as many of you may know, i enjoy following the mayan calendar and a 13 moon calendar as a way to keep up with a different rhythm than the pace that is set by the gregorian calendar. for me, the mayan calendar has been a tool that allows me to play with the concept of time. it’s helped me notice when and where my own dependence on and my culture’s dependence on time gets in the way of the natural flow of life. i am also intrigued into belief at how my own states of being will correspond with the mayan tones and tribes that make up the 260 day cycle. i enjoy focusing my attention according to the different connotation that is placed to each month. today, sunday, 4-4-04, is the first day of the moon of manifestation. yesterday was the last day of the moon of intention. on the mayan tzolkin there are days that are called galactic-activation-portals. starting today, we move into a window of 10 of these days in a row. if you look at this picture, these days are the black ones and we are in the second long column right now. here are some words about these next 10 days from a newsletter that 13moon.com puts out:

10-in-a-row-galactic-activation-portals!!!

Beginning on tone 3 of this wavespell, White Electric Worldbridger (Kin 146;

Planetary 1; April 4) they span through tone 12, Blue Crystal Eagle (Kin

155; Planetary 10; April 13.)

What is a galactic activation portal? Within the 260 energies of the

Tzolkin, 52 of them are called portals for they form the “Loom” on which the

entire Tzolkin matrix is woven upon.

As far as “what this means,” what you can be sure of is heightened

energies; access to amplified awareness and sensory experience; greater

opportunity for information exchange and multi-dimensional insights.

As a Portal kin myself, (due to my galactic signature being Red

Self-Existing Skywalker) I offer the following: The 52 specific energies which constitute the Portal kin can create openings through which we are transported into the depths of the ocean of consciousness. The energies of Portal kin can offer lucid reflections and revelations, accelerated clarity and understanding, as well as good ole’ INTENSITY. Their primary role is to convey and circulate potent and relevant information/energy/light providing unique ACCESS to

realms of being and knowing, customized to the ever-changing now moment!

Portal kin invite us to contemplate and experience the opportunities and

subtleties of the symphony of life!

Let us also note the standard college dictionary definition of PORTAL:

“An entrance, door, or gate, especially one that is grand and imposing.”

May we invite the power of these portals to activate dormant potential and

evolutionary transformation!

christy lee-engel commented on “the quality of exposing/acknowledging/opening the tender underside, one’s down-to-the-ground ordinariness?”

i start to shiver all over thinking about and feeling individuals and whole social systems exposing, acknowledging, and opening to their tender undersides. of honoring down-to-the-ground ordinariness. accepting each other and ourselves, completely as is.

anyone want to share a moment of down-to-the-ground-ordinariness?

i’ll start. right now, i feel that nervous tickle beneath my stomach, that tightens as i pose a question that possibly no one will answer or even read. it’s a “what if” kind of feeling. there’s another piece of my tender underside that keeps looking out the window and melting in the glow of the green. the sun is dancing and reflecting off of the fresh, delicate green of spring. i marvel at how often i keep such treasures and joys of my eyes a secret.

is this related to your original thought, christy?

comments:

thanks christy & ashley for sharing your interchange in the last comment box.

the way i’m experiencing sacred humility & vulnerability lately is when i move between the different “rooms” in the house of my life. in one room, i feel like i am so skillfully riding the surfboard of evolution and expansion. then i move into the next room, where suddenly i am stuck in the mud, head-first. what i used to do was to be in the mud-room as little as necessary, and while i was there, to be reminiscing about the surfing room. over the past couple weeks i am accepting my mud rooms more, pulling my head out, washing my face, sitting there in the mud & being present to the relationships there.

& look, at the edge of the mud in the salt-marsh – an ibis. have you been there so patiently, all along?

chris weaver | Email | 04.04.04 – 5:46 pm | #

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Hello Chris, hello Ashley! Chris, your rare bird on the edge of the mud reminds me of a book I saw of wild animal photos, which included the photographer’s technical descriptions of lenses & film, and clever camouflage, and the incredible patience required. In order to get very close to the water birds, he lay still on a raft covered with reeds and such–as if he himself was mud, basically (though, head-first–that’s advanced!)

Ashley, I sat on the ground in my garden today weeding and planting and thinking some more about sacred vulnerability and humility, and it occured to me that the two might also be distinct in a way:

Christy Lee-Engel | Email | Homepage | 04.05.04 – 2:16 am | #

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because when we step into humility, allowing our ordinariness and partialness, being no higher off the ground than any other one–that might be a position that actually protects the vulnerable places. Whereas those precious and secret and tender parts that we are nervous to reveal, are often (I think) the *extra*ordinary and the particular (and, we’re afraid, the incomprehensible and unlovable).

