Empty Sky --blessed 2013

May your New Year be blessed with peace and inspiration, my friends,
CG

CG Walters primarily writes fiction that focuses on the multidimensionality of our loves and our lives.

If you are enjoying the features of CG's blog, get future installments sent directly to your email or reader via RSS feed.

Good Samaritans help baby fighting for life - Humanity Healing Community

Good Samaritans help baby fighting for life - Humanity Healing Community

BY ALEX GRANADOS

North Raleigh residents Brian and Vicki Allison look for one special person or family to help every year. This year, they couldn’t find one. Then Vicki walked into Papertown on Spring Forest Road and learned about a Spring Hope family and their baby, Michael.

His full name is Michael Ronnie Anselmo. He was born Aug. 30 and is named for his father. What would ordinarily be a joyous occasion was marred for Anselmo and his wife, Bri Gunn. Baby Michael was born with hypoplastic left heart syndrome, or HLHS for short.

The left side of Michael’s heart isn’t working, and he has had two operations already to make sure that the right side can handle the workload for the whole heart.

Baby Michael Anselmo was born with only one side of his heart working and has needed multiple surgeries.

CLICK FOR MORE PHOTOS

He’ll be going home Monday with a feeding tube. Then the week before Christmas, Anselmo and Gunn will bring him back for a surgery to install a bigger stent.

After that, if everything goes OK, Michael will come back when he is 2 to have one more stent put in. By then, Anselmo says, he hopes they can get Michael a heart transplant. But doctors won’t put Michael on a transplant list until after his Christmas surgery, and then Anselmo doesn’t have any idea how long it will be before his baby receives a new heart.

“The situation this baby’s in, a miracle may happen, and you pray for it, but you automatically know what kind of stress that family’s under and how the medical bills must be mounting up,” Vicki said.

To make matters worse, Gunn is suffering from post-partum depression and is unable to care for the baby or herself. Her husband is shouldering the responsibility for the whole family, which means he had to leave behind his construction business and the income it provided.

“It’s hard, but like I told the doctors here, I don’t really have time to process it,” Anselmo said. “I have to be here to make sure he’s taken care of, and the wife is taken care of.”

Vicki and Brian will hold a fundraiser for the family Nov. 3. The Allisons have invited neighbors, friends and customers from Brian’s tree business, and they will all gather, eat hamburgers and hot dogs, listen to music, watch a magic show, hold a raffle and take donations. It’s part of a yearly ritual that grew out of odd beginnings.

“Originally it was because I was married to somebody else and the marriage was not very good,” Brian Allison said.

It took three years to get his divorce finalized, and when the paperwork finally went through, Allison decided to have a party. That party was so fun that he repeated it year after year. Eventually, he decided the party should be used to give back.

They help someone different each year. Once it was a young girl with cystic fibrosis. Another year, someone dying of brain cancer.

Allison said he was inspired by an incident in his childhood. He grew up poor, and he can remember his family’s car breaking down. His mom made it to the mechanic’s, but they didn’t have any money for repairs or a place to stay for the night. They were planning to sleep in the car. Then an employee at the shop stepped in, gave them money for food, rented them a hotel room and took care of their car.

“It’s a good feeling for me, and a lot of times I reflect back to that guy who helped us who didn’t know us from anything,” Allison said.

So, every year Allison looks for a stranger and lends a helping hand.

Anselmo and his family certainly fit that bill. Until Medicaid kicked in a couple of weeks ago, they had no insurance for baby Michael’s bills. Even with Medicaid, they will be saddled with a $28,000 bill. Anselmo said that if it weren’t for Medicaid, after the next surgery, they would owe considerably more. He quoted me a cost in the low millions.

“I would be in financial devastation until the day I die,” he said.

It’s hard, Anselmo said. With the exception of good Samaritans like the Allisons, not many people are willing to cut you a break.

“Unfortunately, they don’t care whether your son is fighting for his life or not,” Anselmo said. “Mortgage still wants their mortgage payment, and the car people still want their car payment.”

