Glorious Fall

Man, is it gorgeous out or what? Everything is in shades of orange and yellow and red, even the sky looks luminous, like the sun has been replaced by the moon. I look out back and just get frozen in place, taking it in, absorbing the colors and the multitude of activity at my bird feeder. Fall is the perfect season to practice staying in the present. It seems like just a tiny slip of a time... before you know it the leaves will be gone and it will be cold, but if you treasure this moment, really stay in it, it will last much longer.

If you know anything about chakras, those energy centers that store and spin our physical, mental and emotional drives, it is interesting to think about how the colors correspond to the seasons. How subconsciously we are led to heal ourselves based on the specific chakras being activated by the colors around us. It's hard not to notice the abundance of orange around us right now. Orange is the color of the sacral chakra, located just below the navel, the guardian of creativity and ancestral knowledge. It's the one that feeds our sensuality, our desires and our appetites. Been hungrier than usual lately? Feeling more creative? Worrying about your parents? Or grandparents? That's just your sacral chakra at work.

Of course, the big culmination of the fall season is Thanksgiving where we finally feed the sacral til saturation and it releases its hold on us. On to Christmas, the season of red and green, which is root and heart. Perfect! Who makes this stuff up? Red for rooting, staying put, keeping our feet steady on the earth. Green for hearts coming home to their roots. Amazing.

Anne noticed on facebook the other day that purple has been added into the Halloween season and was asking why. Great question, it doesn't make any sense for purple to be there. Purple is the color of the crown chakra or even the 3rd eye, God & Intuition are not even close to sacral. It's fairly ridiculous since Halloween is all about ghosts and goblins. Except people tend to be afraid of black, the original Halloween color. We want to sugar coat everything, pretend it doesn't exist, silly really... it's just a color. Oh, the metaphors in just that sentence. But let's not get political.

I find myself very excited about all the new & old changes about to culminate in my world. I'm hoping that the creativity will feed my chakra so I will finally take off this weight. I have all kinds of new plans, feel like I've been sluggish and stagnant, sort of stuck in a summer heat flush and now new energy is pouring through and the summer (yellow) gave me the courage and self esteem to branch into new areas. Yellow, the solar chakra, place of power & yes & no. I'm saying yes to what I need and no to what I don't. It's thrilling really.

Thanks for listening to my musings this morning. I encourage you to go explore your own desires.... Fall into the season... notice the leaves gently swaying before they tenderly let go, shedding the baggage for the tree to rejuvenate... What do you need to let go of so you can rejuvenate?

I love Fall.

Next Month...

I have discovered my mantra. What's a mantra? Nothing, what's a mantra with you?

Sorry.

A mantra is a word or phrase you can use during meditation to keep the mind from wandering too far down the road. You tie it to your inhale and exhale and repeat it over and over. It gives you a place to come back to when you start planning your grocery list when you are attempting to find inner peace and enlightenment.

The ancient yogis believed that each person had their own personal mantra but they needed an ancient yogi to give it to them. They let you borrow the Universal "Om" in the meantime. Since I have yet to meet an ancient yogi (cept myself of course), I decided to wait for my own to appear and one day it did. Or so I thought. I thought it was "shine". Very simple. Breathe in light, breathe out ssshhiiiinnnnne... It's worked for me for years.

I have discovered lately that I have another mantra that I actually use much more often. I've been watching myself talk to people lately. (another ancient yogi practice aka witnessing) I have been shocked at how often I repeat the phrase "next month". As in:

Next month I'll have more time.

Next month we can go/do/have/etc.

Next month I will get my house clean/that work done.

Usually I use it with my second most used mantra "after this month". As in "After this month, everything in the Universe will conspire to create perfection in my world and I will cease to have to do anything to make it happen." Right.

Yesterday I pulled a tarot card that snapped me back into reality. It's one I rarely get but it comes up quite frequently for others. It's called Laziness. It shows a man sitting back drinking a pina colada, wearing a bathrobe, and there are mirrors cracking all around him. The essential meaning of the card is that there is never a time where you are done. Done as in, there are no more mountains to climb, no more work for you to do, no more attempts at enlightenment. Boiiing! Even next month.

One of my favorite sayings of all time is the Zen:

Before enlightenment, I picked cabbages.
After enlightenment, I picked cabbages.

Yeah, time for me to quite thinking the cabbages will pick themselves and I'll get to drink the pina colada. I don't even LIKE pina coladas. Sheesh.

