Five things to improve happiness.
1. Be grateful. Write letters to someone who helped you in some way.
2. Be optimistic. Visualize your ideal future. Describe the image in a journal entry.
3. Count your blessings. Write down three good things that happen to you every week.
4. Use your strengths.
5. Practice acts of kindness. Helping others helps ourselves.
Hope had many choices and she chose Exile. They married at the Cathedral of Dreams and ran through fields over Spanish mountains to the edge of the Mediterranean.
“There’s a big world out there,” Hope said to Exile pointing over the sea.
“Yes and that’s only the top of it. Let’s share an orange,” Exile said to Hope.
“Yes,” said Hope, smiling at real and imaginary worlds over the horizon, “we will sacrifice the peel to enjoy the fruit. Delicious.”
Hope birthed Patience. Raising Patience was a test for Hope and Exile because she gave them the test first and the lessons later.
Exile was a strange wild bird and while he loved Patience she challenged it, his love. She tested his stability, honesty, devotion and his way of constructing a world inside a world, a universe inside the swirling molecules of their experience. He was a risk taker not a ticket taker and Patience admired this reality.
They studied and evaluated their character traits and imperfections. They took personality tests. Patience tested his trust, his ability to forgive and forget with gratitude and love. Patience handed him small portions of fear, anger, jealousy, ignorance, and desire. He created a diamond reflecting 10,000 things. These were the things Patience cherished.
Hope was relieved when she saw Exile was content. She didn’t know how long it would last. He always enjoyed living on the edge of somewhere else.
The old forest when they saw the axe handle entering, said, “Look it is one of us.”
“No one dies,“ Exile said one evening as they chopped and carried wood on the edge of a rain forest.
“No, I suppose not,” said Hope. “Patience will never die. She will live forever because she has a magic about her. I felt it before she was born. It was like a stream of light was floating inside me.”
“She is radiant,” Exile said. “She is beauty, truth and wisdom incarnate. She will learn how to float, how to project her spirit energies. She will be a fine healer.”
Exile raised Labrys, his double bladed laughing axe above wood. Streams of splinters blasted into twilight. Exile chopped and Hope carried. These were the choices they made as the moon rose through orange and blue streaks of light.
“He went to the cemetario today,” Hope said.
“Who?”
“The forcestero, the outsider.”
“He was there yesterday as well, why?”
“Visiting the spirit sources.”
“Indeed,” said Exile, “they will be out tomorrow with the full moon. Clearly.”
Hope and Exile danced in the meadow under the moon.
Light pierced their being and they floated. Nobody else saw them floating. They were protected by a veil of light dancing behind a curtain of surrender. Their spirits were free of their physical being. They were free spirits in a free world blessed by their imaginary limitations.
They left their temporal bodies and floated down to the Rio Guadalete to combine their energies with water. The water was clear, cold and delicious. It flowed from dark gray Sierra mountains in a rush of sound through a rocky path. It flowed flowers absorbing their scent inside water.
As petals danced in air Exile and Hope gathered warm flowers around them below the moon. They ran along the valley through fresh turned soil, past olive and cork trees, inside forests of pine, fir, evergreen, pinsapar, maple and trees without a name.
Bare trees pointed at the moon.
“Look there,” trees said, pointing thin branches toward the sky, “there, there we are.”
Trees pointed to pulsating white stars. “Yes,” they sang, “there we are.”
“Look,” said one, pointing far away, “there we are.”
“And there and there,” they sang reaching every direction. The wind listened to the stars whisper secrets telling star tales seeing star trails across the emptiness of sky inside the vast vacuum of silence.
Hope and Exile were light.
Greetings,
I ruled for 30 years. The military said, It's time to go, Everyone from Cairo to Greenland has had enough of your senile stalling.
I said, Wait, I need another 30 years. No they said, You have 30 seconds, The Egyptian people have spoken with one voice, You have 30 seconds.
I cried, stamping my feet like a spoiled child. I don't want to go. I don't want to go.
Someone handed me a microphone and a scrap of parchment from the Dead See. They said, Take the paper. Look into the camera and read the script. I trembled with fear and anxiety. I took the parchment. I looked into a blinking red eye. I read the script.
My finally free fantastic fellow citizens. I would like to thank the Academy for this opportunity and all the rich memories. It's been a long strange trip. I wish you all the best realizing your freedom from tyranny, repression and idiots like me. My family and I will now take our immense wealth and retire to our resort villa. We will remember you when we eat caviar off gold plates. Farewell my love.
The red light went off. The paper fluttered from my arthritic fingers. Fireworks and ectoblastic jubilated pandemonium erupted throughout Egypt. Slaves loaded our camels. I led my family across the burning desert toward sand castles in the harsh light of reality.
What a glorious day papa, said my child, one of 80 million, I feel free.
Metta.
Greetings,
Sullyman, the Magnificence, my acting heroic Vice Puppet in the never ending charade of manipulative lies told the people to GO HOME, leave the square, forget your dreams and aspirations, we have heard your voice, we listen with benign neglect, we respect your human rights. However, to prevent a messy democracy totalitarian draconian emergency laws will stay in effect for 3,000 years.
Bait and switch stalling blather. The people don't buy it. We are home, they said.
What did you expect from a trembling CIA funded friend? Oh, my. He is closer to me than white on rice. Closer than spots on a dice. I am the dice man. I am the dealer and the house always wins, my friend. My house is crumbling down around my deaf ears. When 80 millions citizens begin yelling and marching and singing and dancing demanding freedom and democracy I change the channel. Denial is bliss.
I sit behind my ornate golden desk trembling with fear. I am worrying out my worry beads. I am a fractured remnant of my old stubborn self. I am an old man. I am 82. I have sacrificed my life for Egypt.
I have amassed $70 Billion dollars in a small tidy personal fortune over 30 years of graft, corruption, business manipulation, Pentagon contracts and plain theft.
I am really an honest man. Believe me. I have wives and rich children to support. I have outstanding mortgages in Geneva, Paris, London, New York, Shanghai, Jerusalem, and a million destitute Egyptian villages.
It ain't nothing but the blues.
Being a corrupt dictator is a pain in the oligarchy.
Metta.
Greetings,
In Hue, Vietnam the Healing The Wounded Heart Shop has colorful woven baskets. Baskets from Nepal are made of recycled plastic food snack wrappers. Brilliant reds, greens, blues, all the hues.
Shop with your heart. Shop to give back.
The Spiral Foundation is a non-profit humanitarian organization working in Nepal and Vietnam.
Spiral. Spinning Potential Into Resources And Love. At the SPIRAL workshop in Hue they make bowls using discarded telephone wires. They work with the Office of Genetics and Disabled Children at Hue Medical College.
All net proceeds from the handicraft sales are returned to Vietnam and Nepal to fund primary health care, medical and educational projects. Projects employ 1,000 participants with fair hourly salaries not based on piece work. Projects have provided for more than 250 heart surgeries and treatments for children with life threatening diseases.
SPIRAL raised $82,000 in 2010.
Metta.
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