Keeping a Loving Heart and Mind

Nothing is more powerful I’ve come to believe than a loving heart. In all of our affairs, with a loving heart, so much more can happen for good, for clarity, for peace in all our relations.

And with such a heart comes a loving mind. Our thoughts are things, living and breathing their influence within our minds, and challenging us to stay in line with them so there’s continuity. Loving thoughts feed loving hearts, and vice versa.

So keeping a loving heart and mind is essential, especially in these troubled and challenging times. Can we love bigger, greater, with more depth? Can we extend our lovingkindness to others easier, even to those whose behavior turns us off, or who we just don’t like very much? That’s the challenge, I think, to love those who are difficult to love.

From our inner life and how we feel toward ourselves, to our close relationships, to our friends, community, nation and our world, a loving heart is essential to peace, and the more we practice nurturing a loving heart and mind, the more our own lives, and the life of our planet will experience that peace.

So cultivate a loving heart and mind. When you feel yourself straying into negativity about someone, bring your Self back to love. Keep a watchful, loving eye on your own thoughts, that will soon spring into words, and make sure they are loving thoughts. Hold others in your heart with love, especially those with whom you struggle to love. Them, especially.

And above all else, love yourself, your Self, with all your heart and all your mind.

That is the way of peace I wish for you.

Namaste’. 

The Illusion of Wall Street & Washington Money

I have to say I was furious over Bush’s paying off his supporters with the initial $700 Billion bailout.

The whole scheme was fabricated on gambles being the basis of our economy, and Bush and his money friends ran with it for eight years, making billions.

You see, much of the trouble of our global financial situation is due to debt. And the process of taking debt, both mortgages, gambles on commodities and the like, and pretending that debt is actually a commodity that can be traded and exchanged, created the real estate bubbles around the world. The more we traded debts like mortgages, the more money seemed to be ‘growing on trees’, and greed took over–as it always does in speculative situations.

Now, the debt has crumbled, as it also always does. An economy based on debt and the growing of the ability to pay off debt is totally dependent on a growing economy, and the peoples’ ability to pay off that growing debt on a regular basis. But when this house of cards slowed down, as all economies do periodically, the greed-based debt pyramid had nowhere to go, but down. And down it has come.

This pyramid scheme propped up prices for everything that we’ve been paying for for a couple decades now: houses, cars, appliances, even wages and those immensely obscene bonuses to corporate managers, even as their companies crumbled around them. The pyramid has led to us having to scramble excessively in our lives, to keep up with the ‘things’ that we all have been duped into thinking we need.

So it has all fallen apart. And what is left when a house of cards falls down? Two things: The players, and the stack of cards on the table. The players are you and me. And the stack of cards are our own resources and talents, connections and skills. In other words, the actual true value of our relationships within our own local economies.

So what does one do when one is furious, but wants to change that anger into something productive?

Bless President Obama. He’s stepped into a nearly impossible situation to win. But he’s focused on the same thing as I’m saying here: Our wealth doesn’t lie on Wall Street, or in Washington. Our wealth comes from that other ‘W’ word: We. We are our wealth, our best source of freedom, of liberty, of economical well-being. We are the source of the cure for this horrible situation we’ve found ourselves in. And We can do it, We the People.

You have to take your financial consciousness into your own hands. And We have to do so as communities, and stop relying on the bloated policies and ideas of this ill-begotten and sickness of greed perpetrated by Bush and his people.  We have to do it, and We have to start now.

Here are three steps you can do, right now, today, that will help turn your life and the financial life of your community around. I’m doing these things, and it’s working. Here they are:

    1) Return to a cooperative way of living within your means, and within your neighborhood and community. Start co-ops for food, energy, transportation, handyman services, babysitting, energy sustainability. Any product, service, need or desire can be brought into a cooperative of teams within your community. Get five people together to start it, and get moving.

    2) Live within your means. Stop believing ads on tv that tell you how you should look, live, eat, behave. In fact, stop watching tv altogether, it’s nothing but a wasteland of horrible values, people hurting and killing each other, and ads for junk that you don’t need. For instance, have you noticed that all laugh-tracks on so-called comedy shows now are laughing at the ridicule and sarcasm one character perpetrates on another? Why watch such junk? Turn it off, start a garden, read with your kids, make love with your spouse, and have coffee with your friends and neighbors. Live locally.

    3) And that leads to the third idea you can start today: Buy locally. Support your neighbor’s businesses, stop going to the big-box stores, stop shopping for junk and junk-food you don’t need, and eat at locally owned restaurants, shop at locally-owned stores, and contribute your money right back into the community, instead of sending it through these huge corporations into this ridiculous maze of financial mishandling we’re now suffering from. Gandhi only bought locally made products, and started a revolution based on not buying clothing made in England. You can start such a revolution, too.

Start being the "We the People’ our fore-fathers and mothers imagined, worked for, fought and died for. Keep their legacy alive in your own life. We owe it to them, and to our children and grandchildren.

If you do these three things, they will lead to other steps you can take.  Be open to community. Let it pull you forward into a life filled with connection, love, and financial abundance, within your means, through this Way of We!

What if We Just Keep on Changing?

Oh my, it’s hard to keep up with the freedom and releases of domestic terror tactics of the Bush gang now that President Obama is in the White House.

Is it perfect? By no means. But of course, the US is a democratic republic, not a utopia. Of course there will be mistakes made, and misdirections followed. But the closed society that the Bush gang was creating, step by step in the model of Hitler, Mussolini, Pinochet, Stalin and others of that evil ilk, is fast being dismantled. And in it’s place is a free and open society, one that does not torture, one that honors the writ of habeus corpus, and one that includes everyone in this great conversation we call America.

The joy and great happiness that came with Barack Obama’s election was in part that he is our first Black President. In part for the honoring of the tremendous sacrifices made to end slavery in our country, to end Jim Crow, to end segregation, and to heal the racism that is the killing virus in our history. Part of the joy of this man and his family entering the White House for the next four, possibly eight years, is that they are affable, likeable, loving and kind people, that their two darling daughters are such joys, and that we have longed for friendly people as leaders for so many years.

But I’m also convinced that a huge part of ours, and the world’s joy, happiness and relief, is that this neo-fascism that Bush and his gang tried to inflict on Americans and the world has come to an end, without their brand of murderous evil continuing. The world breathed a great sigh of relief to see this modern version of hateful leadership leave our government, finally, after years of fear-mongering, hate-based politics, and evil deeds. We are happy for the end of this horrible man’s legacy, and the leaving of his tribe of haters.

It’s a relief.

From this relief can now come energy for change. And what if we just keep on changing? What if we envision a nation of service to others, of compassion and love toward our fellow citizens and toward the world? What if we take on a leadership role as a loving and kind equal member of the world of nations, a people who lift others up, who figure out how to share the world’s resources rather than bullying others out of theirs?

What if honor returns to America? What if we can look ourselves in the eye, as President Obama has stated, and say to ourselves, "We are America. We believe in freedom, the rights of due process, the right of having to be proven guilty. We don’t torture. We honor all people, and hold these truths to be self-evident: That all people are created equal, even gays, lesbians and Iraqis. That all people are endowed with certain unalienable rights, not just those who attend our name-brand church. And among these rights are life, liberty to marry anyone we wish, and the pursuit of happiness."

We are America once again. And the fascists have left the building. We bless them, but still hold them accountable for their crimes. And, we do so in due process, even though they wouldn’t extend that right to us.

Long live freedom, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in America, and around the world.