Category: Words To Live By

The world didn’t end on 12-21-2012 but that didn’t stop many from putting a lot of fear around that date before it actually arrived. Some began prophesying an inevitable doomsday. Movies and TV shows started appearing about it. Churches preached to people to get their acts straight. And suddenly much of the world was focused on something that originated from a Mayan calendar over five thousand years ago. As the date came and went, once people noticed that the world hadn’t been destroyed and souls hadn’t raptured out of people’s bodies, life seemed to resume back to a state of normalcy. But did it really?

Through some research and working with a Shaman, I have come to realize that 12-21-12 was never supposed to be about the destruction or death of our planet. And it wasn’t meant to be about what the Bible said was going to happen in Revelations. It was actually about a rebirth and an awakening happening within and around it. For awhile I was skeptical as I tried to learn more about this. But as time has gone by and I have healed more from my past with God at the center of my life now, I am seeing there is definitely something going on around me that’s different, much different, as compared to how things were before that date.

There seems to be massive forces of nature wreaking great havoc daily now somewhere in the world and resulting in many deaths. It feels as if there is some type of gun violence and large death toll occurring all too often. The threat of war is looming over many different areas of the world. There are more and more suicides happening every day. Many of my own friends and acquaintances are dropping like flies around me from diseases or substance overdoses. Even closest to home, I have seem a drastic rise in my roommate’s addictive and compulsive behaviors as compared to them being more subdued last year.

While there is much out on the Internet written by others who too have been observing this, I have formulated my own thoughts on to what is actually happening.

I do believe that there is an energy shift occurring now everywhere on the Earth. So many movies over the years have portrayed this as a fight between Light and Dark. It’s my belief that as 12-21-12 drew nearer and then passed on by, that fight rose to a much greater level in all of us. If the words Light and Dark don’t work for you to understand this, then how about Love and Hate? Good and Evil? And so on and so forth.

Several years ago I began to feel this shift happening within me to move away from the dark behaviors that I was living in daily. It took me just about two years to get away from them all. By the end of April, 2012, I had freed from myself from all of those things that had kept me filled for years with hate, anger, rage, jealously, judgments, spite, malice, and more. Now I’m working on cleansing myself from all that damage I did during most of this life to myself.

Was this all part of some huge shift that the Mayan Calendar had predicted? I can’t say for sure. The only thing I can say with absolute truth is that I have felt a huge push to clean my own act up and get rid of all the poisons I placed within myself year after year.

What I see happening now as I continue to work on growing more towards Light and Love is many others either heading in the same direction, or going in the exact opposite. For the longest time, I was somewhere in the middle. I sometimes lived in behaviors that one might have deemed as good and loving. And other times I lived in behaviors that one might deem as bad and hateful. Since 12-21-12 has passed, I have felt such a momentum to move more quickly to a life filled with love and light. Many others have already been there for awhile and I’m hoping to join them soon. I still have some more healing to do from my past transgressions before that happens. Unfortunately, there are those too who have migrated a different way to living more in hate, selfishness, self-centeredness, greed, lust, and envy to name just a few of the things on the other side of the spectrum.

Regardless of what the Mayan Calendar was really saying, my main desire today is to continue to heal myself and become much lighter, brighter, and more loving. By becoming much lighter, brighter, and more loving, I am hoping to be able to help others make their own choices to head in the same direction as me. The more I can help others make their own choices to head in the same direction as me, the greater I believe our planet can be filled with a lot more unconditional love. The greater our planet can be filled with a lot more unconditional love, the more all of us will begin to see things much brighter. And the more all of us begin to see things much brighter, the less our world will see any death and destruction that is continuing to happen around it right now.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

It’s pretty easy to build an expectation for something in anyone’s life. Quite often I’ve done it myself and unfortunately, on many of those occasions that I have, I’ve also become overly resentful when they’re not met. Thankfully, I faced a situation recently with my roommate that I believe will help me prevent this from happening a lot less in my life.

The situation with my roommate (who’s also the landlord) was about a parking issue at his home of which I am renting a room within. In a previous entry I made a slight mention to what this issue was about. There’s an oddly shaped tree which mostly hangs over the half of the driveway I was given to park my car in when I moved in. While the tree is shaped beautifully and has strikingly colorful, white flowers in the spring, it also allures many birds to perch upon its branches and poop constantly. So unfortunately, throughout much of the year, my desire to maintain a clean and shiny car gets covered with long streaks of white bird fecal remains. In my first year of tenancy, this wasn’t an issue because my roommate had allowed me to park on the other side of the driveway and said he didn’t really care about the bird pooping issue on his own car. Somewhere along the line though, his tune changed and he took his original space back. My car then returned to the bulls-eye for every bird in that tree who decides to go to the little birdie’s room. About a month ago, I began asking my roommate for compromises to prevent this from happening.

Through our discussions, I learned the tree couldn’t be cut down due to it being more on the neighbor’s property. I learned he didn’t want to park in tandem and have to deal with moving cars around constantly. I also learned he didn’t wish to elongate the driveway into the backyard by losing ten feet of grass either. When I had asked him what his suggestion was, his answer had been to go get a car cover which did nothing more than make me extremely resentful towards him. What I wasn’t seeing was how those resentments were my own doing based upon expectations I had within myself on the situation. A few days ago, there was a final discussion over this issue where I finally saw those expectations and how they were creating the resentments I was feeling.

I had spent most of the day, prior to him coming home from work, helping him out with some things around the house. During it, I had come up with another idea of how to handle the parking situation. Most of that afternoon, I built up an expectation that he had to go for this option, especially since it seemingly in my own brain met all his requirements. Even more so, I figured he would be more apt to say yes due to the amount of things I had done for him earlier in that day.

Boy was I wrong…

While my roommate was quite appreciative of all the hard work I had done around the house, it didn’t translate into him agreeing to the idea I had pondered all day on how we could both park without being a target for bird poop. When my expectation that he would agree was not met, I once again proceeded to get very extremely angry and resentful at him and went out for a drive. There was only one thing I could do to calm down. I parked in a plaza nearby, bowed my head, and prayed to God. I prayed for love, forgiveness, and peace for the situation, for my roommate, and for me. Because of those prayers, over the next few hours, I felt a lot better and saw things very differently and with a more level head.

I could have been more grateful that I have at least been guaranteed an off street parking spot since first moving in, as there is no place to do so along the tiny street in front of his home. I also could have been less manipulative in my attempts to talk about the issue, instead of trying to use any work I had done for him as a bargaining chip to fuel my compromise. But most importantly, the bottom line is that I had spent all day in my head seeing him agree to this compromise. I had used my own thought patterns surrounding it and built an expectation that he had to agree to it. And when he didn’t, my ego took a blow and an argument ensued.

What’s ironic is that after I had prayed and been able to calm down, I returned home to find my roommate had already taken some time to research alternatives on how to deal with the issue. He ended up going and buying some plastic snakes to put in the tree’s branches which supposedly might help ward off those pesky birds. And he was wiling to park a little more forward thus allowing me to park a little further away from the overhang of the tree’s branches.

While I’m grateful that there’s a good chance one of these solutions will work, what I’ve realized from this situation is that the anger in my life surrounding an issue can often be based upon expectations I created in the first place. Sometimes it’s best to just take a moment and breathe, and then do a little praying to be able to see things like that a little more clearly. Because I did so, I gained a little more wisdom in my life and saw another way of how I can avoid becoming resentful down the road.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

The biggest news in the past few days in the United States isn’t about another murder/suicide. It isn’t about anything related to politics. It isn’t about any scandal. And it’s not about anything relating to the economy. Well I guess on some level I might have to take that last statement back with the amount of money being spent to create this piece of news. The headline on Friday for most major news outlets was the Powerball jacket has soared to around $600 million dollars.

With people buying dozens and dozens of tickets at a time while enduring lines that I read in some areas were hours long, it has got me wondering how many of those individuals are hoping that a win for them would make their lives so much better.

Here’s the blunt truth. Besides the 1 in 175 million chance of winning this lottery, the sad reality is that if you feel you life stinks where it’s at now, it’s still going to stink the same if you win all that money. The only difference is that you’ll have a lot more distractions now to make you forget why it stunk in the first place.

How do I know this?

I’ve lived it.

While I haven’t won some large glorious sum of money through a state lottery, I did inherit an incredible amount from my parents after their untimely deaths. Prior to their passings, my life was often miserable. I had a lot of baggage in it that was much in part due to my own doing. I surrounded myself with unhealthy people. I chased all sorts of addictions to find temporary happiness. I didn’t like myself and I did what I could to avoid that fact. When I inherited the money, it became a wonderful new way to distract myself from me.

With it, I bought cars, houses, gadgets, clothes, vacations, and more. And for a time, I forgot about that miserable person that existed before I came into that money. Unfortunately, having a lot more money brought in other complications instead such as higher taxes and friends that I wasn’t sure most of the time if they were only around me for the free things I gave them. Even worse, the more money I had, the more I felt like it was never going to be enough. Though all of this, my ego swelled and I grew more selfish and self-centered. And eventually I blew through most of what my parents had left me, leaving me in the same state I was in before I ever had a single penny of it….miserable.

Coming into a ton of money suddenly, does not miraculously make all one’s trouble’s go away. They only get masked and suppressed for awhile. Sure I felt great for a bit of time and was constantly doing new things and surrounding myself with a lot of people. But deep down inside, I was still avoiding those things that had made me be that miserable person in the first place.

It’s like the sad and lonely guy who walks into a bar and says he’s buying everyone’s drinks for the night. He suddenly becomes quite popular and as he drinks, he forgets about how sad and lonely he was in the first place. But what happens when all his money is gone and he sobers up? The people are gone and he’s sad and lonely again. The same thing holds true with winning the lottery or coming into any large sum of money for a person who was sad, or lonely, or miserable, or hating their life before receiving it. The principle holds true as well for any person who moves from one location to another hoping for a geographical cure from their misery. It holds true with any person who consumes any substance to numb their senses so they don’t have to think about the fact they don’t like their life. Happiness doesn’t come from any of this and especially not from $600 million dollars. While it might make someone happy for a time, it won’t last.

The only true happiness I’ve found in my life is when I’m trying to do God’s will. In that, I’m not chasing money or some other thing to bring me happiness. Instead, I’m focusing in on how I can not only help myself heal from all the selfishness I lived in, I’m also out there trying to help others heal too. Thankfully, I have learned this lesson and am not out buying hundreds of dollars of tickets hoping to win. Will I buy just one for the sheer fun of it? Probably. But the difference today is that my life is already getting better and much happier with God at the center of it. And so if I was to win, the only happiness that would increase within me would be when I reach out to donate much of it to others who need it a lot more than I ever would.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson