matters of perspective: time and distance are likely to increase my understanding. “Ah, that’s what was going on!” “Ah, those are the consequences of my action orContinue reading “Optimism”
Just Say Yes: A Millennial Guide to Ease
The following audio recording is a speech I gave on January 23, 2000, at the Music, Musings and Meditation Fellowship in Albuquerque NM. The talk is about choice and ease at a time when folks were beginning to realize that the anticipated Y2K technological bug did not bring about the end of the world asContinue reading “Just Say Yes: A Millennial Guide to Ease”
The Appropriate Use of Procrastination and Deadlines
The Great Procrastinator For years the L. in my middle name stood for “late,” “lazy,” “loony,” and seemingly downright “lackadaisical.” My negative inner voice was relentless and the outer voices were often a match. I would put things off and put them off again until I had frustrated everyone around me and myself as well:Continue reading “The Appropriate Use of Procrastination and Deadlines”
Kudos to Teachers!!
There is an old saying that has stuck with me my entire life: “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” On the one hand teachers are canonized (sometimes called philosophers and prophets, professors, almost always male, who are initially ridiculed and later revered). Some are teased affectionately (absent-minded professors). On the other hand someContinue reading “Kudos to Teachers!!”
Consent
Consent is a very tricky issue. How do I know if consent is real or even possible? How do I tell if what I am consenting to and what you think I am consenting to are the same? What recourse do I have to change my mind and take back my consent midstream for anyContinue reading “Consent”
Stranger in a Not Entirely Strange Land
Nothing makes us more aware of our similarities with others in our own country or town than travel abroad. No matter how marginal I felt in the United States for much of my younger life, trips to my West African ancestral home in the 1960’s and 70’s made me intensely and even painfully aware howContinue reading “Stranger in a Not Entirely Strange Land”
A Dog’s Intuition
Chaco decided he’d teach me a thing or two about his mastery of intuition, and my equally impressive lack of it from a dog’s perspective.
Intuition Connects Everything!
Intuition is a continuous signal. This signal emanates from all physical and nonphysical environments and sends messages instantaneously to any outpost of literally all that exists: beliefs, emotions, mountains, people (whether we like them or not), animals, universes we know nothing about, immeasurably small particles…literally everything! It provides information about the nature of our worldsContinue reading “Intuition Connects Everything!”
One Way or the Other, One Global Family. Will It Take UFOs to Get Us There?
Many years after an intense decade immersed in African politics and culture I was talking with my friends Kip Eddy and Sue Phillips about the possibility of UFO’s and extra-dimensional or extraterrestrial beings making their presence felt on earth. Kip was fascinated with the subject and I was happy to oblige his curiosity by takingContinue reading “One Way or the Other, One Global Family. Will It Take UFOs to Get Us There?”
Core Beliefs and the Body
I know why I was born an African-American female, why the fulfillment of my purpose in life needed these physical characteristics to make me strong, help me see, even support me in the special kind of leadership I was to undertake. My root assumption, my overriding conscious core belief about our experience of physical reality,Continue reading “Core Beliefs and the Body”
Choice III: Keeping At It
If one single thing distinguishes this new millennium in my mind, it will be the active and fully conscious exercise of choice. It is only the intensity of choice that can break the oppositional pull of dualism, provide the synthesis between contradictions, handle, if never entirely eliminate dilemmas, and move the human spirit to theContinue reading “Choice III: Keeping At It”
The Color of Music
Recently a colleague came to dinner. The conversation was East Coast heady, covering decades of experience, emotion, and intellectual understanding. We laughed, traded professional and bawdy stories, discovered surprise. All was going along quite well until a question shot out like a bolt from the blue… “Why did you stop singing, Helen?” my musically savvyContinue reading “The Color of Music”
Choice and National Culture Revised: Bringing the Question Home
National culture is a blueprint for choice; it is made, not born. How shall we make and remake our national culture today? What is our redefinition of “destiny?”
My Big Toe
I returned from a most extraordinary trip to the East Coast only to discover that all that walking around had damaged my right big toe. It was blue purple, bleeding, swollen, looking as if the nail would pop right off at the slightest touch. We walked a lot in New York City, but I hadContinue reading “My Big Toe”
“It’s Only Meat”
The killing, skinning and dismembering of a healthy two-year-old giraffe named Marius in front of child and adult spectators at the Copenhagen, Denmark zoo has haunted me for days. I am still trying to sort out my visceral feelings about this, and trying to understand and share the public outrage and concern on all sidesContinue reading ““It’s Only Meat””