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Greetings All,
If you’ve not already done so today, take a moment to stretch and a few deep inhales and exhales. I think it’s a very good thing to remember your body with gratitude. Without it, where would you live?
After listening to interviews of prominent scientists and professors tell stories of their religious backgrounds, which are very similar to mine, I thought I could do that! So, I did, and this ezine highlights memories and choices.
It’s natural for some of us to ponder the energies keeping our physical bodies in tact for waking, sleeping, laughing, smiling, dancing, climbing, looking, smelling, touching, remembering, dusting and vacuuming. This prose piece composed in January, 2005, personifies, to no surprise to some, my vision of being during moments of creating.
Rhythms in Cycles
Rhythms in cycles would have us aware of our nature to notice the grandeur that’s us. Cheerfully running, we skip upon cosmic orbiting wheels; pinging our nudges, pleasingly stunning and applauding the sparkling quivering rings.
Repeating rhythms in unseen cycles attend our senses; insightfully beaming, they’re encircling this moment; heeding our thoughts as we shine exceedingly brilliant.
Rhythms in cycles within and without, parade around and below and atop. There’s nothing simple or casual in grandeur sounding a fluttering, surprising, sobering pop.
Absorb the feel of goodwill for folks who spiral our way in a puzzled roar. They move in circles rattling about, unaware they are moiling in the middle of the floor.
Sing your greatness pulsing through space, revealing one’s grace in lyrical rings. While indigo and purple rally your strains, energies blend rhythms on quivering strings.
Cycles upon cycles—where do they all end? Their whirling vigil swirling one sky, glimmers in shivers of momentous rhymes; absorbing globes in a splendorous sigh.
Repeating cycles of rhythms unfurling, sweeping sublime in soundless streaming, dreaming this moment while deepening our muse; reminding our senses, boundlessly beaming.
© 2005 David Moorhead; revised 2007
Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star
When many of us were kids, our parents may have sung the nursery rhyme Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star as a lullaby or bedtime prayer. Perhaps, our first delusion was born, and a powerful one, at that: a little personified star would check in and protect us overnight. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composed a melody for the rhyme, and the popular tune is still with us today. ¹
An image, the star, became a symbol of protection. Lest we forget, the printed symbol ‘star’ reminded us of protection, too. When introduced into our minds by lyrics, a melody of musical magic imprinted our imagination.
Signs and symbols control the world, not phrases and laws.
~ Confucius (b 551 BCE), Chinese thinker, social philosopher
Manipulations of human consciousness with myriad symbols is today’s whelming dilemma, and most Earthlings don’t get beyond symbols or the words that personify them. Even into physical maturity, education, proof, and common sense become secondary to the original perception of any symbol—we Earthlings don’t enjoy giving up our beloved images and symbols—whether tangible or intangible.
How I Wonder What You Are
The first star that really meant something to me in my preteens was the one that shone at Jesus’s birth. You’ll remember the star the three kings (or wise men or magi) saw in the Eastern sky? A star in the night sky leading men to a cradle was totally fascinating and seemed magical. I always marveled, ‘how I wonder what you are.’
As a too religiously spirited kid, the word magic was barred from references to holy experiences and literal biblical interpretations, which had their own references in dogma, faithfully accepted. Nevertheless, hell and heaven, the devil and holy spirit were magical; I felt they must be very real yet invisible. The church and the bible (King James Version 1611) fit perfectly my boyhood curiosities and sensibilities, nay a fertile imagination prepared for more faith training by self-appointed moralists.
There was magic in being incessantly curious about an invisible deity; a deity that knew everything anybody did and said; a deity that logged all my ways, sinful or not, into a giant ledger. Salvation through grace by way of the deity’s son was the most magical of all, and quite a gamble. To insure salvation, I thought and spoke only goodness, behaving properly, too. How could I miss getting a golden crown as a reward in heaven for having been good on Earth?
The star, with all its metaphorical nuances, had become a symbol of both a grand magical protector and friend, and an invisible stalwart warden in a mythical, unachievable secure paradise. An innocent star’s rays of light had trickled down, tangled into intolerant ritual and hymn; the symbology had become unacceptable. No longer did I query ‘how I wonder what you are.’ I already knew the grim dogma the star represented. I grimaced, winced and winced, again.
Growing pains were occurring, and life was maturing. My friends and I discussed how scriptures’ interpretations were no longer matching our educations, sensibilities, or lifestyles. We had been trained to be sanctimonious; the psychological price for righteous self-satisfaction, and the secrets pretense hid, were reckless.
The original star’s symbolism simply had to fade. The star had to return to what it was in the first place: an astronomical object like the Sun, without religious poetic spins put on the star’s performance.
Up Above the World So High
Some of us reared in time consuming, passionate evangelical churches have a tendency to be passionate in adulthood. Without intervention, we’d been trained by fundamentalists’ prerequisite salvation with its rapturous overtones of ‘up above the world so high.’ So, when there’s regard for revealing religious leaders’ bigotry and politics, some of us find paths to unconceal original truth by publishing ezines and blogs.
Unbeknownst to me and high school friends, and later to us college mates, a religious movement had already begun organizing in the 1950s and 60s. We had grown up in the Southern Baptist convention that would eventually show, in part, its rigorous movement into an extremist political right in the USA.
I saw how the dominant religions of nations were twisted and distorted by totalitarian movements, turned into civic religions where the goals of the movement or the state became the goals of the divine. The wars I covered were often fought in the name of one God or another. All in fact mocked the faiths they purported to defend.
~ Chris Hedges, author, speaker ²
If I hadn’t been a witling before age 33, I would’ve dashed away from ‘up above the world so high’ to the grounded Episcopalians before 1980!
Like a Diamond in the Sky
After a while of participating with Episcopalians and their performances of gorgeous music, I was invited to attend a service at a large Unity church. There, I lived and breathed the next phase of social neutrality, and was introduced to cosmology (although I didn’t know it at the time), which became ‘like a diamond in the sky.’
I distinguished not all christians are evangelical; not all evangelicals are fundamentalists; not all fundamentalists are extremist nor radical. Only the latter two obsess in bigotries, fear mongering, and political power, thusly, might be identified as dominionists or reconstructionists. ³
To not know the bible is in some ways to be illiterate of the dominionists; it is naïve to look the other way as masculine energies, portrayed as divine, undermine cultures and societies at the expense of lives of women and children and men. To neglect the very roots that formed Western philosophies, art, literature, poetry and music is to fall into a myopic provincialism embraced by those who say everything in the bible is literally true, who dismiss any kind of intellectual inquiry, and who desire to rule as totalitarian saviors and vengeful masters of nations.
‘Like a diamond in the sky,’ the Sun, and its cyclic movements with constellations, were concentrated upon and cataloged over millennia by early literate and nonliterate humans. Their continuous survival became meticulously heeded without notions of a nonexistent religion. Mythologies (or stories) reveal early humans personified and adored the Sun as God’s Sun—without which, where would they have lived?
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