Anselmo is planning other fundraisers as well. Papertown is having one now, and anybody interested in helping baby Michael can learn more at his Facebook page:www.facebook.com/www.giveforward.comlittlefighter.

Anselmo’s sister has also started a fundraising page at www.giveforward.com/littlefighter.

“We’re trying to do whatever we can to try not to lose everything,” Anselmo said.

With a little help from some people who don’t know them from anything, Anselmo and Gunn might succeed.

Alex Granados writes about people, places and traditions in North Raleigh and beyond. Contact him atagranadoster@gmail.com.

We are the Vessel

We do not choose art, path, message, or song...it chooses us. We are just the vessel.--modified from Madeleine L'Engle

--And the one chosen may not always be the most obvious choice from our perspective, but they will be the most 'perfect' choice for the purpose of that seeking a vessel.

eukrendis numerosa- the mystic child --by Eddi 07

Strike a Chord of Silence is CG's new book of metaphysical maxims and essays.

Sacred Vow is available from Amazon as Kindle version or printed copy. 

"You may journey forever, when you find [dance] the road within...."

Thank you David Klamph  for this video: 

MATRIX FOR ALL

If you are having trouble viewing the video, go to:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AkMHXELyOs

CG Walters primarily writes fiction that focuses on the multidimensionality of our loves and our lives.

If you are enjoying the features of CG's blog, get future installments sent directly to your email or reader via RSS feed.

Beltane Gratitude

We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures. -- Thornton Wilder

Silence by alicepopkorn

Happiness is itself a kind of gratitude. -- Joseph Wood Krutch

This is an archive of a previous journey, as my ankle

injury limits my travels into the forest this Spring.

Yet I am grateful for the forest that still invites me.

May the spirit of the forest be with you always.

If you're having trouble viewing the video, go to

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQgyM1aW3no

Blessings and joy to you today, dear ones,

Celebrate What's Right in the World!

CG Walters primarily writes fiction that focuses on the multidimensionality of our loves and our lives.

If you are enjoying the features of CG's blog, get future installments sent directly to your email or reader

Earth Day 2012: The Earth Is My Church

I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright. ~Henry David Thoreau

Watching the sun go down..... by gjeewaytee on and off

In honor of Earth Day celebrations (April 22), I wish you and your dear ones continued blessings, and an ever-increasing sense of connection and communication with our dear Mother Earth.

In Lak'ech Ala K'in,

CG

If you are having trouble viewing the video, go to

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoKAYoe6Tuw

Blessings and joy to you today, dear ones,

Celebrate What's Right in the World!

Lyrics from Video:

The Earth Is My Church

by Periel Marr Stanfield, Alex Beroza & Brad Stanfield

When I put on my Sunday best

I proceed to get undressed

My holy temple requires no clothes

No high heels, no pantyhose

I’m not trying to be malicious

Heretical or sacrilegious

I’m not an atheist, it’s just the reverse

I’m a human soul on a spiritual search

The earth is my church

The earth is my church

The earth is my church

The earth comes first

I don’t need no preacher man

No Sunday school, no master plan

No fiery hell, no mighty sword

No oxy-moronic “holy” wars

I don’t have to bash the bible

All I need for my survival

Is the sun, the sea, the sky, the dirt

And that’s the whole story, chapter and verse

The earth is my church

The earth is my church

The earth is my church

The earth comes first

At one with nature’s innocence

The dolphins and the elephants

I kiss the trees, embrace the sky

I harmonize with the butterflies

Freedom is the final fruition

Of the fate of the human condition

Corruption of religion is history’s curse

Universal love’s the only vision of worth

The earth is my church

The earth is my church

The earth is my church

The earth comes first

The earth is my church

The earth is my church

The earth is my church

The earth is my church

The earth is my church

The earth is my church

The earth is my church

The earth is my church

The Mystic's Path

The mystic's path is any gateway so perfectly aligned to your core nature that it draws you into perfect union with All via complete immersion into a single experience or focus. Romantic love can be such a viable path....to become so unified with one's beloved to the point of the experience becoming communion with the Beloved.

If you are enjoying the features of CG's blog, get future installments sent directly to your email or reader via RSS feed.

