 The following text is channeled material. The author, my guide, has the name Ophir. This text was channeled on November 11, 2016 in Chicago. This was Ophir's advice to me about how to stay transparent to world events. The text was edited and reposted on November 6, 2024.
There’s an opportunity to choose to be transparent when the world doesn’t go your way. There’s also the opportunity to choose to connect with the people whom you regard as being on the opposing team—to let yourself feel the ways in which their divinity is the same as your own. You’ve heard the expression “namaste” — I bow to the divine in you. When you lose a contest, most especially one in which you don’t like the victor, the benefit of bowing to the divine in the opposing team is even stronger because it is harder to do. It is easy, of course, to love those who are lovable. It’s much more difficult to love those who are not lovable. Yet learning to love those who are not lovable brings even more rewards. Among other things, it allows you to learn to love what you think of as the unlovable parts of yourself. You can choose not to despair that the people you disagree with have prevailed, and instead choose to feel love for them—as challenging and difficult as that may be. If you can master that, you will have learned a great deal from earth life, where the opportunities for growth are great because of and not despite the drama. Recognize that whether the day is sunny or rainy, whether the times are good or bad, whether you’re rich or poor, sick or healthy, it is you and not the circumstances you’re in that control how you react. You can choose to react to anything with joy, with compassion, with faith that the world is a perfect teaching machine. And even when you have classes that seem quite difficult, you can count on the fact that at some point you’ll graduate. Let yourself be responsible only for your own choices. Sometimes you may feel responsible for the choices of others, as if what others have chosen to do, the policies they enact, or the hatreds they express, are somehow your fault—because you didn’t do enough to oppose them. But how much wiser it is to just let your feelings be a reflection of your own actions and not a reflection of the actions of others. You can sail your own boat through fair weather and through storms by simply adjusting your sails to react to the wind and the weather that you encounter. The journey through earth life is challenging by design. For it is through these challenges that the lessons of self-love are learned. --Ophir Illustration from CNN
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 The gardener in January is, God help him, a dreamer. January is undoubtedly the calendar’s botanical nadir. Yet it also marks a midpoint in the chilly months from November to March. This middlemost part of winter is destined to induce in the restive gardener a hankering to get over the hump. In this grim month, when the cold is coldest and the dark is darkest, the gardener dreams of a paradise to come. In the gardener’s reverie, January’s cold dark days give way to April’s warmth and brightness. The mind’s eye, sore from the general bleakness, fills with a verdant vision, stimulated, very often, by a garden catalogue.
When these same catalogues arrive in May, the gardener is too busy to read them during the day, and too exhausted to hold them to the light upon retiring at night. But in January, even a Sunday afternoon will seem like a darling time to lie beneath a coverlet and peruse the catalogue’s glossy pages, festooned with fantastic flora. ‘Tis then the gardener, in his trance, will look forth from the imaginary perch upon which he floats above a fanciful landscape, and beguile himself with virtuous visions of digging, amending, mulching and other praiseworthy tasks which are, of course, delightfully effortless so long as they remain within the realm of honorable intentions. “How glad I shall be to work,” he thinks, “when the warmth of spring ignites fire in my belly.” “I shan’t mind it at all, for it will be pleasant to sweat a little in the cool hot of spring, then sit back with a fortifying tonic, and survey the lilac buds and the cherry blossoms.” “See here how florid these peonies and roses seem, how jazzy these irises appear.” “I could fit a goodly patch of these in that weedy area out by the back fence.” But alas, the lush inflorescences which bloom forth from the catalogue pages postulate an ideal outcome that does not prepare the gardener for the runty roots which actually arrive in the mail in late March. If the gardener has been around the block a few seasons, all this is well known. Yet such experience does not prevent these dreams from germinating, for surely all humans have learned to survive difficult times with benign hallucinations. Come sub-zero temperatures, come coverlet, perchance to dream. Painting: James Stephens - "Snowy Remote Light" - 2002, Gouache on Paper, 8" x 10"  Let it not be said that the Canine Being has ever trampled the borders. No, the Canine Being does not hobble about in the flower beds, or nestle down upon the Plumbago to sleep. She is sufficiently cognizant of the boundaries within the Territory that have been established by the All Powerful Adored One so that she knows well enough where it is proper to saunter about and where it is not.
