I need some asbestos skis (thank you)

My spirit might as well be in hell right now.  When I say this, I don’t mean my butt is on fire and I’m skiing across the lake of fire on my asbestos skis.  I mean, things are rough on very subtle and not so subtle levels.  And yet we are all here, right? 

Yesterday, I was working in the garden and there were some leftover items in our garden cart that needed to move out of the way to get to the compost.  Pushing the cart didn’t move it very far (how odd), and then without considering why I pushed it further and over it tipped.  I got determined and I pushed the cart sideways out of the way with my hip on my way through, congratulating myself on not “even getting mad” at this turn of events.  I will return to this story in a moment.

Astrologically, things are rough right now.  They are damn rough.  A close friend came by this morning asking what was up: “at least 3 friends were in serious crisis.”  The planet is experiencing the 3^rd of 7 Pluto Uranus squares and people be hatin’.  When Uranus comes through the scene we find deep changes, new inventions, revolution, and higher awareness.  We just LOVE changes right?  We always embrace changes with open arms and a big smile.   Just like we love a good root canal.  Most of the time our conditioning has us utterly panicking as change arrives.  Depending on its house placement in our chart its effect often is felt as shocking, unpredictable, and erratic. Pluto brings destruction, transformation, and renewal.  Its effect on our life (once again based upon its placement in our chart) is grinding, ruthless and extreme.  And what happens when these two rogue cowboys are running amok on the planet at odds with each other? Look around.  Who are we praying for right now?   

So the real question is, we have 4 more of these, how do we get through? This was was pretty rough already.  

By educating our soul.  

Kabir Helminski says, “this education of the soul…is a process of awakening a presence that can initiate and sustain the activation of our latent human faculties.”  

We need ALL our faculties to be functioning folks, not latent.  

These transits through various aspects of our life educate our soul about our true relationship with the larger Reality (God, Universe, Divine Presence) and are a benevolent universe’s systematic removal of those obstacles to that knowledge.  We get to become more real, more human!! This removal and re-creation process is essentially a process of deconditioning, reconditioning, and unconditioning. 

Back to the garden cart (I didn’t forget!) On some level,  I was moving forward trying to DO something that I set out to do (get through an obstacle course), making my yard look a certain way (cause that’s what responsible people do), interacting with the things in my care, all without pausing to figure out why perhaps the cart didn’t move.   When I observe myself energetically and psychologically I discovered that I have conditioned myself to push myself through situations who qualities do not include that didn’t checking in and make changes to my trajectory based upon the truth of the situation vs my perceived understanding.  Later I found out through my Father that my garden cart tires need to be filled and if they HAD moved very far I would have to replace my tires.   My lack of presence into the situation then would have created more damage, facilitating more stress, and locking me into a pattern that I would then have to also respond to.  And then I could congratulate myself about my mature response to the situation then too! (God bless my ego)   

At the end of the day, my interaction with my garden cart IS a metaphor, and it is ALSO the physical reality.  My actions with it and towards it is an indicator of the way in which I can often be unaware of what I am doing and why, the unexamined way in which I follow my inner programming assuming that my instinct or thoughts are the right or best way.    It is this zombie response that shapes interactions and ultimately the direction of our friendships, our relationship to possessions, and the raising of our loved children.  Right now, in this transit, this is the liability.

So, to get through this transit, we need to get real practiced at stepping back from the obstacles we are trying to push through.  Examine that cart with our inner eye, use our reason and intuition around what we are trying to do and take to task the “whys” that formed those.  Then, pray for guidance from the Higher Power (as you see it) since that Power sees farther than we do and then surrender to the outcome. 

The control freak in all of us gets all medieval about surrender. 

That desire to control and manipulate the outcome is oft directly related to our social and cultural conditioning.  While Pluto and Uranus might be impersonal in their systematic removal of those things that we sedimentally hold, the Universe does have our backs.  Every single person on this planet is held and guided.  The pain we are in, are coming out of, or might be coming, while difficult and not our idea of a good time, often has a noble purpose. 

So if my heart can offer a prayer for you out of my own experience of pain and loss:

I pray that you receive guidance in a way that you can see it, the capacity to follow it, that it is easier than those that went before you, and protection from the blessing as it unfolds. 

