Ami Ahlstedt Introduction Welcome to the Ramblings of a Seeker portfolio: a collection of both published and unpublished works. Articles, Essays, Copywriting samples, Poetry, Photography, Editing/proofreading work and Voice-overs, with a variety of Random Thoughts mixed in, for good measure. * * *

The Latest Ramblings of a Seeker

~Straight Talk From A Modern Mystic~

 

 

Joy is the seed from which all good things grow

Let it set root anywhere--it will spread everywhere

 

 

 

Retribution

I struggle with my son’s materialism. At the wise and wicked age of twelve, he’s already maneuvered his way through more PDA’s, video game systems, iPod’s, and cell phones with the capability to launch private space missions, than the entire previous generation of his family tree -- at a cost far higher than what I’ve spent on shoes in my entire lifetime as a professional shoe whore.

Partly to blame, I’m sure, is the fact that I’ve chosen to raise him in a spot on the globe that values expensive things for two days before discarding them with yesterday’s trash, as something new appoints itself as the salvation. I did consider paddling us to a deserted island once, but soon realized that I was too out of shape from my sedentary corporate lifestyle to make it. Partly it’s due to his even more materialistic father, who, like a true addict, keeps thinking he can buy himself out of the empty void that is his life.

I still have a leather-bound Filofax from 1989, carefully selected from the display case at NK in Stockholm. It’s the only personal organizer I’ve ever owned. My son has three – all of much higher grade supple cowhide than mine – handed down from his father, who, undoubtedly believed he would somehow manage to get himself organized, if only he had the right organizer.

When we split up, he charged seven thousand dollars to my credit card. The one I so foolishly forgot to cancel when I realized the lease on my marriage was up -- the eviction notice standing before me in the form of a redheaded firecracker, with a child that bore the most remarkable resemblance to my husband. Although, logistically, it was impossible for him to have spawned this dark-haired, brown-eyed child, it was enough to make me realize that I was now the odd-man-out.

“You’re fucking paying for this, you shit,” I said. But of course, he never did. The court’s papers were equally ineffective at collecting his child support each month.

If you’ve ever paid for your ex’s shoes and shirts – the ones he wore when he took your replacement out to dinner, which he paid for with your plastic – then you know the true meaning of ‘heart burn.’ There’s not enough Pepto in the world to ease that kind of regurgitation.

Six years it took me to pay that sucker off, at twenty-two percent interest, and finally relieve myself of the monthly reminder that I’d been stupid enough to marry a dildo that would keep fucking me, years after the batteries exploded into a corrosive mess.

Which is why I don’t tell my son to stop haunting his father for the latest gadgets. Even as I wrestle with the inherent dichotomy between my own thrift, and my son’s greed, I let him guilt his father into submitting to his every whim and fancy. It’s like a passive-aggressive form of retribution for my years of counting pennies and cooking Ramen noodles to pay for his well-put-together courting ensembles, and those juicy steaks I never got to taste before being manhandled in the rear.

His father recently bought him an mp3 player. They returned it after two days. Replaced it with a Sidekick. “You’re such a push-over,” I said, to which he grinned sheepishly, shrugging his shoulders. He always said he just wants his son to be happy… But, that’s bullshit. In reality, he’s running scared that he too will soon become as dispensable to his son as that latest device. So. He’s gotta keep up. Gotta maintain his usefulness.

Me? I take the opposite approach. I say ‘no’ to everything, except his demands for daily I love you’s and nightly back rubs. “Whine at the hand,” I say, “for one day you will realize happiness grows on trees – money doesn’t.

”Two weeks later the Sidekick got punted back to the store. His dad was angry when he dropped him off that night, and our co-creation was visibly unhappy. “I’m staying out of it,” I said. But secretly I thought, “Good. You too will never get what you paid for.”  

 

Tango and Chocolate

Like chocolate
sweet 'n smooth
your skin
against my lips

Like ripened mango
juices flow
as the quivering
besets me

Spicy tango music
sets the mood
peppering my pulse;
egging on yours...

Like chocolate
sweet 'n smooth
your skin
beneath my tongue

Like salty dew
your passion tastes
"Sweat" too crude
to describe the moment

Latin salsa
heats the pace

Melting... melting now
like chocolate

 

 

 

 

No Such Thing As A Missed Opportunity…

 

“So…Tell me, tell me!” Ruben says, leaning forward, stirring his coffee.

