Norman Vincent Peale's Positive Thinking

With the relinquishing of my role as target or victim of a man, my ex-spouse, existing somewhere on the continuum between narcissism and psychopathy, I have discovered the return of hopes and dreams.  The feeling is one of moving from a black-and-white film to one of color and shadings.  Faith has returned and although it is true that I am a very different presence in this universe than the one of "pre-encounter,"  I find life now full of promise.

Money serves as such a fascinating topic of life's leeway.  I was left for dead in the financial domain with all the pushing/pulling and promises of paying back of the entirety of my funds.  The pain for me was one of betrayal, surely, but also acknowledging my choice to go along with the strangely and absurdly, mentally disordered approach to a mono-dimensional lifestyle.  I comprehend why so many label subjects like me as co-dependent, but that's incorrect because I - and most of us, I believe - was trying to give generously for the larger picture in time.

It should be no surprise that Faith dropped into the gray zone, as well.  Interestingly, for me, faith has been so personal, that this occurrence ran parallel to the evaporation of the-me.  I remember a movie of some time ago about a female devil and the hero offering to lay his soul on the altar of sacrifice to save another.  In that  film, an angel explains to the hero that his soul was never "his to give."  It belonged all along to God and the Universe.

So it is for all of us who have survived the "Twilight Zone" encounter with these black-hole entities.  The media and social networking sites are jumbled with tales, helping blogs, and evaluations - both professional and lay.  But, "following" is not the key to living this life to its fullest potential.  And that, in my opinion, is the dawning of amazing awareness.  There exists a very tricky tight wire in giving of oneself and giving away oneself.  If we do not fall into the abyss of no-choice in following ideas of sacrifice for the good of others, and instead pursue the voice within that connects us to goodness and strength, we bestow energy to another from the core of us as individual creations, part of the God-force.

This primitive and most painful test of sharing has brought an immensely powerful cognizance of place and footing in this physical realm.  I find that I am able to acknowledge another without needing to comply with some molded concept of merging interplay with that other.  Unlike co-dependence, the decision to give too much and too freely was made from a post of genuine compassion.

For me at age 61, I am keenly aware of the laboriously powerful force of hormones that drove me when I opted to forge this particular path in the arena that now seems so "long, long ago and far away."  I have noted other folks on internet sites that go onward to find love and a more substantially happy situation.  I am not at all sure where my direction lies.  Without that magnetism toward co-creating on a one-to-one basis, I find that I might be like those monks of old who might just link their life-paths with the God energy.

Reading Peale's Positive Thinking, I find that I am viewing from a new perspective.  This belief of Peale's fully takes in one's connection through an individualized integrity.  One need not manipulate the purer form of positive thinking to bring the wish closer to what might be possible from one's ability to operate in a framework of reality now.  I am pretty darned poor in finances at this moment, but I am allowing myself to "see" that ranch I have wanted as becoming more real.  What will happen?  I don't know, but I do recognize that I am more than I ever before regarded as "true."  I suspect it's all part of planning the trek from A to C and re-evaluating when you reach B....do you still want to go to C or have your ideas and desires changed?

Optimism.  And hopeful expectation.  And Gratitude.

"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the most discoveries, is not 'Eureka,' but 'that's funny.'"  I think Asimov is onto something here.  Then, again, James Cabell may be right, "the optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears this is true."

Oz the Great and Powerful

It's fascinating how we flesh-out our feelings and explain them to ourselves and others using story-lines that may be enjoyed.  There exists a sense of comfort in locating extraneous plots within the writings of others that highlight our own emotions and thoughts... when handling the series of events in our own lives.  They piece together a fabric of not-so-disjointed actions of cause and effect, just waiting for us to claim them as our own peculiarly tinted takes on this living work of art.

Watching "Oz the Great and Powerful" last night, I found myself enthralled by the film as a prequel with its twist on the original Oz tale as well as abruptly aware that it might not have been the continuation of Walt Disney's plans for the Oz books as suggested in the bonus segment about the film.  Even so, the exciting account moves the male lead, a carnival magician, from drifting in the waves of his life's happenings into a world of choice, consequence, and enlightenment.

