Our Paulo and " Mysterious Ways "

Good day , soul sisters, brothers, cousins ......

Today is a good day . I'm feeling happy and enjoying the last day of my holiday of Being and doing exactly what fancy. It's been great. Perhaps this is a good philosophy for the next month too ? and the one after that ?

The sun is somewhere behind the clouds - this I know. A perfect day for meditating , contemplating reading and pottering about. I've just watched " Mysterious Ways " on TV. ( " dead dog walking " was the episode I just watched )
http://www.tv.com/mysterious-ways/show/995/episode_guide.html

Paulo Coelho is impacting my life too through his latest book " The Zahir" which I have nearly finished now .. I was in the Russian Steppes this morning , standing naked in the freezing wind, listening to the dunes sing and awaiting to pronounce my new name as reborn ;-) Oh he's GOOD , our Paulo !!!

You can read the first chapter of " The Zahir " on line here :
http://www.paulocoelho.com.br/ozahir/livro/index.html
While I was there at his site I also found him refer to Sweden and a peculiar form of exercise that exists here , which as a foreigner I too find odd and silly to say the least - though it is supposed to be very good for you .


http://www.warriorofthelight.com/engl/index.html
Poles and rules
In the fall of 2003 I was walking late one night through the center of Stockholm when I saw a woman walking along using ski poles. My first reaction was to think of some injury she must have suffered, but then I noticed she was moving quite fast and with rhythmic movements as if she were on a patch of snow – except that all that was around us was the asphalt of paved streets. The obvious conclusion was: “that woman is crazy, how could she pretend to be skiing in the middle of the city?” Back in the hotel, I mentioned the incident to my editor. He said that I was the crazy one: what I had seen was a sort of exercise called “Nordic walking”. He explained that besides the movement of the legs, the arms, shoulders and back muscles are also used to make it a much more complete exercise. .......
http://www.warriorofthelight.com/engl/index.html

YES -- altogether an interesting Sunday
Lots of love and Light to us all .. may OUR LIGHT shine brightly and reach through the cracks everywhere .

Lindeman's makes life more enjoyable

Many Monday greetings and blessings to my souls friends ! Here I am again , back from the country with a story to tell. I'm exhausted; have a dull headache, and feel bloated obviously paying the price for indulging in all the food and cpious anounts of wine. I'm still in a daze, but waking up slowly. Writing this helps. It is both a pleasure and a penance.

Plants on the balcony are soaked . Yellow leaves , sign of rotting from too much water. They need sun now and WARMTH . It is cool here now . Damp. Not nice for summer. Still , I am practising acceptance . I can be indoors without feeling guilty , I’ll walk around the lake later and feed the ducks later.

So....How was it ? What’s my weekend out in the county story ? Here’s gathering my thoughts ...Peaceful, dreamlike quality, rain , lush vegetation , woods are filled with blueberries , I was told by the only other passenger on the bus, a pensioner who was going out to her summer cottage for the week, her huge shopping trolley heavy and full of provisions since there are no shops there.

The journey out there is an adventure. After an hour or so on the big train which is just long enough, I get off at Katrineholm station, just as the rain starts to bucket down. This is followed by a half hour’s wait for the bus and chatting and exchanging stories with people also waiting and sheltering from the rain.

The bus driver drops me off right outside Anna- Stina’s cottage – they do that in the country – and there she is waiting for me in the rain, wrapped in a raincoat and wearing wellies ,holding a big brolly ( umbrella ) apologising about the rain , thunder and lightning. My travel companion , the only other passenger on the bus, has also told me about the dangers of lightning ...the time lightning struck her home, cutting cables and singeing the wood, cutting off their electricity supply and the tall tree that was sliced right down the middle .

Once inside the cottage, I see that a hot meal is there waiting; two glasses of wine already poured, candles lit . Oh the beauty of candlelight against all the rain. Peace and calm and then Lindeman’s bag in box wine – " Lindeman’s makes your day more enjoyable " written in cursive letters on this delightful box.

There is much listening to stories this weekend and everyone has a story . Nieces, Sara and Emma appear with their boyfriends, both called Andreas. Emma’s Andreas is dark and charismatic in a quiet way; beautiful eyes, well - balanced, sturdy, stable , grounded works with autistic children. Sara’s Andreas, by contrast is very tall blond and thin; a sharp, technical, practical, understanding, human, human being recently returned from three months in Sri Lanka where he’s been working on a road safety project part of a government programme. Theirs is a well- established relationship, whereas Emma and Andreas only met a month ago and still can’t keep their hands off each other. New love !

