April 11, 2013 by IdealisticRebel

The Dalhai Lama and his wise and love filled words.

The Dalai Lama and his wise and love filled words.

Ghazal of Hazrat Inayat Khan

“Thanks be to God, the very world that birthed us
now is bathed by wondrous Nature
in a rapture of her glorious light:
the splendor of Earth, Air, Fire, and Water, now revealed.
And humankind, highest of creatures, endowed with Intellect’s might
so that all the beasts, wing’d and hoof’d
are place under his command
And Adam’s veins are filled
with Art, Science, Faith:
he knows the sciences are clear
–but music is the weightiest
as a surging ocean
outweights the very world through which it flows.

If he whose heart’s been moved
by the science of Music’s world effect
Were offered the pleasure of emperorship,
he’s certainly ignoring it
–for Man is not alone in his delight
at that sweet sound
since even animals have sacrificed themselves for it.

More stubborn than a donkey,
he who holds that Music’s “impure”;
Ignorant of beaty,
how clain acquaintance with the Lord?

Creator!

The ocean surges!
Permit my skiff to reach the shore
-King!
I beg what kindness thou canst afford.”

—-Hazrat Inayat Khan, founder of Chisti Sufi Order

what a wonderful gift

Have you heard the music of the spheres?

Open air amplitheatre at Chautuaqua Institute, NY. Photo copyrighted in 2001 by Barbara Mattio

April 9, 2013 by IdealisticRebel

Heartbreak again in America

We must find a way to coexist.

Lone Star College has suffered its second mass attack. The first, as you might remember was a mass shooting. A terrible event for students and parents to live through. Sadly, mass murders and mass attacks are becoming part of the tapestry of American life. WHY?! How could so much anger and hatred be breeding within our shores?

Today, this campus was invaded again by pain, terror and tragedy. A male suspect dressed in black, had stabbed 15 people, four of whom have been life-flighted to the hospital. It appears that an X-acto knife or a box cutter, or another knife, may have been the weapon used. One young woman interviewed stated that a woman had been cut around her mouth.

Lone Star Campus

An item like this was the possible weapon

My heart is screaming. More children, more injuries, tears for students and teachers and parents. Fear, on this campus and others, has reached a crippling state. This is horrifying. I have a grandson, not in Texas, who is in college, and this sort of violence terrifies me on his behalf. And still, we do not learn.

Hatred is not holy, or religious, or beneficial. We must turn away from anger and hatred. We have to learn to live with acceptance and love and courtesy.
This country will die — we will continue to kill each other — if we do not teach our children to love, to be kind, to give, to accept and not to judge. We need to protect our children and change our society to a loving and accepting society.

Hearts need to be more important than guns or knives.

Until we learn to accept one another, to teach love instead of intolerance, to stamp out prejudice in favor of caring, this sort of tragedy will continue to occur. We must do more than cry and wail and beat our chests. We must ACT, in love and in compassion and ensure that the next generation does not continue the violence.

February 27, 2013 by IdealisticRebel

One World Filled With One People

I am thinking today about the women who have been my friends and support in life. I am grateful for all that they have added to my life. As I think back it was they that helped me accomplish all that I have done. There is an connection between women forged by survived violence against women, injustice, oppression and we are an important part of American Life. We have stood up to discrimination and put-downs and we have gotten back up each time we were knocked down. In truth, we started a revolution that affects men and women everywhere.

I loved this video because as we move around the world living our lives, we meet so many men and women from other cultures and relighons. We all live here on this one planet. We don’t look alike, we don’t all think alike or love alike, but we are all children of the Universe. Love for the One and each other is what binds us together. Caring about all the women and men in the world who are suffering under oppression, who have not medicine for something as simple as TB or Malaria, who have to watch their children starve to death.

The language of the people of this planet is love, music, dance and creativity. This language is what gives us the courage to fight for the best in ourselves and each other.

February 15, 2013 by IdealisticRebel

Healing Humanity

There is nothing really for me to say. We are all made of star dust and we are all children of the Universe. The richness of life is the beauty of our differences.

