Tag: life

On To More Rewards

Many years ago I would say I lost my way. Or, perhaps the powers that be saw an opportunity in me to be a good example for others. So on I went about my merry way barely making two sober-minded decisions a day and few of them ever were when I was sober, because, who has time for that…LoL

Whether it was alcohol, a 1-pound bag of Skittles, a HUGE bowl of salty/buttery popcorn, or any other thing in life I could add to my equation to stimulate me was on the menu most of the time. Sober-minded decisions were not being made.

I found it first took a clean, sober body before my mind was able to make sober-minded decisions…😎.

I love how ultimately it is my body that goes before me and if I walk in its ways, following its paths of righteousness, I find myself missing the mark less and less. Oh…And I don’t miss my old life one bit.

It has taken me 50 years to become the person I’ve always wanted to be. I believe I finally understand what it means to truly love myself and I’m ready for another century to learn more, serve more, to live more. Because LIFE is the reward.

I could have missed the pain but then I would have missed the dance according to Garth Brooks. I couldn’t say it better.

I’ve spent the last five years recovering from a life of excess consumption of many things that were not beneficial for my overall life and wellbeing. I am grateful for every day that I have before me and I am very happy that I began listening to my body.

When I began this journey I thought I was just giving up drinking but it has been so much more than that. A return to a fullness of life and a life much more abundant.

Our body speaks to us continuously if we listen. It whispers but sometimes it floods. And it has two messages; pleasure and pain. One for when you do things the wrong way leading to death and the other pleasure(reward) for doing things the right way leading to life.

I have found that life is much easier living in a state of reward…😎

And I thank you all for letting me tell this story.

On to more rewards.

A Boulder Lifted

Could my body create a problem big enough that it couldn’t fix it? I am going to suggest the answer is no. Our body doesn’t have the ability to kill itself. Its imperatives are too divine. That would be against its own will and nature.

Or better yet can I even know enough about reality to make the above statement with any surety other than my own self-inflated sense of authority? Maybe not in so much as my knowledge is subject to my own limitations. Yikes. Here we go

The creation that I exist in is infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in its being, wisdom, and power. It is all-sufficient, incomprehensible in its fullness, everywhere in its presence and it is a recording of all things.

The creation that I know exists in and of itself and from itself and is in no way dependent on us for its existence. My creation is not served by me, on the contrary, I am served by it.

The creation that I find in my existence is not unique to me but a stream that is constantly flowing in only one direction without variance. Death is the past, the finite time we call life spent whether productive or not, our most valuable asset, time that cannot be recovered because it is past. That is the realm of death. Now, this present existence, is what is flowing through the river of life, the space-time continuum, what we call our experience is one reason why we are here. To observe and to write it down for future generations to look upon to better understand their present life. Our future is hope. Hope is all we have to look forward to because we cannot do anything about it any more than we can change the past. Of course, we can make plans and even try and execute them, but there is no way of knowing if we will succeed. And hope, if well exercised, allows us the benefits of a sort of salve for the bruises we currently receive and experience as we feel our way, with limited vision, around in this world as we move onward and upward.

As far as I can tell it is futile to even imagine a beginning or an end. I don’t have a light bright enough to shine that far back in time to see what a beginning would look like anyways. My history does not begin and end with me, that is the realm of my creator and its creation. It is the beginning and end; I am just along for the ride and the water is nice in this river of water of life.

If I want to know what is the purpose of this creation of mine I need to look no further than the creation around me. Its purpose and function are everywhere; it knows no different. Our creation, its purpose is life, and life more abundant as each opportunity presents itself. If there is any lack of goodness or purpose in the creation around me it is because I or one like me has interfered in the course of nature; the stream of life(all things).

Purpose, symmetry, and asymmetry…Balance.

Apparently, my creator is also very merciful; compassionate in every way imaginable knowing the unusual amount of distress I once embodied as a creation; even to the ignoring of the continual and even willful missing of the mark. That mark and standard being life, in and of itself.