Sara, is an architect , wise, clever , serene and beautiful and also tall. She seems to hold herself back from time to time, consciously choosing when to open up and when to blossom. I imagine an overshadowed flower in the presence of her sister Emma’s bubbly exuberance. Emma works as a journalist, does reports and has her own column at the local newspaper. Sara seems to live in her sister Emma’s shadow, like Anna-Stina lives in her sister Ina’s shadow. My observations.

I am aware that I keep losing myself. Where am I ? I seem to disappear in the mass.. I don’t realise it at the time. I feel happy but it is not really ‘me’ . It is someone else being happy for me. Anna- Stina has picked a whole bowl of wild raspberries for me .. oh the divine taste and aroma of freshly picked wild raspberries as they melt in your mouth and the furriness touches the tongue .... Anna- Stina has really made an effort to make things enjoyable to compensate for the rain, the never ending rain.... we shall all go rusty soon .....

I’m drawn into Anna- Stina’s family stories the family that she both loves and hates and I do this willing. I allow myself to get lost. I have no demands. This has a consequence. " If you don’t choose, someone else will choose for you " This is true. There is something heavy about being entertained by someone who feels you need to be entertained. " i......I suppose you have to be eternally evidencing gratitude" as Valerie commented this morning.

Yes , I am caught up in the stories. Anna- Stina’s many stories from her anthroposophic world . These stories are extra potent and numerous right now as a direct result of a whole week of STORYTELLING AS A HEALING ART International Symposium that she attended in Järna- south of Stockholm.

http://www.healingstory.com/symposium/program.htm

But , when we were not talking , I'd sit out on the terrace and gaze out at the lake and at all the greenery, mesmerized by nature...and simply going with the flow. Oh and yes, there is " Lindemans...... always making the day more enjoyable as the slogan on the bag in box wine says. We thank Lindeman’s for that.

Also , Nature gracefully and pwerfully takes over. Paulo Coelho’s latest book " THE ZAHIR " is also great and full of stories.

COMMUNICATION

Your communication is only as good as your understanding of the person you're communicating with.



Dr. Tony Alessandra

Moon phases

http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/vphase.html

http://users.ameritech.net/paulcarlisle/MoonCalendar.html

http://aa.usno.navy.mil/cgi-bin/aa_moonphases.pl?year=2005&ZZZ=END



http://www.hermetic.ch/cal_stud/lunarcal/lunarcal.htm
It is possible to devise a lunar calendar which is simple to use (only elementary arithmetic is required for its use — a computer is not needed) and which may be expected to stay in sync with the lunar phases over a period of several millennia. This article presents such a calendar, more specifically, a rule-based solar-count lunar calendar. (For an explanation of types of calendars, with a brief discussion of lunar calendars in general, see Types of Calendars.) In this calendar, years have 12 or 13 months, which are named after goddesses from various cultures, and so this calendar is called the Goddess Lunar Calendar (or Goddess Calendar for short).
I shall now define this calendar, then I shall discuss the accuracy of it with respect to the lunar and solar cycles. Then I shall relate the Goddess Calendar to the Common Era Calendar (which is the same as the Gregorian Calendar except that instead of the A.D./B.C. year-numbering system the astronomical year-numbering sytem is used), and finally I shall provide software to allow conversion between dates in these two calendars.