There is clearly a chasm between how the Territory is perceived by the Canine Being and how this same realm is distinguished by the All Powerful Adored One. While the Canine Being is perfectly aware of the layout of certain fixed—and to her way of thinking illogical—boundaries within the Territory, and while she understands that within these boundaries assorted flora have been established, she, being decidedly a member of the fauna division, does not comprende what any of this flora fuss is about. When it comes to appreciating the beauty of an Iris or even the olfactory delights of a Rose, she is, in fact, oblivious. That said, woe be to any other fauna division member that dares to amble into any portion of the Territory that lies within the Canine Being’s purview. What word is the opposite of oblivious?Obsessed! Squirrels are particularly disdained in this regard. Let it be widely understood that squirrel incursions into the Territory are not countenanced by the Canine Being whilst she is on duty. Of course, should the Canine Being happen to be asleep, the squirrel can do whatever it likes. In general the Canine Being is indifferent to the garden arts.Flower fragrances, it seems, are not nearly as fascinating as the unique scent of rabbit droppings. This is not to say that should the All Powerful Adored One come lumbering into the Garden with a wheelbarrow loaded down with a massive whatzit plant that the Canine Being will not dutifully stroll over to observe the goings on as the whatzit plant is heaved from the wheelbarrow onto the ground. The Canine Being will even go so far as to wag the tail and sniff at the whatzit plant with a bemused tolerance that conveys her devotion to the All Powerful Adored One whilst still indicating that—to her way of thinking—it is foolish in the extreme to lug about entities which God intended to live and die in one spot. Hers is not to question such behavior, for it has been well established that the All Powerful Adored One is inscrutable when it comes to most of his activities. The Canine Being, therefore, wags her tail and hangs out her tongue, grateful that, if nothing else, the whatzit plant has gotten the All Powerful Adored One out of his easy chair. (This post was inspired by one of my favorite garden writers, Henry Mitchell.) Photograph of my dog Asia in our garden Here are excerpts from the poem "Song at Sunset" by Walt Whitman. Read by David Greene, with piano accompaniment written and performed by David Greene in 1990.  Last week James and I acquired a wonderful work of art from the painter Michael Banning. His painting “Bathroom Window” (shown above), was painted in 2011 directly from the bathroom in his Chicago apartment. Looking at this painting every day for a week has got me to thinking about ordinary beauty. For me, the easiest way to elevate the ordinary has been to look out at the world as if looking through the eyes of a painter. It's a great way to make things look more beautiful. I often experience this change of perception from looking at art. James and I went to a Van Gogh retrospective at the Art Institute some years ago. Many of Van Gogh’s paintings have a physical texture (impasto). Here's Van Gogh's 1899 painting Olive Trees:  In person, this painting is magical. If you stand close to it, you see this:  After looking closely at Van Gogh’s brushwork, I found myself noticing the textural beauty of things around me during the ride home from the museum on the el train. The textures of the bricks on the backs of the buildings passing by the train window were breathtaking in their beauty, as if I’d taken a hallucinogenic drug. The effect lasted for hours. I’ve also experienced a change in visual perception from reading poetry. The visionary poet, Percey Shelly, wrote: “Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.” There are many poems that lift the veil. Here’s an example from Gerard Manly Hopkins: Pied Beauty GLORY be to God for dappled things— For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough; 5 And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: 10 Praise him. I read Hopkins poem as a boy. Since then I’ve sometimes noticed the pied beauty in front of me. One such moment came last spring, when James and I were walking in the Chicago Botanic Garden. The crabapple trees were in bloom along the path to Evening Island. But it was the dappled light—and the memory of Pied Beauty—that caught my eye and led to this photo:   Images:
Bathroom Window, 2011 - Oil on Canvas & Panel, 28" x 22" - painting by Michael Banning Olive Trees, 1899, Oil on Canvas - painting by Vincent Van Gogh Crab apple Trees at the Chicago Botanic Garden - photo by David Greene, April 2012 Mackerel Sky photo by Nick Fraser. Dunston Fen, Lincolnshire, December 2005.  One of my favorite works at the Art Institute of Chicago is the George Bellows painting, “Love of Winter.” Winter may be the least comfortable season to be outdoors, but it may be the most visually appealing season to paint or photograph.
