Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Thoughts on beauty and suffering...

(10:34PM) Last night I went to bed around 1 or 2 and today was a market day so I woke up around 6. I got the day off to a rough start. I dropped and broke my new digital camera, for the second time. I did the same thing two weeks ago, but with another camera: this was the replacement camera. So in less than two weeks I have broken two brand new digital cameras in the same way: by dropping them on the ground. But rather than going into detail over it, I would like to instead add here some excerpts that I really liked from Eckhart Tolle's book A New Earth:
"Suffering begins when you mentally name or label a situation in some way as undesirable or bad. Go beyond good and bad by refraining from mentally labeling anything as good or bad...Watch what happens when you don't name an experience as "bad" and instead bring an inner acceptance, an inner "yes" to it, and so let it be as it is...This is the miracle. Behind every condition, person or situation that appears "bad" or "evil" lies concealed a deeper good. That deeper good reveals itself to you - both within and without - through inner acceptance of what is." I love these words.

It was a lovely day at the market. Perfect weather, lots of smiling people and sunshine. From the moment I arrived at the market until the very end, I was (somewhat surprisingly) all full of big ole smiles:))))) My market neighbor Josh told me I was glowing and I felt like it. I had a Bmax/coco drink around 10 or 11 and 4-5 medium oranges around 12/1pm. I got home and fixed a giant salad: my usual. Then I had 7-8 triple seed crackers with pesto. Several hours later I had 2 servings of my latest favorite dessert: cashew butter w/ honey and cacao nibs. Then around 8/9 I had some broccoli with coconut/cumin dip and 24 oz of super sweet tea. Too sweet. I feel a little hazy from all that honey, maybe.

I love working in my new garden. There is something that feels so right about it. So far, it is one of the most satisfying things I have ever done.

I recently found out about and joined this thing eat.rawfood.com that is a social networking site (similar to mySpace) for raw foodists. Well I have only posted one picture of myself and written a couple of lines on my profile there, but today a perfect stranger sent me this message: "you are SO beautiful your eyes remind me of ancient wisdom" It was the nicest thing. It got me thinking about beauty. Most of my life I have not been in touch with my beauty. I have only recently begun to discover it. For so long, my whole life so far, almost, I have thought I was unattractive and boring. That has begun to change. Beauty is so intriguing to me. The more beauty I find and see in myself, the more I see in other people. People are more beautiful to me now than they ever were before. I feel so strongly attracted to so many people in a way that I never was before. And I am amazed and in awe sometimes at how the beauty of someone's eyes - just their eyes - can totally captivate and mesmerize me. I never saw it this way before, but now I see people's eyes as something very, very special: their special set of jewels from nature. And perhaps it is because I am not as afraid of people as I used to be so I will stand closer to them in conversation, perhaps it is because I wear contacts now and used to wear smudgy glasses, or perhaps it is because my vision has improved as my diet has improved, but I can see all these details in people's irises when I get up close that I never knew existed. I looked up the wiki definition for Iris and I found out something very neat: "The word (iris) comes from Greek mythology, in which Iris is the anthropromorphized form of the rainbow." EXACTLY! That's it! Some people's eyes ARE kind of like rainbows and I never knew this until recently. I never was able to see this! And of course there is so much more to looking into someone eyes than just observing their iris - there is the MAGIC! The MYSTERY! The intense way it makes you feel sometimes...

I wish we told each other more often how beautiful we see each other to be. I will try to work on this in myself.

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