I do have one "next month" that I really like though:

Next month I become a Reiki Master Teacher. Yes, indeedy. That is my mantra this month.

Feng Shui

Every now and then my life gets cluttered. My house gets cluttered. My website and blog gets cluttered. And my desk...

You know what they say about clutter being a reflection of your mind? "A cluttered desk is a cluttered mind?" Do they say that or did I make it up? And who are they? I digress.

Anyway, when I start to feel cluttered I pull out my trusty Feng Shui bible and rearrange. Feng Shui is cool because it works based on common sense that you forget when you are cluttered. Stuff like-- if you keep your desk cluttered, you won't be about to relax and your mind will find it hard to let go. Duh! Why do we need to let go of mind? So we can act through heart and soul... ahhh, grasshopper, now I understand. Actually an added benefit of cleaning your desk is being able to find stuff which will also free your mind for other stuff like "where should I put all this crap I took off my desk?"

So, I started with my website. Now, believe or not, my Feng Shui bible does not cover feng shui-ing websites. I was forced to create Linda Shui rules such as:

1. Remove a third of the clutter.
2. Make things match. (this was sorta tedious as I had to do each page)
3. Simplify.
4. Stay with one color & one font. (this was REALLY hard, I was feeling very stifled)
5. Say what you have to say and move on.

I'm not so sure I succeeded at the last one, as you know, I tend to get a bit wordy but I did my best. Anyway, I moved on to my house. One of the best Feng Shui rules is to walk around your house and anything you do not like or that has bad energy or reminds you of bad times must go. This is not the first time I've feng shui-ed, in fact, I've been doing it for years but it's amazing how much stuff we accumulate every single day. This is a great way to get your house clean because you don't have to agonize over your Great Aunt twice removed precious gravy ladle with the chipped goose neck as a handle... gravy is bad for you so out it goes.

One of the biggest thing to go this time was the piano that no one wanted (cept Cory, who is still not speaking to us, another added Feng Shui benefit LOL JK) When Cory was little, he took piano lessons and needed a piano so the Universe provided because the nursery school was trying to get rid of one so we wheeled it up the road. Considering it had been in a nursery school for 400 years, you can imagine the condition of it. But we were grateful to have it and it served us well. As Cory and Rhia got older and their pitch became more critical, they would complain about how out of tune it was. Trouble was, we couldn't get it tuned because it needed a minor repair that would have taken 400 hours. Bottom line: we needed to get rid of the piano.

You ever try and get rid of a piano? Over the last year, I have had many people interested, coming by (requiring me to dust the damn thing since no one was playing it) and saying they wanted it, only to never see them again. Finally, I get very cranky about it (menopause? BITE YOUR TONGUE!) and insist that it leaves my house this very minute! I call the City of Bowie and they say they will be happy to take it-- if we chop it into 12 inch pieces. All of it. Ugh. This would hurt our musical souls. But our feng shui was sooo bad with it here. What to do?

Saturday, We wheeled it down to the end of our driveway. Put a sign that says YOURS! Take it! We make our way back into the house and no lie-- before we even made it to the kitchen we hear it being played. In our front yard. LOL, that's something you don't hear everyday. Barry goes out and this lovely Oriental (coincidence? Ha grasshopper) man from around the corner says he wants it. Comes back to pick it up and even brings me a gift of tea he picked up on his last trip to Taiwan.

Now our hearts are happy. Our living room is clearer. The energy is flowing.

See? Feng Shui Works!

Abundance of Time

Now
That
All your worry
Has proved such an
Unlucrative
Business,
Why Not
Find a better
Job.
~Hafiz

I love Hafiz. He has such a way... he kinda reminds me of my Dad in a strange way. Sort of drops a word out of the side of a smile and the impact of it slowly dawns on you. Infinite wisdom out of a wino (Hafiz, not my Dad) My favorite poem of all time:

What Should We Do about that Moon ?

A wine bottle fell from a wagon
And broke open in a field.
That night hundred beetles and all their cousins
Gathered
And did some serious binge drinking.
They even found some seed husks nearby
And began to play them like drums and whirl.

This made God very happy.

Then the 'night candle' rose into the sky
And one drunk creature, laying down his instrument
Said to his friend - for no apparent
Reason,

"What should we do about that moon?"

Seems to Hafiz
Most everyone has laid aside the music
Tackling such profoundly useless
Questions.

Yep. Hafiz is a genius. My week has been all about putting down worry and letting go of thinking what I should do about that moon.

Off to a massage. We'll chat soon.