In winter, snow is the white canvas against which the visual world is displayed. The snow produces an aesthetic transformation. It acts like a wrapper on the objects of the physical world, which, removed of color and texture, are distilled. They're reduced to their essence, as their shape and scale—normally overwhelmed by color and texture—become their primary characteristics. All that white emphasizes line. Immediately after a snowfall, trees, which may have looked merely barren and lifeless without their leaves, suddenly seem exquisitely sketched, as though they have been traced and brushed with snow by a master painter. Then, when the snow on the tree branches melts, the snow that remains on the ground provides the contrast against which the forms of the trees are set off, as seen in the trees in the Bellows’ painting. When color is introduced—by the brightly colored clothing people wear, as is depicted in the painting, or by something like a brilliant cardinal perched on a snowy fence—it's luminous. Winter is clearly the best season to be inside looking out. The more austere the outdoor weather grows, the cozier the indoor crib becomes. I like to look out through the multi-paned French doors in my study, especially after the glass has been etched by sub-zero temperatures with half moon frost patterns on each pane. Whether the world outside is a mass of low contrasts—grays and whites—as it is during a snowstorm, or a sparkling clear rasher of intense blues and whites—as it is on a bright sunny day, the framing of the scene by these frosted window cells makes it feel visually more abstracted. The panes of the window deconstruct the visual notes of the scenery as the Impressionists did with their brushstrokes and pointillism. There are words missing from human language—missing, at least, in English. One of those is a word that would better describe looking deeply or intensely with a highly refined aesthetic expertise. The word I want would be like epicure is to eating, or sensualist is to feeling, or like connoisseur or aesthete is to the arts. This word would describe the way that artists see the visual world. I think this is one of the great benefits of looking at art. It helps us see the world differently. Winter, I think, is a good time to cultivate a more highly developed visual discernment. One can do this by looking at paintings and photos, but also by looking, directly or through the windowpanes, at the underlying formality that comprises physical reality. Form and figure are easier to see at a time when the distractions of color and texture are diminished. George Bellows: "Love of Winter" - 1914, Oil on Canvas, 32 1/2" x 40 1/2"  Painting: East of Hobart – 2006 – Oil on canvas - 31" x 40" (James Stephens) Many of the paintings of James Stephens are drawn from industrious nature. I can attest that he also paints with industrious energy. Some weekends he rises at dawn to follow his mantra: “I have to paint!” In the studio, he puts on his headphones, then hums, dances and interacts with the canvas in what seems like choreographed mania. James's characteristic visual combinations—juxtaposing forms from the idioms found in industry and nature—depict what he calls the “ecotone,” the transitional zone between the manufactured and the organic, which, in many ways, is the zone in which we live. Before knowing James I'd rarely look twice at the artifacts of industry that dominate the landscape around Chicago and Detroit. While driving I-94 from Chicago to Detroit, I'd try to ignore the smokestacks, power lines, water tanks, lamp posts, boilers, cranes, chain link fences, warehouses and all such industrial paraphernalia that, it seemed to me, blighted the natural landscape. But when I saw James light up with aesthetic delight over these same forms, when I saw his eyes widen upon discovering a row of huge industrial drums in varying states of decay, I realized he was experiencing the visual world differently than I was. I realized that he has the ability to see form, color, lines, complexion, uncloaked from their layers of cultural meaning. I think that for him the information is first and foremost visual. But the cultural meaning behind the images also stimulates his creative impulses. He relishes visual connotations that are funny. James is not the first artist to aestheticize industrial forms, an impulse taken up