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Gratitude Latitude # 21

Posted on May 12th, 2009 by Andrei : Perennial Integrator Andrei
I am grateful for:

Blue Plate restaurant in SF - yummy Americana Comfort food with local and organic sensibilities.  Mmmmmmmmm.  Also they are serving Four Barrel espresso, and the macchiato I had was BEATNIK PIRATE GOOD.  Like you knew it was going to be good because people talk about it all the time, and then you have it and you are like - ok this isn't just water cooler blabberfest good.  It is write a hand letter to an old cafe buddy good - put a really cool stamp honoring a dead artist or poet on it good and maybe even get some sealing wax with a skull and cross bones seal good.  Damn fine soul joe.

I am thankful for hearing some good news about a big project that might be coming our way.

I am thankful that for this time that above all other things has helped me to reduce the amount of expectations and attachments I have.  Being right about the way something should be or being clear about what you want something to be - these are fantastic abstract planning modalities.  But they are not the map to live life by.  Looking outside of one's self for clarity, certainty, comfort, peace, happiness....  this is like chasing clouds in a dream and expecting to wake with from it having built a castle.  The fortress is inside - its flags and banners, its sturdiness, great halls and merry feasts, its meditation chambers for peace, its jesters for laughter.  Inside I might find these and stand beside others who have done similarly - this is the way to live.

I am thankful for a lovely mother's day weekend and that sherry had a wonderful time.  I really wanted her to have a good weekend to say thanks for all she is doing for our family and all she is doing as a mother to Raine.

I am grateful for my little Raine - I love her and like her so much.  I am proud to be her papa.  I thank her regularly for coming to us and as she grows I want to always tell her how grateful I am that she found her way to us, as if it were her spiritual choice.  I dont know if this is a cosmological emperical truth, some would say yes, but I love the metaphor of the gift inherant in being chosen by this wonderful soul.  It is an honor and helps me understand that gratitude is not the end of a connection - not the triumphant zenith - that place belongs to devotion.  Devotion to what you are blessed enough with to notice and be grateful for.  It is the act of building a temple at the top of the mountain, or at the very least it is the act of packing out your own trash.

peace and good things,

Andrei
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Tagged with: Gratitude

Gratitude Latitude # 22

Posted on May 15th, 2009 by Andrei : Perennial Integrator Andrei
Gratitude for....

Fog and sun so close along a morning timeline they seem lovers - ahhhh San Francisco!

The Wire - what can I say? I love that show - Balmer and real pOleese.

A.J. Roach - twang, country mountain - music that is almost sad unless you picture sitting on a mountain cabin front porch in a rocker seeing the world from a storytellers eyes. Everything in the context of everything else.
http://www.roachmusic.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuMPecU6RFg&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjKVGnmJD7k&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpdhDu15bfM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApojsIljgQY

Fiddle

Little kids running

Light breezes

Memories of a walk in a thunderstorm in the Blue Ridge Mountains with an old friend and his daughter. He taught to be excited when the thunder clapped. There was a meadow running along the side of the road we walked along. There was a white washed old baptist church with someone practicing a song for Sunday.

The smell of wet ground.

That life keeps giving me lesson after lesson of how happiness, peace, stability.... and all the rest of those yummy feelings and ideas and states.... these do not exist outside of oneself. They live inside. The one exception is when they are experienced through the love with another or in community. These are shared inward states. The desperate need for others to provide us these things has been at the center of so much heartache and disappointment. Lately with the challenges at work, I have seen people become so upset because the illusion that others can provide this for them. It is another case for taking complete responsibility for ourselves.

Early jazz and ragtime
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugkCH8f7UJw&videos=xjHPptSSYCA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PpKXx3Varg&feature=PlayList&p=DBC4A279290E8B03&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=51

Louis and Billie
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWtUzdI5hlE&videos=xjHPptSSYCA
Loius - what a wonderful world
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnRqYMTpXHc&videos=xjHPptSSYCA
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