About Five Minutes

 It is OK to recognize dark thoughts and feelings within yourself. It is OK to think of horrible things, we all have the darkest and most gruesome ideas pass through us once in a while. Anyone who denies it is only denying a portion of the truth in all existence; they are going to need space to grow. We want to be all light and love. When we recognize the layers of reality within each of us, is when we can see that the dark thoughts and ideas are a tiny portion of our selves. The human can feel these things so strongly that we can worry over what we might do, or just want to do it and see what happens. It is perfectly natural for our brains, with billions of neurons and our minds that are connected through the subconscious to thousands or millions of lives, to have some bad thoughts flow through. This does not make anyone a monster, and acting on these thoughts is not what the deeper layers of your self wants, but it understands and you can find love beyond them if you were to slip...

 Spirituality is in and out of the body. You are a human on this Earth, living a life with money, time, food, and weather; facing the ongoing need to keep yourself alive through everything. It is hard to not be focused on these things because of how each affects your comfort. Imagining ourselves without money, food or shelter can bring us to tears and high levels of anxiety because we feel like our body is all we have. Our pain, being cold or hot and hungry are all so real and seem inescapable when we are in the middle of any one of them. But we are able to see beyond each when we find our own connection to the spiritual landscape within our body and just outside the mind. I have not discovered a way to survive without food or having some way to stay warm in freezing weather, I have found that we can experience hunger as something outside of what we are. Cold and hot can be felt as energy hovering around a form you are using to take each in for the pleasure of their presence. We ca...

 I have a home, I have some property and I like to think that I have a right to use it without worrying about someone coming in and staking claim to any part of it. But, I have to consider the history behind this house and property; it was once a land where an entire native nation lived, shared experiences and then was nearly killed off and penned up in little areas. My land was not always white people's land, along with all the land of this country. I call you to recognize where you are, how you have what you have, and where your people came from. If the generations of your family do not stretch back into this place before the Spanish hit the South and the English later trampled the North, then you have to consider how equal your right to the land is as anyone else who is trying to live and be part of a community that has some ease. You are equally a foreign presence putting territorial pressure on the original people of the land, as much so as anyone else who's families arriv...