A Fool's Errand?

The round-trip drive was 568 miles.  The gasoline came to $125.00.  I started at 6 a.m. and got home by 6 p.m.  I had gone to fetch a 10 week old apricot miniature poodle.  I knew my client loved the original dog that was lost to her, but she was so debilitated  now that I could hardly see the benefit...............until this afternoon.  When I put that dog in her arms, I saw that hard-nosed, shrewd, demented little old lady soften and become affectionate and loving.  A pretty large miracle for a really tiny dog.

Are there are heroes in the seaweed?

Good question.  Your approval matters to me.  Reassurances from you can change the course of history and totally change my point of view on everything.  No..that does not mean you tell me what to think.  You never do that.  However, you are the one person on the face of the planet who, if all else fails, can reason with me and successfully persuade me to another point of view.  This would not be because I love you, but because I respect and trust you.  I appreciate your mind, recognize your intelligence and the ethics of your reasoning.  I understand your character, acknowledge your fairness and objectivity. In this life (or any other) and for nearly forty years, you have been, are, and always will be, my hero.

The Path to Enlightenment

I heard it best put by a young woman in a public service announcement, "I believe there are many paths to God."  My friends and acquaintances follow different ones.  This morning I awoke to a program about the Buddha, who existed historically five hundred years before Jesus Christ.  It would seem to me that religion is essentially about providing us with skill sets to help us cope with the concepts of aging, illness, and death.  The gift to sentient beings is the awareness that at some point existence will terminate and that the event, if not traumatically painful and immediate, will be a process, ugly, painful and drawn-out.

I have been a practicing Roman Catholicism after a fashion for forty years.  According to the tales upon which Christianity is based, the first man and woman would have remained immortal and living in the Garden if it weren't for the sin of ignorance....no, I have that wrong.  Adam and Eve WERE ignorant.  It was the serpent who lead them to knowledge, thereby inciting God to cast them out of paradise.  And God has been pissed at us ever since.
Talk about holding grudge.  Why would God punish thousands of generations of his favorite creation who weren't even there when it all happened?  He is a jealous god and a vengeful one and it strikes me as more than a little coincidental that God is frequently identified as an internal deity.  Religion then becomes a form of self-delusion to engender acceptance of our end.  I think there is probably more to it than that, but this is what happens when I wake up at three in the morning and cannot go back to sleep.

The Side-effects of Loving

Just like medication there are side-effects to giving and receiving love.

In giving love we take all the tenderness, understanding and compassion out of ourselves where we have been hoarding them and lavish them over someone outside ourselves....a little like slathering jam on bread. Most of us are not terribly sure how to apply it elegantly, so we just smear it all over hoping not miss any critical area.  We are so enamored of the object of our love that we cannot do too much for them.  You know it is really serious when you realize you would be willing to donate a kidney (or your own heart) to them or take a bullet for them.  Those things are kind of risky, but there is nothing too foolish, too dangerous, or too terrible to endure for the sake of your love.  Your own well-being takes a backseat to the well-being of your love.  We are brave, expansive, generous and forgiving.

In receiving love we learn we have value greater than we ever imagined.  We become confident and bold, become risk-takers, feel ourselves capable of achieving anything simply because we are important to someone else.  We can feel the love pour over us like warm honey........sweet and comforting.  We are brave and expansive and generous and forgiving. 
We are lifted up by both the giving and receiving of love.  Our internal manifestation of the deity is closer to realization because God IS love.

Yes, indeed.  There are side-effects to love.