Middle Class Poverty, ASL and Dakini Valley

Post topics have been rattling around in my head. Sometimes I compose "to a particular" audience/reader. Other times I just get a random thought that won't relent. Today is a swirling onset of many topics I want to discuss, in no particular order...

This is some strange defense of my poverty that has been floating around. I don't know "who" this is directed at, but it has been nagging in my brain for a few days - and this dialog with an unknown correspondent has bubbled up slowly over time. Sometimes we are just conduits for messages: so here is what keeps coming through:

I know from the "outside" my life probably looks grim. All the rest of my peer group is out attempting to conquer the material world. I am very happy about the choices I have made and the inner prosperity it brings -- I am amazed at how John still inspires me to grow and mature in my practice and relationship. Especially as I watch this government drive the economy into the hell realms, deny me as a "citizen" of certain inalienable rights, and feel little relief from the prospect of any of the inbound candidates -- I cannot imagine what life in this country will have become ten years from now, so I continue to pray in earnest every day that we aren't ruining the planet that we reside on and that our children and neices, nephews, friends and strangers will inherit from us. I believe beyond superstition that we will each return to the reality we are creating in a future time (and look how bad this place has gotten in our short lifetime already!!)

People call it gloom and doom. I call it realism. I am sure there were people before the fall of every major empire that could not see or hear (or be bothered by) the people who witnessed it coming and spoke about it openly. Those voices that are doing it with some balance and intelligence are often drowned out by the radical and peripheral voices that make for splashy headlines or great fodder for cocktail party discussions. But I just cannot deny what I am sensing is happening all around the world and right in our back yards (and gas tanks and bank accounts). The USA is in an unfortunate downward cycle and I am sure this little "stimulus package" that will go out in May will mostly fill people's gas tanks and go right back to the countries we claim to be entering war with to stop their participation in terrorism and so on, and so on, and so on... *SIGH* I have 6 syllables I would utter to the world if I could. They make no sense without context... but they are words I speak in earnest hope of creating positive change in the world: OM MANI PEDME HUNG.

*Next Random Topic: The now ever growing "ASL" continuum. I don't know where the impulse came from to purchase my American Sign Language DVD. But it seemed urgent at Christmas in 2006. I studied a while. I gave up. Then I recently started thinking about looking at it again. I watched it one night. Within a week I met someone training to become an interpreter for the deaf. Then I started studying again with a passion. And I went to a gathering of poets on Saturday and met a girl who is DYING to sign again (apparently used to teach it at a charter school.)

So I am going with the flow and trying to become at least socially fluent at signing.

And Finally: Tomorrow John and I return to Dakini Valley, a place we had the precious opportunity to live for 18 months when we moved to Arizona. Tomorrow we go to help build dog pens and new runs for the Tara's Babies dogs that are fostering there and awaiting new homes. I am very excited to return there - it is like a spiritual womb that always invites rebirth to any who visit or inhabit the land there.

That's all that is tumbling around in the upstairs chamber for now. Again, apologies for the rambling nature of what comes out. But hey - some bloggeers are just too disorganized to keep up with a diary, so we subject you to our "pens"!

With utmost appreciation that you stopped by...
-Bowdawg