I had a feeling this next card would be the one I would pick for today and that card is the 8 of water; Letting go.
In this image of lotus leaves in the early morning, we can see in the rippling of the water that one drop has just fallen. It is a precious moment, and one that is full of poignancy. In surrendering to gravity and slipping off the leaf, the drop loses its previous identity and joins the vastness of the water below. We can imagine that it must have trembled before it fell, just on the edge between the known and the unknowable. To choose this card is a recognition that something is finished, something is completing. Whatever it is - a job, a relationship, a home you have loved, anything that might have helped you to define who you are - it is time to let go of it, allowing any sadness bey not trying to hold on. Something greater is awaiting you, new dimensions are there to be discovered. You are past the point of no return now, and gravity is doing its work. Go with it - it represents liberation.
In existence there is nobody who is superior and nobody who is inferior. The blade of grass and the great star are absolutely equal.....
But man wants to be higher than others, he wants to conquer nature, hence he has to fight continuously. All complexity arises our of this fight. The innocent person is one who has renounced fighting; who is no longer interested in being higher, who is no longer interested in performing, in proving that he is someone special; who has become like a rose flower or like a dewdrop on the lotus leaf; who has become part of this infinity; who has melted, merged, and become one with the ocean and is just a wave; who has no idea of the ‘I’. The disappearance of the ‘I’ is innocence.

Letting go is a good thing sometimes and right now I can think of something I want to let go of and that’s this damn cough I got. I am more than ready to let this creeping crud go. I do feel better than yesterday but I am still pretty sick. The coughing is not as bad as it was but I am still very sleepy and tired. I don’t know for sure but I think I may have come back from the dead. Two days ago, I was pretty darn sick. There were times when I was kinda delirious and really out of it. I might have to go back and read what I wrote and see how incoherent I was. There were times in the past few days when I wasn’t sure of what was reality and what was not. For example, at one point I thought I was an Amish Witch in an Amish community here on the blogstream. That’s some crazy shit, ain’t it? No but for real, this really was a problem for me, not being Amish, but that reality thing. Well anyway, the good news is, I am feeling quite a bit better. I will remain on the oxygen for a little while longer until I know for sure that this thing is on it’s way out.
I think I will start a little project for myself here on the blogstream. I’m thinking about picking a God or a Goddess and doing a little research and writing about them in my blog. That way I can learn more about them myself.
Brian went to Richmond with Rick this weekend to catch some bands. They are home now and Brian says they had a good time. He says they didn’t go the Raceway for the Chilli Cook-off. It rained all day and they were too hung over from the night before to get up off their asses and go over there. The important thing is they had a good time and came home safe and sound.
We have some friends that have come over, Rorey and Karen, and they are fixing us dinner and then we are going to watch the Sopranos together. Shout out to Lucy! Your Amish party was so funny and so cool! Let’s watch the Sopranos, girl!!!

Today’s card to meditate on is the 20th card of the Major Arcana, called Beyond Illusion.
The butterfly in this card represents the outer, that which is constantly moving and that which is not real but an illusion. Behind the butterfly is the face of consciousness, looking inward to that which is eternal. The space between the two eyes has opened, revealing the lotus of spiritual unfoldment and the rising sun of awareness. Through the rising of the inner sun, meditation is born. The card reminds us not to look outside for what is real, but to look within. When we focus on externals, we too often get caught up in judgments - this is good, this is bad, I want this, I don’t want that. These judgments keep us trapped in our illusions, our sleepiness, our old habits and patterns. Drop your opinionated mind, and move inside. There, you can relax into your own deepest truth, where the difference between dreams and reality is already known.
This is the only distinction between the dream and the real: reality allows you to doubt, and the dream does not allow you to doubt...
To me, the capacity to doubt is one of the greatest blessings to humanity. The religions have been enemies because they have been cutting the very roots of doubt, and there is a reason why they have been doing that: because they want people to believe in certain illusions that they have been preaching...
Why have the people like Gautam Buddha been so insistent that the whole existence - except your witnessing self, except your awareness - is just ephemeral, made of the same stuff as dreams are made of? They are not saying that these trees are not there. They are not saying that these pillars are not there. Don’t misunderstand because of the word illusion.... it has been translated as illusion, but illusion is not the right word. Illusion does not exist. Reality exists. Maya is just in between - it almost exists. As far as day-to-day activities are concerned, it can be taken as reality. Only in the ultimate sense, from the peak of your illumination, it becomes unreal, illusory.

