Hidden Blessings

Some of you might be aware that my 12-year-old son is now on his fourth day trying to leave Italy and get back home. Because of flight delays and cancellations which have made it impossible for him to make his connection, and given that he is an unaccompanied minor, the airline has refused until today to board him until they were sure he could have proper supervision during layovers. This situation has caused everyone a lot of frustration, but in the end, we will never know if all he went through happened for a reason unknown to us. When I mentioned that to someone, yesterday, they said: ‘Well, the flight he was initially scheduled to be on reached destination without incidents, so I can’t imagine what the reason would be.”


Truth is that things aren’t always what they seem. Yes, the flight arrived – even if late -- but what if we had gone somewhere after his arrival and something happened then? Of course, that’s just a supposition, but I deeply believe that many situations are averted every day without us even knowing. When anything unpleasant occurs, it is always very difficult to see the hidden blessings. The people whose alarms didn’t work - or whose cars broke down - the morning of 9/11, were probably very angry, and didn’t realize their fortune until they heard what happened. We may misplace our car keys and spend thirty minutes looking for them. Meanwhile, thanks to that delay we might have missed getting into a traffic accident. We may be upset because we haven’t been hired for a job position we wanted; yet, if we had, we might have missed a better opportunity that was right around the corner. Going through this ordeal reminded me of a story someone e-mailed me some time ago, so I am including it in this post.


“Two angels were traveling the country, occasionally seeking food and shelter during their journey. They came upon a very poor farm, and asked for shelter. The farmer and his wife shared the little food they had, and offered their bed so the tired strangers could sleep comfortably. Early after the sun had risen, the two Angels were awakened by the farmer and his wife weeping. Their only cow, whose milk was their sole wealth, had died during the night. The younger Angel became angry, and asked the older spirit why he would let this poor man’s cow die. The older Angel replied: “Things aren’t always as they seem. When we were down in the basement, I saw gold hidden behind the wall, so I patched the hole to hide the fortune away from the greedy owner. Last night, while we were sleeping, I saw the Angel of Death coming for the farmer’s wife. I asked him to take the cow instead.” ~Author unknown


As all gifts, blessings come in many packages. Some are very obvious and colorful, while some others are so subtle that we don't even recognize them for what they are.
Each moment in our lives is a perfect moment, whether we do or don’t realize its value. Through our experiences we grow, learn, become better people; for some, the most meaningful gifts have come from the difficult moments they have survived.
As we are reminded by the older Angel, things aren’t always as they seem. Even the worst tragedy or the most annoying occurrence may hold the seed of our greatest blessing.

The Power of Being

“I cannot tell you any spiritual truth that deep within you don't know already. All I can do is remind you of what you have forgotten.” ~ Eckhart Tolle

Since the early days in the history of our world, mankind has been on an endless search of the self and God. Going back to ancient times, our need to connect to someone or something higher than ourselves has inspired individuals to create complicated rituals aimed at reaching a higher consciousness.

In many cases, the universal need of establishing a connection has been exploited by institutions to exercise control over the masses and serve the personal agendas of a few. This process has been made possible by a far-spreading propaganda which has painted God as an inaccessible entity one must seek without, even if the Bible itself (Luke 17:21) teaches us that the kingdom of God is within us.

Our first step to finding God within is through acceptance – not necessarily acceptance of situations but of the way we feel about them. We spend a great portion of our lives fighting the wave, and rejecting the simple truth of just being. Once we overcome our obsession of controlling how everything should be, we allow our experiences to manifest directly from the mind of the Creator, pure and unspoiled by human assumptions.

If we can get to the point of looking at another form of life and just feel love toward it before our mind has the chance to add labels and shelve what’s in front of us within the compartments of an illusionary life hierarchy, what we experience in that moment is God’s love – unconditional, all-serving and powerful. Labels are created by the ego because of its desperate need to quantify something which cannot be quantified. An absence of labels robs the moment of illusion and leaves only the pure essence of it.

According to the Flower Sermon, toward the end of his life the Buddha took his disciples to a quiet pond for instruction. As they had done in the past, the followers sat in a small circle around him, and waited for the teaching. But this time the Buddha had no words.

