Life as a Conscientious Hourglass

What do we have to show for our lives?
What would your eulogy sound like?
Who would attend your funeral?
What have you done with each minute you have been given to live?

Until I was unemployed for a season, I was not aware of how much of my identity was wrapped up in what I do for money. And I wonder how true that is for others. After all, the working person spends the majority of their waking week at work. This is why what we choose to do for work, and whom we choose to work for, is so very important. Then I realized that to even think about having such a choice is luxury that is afforded to very few.

Keeping It Real

I walked into Real’s room and told her that there would not be a sexual assault examination conducted, but that I had requested that the doctor perform a medical exam.

“Is there anything more I can do for you?” I asked in somewhat doting but concerned voice.

“Why do you talk like a child?” she asked.

I sat down, propped my elbow on her bedrail and leaned by head on my hand and inquired, “Can you help me understand what you mean by that? How do I talk like a child?”

The Downside to Karma

About ten years ago, I took an Eastern philosophy class and dedicated some time to studying Karmic principles within Hinduism. Up to that point, I had only been exposed to Judeo-Christian principles, so I found the idea of Karma much more sufficient in explaining the unfairness of this thing called life.

“In Buddhist teaching, the law of Karma, says only this: `for every event that occurs, there will follow another event whose existence was caused by the first, and this second event will be pleasant or unpleasant according as its cause was skillful or unskillful.' A skillful event is one that is not accompanied by craving, resistance or delusions; an unskillful event is one that is accompanied by any one of those things.”

The Captain and the Ferryman

I had just finished watching “The Whistleblower” starring Rachel Weisz. I would liken the existentially empty hole it leaves in your spirit to the feeling one might get after watching “Requiem for a Dream.” It was the first movie in years that was almost unbearable to finish. I left the room more than once because the on-screen content was making me nauseous.

This time it was just characters playing a part for a handsome paycheck. The real tragedy is that the soulless make handsome gains from the victimization of real life characters. Unfortunately, in the career I’ve chosen I hear heartbreaking stories too often. I’m not sure why this particular film sent me over the edge, but I went into a full-fledged breakdown after turning off the tube.

If You Teach a Man to Fish

Another Saturday of racing the sunrise to the upper level of Hell. When I wake up at 5 am on a Saturday morning, I often ask myself why I work so many hours and feel like I never get ahead. Some days the hour-long drive feels like a shackled walk to the town square where I will trade my body for a few measly morsels of currency so that I can pay one more month’s worth of bills. As I pull up to the dull gray, unassuming, one-story, concrete square with fish-gill slitted windows surrounded by two, twenty-foot barbed wire fences, I feel a surge of energy shoot through my body. I may feel enslaved to my bills or my chosen lifestyle or societal expectations, but I am freer than many – including the thousand plus men inside that daunting place.

The Inter-Connectedness of Life on Earth

a poem by Janice M. Pickett

Quantum leaps of mammoth proportion

Vibrating the energy of a world once dying from a breakdown in energy
Man awakes to a realization that he holds the power within
Magic is in fact not an illusion as once thought and expressed
Energy so powerful is resonating to higher frequencies fast Infinate perhaps

Connecting and attracting desires into a once desolate creation
Feng shui the art of discovering the energy within a place
These elements that impact on our lives
The force that drives us and spirals us to greater heights
The matrix perhaps? In all it's facets unleashed and ready for exploration

Energy changes us moment to moment in the realization that without energy  friction and movement nothing could exist
Life is the way it is because it is familiar this way and safer for us than stepping out
We feel safe within our narrow understanding 
What if? By creating every experience in our lives we could change it all?
For every action is created by man and for every action is a reaction

However we think about it whether we consider something is  possible for us to do or we think it is not possible
Whatever way we think
We are right for we will be as we think
Such is the universal law that connects all existence
This is the great secret to our salvation