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Epiphanies 2026...Lowercase & Uppercase

Updated: 3 days ago

Somethings old...Somethings new...


MANIFEST...OUR OWN DESTINIES



Among my top 2025 epiphanies

  • "as" saved my "ass"...SELF-CARE One day early in the year, as I was reading a New Testament passage about loving our neighbors, the word "as" caught my attention - as I realized it was making a conditional statement...HOW I was loving myself had a direct impact on HOW I was loving you and everyone else. As a result of this insight, I began paying more attention to how I was caring for myself, starting with paying more attention to my thoughts and words, especially negative self-talk.



Another self-care practice that is still developing is NOT trying to fit too much into my day. This over-scheduling inevitably leads to anxiety.



It also caused me to get anxious as a result of fear of not meeting "self-imposed" deadlines. This first section of this post is an example of what can happen when I trust my Higher Power and let things naturally emerge...It wasn't part of earlier drafts.


"Go ask Alice..." Let's see what she has to show us:




  • "Let my people go" (and merge into traffic)...Woke up thinking about this practice in the context of this post. It's been part of my toolkit for some time - both on the roads and the supermarket checkout lines.




  • Learning a new form of meditation that's helping me deal with common distractions in prayer...and more...For this gem, I'd like to thank Garden City's Cathedral of the Incarnation's Center for Spiritual Imagination (CSI) and their "Exploring the Incarnation Method of Prayer" course [see links at end under "Resources"].

For almost 50 years I've had a twice-daily centering prayer practice. Like many practices over time, they can lose something.


What I noticed right away about the CSI practice is that it begins by inviting us to recognize what's going on in our thoughts and bodies AND present these as legitimate parts of our prayer. So, instead of trying to block them, we welcome them and talk about them with the One we are sitting with. In a few minutes, we then pray for others. As a result, intercession has become a regular part of my prayer life...AND, one that continues throughout the day after I leave the cushion.

The CSI practice concludes with a period of REST...RECEPTIVITY...and SILENCE.


  • Seeing my "old" centering prayer practice in a "new" light. As a result of these reflections, I was led to revisit centering prayer through the eyes of my original teachers: Fr. Thomas Keating, Fr. Richard Rohr and Cynthia Bourgeault.

She writes, "In one of the very earliest training workshops led by Keating himself, a nun tried out her first twenty-minute taste of Centering Prayer and then lamented, “Oh, Father Thomas, I’m such a failure at this prayer. In twenty minutes I’ve had ten thousand thoughts!” 

“How lovely,” responded Keating, without missing a beat. “Ten thousand opportunities to return to God.” 



Follow the Star: "Sometimes we get shown the light in the strangest of places if we look at it right"



This heading is a NEW find for this season's post...as is "LaBefana" as the end...


--from "Scarlett Begonias" - The Grateful Dead




Wise ones still follow a STAR...



Here's the single version...for "beginners"...there are MUCH LONGER versions.

FYI - I like this uploader's sci fi take...






Grateful Dead epiphanies (aka, "There's a Grateful Dead song...tale... for every occasion"***)


[This and subsequent citations are from the link that follows the last citation.]

Epiphany is both individual and universal, an insight in which we intuit answers to the mysteries of consciousness and existence and glimpse the profound connections between the self and the world.


...the Grateful Dead's project is one of the minor utopias that held sway in America and Europe during that deeply destructive epoch, ones that loom large in retrospect precisely for the hope they represented against the much larger and deeply destructive utopian—or dystopian—movements that dominated that time. Phil Lesh used those terms when he reflected, “The onrushing sixties were to bring a completely different paradigm, when we would begin to involve ourselves in working toward the realization of what some would deride as a Utopian dream: a nation and a culture built on love, respect, and the quest for spiritual values.”


One of the band's earliest literary influences, James Joyce, expanded the idea of epiphany from its strictly religious context to the secular; no wonder that concept would strike a critic as a fitting way to describe the power and impact of a Dead concert, of its consummate co-creation of a music-in-the-moment that dissolved the boundary around the stage in what Garcia memorably called “seat of-the-pants shamanism.” As early as 1966, however, both the Dead and their fans had their own description for that vision quest, one that connected to that older spiritual definition: “Every place we play is church.”