early on in Modernism, nor the first painter to paint from nature. Like his predecessors, James plays with the visual resonances between forms. For example, in his 2006 oil painting, East of Hobart, shown above, a metallic, curved industrial object that might be part of a rooftop air-conditioning mechanism is juxtaposed with shrubbery. In suburban neighborhoods around Chicago, sometimes the shrubbery in front of the bungalows is obsessively shaped. It's as if the landscapers have tried to browbeat the natural shape of the bushes into a manufactured form. This is James’s milieu. He gets excited when the shrubbery gets obsessive, since it illustrates a craving to impose order on the messiness of natural forces. Industrial forms are also an attempt to harness natural forces. Their strange shapes are the result of chemistry and physics. Engineers work out practical solutions to mechanical challenges, usually without regard for the aesthetic effects of their efforts. But the resulting industrial forms—like the shrubbery—are partly shaped by their organic provenance: industry must cooperate with the forces of nature. The artifacts from this collaboration between engineering and Mother Nature are all around us. And since these manufactured objects live within the landscape, nature harnessed and nature un-harnessed sit side by side in our field of view. When we notice the commonalities between them, mundane forms become artistic. Many of James’s paintings illustrate this insight.  Shrubbery on Longwood Avenue, near our home in Chicago  Municipal water tank No. 5, found near the intersection of Hawthorne & Glenview avenues in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin. Its distinctive shape and structure are typical for the locale. Notice also the tree-like streetlights along the road. Copyright © 2005 Sulfur  The following text is channeled material. The author, my guide, has the name Ophir. This text was channeled on March 26, 2021.
Each of you who comes to human life comes with an intention to grow, to experience, to feel, to become part of the play, to step on the stage, to give voice to an expression of and a discovery of yourself. It is through expressing yourself that you discover yourself. One way to discover more about yourself is to feel more of your connection with others. Notice the wide range of feelings you encounter from day to day that you share with other people. This recognition of shared experiences and shared emotions can become the basis upon which you can feel the connection you have with everyone and with all life. All people and all life forms share common aspirations: the desire to love and be loved, to feel joy, to share joy, to make a contribution to the collective creation that earth life represents. You will find your path through life seems at times to be indirect. But that is the most edifying kind of path to have. Who wants to go straight from point A to point B when it is possible to wander and discover and to grow and learn as the many possibilities that exist between A and B present themselves? You will find that your life does not follow a straight line, but rather meanders through the field of possibilities in the same way that one would stroll through a beautiful garden, braced by the beauty of what’s visible, feeling the richness of human senses of sight and sound and smell and touch. You can learn to stop from time to time to bend over and look more closely, to really see deeply the shape of a blade of grass. Notice all the varied individual and unique patterns created by nature, which is so full of exuberance. Practice staying in the present, focusing with great attention on the particulars of each moment, whether it be a moment of sunshine or a moment of rain, a moment of cold or a moment of warmth, a moment of wind or a moment of stillness, a moment of happiness or a moment of despair. All these notes combine to make the melody of your experience. The experience that you have is unique. It is both the manifestation of and the acknowledgment of your individuality. As you grow you will learn how your individual experience is like the individual blossom of a flower placed in the Divine landscape. Photograph: Sunrise in my garden on February 18, 2022  The following text is channeled material. The author, my guide, has the name Ophir. This text was channeled on March 27, 1994.