May our differences bring joy, not fear,

May our differences make us stronger,

May we all turn from the need of power and control, from greed and jealousies.

May we all raise our voices in love to The One.

May we remember how to be compassionate and forgiving.

—By Barbara Mattio

Greatness is what you give.

February 2, 2013 by IdealisticRebel

A Day For Contemplation

Love in the World

Roaming in Thought

“Roaming in thought over the Universe, I saw the little that is Good steadily hastening towards immorality, And the vast all that is call’d Evil I saw hastening to merge itself and become lost and dead.” –Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

The Snow Light

In the snow light,
In the swan light,
In the white-on-white light
of a winter storm,
my delight and your delight
Kept each other warm.

The next afternoon
and love gone so soon!-
I met myself alone
In a windless calm,
Silenced at the bone
After the white storm.

What more was to come?
Out from the cocoon,
in the silent room,
pouring our white light,
amaryllis bloom
opened in the night.

The cool petals shone
like some winter moon
or shadow of a swan,
echoing the light
after you were gone
Of our white-on-white.”
—May Sarton

One Life

“A woman walking in a walker on the cliffs
recalls great bodily joys, much pain.
Nothing in her is apt to say
my heart aches, though she read those words
in a battered college text, this morning
as the sun rose. It is all too
mixed, the heart too mixed with laughter
raucousing the grief, her life
too mixed, she shakes her heavy
silvered hair at all the fixed
declarations of baggage. I should be dead and I’m alive
don’t ask me how; I don’t eat like I should
and still I like how the drop of vodka
hits the tongue. I was a worker and a mother,
that means a worker and a worker
but for one you don’t pay union dues
or get a pension; for the other
the men ran the union, we ran the home.
It was terrible and good, we had more than half a life,
I had four lives at least, one out of marriage
when I kicked up all the dust I could
before I know what I was doing.
One life with the girls on the line during the war,
yes, painting our legs and jitterbugging together
one life with a husband, not the worst,
one with your children, none of it just what you’d thought.
We took what we could.
But even this is a life, I’m reading a lot of books
I never read, my daughter brought home from school,
plays where you can almost hear them talking,
Romantic poets, Isaac Babel. A lot of lives
worse and better than what I knew. I’m walking again.
My heart doesn’t ache; sometimes though it rages.” —–Adrienne Rich

Gayan

“if you will go forward to find Us, We will come forward to receive you.
Give Us all you have, and We shall give you all We possess.
In man We have designed Our image; in woman We have finished it.
In man We have shown Our nature benign; in woman We have expressed Our art divine.
Make God a reality, and God will make you the truth.
Give all you have, and take all that is given to you.” —excerpted from The Complete Sayings; Hazrat Inayat Khan

The receipe is to add positive energy to the negativity you find.

The recipe is to add positive energy to the negativity you find.

I am love

Be free, be love
Photo by Barbara Mattio

January 27, 2013 by IdealisticRebel

Act As If

Photo by Barbara Mattio

“You’ve got to get up every morning with a smile on your face, And show the world all the love in your heart .Then people gonna treat you better. You’re gonna find, yes, you will. That you’re beautiful as you feel.” —–Carole King

Boat launch near Cleveland. Photo by Barbara Mattio

Act as if.” There’s magic in behaving the way we want to be, even though we don’t yet feel it. The behavior seems to lead the way. The attitude, the mental state follows.

Many days we we may not get up with love in our hearts for our family, our friends, our co-workers. We may, in fact, want them to show their love for us first.

If we reach out, give love unconditionally, focus on another’s needs, love will return tenfold.And the act of loving them will lift our own spirits. We will know love; we feel love for ourselves and the many other persons close to us. The principle is so simple, if we meet life with love, with a smile, we’ll find love and something to smile about.

Evening stroll

January 27, 2013 by IdealisticRebel

Praise for The Divine

The color of flowers

The Wild Rose of Praise

Those unable to grieve,
or to speak their love,
or to be grateful, those
who can’t remember God
as the source of everything.

Might be described as vacant wind,
or a cold anvil, or a group
of frightened old people.

