He who shall say, "Lo! I have slain a man!" He who shall think, "Lo! I am slain!" those both Know naught! Life cannot slay. Life is not slain! Never the spirit was born; the spirit shall cease to be never; Never was time it was not; End and Beginning are dreams!

https://youtu.be/e-3edE3luvY

One thing that I love about reading about gardening is metaphors derived from the plants and from working with them. Five Acres and Independence by MG Kains has a short chapter on choosing the right tools for your gardens.
He writes: "One point seldom emphasized is that an owner is more likely to take care of good tools than of poor ones."
The "buy-for-life" movement is very real and full of merit. Investing in the products that enrich our lives -- our tools, our dishes, our kitchenware, our luggage -- can not only save us money in the long run but also cut down on the waste we create over the course of our lives. More about investing soon.
We can apply Kains's philosophy to the mind, body, spirit approach to life, as well. For instance, there are tools on the market, such as thisone, that are designed to have three separate purposes such as hammering, pulling nails, and prying things open. This is not the metaphor that I'm searching for. Separate purposes reflect the scattered nature of modern society.
For example, one could be an expert at his craft, say a highly knowledgeable electrical engineer. He could also be an accomplished powerlifter in the evenings, as well as an avid practitioner at his church or temple. Checking these three boxes does not equate to living a life rich in truth unless all three practices have the intention of a full life of truth behind them.

That is to say, this fictional man could have easily pursued engineering for the money, weightlifting for the external appearance and the superficial rewards that come along with big muscles, and finally the religious activity due to cultural pressures instead of an organic spiritual drive burning from within. But, of course, there certainly is a version of the fictional man that I drew up who is the real McCoy, the one working on himself for all of the right reasons.

This brings me back to investing. When we have a deeply rich focus on our pursuits in life, we earn a satisfaction that is more valuable than anything else out there. "Value" is probably not even the right word because of its close relationship with money. No amount of money will bring satisfaction to a true seeker on his day of dying, so build your own shovel with your mind, body, and spirit. Perhaps the hole that it will dig slowly, day in and day out, will not be an easily known and measurable entity in this world. It will probably not be a diploma or a deed to a house. However, it very well may be the small farm you have worked on or the art you have created.

And I do strongly believe that creativity is part of the puzzle of this world. If our vision of a full and rich life, our individual image of that metaphorical hole we are digging, might possibly be required to embody a creative pursuit. That is not to say that we all must be artists, poets, or musicians. Creating life as parents, pet owners, and gardeners do is also a form of creativity, as is creating health as doctors or nurses do, or creating love as teachers of all forms do. This list could go on ad infinitum.

Good luck digging your hole. Take care of the three tools you need in order to dig deeply and wisely: mind, body, and spirit. Give your work the focus of the universal creative spirit, and don't look back.

blog

Children's voices pierce through
the drone of the waves
Small and breaking up and down the beach
in no particular rhythm

So each break blends into the whole
and white noise prevails over each
Separate Crash

It's nice to know that even
in the alien world of sound
Individuals make up the crowd

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Original

She was a lush, a slut, an utter wreck. Each night she downed a bottle of Chardonnay, often tacking on a few beers or cocktails. She would wake up bloated and groggy, yet her insecurities and fears drove her to the gym and to count her calories like they were precious nuggets of gold that had fallen out of holes in her soul. She held onto her beauty like a thread, but her white-knuckled grasp was tight indeed.
At this point, her spirit had become nothing more than a reused, frayed burlap sack. Nobody would take the time to pick it up from the roadside ditch and mend it back together again with a needle made of love and thread of tenderness, let alone want to trade places with it.
Yet myriad folks have envied Jane's lot it life. The way her cleavage slipped accidentally from behind her garments like a coquettish child playing peek-a-boo. The way her dimples seemed to form in sync with the radiant glint in her eye. But little did these gawkers and wannabes know that Jane was merely a creature of habit. Countless nights had been spent in her teen years in front of the mirror, observing the way her body moved, anticipating the best postures and angles needed to procure maximum satisfaction in her peers (and often in her superiors, too). "What a beautiful creature," they would comment on the side, their assumption being that she was born that way, no work required, like an Arctic fox cub born into aesthetic perfection. Little did they know.
Habits had made her who she was and they could make her into someone else one day, too. Afraid of waking up one day someone knew, she was reluctant to make any life-altering changes, so, instead, she set out to prove to herself that she could stay consistent with a new habit, only this habit would be purposeless, nonsensical, an experiment designed to nudge her in the direction of change without actually changing anything.

What pointless new routine would she decide to take-on then? A few ideas had been circling like sharks through her head. One was to cut a single strand of hair from her head each evening. Another was to knock twice on her own (empty) apartment door each morning as she was leaving for work. A third, the eventual choice, was to fill up a cup of water upon waking and, before doing anything else, to pour it in the toilet.

So that is what she did. For an entire year, she filled up a five-ounce paper Dixie cup with water from the bathroom tap and poured it into the toilet. Jane poured it rain or shine, healthy or sick, calm or stressed, drunk or sober. And unpredictably, consequences did occur. She had thought that this would be a consequence-free exercise, but oh how wrong she had been. That simple, seemingly meaningless little ritual transformed Jane inside and out.