In its infinite wisdom, my creator placed within its creation provision for the inevitability that marks would be missed and messes well made would need to be cleaned up. Not only is my creator compassionate enough to fix my problems but had enough forethought to plan on them.

The creation I enjoy supplies all of my needs even if I don’t understand that some of what I think I need is not as much of a need, but a desire, or something that possesses me; a possession, which is most likely a liability. It is only when I strip away that which possesses me, that I, with sober-minded clarity, see that my needs are very small and always met, it’s just that I have become gluttonous in my creator’s abundance rather than my own understanding.

This creation is one that does not, by nature, cause distress, but that does not mean that I or one like me within creation cannot, or does not, foment that which is distressing. I know…I am a drama-sapien. It is how, in my own head, I add meaning to my existence. If by chance that added meaning, narrative, or for better lack of a term, drama spills out into the creation around me, somehow mercy was there waiting for me too, with a smile; mop in hand.

This garden I know(my body); is planted within creation, crafted by my creator who is clearly slow to anger. Forgiving of inequity and iniquity alike to maintain a creation free from hindrance always working all things back to the center. Ultimately ready to forgive me for both and more.

The lusts and overindulgences I exhibit in this creation are independent of the creator’s explicit creative act and are inconsistent with my creator’s will(direction/flow). My indiscretions are only eggs on my face and in no way a reflection of my creator.

The creator is not difficult to understand, separated from its creation standing by with disinterest; far from it. And if I ever for a moment begin to think that the river of water of life I find myself in is going to stop, reverse, and flow the other way I should just slap myself. That’s just silly. My creator seems to only know ONE WAY—>

My creation does not and cannot suffer. It only knows life and conservation thereof even through death. My creator is without body, parts, or passions. Without emotion, whether grief, pain, or sorrow; knowing only stability and steadiness of course through its action.

I imagine my creator is nothing I could or should even begin to wrap an image around. So far every god I’ve seen fashioned seems to look an awful lot like the creature rather than the creation. That and I might not like what I see if I actually were able to observe it.

And even if I were able to observe such a creator I imagine it would simply invoke more questions than answers in that the answers were likely never intended to be found, much less searched out.

There is no limit to creation, my creator, or its creative powers. Yet I am limited by what I call time. Limited to such a small sliver of my creators existence that it appears immovable; like a rock. Like a statue frozen in time. Like a man with a swatter, chasing after a fly, wrenching out one grand gesture after another while that fly, from its perspective, is making an epic voyage, like Christopher Columbus, across the vast Sea of Kitchen. I imagine we look much like the Statue of Liberty to that annoying imp of a buzzard.

The power and wisdom of our creator are everywhere all at once in balance whether we see all that is being held in balance; homeostasis.

The power of our creator and creation is a life-giving force that flows from one source; our innermost being and it is simpler than we can imagine because it is precisely the fruit and excesses of our imagination that obscures our access to this creative life-giving force within.

That which is called god for better lack of language is always making provision, continually creating for our future, providing for us everything we need even in our ignorance; gross, slight, or acute. Nature doesn’t just rain on individuals but upon us all, even though it might occasionally seem so as it can appear as though the sun doth smile upon us uniquely at times. That is the joy of creation always working towards the center towards balance and homeostasis.

My creator is always right and good and just; factors of which I have no bearing. A unity in the simplicity of its parts that begins with one that becomes everything else fulfilling all creation as intended from a grand illusion we see as a beginning. We couldn’t create a god if we tried because everything that already exists is god in essence and it is I, the hearty fool to think he can improve on perfection.

It was in me all along…

-Michael J. Loomis

What Disease?

I will proclaim that there is no such thing as disease from this day forward. That is not to say that there aren’t disorders of function(disfunction) within the human experience. Indeed there is, and we have all experienced disorders to one degree or another.

