Zimbie's Reverie

Finally Carrie lets me off of the drawing board..she's been having too much fun painting, playing and generally fooling around to let me out. I started pestering her so we can hang out together.

Firstly I miss you guys and secondly I do understand that we all need to play and we have to encourage this sort of behavior but jeeze I've got to get out and about too!

While I've had so much time to my self I've been watching my mind. It's pretty entertaining in there. Thankfully it's getting much more quiet lately and giving me some space to just be without a lot of chatter. It's a relief to be honest!

Anyhow, I was asking my mind about mindfulness. What is a mindful mind? My mind says it's a quiet awareness, a being present in the moment but I'm not so sure. If I have quiet awareness my mind isn't involved and it doesn't think about being aware. It doesn't think about anything. Why is it mindfulness when it's an empty mind? My mind is not full it's spacious, expanded and I don't feel separate from anything like you do when your mind is full. I think I like the term empty headed. It's taken on a whole new meaning in my world.

IMG_0463.PNG

Zimbie's Reverie

I woke up this morning thinking about love, how we love and why we love. ....and how when we let go of need and attachment love gets really big.

When we are content with ourselves there are no limitations. When we let ourselves love big there is a lot of freedom for growth and creativity.

I think many of us love children that way. Love them just as they are. See them perfect in all the messiness of growing up. I wonder why we don't allow space for all that messiness in adults. To be honest I'm not really clear what growing up means. Hopefully we never stop growing. It all a process, fun, hard, sticky, sad, joyful, darn interesting and always changing.

I really like the idea of letting loose of all my expectations, limitations and preconceived believes about what love should be and making room for love be everything it wants to be.

IMG_0459.PNG

Zimbie's Reverie

The ability to perceive the passage of time is considered one of our senses. So of course this only encourages me to play with it. If we think of time as a fixed measure one option is to manipulate our sense of time. For example if you're driving down the road and your concerned about being late and your body starts to tense up. You may start to feel anxious and stressed out it's a perfect opportunity to stretch time and your perception of time.

This is how I do it. I take a deep breath and let my shoulders drop down. I start observing the scenery as I'm driving along and take in the beauty of it. I imagine the area all around me expanding and push out my personal space. Then I push out the time space seeing it make room for my travels. All this makes me feel relaxed and joyful. I feel a peacefulness settle my mind and body. By the time I get to where I'm going I'm either on time, the situation has shifted and it doesn't matter if I'm a little late or I'm in such a good mood everyone is happy to see me. It all works!

I have to confess though sometimes I loose track of time altogether. If I'm painting, reading, sculpting, wondering around the woods, mountains, desert or ocean time doesn't exist at all. That's why it's helpful to find these little time management tricks!

IMG_0456.PNG

Zimbie's Reverie

Have you ever thought about what's it's like to experience something without any thoughts about what you're experiencing? We really don't do that except when we're little babies. It's like our brain starts comparing whatever we encounter with something similar from the past and we don't get a true picture of what it is. Imagine what it would be like to hear, touch, see, taste or smell something for the very first time and not compare it to anything - just experience it! ... And just think if we opened our minds up to all the other senses we have and don't even recognize the world would be something all together different than what we think we know it is!


IMG_0454.PNG

Zimbie's Reverie

Sometimes I get curious about how we humans experience ourselves. I was imagining connecting up with the very center of the Earth. All of the sudden I felt this shift - a movement in the Earth and got an odd sense of how to orient myself on the planet. It was kind of a weird feeling.

So I started digging around and found some interesting articles on how humans may have sensors similar to birds and other animals or fish that can recognize the Earths magnetic field. It's called Magnetoreception. This helps turtles find their way in the ocean or birds orient themselves as they travel. Some scientists think we may have this ability too, a lost sense. They think there may be magnetite particles in the body or sensors called cryptochrome in the protein in our eyes.

This lead to further articles on how many senses we do have - many more than the five we usually consider. They estimate we have between 22 and 33 senses. It's kind of fun to walk around imagining how you are relating to the Earth, plants, animals and people in so may ways we have no conscience awareness of. Don't you wonder what is possible if we utilized all these senses with full awareness?

IMG_0453.PNG