The Lord’s Prayer says give us this day our DAILY bread, not: tell me six months ahead of time what my job is going to be, right?  We don’t need to know the entire highway, we just need to be led to the next right step.

Baby armadillo

How cute, all curled into his protective shell, no one can disturb him now. But that’s no way to live. Sometimes I do the same thing, go within, hide away. When I reconnect to inner guidance and remember there is no separation, I expand again and the shell drops away.

You know that controlling woman you’re so angry and hateful toward? That’s your mother who is giving you a roof over your head. Have some respect.  Don’t like the authority?  Grow up and do it on your own.  Never should you be verbally abusive to your mother in her own home. Stop and think before you react. Develop some discipline. Learn to control your anger.  Take that zen teaching into your heart and practice it.

A friend told about a movie he saw and he couldn’t recall the name of it. “Is it in your browser history?” I asked? “Yes,” he said, “Probably. It’s on my Facebook. I liked it so much that I wrote about it. Then I wondered what I was going to watch next.” Then he cracked up laughing because he was making fun of me putting everything on Facebook because he shares nothing. Brat.

A friend writes, “Too often on the spiritual path I isolate to the extent that I get caught in my own head and I lose my ability to relate to people.  I begin to think I am superior to them in an intellectual or spiritual way.  I say I keep away because I don’t want to “be in their vibe” but the truth I feel unable to resist it when I’m near.  I say I’m just going with the flow, but I really feel adrift in an open sea, unable to navigate.  I isolate to find an anchor yet all that happens is I get caught up in my own head trips which makes me isolate even more. Only later when I read my daily journal do I realize my ego had complete control over me and it was all mental masturbation. Why do I keep doing this?”   Janell writes in Your Feeling Alone Is An Illusion  “You are cut from the divine cloth of the universe. You are carved out of that beautiful oblivion.“

The question was “What’s one action that people can take right now to help move them forward towards their goal of changing the world?” Here is Seth Godin’s answer:  “Write down what you’re afraid of. Be vulnerable about it. Confront your shame and to be aware of the fact that if you’re not finding it difficult to write down, it’s probably not what you’re afraid of. That act leads to you taking responsibility for the next set of choices as opposed to blaming the outside world that is stacked against you because of what you look like, who your parents are, where you were born, how you speak, how old you are, who you know, who you don’t know and what cards you were dealt.  That’s all a given, right? But if we take that and put it right next to what are you afraid of, then I think you can chart a course that isn’t filled with excuses and deniability. Well of course it didn’t work because I have this whole list, which I used to carry around on a piece of paper in the back of my head before I finally got rid of it. This whole list of why it wasn’t fair. You say all right that’s all a given but given that, I chose to make this, what do you think? And the act of doing that is really, really difficult. No other creature on earth knows how to do it. Most humans are afraid to do it and if you can figure out what part of that process you are afraid of, I think you are going to discover your life changes.” —Seth Godin

Walked outside about 9:00am and saw that the bamboo grew about 6 foot since yesterday. I cut and freed some branches of the orchid tree that the new bamboo shoots were crowding and I got a bunch of those itchy little black bamboo hairs on my arms in the process. That’s okay, they take my mind off all the misquito bites I got on my legs. I topped my night blooming jasmine and rooted the cuttings in the moist ground beneath the mother plant in the courtyard outside the main suite.  At mid afternoon, it’s 87 degrees, 61% humidity and a breezy 78 degrees inside.  The doors and windows are all open to the outside air for the first time in months and it feels invigorating.  I walked a friend around the yard checking all the new growth: mulberries beginning to fruit, loquats beginning to blossom.   The jasmines are all in bloom: night blooming, confederate and star jasmines. They root so easily, I have lots of it.  Fall is on the way!