Sparks from the Fire

“Reality cannot be found except in One single source, because of the interconnection of all things with one another.” — Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, German philosopher and mathematician, 1670.

“The words ‘We are ALL One’ have reverberated through the hearts and minds of Humanity in one form or another since the beginning of time. They do not express a lofty platitude or a sweet cliché even though our lower human egos have often perceived them as such. They profess a profound Truth.” — Patricia Diane Cota-Robles

This concept of Oneness is one that I’ve always wanted to believe in, but never really understood.  I’ve sometimes felt ‘at one’ with the world in lofty moments, sometimes I’ve found a kind of oneness with my mate, I’ve experienced a sense of being at one with great teams I’ve played on, and I’ve certainly felt a kind of oneness with God in true healing moments.

But I have to admit, most of the time I walk around in an individual state, lost in my ego, trying to find my way back to this concept of oneness, trying to scramble back up that mountain of daily doings to the heights of Mind.

For the first major portion of my life I considered only my oneness with God.  This was often confusing because my concept of God often changes (hopefully evolves) and so becoming ‘at one’ with a changing thing that is not always easy to grasp can be confusing and elusive.

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OK, here comes the Fourth of July, the heat, fireworks, independence, food and drink.  We here offer “all things Inspirational” and inspiration comes in all sizes – large, small, heavy and light.  This one’s light.  So sit down, put your feet up, have the butler pour you a cool one, and take the load off.

iced tea

Some things in life are so simple that, yes, they are inspired.  I found one years ago that gets me through the summer.  I like iced tea with lots of lemon to balance the sweet.  Here’s a recipe for a no-cal drink that’s super easy to make without the no-cal taste and totally refreshing.

I use Crystal Light Natural Lemon Iced Tea and Crystal Light Natural Lemonade – you know, the kind that comes in those little 2” plastic canisters.  If ya’ don’t have a butler, just rip the top off one of each yourself, pour them both into a 1 gallon jug and add water.  Stir and serve with ice and a tall glass.

You don’t even have to cut up those messy lemons – the lemony flavor being just right from the lemonade.  I’ve heard this called an Arnold Palmer, but to me it’s just a Half n’ Half – half iced tea and half lemonade.  Now I didn’t say it was an original, but I do feel that I’ve refined the process down to its basic simplicity.

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1.    The Heart That Beats – Why does the next beat take place? After all, it’s not like it’s bouncing.  Each beat, each pump of the pump comes because of this thing called ‘life’.  Do we have anything to do with this life essence?  Not that I know of.  I can locate no responsibility for this energy.  It is something that is given.  I do not engender it.  It’s there whether we think of it or not.  It’s there for us.  We have no clue where in space it comes from, how it got there, why it’s just always there.  But it is.  There is always the next beat of the heart.  And you have trouble believing in some higher power?

2.    The Breath You Take – (See above) Also, I think of the complex machinery that activates this life activity.  What a miracle!  We slap a baby’s bottom and it starts.  Then it continues with relatively no input from us for a lifetime. The average respiration rate for a person at rest is about 16 breaths per minute.  This means on average, we breathe about 960 breaths an hour or 23,040 breaths a day or 8,409,600 a year. If a person lives to 80, then that means on average they will take 672,768,000 breaths in a lifetime!  That’s you.  That’s me.  Cool.

3.    Those We Love – Why is this?  These are the folks we should appreciate the most, but seldom do.  These are the people we should count in our blessings every day.  But these are the people that we expect to love us back because we love them.  Perhaps it’s the nature of love.  We love and expect love in return.  And you know, it almost always does – return, that is.  In fact, I’ll bet that it always does when our love is pure.  That’s the nature of love.  It’s a circle.  Instinctively we know this and so we tend to take it for granted.

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Everybody mourns in his own individual way.  Some wail, some must crawl off by themselves, some need to be with others, some need to get drunk, others prefer to pray.  To each his own.

I prefer the silence of meditation and memories.  I prefer to mourn quietly.  I don’t want to do it for a long time as I’d rather celebrate the life, but I do honor the act of mourning even though I believe in life eternal — especially for those who leave us seemingly early.

I lost over a hundred friends in the AIDS epidemic in the 80s and 90s.  Back then, when someone you knew was diagnosed as HIV positive, that’s when you mourned.  By the time they passed, you were grateful the ordeal was over for them.  It wasn’t fun and I’m sorry to say that I got used to it somewhat.  It became a regular occurrence in my life.  Who was next, one wondered, and it was always somebody.

Two wonderful people that Julia and I knew lost their son, Maurizio, in the late 90s Swiss Air crash over Halifax.  We went through this experience with these two loved ones and shared their grief.  Up until this point in life I pretty much left grieving to all the others and tried to focus on the positives of the life lost, but in this situation I got caught in the middle of it and fully experienced the parent’s powerful grief.

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God stands at his conveyor belt.  The unborn babies come down the belt one by one as God stands with his hypodermic needle injecting life into the babys’ butts.  He knows he has to push the plunger each time only down to the red line, but even God gets tired of this routine, loses concentration and consequently sometimes his thumb slips and He mistakenly pushes the plunger all the way down past the red line.  “Oops”, He says, “there’s another performer!” And he tosses that baby over into another bin.

Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson was one of these. In fact, you might say that with Michael you had the one where God’s thumb slipped the most.  For about a decade he was arguably the most talented man on the planet and definitely the world’s greatest performer.

