spy vs spy

good news: cuteness rules

"Money Magic Trick for Homeless" nice story xposted from GD

you are right, it's what makes the most sense. if people stop and use their brains and common sense.

but it's in the heart where the real power lies.

Reason and logic can't always break through
a lifetime of wrong beliefs. But when the heart
is touched, it starts a new perspective -- and
even the most dogmatic will re-think their
positions.

thank you! very thoughtful point of view

and I agree ..
except that peace isn't something we're going to
create, nor will governments, because it is already
here, in existence, inside every human being.

When we learn to tap into that, into our own
human hearts, peace on earth will have a chance,
and maybe humans will start trusting one another
again, living with integrity.

Creativity Requires Time

I think that creativity is our truest nature. Most of all, don't overanalyze it!

(I just realized you posted your OP back in March..
but you inspired me... and, no guilt allowed.)

Our creativity isn't different from the creativity in all nature.
Talk about active creativity..
and what is the purpose of it?

Blue & gold skies - why bother?
Rainbows? Northern lights? Stars
that are born and die every day,
Different clouds every day, or no clouds,
unmeasurable color combinations,
creatures with legs and antennae,
growing new ones, dropping off old tails or
extra thumbs, or fur;
spots that look like eyes on the
backs of baby bugs, mating colors and dances,

leaves and plants, of every shape smell and color,
tall trees that change colors and creatures
with wings who fly through the air, everywhere,
too many to count.

Wind that makes music with trees and
mountains, windchimes, creatures who
sing to the moon, water that falls from the sky
sometimes frozen sometimes not
and every drop reflects light and color.

stinky dirt that transforms into colorful
fragrant delicious things. even stinky dirt!
creative everything, everywhere. and
worms that help!! squiggly slimy things.
made out of dirt & water, like we are.

it goes on and on: new things coming into
existence and old things vanishing
into time (as we also will.) Creativity.

One time I was in an airplane, looking
down at the clouds. And I wondered, why are
the clouds so beautiful from the top? Surely
not designed for anyone to see, not even
birds fly that high.. still they were exquisite,
vast mountain ranges of clouds, every sort,
miles high in the sky.

And I concluded that it just can't help
itself, that Creativity. It just has to keep
making beautiful stuff. That's what it does,
no time to stop and think about it.

But I understand the question about purpose,
and often have asked myself the same. If it
isn't making money, it's hard to justify.
If it's FUN, it's hard to justify. If 'impractical'
it's hard to justify. WRONG

It's like breathing. The creative is a force within you,
me, within everything. We are part of that. It is the
most natural state of a human being, to be creative.

I suppose one spring the grass and flowers might
ponder: should we or should we not grow and
bloom this year? Everything just dies again in the fall,
and the world hasn't changed a bit for me blooming.

But for a creative person, it's like breathing.
We ought to use our gifts, if we can.
That's what they are for.

Regardless of belief in a god, or not,
there is something I call life itself,
or beauty itself,
which I recognize as omnipresent,
but most importantly,
it is the force inside of me that makes me
breathe and live.

It is my creator; it doesn't need any name, but
it keeps creating me, from
birth to death, as long as I live and breathe.

So when I am also being creative, I feel closest to
that beautiful energy.

Death is part of life, that's how it is. We may not like it but

people and the myriad creatures have been doing it for a long
long time. We are dust to dust, and that's how it is, and
can't be changed. It is not terrible.

Pain is real. Your pain is clearly deep and agonizing, and I
do empathize because I have lived much of my life on the
edge of madness, peering into death, and believing in
almighty hopelessness. The pain which hurts so much
that you turn off all feeling. Hope seems like a joke
and so does the occasional happy moment, a cruel joke,
because what I'm used to is pain, that's what's familiar.

I'm not there any more, it's been a long hard climb.

There is beauty everywhere, and hope as well.
There is a ton of shitty stuff but that is NOT courtesy
of Life -- it is courtesy of human beings.

Life does stuff like turn dirt into fragrant colorful
flowers, or food, or living breathing walking creatures.

Life makes winds blow and cells dance and hearts
beat. Life recycles it all, including us, in a never-
ending cycle of compost here on earth. One day it
may all be ruined, or one day it may all be restored,
we don't know. There are millions of good people
on the planet who care and work hard to make it
good, to help. We are on that team.

If you give all of your attention to the miseries of the world,
it will fill your vision, like a swarm of enormous bugs on a
windshield. You won't be able to see anything else.

You and I have a choice about this.

If I want darkness and misery, that's what I will nourish in me.
If I want to feel suicidal and hopeless, that's what I will nurture.

Here's how:
All of my thoughts will be spent on thinking about the miserable stuff.
I will read and or watch only miserable bad news from every possible source.
I will reinforce the badness by thinking about it over and over.
The more I do, the worse I will feel, which will only prove me right.
I will let everyone else know how crappy everything is,
and reinforce my belief that this is the truth.
Whenever I do something good, or feel good, I will remind myself
that I am bad, or that happiness is false and fleeting. I
will reject hopeful thoughts and feelings, even if
they are coming from my own heart.

You're here at DU, I am guessing, because you wish for a better world.
But you must be part of it. We can't afford to lose any
of us to hopelessness. Keep some hope alive for the team.

the ability to feel includes our sense of touch, which is both internal and external

This is a machine, this body, designed for feeling.

Without the ability to feel, we can't feel our wounds.
It's a survival instinct -- to learn not to feel --
for a threatened creature.

Threatened too often, the creature learns not to
feel, and eventually forgets how -- becoming
hostile and unhealthy, depressed, and/or more.

If we can't feel, we don't know to drink water,
or not to touch a hot fire.

If we can't feel, we can't discern hot and cold, or
feel our stomachs grumbling for food.

If we can't feel, we don't know when to sleep, or
what to eat, or how to do pretty much anything,
unless someone has programmed our brains for
us.

Human beings are meant to feel -- from the tips of
our fingers and toes, all the way into our insides,
every square inch of skin, our organs, the beating
heart, the breath, the swallow, the food moving
down the esophagus. And deep into our emotional
body, the psychic body, the subtle body, where our
emotions rush and swirl, and trigger all sorts of
chemical reactions, and we can feel these chemicals
which are our emotions not in our minds but in our
bodies, and they can instruct us. And our beautiful
breath and beating heart can ground us in their
rhythms. and they do, if we give them a chance.

We have feelers. We are feeling creatures.
Thinking creatures, yes, but foremost designed
to feel, in nearly every particle of our being.

"death could really suck worse than life"

Yeah.. we just don't know. I have a feeling it's not a good solution.

Often with depression and ptsd there is a persistent and
overwhelming desire to sleep. I used to fight this, as a sign of
something wrong with me, this utter exhaustion of body mind
and spirit that made me want oblivion.

Not accepting that sleep was what I needed, I longed for
death.

A friend who survived profound and violent abuse said
to me one day "maybe you need to sleep."
I needed to sleep, and to stop judging myself.

We pay too much attention to all the inherited voices
in our heads, and not enough to the innate, built-in
self. This includes our simplest survival urges, our most
childlike needs (which for most of us weren't met).

It includes the urge to sleep, it includes the urge
for water and food. Our bodies alone can give us
so much information for our healing.

When we lose touch with our ability to feel,
we go insane, or die, or become dangerous to
ourselves or others.