 His definition of perception and the realization that making a purposeful stand in living not only grows the strength of character present, but increases his sense of compassion and accountability.  While performing his act before his trek into the land of Oz, our hero haphazardly and by rote tells the audience "to believe."  With his developing change and ownership of ethical traits as the wizard, he tells the Munchkins, "We have nothing to fear as long as we believe." And he regards this as truthful.  There will always be those we've touched in the wake of our interactions - some positively and others who must deal with their responses to our inability to conform with exactitude and precision to their framework of ideals.  The naive young and lovely dark-witch experiences hurt when she believes that the "wizard," as he is accepted to be from prophecy, has discarded her for the good witch Glinda.  Her self-attuned sister offers her an apple laced with magic to squelch the pain of feeling.  Biting into the fruit, the bad witch becomes forever changed and the upset flares into jealous rage and hatred.  Of course, the prejudiced hostility presents as irrational and no attempt is made to curb the execration of all that has produced upset along her historical timetable.

The apple's power to mask the pain of upset actually blotted the balance of the equation where another has free will and exploded the hatred of aggrievement  into ugliness.  In the story, the once beautiful dark-witch evolves into the pointed-chin, green woman as a quintessential black-magic  sorceress intent on destroying all who thwarted her happiness. The wizard in this presentation is the one who comes to understand his own failings and then to discover his personal sense of valor and risk.

The farther I move from my own discolored land of angst with a narcissistic spouse and his taker-clan, the more volitionally ready I am to believe in my accountability and sense that anything is possible.  For such a long time, I felt adrift and at a loss for the firm foundations of belief systems I once valued.  The "what if's" had disappeared from my thoughts and vocabulary and my dream-scape had become mundane.  Although I feel that my ex-spouse lay somewhere on the continuum between narcissism and psychopathy, it was I who allowed the persistently sustained sense of identity into which I had fallen.  I am getting off my broom and freely electing to drop not only any rose colored glasses, but blinders as well.

I have just read Dr. Norman Vincent Peale's The Amazing Results of Positive Thinking.  What I might well have deemed innocently credulous not long ago, I now embrace as amazingly dynamic in the navigation of the principles of the suppositional question on a higher tone of imagination.  What happens if one "just believes" - in the face of all the thoughts and energies to the contrary?

It's a doorway.  Not into Oz, but into the appearance of probabilities.

"Are you the great man we've been waiting for?"

"I think I could be."

     James Allen sums it very well:

"The law of harvest is to reap more than you sow.

Sow an act and you reap a habit.

Sow a habit and you reap a character.

Sow a character and you reap a Destiny."

Faith's Phoenix - Intermission

I have long been a fan of a terrific psychologist of this generation and his site of mind and soul awakening.  Peter Shepherd has probably shaken his head many a time over my wishy-washy "catch and release" wisdoms as I dealt with my own fun house of experiences in the last few years.  Robert O'Connor is another of my "heroes of this and other realities" in his presence and with his practice of psychology.

Choosing - whether or not totally conscious of my own part of that action - to take the jaunt into time with beings alien to my own personality, I now recognize that I not only sank into that quicksand, but stayed just enough above the ooze to remain alive.  Not thriving, but existing.

My belief systems took such a frenetic strike that the blitzkrieg of assault to my spirit-hood had me "give up the ship"...but only for awhile.  I will express that the short number of years seems like a lifetime as I "become aware" that I have awakened.  Years ago I watched the movie, "Jacob's Ladder," and the feel has been much the same.  In the movie the protagonist apparently skips threads and slips into an alternate reality.  Personally, I think the creators of that motion picture took a more readily acceptable route for the public when they laid the experiences of that artificially formed state-of-being at the door of drug and chemicals.  For me, my own "twinkling" of alternatives has been quite simply from within.