“His name is William. ‘Will’ for short,” Anne answers, staring out the window with a dreamy look in her eye.

“And…” he says, motioning with his hand for her to continue.

“And, nothing,” she says, taking a sip of her coffee, staring into the depth of her cup.

 

“Nothing? I thought you were head over heels for this guy? Is he gay?”

“No! He’s not gay—you can’t have him,” she says, wagging her finger at him. “No. Not gay…Just ‘not right, right now’.”

“Do I have to throw a fish hook down your gullet and pull it out of you, or what?” Ruben says, tapping his well-manicured fingers on the tabletop.

“Spirit told me to ‘go home’, that’s what happened,” Anne says, sighing deeply, now looking Ruben straight in the eye.

 

“Spirit,” he says, shaking his head slowly. “I don’t know how you do it.”

“Do what?” she says, listing her head to the side with a quizzical expression on her face.

“You hear things—I get that. But how you can just go along with ‘instructions from god’, without questioning it…that I don’t understand. Doesn’t it just burn you up? What if you just threw away the Perfect Guy? Over what—a voice in your head, telling you not to go with it, even though you’ve wanted nothing else for weeks on end? That’s crazier than the hearing voices part.”

 

“No it doesn’t burn me,” she says, a faint smile raising the corners of her eyes. “You know…it’s like in the movies, where one life splits into two possible universes. Two different paths of action, resulting in two very different lives. A woman meets the ‘man of her dreams’ one night, and in Path One their passion takes over—they become lovers—she gets pregnant—he dies in a fireball explosion—she finds out he also gave her HIV…The rest of the movie is spent watching her agonizing downward spiral of a life until, in the end, the camera pans into the eyeballs of this cherub-faced orphan.”

 

“Lovely,” Ruben mutters, suddenly aware of the dichotomy between his inner state and the twittering of birds on the sun-drenched branches outside the window.

 

“In Path Two,” Anne says, holding up two fingers for added emphasis, “the woman doesn’t bring him home, for whatever reason they come up with—maybe she’s embarrassed about her underwear and not quite in the same league as Bridget Jones when it comes to laughing at herself—and, she never sees him again. She knows ‘he was the one’, or at least that’s what she keeps telling herself, and no one else quite measures up the same. So, she throws herself into her work, and at the rip-roaring age of seventy-eight she earns a Nobel Peace Prize. There she is…at the pinnacle of a fabulous, distinguished career—having changed the lives of thousands for the better—thinking about Him. The one that got away. “Oh, if only I hadn’t walked away that night…What a life I could have had,” she says to herself—camera zooming in to catch every last drop of regret.”

 

Ruben stares at her, absent-mindedly plucking at the tie-died woven bracelet on his left wrist. “That, my dear friend,” Anne says, “is why I never agonize over what may appear as a ‘missed opportunity’…See?”

 

 

 

 

 

 

God Is A Shoe

“I’m having a spiritual crisis,” my friend said over the phone.

“I think I must be an atheist because I can’t figure out what “God” is to me. I’ve gone through all the standard descriptions of God and none of them make any sense to me.”

“Maybe your path is not a standard religion,” I said, “perhaps you need to find your own definition. It can be anything you want—who’s to say you’re wrong?”

I’m not sure why, but she was actually surprised by the suggestion. It had never occurred to her that she was free to define God in any which way she fancied.

“OK,” she said, “but that still doesn’t solve my problem because when I think about what God might be, all I get is a feeling—no words to describe it—other than those “New Age” terms that are so cliché that they don’t seem to mean anything anymore.”

It’s a sentiment I’ve heard many times, and one that I share myself: New Age terminology sets off my gag reflex. It all sounds the same and no one is really explaining anything.

The fundamental problem is that we’re stuck with the limited language of our native tongues. We have nothing else to use than the words that appear to be the most descriptive for the message we’re trying to convey. What we need is an upshot of creative verbiage—an infusion of new linguistics. But until then we’re restricted to what’s available in Webster’s.

The ancient teachers used parables, myths and mind-opening riddles rather than attempting the near impossible task of giving a straight description of the indescribable. This all began to change with the advent of New Age, when suddenly everything became “real”: ghosts, angels, parallel lives in alternate universes, you name it, it’s real. But how real is “real?”

In quantum physics there is something called “virtual photons”. These virtual photons are essentially photons that don’t really exist… They are like “real” photons in every respect except for the fact that they are immediately re-absorbed into the electron as soon as they are emitted, rather than flying off on their own as an emission of light.