Phil Lesh called the Dead phenomenon “slippery” in a discussion with one writer. “There's nothing you can get a handle on . . . it's like looking at a mirrored ball: There's nothing to grasp, because all you're seeing is what's reflected. All you're seeing is yourself.” Barlow put it more poetically in his lyrics to “Let It Grow”: “What shall we say, shall we call it by a name / As well to count the angels dancing on a pin.” In an interview with Garcia, Lesh commented, “If we could explain it to ourselves, we would. But then, we'd probably lose it.” Garcia agreed: “Yeah, right! It's always skittering out of our grasp.” Yet they welcomed that elusiveness; that was what their music sought. “That's why we play,” Bob Weir explained to a reporter in 1980. “If there's anything about us, if there's any point we'd like to make, it's so ethereal, so abstract, that we have to turn to music to articulate it.”


It was a tantalizing statement of what the band's project really was: to reveal what was hidden, to do what Aldous Huxley had suggested of psychedelics when he quoted William Blake's line from The Marriage Of Heaven And Hell: “If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite.” For the Dead and their listeners, that went to the heart of what the shared ritual of music-making could be: nothing less than a tool for expanding consciousness, for emotional catharsis and psychological gestalt, and most of all, renewal-to touch the infinite. And it expressed a fundamentally artistic imperative, a restatement of the ancient aesthetic charge that all artists embrace, to “make it new.”

Together, all of these insights add up to indeed form mammoth epiphanies. Yet at their core, what made up those epiphanies were moments, scattered and fragmentary and precious.




***A frequent quote - this wisdom was first uttered by my former surfer friend and VW repair mentor Steve Bermont.


Epifunny :)))))





This next one's for my card-playing friends from South Ozone Park...Great seeing youze guys the other day at the diner...










Here are two SNL skits that are included in the above post link.




Because they're in the wrong part of town...They get pulled over...by a torch-wielding Roman officer...Some things never change...BUT, they should!






The Three Italian Kings asked, "WITCH way did they go?"


(NIV...New York Italian Version) Three wise guys from the East Side, lower East Side to be precise, crossed the sands of Old Nevada and arrived in the city looking for a place to crash…but no dice…not even when they told the bouncer at the door, “Gabe sent me…”


Disappointed (and pissed off) they packed up their Camels (the only kind real men smoke) and headed for the poor side of town - the other side of the tracks - camel tracks…singing as they arrived, “just got into Nazareth…”


(Another NIV) Napoletan Italian Version (original "sauce" unknown)




Look who's located there...




[from their description] A McCall Brothers Band tribute to (The Band) and their song (The Weight). The song is described as a masterpiece of Biblical allusions, enigmatic lines and iconic characters making it an essential part of the American songbook.


Some closing thoughts offered as a shout out to music and horror maven Keith Crocker (1) as well as the crew at Witches Brew Coffee House in West Hempstead, NY.

(1) this is just one of several posts about Keith's presentations on topics like music and horror. For more fun, get on his mailing list: faustusmd@verizon.net 




[from next link] In the Italian cultural calendar, the period between December 24th and January 6th represents a sacred suspension of time—a "liminal" space where the sacred and the profane intertwine. While much of the Western world concludes its holiday festivities on New Year’s Day, Italy holds its breath for one final, spectacular crescendo: l'Epifania.

As the popular Italian proverb dictates, l’Epifania tutte le feste porta via (the Epiphany carries away all the holidays). Far from being a mere postscript to Christmas, January 6th is a national holiday and a cornerstone of Italian identity, blending rigorous Catholic liturgy with ancestral pagan rites that date back to Roman times. For the discerning traveler, understanding the traditions of the Epiphany is the key to unlocking the true soul of an Italian winter.



Seeing "The Trinity" in the title of this cover of Donovan's classic 1966 song echoes our Three Kings themes...




Resources...for manifesting our own epiphanies...


--Meditative & musical reflections to help us avoid getting mauled in a shopping mall...But there’s more…Wise folks recommend periodically taking stock of where we are on this adventure called life.


--My expectation is that what follows will help us appreciate yet another way to experience the reality that "G-d as we understand G-d" (AA's Step 3) is all around us. This broader awareness can be helped as we learn new ways to see...


 
 
 

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