Happy Birthday Haiku

“Our inner lives are every bit as astonishing,
baffling, and mysterious
as the infinite vastness of the cosmos.”
~ Adyashanti

Adyashanti’s words speak volumes to me as I am in the pondering process related to culling everything SCS-Matters in preparation for a new DebraBasham.com website. What to keep, what to save. What to repackage or repurpose. What to give away, what to sell; what to forget and what to savor. Timely for my birthday today.

I wake up this morning having turned 73. While some dread aging, I experience each day of aging as grace. It seems having had birth trauma, and medical trauma at age 5, and a near-death experience at age 12 prepared me for LIFE.

Again today a mocking bird was sitting on the fence directly outside of the kitchen window of the house we are sharing with Linda and Larry this winter. The title of To Kill a Mockingbird has very little literal connection to the plot, but it carries a great deal of symbolic weight in the book. In this story of innocents destroyed by evil, the “mockingbird” comes to represent the idea of innocence. Some of the key characteristics and attributes of Mockingbird Animal Spirit include inventiveness, keen-mindedness, happiness, playfulness, protection, thankfulness, security, and, most of all, communication.

For sure, the Imagine Healing process is something I want to have available to the world. It is such gift to see in every surgery or injury or experience myriad opportunities. Why just go through whatever it is on the surface level. Let that bruise be an evidence procedure of healing of memories, beliefs, behaviors, or attitudes that lessen the amazement of living. Every moment of every day we are meeting life on infinite levels and awareness provides a HUGE happening from the most mundane. I don’t even just brush my teeth!!!

When Joel Bowman and I were actively training folks in the Imagine Healing process we always did mock surgery as a role-play and students experienced an ectomy (removal of something they and others in the world would be better off without) and implant (something beneficial they and others in the world had not been able to have previously). Imagine a fear ectomy and a joy implant….

January 22 is a birthday I share with my friend Wayne Kaiser. This is the first year since we have been friends that I am in body and Wayne is in spirit. I do not think of Wayne as dead. In fact, I cannot comprehend death as different from birth, and this week I listened to an amazing account of Rabbi Stephen Robbins (who has had 8 near-death-experiences!!!) and, as my birthday ritual, will share some of his beautiful comments about life.

“Every soul is formed to do one of three things. One is to take something out of the world which no longer belongs — either a treatment or a system of genetics which don’t belong in the world anymore or a spiritual quality that can be stopped. The other is to bring something new into the world of knowledge or experience — an insight that has not been there before. And the third is to synergize both of them so that what comes in is the sense of what it means to live a life for service and for purpose rather than for our own gain.”

“So that in our leaving this world and realizing there is no death, we change the genetic out-pour that will stop the repetition of the destructiveness like drug addiction, child abuse, violent acquisition — and at the same time will add a sense of insight and understanding which will lead beyond living with a sense of the limitation in this life.” (Rabbi Stephen Robbins 8 Near Death Experiences)

If in our daily life we can smile, if we can be peaceful and happy, not only we, but everyone will profit from it. This is the most basic kind of peace work. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Yesterday Linda and I spent our day busy in the kitchen. She roasted a turkey and we have made a dinner for friends out on Pine Island that are living in (while doing rehab) after Hurricane Ian filled their manufactured home with four feet of floodwater. Four months later they do not yet have a stove. Mind you, theirs is a three-generational family including their adult daughter and their 4-year old grandson. Today we will deliver turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, carrots, two-corn casserole, and brownies. These can be warmed in the microwave oven they do have. I told Linda that this is my best birthday dinner ever.

After the delivery, we will attend a matinee of “The Sound of Music” at the Cultural Park Theater in Cape Coral, before meeting Nancy Green for dinner at Miceli’s in Matlacha. In 2013 John and I went there for my birthday dinner and discovered they give you a free entree plus desert ON YOUR BIRTHDAY. We have gone back every year since. It is bittersweet to go this year after soooo much of what was familiar and special about our beloved Florida community was damaged, devastated, or destroyed.

Even in the midst of loss there is gift….

A Happy Birthday Haiku

I am young no more
Neither am I old
I am timeless like the wind

I do change a lot
No longer the same
I’m here and there however

Here and there am I
Not one single place
Ever moving, always free

Happy Birthday, Wayne Kaiser. Happy Birthday, Debra Basham.

And many happy returns.

He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart. – Ecclesiastes 3:11

Don’t Go Back to Sleep
by Rumi

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.

The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.