The Goddess Lunar Calendar DefinedAccording to the Goddess Calendar, time, although not strictly cyclic, is measured in cycles — cycles of 1689 calendar years. For the purpose of viewing time as linear, and assigning each day a unique date, each 1689-year cycle is associated with an integer -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, ... Years within each cycle are numbered 1 through 1689.
Years usually have twelve months, but sometimes thirteen (such years are known as 'long years'). A year has a 13th month if and only if the number of that year is divisible by 3 or if the digits of the year sum to 2, 22 or 23.
Months are numbered from 1 through 13. Odd-numbered months have 29 days and even-numbered months have 30 days.
The months are named after thirteen goddesses, as follows:
Monthnumber
Month name
Number of days
1
Astarte
29 usually
2
Bast
30
3
Cybele
29
4
Diana
30
5
Eris
29
6
Freya
30
7
Gaia
29
8
Hathor
30
9
Isis
29
10
Juno
30
11
Kali
29
12
Lakshmi
30
13
Maat
29 always
The names of the months begin with the letters A, B, ... M, making it easier to remember their order.
The thirteen goddess names are taken from eight different cultures. There are four Egyptian goddesses, two Greek, two Roman, two Hindu and one goddess from each of the, Canaanite, Phrygian and Norse cultures. This is thus a multi-cultural calendar.
As stated above, the 1689-year cycles are numbered -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3 ...., the months are numbered 1 through 13 and the days are numbered 1 through 31 (in various months). Thus a date in the Goddess Calendar has the form "cycle-year-month-day", for example, "3-0825-02-27".
We will see later how dates in Goddess Calendar correspond to dates in the Common Era Calendar.
A year is a "long" year if it contains a thirteenth month. The rule for when a year is a long year was given above, and here more formally:
A year is a long year (and so has a 13th month) if and only if 1.1 The year is divisible by 3 or1.2 The digits of the year sum to 2, 22 or 23.
1.1 and 1.2 are mutually exclusive possibilities (that is, a year is a long year by virtue of 1.1 or 1.2 but not both).
Examples:
The year 0-567 in the Goddess Calendar is a long year because 567 is divisible by 3.
The year 1-779 is a long year because the digits of the year sum to 23 (= 7 + 7 + 9).
The year 2-1003 is not a long year because the digits of the year sum to 4 (= 1 + 0 + 0 + 3) and 1003 is not divisible by 3.
In any year (whether or not long) odd-numbered months (1, 3, ..., 13) have 29 days and even-numbered months (2, 4, ..., 12) have 30 days, except that in a long year the length of the first month is determined by the following rule:
2.1 If the digits of the year sum to 2 then the first month has 28 days.2.2 If the digits of the year sum to 22 then the first month has 29 days.2.3 If the digits of the year sum to 23 then the first month has 30 days.2.4 If the year is divisible by 9 then the first month has 30 days.2.5 If the year is divisible by 3 but not by 9 then the first month has 31 days.
These are mutually exclusive possibilities, so in a long year only one of 2.1 - 2.5 can be used to determine the number of days in the first month.
The regular structure of the Goddess Calendar (twelve months of alternating lengths 29 and 30 days, with an occasional 13th month of 29 days, and a variable length for the first month in long years), and the rule for when a year is a long year, are sufficiently simple to be remembered easily, and the rule for the length of the first month is not particularly difficult to remember.
To reckon time according to this calendar it is necessary only to know the Goddess date for a particular day and to be able to calculate the date which follows any given date. This requires only the ability to remember the rules of the calendar and to add four single-digit numbers and to divide a four-digit number by 3 and by 9, all of which can be done mentally.
For example, is the year 1686 (in any cycle) a long year? And if so, how many days are in the first month? Well, 1686 divided by 3 is 562 exactly, and divided by 9 is 187 with 3 over, so by rule 1.1 the year 1686 is a long year, and by rule 2.5 Astarte's month has 31 days (in this year).

Speak Kindly To Yourself

“What is this self inside us, this silent observer,
Severe and speechless critic, who can terrorize us,
And urge us on to futile activity,
And in the end, judge us still more severely,
For the errors into which his own reproaches drove us?”
-- T. S. Eliot

How do you talk to yourself?
Would you talk that way to anyone else?
Our thoughts create our reality.
How do you typically think about yourself?
Do you berate yourself for being stupid, sloppy, forgetful or insensitive?
Do you watch yourself with interest, respect and compassion?
Stay alert to your self-talk and let go of judgments that don’t serve you.
"Self-acceptance is my refusal to be in an adversarial relationship to myself."
-- Nathaniel Branden

Peter's refreshing view on CREATED STUFF

MY PHILOSOPHY OF CREATED STUFF
(AKA "ART", AKA "INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY")

Here ( http://www.mcwilliams.com/aboutme.htm) you will find the complete text of all my books currently in print, plus works "in progress." You are welcome to read, search, download, copy, print, or give away any of it. Just don't try to sell large chunks of it, or I'll call the FBI. (See the first 30 seconds of any rental videotape.)

You're certainly free to incorporate portions of these books in what you create, and sell that. That's the nature of the creative process. There's no need to ask me to "grant permission". Who the hell am I to "grant permission"?