I wish the crap in my lungs was an illusion and wouldn’t it be nice if my irritated throat was a mere illusion? Oh yes, that would be so very nice. What’s that you say? Fat chance. Yeah, I know but one must have dreams to dream and you ought to be able to dream them your way, right? I slept a little bit last night and today I do feel a little better. I spent last night in my chair in the living room. It’s very comfortable and the air conditioner works better in there too. Also, I have tables near me where I can set my drinks and medicines and tissues. My oxygen machine is in the bedroom but it has long tubes so I can go pretty far away from it and still use it. So now I’m just so exhausted and sleepy, I can hardly keep my eyes open to write this right now. I may have to give in to it and take a little cat nap. I’m fighting it but I’m afraid it’s kicking my ass. I even tried to eat some Ritz crackers and some peach yogurt. Fuck it, I can’t get my eyes to work together on this. They keep doing what ever they want and it ain’t the same thing! I think I'm gonna take a nap now, will check on the stream a little later!

Ok, here’s the update on the cold/allergies: I’m now back on the oxygen full time for awhile. Let’s see if this will help some. I was too sick this afternoon to get up and get going with Brian and Rick. So no Flyleaf show for me. Damn, I just love sitting at home all weekend and coughing until I feel like I’m gonna die or something. I woke up this morning from a sound sleep, coughing violently. I think my lungs were full of carbon dioxide and I couldn’t get it out to make room for some fresh air. I couldn’t help but think about how it must feel to drown or suffocate to death. I mean that shit this morning was very painful in many ways. It hurts my throat, my head, my lungs and my stomach muscles. But the one thing that scares me the most is the way I get all these pinprick feelings in my arms, my breasts and my stomach. It feels like someone is sticking little needles in me every time I start coughing bad. After awhile you start to feel like a balloon that is being pumped up with too much air and it’s about to pop The more I cough, the more I need to cough, right? I know this crap will pass but I don’t have to like it do I? Maybe I should try to suffer beautifully like Cher did awhile back. I don’t know. I do know that I need some more water to drink. SHAWN
My Friday Fun FActs
1. My goldfish are watching me. They just keep staring at me and I don’t know why.
2. I did one of those online tests about what I was in a past life and it told me that I was a lazy belly dancer from Romania and I died from consumption. That figures.
3. My favorite chair in my house is purple. I love purple.
4. When I was 12 years old I had surgery on my legs to correct a birth defect. I spent 3 months out of school with a tutor at home. It was great. When I went back to school, I was ahead of everybody and felt like I hadn’t done any work at home, just had a good time.
5. In the summer of 1998, Brian, my son, Aaron, me and another friend of ours, Ricky bought a big van and took off on the road with not much more than $250 cash with us. We went from VA to GA and while we were there, we met these two kids with two dogs that were homeless and looking for a friend of theirs. They thought he had gone to the next show which was in northern Va, so we said they could come with us since we were going there anyway. So now we have 5 people and 2 dogs in the van and off we go back to northern VA. We find their friend, Matt and they all say what the heck, they have nothing better to do, they might as well go with us and go to the gathering. So now we are 6 people and 2 dogs in a van with no air conditioning in the summer and off we go out west to Az for the National Rainbow Family Gathering. We spent 3 days there and then we took off for Las Vegas, NV for another 3 days. From there we went to San Francisco, CA to see where the Grateful Dead once lived and spend another 3 days in Berkeley, Ca. Then we went to Oregon and WA and back down through Ca to Los Angles Ca. That summer we followed Phish across the country, up and down the west coast, across to Texas and up through the mid-west states and down to Ga and back up the east coast to Maine. That was the first time I ever saw the sun come up at 4:30 in the morning The trip took us more than 2 months to complete. I was reminded of all this while reading Captain Morgan’s blog about Jack Kerouac. Maybe one day I will write a book about my adventures on the road in a van called Godzilla with 6 people and 2 dogs from the east coast to the west coast and back again. What a long strange trip it’s been.