Over the last few weeks, I realized that not only have I felt no one-on-one connection to my sense and definition of God, but that I wanted to know this once more.  Emmet Fox writes of "taking a vacation from yourself."  It's as easy and yet, painstakingly difficult as blinking one's eye and then during that moment choosing to "see differently."  I won't attempt to comprehend the mind and spirit's workings from a therapeutic standpoint, but I do recognize that I have grasped a fresh view of living. The appraisal of this significance is that I took on my own closet full of "identities" in the casting of this role.

Was there experiential value to all of this?  I can explicitly respond, "yes."  That need which permeated my presentation of myself to temper communications has melted.  Fear exists as a perception of knowledge and no longer as the driving force for survival of my spirit.  For the first time in many years, I told "God and the Universe" that I didn't know what I believed, but WANTED to hold a firm conviction of goodness and the contact with an energy flow that reinforced this tenet.

A couple of days ago - with this prayer in the ethos - I rose early and ambled into the bathroom.  The cabinet shelf had fallen leaving the orderly set-up of items in disarray.  My immediate thought was wondering if we'd had a small earthquake.  As I worked to replace the bottles and boxes, it became apparent that the shelf was too long to fit properly.  I felt myself perplexed, but balanced the feeling with the idea that the wood might have swollen, so I took it to the garage and sawed off enough to make it fit inside the cabinet door.  The adjacent side also has a wooden platform made the same way and it remained upright, holding towels.  As I looked at that setup, I wondered....could that shelf actually fit in the first side?  AND, it did!  So, I swapped them.  All the while, I felt the most peculiar sense of "out of space and time" shift.

Could all this be explained within some framework of ordinary reason?  Maybe, but to me, it was AN ANSWER to my earnest request.  To underscore my newfound CHOICE to BELIEVE in goodness, I found two good films in the "spirituality" section of Netflix.  "Rust" dealing with the way Faith can slip during times of conflicting moments of dissonance and "Breaking Man" which handled the relationship issues of another minister and his loss of "self" and a resulting divorce.

As the pastor in "Breaking Man" takes time alone to rekindle his knowledge of who he is and his mutually interwoven ideological concepts, he recognizes that "you have to be who you were created to be."  So, too, does the priest in "Rust" as he returns home to regroup.  Seeing an old friend, the man says, "so what happened.  Did you wake up one day and say, Lord this dance is over?  Wow.  That's going to be one messy divorce."

I don't feel that I am alone in the discovery that the me-of-today isn't the same as yesterday and that I even miss that past arena of non-tinged operating field. Trauma has altered my thoughts on my place in the scheme of living.  But, I also know viscerally that it's OK.  I am not the same, I am actually more in the wave of cognition.  My life has a sense of Grace now.  I can be the totality of who I am without censoring that wholeness.  And I am also keenly aware that I will again laugh heartily and even cry, but the import of continuity plays gently against the backdrop of this particular lifetime.  Gabriel Marquez expresses it so well in Love in the Time of Cholera:  "He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers gave birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves."

"Now, there is a final reason I think that Jesus says, 'love your enemies.'

It is this: that love has within it a redemptive power. And there is a power

there that eventually transforms individuals... There is something about love

that builds up and is creative..." ~Martin Luther King, Jr.

Sharing ideas/ reinforcing strengths/ opening doors - Teaching

I have some of the most amazing contacts on Facebook.  The threads of conversation share outstanding as well as run-of-the-mill ideas...but, they are all creative aspects of ourselves and sharing with others.

This is a fantastic post: http://www.rebellesociety.com/2013/08/15/5-signs-youre-on-the-heros-journey/....

Although we all deal and respond to life's mundane aspects, many - maybe even most - of us are risking uncloaking ourselves to express our thoughts.  I almost, and with a bit of humor wrote, "brazenly uncloaking" but that wouldn't be accurate because most of us still operate within parameters of give-and-take while offering our tidbits in the open air.  It's true that we clarify our own inner selves when we share our creative streaks, but we also supply raw material to others in the ether.