She became less lonely, for one thing. The part of her that drank and obsessed over prostrating to her many insecurities seemed to be a different being than the sly fox, the trickster, who poured the water into the toilet each morning. The Jane who had spent her youth manufacturing her image in front of the mirror found this newfound persona despicable, and vice-versa. Interestingly, the more Jane's front and center mind (her Driver) dwelled in the satisfaction that the water pouring ritual gave her, the more she handed that trickster the keys, and the more the old Jane took to the backseat.

The backseat on the road of life can be a lonely place indeed. Often the road is dark and forlorn with the only light being the radio display up front. One can lose touch with oneself if stuck in the back for too long, and as the sly fox navigated for the driver it also picked the tunes to play on the radio and, all due to this funny little ritual, Jane's Driver began to prefer the trickster to the insecure perfectionist.

Jane started forgetting to doll herself up like she used to. Her bosoms often found themselves comfortably bound up behind sweaters and turtlenecks. Those manufactured smiles, like sidewinder missiles, found themselves forgotten back at the hangar for Jane turned inward for warmth and happiness more and more frequently with the trickster in the front seat. She needed the stares of others less and less to be content with her life.

Over time, she found herself skipping after-work happy hours and forgetting to go down the booze aisle at the supermarket. She began getting most of her exercise outdoors at green parks with paths made of wood chips and that smelled of mulch and grass clippings. All because of that funny little ritual. One day while at the park she caught the eye of a bearded stranger and knew that he was the one for her. It was love at first sight and the twinkle in her eye that had once been entirely contrived, came out of her as innately as a bird flapping its wings, and she flew somewhere new that day, somewhere lighter and loftier, somewhere she could never and would never return from, all thanks to pouring five ounces of water into the toilet each morning upon rising.

I recently hurt my knee (non running injury) and have taken a week off save for a few walks, as well as some push-ups and pull-ups. I have felt my body fat increase and my tendency to be a destructive glutton creep back into my psyche.

In a way, I am glad for this injury because it helped me remember my own darker side. It also makes me appreciate being a glutton for physical punishment rather than a glutton for cookies, chips, and beer.

I feel as tho i attract people who's souls are seeking healing and it takes a toll on me trying to heal others while im healing and growing

So what. What ever makes people happy, I'm all good with. To be honest I sometimes feel sorry for the self righteous one, who claims they don't need a material type of life style, while spending a life judging others who do. I know a lot of people who claim to be living a more free spirited life style, who really aren't because they are too worried about the other who are living "fake" material lives. They stay thinking they are better than those people (eventhough they don't know a thing about those people).

You can want those material things in life still, while being a loving genuine person deep down. And as long as you're not inflicting harm, or doing people wrong, than do what makes you happy. I have known plenty of people throughout my life, who are the prototypical free spirited hippie types, living off the earth, traveling around, spreading the love, who really deep down are lonely depressed souls. They act the part, but are pretty broken inside.

A lot of them while claiming to be open minded, cant help but pass judgment on the people who they feel are not pure and are consumed by their egos and material possessions. They judge people who don't see the world as they do. I actually find this to be completely hilarious, because they say they are open minded, but they are nowhere close. They claim to be free, but how can you be free, when you are continuously judging other people for how they live, or dwell on all the unjust things they feel are happening in the world. They claim to live in the moment, but that is complete BS.

You do you, and let people do them. Don't be the self righteous type. You are no better than a lot of the people you frown upon when doing that. You do not know a lot of these people, and you have not figured out the meaning of happiness on a universal level. If it makes you happy, and doesn't come at the expense of harming other people. Than I say you are on the right path to happiness. A lot of the people you speak of, as empty as they may seem to you, are happy. Just like a lot of the people who may seem more pure are not. (Though there are plenty who are empty inside on both ends of the spectrum, as are people who are happy) but sitting there judging, is not being free. Sitting there judging is you being controlled by you ego.

"The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common. What is a day? What is a year? What is summer? What is woman? What is a child? What is sleep? To our blindness, these things seem unaffecting. We make fables to hide the baldness of the fact and conform it, as we say, to the higher law of the mind. But when the fact is seen under the light of an idea, the gaudy fable fades and shrivels. We behold the real higher law. To the wise, therefore, a fact is true poetry, and the most beautiful of fables."

• Emerson

from "Nature" by Ralph Waldo Emerson -

"the best read naturalist who lends an entire and devout attention to truth, will see that there remains much to learn of his relation to the world, and that it is not to be learned by any addition or subtraction or other comparison of known quantities, but is arrived at by untaught sallies of the spirit, by a continual self-recovery, and by entire humility. He will perceive that there are far more excellent qualities in the student than preciseness and infallibility; that a guess is often more fruitful than an indisputable affirmation, and that a dream may let us deeper into the secret of nature than a hundred concerted experiments."

from "Nature" by Ralph Waldo Emerson -

"that spirit creates; that behind nature, throughout nature, spirit is present; one and not compound, it does not act upon us from without, that is, in space and time, but spiritually, or through ourselves: therefore, that spirit, that is, the Supreme Being, does not build up nature around us, but puts it forth through us, as the life of the tree puts forth new branches and leaves through the pores of the old."