In order to stay on course in your life work, pay attention to signals from all sources, not just from your intellect. Some of the signals available may be fairly subtle. You can find navigational help in your body and its physical sensations, in your emotions, and in your imagination. So, for example, if you feel a certain physical malady, such as a headache, you might look for a navigational message in this minor ailment. You can start by posing a question to your body. Ask what message it has for you. The message might be a conventional one. Perhaps back pain might be a signal that you’re taking on too much responsibility. Maybe problems with your throat indicate problems in communication. Or the message might be one that is more intimate and less obvious. It might be one that requires a more personal understanding of your body. So you must ask and contemplate. Just as with physical sensations, you might find yourself experiencing a strong emotion. Does it feel out of proportion? Are you clear about the cause or does it feel unprompted? Either way, ask what message it has for you. A strong emotion signals that something is off—that a change is wanted. Are you enjoying what you do? Do you need approval to validate what you do? These physical and emotional signals are there to help steer you. They are part of the wind that blows. By using your imagination, you will also find navigational help by seeing the ways in which your daydreams and ideas move. Listen to your impulses and intuitions. You must trust your unfolding urges. As time goes by you will gradually imagine more and more of the scope and details of your life’s work. Though things will surely change and evolve, you can trust your urges and daydreams to guide you over the course. Don’t judge the results of your intuitions too quickly. You may have noticed how things that seem like false steps or off-course distractions are, in fact, sometimes important detours that bring you into contact with experiences or events that you have ultimately recognized in hindsight as having been essential. There will be moments when some of the things you pursue won’t seem to get you anywhere. And yet these things also will in the long run play a role. At some point, in retrospect, you'll understand this more clearly. It's easier for you to do this when you look back at your life and think about the vast assortment of experiences you’ve accumulated and the ways that all of these diverse things are now part of your palette of skills and experiences. This principle is an important one in human life because very often people feel a sense of being lost or adrift, of having experiences which seem somehow to be far removed from the kind of life they dream of. While it is important for people to learn to pursue and create their dreams, it is also important to trust that whatever experiences come to you are useful in some way. You would not have them if they weren’t. In that sense there is no wasted time or wasted experience in human life. Even though some insights may come to you through long, arduous or painful experiences, they are still worth gaining despite the difficulty. With time, you can learn to acquire insights in less arduous or difficult ways. As you come to believe in happiness, well-being, health and joy as the primary forces of human life, it will be possible for your life to be a pleasant experience with no forfeit of insights. It is in the nature of nature to grow organically, which is a complex process, not simply done. It depends upon time and growth. A quick progression from conception to realization is not in the nature of life on planet earth. Your time in physical reality gives you an opportunity to grow things organically, which means with time and nurturing and in response to the elements. Things grow toward the sun, bend with the wind, grow best where there is good rain and good drainage. These are all metaphors that apply not only to the natural world, but also to the achievement of your life’s work. There is a great deal to be learned from the example of nature. You can observe the efficiency of nature in accomplishing powerful changes and spectacular effects. Yet rarely in nature to do you see an example of effort, or straining ... rather, what you see is the exuberance of things to become, to grow, to transform themselves into something new. In the spring you feel the energy of the buds swelling. This swelling of the buds is not the same as straining. It is an exuberant process. In the Fall you will see many things wither and die, many things let go and relax, release themselves without anxiety or fear. For it is just as natural to decay in the physical world as it is to blossom. One of the advantages of spending time in nature is that you can better learn how these transformations can be accomplished without deadlines. The emergence of leaves on the trees in Spring does not occur because the tree has been given a deadline. The tree does not think, 'I'd better hurry up and get my leaves out before May or I will be late.' Rather, the tree feels the growing warmth in the air and feels the lengthening days with their longer hours of light and in response ... always to the present moment and its energies .. the tree begins to grow leaves. So live in the moment, and respond to its conditions, its climate, its weather, its energy, and trust that by doing this you will sprout and grow at the right times. You may have learned to associate deadlines with being productive. Perhaps you have used deadlines to whip yourself forward, to keep yourself moving by creating circumstances that leave you feeling pressured, obliged, and committed to accomplish things. This self-imposed pressure may be strengthened by the thought that if you don’t reach the deadlines you’ve set for yourself, you’ll be deemed a failure, or judged poorly by others for having failed to accomplish your goal. This use of deadlines may work well in goading you to accomplish many