In my lifetime I would place Michael right up there in the top 5 with The Beatles, Judy Garland, Stevie Wonder and Frank Sinatra.  We watched Thriller until many of us knew all the steps.  We totally rocked out to Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough, I’m Bad, and Billie Jean, and my favorite will always be Man In The Mirror.  That music stop into the big key change will ever be the epitome of great pop music.  Michael was a great rocker, but the King Of Pop.

On top of it all he was a great innovative dancer, right up there with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly.  It wasn’t just Thriller that thrilled.  Every time I ever saw Michael dance, my jaw would drop at this wondrous human being.  The rhythm that poured from his body and his music was way beyond the rest of us mere mortals.

I was a fan.  I was in awe of his talent.  I loved him for being a super human performer and then I came crashing down just like the rest of you as he went over some mad crazy edge in his life and lost his balance.  I laughed at him and dissed him and pitied him and finally shook my head and walked away from him as he became more and more confused with his own identity.

He never really had a boyhood — he was always out there entertaining us – and so in his adulthood he turned to playing with boys, hanging out with them and God knows what else.

He was a consummate performer, always trying to make the song, the step, the move new, better, best and he often succeeded.  So it was only natural that he try to remake himself and his look new, better, best.  For a minute there, when he had his long hair and his glove and his white socks, he succeeded again.  But he couldn’t stop tinkering and for some reason thought he might try to make his make-up permanent.  He was great, but he wasn’t God, and he found that out the hard way – losing his nose in the process.

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OK troops, I need your help on this one.  Yesterday one of my life’s unanswered questions came up for me big time.  Once again I did not have a sufficient answer.  This morning I decided to turn to you, dear readership, to see if you might be able to shed a little light on the subject.

Muir Woods

You see, I took a walk in the woods – Muir Woods to be exact — one of Northern California’s great redwood forests.  My wife, Julia, and I had a rare day off and after spending the morning being tourists at Fisherman’s Warf in San Francisco, decided to get in a little nature — literally.  Neither of us had ever been to Muir Woods and I had never experienced our country’s amazing giant redwood trees, though I had certainly read a lot about them and seen the pics.

So we walked among these giants for a couple of hours in awe of their splendor, their majesty and their lives.  The day was perfect — cool but warm, one of those Northern California days that make you realize the God must live in Northern California.  By the end of our walk my neck was stiff from looking to the heavens, my feet tired, and my brain in a frazzle.

At one point I stood before one family of mammoth trees and wept at the thought of them standing together in such incredible strength, waving softly in the wind as the world went by below for the last 1100 years or so.  Time shrunk and then expanded and then simply slipped away as I tried to wrap my mind around the magnitude of their trunks, their bodies, their lives as trees, their time on earth living, standing, waving in the sun.

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(If you are looking the first installment of this article, simply visit In God We Trusted-Part 1)

So there we were, in total blackness.  The bottom half of my body still wedged into the tightness of the 2’x3’ crawl space tunnel and the top half sticking out into some unknown space, me on my back, laying in an underground stream, with my four friends still in the tunnel behind me.  It’s amazing how your other senses take over when one sense is dysfunctional.

The Way Out

I could not see, but the smell of the space had changed.  It was no longer of rock and stale air, but now of clean, pure air with a strong hint of mineral water.  It was a good smell, a freeing smell.  The first thing I did was to elicit a loud but short “Ah” into the darkness.  The return of the reverb totally surprised me.  It told me that I was in a huge room.  I took my flashlight from my belt and shined it into the darkness, but the room was so big that its beam found nothing but empty space.  I whispered excitedly back to my spelunking buddies, “Pass me a flare.”

I lit the flare over my head as I lay prone on my back so as not to catch fire from the flare.  As the flare flared in its brilliant redness, I shut my eyes to protect them from the sparks from the fire (no pun intended).  The sudden light took long moments to get used to, my eyes being accustomed to the blackness of the cave tunnel.

When I could finally see, the room was bathed in red.  The top half of my body was sticking out of a hole in the wall of this room about 40 feet up the wall as the stream trickled down the wall beneath me.  In rainier times, the trickle would probably turn into a waterfall with a 40 foot drop.  I did not feel precarious; rather I felt freed from the claustrophobia of the tunnel.

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We lay there on our backs in a line, I in the lead.  The water in the stream wherein we lay was only an inch and a half deep and had slowed to a trickle beneath us, but it was cold, icy cold.  It was so dark, there being no light whatsoever, that we had given up trying to see anything long ago.  The walls of the passageway in which we lay had narrowed down to a claustrophobic six inches on either side of us.  But it was the ceiling, the ceiling of that cave in which we lay, that was so overwhelmingly awesome in its presence.

That ceiling of dirt and rock had narrowed down to only six inches above my face.  I had had to turn onto my back and push myself forward with my feet, inching myself forward through the ever-narrowing tunnel.  I stopped and grunted, “Hold” to my other four companions, breathing in the dank, stale air of the underground passage.  I thought of the rope tied amateurishly around my ankle running back to the next guy’s ankle and so on to the next.  My buddies could always pull me out.

I did what no professional cave explorer would ever do.  I thought about it.  I thought about the walls, the floor, the ceiling.  I imagined the earth above me slightly shifting and the great expanse of rock above me simply settling to fill this narrow worm-hole, crushing my body beneath its weight.  The waves of claustrophobia began to wash over me.  I suddenly could see, but it was only an imagined redness of fear.

The single word “Pull” burned into my mind, but what came out was a blurt of panic, “Just a sec.”  One of my buddies, sensing my fear, called out, “Are you all right, Pete?”  I couldn’t answer.  The feeling of that ceiling pressing down on me had grown so that the words would no longer form in the tangle of my mind.  My fear began to spread among the other four.

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