Wallace & Portia

getting out, i felt better. i came home and started this: carbonmade site.

I also started twittering. I linked it to my cell phone, so i can txt updates. this will be interesting at work most certainly.

all of the motivation dropped off around 2pm. i fell asleep. woke up bewildered and not hungry. i still want to see hamlet2

OK, so here's the thing. No matter who I read, they all say the same thing. It's just regurgitated with a few new phrases for the same things thrown in. I'm serious. Read a few books about life in the Now. Being Present. Whatever you wish to call it... I'm telling you, it's all the same.

But maybe there's a good reason for that.

Maybe it's because, as my Dad likes to say and probably several hundred self-help books, the present is all we've got.

I'm down with that. Especially the "not-over-thinking-everything" thing.

Like this past weekend at the beach. Body surfing in a strong current means a) great waves and b) the distinct possibility of drowning in an undertow. You have to pay attention. You have to focus on the job, or in this case the play, at hand.

I was in the Present Moment. It was all surf and salt air and feeling for the tide and seeing the dragonflies every where. It was the cold water of the deeper ocean mingling in with the warmer waters of the shoreline. It was being turned ass over tea kettle in the crashing waves and tossed up against the shrapnel of razor-sharp shells that covered the coastline. I came up for air with scratches, the odd bruise and the exhilaration of feeling Alive.

When you can be that focused, you can't think about anything else. None of the things that plague your mind during the hours of your "regular" life... things like career, living up to your potential, your choice of a mate or lack of a mate, your bad haircut, wondering if you should've been a doctor, afterall. Stuff like that.

So, maybe all these people have to tell you the same thing over and over because we just don't hear what is said. Yet, we still have the desire or need to reach that place of peace.

I found it at the beach last weekend, but I would guess, if all these self-help gurus are correct, that you can find it anywhere you happen to be. It's a choice. It's a place you go in your head and heart.

I'm going to try it more often. If you do, way to go. Good luck with that.

Jacksonville 40 out of 40

Marriage is honorable but whoremongers God will judge - Hebrews 13

"In hell you never sleep, rest or find a quiet moment. No rest from the torments, the screams, the fear, the thirst, the lack of breath, the stench, the heat, the hopelessness. You are isolated from contact with any other people."

- Bill Wiese – Book: 23 Minutes in Hell

"Now, O body, you are paying the price of the delights you granted yourself!...and you did it of your own free will I saw several souls fall into Hell, and among them was a child of fifteen, cursing her parents for not having taught her to fear God nor that there was a Hell. Her life had been a short one, she said, but full of sin, for she had given in to all that her body and passions demanded in the way of satisfaction"

-Sister Josefa Menendez - From the book Way of Divine Love - 1923

"I'm a surgical nurse at a hospital in Phoenix, Arizona. We have lots of near-death cases there, and almost all of them are the negative kind. You know what I mean people who wind up in hell!"

- P.M.H.Atwateer (Journal of Near-Death Studies Vol.10)