things. But perhaps now you’ve come to a point where you realize that this approach, while effective in making you productive, is stressful, and does not help you enjoy what you do. Perhaps you have been thinking about transforming this process, so that you can continue to be productive, but without forcing yourself to proceed by using deadlines and commitments. One way to make the change that you seek is to think of each task you undertake in terms of what would be the most enjoyable way of accomplishing it. Then, without regard to commitment or a deadline, follow your intuition about what is the most enjoyable route to reaching your goal. Consciously hold yourself in a state of pleasure. You will find that if you do this, you’ll be able to forget about the pressures of time, for you will so empower your productivity that you’ll be able to accomplish things quickly and, as a result, always have plenty of time. It is beneficial to remember that in the long run there is no deadline. There is no ultimate obligation on your part to accomplish anything. Rather, there is, in fact, all the time in the world. For you will certainly achieve the goals of your soul, whether it takes you moments or a lifetime. In the end, so to speak, for ends are simply beginnings, you cannot help but arrive at your destination. It can be useful for you to adopt the mode of a passenger who is in the car looking out the window and enjoying the scenery of the journey. You can let go of the role of being the driver who steers the car and must focus concentration on the road, on driving, on the future. There is a big difference between driving, watching the road ahead, worrying about road conditions, traffic, directions, taking all the responsibilities of maneuvering the vehicle, and being a passenger who completely trusts the driver so that, as a passenger, you need never even look out the front window. The front window is just one of four windows in the car. You might just as easily look out the rear or the sides. I encourage you, whenever possible, to be like a passenger in the journey of your life. Trust that goodness will drive you. Look out the window at the side to view your current position. And also look out the rear window to reflect on what you have already accomplished. Doing so means putting less energy into always looking out the front to see what is coming up. This shift of focus will be useful in transforming your work. For as you turn your attention to the pleasure of the moment and let go of all thoughts about the obligations of the future, you will enjoy yourself much more. The key element to all of this is trust. Trust may be an issue you have dealt with throughout your life. Perhaps you have at times been consciously aware of the fact that you are unwilling to trust others to drive you. The more completely you can trust other people to drive you with safety, the more you will have learned about trusting the universe to bring you where you need to go. And so it is with many of the goals of your life. You will find it more enjoyable and in the end more efficient to let things come to you, to trust that they will, to stop efforting. The universe will provide. And you will be safe. And it is entirely possible for you to relax and enjoy the scenery on this journey of your life. If you are skeptical about this, I say, try it out for a while. Try it on as you might try on a new pair of clothes, a different outfit. Just adopt the attitude that you have all the time in the world, that there is no rush to do anything, that everything will be done as it needs to be, and that you will simply do what you enjoy. Part of you may resist and want to fret and worry about this approach. But I say, try it on for size, before you make a judgment. Painting: Jean-Francois Millet, The Gust of Wind, 1871-73, National Museum of Wales  The following text is channeled material. The author, my guide, has the name Ophir. This text was channeled on May 31, 2015 in Chicago. This was Ophir's advice to me about how to understand right timing.
Time is of the essence for physical life on earth. Time is the platform on which you are able to experience physical reality. It allows you to have beginnings and endings. It also gives you the opportunity to separate your creative conceptions from their realizations, because you are able to walk through time between the moment that an idea or concept arises and when it takes form. Time gives you an opportunity to refine. Because time is relatively thick and slow, it is bound with physicality. It is the key to tempering your ideas. Finding the right “time” to bring an idea, a concept, a work, into existence … involves paying attention to inner signals. You are always guided by impulse, and by the flow of enthusiasm. You can rely on your enthusiasms to guide you into right action at the right time. The right timing of things may look different at different moments in time. So, for example, if you feel the urge to create something … and you bring it into being, it may not be obvious to you right away that it was created at the right time because it may not produce its ultimate effect upon the world right away. It may take days, weeks, months, years, or even decades, before something you’ve created is able to fulfill its potential in the world. The right timing of your accomplishments may be obvious only in retrospect. It may be obvious only from the point in the future when your creation’s impact has peaked. At that point, in hindsight, you would be able to see the arc of its unfolding from concept to realization to blossoming in the wider world of consciousness. So, for example, the moment that you complete a painting, or complete a musical composition, or publish a book, or finish any creative endeavor, you’ve completed a cycle that began with the seed of an idea and that culminated with its completion, it’s moment of blooming. But that moment of completion is itself like a seed, because your completed