“Virtual” means “being so in effect or essence, although not in actual fact.”  In that same vein, our descriptions of God and our various spiritual experiences are descriptions of a “virtual God” and “virtual experiences of God.”

We are describing the essence of what God is, and how the effect of God can be observed, but we are not describing what God is, as an actual fact. Why? Because God is as invisible, as unfathomable as the particles we’re studying on the subatomic level. And, just as subatomic particles are not made of energy, but rather they are energy, so we are trying with our limited vocabulary to explain that God IS (a force of energy.) Nothing more, nothing less. In fact, there is nothing in the universe other than that which materializes out of pure energy. Which is exactly why we keep hearing the same thing over and over: There is only One God. We are all One. God is within. God is everywhere. So why are so many people having such difficulty “getting” the gist?

In 1996 I had a six-hour long meditative journey into the heart of the ultimate mysteries, (notice I can’t tell you just where the heck I went) during which I was given instantaneous transfers of information on everything from pre-birth decisions and agreements, to explanations and descriptions of that which is referred to as “God.”

When it was over I was elated: I knew why things were the way they were in my life. I understood the synchronicities of how everything worked and flowed together like a path traced through an enormous, chaotic-looking matrix. I knew there were no mistakes; that I was not a victim because even my “enemies” were my allies. I knew what God was!

Imagine the frustration and wrenching dismay when I realized, immediately thereafter, that I had no words, no language of any kind at my disposal to share what I now knew. How could that be?

Because the information was not delivered, nor received, via words and sentences in English (or any other language I speak for that matter.) It was transmitted through images, symbols, motion and sounds that had inherent meaning, even incredible mathematical formulas which I could never decipher in this lifetime, but that I could understand on a sub-intellectual level, like a truth that you can feel in your bones but can’t explain or justify through the use of your mental faculties.

All I was able to put to paper that day was this: “Explain the circular matrix.”

It’s been 10 years, and that’s still as far as I’ve gotten. I do know that one day, someone with a brilliant genius for the language of mathematics will be able to explain God through a mathematical formula. Science and religion will one day join hands and realize that they have been saying the same thing all along.

“Science?” my friend said, “you’re giving me science? Where’s Ami and what have you done to her?”

Yes, dear friend. I’m giving you science. And, no, I’m not saying that science is the answer to the question “what is God?”

I’m saying that science is just another language that can be used when trying to define, explain and describe the One Life Source. Mathematics is a language, just like English, Mongolian or ancient hieroglyphics. If you understand what the symbols (words) represent, then that language can convey meaning.

I am saying that if you want to find out what God is, you can look and find the answer anywhere, and the answer can be communicated and shared in ways that are limited only by your own imagination.

Many insist that only if you believe, if you have faith (theirs, of course), then the power of God will grace you. Or, only if you believe in the voodoo can the curse or blessing affect you. Hogwash! I say.

We do not need to believe in gravity in order for gravity to assert its influence upon our bodies and keep us firmly planted on the face of the earth. The Truth is the truth, whether you believe it or not. Energy interacts with energy on a subatomic level, without cessation, and without regard to whether or not we believe that it is actually taking place.

"God" IS. Whether you “believe in God” or not. The effect of this primary, pure energy that animates all things—the first and only everlasting, continuous building block—is observable everywhere.

God IS. But the word “God/Yahweh/Allah/Shiva” doesn’t have to be the word we use. We can use any word we want that describes the knowing we feel in our bones.

My shoe IS. It is right there on my foot, so therefore it must be “real”. It touches the ground, which IS, underneath my shoe at every step. Metaphorically speaking, my shoes also represent what I wear for protection, with pride, with a feeling of belonging (‘cuz my shoes are so “in” right now) as I walk to work.

So why would I not be able to say “God is a wooden clog.” Can you prove me wrong?

What is the clog made of? Wood. What’s the wood made of? Cells. Cells, which are patterns of molecules that are patterns of atoms, which are patterns of subatomic particles that are made of “nothing.” Nothing, but pure energy.

If there is only One everlasting God…If we are One with everything…If the only “stuff” in the universe is pure energy…And everything is made of this “stuff”…Then God is—virtually, of course—a shoe.

“You’re wacko,” my friend said.

Well, in that case, thank heaven there are no mistakes in the universal petri dish.

 

Want to know what people are saying?