There is a story of the great Tibetan teacher Marpa, who lived on a farm with his family a thousand years ago in Tibet. On the farm, there also lived many monks who came to study with this great teacher. One day, Marpa’s oldest son was killed. Marpa was grieving deeply when one of the monks came to him and said, “I don’t understand. You teach us that all is an illusion. Yet you are crying. If all is an illusion, then why do you grieve so deeply?” Marpa replied, “Indeed, everything is an illusion. And the death of a child is the greatest of these illusions.” (Stories of the Spirit, Stories of the Heart, ed. Christina Feldman and Jack Kornfiels, Harper Collins)
For
Cobi this past Saturday night, one long-burning candle, eighteen flowers, wine and smoke, conversation, vivid memories, a party. Inspired by the Jewish
Jahrzeit.
For me and my beloved, on Sunday, a ceremony, a re-commitment to life. Many deaths we've each known, but this death of our heart-child, this great illusion, has sent us wandering through the veils, exploring the hinterlands of grief, life, love, mortality. A year and a day. Enough wandering. We stepped over the threshold of the year and back into the land of the fully alive.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
My art is inspired by the work of a former drumming buddy of mine, Joules, whose
new blog features the
ArtRage she's been doing.
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I've been spending most of my free time outdoors recently. The birds are migrating, and I don't want to miss a song or a snippet of color flying through the trees. If I were naming the seasons, this would be the Season of Sound.
I still don't have a digital camera! So, here's a photo of Dutchman's Breeches courtesy of
Michael Clayton and The Wisconsin State Herbarium:
These beautiful clumping wildflowers are thick on the near end of the hillside and I see that they've spread further up the hill than last year. The mortensia is up and soon we'll have their entrancing colors stirring the air. In the cottage garden the pulmonaria is blooming, and all the lilacs have budded. So next, the Season of Color.
The weather is changeable, warmer, cooler, clearer, stormy. The winds off the lake have been strong at times. I delight in standing in them, breathing them in. Life calls to life.
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Well, I've been thinking about playing with another blogging software, WordPress, to see if it would be more user-friendly for MFDN bloggers, but I came across this today at
Slashdot:
The Real Nick W writes "Wordpress, an incredibly popular Open Source Blogging system was found to be spamming google by inserting hidden links to junk content on high paying Adsense keywords such as mesothelioma and debt consolidation. Following Threadwatch picking up the story an anonymous Google rep appeared in the original thread admonishing bloggers not to use sneaky tactics to rank highly for "duplicate content" such as the 100,000 hidden articles on the Wordpress site. The articles have now dissapeared from Google and it remains to be seen whether Google will ban Wordpress outright as they tend to do when SEO's and web dev's pull these kinds of stunts."
(Wordpress Banned by Google for Spamming) Update. I did some surfing to learn more about this, after reading comments by
Blue,
Barbara,
Andie, and
Dan. Found lots of information with updates and relevant links at Waxy.org's post on
Wordpress Website's Search Engine Spam. Guess I'll give the dust a little time to settle and test-drive WordPress, prolly on my biz site which has been neglected far too long.
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We spent the day yesterday clearing away what remained of last fall's leaf cover. It was a glorious day to be outside. In addition to grasses, crocuses were up, the lilacs budding, daffodil and daylily breaking soil, and the birds, oh the birds. A northern flicker climbed the black cherry near where we worked. We heard a larger woodpecker nearby. Something with a yellow belly flew overhead. Cardinals sang to us (ok, to their mates). We heard and/or saw gulls (laughing gulls by the sound of them), geese, something we believe most have been an eagle with a loud, high, long whistle, and just at sunset, loons on the lake.
It was a perfect afternoon for thinking about spring festivals instead of getting back to work.
If we could get all our pagan holidays on contemporary calendars, today we'd be starting our neoversion of the Roman
Megalesia (April 4-10 on the Roman Calendar) a six-day celebration of the arrival of Cybele's stone in Rome some 2200 years ago.,
The stone, a large black meteorite later modified by the Romans into the likeness of Cybele (aka
Magna Mater aka
Ops), was brought from Pessinus, Anatolia to Rome on the advice of the Sybils, oracles who said her stone would help the Romans defeat Hannibal the Carthaginian.
More from the Fellowship of Isis
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