Created stuff is meant to be shared. That’s why the creative person created it. Why else do creative people exist? "I burn to be seen!" as someone wrote. Well, maybe someone wrote that. I just made it up, but it sounds as though someone else might have written it earlier. Maybe I read it somewhere, or saw it on an Arts & Entertainment documentary on Paris in the Twenties. Who cares? It got said, and it fit what I wanted to say, so I said it.

Creativity stimulates the creators and entertains everybody else. The vast majority of people need to be entertained. God bless them every one. Creative people, however, need to be stimulated, inspired, nudged, cross-pollinated, and occasionally kicked in the ass. Art both entertains and inspires at the same time. (I use "Art" here in the broadest sense of the word - everything from Jeopardy! to Goethe to Graffiti.)

Art, therefore, needs to be readily available - available to the general public for entertainment, and available to artists for pilfering. Artists should be able to incorporate - consciously or unconsciously, credited or not - the work of other artists.

Andy Warhol makes an epic film: Empire - twenty-four nonstop hours of one view of the Empire State Building, and where would David O. Selznick’s King Kong be without the climatic scene atop the Empire State Building? Yet neither Warhol nor Selznick give credit to the architectural firm that created the building: Shreve, Lamb, and Harmon. But was it Shreve, Lamb, and Harmon themselves, or some nameless geniuses within the organization?

As one explores more closely the sources, inspirations, and antecedents of any creative work, the more it becomes difficult to give full credit to any one person, just as a single letter on a computer screen becomes just dots when examined more and more closely. To credit everyone who contributed anything to a work of art would excessively burden even the sturdiest creation.

Obviously, there must be some protections - creative people have to live and are entitled to a fair return for their labor. What concerns me is that art has now become "intellectual property". It is bought, sold, and litigated over by an anonymous group of bean counters who collectively aren’t creative enough to make a decent pot of baked beans.

So, I throw my intellectual properties onto the net to stimulate or appall, comfort or enrage, entertain or exasperate.

Happy hunting.
Peter McWilliams

THE LIFE WE CHOOSE

The Life We Choose
By Peter McWilliams

Here's the premise: We are all, right now, living the life we choose. This choice, of course, is not a single, monumental choice. No one decides, for example, "I'm going to move to L.A., and in five years I will be a waiter in a so-so restaurant, planning to get my 8-by-10's done real soon so that I can find an agent and become a star," or "I'm going to marry a dreadful person and we'll live together in a loveless marriage, staying together only for the kids, who I don't much like, either."

No. The choices I'm talking about here are made daily, hourly, moment-by-moment. Do we try something new, or stick to the tried-and-true? Do we take a risk, or eat what's already on our dish? Do we ponder a thrilling adventure, or contemplate what's on TV? Do we walk over and meet that interesting stranger, or do we play it safe? Do we indulge our heart, or cater to our fear? The bottom-line question: Do we pursue what we want, or do we do what's comfortable? For the most part, most people most often choose comfort - the familiar, the time-honored, the well-worn but well-known. After a lifetime of choosing between comfort and risk, we are left with the life we currently have. And it was all of our own choosing.

About the Author: Peter McWilliams has been writing about his passions since 1967. He is the author of several best sellers including Do It! Let\'s Get Off Our Buts. Peter can be reached at http://mcwilliams.com

GUILT FREE PLAY

"There is no pleasure in having nothing to do.
The fun is in having lots to do and not doing it."
-- Mary Little

When you're tempted with a promise of pleasure, does guilt promptly spoil it for you? For many of us, the work ethic still rules supreme. It keeps our life out of balance and our health at risk. There will always be lots of work to do. We can't wait for it to go away to enjoy ourselves. Today, we invite you to become aware of your attitude towards rest, relaxation, pleasure and fun. When you give yourself a break, do you carry guilt through it? Deep down, do you believe that you don't deserve to have a good time, that you haven't earned a holiday? If you do discover these thoughts, send them packing.

"Guilt is the source of sorrows, the avenging fiend that follows us behind with whips and stings." -- Nicholas Rowe


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These quotes are supplied courtesy of Higher Awareness. They offer inspiring, thought-provoking self development programs to help you clearly understand how life and natural laws work, whilst enhancing intuition and creating the future you desire.Click Here For More Information:-http://www.thedailyguru.com/higherawareness.htm