What’s Love Got to Do With It? (Love Matters)

Hi All, I am merging week One and Week Two topics this time because the author interview posted last week came through unexpectedly, and I was asked to share that.

This past month has brought difficult news about two of my good friends who are facing very difficult health conditions. Both are facing their conditions with strength and some degree of appropriate humor, but they are facing the impending mortality of their physical bodies and the mysterious transition of spirit which that entails. As I ask myself what should my monthly contemplation question be for April, I hold my friends dearly in my heart as I ask, “What Is (the Value of) Love?” or maybe more specifically, “What’s Love Got To Do With It?” Because Love seems to be what matters most in dealing with issues of life and transition.

When I was in high school in the turbulent early 1970’s, my father once grounded me because he said I “do not know what love is.” We were at a restaurant with the family for a Sunday brunch. Dad made some negative comment about the Beatles, especially John Lennon. I said boldly,

“All they are singing about is Love!”

For this Dad grounded me for a month, to think more deeply about the true meaning of love (to be generous with his motivation; actually he just didn’t like for anyone to challenge or contradict him in public). But I have never forgotten this experience and have often asked myself, at every new stage or transition of my life:

“Do I truly know what Love Is?  What Is Love, Really?”

This means, for me: why is love so important; am I truly capable of love or of being loved; and what does/ how can love matter, for I sense it is the most important state of consciousness one can have/ develop/ give/ receive/ share. I have come to believe that “Love is All!;” that at the base of any vital experience IS Love, a fountainhead of grateful bounty and blessings, the foundation of a true harmonious connection with another being or with nature or with our own higher Self, Spirit, and Divinity Itself; or else, the apparent lack of love, an emotional or spiritual vacuum.

In all, my best understanding so far is simple:

Love Matters.

So this shall be my personal growth question for this month, about how love matters and how the fact of Love, as an unconditional spiritual force, matters to the continuation and transformations of Life. I am reminded at the start of one of my favorite songs ever, about Love. It happens to be by the Beatles. (You may Click here to listen.)

In My Life

(by Paul McCartney, John Lennon)

There are places I’ll remember
All my life, though some have changed
Some forever, not for better
Some have gone and some remain
All these places have their moments
With lovers and friends I still can recall
Some are dead and some are living
In my life, I’ve loved them all

But of all these friends and lovers
There is no one compares with you
And these memories lose their meaning
When I think of love as something new
Though I know I’ll never lose affection
For people and things that went before,
I know I’ll often stop and think about them
In my life, I love you more
In my life– I love you more

 What is YOUR question for the month of April? I invite you to set your focus question as a contemplation seed for personal growth.

I welcome YOUR Story and Comments!

 

 

 

The Elixir of Musical Harmony

On Fridays I am doing a “negativity fast.”  That means that any critical thought or negative emotion that enters my mind, I wash it away or dissolve it immediately, focusing instead on only neutral or positive thoughts and experiences.  Because I have made a conscious choice to do this fast, it works wonderfully!

The goal of this fast is to help me maintain a greater harmony in life overall. I tend to be fairly overwhelmed at this stage as I am teaching several extra classes to prepare for retirement and relocation, plus I have a book release coming up that I need to shepherd by preparing for a book event tour.  With all that in addition to health matters requiring daily maintenance, I find my nerves are often somewhat frayed. All these changes looming on the horizon are unsettling to my introspective, balance and security seeking Cancerian nature!

One great elixir that helps me achieve a greater harmony and positive acceptance of what I can do to press forward day by day is music.  Thank heaven for Pandora as a musical companion while working!

Music weaves harmonies that can lift, inspire, soothe and encourage us to face our challenges with grace instead of acrimony.  Such a gift!

