Category Archives: Perspective

Don’t stand still

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Everything I’ve learned in my life has been a result of being in action. I step in the direction of my intentions, many times having no idea of what the picture will look like.  I’m open to what shows up along the way and embrace it as part of my path, unfolding for my growth and development. There are no mistakes where life takes us.  It is so hard to trust the journey. The tracks we lay bring us to many interesting and rich experiences. Don’t stand still.

The Story of Your Life

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Start telling the story of your life in new terms and see what expands for you and your life. When you are approaching life from your eternal viewpoint, you understand the limitless possibility that manifests each moment in your life. New desires radiate from you whether you speak it or not creating the world you walk through. Life expands-are you keeping up with that expansion?  When you ask for greater wellness, life expands. Are you keeping up with it? We tend to observe where we are. We are surrounded by the isness of what is. It has our attention. When you are fixated on what is, you seperate yourself from the larger version of you. You get fixated on the details of where you are and it keeps you from standing in the expanded, broader part of you.

The larger part of you becomes what you’ve asked for. Fine tune, focus. Vibration wasn’t build yesterday–you add to it, amend it– ask for what you want. Once you expand to an new place you then have to move to that expansion. You cannot stay where you are! Feeling despair, you are so far from this expansion you start judging others, hating, sabotage. Change your conversation. What’s  staying alive by your actions and your conversations?  What’s holding you from become the expanded person you are.

The universe gives us clues–recognize them and things start showing up for us. Drop your old belief system along the way–stop beating the drum of where you are rather than what you want. Step into who you’ve become. The universe will require this of you by presenting you with discomfort, frustration and struggle to give you a push or a kick. Knowing what you don’t want gives birth to what you DO want. No means yes. Let the yes be born and turn your attention to THAT. Knowing what you don’t want identifies what you do want. Turn your attention to what you want. Allow the wellbeing that is yours. The better you feel, the more you are allowing it, the worse you feel the more you are not allowing it. Expect things to go your way, believe and step into the expanded side of you. At the same time let go of your attachments.

love, Kate

An Early Morning Cafe’

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An Early Morning Cafe’

At the summit of the Trade Center
107 stories into urban ether
the Windows of the World Cafe
served pate’ and poached salmon
to diners staring down
into the caverns of Manhattan,
but early in the September morning,
the sommelier and maitre d’
still asleep in their far-away flats,
only the sous-chef and banquet staff
had arrived to peel the shrimp,
trim the artichokes, and wash
the leaves of the escarole.
Simple work in silence with your mates
in an empty early morning cafe’
is a pleasure: jokes, mild complaining,
a hummed tune or two,
sneaking a cigarette in a quiet alcove,
stories of luck in last night’s poker,
when suddenly a berserk machine
decides to murder a building with fire.
Like a badly shot elephant,
the hundred and six stories holding up
your peeling knife and lettuce drier
wobbled and shook for a little while.
Smoke belched out from blown-out eye sockets
but when the flames began melting the bones,
it all tumbled down on top of itself in
a smoking gray heap, the shrimp,
the artichokes, the escarole, fifty thousand
bottles of elegant wine, joining
in a sticky red downpour:
type A, type O, Chateau Lafitte, Rothschild.
Pouilly Fuisse ’79, type AB ’49,
and you yourself unless you leapt
out one of the windows of the world
to try with your imaginary wings
to finish the flight to the city of angels.
Humans so riddled with hate they transmogrified
from men to bombs to smash the girders
under your cafe’, though they’d never met you at all,
to murder you for the glory of God
with your apron still smeared with shrimp guts.
It was always thus. Try killing an abstraction
by murdering a building from the air,
but all you kill is Bob and Edna
and Sallie and Rodrigo and Mei-Mei.
A building is only a set of artificial legs
to hold up human beings in the air,
and an airplane only a sheet of folded paper.
But 50,000 bottles of good wine
and ten gallons of fresh gulf shrimp,
and Bob and Edna and all the rest.
Now that is something real!
If you think you’ve bagged the one truth
and that truth wants final sacrifice,
then you have stepped outside the human race,
and your plane will not land in heaven
wherever you think it might be.
Heaven in an early morning cafe’.
Wherever you are.

Bill Holm Playing the Black Piano
© Milkweed Press, 2004

So what is evolution?

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I was thinking how often I have heard people say ” I have evolved. She or he had really evolved over time. I have evolved into a spiritually enlightened individual.” This of course led me to ask the question “What is evolution? I have come to belief that enlightenment is not of an evolutionary  nature but rather an unfoldment. The term evolution to me feels very linear, as if there is somewhere outside of you to get to. We come into this world with the knowledge of all—we stil have the knowledge of all whether we know it or not. We are whole and complete Beings. The dictoionary defines evolution as follows: a. The process of developing.b. Gradual development. 3. Biology  a. Change in the genetic composition of a population during successive generations, as a result of natural selection acting on the genetic variation among individuals, and resulting in the development of new species. b. The historical development of a related group of organisms; phylogeny. 4. A movement that is part of a set of ordered movements. 5. Mathematics The extraction of a root of a quantity. Development. What is development?

Webster defines development as follows: the act, process, or result of developing <development of new ideas> <an interesting development>

: having a relatively high level of industrialization and standard of living <a developed country>

Synonyms: advanced, evolved, forward, high, higher,improved, late, progressive, refined

A linear process? You develop SKILLS. Based on a past, present and future. Do skills live in the spoken world? The world of judgement, assessment, filters, believes, opinions, views? What is the EXPERIENCE of unfoldment vs. evolution? I look back at my life, with it’s many twists and turns and think how NOT LINEAR those experiences occurred for me. The experiences may have occurred over time in a seemingly linear fashion. I mean, time passed.

2002 came before 2005. But my experience in the unfoldment of awareness came more like leapfrog–bouncing back and forth, connecting dots in an irregular fashion. Awareness works like that for me. Experience may inform in the world of past and present, but awareness unfolds more organically for me. I see when I see. The seeing is always there and what we see is the world we walk though. HOW we see is created by us. We are the authors of our story, our experience. So, what develops is our language—how we describe what we are experiencing. It is a story of a memory. IT is not REAL. How much of our self-worth is wrapped up in false memories? How much bravado? How much time do we spend beating ourselves up, or making each other wrong? How much time and energy is wasted on what we think has been done to us? What are we creating FOR each other?

So then I ask again, WHAT IS EVOLUTION? We are taught to respect evolution as path to betterment. Survival of the fittest, a learned improved outcome of a linear process–a heirarchy. We have evolved into thinking, feeling, superior beings haven’t we? Well, haven’t we? I read an article today in this months TIME Magazine. “The Price of Free Speech”. It’s an article of a hatemonger named FRED PHELPS, founder of Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas. He goes to soldiers funerals with a group a poeple who hold hate signs hate signs saying “You are going to hell”, and “God hates Fags ” among other things. A quote from him in his church preaching ” You cannot preach the bible, if you don’t preach God’s hate. Evolution?

Unfoldment happens and shows up in the language world. Many of us have insights, an epiphany, a seemingly insurmountable challenge, facing mortality and just an ah ha moment where we see something we have never seen before.

Yes, I like the believe enlightenment occurs more like a flower unfolding it’s petals to take in the morning sun–allowing the darkness of isolation to give way to the warmth a light of the new sun. Open and stretching, embracing the shadows and the light in the same moment.