All anyone ever needs »Buy This Photo!«
The gig is spiritual. That’s the thing. It always was. I can sit here contemplating my next sentence, accidentally rest my joined hands on too much belly fat, freak out, and that would be legitimate enough. But it’s easy to use that same concern to bash myself, and then I’ll want more peanut butter or something fried, and afterwards a nap. So not just about the diet, is it? More like love and trust, and where does that come from? (With a whole bunch more, I’d weigh thirty pounds less and be bouncing all over the room.) The gig is spiritual, I tell you. You’d better love yourself a lot when you wake up at 4:00 a.m. because you’re terrified and don’t know what to do. Oh right, most folks sleep through. Well, good for them!
Ram Dass (born Richard Alpert) popped up in my Twitter feed the other day. This is kind of fascinating for me, because I bought his Be Here Now book in 1971 when it was new and had no idea of who he was, not even that he’d been a colleague of Timothy Leary’s at one point and launched a brand new life as a result of their LSD experiments, and because the American ashram associated with his guru (Neem Karoli Baba) is located right here in Taos, where Ram Dass has visited many times. Connections between northern New Mexico now and my own life over forty years ago keep showing up just when I least suspect it, although no, that isn’t any conscious reason why we came—the relationships have been floating out of the mist over the last fifteen years in ways so strange, they’d never be predicted.
Be that as it may, here’s something he wrote in August, 2012 and posted on his Facebook page. I mention it here because I want to see it, not because I’m advocating anything in particular, and because it might come in handy for a few of you left hyperventilating on the road to panic. The gig is spiritual, dammit, and the mantra really helps:
If you follow your heart there is nothing to fear. As long as your actions are based on your pure seeking for God, you are safe. And any time you are unsure or frightened about your situation, there’s a beautiful and very powerful mantra:
“The power of God is within me. The grace of God surrounds me,” which you can repeat to yourself. It will protect you. Experience the power of it, it’s like a solid steel shaft that goes from above through the top of your head down to the base of your being. Grace will surround you like a force field. Through an open heart one hears the universe.
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Callie the Wonder Cat,
el Norte,
writing life
May 13, 2015 10:26 PM
by JHF
in
Birds
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They’ll do it every time. This Bullocks oriole will even drink upside down if no other opportunity presents itself. I don’t think that would work for me. Once again note how the red light reflected off the feeder colors the throat and chest.
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Bullock’s oriole
May 11, 2015 11:02 PM
by JHF
in
Birds
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Learn to live on sugar water & you’ll have it made »Buy This Photo!«
All we have so far this year are black-chinned hummingbirds, but ain’t they nice? Next will come the broadtails and then the rufouses. There may even be a few Costa’s hummingbirds. For that matter, a few minutes before I took this shot, a male Bullock’s oriole was climbing all over the feeder, sending it spinning when he left. What an amazing picture that would be, if only I could take it. These orioles are highly sensitive to any movement on my part and always flee instead of hanging out to get to know us better.
But just look at this guy! See the reddish “shadow” on his breast? That’s reflected color from the red plastic of the feeder. Most people don’t realize light can spread like that and bounce color onto nearby objects, but it was one of the first things I learned in painting class.
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Tags:
hummingbirds,
Llano Quemado
May 11, 2015 12:28 PM
by JHF
in
Birds
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Shot through the living room window »Buy This Photo!«
They’re back in force now, including this pair. I’ve seen as many as five or six at a time. I just love lazuli buntings. They also go for the cheap birdseed that has the little tiny crap seeds hardly any other birds else will eat. That means the jays and magpies stay away. The black-headed grosbeak in the background is probably just hanging around for the few sunflower seeds in the mix.
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black-headed grosbeak,
lazuli bunting
You have to imagine the high winds in this photo, but they’re there »Buy This Photo!«
Springtime in the Rockies, as the saying goes. I even let us run out of wood, because I thought the warm weather would last. What you’re looking at here is an all-too typical early May afternoon at 7,000 feet, about forty-one degrees when I shot this image of Taos Mountain in between snow squalls. That’s right. Yesterday saw some kind of crazy weather business, with periods of blazing sun and clear blue sky alternating with forty-five miles per hour winds and horizontal “corn snow” (graupel or pellet snow) that coated the ground, for the most part. It was still too warm for it to stay there very long before melting, but the view out my window was pretty horrible if you’re the kind of person who thinks May means dancing naked in the back forty. It was all profoundly disturbing, to tell the truth. Unsettling, hard on the emotions, even as it was exciting.
(And it was!)
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Tags:
firewood,
spring,
Taos Mountain,
weather
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