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eyes to see

When I was very young, I heard a story and it goes something like this:
There are two birds that fly over the deserts of California, the condor and the hummingbird.  If you ask the condor what the desert is like, it will describe death and carnage, blood, rot and decay.  If you ask the hummingbird what the desert is like, it will describe flowers dripping with sweet nectar and an unspeakable beauty hidden everywhere.
Life is like that.  We find exactly what we are looking for.  We think it's the other way around.  We think it's random and "happening to us".  But the lens of our particular perception changes everything we see and all we experience.
We literally find what we are looking for.  But we can't trick the looker.  All our positive thinking-new age-psycho babble doesn't focus the lens, our beliefs do. Life isn't "out there" happening to us.  It is in here, happening in us.
If that's the case, perhaps we can stop our victim-perpetrator-coulda-woulda-shoulda stories and ask what it is we expect to see.  There's no judgment.  If I want carnage, it's not hard to find.  If I want beauty, I need only LOOK for it with eyes prepared to see.

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