My love of musical companionship pervades my life history; does it yours too? My mother would play piano on many an afternoon while her five children did homework or played at home. “Moonlight Sonata” was one of her favorites and so it is one of mine always.  I played violin in several orchestras and took private lessons for many years. My sister Lee and I spent countless evenings during high school years talking and playing cards in her room while listening to Simon & Garfunkle, the Beatles and other popular songsters of the 60’s and 70’s. Lee’s favorites were “MacArthur’s Park” and “Delilah”; some of my favorites then were “Dock of the Bay” by Otis Redding, “King of the Road,” “In My Life” by the Beatles, and “Imagine.” Lee and I both loved, and still do, Ravel’s “Bolero.”

images are gratefully from pixabay.com

A musical Life Map can be revealing of the trends and focus of your life over time.  What are you listening to now compared to during earlier life stages? I listen more now, in my sixties, to melodious Classical music and to Celtic artists, who seem more in touch with harmonies of place and family rather than romance or intrigue.  Yet I still enjoy most of the music I have always enjoyed.  Music weaves the various stages and experiences of life together as a unified whole!

Here for your enjoyment then, a song that bares my Soul, In My Life :

I welcome YOUR Comments and Stories. What was/is your favorite music or song, and why?

 

Liminal Lives … as Change Agents

 

Artists including painters, musicians, writers, actors/directors, photographers, and others (including some scientists) who apply their artistic perspective or highly focused talents and perspectives to the work or the vocation they love, often spend much of their lives as what we could call liminal persons.  They might feel or be perceived as “outside” the norms of society, either by happenstance or by design.

As Outsiders, liminal persons can develop a point of view or vantage point at odds with normal convention; it is often this very ‘oddity’ about them that allows them to contribute original or even revolutionary ideas.  They can help a culture or a community to bend and flex in ways otherwise less likely and can help a society to adjust more quickly to new conditions. 

The Beatles when they first erupted upon the musical scene in the ‘60s were one such liminal group. They broke up thought forms by what at the time was considered even radical hair styles, musical beats, and ideology as represented in their lyrics. Mostly they sang about love, but the love they celebrated was broader and deeper. They wrote of world peace and love as a generational construct at odds with their own society’s post WWII and more recent Korean War global conflicts and the controversial war in Viet Nam. It was important for the Beatles to stand outside conservative norms in order to move society forward, even bringing non-Western spirituality to the fore in their later songs and lives.

Socrates in classical Greek times was likewise viewed as an Outsider to the established order. He went about encouraging free thinking in public arenas through his method of philosophical questioning. Socrates’ decision not to escape his sentence of drinking hemlock for the crime of “corrupting” traditional Greek thought of the time was in itself a violation of norms, forcing people to think about his premise of the immortality of Soul.

Let’s list some more names of historically well-known liminal persons whose departures from norms helped humanity to be more open to new ideas or even to revolutionary change:  Amelia Earhart, Albert Einstein, Rumi, Gertrude Stein, Frida Kahlo, Emily Dickenson, William Butler Yeats, Lord Byron, Albert Camus, Immanuel Velikovsky, Nelson Mandela, Andy Warhol, Vincent Van Gogh, Oscar Wilde, Michelangelo. You can add to this list to form a litany of change agents who in the times they lived were relative loners or outcasts.

images are gratefully from pixabay.com

So we see the genius of Life inflecting in such broad strokes of diversity–often accompanied by intense sacrifice or by long-term personal isolation and hardship–so as to illuminate and break through boundaries of perspective and limitations of human consciousness in ways that have allowed our species not only to survive but to thrive.

Vive la difference! as the French might say.  Or, as Lennon and McCartney contributed: “Imagine!”

I welcome YOUR Comments and Stories.

Cycles Within Cycles of Healing / A Long and Winding Road

Chartres Cathedral  Labyrinth  Chemin Neuf

©jillkhgeoffrion www.jillgeoffrion.com, www.praywithjillatchartres.com

I’d like to add a postscript to my Sunday post last week about Walking the Labyrinth: A Healing Path. Part of the healing nature of walking a labyrinth, for me, and about invoking the Inner Healer Archetype while walking a labyrinth, is the very physical fact of TURNING, with 180 degree turns, throughout the pathway. You walk a segment of the path, pause, then turn around and go back over an adjacent segment until that comes to a turning point too. An online site I have read says there are some 112 such turnabouts or Turning Points within the Chartres Rose Labyrinth (shown above with gratitude to the photographer cited). This process of walking and turning about is a physical manifestation of the principle of Cycles within Cycles.