Today my card to meditate on is the 7 of clouds; Politics.
Do you recognize this man? All but the most innocent and sincere of us have a politician lurking somewhere in our minds. In fact, the mind is political. Its very nature is to plan and scheme and try to manipulate situations and people so that it can get what it wants. Here, the mind is represented by the snake, covered with clouds and speaking with a forked tongue. But the important thing to realize about this card is that both faces are false. The sweet, innocent, trust me face is a mask, and the evil, toxic, I’ll have my way with you face is a mask , too. Politicians don’t have real faces. The whole game is a lie. Take a good look at yourself to see if you have been playing this game. What you see might be painful, but not as painful as continuing to play. It doesn’t serve anybody’s interest in the end, least of all yours. Whatever you might achieve in this way will just turn to dust in your hands.
Anybody who can be a good pretender, a hypocrite, will become your leader politically, will become your priest religiously. All that he needs is hypocrisy, all that he needs is cunningness, all that he needs is a facade to hide behind. Your politicians live double lives, your priests live double lives - one from the front door, the other from the back door. And the back - door life is their real life. Those front - door smiles are just false, those faces looking so innocent are just cultivated.
If you want to see the reality of the politician, you will have to see him from his back - door. There he is in his nudity, as he is, and so is the priest. These two kinds of cunning people have dominated humanity. And they found out very early on that if you want to dominate humanity, make it weak, make it feel guilty, make it feel unworthy. Destroy its dignity, take all glory away from it, humiliate it. And they have found such subtle ways of humiliation that they don’t come in the picture at all; they leave it to you to humiliate yourself, to destroy yourself. They have taught you a kind of slow suicide.

Have a grateful weekend, everyone!

My card to meditate on for today is the 9 of Fire, Exhaustion.
This is the portrait of one whose life energy has been depleted in his efforts to keep fueling the enormous and ridiculous machine of self-importance and productivity. He has been so busy keeping it all together and making sure everything runs smoothly , that he has forgotten to really rest. No doubt he can’t allow himself to be playful. To abandon his duty for a trip to the beach could mean the whole structure might come tumbling down. The message of this card is not just about being a workaholic, though. It is about all the ways in which we set up safe but unnatural routines for ourselves and by doing so, keep the chaotic and spontaneous away from our doors. Life isn’t a business to be managed, it’s a mystery to be lived. It’s time to tear to tear up the time-card, break out of the factory, and take a little trip into the uncharted. Your work can flow more smoothly from a relaxed state of mind.
A man who lives through conscience becomes hard. A man who lives through consciousness remains soft. Why? - because a man who has some ideas about how to live, naturally becomes hard. He has continuously to carry his character around himself. That character is like an armor; his protection, his security; his whole life is invested in that character. And he always reacts to situations through the character, not directly. If you ask him a question, his answer is ready-made. That is the sign of a hard person - he is dull, stupid, mechanical. He may be a good computer, but he is not a man. You do something and he reacts in a well-established way. His reaction is predictable; he is a robot.
The real man acts spontaneously. If you ask him a question, your question gets a response, not a reaction. He opens his heart to your question, exposes himself to your question, responds to it.....

Funny thing is, Brian and I are planning a trip to Richmond, Va to see a heavy metal band called Flyleaf in a bar I’ve never been in before, the Canal Club. I sincerely hope that I survive the evening. I do want to see Flyleaf but I hate bars with all their drunks and crowds and smoke and all and on top of that I’m still sick too. Can’t stop the coughing and coughing.. I take cough syrup and allergy medicine and drink lots of fluids and still I cough. Now I’m drinking pineapple juice and using a throat spray too and still I cough. I have an inhaler and I use it and still I cough. I try to sleep and I cough, all day, all night. I hate being like this. It hurts so much and the medicines don’t do much good, they just make me feel drunk. Last night, I think I took so much of it all that I was tripping on the shit. It’s hard to sleep when you are tripping on some cold medicine. Seeing all kinds of weird shit, colors and patterns on the walls, my eyes all wiggling and my eyelids don’t want to stay open and shit. I hate cold medicine. I don’t know how people can be addicted to cough and cold medicine like they do sometimes. It tastes like crap and it makes you feel like crap too, yuck. Took me about an hour to write that last paragraph due to all the coughing. My stomach hurts from all the coughing, makes my muscles sore. There are times when I almost wish I could rip out my throat so it wouldn’t be so scratchy and itchy. I am thankful though. These episodes used to take longer for me to get over them. Before my surgery, I would get this crap and keep it no less than 3 weeks to 3 months or more. Now, since my surgery, when I get this shit, it seems to only last about a week to a week and a half, which ain’t so bad. Of course when it’s only been like 3 or 4 days into it, it’s not feeling so good and it’s hard to think about when it’s gonna be over. And so I cough some more.

Shawn found some real old bottles in the woods the other day. One of them looks like about a 6 oz. bottle of soda pop and says Grapette on it. It was manufactured in Roanoke, Va which isn’t far from here. I’ve never heard of that kind of drink. The bottle is kinda cool. He found some other ones too. They all look pretty old.

