This is about us, you and me; each and every one who is or ever been wrought with pain, confused in love, ripped wide open with feelings of guilt, anger, rage, jealousy, hate and doubt. These are feelings, emotions that stifle love, growth, happiness and fulfillment. Your life has purpose; meaning and the answers are within you. How, what and who you hear and feel in your heart and soul is the direction to your life’s purpose and meaning. You are as unique, special and important to those around you as to yourself. Those you love, adore, admire, respect, even those you feel hatred, anger, pain or doubt are all a part of us. The story goes on as we travel thru life, now as one. Come with me and let‘s see how and what we can make out of this wonderful thing we call living.
Enter and Inner
The true essence of life is love, but have you ever known unconditional love?A primary truth to love is trust, yet do you trust yourself?
Love by nature is growth, growth in spirit, purpose, passion, desire and sharing,
Yet, have you felt the nurturing of love enabling you to grow, bloom and bask in the warmth of another?
True love is not about questions, yet how many times have you searched for an answer.
Mind, Body and Spirit
A mind is your brain, yet do you use it to find answers of the heart?
A body is the encasement of your mind, heart, yet how do you know your soul.
A Spirit is your soul, but do you know how to find it?
Favorite poemFour quartets by T. S. Eliot:
“Never cease your exploration and the end of all your exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time”
Favorite song: “Drinking from my Saucer” written by “Whispering” Bill Anderson and sung by Michael Combs.
Feelings:
Waves sweeping thru my heart
cleansing my mind, engulfing my soul in
the timeless ocean of my being gently
coming to rest on the shore of my life
Inner peace, wrought with pain, filled with joy
Am I of this world? Am I in this world?
Ah, yet this world knows ME.
Food for Thought before We Start: To enjoy life you need and should enjoy people and there are 2 significant steps. The first step is to love yourself for what you are, the second step is to not overrate the first. There is one unique difference between a smart person and a wise one. A wise person knows the strength in their humility!
Introduction is over, my name is Jimmy, now let’s get to work.
TABLE For CONTENTment
Chapter 1 - MIND and HEART - What is it?
In order to establish mutual understanding it is very important for you to know my feelings regarding mind and heart. MIND is a tool; a brain composed of what we learn as we grow and absorb information, knowledge. We also form in our mind logic, reasoning, rationalization in thoughts. This is where our MIND develops our power to THINK. Our MIND also develops ego, pride and many, many forms of conditioning as we grow and develop from childhood. This conditioning is a result of events, circumstances that become perception, feeling and in some ways illusion or disillusion of the MIND. The MIND creates FEELINGS. These feelings of the MIND can manifest themselves in doubt, jealousy, anger, confusion, and even hate. They are what we THINK. This can become what and how we FEEL. There is a distinction between FEELINGS and EMOTIONS, a point as we are growing where FEELINGS become OUR EMOTIONS. WE begin to EMOTE the FEELING in expression as words, facial and BODY LANGUAGE.
Now what is HEART? HEART is our BEING and INNER SELF. It is the window to our SOUL. Our heart is the key that opens the door to INNER PEACE, LOVE, and AWARENESS. Our HEART is pure in FEELING. Our HEART has no right or wrong, judgments, doubts, fears, ego. FEELINGS of our HEART are joy, happiness, contentment, trust, passion and desire, love, pain, sadness and sorrow. Our HEART is not subject to the same conditioning as our MIND, however, our HEART is vulnerable. FEELINGS of our HEART give us our greatest joy yet also give us our greatest sadness. Most of us have seen the world at one time or other through a child. A child’s HEART is pure, unbiased, unconditioned. LOVE in a child is unconditional. WE were all children and had the same FEELINGS in our HEART. What happened? Where did these FEELINGS in our HEART go?
During my early years I was fortunate to know and feel loved in an environment surrounded by people with warmth, caring. My heart felt nurtured, engulfed in feelings of a very positive nature. This occurred during WWII since I was born in March of 1942. My Father, like many, was in the Army and my Mother, Grandmothers and Grandfather were my first line of family contact and interaction. I was born in a clinic since the small town in Texas didn’t have a hospital and have always heard the Doctor who delivered me was paid in common hay. Anyway, I’m about as common as they come so it would fit the picture. My Grandfather was a county judge, which in Texas is a darn good place to sit on your tail and call it a bench. He had a farm; in some circles it might have been called a ranch. Whatever you called it, it was big. We had cattle, hogs, chickens, ginnies, dogs and acres in corn, cotton with plenty of hands to do the work. As a baby and young child I was raised by quite a few black folks and of course my Mom and Grandmothers. Something about black folks, they just know how to make you feel loved. They would sing and sing as they worked, sing from their heart. As I reflect on it, I believe this is where I developed a love of music, soul and probably where I got a lot of my rhythm and dancing. Course my Mom was a great dancer too and my Dad was so smooth on a dance floor he looked like he floated on a cloud.
We had a cotton picker used to come to my Grandfather’s place like so many of ‘em when it was pick’n time. Now there is a big difference between pickers and pullers of cotton in case ya didn’t know. To pick cotton meant you had to pull the cotton out of the boll and that was rough, hard on your fingers and hands as it was drag’n that sack on your knees as ya worked your way through rows and rows of cotton. Pickers got paid a bit more per pound but they shor nuff earned it by the time that sack reached a hundred pounds. Their fingers bleeding, knees so sore they can barely walk and an ache’n back that would make any chiropractor wanna go ouch! Anyhow, this one picker named Sam was a good’n and he’d always bring his lunch in an old syrup can and had this old beat up looking guitar. When they’d get a break from pick’n he’d sit down in the shade pull that guitar over his stomach and start strum’n and sing’n in a humm’n sorta way. That guitar would almost cry too as he moved his fingers over those strings and sing those blues. One day he left, some of the other folks said they heard he jumped a train and headed to Houston. Quite a few years later, I walked into a club in Houston and there he was sit’n in a chair on a stage strum’n that guitar and sing’n those blues like his soul was reach’n in your heart and tug’n at all there was inside of ya. His name on the marquee was “Lightning Hopkins”. I sat down, listened to ole Sam and a tear came to my eyes, knowing all this man's heart had felt and how much was in his soul just to get to that stage in his life. He touched my HEART and I felt his PAIN and knew the depth of his SOUL with LOVE.
To be continued..
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