He reached into the muck, pulled up a lotus flower and he held it silently before them, its roots dripping mud and water. The disciples were greatly confused. Buddha quietly displayed the lotus to each of them, and in turn the disciples did their best to understand the meaning of the flower, without much success. When at last the Buddha came to his follower Mahakasyapa, the disciple suddenly understood. He smiled and began to laugh. Buddha handed the lotus to Mahakasyapa and began to speak. “What can be said I have said to you,” smiled the Buddha, “and what cannot be said, I have given to Mahakashyapa.” Mahakashyapa became Buddha’s successor from that day forward.

There are no labels to describe the energy of God, or Its power, just as there are no labels to properly describe who or what anything is. Simply being sets us free from the chains of illusion and the kingdom of ego.

Welcome to the Jungle...

I have always wondered what walking into a rain forest would feel like, and I have even gone as far as comparing that type of excitement to the adrenaline shot of venturing into a strange city. Yesterday, I entertained yet another thought: how has my daughter’s room come to resemble both of those places? After postponing cleaning out her bedroom and play area for a while – I think that’s part of the survival instinct to avoid something that can mean sure loss into the impenetrable – I woke up yesterday morning determined to organize those rooms. Pretty sure I was going to need a gun or a machete to make my way through, but not wanting to scare the kids on my way up, I instead grabbed a handful (a big one!) of large garbage bags and headed toward her room.

I entered Morgan’s room with a slightly elevated heartbeat, my body already knowing I was going to need extra coffee to undertake this task. The scene unfolding in front of my eyes was the mother of all jungles and could put the Big Apple to shame: toys were staring at me from every inch of the floor, as if daring me to come in; her bed was covered in little scraps of drawing paper she had shredded an hour before for a project, and her desk was covered by so many knick-knacks that I couldn’t tell the color of the plastic underneath. I took a deep breath and walked in, ignoring the evil stare of toys stubbornly guarding the entrance to the area under her bed. That was another reality altogether, which I wasn’t all too eager to enter yet.

I made my way to the bed and sat down, trying to figure out where I was going to start. I got rid of the scraps of paper, and put her unworn clothes back into the closet, barely making a dent. A decision had to be made and I needed to figure out something fast before she got back. I tried to think about what she would not miss, what she no longer used, and I continued coming up with a blank. All those toys, once I picked them up, brought something nice back to mind, and I had a hard time throwing them out; even giving them to charity, I felt like I was discarding memories. This approach wasn’t working, until I thought of a different way to tackle the problem…

What if, rather than selecting things she no longer needed, I focused on deciding which things she actually had a use for? Were there a few toys she absolutely couldn’t do without, that she played with every day? Were there any knick-knacks that were particularly dear to her heart or mine?

Feeling a solution was finally dawning, I looked around the room to collect the irreplaceable – a stuffed tiger she had since babyhood, a few board games she loves to play on rainy days, her art supplies, Hello Kitty and her clothes, and a few other pieces of memorabilia. After setting those objects to the side, I looked again, to make sure I hadn’t missed anything important; then, I opened the bags and, one at a time, I filled them without even looking. Very soon, the impenetrable jungle looked like a manicured garden.

I left the room completely satisfied, and Morgan never even missed the things I took out. In fact, she walked into her room and clapped her little hands, saying that everything looked great. Never once did her thoughts wander to the myriad of happy meal toys in a basket under her bed, or to the dress-up set she HAD to have last year and had quickly outgrown. She didn’t miss those things because she never really cared for them; they were just there, an unseen part of her room décor or lack of.

Cleaning Morgan’s room made me think of how many times we focus our energy on deciding what we need to remove from our lives to make them work, when instead it would be so much easier to think of what we need in them and rid ourselves of the rest that no longer serves us. Humans are hoarders by nature, regardless if the loot is toys, clothes or merely emotions and past experiences. Surely we can approach a cleansing by picking up each individual thing and looking at it again, but most likely, we will only pick it up, find a reason to keep it, and end up just as cluttered as we were in the first place. Sometimes, spring cleaning starts with a simple assessment of what we can’t do without; the rest we can always send to Goodwill.