Isn’t any PROCESS, certainly including a Healing Process, a sometimes long and winding path with many turns, with many cycles within cycles of the WHOLE process over space-time? I leave it to each of you to ponder or contemplate the significance of this observation with regard to your own PROCESS situations.

A PROCESS brings one from position A to some destination, say X.  The pathway leading from A to X is the process itself, at least outwardly. So, what are the many turns along the way about?

Stepping back two steps to go forward three? That could be one sort of Process. How might that be helpful?

images except otherwise cited are from pixabay.com

For fun, select and click:  to listen to Paul McCartney and John Lennon’s beautiful song: “The Long and Winding Road”. Here are their lyrics:

The long and winding road
That leads to your door
Will never disappear
I’ve seen that road before
It always leads me here
Lead me to you door

The wild and windy night
That the rain washed away
Has left a pool of tears
Crying for the day
Why leave me standing here
Let me know the way

Many times I’ve been alone
And many times I’ve cried
Any way you’ll never know
The many ways I’ve tried

But still they lead me back
To the long winding road
You left me waiting here
A long long time ago
Don’t leave me standing here
Lead me to your door

Songwriters
JOHN LENNON, PAUL MCCARTNEY

http://www.metrolyrics.com/the-long-and-winding-road-lyrics-beatles.html

I invite your Comments and Stories!

The Beatles On LOVE

I’ve been to the Cirque du Soleil Beatles LOVE show in Las Vegas. As a Beatles fan from the beginning here in the states–I was about 12 years old when they made their first visit to the US–, I loved this show!

The Cirque du Soleil Beatles LOVE show tells the story of the Fab Four’s journey in the context of world history and as a phenomenal energy that transformed the world, not just the world of music but their lyrics and BEAT expressed the values and ideals of a transformative generation.

When I was a teenager, I was grounded once by my father for defending the Beatles’ music as being “all about love.” “So, what do YOU know about love?” asked my conservative minded father. Actually that question of his has stuck with me always. What DO I really know about love?

But love is not necessarily something one needs to know about, right? We FEEL our way through life via love. I now believe love to be the very essence and the progressive, healing substance of life Itself. When life goes forward (is not static or in decline) it is love that propels that advancement of purpose, awareness, or of love itself as its own blessing.

So how can you use love, or your current version of archetypal LOVER energies, to “Live Your Dream, Now,” which is this month’s theme here at Better Endings? Let’s turn this over to the Fab Four for insights.

• Love is all you need:

There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done
Nothing you can sing that can’t be sung
Nothing you can say but you can learn how to play the game
It’s easy

There’s nothing you can make that can’t be made
No one you can save that can’t be saved
Nothing you can do but you can learn to be you in time

It’s easy

All you need is love
All you need is love
All you need is love, love
Love is all you need
Beatles – All You Need Is Love Lyrics | MetroLyrics http://www.metrolyrics.com/all-you-need-is-love-lyrics-beatles.html

• Let It Be

When I find myself in times of trouble
Mother Mary comes to me
Speaking words of wisdom, let it be

And in my hour of darkness
She is standing right in front of me
Speaking words of wisdom, let it be

Read more: Beatles – Let It Be Lyrics | MetroLyrics

• It’s a long and winding road that leads us HOME:

Many times I’ve been alone
And many times I’ve cried
Any way you’ll never know
The many ways I’ve tried

But still they lead me back
To the long winding road
You left me standing here
A long long time ago
Don’t leave me waiting here
Lead me to your door

http://www.lyricsfreak.com/b/beatles/the+long+and+winding+road_10026544.html

   And in the End…

The love you take

Is equal to the love

You make.

http://www.metrolyrics.com/the-end-lyrics-beatles.html

All images from pixabay.com

The Road Leads Home

Many times I’ve been alone and many times I’ve cried
Anyway you’ll never know the many ways I’ve tried
And still they lead me back to the long and winding road
You left me standing here a long, long time ago
Don’t leave me waiting here, lead me to you door

https://www.youtube.com/embed/fUO7N-zSMYc?rel=0“>Beatles, The Long and Winding Road

Road songs, road trip novels and movie scripts, mythic journeys (e.g. the Odyssey): why is the Road such a common, universal cultural motif?

