Notice: Ride plays Washington Square this Saturday night.  We’d love to have your energy in the house.

Our motto is “you can’t stop the wave, but you can learn to RIDE it”.  We chose March 20 since it’s the Spring Equinox, we’re into Daylight Savings so it’s effectively an hour earlier, and many of you had complained about the difficulties in waking after our typical Thursday night of partying.  We also took off January and February, to offer a little space.

Anyway, Spring’s a great time to let go the pain of a long winter and meet the hope of a new day.  That’s basically what the blues is and why we hope you’ll join us in leaving the suffering of the world at the door as you come into the party of the moment.

I recently watched the Minnesota filmed movie, Sweet Land, and was taken by a phrase used by an aging woman, gracefully speaking to her cultivation of “different kinds of happiness”.  We’ll never again touch the happiness of days gone by.  Change happens, but we can always touch a different kind of happiness.

If you’ve ever attended one of our events, you know we resonate in response to one another.  We’re all connected energy, the Blues knows this, and we hope you’ll consider coming out to vibrate with us, if for no other reason than to share a toast to Spring’s arrival.

Whether you make it or not, please know that the Ride crew will forever be grateful for the energy you’ve provided in the music we’ve created together when you have shown up.

Just Be It, Inc.

9597 North Shore Trail

Forest Lake, MN 55025

Phone: 612-590-0970

Principal: Randy Johnson

Email: randy@just-be-it.com

The temptation of feeling loved is to blame another for the loss of that feeling.  When suffering happens, when things fall apart, and when change happens in such painful ways, maybe then I’m tempted to question my faith.  In her book, Speaking of Faith, Krista Tippett references the authentic words of Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel.  She references his questioning of faith in a passage from Wiesel’s Night. He spoke to a loss of desire to live and horrific moments when brutal human acts seemed to murder his God.  Yet, he went on praying, and presented her with the following prayer:

I no longer ask You for either happiness or paradise; all I ask You is to listen

and let me be aware of Your listening.

I no longer ask You to resolve my questions, only to receive them and make them part of You.

I no longer ask You for either rest or wisdom, I only ask You not to close me to gratitude, be it of the most trivial kind, or to surprise and friendship.  Love?  Love is not Yours to give.

As for my enemies, I do not ask You to punish them or even to enlighten them; I only ask You not to lend them Your mask and Your powers.  If You must relinquish one or the other, give them Your powers.  But not Your countenance.

They are modest, my requests, and humble.  I ask You what I might ask a stranger met by chance at twilight in a barren land.

I ask You, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to enable me to pronounce these words without betraying the child that transmitted them to me:  God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, enable me to forgive You and enable the child I once was to forgive me too.

I no longer ask You for the life of that child, nor even for his faith.  I only beg You to listen to him and act in such a way that You and I can listen to him together.

Wiesel’s words highlight the tremendous power of gratitude and forgiveness practice.  This practice is founded in deep, open listening.  It’s grounded in the ‘felt’ sense of never being alone.  Can it be that lasting joy is cultivated through our awareness to and relationship with the present moment as we forever drill deeper in gratitude and forgiveness?

So what do I want?  Short term limited pleasure or long term unlimited joy?

How has my quest for short term pleasure impacted my quest for long term joy?

Unlimited lasting joy sources from gratitude and the ‘feeling’ of never Being alone, always being listened to.

Meeting the arising moment in felt sense of belonging

It seems that two of our most important questions are:

1. What’s my relationship with this present moment?
2. Do I feel loved?

Most of our restlessness and stress revolves around a bad relationship to the present moment.  We’re either wishing we were someplace we were or anticipating a place we’re going to, missing the surprise of the moment.

The next question is perhaps more tricky.  If I ‘feel’ loved, then by whom?  If it’s a feeling from another being, am I preoccupied with what it was or fear about it’s possible loss?  Or is it a bigger feeling?  Perhaps it’s more a feeling of Big Hope and a bigger belonging.  As the surface events of the day encounter a variety of rapids and eddies, can I hold a ‘feeling’ of being loved, with one foot on the ocean floor, grounded in the joined response, not taken by life’s surface disturbances?

This may be the big pull for theistic religions.  It’s something that works me deeply.  I feel great joy and comfort in a personal divine Being who has my best interests at heart.  The arms of sacred love can never betray me if I dedicate to cultivating my relationship and my gratitude for the gift of the arising moment.  Yet, a feeling of  ‘being loved’ from a smaller group will always run the course of entropy, tied to the realm of form and the material.

