This Theme We Call Life

The Sages and Gurus talk about Emptying the Mind, and I have read about, but not given it much thought, mostly because I kept myself in a state of numbness working, attempting to start and run businesses, managing partnerships, and trying to be an Entrepreneur. All good things I guess, but they fill your life, and it is easy to start to see “all that” as part of you, part of who you are.

So when career inevitably leaves the scene, sometimes abruptly, maybe unexpectedly, there seems to be a void, and emptying of the space. What we do next could go in many directions.

"The answer which appears to come from the void, the light which flares from the blackest darkness, these have always been experienced as a wonderful and blessed illumination."

C. G. Jung

Father Richard Rohr talks about the First half and Second Half of life as being quite different. He delves deeply into how many folks stay stuck in the first half routines, and miss the second half wonders,.....I feel like “hearing the melody of raindrops from the trees is what Father Rohr is speaking of for the Second Half of Life.?

You Are Enough

Most of us feel a sense of incompleteness no matter how much we have or accomplish in life. Yet we usually miss the fact that external accomplishment and accumulation has yet to make anyone actually feel whole and complete. Wholeness and completeness are characteristics of our natural state which is under all the layers of need and want. This release will help you peel the sense of incompletion away until you can discover this for yourself.

Allow yourself to notice how much you are trying to find completeness outside of yourself, and do your best to let go of wanting to look away from your natural inner completeness in order to find completeness outside of yourself. You can ask yourself this simple question to help with this exploration: “When is enough, enough?

~Hunter S. Thompson; Book: Letters of Note

"Every man is the sum total of his reactions to experience. As your experiences differ and multiply, you become a different man, and hence your perspective changes. This goes on and on... So it would seem foolish, would it not, to adjust our lives to the demands of a goal we see from a different angle every day? How could we ever hope to accomplish anything.

The answer, then, must not deal with goals at all. We do not strive to be firemen, we do not strive to be bankers, nor policemen, nor doctors. WE STRIVE TO BE OURSELVES. But don’t misunderstand me. I don’t mean that we can’t BE firemen, bankers, or doctors but that we must make the goal conform to the individual, rather than make the individual conform to the goal. Beware of looking for goals: look for a way of life. Decide how you want to live and then see what you can do to make a living WITHIN that way of life.

Give yourself the thumbs up to have your cake and to eat it too. Start celebrating what you want to see more of, and don’t let anyone dampen your parade. As for Problems, Look Where the Problem isn’t. Stay out of the fast lane, enjoy hugs, and remember to say ’thank you’ to yourself at every turn of the day.? Take a tip from Willa Cather: “People have to snatch at happiness when they can in this world. It’s always easier to lose than to find.” Love who you are, and know that you matter.

It's tempting to think of grace as a gift. That someone or something will step in to save you. God, a lover maybe. It's taken me a LONG time to realize that grace is the chance I've been given, the opportunity to do the work to make my particular dream come true. The same goes for you. If you can allow yourself love, you can do your damndest to live it. Only you know what that might look like. Or maybe you don't even know.

Obstacles, doubt, hardship, loss, suffering? The elegant thing is to transcend being a victim of your circumstance. Begin. Just begin.

A line I love from a Marie Howe poem. - Love is an action. - Let that be our resolution, our resolve. To love for all we're worth. To sing for the sake of the song. How it all ends is anyone's guess, but you can do your part. That much you can control.

The best way to predict the future is to create it.

"And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time." -TS Elliott

May you fully digest the experience of these 365 days, to arrive again in this same-new starting place; reborn, again, as in each new day, each new moment.

?Start Where You Are; -Pema Ch?dr?n

The underlying point of all our study and practice is that the happiness we seek is here to connect with at any time. The happiness we seek is our birthright. To discover it we need to be more gentle with ourselves, more compassionate toward ourselves and our universe. The happiness we seek cannot be found through grasping, trying to hold on to things. It cannot be found through getting serious and uptight about wanting things to go in the direction that we think will bring happiness.

We are always taking hold of the wrong end of the stick. The point is that the happiness we seek is already here and it will be found through relaxation and letting go rather than through struggle.

The process of letting go and relaxing during our lifetime is the way to live: stop struggling against the fact that things are slipping through our fingers. Stop struggling against the fact that nothing’s solid to begin with and things don’t last. Knowing that can give us a lot of space and a lot of room if we can relax with it instead of screaming and struggling against it.

Readings From the Woods; The Book of Life; J Krishnamurti;

“I want to tell you something, perhaps the way to find out what is reality—not the way as a system, but how to set about it. And if you can find this for yourself, there will not be one speaker, there will be all of us talking, all of us expressing that reality in our lives where we are….

Truth cannot be accumulated. What is accumulated is always being destroyed; it withers away. Truth can never wither because it can only be found from moment to moment in every thought, in every relationship, in every word, in every gesture, in a smile, in tears. And if you and I can find that and live it—the very living is the finding of it—then we shall not become propagandists; we shall be creative human beings—“

There is only the problem; there is no answer; for in the understanding of the problem lies its dissolution.

I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.

Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure. ~Oliver Sacks; Book: Gratitude

CLOSE -DAVID WHYTE

is what we almost always are: close to happiness, close to another, close to leaving, close to tears,, close to losing faith, close to being done, close to saying something, or close to success, and even, with the greatest sense of satisfaction, close to giving the whole thing up.

Our human essence lies not in arrival, but in being almost there, we are creatures who are on the way, our journey a series of impending anticipated arrivals. We live by unconsciously measuring the inverse distances of our proximity: an intimacy calibrated by the vulnerability we feel in giving up our sense of separation.

To go beyond our normal identities and become closer than close is to lose our sense of self in temporary joy, a form of arrival that only opens us to deeper forms of intimacy that blur our fixed, controlling, surface identity.

To consciously become close is a courageous form of unilateral disarmament, a chancing of our arm and our love, a willingness to hazard our affections and an unconscious declaration that we might be equal to the inevitable loss that the vulnerability of being close will bring.

Human beings do not find their essence through fulfilment or eventual arrival but by staying close to the way they like to travel, to the way they hold the conversation between the ground on which they stand and the horizon to which they go.

We are in effect, always, close; always close to the ultimate secret: that we are more real in our simple wish to find a way than any destination we could reach: the step between not understanding that and understanding that, is as close as we get to happiness.

How suffering becomes a door to peace.

How pain is a trapdoor that if stood fully upon opens under the terrible weight of full acceptance . . .

How the very things we think are obstacles to peace are windows, and on the other side of the windows are our peaceful selves.

How if we do not get this, the obstacles will keep coming and keep coming. How we pull them to us like iron filings to a magnet.

How powerful is a human being. How little we know this.

How the not-knowing is the greatest obstacle of all.

Life itself is just one long series of mastery of difficulties and obstacles. Not until we are pricked, and stung and sorely shot at, awakens the I indignation which arms itself with secret forces

~ Clarissa Pinkola Estés"The time will come

The doors to the world of the wild Self are few but precious. If you have a deep scar, that is a door, if you have an old, old story, that is a door. If you love the sky and the water so much you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door.

"when, with elation

you will greet yourself arriving

at your own door, in your own mirror

and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was your self.

Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart

to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored

for another, who knows you by heart.

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,

peel your own image from the mirror.

Sit. Feast on your life." ~Derek Walcott

About Eric

Eric is a Writer / Published Author / Poet / Photographer

Reiki Master / Permaculture Practitioner / Life Coach??

Real Estate Developer / Apartment Operator

Modern Elder / Grey Nomad

Find Eric’s Books, Courses & Offerings here;

https://linktr.ee/ericurbane

Eric is an Entrepreneur, and lives a Nomadic Lifestyle and is an OffGrid Practitioner. He is also an Instructor for Melina Emerson Small Biz Lady and an Adjunct Instructor at Drexel University. Eric is well seasoned in urban housing development.

He has built and developed over 14,000 market rate apartments on a national scale. He founded Urbane Apartments in 2000 and oversaw new business, general operations, marketing and branding at the company until retiring in 2021.

He was long recognized by the multi-family housing industry as a vanguard of cutting edge social media marketing. Eric’s social media marketing and branding strategy has garnered national media attention

Eric’s background is rooted in the rental and real estate industries. He founded metro Detroit’s Urbane Apartments in 2003, after serving as senior vice president for Village Green Companies, a major Midwest apartment developer.

He established a proven track record of effectively repositioning existing rental properties in a way that added value for investors while enhancing the resident experience. He also established Urbane Media, a social media marketing and PR laboratory, where innovative marketing ideas are tested. Eric has been featured in the New York Times, Harvard Business Review, Entrepreneur Magazine and Business Week Magazine.

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