Usually the Road leads Home or completes a full cycle of Departure–Transformation–Return, as per Joseph Campbell’s well known insight about “the Hero with 1000 Faces“. The mythic journey we all take is a “going and a Return”; it  is a journey of Self-discovery and advancement to ever greater horizons.

Is it an Illusion, though? The Journey or Winding Road metaphor is after all just that: a way to frame experience as an ongoing, coherent Process. We depart from point A, traverse through obstacles or vistas, and ultimately aim to arrive at a “later” destination, one that is the same as that which we departed from, but we have gained through the struggle and lessons learned a greater maturity, skills and awareness. The Prodigal offspring, we seek to acquire wisdom in the lower realms in order to be of even greater service and humility when we finally return to the divine source of our own true essence. And every lesser journey is a microcosm or a small step along that ultimate Pathway of spiritual unfoldment in the eternal Nowness that IS.

Well then, just think of it! Nothing is ever wasted; every experience carries within it the Seed of this ultimate Return.

Ithaka

BY C. P. CAVAFY

TRANSLATED BY EDMUND KEELEY AND PHILIP SHERRARD

As you set out for Ithaka

hope your road is a long one,

full of adventure, full of discovery.

Laistrygonians, Cyclops,

angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:

you’ll never find things like that on your way

as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,

as long as a rare excitement

stirs your spirit and your body.

Laistrygonians, Cyclops,

wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them

unless you bring them along inside your soul,

unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope your road is a long one.

May there be many summer mornings when,

with what pleasure, what joy,

you enter harbors you’re seeing for the first time;

may you stop at Phoenician trading stations

to buy fine things,

mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,

sensual perfume of every kind—

as many sensual perfumes as you can;

and may you visit many Egyptian cities

to learn and go on learning from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.

Arriving there is what you’re destined for.

But don’t hurry the journey at all.

Better if it lasts for years,

so you’re old by the time you reach the island,

wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,

not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.

Without her you wouldn’t have set out.

She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.

Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,

you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

C. P. Cavafy, “The City” from C.P. Cavafy: Collected Poems. Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Translation Copyright © 1975, 1992 by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Reproduced with permission of Princeton University Press.

Change It UP!

This week I have noticed a theme in blogs and Tweets I’ve been reading from others. You have to fall sometimes, or take a step back, in order to go forward with greater strength and find success.

This past Thursday morning, while thinking about this theme, I dreamed about a football play. It was an unconventional play. The QB tossed the ball, underhanded, to a receiver some 5 yds ahead. He caught it, looked around, and saw the defense closing in; he could see he had nowhere to run. So, he threw it back to another receiver behind the QB. The player there caught it and, also seeing the defense about to close in on him, he threw it even further backwards to a teammate back near the other team’s goal posts. I knew as the dreamer that the intention was to open up an area without defensive players, so a player could run forward less obstructed after catching the ball from well behind the line of scrimmage. The last player trying to catch the ball, did not, but neither did the opposing team’s players intercept. The play was dead. But it had only been a 1^st or 2^nd down, so the same team lined up again at the line of scrimmage and the next play, the QB passed a regular forward pass that was caught for a 1^st down; forward motion was restored.

Writers and other artists are very often the Innovators for art itself and for culture. New ideas have to start somewhere and it often takes an unconventional thinker or artist to advance ideas and to “change up” how we think about or view the world. This is the basis , to me, of the Beatles’ wild success; it was not that they started by doing anything entirely new, but they ‘changed up’ the way it was being done. They set a new beat that perhaps changed up slightly the heartbeat of the collective world. They broke up thought forms by being unconventional in several ways. Their haircuts—at the time; in retrospect this seems silly now—astounded and offended many parents of their young, devoted fans. Teaming with the Maharaji, courting “revolution”, daring to “Imagine”, they changed up rock and roll and, with it, they elevated an entire generation around a basic theme: openly expressed, unconditional Love.