At the same time, though, I notice that your own brave willingness to be vulnerable, to be seen, to be true, doesn’t try at all to be anything special–so, humility accompanies vulnerability again!

love, Christy

Christy Lee-Engel | Email | Homepage | 04.05.04 – 2:18 am | #

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hmmm… in the mud?

mud bath, mud wrestling, mud wrap, squish it between your toes, use it as warrior paint, mud pies!

christy, thank you for noticing me. i’m still pondering the humility and vulnerability relationship. now i wonder about humbleness…

ashley | Email | Homepage | 04.05.04 – 10:19 am | #

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i remember a wonderful cartoon by r. chast called humble pie. it was a picture of a pie, who was murmuring lots of things, such as: “oh, it’s not me – it’s the ingredients.”

grin.

now that i’ve seen your tuesday sharing ash, there’s now something called a “dallas grin!”

chris weaver | Email | 04.06.04 – 5:36 am | #

animated with divine love



“a world animated with divine love.”

if you’re interested in going on an intense and delicious head journey, filled with conscious language (language in which every word has deep meaning), please spend 27 minutes listening to this conversation, A Political Pilgrimage to Your Highest Self, between ken wilber and rabbi marc gafni. you can join the site for free for the first month.

here’s a taste of what has me buzzing!

they go into detail about “no self” and “Self”, using crisp, passionate language (watch me flail as i try to convey the essence to you!). a fundamental point is to embrace the infinite depth of one’s story, of one’s singularity… entering into the personal depth of one’s human story..when one participates in the fullness of one’s name is where one meets their divine name…

sacred humility

infinite uniqueness

a symphony of spirit

akosmic humanism… gafni talks about when the divine god voice speaks through the throat of moses.

“moses was so present in his mosesness, he was so fully there, he was so fully in his eros, that he merged with the divine voice and the divine voice flowed through him.”

“what you’re doing in the world is so incredibly important. opening up a whole world… and energetically in the world– in the world of streams of sacred consciousness — the weaving that you’re doing eactually is moving something in the world…”

sacred holy battle

a knight of faith

comments:

Yes! I am also finding their conversation enchanting and transporting, and have been listening to it over and over this week, letting the words sift through. I especially love what they say about the holy Name, how it is deeply encoded in us to know that the name of every created thing, and the name of god, is the same name. (my current favorite name of god is “yah”)

I made a copy to give to Rabbi Ted (http://www.betalef.org) tonight, and it was lovely to hear him describe in his talk the same communion between the divine and the intensely particular as Rabbi Gafni does:

(ooops too long!)

Christy Lee-Engel | Email | Homepage | 04.02.04 – 2:18 am | #

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(here’s the rest!)

emblematic of the path of creation (“which is how Nothing becomes Something”), the “Ayin” (Hebrew for “no-thing”, the indescribable, spelled aleph-yod-nun) becomes “Ani” (“I”, or “I am”, spelled aleph-nun-yod). Ted thinks of it as “the Universe opening its I”, Marc Gafni talks about “being infused with eros”, with “I AM-ness”

And then plunging into the “infinite depth” of “I am-ness” is the path back from Some-thing to No-thing.

Happy Pesach, Ashley!

love, Christy

Christy Lee-Engel | Email | Homepage | 04.02.04 – 2:19 am | #

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hi Christy!

another thing that’s been spinning inside of me and that i found myself in again after listening for the 2nd time, was how much more i feel conencted to verbs (as in “i am-ness” vs. “i”). i’m noticing how any way of defining the opening of myself in comunion with the divine, inculdes me “being” and not what i’m being. I think about that eternal question “who am i?” and how much that stumps people as they try to fill in all of the labels that define who they are…

the tricky part, however, is that all of those defining labels are perfect for embracing the infinite uniqueness in all of us. for embodying it so fully that we can dance intentionally and join in the symphony of the spirit.

looking at the words that i posted, i notice sacred humility. is that related to sacred vulnerability?

thank you also, christy, for giving me the link to rabbi ted. he opened such a key place in my heart at POP.

happy pesach, christy

filled with love,

ashley

ashley | Email | Homepage | 04.02.04 – 10:20 am | #

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I have an image of all of one’s defining labels on top of and adjoining each other, forming the facets of a stone/jewel–beautiful (or not), unique, seemingly solid and bounded. Whereas the verb-ing way inspires in my imagination a sensation of movement, energy, permeable and undefinable interfaces. But maybe the labels are really transparent, if you catch them in just the right light.

I wonder if sacred humility, and sacred vulnerability, might have in common the quality of exposing/acknowledging/opening the tender underside, one’s down-to-the-ground ordinariness?

love, Christy

Christy Lee-Engel | Email | Homepage | 04.03.04 – 12:37 am | #

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your words enchant me, christy.

“maybe the labels are really transparent, if you catch them in just the right light.” and the different ways of looking at them is synonymous with standing in varying light.

ashley | Email | Homepage | 04.03.04 – 4:21 pm | #

more compliments

i had an interesting conversation the other day. someone said to me:

“i know i’m not supposed to say this, but the people in the group really loved me.” i was crushed by the preface that we’re not supposed to say good things about ourselves. i think that being humble is a concept that has been taken way too seriously.

right now, i’m reading more about compliments. the positive discipline book for families recommends practicing giving and receiving compliments until it becomes a habit. i add to that, practice feeling good about and proud of our strengths and weaknesses. so on that note…

a new game. please share a compliment that you received that really touched a place inside of you. think of it as a way of being proud of your gifts and letting others know what kind of compliments make us feel all warm and tingly inside.

i’ll start: i was stuck in line at the airport for a couple of hours (the computers had crashed). another man in line said to me, “I adore you — i’m exploding in your smile.”