CG Walters primarily writes fiction that focuses on the multidimensionality of our loves and our lives.

Autographed/signed copies of CG's "Highly Recommended" (Midwest Book Review) Sacred Vow are available from the author– or purchase from Amazon as Kindle version or printed copy.

Ideologies are Irreconcilable

Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.

--George Santayana

image by Beautymist

I have to be careful not to assess actions as if there was some objective correlation between any deed and what I anticipate as its result. It is a bit of psychological shorthand, often inspired by the pace in which we try to process information/experience these days. However, the price of this convenience is that we might not look deeply enough into the act and its initiator to recognize their true character. After all, it is primarily the motivation/intention of any action that will determine its final nature or manifestation.


Look within the mind that conceived the goal if you seek the tools to judge the value or success.—Strike a Chord of Silence, CG Walters


Alan Watts is a philosopher that I have always enjoyed, mostly because of his combination of insight and unwillingness to take anything too seriously—at least that was the persona of his lectures. In an example of assessing the truest nature of one particular action that is easily categorized—political agenda—this eternally relevant quote from his book, “The Way of Zen” seemed particularly pertinent in the world today.


“It is a basic Confucian principle that it is [a person] that makes a truth great, not truth that makes [a person] great. For this reason, ‘humanness’ or ‘human-heartedness’ (jen) was always felt to be superior to ‘righteousness (i), since [people themselves are] greater than any idea which [they] may invent. There are times when [people’s] passions are much more trustworthy than their principles. Since opposed principles, or ideologies, are irreconcilable, wars (ideological or literal) fought over principle will be wars of mutual annihilation. But wars fought for simple greed (as opposed to ideological/corporate greed) will be far less destructive because the aggressor will be careful not to destroy what he is fighting to capture. Reasonable [humans] will always be capable of compromise, but [people] who have dehumanized themselves by becoming blind worshipers of any idea or an ideal are fanatics whose devotion to abstractions makes them enemies of life.”


In reading this, I was taken with several points:
1) There is at least some benefit to greed (and other ‘bad’ traits, etc.—if we see from a broad enough perspective)


2) Ideologies are irreconcilable, but not people


3) Blindly following an ideal is dehumanizing


Also, I would like to restate this great bit of Confucian wisdom:
It is [a person]--their true nature, and therefore their intention--that makes a truth great, not truth that makes [a person] great.
  ---working in the name of supposed noble cause will not alter the basic petty nature or intention of an self-serving absolutist


For those of you who would like a quick re/introduction to Alan Watts, try these videos http://deoxy.org/watts.htm

Blessings and wonder to you and all you hold dear, 

Celebrate What's Right in the World!

Strike a Chord of Silence, CG's  book of metaphysical maxims and essays.

Available in Kindle  ($.99 USD). International and US print sales, are available at  online bookstores and upon request from your local bookstore.

Autographed/signed copies of Sacred Vow are available from the author– or order from you favorite brick and mortar or online store. Also available  as Amazon Kindle version  or Google Editions.

Receive new editions of Into the Mist through a reader http://feeds.feedburner.com/IntoTheMist

CG Walters primarily writes fiction that focuses on the multidimensionality of our loves and our lives.

The True Nature Shines

People are like stained-glass windows.
They sparkle and shine when the sun is out,
but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed
only if there is a light from within. -- Elizabeth Kübler-Ross

Meditation Transcendence 

By h.koppdelaney


Given the misogynistic nature of much of the politics in the U.S. these days, I think it very appropriate to have been gifted with this video at this time. Women, ask yourself, 'how would you treat yourself (or allow others to treat you) if you knew you were sacred?

This is from a Youtube friend, InnerVoiceAngel
Sacred

If you are having trouble viewing the video, go to:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCwSZU6VeSM

Blessings and wonder to you and all you hold dear, 

Celebrate What's Right in the World!

CG Walters primarily writes fiction that focuses on the multidimensionality of our loves and our lives.

If you are enjoying the features of CG's blog, get future installments sent directly to your email or reader via RSS feed.