Everything belongs

"How much more simply life could evolve if we'd but focus our attention on the obvious situation confronting us, looking always for our direction from within the situation's elements.  How little point there is in worrying about what may come, and yet we expend incalculable amounts of energy in just such activity. "
  -- The Promise of a New Day

"It is a dualistic fixation, the tension between 'me' -- as self -- and 'my thoughts' -- as other -- that makes thinking problematic, tormenting, 'sticky,' like the tar baby to which Brer Rabbit becomes affixed by trying to push it away.  Thoughts become thick, solid, and heavy only when we react to them."  --Welwood,  Toward a Psychology of Awakening

For some reason these quotes, which I read this morning, seemed related to this image, which I've been struggling with for two days now.  There was this huge yellow-green mass on the right, and I kept trying to push it out of the picture -- kind of the elephant-in-the-living-room sort of a feeling.  But in the end, when I decided to give up and take it with me into an earlier version of the image, it turned out there was a lot less of it than I thought; I'd created it with some sort of overlay somewhere in the process, and all it did was add some drama.

So I like to think the black streaks -- those tarbaby bits -- are embracing and accepting that problematic piece, which is another bit of advice from today's reading in Promise of a New Day:

"Everything in the world has something to say to us: rocks, garbage, even our disappointments and failures.  For everything belongs to the vast pulsating pattern that is the earth.  Nothing that exists does not belong; if we find this or that piece of the pattern troublesome, it's because we haven't perceived its contribution to the whole..."

So -- what's troubling you today?  What are you worrying about; what are you pushing away?  What does that troublesome thought have to offer you -- and how can you embrace it?