I recently had some rehashing of the ordeal of handling bullying at my grandson's school last year.  Still receiving the cold shoulder from teachers, I felt such sadness for my inability to "fit in."  And yet, my grandson needed advocates to aid him.  My dad who was an adjunct English Professor and then entered the corporate realm of textbook publishing, always told me, "be ever so careful how you rock the boat with teachers because they will hold it against the child."  He was, of course, absolutely correct.  Even so, there are times when adults have to don that hero's armor to stand for helping another.

Then, the task becomes vigilance.

I have noted a return to hierarchy valuing of professionals in my area of life.  And, a fear of rocking the boat.  Succumbing to this, myself, I had thought I wouldn't go to my grandson's open houses to allow distancing.  I became angry about Hilary Clinton's thoughts that "it takes a village to raise a child."  As "proper" as I felt my following the chain-of-command to have been during this ordeal in seeking answers for my grandson, I saw many times where "tried and true" excuses were used and even the attempt to upset our small family unit's continuity and innate credit of the dependability of goodness between generations.

Remembering an episode from "Everybody Loves Raymond," where Ray gives the "it's all about editing" toast to his newly married brother, maybe it's also about focus.  It's not simply what one chooses to bring to mind, but deals with focus of intention.  My grandson must go on a bit of a diet - not withholding anything, but changing portions and attention.  Just perhaps this is the very core of choice.  It's the volition and purposeful course that is accented in living.

There may be no way to eradicate the negativity of some of the teachers who felt that the bullying would just follow a natural curve and that I was wrong and caused undue application of awareness to their profession and school system.  That may be.  To me, that kind of "turning away from the problems at hand" is not only unacceptable, but cowardly.  Trust is not built from acquiescence.  Assured reliance on character grows from communication linked to action of accountability.  Much like handling the situation of dieting.

I won't pretend it's not painful to experience the spotlight of being a pariah, but I can genuinely state that my own resolve of initiation to protect my grandson was without malice. So, I have decided to continue to be present in the school functions of my grandchildren.  I'll seek that piece of Chocolate cake along the way.

We are all teachers.  "The dream begins with a teacher who believes in you, who tugs and pushes and leads you to the next plateau, sometimes poking you with the sharp stick of 'truth.' " ~Dan Rather

Humanity's Quest: Setting the Tone

Humanity's Quest: Setting the Tone: It's a Sunday and "Begin the Beguine" is playing on my tiny CD machine.  I have the volume cranked up considerably.  With time...

Humanity's Quest: A Moment to Reflect

Humanity's Quest: A Moment to Reflect: My daughter and grandsons are away for the weekend and I have a moment to reflect on my life's path - especially since my last marriage ...

Setting the Tone - My Montana

It's a Sunday and "Begin the Beguine" is playing on my tiny CD machine.  I have the volume cranked up considerably.  With time alone I looked at the Facebook pages and saw that my new found love in an author, and his character, had posted a great photo of his pickup truck precariously perched on a one-lane mountain pass without any room to maneuver.  Craig Johnson writes with ease and intelligence, bringing Sheriff Walt Longmire to life.  Obviously, Johnson has many admirers and I dare say of both genders.  I enjoy getting a feel for a book before beginning to read and submerse myself in the texture of that creative reality.  Johnson's first of the series hosts a neat surprise package at the end, much like the "Easter Egg" following a movie: this proffers a readers'guide with an introduction, interview with the author, and questions for discussion.

Viewing that picture posted by Craig Johnson, I remembered my magnetic draw to this land of Montana.  "Longmire" exists in a Wyoming setting, much like that of my home.  Although I was born in Oregon, my parents were North Carolinians and we returned to their stomping grounds immediately following my brother's birth, when I was two.  They were of corporate stock and much more sophisticated than I.  Probably the reason I left North Carolina after living in various states and returning "home" when my mom became a widow and moved to be near her family.

Following the matriarch of our family's passing, my much loved aunt, I found myself lying in bed before starting the day with my two young daughters, just staring at one of my aunt's paintings of a bluff in the West.  Maybe I had to wait for most I loved to have left this plane of existence to decide to runaway and join the circus of this life.  I decided it was time to explore my connections to this land...to My life.  Literally, I threw a dart at the map and did some research, settling on a transition to Montana.