In other words, I am going to do my best to remove the term disease from my linguistic arsenal because I believe it to be problematic. Problematic in that it allows for a continued building up of ideas and language that takes us further away from the truth of what disease truly is. An advanced state of aging. A problem resulting from our body lacking the vital energies needed to repair or replace the components that we are wearing out. To say it another way, we are using up our body’s resources faster than we can renew them.

And so in some sense, the word disease becomes an expensive paywall that prevents us from understanding what is really going on. And this disease is simply the first paywall or locked door that keeps us from really understanding what is really going on. Once you are convinced that you have a disease and you have gone through that door, it is further separated out into many other doorways and dim passages by which the initial problem becomes even more confused, obscured, blurred, and specialized into other, even scarier sounding disorders and diseases that become even more difficult to understand. This then ultimately leads us down the road to needing a doctor to guide us as blind people through the perilous straights of murky medical terminology. By the time the common man gets to this point they don’t know what to do. And in many cases, their doctor’s primary care doctors know little more. From this point, specialists who hold the keys of knowledge hidden behind the doors of specialties and specific diagnoses aren’t really able to help us better understand what is going on simply because they lack the time or skills needed to easily teach us in plain language what is really going on within our body. And thus we simply trust them in their decision-making processes that landed us in their care in the first place. And once most people get to this point there is little they can do other than say okay, submitting ourselves to a course of treatment that isn’t necessarily going to get us back to a state of homeostasis. To a place of normalcy where our body can once again be in its default state of organic and biological flow where everything is working with ease.

And this then leads us back to life…

There is only life and life exists regardless of our consciousness of it. We get to participate in it for a period of time. A span. A spectrum of existence that begins with what we humans call birth, and that existence has a temporal ending that we call death. Metaphorically speaking, we are simply an act if you will. A scene in a movie or play that makes up the whole of our individual lives. Our act or scene is a story that has many stages in between its temporal beginning and end. One story; yet two natures. One that is physical and the other that is spiritual. One is the story of our physical body and the other is that which we call our consciousness. Yet, both are a part of the same individual story that makes up each individual human life. And it is all an animated existence powered by electrical energy.

Our physical body is an organic, carbon-based life form that has been drawn up, gathered together, animated, and electrified as a utilitarian, beneficial, and necessary part of life here on Earth. We are here for a reason. In some sense acting as a counterbalance to another factor that exists within the realm of life on Earth.

So where does disease fit into all of this talk of man’s nature? What if I told you that disease is simply a metaphor for aging that has been used as a marketing tool in some sense? Well, that’s exactly what it is. The marketing of an idea that at the very least implies that there is something going on in our body that is out of our control that needs some form of external input, whether by ourselves or the hands of another.

So let’s remove the word disease from our common use of language and call it what it is then. Simply aging.

Beginning somewhere between conception and birth, aging has been defined as a steady decline or reduction of physiological function that leads to increased susceptibility to diseases that will ultimately end in biological death.

Beginning –> Aging –> Disease –> Death/End

When compared to other mammals, humans have what appears on the surface to be a longer lifespan. Approximately 120 years according to what humans have defined as a solar year consisting of 365 1/4 days.

Sidenote: I would like to argue that all mammals within their individual context from their own perspective experience the same amount of perceptible time known as a lifespan regardless of how humans define time. The idea that a day to a human would be something like a week to a dog, as an example. This might explain why a dog is so happy to see its human that has been gone on a two-week vacation. To us humans, it has only been two weeks, but to that dog, perhaps, it has been something akin to us having been gone for almost 2 months time.

Standard evolutionary models of aging are explained as the full potential of our body’s ability to repair or replace cells that would allow for continued existence. The idea is that over time, what we call natural selection, through a process called senescence, or the deterioration of age, begins to exert less effort in the removal of our spent cells. Our body loses its will to take out the trash, if you will.

This brings me back to the state that we have classically called disease. And this is the basis by which I would like to suggest that we stop using this negative, pejorative term for what is simply the process of aging.