What’s the message here? CHANGE IT UP! What do we have to lose, really? We must be true to ourselves and forge new grounds where that seems the direction we are given to go with our talents.

If the backwards seeming football play I dreamed of this morning had succeeded, it would have been a wild success; it would have forged a whole new concept in how to move a football forward on the field of play. If, on the other hand, it had been intercepted back near the opposing team’s goal, of course it would be seen as a monumental failure. But, in the end, what does that matter? A “touchdown,” points scored, on this side or that, is only that. I admire the player who got the random idea to “Change It UP!” and started the ball rolling in an entirely new direction. In the dream, on the next play, his team moved conventionally forward again, anyway. Still, the game was forever changed. The other team now knew their worthy opponents might do ANYTHING to succeed. It would be more difficult to defend against this new form of play. It was, in my view, an artistic accomplishment. Perhaps, by the next game, it might become a formal new play in the team’s playbook, one they might incorporate into their team strategy, with tweaks, over time.

What, to you, is an example of this Better Endings principle of “Change It Up”? If you are forging new directions, pushing genre boundaries, Change It UP! Follow your OWN North Star!

Shifting Attitudes for Better Endings

I began this blog site three months ago around a simple, fun concept of Better Endings. How might we change a movie ending or a story to a more desirable outcome? How might King Kong finally survive, “this time”? That simple concept turns out to be neither so simple nor mundane, after all. If we can change a Story, we can change a Life (Story), especially our own!

So, week by week, we have been applying Better Endings here to topics ranging from better movie endings, to revisionist history, to revising our own personal decisions or to changing our night dreams so we can realize our Dreams.

Somewhere along this journey, already, especially as more of you have been joining in on the adventure, we have discovered that Better Endings is more than a fun concept to flirt with. It is a creative principle we can draw upon to help us move from any one state of affairs, conditions, or fixed perspectives to another, more flexible position that allows us to grow, to expand our reach, and to transform our outlooks to embrace creative solutions for difficult or apparently ‘stuck’ situations.

This week’s topic is Attitudes. Let’s explore the open terrain of how our sometimes mixed or conflicting attitudes can shape or interfere with our experience. We can share stories about how shifting an attitude can transform our view of some aspect of our lives and can potentially transform our own outcomes.

With this week, Better Endings will exceed its first 100 blog posts. At this stage, I want to thank all of you readers and ‘follower’-Readers and contributors to this site for your excellent comments and great posts of your own that you have contributed or have allowed me to re-blog here.

I invite you to share your stories, insights and comments about Attitudes this week. Have you had an experience where you found that just by slightly changing your point of view on a subject, everything about that experience changed?

I am especially thinking about “paired (or, opposing) attitudes” as I look at our topic this week.  I’ll share a list of these tomorrow, but think about it. One attitude always seems to be paired with an opposite point of view.  Some would say this is due to the “duality” we deal with in the nature of human consciousness.

For myself as a starting example, I find lately that I sometimes vacillate between the two attitudes of Impatience and Contentment. If I focus on one end of this spectrum, Impatience, I feel like I will never reach the goals I have set for myself, for example, with a major editing project within which I am now enveloped. However, when I shift my attention to think about how much I gain from immersing in something I love–the very same writing project–I find I am content with where the process is at right Now, in the Moment. Then I wouldn’t change anything, no matter what the results might be, or not, down the road. I realize how fortunate I am, as well, to be writing this blog every day and to have found that there are people, other bloggers and other blogs, and Twitter or Facebook readers, et. al., who actually form a ‘cyber’-community of ardent people sharing ideas and authentic communication!

So, let’s–for any of you who feel like joining in–plant some soul-seeds this week around the topic of Shifting Attitudes. If this topic lights up a story or an example for you, please feel free to share it with us. (You will always keep copyright for your ideas posted in this blog, of course, and I will publish an author’s byline and bio for you with contact information.)

P.S.: I grew up with the Beatles! This week in honor of their 50th Anniversary since their USA appearances, all Quotes of the week are by them, so feel free to send some Beatles lyrics that relate to Better Attitudes.

Better Endings to You! –Linda