This has been a crazy year. I have been planning a wedding & busy starting my own businesses, Fantasy Photos and Paul Micarelli Design. However, I still try to keep my pulse on news & current events.
Having the ridiculous human being known as Donald Trump as President of the US has proved to be the embarrassing disaster that anyone with any common sense could have predicted. Only the most insulated conservative true-believers think he has any redeeming qualities whatsoever. I have mostly given up on commenting on politics, especially Trump's painfully obvious con-game on the country, because every damn day there is something that makes reasonable people throw up their hands in disgust or disbelief.
I don't know what this upcoming year will bring, but at this time of transition it is important to remember that the only constant is change, as Heraclitus observed. All things will pass in time, including Trump, America, humanity, planet Earth, the Universe, and ourselves. Every moment is a bardo, or transitional state from the past to the future. The only "real" time is the ever-changing NOW.
The ancient Romans used the two-faced Janus as the symbol of the transition of the new year. In that spirit, I'm posting this creation I made, using two stylized self-portraits:
"Mood Swings"
by Paul Micarelli
In reality, my emotional state is pretty stable, & I don't swing between moods nearly this drastically! My whole adult life, I've practiced meditation techniques and, more recently, different styles of yoga. I've learned to control my emotional reactions, without bottling them up in an unhealthy way. I still have deep emotions, though, and sometimes I can lose my cool like any other person. Everyone has varying states of mind and conflicting sensations:
Emotional & Calm • Good & Bad • Hot & Cold • Light & Dark • Happy & Sad • Loud & Quiet
Reality, according to human perception, seems to consist of these kinds of binary states & dualistic extremes. The truth, however, is that out of the Infinite Unity, all seemingly opposite things arise & dissolve. Duality and multiplicity are illusions of our discerning consciousness and our mind's desire to seek patterns of categorization.
These conceptual models of opposites are helpful as tools in understanding the world, but can blind us to the fundamental "One-ness" of everything.
As we move continually into new states of being, may we keep this truth in mind- and realize that all the phenomena in this world is a dance of energy in an infinite field of possibility.
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