(p.s. it’s difficult for me to publish this post. i have to gather my self-doubt and push the publish button, regardless of how egotistical i might feel because i’m sharing with you that i have a great smile!!)

any one else want to share a meaningful compliment that you received?

comments:

Your comment about feeling good about our strengths and weaknesses reminds me of a conversation with my son. We’d just gotten home from picking him up at after school daycare. He showed me his math exam and told me, “I’m not good at math.” Now, I knew this wasn’t true, and the perfect score on his exam confirmed my opinion. I asked him, “Well, Brandon… What do you mean?” To which he again said, “I’m not good at math.” The conversation went on like that for a few more rounds, and Brandon acknowledged that he’d gotten a perfect score and, while he was quick to point out that another kid in his class was as good as him at math, there was no one in his class better.



Dave | 03.28.04 – 5:24 pm | #

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In the end, I said to him, “Brandon, it sounds like what you’re telling me is that you don’t like math.” He got a sheepish grin and said, “Well, yeah.” And from there, we talked about how it was perfectly fine to be good at something without necessarily enjoying it.

It’s possible that he was just fishing for compliments, but I really don’t think so. He receives many, many compliments on a regular basis. I think he was simply not comfortable with having a gift that others valued more than he did.

Dave | 03.28.04 – 5:26 pm | #

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Recently, I have received the same deeply touching compliment from a few different folks, most of whom I’d never considered myself to be very close to.

This past quarter I dropped four of my six classes due to a death in the family and other personal stuff going on. A few different classmates and a professor at various times came to me and told me with depth and sincerity that they missed my presence in class.

To know that my presence made a significant difference in people’s lives was truly touching, far more so than any compliment about a specific gift or the performance of a specific task.

Be love,

-Dave

Dave | 03.28.04 – 6:02 pm | #

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thanks for sharing dave. that is an ultimate compliment… and just to be confrontational (grin), i’d say that that is also a gift.

brandon’s feelings towards math bring up some of my own experiences. i LOVE math. i think that it’s wonderful! growing up, however, it was a hard subject to enjoy and be good in. it seemed that so many others struggled with it and had a passionate distaste for it. some times when i say that i love math, i still have that hint of embarrassment in my voice!

being love!

ashley

ashley | Email | Homepage | 03.29.04 – 12:22 am | #

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Hey, Ashley! It’s patrice from the workshop. I continue to discover things that I learned while I was there. In response to the current topic, while I was in Austin, my friend, Jim, put his arm around my shoulders, gave me a squeeze and told me that I was a really good person. That kind of got to me, since I usually don’t characterize myself like that. It’s not that I don’t think I am; I just don’t really think about it. I loved the workshop. I was happy to have met you while I was there.

Patrice Hall | Email | 03.29.04 – 11:07 pm | #

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one of my favorites… i was at the open space on open space conference some years ago. anne stadler, one of the really wise souls of open space was there and went out on day one and got a pile of toys and fun stuff. i made a crazy hat out of tubers and zots foam stuff and wore it for most of the conference. nutty. at the end of the second day, i met anne at the elevator and said something like: “this has been the most amazing couple of days…. i’m going to have to wear this hat all the time now.” and without a moment’s hesitation anne says: “it might be the guy underneath the hat.” perfectly reflected all of my best words and energy right back to me. brilliant she is.

michael herman | Email | Homepage | 03.29.04 – 11:26 pm | #

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Leela’s post over at IN got me thinking about this some more…

I think people all too often see individual worth, the worth of the self and others, as a zero sum game. Even though we all rationally know that praising another in no way diminishes ourself, I suspect that sub-consciously most folks feel that by praising others, the praiser’s worth, even if only their relative worth, is diminished.

Could this explain why people are both reticent to give praise and uncomfortable receiving it?

[continued below…]

Dave | 03.31.04 – 12:41 am | #

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[…continued from above]

Ironically, when we’re free and open with praise, our perceived value in the eyes of others tends to go up. At least this is my experience…

I’m all for the regular sincere practice of giving and receiving praise. If we could all do that, it would be a step toward making the world a more pleasant place. My fear is that if we started practicing praise on a societal level, it would fall into the same trap that respect and consideration have fallen into. That is… Rather than focusing on being respectful and considerate of others, society has codified these attributes into a mindless, heartless, intentless set of rules called political correctness. But, that’s another rambling…

Practicing love, praise and respect,

-Dave

Dave | 03.31.04 – 12:42 am | #

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patrice,

great to see you here. i’d like to share an impression that you left on me. at the conference, each time i asked a question and didn’t quite get the response that i thought that i was needing, you poked your head down and said, “just so you know,….”. i really appreciated how tuned into my experience you were. thank you. it was a joy meeting you as well.

michael,

your story leaves me grinning!

dave,

i propose that using the word encouragement (and all that it entails) as separate from praise might differentiate from mind-less to heart-full.

ashley