So, here I am in deep loving relationship to Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, and the other great divine Beings who’ve blessed me.  My physical response to this love seems to resonate most with Jesus, yet my most intimate spiritual experiences have had a distinct feminine feel to them.  So I pray and give thanks for this gift of opportunity to participate, to curiously explore the realm of spirit, mind and body, forever drilling deeper in this journey.

I see the poison in greed, ignorance and fear and how they play one another.  In greed, I’ve lost my relation to the present, forever thirsting for ‘more’.  Poof, another moment lost, another unintended harmful action.  In ignorance, I’ve locked into a static notion of an answer.  This is different from living faith.  This is fixation on thinking I know, holding to my notion of being ‘right’.  Ignorance is overcome by a curios mind, forever willing to actively listen for a deeper question.  And fear is expression of my lack of ‘feeling’ love.  It’s a response of feeling separate, unjoined from the Divine.

So, if I can embrace the present moment in surprise, in felt sense of being loved, my only response is that of full gratitude for the gift of opportunity.  Now, this breath.  Again, this breath…knowing I’m loved…knowing these breaths are limited…knowing it’s a rare gift to experience consciousness…this moment…knowing I’m in you and you’re in me and all is in all, forever bathed in the feeling of ‘being loved within the divinity of the moment’s arising’.

Cultivating the ‘Feeling of Being Loved’

When I can reflect on the ‘presence’ of ancestors who came before and upon future ancestors I’ll never meet while in this body, I’m warmed.  Friends who’ve loved me beyond conditions, parents, grandparents I may never have met, someone I touched who may never had a chance to say what it meant…this ‘feeling’ comes up.  And it’s my fuel for ‘Big Hope’, for knowing nothing disappears, I’m never separated, forever, each moment, filled with a deeper sense of belonging, of mattering.  This ‘feeling’ of the Divine within all comes and goes.  But I can grow it by taking pause, reflecting on the felt response of being loved…of Being…filled with gratitude for the opportunity of this breath, of this consciousness.

As energy dissipates, it’s easy to slip into depression.  There’s great pain in feeling things will never be the same.  The Law of Impermanence seems to be what fuels our drive to ‘wake up’.  Wherever we look, the Second Law of Thermodynamics is at work, energy dissipating and the apparent felt separation from what was.  We hit the bell and perceptually notice the disappearance of sound.  And yet, we now know the sound never disappears.  We now know that nothing disappears, it just dissipates its energy of vibration.  No doubt, we can grow a louder vibration when conditions are right, yet we know it will entropy naturally as conditions become ‘not right’, the inevitable.  It’s why we have a multibillion dollar plastic surgery industry, why some try to freeze their bodies, and why we spend fifty billion dollars of our health care budget with valiant efforts to stop this process, trying to save people during the last two months of their lives.

So what to do?  We can hide behind myth that’s clearly out of step with our contemporary ‘knowing’.  We can numb ourselves with media consciousness shaping, glued to the TV for hours.  We can immerse ourselves into the spectator sports world.  We can join an organization dedicated to the belief that change can be stopped and we can become very angry as a result.  We can numb ourselves with various addictions that temporarily comfort us only to bring us further from our life vibrancy.  We can pursue increasing amounts of pleasure and consumption, only to realize the happiness is fleeting and the collateral damage very painful.  We can try to escape our awareness to the demise of heath care and education at the expense of morally exempt capitalism and militarism.   In effect, we can retreat from participation in stewarding the unified vibration because it hurts too much.

With courage, we can hold the curious mind.  We can ask the deeper, heart driven questions.  We can study those who’ve gone before with a sense of deep stewardship to those who will follow, knowing that we can never be ‘disconnected’.  We strike the bell.  We can all sense it, but some of us don’t hear it.  We’re too busy or too distracted.  Yet, the bell sounds and the vibration dissipates.  Yet, our deeper awareness takes great care in slowing our perception of the dissipated energy.  The music is alive.  Time and occasion, outside the realm of our known three dimensions, outside notions of beginning and ending.

The vibration is here and always will be here, penetrating all things.  Awareness is our security. Participating in the art of taking care is our action.  Home. Free. Free at last.  Vibration…Just Be it.