Father Mulcahy from M.A.S.H was here in Bedford today. There was an article about it on the local news tonight. He came to give a talk to some people at the D-Day Memorial about working on the show, M.A.S.H. and how much he learned from his experiences. He liked seeing the real tools of a M.A.S.H. unit and not just the props in the show. That D-Day Memorial place has had a lot of celebrities come there, like the President. I remember that day. We left town that day. We knew it was going to be bad. The secret service came in to town about a week before the President’s visit and all. I heard the traffic was really bad and it was hard to get around town but we left just before it got that bad. I think we went to a show somewhere or something.

Well, happy 420 everyone I wish I could really celebrate, but me lungs ain’t co-operating today, I’ll be eating my ganja instead of smokin’it! Ya’ll burn one for me!

First of all, let me say that I am sick as a dog, coughing and all stopped up so I am now drunk on cough medicines. So if I say anything here that is silly or doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, then you know why, right? Cause I am Alice in Wonderland, woohoo I’m off to see the wizard, oh wait that’s another story. Oh well, I got a good excuse, right? I’m on drugs Damn, it’s hard to use two computers at once. It does help to have four hands though, oh that’s right I’m only supposed to have two hands.
When I got up today and came into the living room, Brian says to me, hey we could make love right now and we would both be sick fucks I’m like huh? He says, hey we are both sick, right? Very funny, Brian.
Geeze, I feel so dopey and sleepy, but at least I’m not coughing so much. My throat is so sensitive so when I get a scratchy feeling like this it just keeps getting worse. It’s like a vicious cycle, my throat gets a little scratchy so I cough a little, which irritates my throat a little more, which makes me cough more which makes my throat more irritated, which makes me cough even harder. Ok, at this point I would love to scream but it would hurt too much and would only make things worse. So I have two choices, I can either cough my freaking brains and my guts out or I can go around kinda dopey and sleepy on cough meds. At least I don’t have to drive any large machinery right now. Thank my Creator for the small miracles, right?
Ok, I ate some yogurt, maybe that will help some and I won’t feel so drunk and spaced out. I hate to cough so hard. It hurts too much. Hurts my head, my throat, my back, my lungs, my chest and my stomach and sometimes when I am sleeping I bite the shit out of my tongue because I’m trying not to cough, I’m trying to sleep, you know? Fuck some coughing.

I look to the skies
and what do I see?
I see a mighty dragon.
And as he flies by me
I grab on to his tail,
off we go on a wild new adventure.

Now I moved up his tail
and I’m holding on to his back.
he’s weaving in and out,
soon we are zooming
and I am holding on for dear life.
up and down, in and out
around and around he goes.

The wind blows my hair
as the dragon dips and curves.
The ground is only a distant memory,
and I don’t ever want to go there again.
The dragon has other ideas
but then he always does.

You can’t tame a dragon.
You can’t make him do what you want.
All you can do is hold on
and hope for the best.
It’s nice to dream in rock and roll
and technicolor.

My card to meditate on for today is the 5 of rainbows, The Outsider.
The meaning: The small child in this card is standing on one side of a gate looking through it. He is so small, and so convinced that he cannot get through, he can not see that the chain holding the gate is not locked, all he has to do is open it. Whenever we feel left out or excluded, it brings up this feeling of being a small, helpless child. It is not surprising, as the feeling is deeply rooted in our earliest childhood experiences. The problem is that because it is so deeply rooted, it plays over and over again, like a tape, in our lives. You have an opportunity now to stop the tape, to quit tormenting yourself with the ideas that you are somehow not “enough” to be accepted and included. Recognize the roots of these feelings in the past, and let go of the old pain. It will bring you the clarity to see how you can open the gate and enter that which you most long to become.
So you are feeling yourself an outsider. This is good. This is the transitory period. Now you have to be alert not to fill yourself with pain and misery. Now that God is no longer there, who is going to console you? You don’t need any consolation. Humanity has come of age. Be a man, be a woman, and stand on your own feet...
The only way to be connected with existence is to go inwards, because there at the center you are still connected. You have been disconnected physically from your Mother. That disconnection was absolutely necessary to make you an individual in your own right. But you are not disconnected from the universe. Your connection with the universe is of consciousness. You cannot see it, so you have to go deep down with great awareness, watchfulness, witnessing and you will find the connection. The Buddha is the connection!