Good Morning Digitial Neighbors! Happy Tuesday ADD Irregulars, WSN Devotees, Friends, Refugees, Phamily, Misfits, Lurkers, Conversants and the Lost that find their way to Locals. How about another visit from David Whyte? His wisdom and some of my commentary. Enjoy!

MEMORY is not just a then, recalled in a now; the past is never just the past: memory is a pulse passing through all created life, a waveform, a then continually becoming other thens, all the while creating a continual but almost untouchable now. But the present fashionable obsession with living only in the now misunderstands the multilayered inheritance of existence, where all epochs live and breathe in parallels.

Whether it be the epochal moment initiated by the appearance of the first hydrogen atoms in the universe, or a first glimpse of adulthood perceived in adolescence, or the raw physical remembrance of holding our first child in our arms, memory passes through an individual human life like a building musical waveform, constantly maturing, increasingly virtuosic, often volatile, sometimes overpowering. Every human life holds the power of this immense inherited pulse, holds and then supercharges it, according to the way we inhabit our identities in the untouchable now. Memory is an invitation to the source of our life, to a fuller participation in the now, to a future about to happen, but ultimately to a frontier identity that holds them all at once. Memory makes the now fully inhabitable.

The genius of human memory is firstly its very creation through experience, and then the way it is laid down in the mind according to the identity we inhabited when we first decided to remember, then its outward radiating effect, and then all its possible future outcomes, occurring all at the same time and able to change alongside the person who is remembering. We actually inhabit memory as a living threshold, as a place of choice and volition and imagination, a crossroads where our future diverges according to how we interpret, or perhaps more accurately how we live, the story we have inherited. We can be overwhelmed, traumatised, made smaller by the tide that brought us here, we can even be drowned and disappeared by memory; or we can spin a cocoon of insulation to protect ourselves and bob along passively in the wake of what we think has occurred, but we also have other, more engaging possibilities; memory, in a sense, is the very essence of the conversation we hold as individual human beings. A full inhabitation of memory makes human beings conscious, a living connection between what has been, what is and what is about to be. Robbed of our memory by Alzheimer’s or by a stroke, we lose our identities. Memory is the living link to personal freedom.

Through the gift of an inheritance truly inhabited, we come to understand that memory creates and influences what is about to happen, and has little to do with what we quaintly, and often unimaginatively, call the past. We might recall the ancient Greek world where Memory was always understood to be the mother of the muses, meaning that all of her nine imaginative daughters, all of the nine forms of human creative endeavour recognised by the ancient Greek imagination, and longed for by individuals and societies to this day, were born from the womb and the body of memory.

Consolations - The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words. David Whyte

We actually inhabit memory as a living threshold, as a place of choice and volition and imagination, a crossroads where our future diverges according to how we interpret, or perhaps more accurately how we live, the story we have inherited.

Memory is such a odd experience, it can be a black pit of shame, guilt and remorse or a wellspring of gratitude, joy and beauty. How you remember and what you do with those memories seems to make as much as a difference as the original experience itself. This is not to minimize the hardships of the past or to inflate the golden moments, but memory can heal memories and place them in a new light of understanding. The good moments can become enshrined in gratitude and the painful ones can become lessons of wisdom and an invitation to growth. It is not easy, it some of the hardest work for individuals and can not always be done alone. The intensity of the past can be more overwhelming than the present moment when the past is no longer suppressed or denied. A good friend, therapist or someone to hear the story of "Me" can make all the difference. Even with that in place, I don't think there is ever an escape from the occasional emotional ambush memory can enact, and none of us like those moments of being overwhelmed in the present moment by past memories.

Through the gift of an inheritance truly inhabited, we come to understand that memory creates and influences what is about to happen, and has little to do with what we quaintly, and often unimaginatively, call the past. We might recall the ancient Greek world where Memory was always understood to be the mother of the muses

Memory can be the seedbed of creativity. It can be the sacred space in us where the past is integrated with the present, where the hidden treasures yet to be unearthed by reflection suddenly become present and add a new dimension to the story we thought we knew so well. New meaning is added to old chapters and new horizons open that were previously absent.