Say the Name. Moisten your tongue
with praise, and be the spring ground,
waking. Let your mouth be given
its gold-yellow stamen like the wild rose’s.

As you fill with wisdom,
and your heart with love, there’s no more thirst.

There is only an unselfish patience
waiting on the door-sill, a silence
which doesn’t listen to advise
From people passing in the street.”
—Sanai

“Let the beauty we love be what we do.” —-Rumi

January 8, 2013 by IdealisticRebel

Our Passion for Justice

Justice is part of the foundation of our civilization

Love, like truth and beauty, is concrete. Love is not fundamentally a sweet feeling, not, at heart, a matter of sentiment, attachment, or being “drawn toward.” Love is active, effective, a matter of making reciprocal and mutually beneficial relation with one’s friends and enemies. Love creates righteousness, or justice here on earth. To make love is to make justice. As advocates and activists for justice know, loving involves struggle, resistance, risk. People working today on behalf of women, blacks, lesbians and gay men, the aging, the poor in this country and elsewhere know that making justice is not a warm, fuzzy experience. I think also that sexual lovers and good friends know that the most compelling relationships demand hard work, patience, and a willingness to endure tensions and anxiety in creating mutually empowering bonds.

For this reason loving involves commitment. We are not automatic lovers of self, others, world, or God. Love does not just happen. We are not love machines, puppets on the strings of a deity called “love.” Love is a choice–not simply, or necessarily, a rational choice, but rather a willingness to be present to others without pretense or guile. Love is a conversion to humanity–a willingness to participate with others in the healing of a broken world and and broken lives. Love is the choice to experience life as a member of the human family, a partner in the dance of life, rather than as an alien in the world or as a deity above the world, aloof and apart from human flesh.
——Excerpted by Carter Hayward from Our Passion for Justice

Sunset Black Mountain, North Carolina Photo by Barbara Mattio

December 25, 2012 by IdealisticRebel

A Quick Message

The bridge from grandma’s house

I would like to take a moment to say I am home and before going to bed, I want to wish you all a wonderful holiday and a joyous day with your families and friends. It has been a real pleasure to “meet” all of you and you. Your blogs and comments brighten my days.

Home for the Holidays

December 19, 2012 by IdealisticRebel

Time to Begin Healing

He is my brother

The town of Newton and the country need to begin the long process of healing. There has been a frightening amount of negative energy released into the world this year. Yes, it does happen every year, but somehow this one felt worse. So what to do? What is the response of rational, thinking, feeling, caring citizens?.

There is a lot of negative energy right now and the numbers of people who have died due to violence is escalating. How should we react in the face of all of this negativity? We use love and light. We walk our spiritual paths and we surround our country with white protective light.

I am talking about working on the spiritual plane right now. The government can and I hope, will handle the issues of violence and gun control facing us now. When we face people with negativity, hatred, greed or power seeking, we need to use compassion, love, and light to carry the message of love and peaceful living into the world.

The idea of meeting violence with violence is not good because it escalates the issues. Caring about other beings is vital for us as children of the Universe. Meeting violence with love is the place I think we need to begin. We need to use forgiveness, compassion as well as light and love to heal our own hearts and to prevent hearts from filling with hatred and violence.

There are a lot of people who are working very hard to doom our beautiful world into darkness. We need to be more positive, show more kindness, act with more compassion and find more of the beauty that is in our lives. We need to give more, stand up and speak the truth more and deal with our anger. We need to go to anger management or therapy. We need to realize our anger does not give us the right to react violently when we disagree with someone.

We need to praise good work and honest effort. We need to listen to the wisdom, gained through years of living, of those who have earned their wisdom from facing and dealing with the many issues that come up in the journey of a lifetime.

The Wild Rose of Praise

“Those unable to grieve,

Or to speak their love,

Or to be grateful, those

Who can’t remember God

As the source of everything,

Might be described as vacant wind,

Or a cold anvil, or a group

Of frightened old people.

Say the Name. Moisten your tongue

With praise, and be the spring ground,

Waking. Let your mouth be given