November 27th, 2013

A Thanksgiving Respite

“All things, all places, are sacraments to which we pay the reverence of complete awareness. With that attention, a universal resonance comes forth from all around us, and this universality, the sense of oneness — glimpsed only through close attention to the present moment, moment after moment — is the simple, great secret of existence.” — Peter Matthiessen
 
I’ll be taking some time off from Astro Inquiry for the next few days to join family and friends in what I’ve come, each year, to call the “Holidaze Bardo.” (A bardo is a Tibetan term used to describe various post-death phases, but also to designate times when our usual way of life becomes suspended.)

In reference to the quote from Peter Matthiessen, it’s my true wish that each of you take advantage of the next five weeks to reaffirm and reconnect to the simple, ordinary wonder of your existence; your loved ones’ existence and to the existence of life’s myriad forms — including the existence of the sweet angelic being we call ‘Earth’ that — along with the Sun — supports and sustains each of us.

In the spirit of giving thanks, I’d like to particularly say ‘thank you’ to my peers in the astrological community, both colleagues and clients; and my own teachers and fellow students. And to each of you that visit and support this site and my work and efforts for more ‘complete awareness.’

As my teacher said to me once: “What else is there to do in life but focus on soul work?” Of course there is conventional work, pleasures and leisures, relationship and camaraderie — he wasn’t diminishing the stature of those happenings, but he was addressing priority, for happenings mean little if there is no one truly present, awake, to experience them.

Carl Jung once noted: “…until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” And that might be fine — a fated path for an unexamined life — but one’s true Fate (in the Gurdjieffian sense) is when essence is fully illuminated; lived and worked in service to the all. Then being replaces doing and there is the simple freedom to simply be. That’s a true respite.

Love,

Frederick
 
Photograph: Silvers Welch Road View by Oldoinyo



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