Partings can be tough - I'm a soft touch even when I returned my daughters to their dorm rooms, I cried as if there had been a death in the family.  But, in this case, the move was adventure!  My daughters and I climbed into the cab of the 27-foot  Uhaul with 90 pound dog at their feet, cat-in-carrier behind my seat, and car-in-tow and headed that-a-way.

The few years after my aunt's death left rifts in our extended family and upset bonds between my mother and me as we had worked as executrix to the estate.  The estrangements overflowed to that link between my brother and myself, too.  I decided it was time to see what there was to see; to let old hurts go; and to explore creating this grand undertaking of possible risks.

Settling into the cab of that Uhaul the first day, I thought, "oh, Lord, what have I done?"  My daughters each had CD's and headsets and scenery galore.  By the end of our fourth day, the interior seemed like a suite and we hired local fellows to unload the truck.  Adventure along the route?  There was some.  I pulled into a motel parking lot only to discover I was totally inept at backing the trailer.  The powers that be smiled and I hired a nice garage attendant to rescue us and we were off once more.  Storms hit our route with flooding and the guiding spirits offered alternate pathways.  Climbing onto the hood of the truck each morning, my daughters handed me oil and antifreeze to fortify this steadfast companion.

We arrived at our new home, just down the road from a feeder stockyard in the heat of June.  Aroma?  There is nothing quite as memory fixing.  The sky was as huge as the expanse of this wide Montana and the sky seemed to go on forever.  The altitude is so high that the clouds make shadows on the ground!  It was AND is glorious!

Working in Billings, the drive to Shepherd was relatively short.  Hiccups in the economy struck my agricultural lab and it closed.  We sold and I bought a place with a single-wide trailer, roomy hunting cabin, garage, outbuildings, and 25 acres in Roundup, still employed in Billings almost 60 miles away. The treacherously long mountain skidding to and from work had me rethinking locations in this state.  Neighbors are a huge blessing.  Once stranded in Billings with car trouble, they transported my daughters to the grocery store and offered a range of help.  Changes developed and we moved to Anaconda where I could buy a home outright.  I love Land, but going it alone with wells, frozen and high-centered roadways,automobile travail, and power outages in hip deep snow suggested a small town might just be an option.

Now both my daughters are adults and following their own adventures - my youngest married a terrific fellow this past New Year's Eve and my oldest has found a great guy a couple of hours away.  Once again I find myself free to "look newly." AND at the ripe old age of 60!

Following the utter heartache and anguish of being taken and left for dead by my ex and his clan, the journey of matrimony that I had believed would be my "last Tango" with romance just might have been such - but  romance with living is something else entirely.

For the first time in decades, I awoke to the realization that I want to be "Longmire."  No, not a sheriff, but a person of decency and integrity even as I seek new horizons from the stance of a loner-of-sorts.  So many of my months had centered focus on plain survival, aiding my family; and now my two dogs, cat, and I have our tiny house which holds love and memories.  Once again after many years, I listen to that inner voice reminding me that the "best may be yet to come."  I am honestly without a particular road map, but I surely am returning to life, just as the character, Longmire.  It's time to rebuild, to find that joie de vivre.

I had felt that the trek through the bowels of the Twilight Zone in my last marriage to a psychopath and his taker-clan might define me as a person. My months and years following, seemed consumed by the quest for answers and comprehending my own culpability.  I feel akin to this character of Longmire in this "return to the land of the living."  In a way, I, too, have scripted the "package at the end of my particular ordeal" and have just maybe seen what I needed to evaluate.  The new fleshing-out of my own character's texture allows for the memories while forever expanding with possibility.

Now I sit in a sphere of economic adjustment and no wherewithal to locate that "ranch" for myself.  Maybe it will come in the form of experience or a coloring of distinguishable vitality.   It's funny that my sense-of-humor has remained intact.  Without the physicality of a new excursion, I am looking from the me of now, that-a-way.

"A man's got to take a lot 

of punishment

to write a really

funny book." ~ Ernest Hemingway