Brain Bleed

I recently had some serious bleeding in the back of my neck that traveled through my spinal fluid up into the covering of my brain. I was in the hospital for 9 days. Oddly, the most marked immediate result was first unconsciousness, then a radical loss of short term memory, and yet the longer term result of this experience has been just the opposite, an awareness and remembrance of what is most important in life: human kindness, loving others, forgiving from the heart.

I have spent this time of recuperation creating the “Seeds of Love” project, (www.seedsoflove.net) an audio visual presentation that can be viewed for free on the internet. Being rather, “spaced out,” for some time, the technical work was difficult. I found myself repeating certain aspects of the project over for days, and ending up as technically mystified at the end as I was when I started. But something good came out in spite of all this, an expression of remembrance of what is most important in life.

I worked in the hospital for 6 years in the 90’s, playing music for people, serenading them, and learned from these beautiful souls again and again that Love and kindness are the supreme values in life. It takes the dying to show the living what the highest values are. My recent experience has only deepened this conviction.

May we all “get it…” that what the merchants of the world keep telling us is so important, (the cars, the clothes, the right makeup or toothpaste), is all so unimportant in the end, and what is truly important has always been here, right under our noses, reaching out for our attention, asking us to come join the feast of life by paying attention to simple kindness, heart-felt gratitude, and the supreme gift of genuine Love that unites us to each other, to the good Earth and the infinite reaches of the Sky, and to the miracle and mystery of the essence of our own Being, this wondrous Love.