I’m pleased and proud and thankful to be a Mud Pud along with you all.  Before waking this morning I started thinking about what to write - so here goes - I’m presently immersed in two courses at two different universities, and as usual, in my mind am weaving their meanings together with my realities, or trying to.  One course is called Ethics, and the other is called Image and Imagination. Ethics has a wide variety of stances ranging from complete selfishness to total altruism, and tends to get lost in ’shoulds’ and in opposites, but it has made me think how when any one of us is stuck way down in the mud, we also can get stuck in desperation.  Desperation - it’s a universe where poverty, fear, anger, reaction, usery, competition and a bunch of other rough elements seem to be our social tools.  Some of us were born into it, and some got tossed into it for awhile, but I’m willing to bet all Mud Puds experienced it.  Plus, it might be that it is what some call the “real” world - after all, it is all over the news all the time.  The ethics of it are pretty brutal - dog eat dog, use others to get what you need, oppression….so it’s really blind, or nonempathic, for philosophers or ministers or whoever to come up with a lot of “shoulds” for someone duking out survival.

Nevertheless, desperation is really a way of thinking or a way of perceiving the world, and the way we think actually shapes the world.  Scary, huh?  This is where my other course, Image and Imagination, comes in.

In this course we are making images freely, trying to respect and nurture imagination so that it can get past our fears and egos and little identities to show us … a whole other universe, another dimension of reality that is going on simultaneously with the one we assume is “reality”.  I am blissed when I am in this class because this imaginal dimension is the one I’ve been hiding out in, pretty much by myself, all along.

I promise to describe it in my next posting!  Just one thing - here in Mud Puds is a good place to say I know how fragile each of us is and how important it is for that fragility to have safe loving space - those three things arrive in the imaginal world around us by magic - here, by the magic of Cabe’s imagination.  Merci, Muchas Gracias, Ahi hi, Thank you.

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