work, too, will, with time, further unfold, and grow, and bloom anew. And you cannot know, in many cases, what the arc of its maturity in time will look like. And so you must master patience and trust, which are very closely connected. In order to be patient about something, you must trust that the outcome you are seeking will eventually occur. But there is an even higher form of trust, which is the trust that the right outcome will occur, whether or not it is the outcome that you’ve imagined. For sometimes what you imagine may become refined. Or you may be surprised to discover that whatever you’ve created takes on its own existence and leads to outcomes you never imagined. And so it is useful to trust that, as the saying goes, it’s all good—which means that the highest form of patience is one in which you’re able to allow something to become whatever it wants to become, without any constraint or limitation. You are able to achieve this by opening your heart and mind to allowing your work to find its own path. There may be a contradiction between the part of you that relinquishes control, lets go, allows, and becomes open to whatever path your work takes … and the part of you that must, necessarily, execute your work, that must be in control of it, that must take steps to achieve it. It is a contradiction, a paradox, because you have to both walk toward a goal by creating your work, and at the same time be comfortable with arriving at any destination that the work takes you—whether it is the destination that you envisioned or not. The easiest way to master this paradox is to always stay in a state in which you are responding to your impulses. Follow your instincts. Adjust your sails to meet the wind as the wind shifts. For many, it’s not easy to let go of control. For many, it's uncomfortable to not know where things are going or what’s going to happen. But it need not be difficult. The best way to let go of control is to adopt a sense of adventure. Imagine yourself as being on a journey in which you are, at the same time, paradoxically, both the driver and the passenger. You must put your foot on the gas, and follow the road, and steer the wheel, and, simultaneously, be present in the passenger seat where you are able to see events unfold, and appreciate them regardless of where they lead. It’s always helpful to dip in and out of both roles—to set forth boldly on a course of action in response to your intuition and impulses and passions, and, at the same time, to marvel, from moment to moment, at the sights and sounds that surround you at the present moment, whatever that moment may be like. Whether it’s sunny or raining or snowing or pleasant, whether it’s quiet or still, whether it’s exciting or boring—it is all part of the tapestry of your experience. Every moment is worth your mindfulness. Every moment is worthy of appreciation. It is all sublime. You can choose to experience each moment, each outcome, each turn in the road with an open heart, an open mind, and a spirit of adventure. If you keep an ever keen eye to find the glory in each moment, you will find it. You can find glory in the most subtle things, from the flutter of leaves in a tree, to the sound of a bird singing, to the sight of evanescent fog drifting off a roof. You can find glory in music, for example, whether it is music aimed at edification and spiritual stimulation, or music that is commercial, aimed at selling you something. Whether you hear silly music, or serious music, or fun music, or scary music, you can find glory. And you can see the people that you encounter in the world as they are, which may be plain and ordinary. But each person you encounter has his or her own rich tapestry of experiences, which you can sense if you look beneath the surface and let go of whatever judgments you may have about that person’s life. Open your heart to the beauty around you, whether it’s presenting itself in a loud, hard-to-miss form that is easy for everyone to appreciate, or whether it’s presenting itself in a more subtle form that you can learn to appreciate. So you might see the exuberance of a squirrel jumping around and playing with another squirrel, or you might hear the earnestness of a bird singing for a mate, or you might feel the combination of determination and vigor and hope that accompanies someone who’s out jogging, whether or not that person possesses physical beauty. And even if you encounter a person who is not someone you would normally feel easily connected to, you can connect. You can connect to everyone that you meet, regardless of his or her politics, or his or her race, or his or her gender, or his or her age. Just let yourself feel the rich tapestry of humanity that each person represents, because, like you, each person you meet experiences all the same emotions of human existence, from happiness to sadness to joy to boredom to excitement to fear to sadness to hope. And so you may also notice that this channeling session, this collection of words, is itself an example of something in which you let yourself set forth on a goal to learn about right timing, yet you walked along a wide-ranging and roundabout path, that touched upon many ideas, but which led back to this insight into the nature of time: Time is like space. It is a dimension that you can explore. And, as with space, you can move through it. You can propel yourself backwards and forwards and sideways. You can stand still. You can find it frustrating—or you can marvel at its enormous affordance of opportunity. Because you can do whatever you want with it. You can choose, always, where to step, and how to experience the present moment. Once you’ve fully and completely grasped the fact that you can choose how you want to experience each moment, you can transcend the paradox of being both the driver and the passenger in time and space, and in your life. --Ophir Painting: Salvador Dali, Figure at a Window, 1925, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain |