Gone to Soon - the Michael Jackson Memorial

Just watched the MJ memorial on replay. I got quite emotional watching it. His songs carved out my childhood and teenage years. I didn’t realise until today that they also served as affirmations too. I thought it was the music itself, but now as an adult with a life shaped by the idealism of the change he sung about I realise it was words of the songs too.

When I was first sick in my 20s I used to listen to Will You Be There all the time

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRqYVFr7sL4&feature=related

I thought it was my yearning to have others understand my condition. It would lift me, raise my vibrations and allow me to release what was held inside. Today was the first time I realised it is actually a prayer and request to God in an hour of darkness, the walk across the desert so to speak. I understand what Maya Angelou meant by We Had Him.

He sung all our songs. All the ones we buried in the light and dark parts of our hearts. He sung our wishes and he sung our fears. Our memories entwined with his songs and thus our spectrum of feelings were imposed on them and him. He became part of all our growing up journeys. I believe he became a reflection of all that was good in society and then eventually all that was bad. A mirror to society showing us all that we applaud and all that we disown. Made and broken by the reflections.

I read an article today by Paul Theroux talking of his trip to Neverland. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/5664968/My-trip-to-Neverland-and-the-call-from-Michael-Jackson-Ill-never-forget-by-Paul-Theroux.html

In it he quotes George William Russell’s poem Germinal to MJ.

In ancient shadows and twilights

Where childhood had stray'd,

The world's great sorrows were born

And its heroes were made.

In the lost boyhood of Judas

Christ was betray'd.

MJ is fascinated by this concept of lost childhood being the root of heroes and betrayals. Theroux states

Twenty more minutes of Biblical apocrypha with Michael Jackson, on the lost childhood of Judas, and then the whisper again.

"Wow."

Michael Jackson did what he did because he was seeking to heal the world. As was said in the memorial he is in the Guinness Book of Records as the Popstar who donated to the most charities. We forced much on him through his music. I felt all my recollections come back to me as I listened to all the songs today and that is what that man had to deal with - our stuff running through him and his music.

His music - word, sound and movement - inspired a generation, showing us the truth in all of us and what we can really be in our lives. Inspiring us to move bodies, feet, head and hearts. And thus we grew. Art imitated life and life imitated art.

Gone too soon perhaps, but the ripples from his stone in the pond of life will last for generations to come.

How I met a Zulu man on George Street (aka How do you recognise the angels?)

As sudden meetings go today’s ranks right up there with the very strange. It is also making me understand the principles of the laws of attraction. I was walking down George Street in Sydney and was very much lost in thought. To be honest I was feeling a little sorry for myself. I had been travelling for a while and had been eating and sleeping in ways that my body was not used to. My stomach and digestion were beginning to feel as crammed with low grade items as Argos is just before Christmas. There was little space to hold and contain goodness and my mind was following suite (if not dictating the situation in the first place).

As I stood at a street crossing waiting for the little green man a man reached out for my arm and asked for directions to the Harbour Bridge. I told him I was as new to this area and had no idea. He struck up a conversation and asked me about what I was doing in Sydney. His English was an admixture of many accents and like many other things about him from his Asian complexion that falsely suggested his ethnicity (he was instead from both New Zealand and South Africa) to his work (he worked in upholstery but was also a healer having been tutored by Zulus in his tribe in Africa) I couldn’t sense anything conclusive and tangible about this person. I just couldn’t read him at all.

We talked on the street corner and for some minutes I noticed nothing else around me. No one knocked into us, or jostled us, nor did I hear any other sound. I felt my guard go up, but my intrigue sharpen. I replied to his questions in monosyllables and let him do most of the talking.

The blunt precision with which he asked questions and offered information about me (without being asked to) made me realise early on that this man had an ability that he was not being forthcoming with. He was either very psychically gifted or a fabulous people reader. Either way he was launching into an unnerving full ‘read’ on the street corner. He started to tell me about the blocks in my chakras and the state of my bowel whilst throngs of people flowed around us. He said that he was leaving for Africa the following day and that I could go with him for healing, but as that would be too expensive he could send herbs at his expense to help clear my systems and ancient Zulu oils that would shed me of the evil spirits that were around me. By this point I had no idea what to make of this man. I had verbalised nothing to suggest that I would want to hear any of this and I definitely hadn’t told him of my ailing gut. My mind of course was rather vocal expressing it’s resistance with things like, ‘Who the hell stops you in the street, claims to be a Zulu healer and then starts energetically examining your bowel?! And why on earth would you want to take herbs from a man you just met on a street? If he is this gifted can’t he pick up on the fact he’s giving me the creeps. What does he want?’ Try as I might I couldn’t trust this man and the more he spoke the more my distrust grew. It bothered me that he seemed to want to heal me more than I wanted to be healed either by him or others. He seemed to have a personal attachment to the outcome he was pursuing and sensing this was unnerving me.

He then moved onto the problems I had with my Ex with startling accuracy and told me about someone who I had met at the weekend who had told me something troubling. He told me where and how I was storing this all in my body and the effects this was having and all the time I found myself closing up more and more and wondering what I had done to give this man permission to be so open and descriptive about my inners like this. He suggested we take a few steps off the pavement to a nearby table outside a coffee shop. By now he was trying to put my mind at rest because a blind idiot could have picked up on my defensiveness by now, and assure me of his good and noble character. His wording though was in the negative however (‘ I don’t try to do X,/I am not like Y’) and my mind heard nothing but what he was trying to tell me he wasn’t. He began to protest that I wasn’t looking him in the eye and that I was therefore hiding something dark from him by doing so. Telling me that I have dark spirits controlling my eyeballs is a good enough conversation closer if I ever heard one. I made my excuses and he gave up trying to convince me he was the saviour of my health and bowel and after saying a prayer went his own way.

Later back at Rocky’s and Sharon’s I found myself thinking about the concept of earth angels. I remembered that joke about how a man was sitting in the middle of a flood and asking for salvation but turned down the horse, the boat, and the helicopter. When he dies he protests to God about the absence of salvation and God points out all that he has turned down. I began to wonder if I had passed up an opportunity or if I had narrowly escaped being crowded by a nutter who I had inadvertently invited into my space. I shared my thoughts with Rocky and said ‘how do you know when you have met an angel and more to the point how do you trust them?’

His answer was the simplicity my mind was doing its best to ignore and avoid.

‘You just know,’ he said.

6. Master doing what you love and love what you do

Successful people follow their hearts and guts. The wisdom of the mind is something that gets used later. Because they follow – and trust – their hearts, opportunities and breaks have invariably come to them along the way. They don’t just intend and seek them - they get found by them. Success in this respect becomes a by-product of them doing what they love, just living their lives and embodying these 7 tenets on a daily basis.

The 25 year old business woman I met in Sydney fell into buying a business at 20. She was working for a company and an opportunity came up to get more involved and buy part of the business. She took it and over the years bought a few more bits, worked hard and before she knew it, she was very successful.

The Supermodel Stylist come shop owner I have mentioned in a previous blog post was doing a favour for a friend in dressing them up for a high school show when Fiorucci just happened to be sitting in the audience. Fiorucci liked what he saw and offered him the chance to fly to Milan. He did and a few years of mentorship later, we have a world leading stylist.

Rocky tells the fabulous story of how he met his publisher. Having found something he had to write about because he simply had to share the story to inspire and help others he wrote with little thought of what to do with it. He shared his story whilst walking his dog one day with a lady he saw who regularly walked her dog there too. She asked to see his manuscript. He showed it to her. She turned out to be the top literary agent in Australia and got him a publishing deal at one of the best publishing companies in Australia. Dog walking is clearly good for you.

Many of the successful people I have spoken to didn’t have formal training (though this is not to dismiss formal training). Instead by taking action, training and therefore success found them. Mentors appeared along the way (or as the old quote goes, ‘when the student is ready, the master will appear’).

I read something wonderful once in a book called ‘Fish Sticks’ that said if you can see your path stretching out in front of you, the only thing you can be certain of is it is not your path because your path appears the moment you actually step on it.

Successful people know they can take a leap of faith because life/God will stitch them wings only after they have jumped. They also know that it is better to jump that be pushed.

5. Master being present and living in the present moment

I haven’t heard one successful person say ‘when I have X in my life, my life will be okay.’ Life isn’t something in the future. Life is Now. And Life is okay Now. Even if you don’t think it is, it is, because there are blessings and balance and chances and choices everywhere. For things to be viewed as okay is not to say they are magical and always brilliant. It is just to accept them as they are. To accept them as they are is not to say you don’t want something different in the future. It just means you stop resisting life as it is and trying to change it and start living it instead. The more you affirm life and appreciate what you already have the more what you have will grow. You get what you focus on.

Trying is doing

As Gandhi said BE THE CHANGE YOU WANT TO SEE IN THE WORLD.

Being is awakening.

When you start to accept life as it is, all that energy you were expending in resisting it, is released to serve you and you vibrate at a higher level. Successful people have goals and visualise a marvellous future, but they don’t live in them in. They let go of their goals whilst they work on the present moment as most people let go their reoccurring dreams when they wake in the morning and plod down to breakfast. Once again to use the analogy of the carpenter successful people put that tool in their mind down. If you hands are full with hammers and nails how can you ever pick up a drill too?

‘I can only ever do what is in front of me and that is it. If I focus fully on that it gets done to the best of my ability and so my future gets done to the best of my ability.’ (an MD from Auckland)

4. Have Inspired and Focused Dedication

This isn’t passion. Passion is highly energised, but it is also mostly highly unfocused. Inspiration however, is focused and is the precursor to real directed action. Successful people have decided to win from the outset and have unrelenting inspired and focused dedication to make it happen. They don’t crowd their minds either with myriad goals that confuse the universe and themselves as to what they want and when they want it. They let go of everything, but the one thing they want and they visualise and emotionalise this until they feel its certainty.

As one business woman said to me in Sydney, ‘I am exceptionally energetic. And focused. I love challenges. I love being inspired. But I don’t think unless I have to. ’

They work smart and they work hard. They make use of the opportunities and chances that come their way in that moment with wise consideration - not procrastination. Their time is organised and optimised. They are people that ‘eat their frogs’ and get the bad jobs done first. Once again this sense of time management is not just in regards to money making. Take a surfer off a beach and they will find their way back better than any homing pigeon. They will also get out of bed at the crack of dawn to make the best use of the waves and hone their skills. How many things in your life can make a claim on your time like that?