january 15, 2016

posted in: photography | 0

“The truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering the more you suffer because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you in proportion to your fear of being hurt.” ~ Thomas Merton

 

perspective
perspective

Someone asked me the other day what exactly Mercury in retrograde meant. My feeble answer was that, astrologically speaking, when Mercury is in retrograde things become topsy turvy. Things that shouldn’t break, do. Communications are horrid. Travel is not recommended. It’s the Murphy’s Law of astral events: anything that can go wrong, will. This retrograde was proving no different for most everyone around me. Cars breaking down, cats getting sick, arrests, divorces, panic of some sort, virtually everybody I ran into was cranky about something. Even David Bowie and Alan Rickman died for goodness sake. It was a bad week! Meanwhile, save for Lilly’s still unknown malady, I seemed to be getting along swimmingly. This oddity did not go unnoticed, and I said as much, hence my explanation of Mercury’s retrograde. For the first time in four months I felt like I wasn’t treading water. I had accomplished a great deal last year. I set personal goals, exceeding some of them. I was feeling good about 2016, gosh darn it. And then, in the span of ten minutes this morning, that changed. The celestial demon caught me. Except this time it was a blessing in disguise and it didn’t take me a year to see it. Do you know why I’m showing you this recent picture of Craig and Kelly Barnes? It’s because there is nothing that can be thrown my way by this astrological doomsday – real or imagined – or anything else that can hold a candle to what these two have been through in the last two years. I’ve watched them go from the highest mountains of joy to the lowest valleys of sorrow, and yet here they are just darned happy to be alive. Most of our day-to-day struggles are self made if only through our perceptions of what we think should be. Suffering is the first noble truth of Buddhism. We suffer because we cling to what we think we should rather than accepting what is. And that is the essence of why this morning’s turn of events is a blessing. One can choose to see something bad, or one can choose to see inspiration. I’ve had all day to think it through and all I keep seeing is inspiration. In the end, the effects of Mercury in retrograde comes down to perspective. Kelly and Craig can tell us a thing or two about perspective. Be happy to be alive, because the rest is stuff not worth suffering.

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