I found a new author thanks to the 90s Baz Luhrmann's song

Thursday, April 14, 2022

*Photo credit: Nothing Ahead on Pexels

The time I give you my rambling best, plus a new author find!

I was blasted back in time when this song played on the radio. Vaguely remembered how it was one of the 90s songs that wasn't technically a song.

It's more of a spoken work of art with a background of mellow music. Thoughtful and different. The song's called Wear Sunscreen. I didn't remember the title or who the artist was whilst listening to it a week back. It was Baz Luhrmann's unusual song that made its way across continents.

As per usual, I googled the part that stood out: Don't self-congratulate or berate yourself. Instead of going to the artist's official YouTube video, I found myself staring at a book preview by Jan Frazier. I read a few pages and, wow how amazing!

It made me think of those times in my younger days when I'd dropped by a bookstore and found myself lingering at a shelf slowly approaching a book that caught my attention. I'd make sure to read the first page slowly and if something in me was stirred, I'd get the book.

These days, google preview has taken over that and it's been a long while since anything captured my attention long enough. But not with Jan Frazier's. I found out she kept a site with wonderful teachings and I've decided to share her post titled Really Alive with you.

If her words resonate with you, then please visit her website for more wisdom nuggets and get her books! I'm already debating to get three of her books in my head. Not sure how to go about it though. It's been a long time since my last book purchase and those are thrifted books from the local book store. Can somebody please cue me in on the best way that's also kind to the pocket. Thanks ;)

Frazier wrote this on February 13, 2014:

"Assume there is more to you than the apparent. Become acquainted with the awareness that isn’t the ordinary mind. If you leave the door open, it will come. Like an unexpected visitor, a stranger you’ve known all your life. An intimate whose face is being seen for the first time, with a voice you recognize, though you’ve never heard it before.
It’s you, only it doesn’t come with an armful of stories. It’s you, minus the complaints, the unresolved, the projects, the dread of what’s ahead. It’s just content to be here. To stretch its legs into this moment. Into this very stillness, absent anticipation of the next thing.
Where does the awareness reside? What generates it? What is it that can tell it’s here?
Memory is there, if you go looking. But it doesn’t visit you of its own accord. Or if it does, it’s without the familiar weight, the acid, the pressure. Like watching a movie.
The awareness that isn’t the ordinary mind is still. Willing. It’s ready to be there for anything. It has no agenda. It’s receptive. Curious. Profoundly de-personalized. Matter-of-fact, like a cat washing itself. It doesn’t miss a thing. It doesn’t process. It’s just there, for whatever happens.
It’s how you can tell you’re alive. Really here.
Only strangely, you’ve disappeared. The you that got assembled in the familiar way doesn’t seem to be in the picture. Yet there is awareness. Receptivity. Delight, even.
Where does the awareness reside? What generates it? What is it that can tell it’s here?
But you are disinclined to linger very long over these puzzlings. After all, the light and shadow and color are in motion. Breath is moving in and back out again. The cat is washing itself. The snow is starting to fall. Something is always happening, and you are there for it. It enters you, you feel it, and then it passes all the way through, and out, as if you — as if awareness — were a window screen. Generous like that. Nothing grasping. The thing is allowed, felt. You are unchanged.
The next thing happens. Things just keep happening. You’re really there for it. All of it. When death begins murmuring into your ear, you relax into its arms. Because you have really lived.
Or, what you could do is crawl inside your head and spend your whole life there, being rocked and tumbled and massaged by stories that you don’t even recognize as stories. As if what the mind makes of life were life itself. You could miss it.
There’s a reason little children don’t understand about time. They are really alive. Briefly.