Warning – This one may be rather raw.

I think I have said – Are you fucking kidding me – in the past two years more than I have said in my entire lifetime. Please know that when I say this it comes from a place of heaviness, dismay, and great sadness or total bewilderment. I remember exactly when it all started…and it hasn’t stopped. It’s one thing when someone passes when they have lived, you know a lifetime. At least the way you and I experience a lifetime where we celebrate let’s say at minimum 65 birthdays (although if you are in your 60’s and reading this you still have a lifetime ahead of you. Also as a side note, in my life it actually began in May 1999, but it has accelerated in the past 25 months. Rather than listing out all the loss or effects of people making bad choices that has left so many in my life with big holes in their heart, I’d rather share this…

I was watching Oprah this weekend. It’s a new trend in my life but Opera and I share the belief that EVERYTHING is spiritual and I find myself more and more grateful for the work she is doing in her own way. Then yesterday someone said to me, why when everything is great in our life we say ‘praise god’ or ‘thank the lord’ but when things go wrong god doesn’t have anything to do with it or that we aren’t allowed to be angry at god. In my opinion God does not have favorites. If you go to church every sunday, bad things can still happen. If you don’t go to church every Sunday, good things can happen. For clarity, I don’t believe we have all fallen from grace, but rather descended from grace and that this life is an opportunity to evolve and expand. Hence my previous post… Living Optimistically Visualizing Evolution. I also don’t feel god has a grand plan for us or shuts us out of god’s club, nor does god pass judgement. These are all my feelings based on my experience of life. I do believe there is a lot that we can’t see or understand and that if we could, life wouldn’t be so painful, but then there wouldn’t be an opportunity to grow nor experience the full spectrum of life.

Back to Oprah. She was in conversation with Gary Zukav, who up until this weekend I did not know existed. As I was listening to him, all kinds of light bulbs started going off and many parts of how I live started to weave together in a whole new crystalized vision. One thing that he said I’ve spent the past 48 hours contemplating. I am not anyone who takes what someone says and do it just because they say so instead I look at it and inquire deeply about it to see if there is any validity for me. Gary was talking about how we have choices, it’s one of the most beautiful things we have in this experience in life. But that every choice has consequences. Yes, it can work out just the way you had intended, or it holds the possibility of offering a form, an experience of life that you didn’t see coming. Right, it’s kind of like flipping a coin and saying heads or tails. You choose one, knowing there is a good chance that it could land on the side that you didn’t choose. But life isn’t a gamble, but rather an opportunity to understand all the possibilities so that as you make choices you are better prepared for what may come your way. This is great to remember, but we forget.

Cosmic amnesia is how my beloved meditation teacher Paul Muller Ortega refers to these moments of forgetting. That everyone forgets, and it is good to forget as there is a moment that the beauty and wonderment, love and peace will reveal itself…someday, sometime, at some point in your journey. But if we can empower ourselves to know that the possibilities are endless. Though we may want something so bad, we try incredibly hard to make it happen, there is always the possibility that it can turn and go a whole other direction.

This is not meant to be depressing, but instead to be enlightening. As I step out into my day today I will carry the intention to be the best possible person that I know how to be. That I will make choices with integrity and try to hold the light and love that all beings deserve as well as contain, but I will also carry the awareness that things can go wrong, that I can hear more news that will cause me to say ‘are you freaking kidding me’ and then I will breathe deep and remember the vast possibilities that invokes every feeling, emotion, and the opportunity to carry the highest intention and to act from a place of love is always available to me.