Giving up the battle against our soul

Orion Foxwood likes to speak regularly about becoming creatures of congruence instead of creatures of compliance. it is is a tricky place to stand to figure out the ways that we are finding ourselves following roads or ideologies that are not good for us, whether we are actively beating ourselves up for them, or whether we feel we are fighting a just war against an ideological enemy that hurts us in the process.  

The question really we need to ask ourselves in each moment, like asking the sacred paswords of entry to each breath, thought or deed is:  is this bringing me closer into my center, connecting me in, or is this pushing me further away, disconnecting me from my core?  Our minds are tricky buggers and our emotions can make coyote medicine look like sport.  Our job here is to priest and priestess our hearts, minds and bodies.  The way we do this is to invoke more and more love, and call into the center of our being more and more light.  

We might have to sacrifice on the altar of truth up some of our ways and beliefs that we utilize to govern our inner chaos carefully and actually open the pandora's box of intimacy. It Perhaps we might just have to figure out how to get comfortable with being seen, being loved and being offered grace when something goes pear shaped!   

"For the Horned God himself kissed the Goddess' feet in the five-fold salute, laying his power at the feet of the Goddess because of her youth and beauty, her sweetness and kindness, her wisdom and justice, her humility and generosity.  So he resigned all his power to Her."  - BOS writings

Resign your power to grace, beauty, sweetness and kindness... to humility and generosity... to yourself, to your community, and to the Gods.

  

Little Pockets of Happiness on Beltane

My friends, 

As we are crossing this beautiful May Day, the most wonderful posts about May day's past have been shared across countries, faith traditions and families.  (Isn't the internet wonderful!)  My favorite so far are the May Day baskets that are secretly dropped on each other's porches:  for our neighbors, our friends.  Many of us it was our earliest teachers that taught us how to do this and instilled this practice at a young age.  I am recalling a story yesterday where a friend was sharing his joy that he found a May Day basket on his porch when he came out, this gift both a joy for his soul and also the gift of a blessed memory.  

And such a gift it is!  These happy little baskets are symbolic droplets of the vast ocean of humanities ability to actually BE human.  They are tokens of humanities capacity to offer love, service, kindness, and thoughtfulness.  The God and Goddess' wedding day is a tangible and potent reminder of the way that we truly are a marriage between the denser earth and the transcendent light!  May Day itself shows not only our ability, but our need to reach outside of our preoccupations with our fears, our families and our work and physically show our deep capacity to reach out to another person and show them deep love, to offer kindness, and deepen our presence together.  

The Goddess told us in her charge "no other law but love I know, by naught but love may I be known."  It is the love that connects us into each other and into our holiness.  It is service and thoughtfulness to others around us that connects us to that love, tangibly, like a cord that plugs a lamp into power.  As we reach out to one another we create more light, and our very humanity, what makes us holy, comes alive!!  

So this May Day, celebrate the marriage of our beloved Gods by filling your love basket in service to those around you, the people who are in your life: your co-workers, your husband or wife, your children who you are teaching what the world is like, or your neighbors, and plug in with them.  Bring more love into this world!  Happy May Day!!   May it be love!! 

Getting brave enough to fall in love with God.

As I have fallen more in love with the Holy, it has become clear to me that God/dess (God doesn't have gender so I try to be equal opportunity!) is all around me: in the people I see, in the land that I walk on, in the air that I breathe, and in the spirit that animates me. 

But this has not always been as apparent to this woman and it has come at a cost of saying that this physical world is worth time and energy to delve into to understand Divinity further.

I was taught, as many of us were, that the Holy was only found in transcendence (even though paradoxically God is everywhere!) and that this physical realm was a distraction at best from holy pursuits.  I was also trained at university and seminary that the Protestant Christian version of the scriptures was the only source of true wisdom that could be trusted and that every other source of knowledge or wisdom could be fallible.

While trodding this path I came to this passage spoken by Paul to the Romans (1:19-21):

“19 since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20 For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.  21 For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.”

I found myself in an internal battle between what scripture was telling me, which is that the heavens declare the Glory of God, and a mass of well intentioned teachings from a religious community that was so fearful of committing the sin of idolatry (confusing a physical object with the transcendent Holy) that it was unwilling to look at anything outside of a single religious text to even look for a more mature understanding and knowledge of God.

Then, I did something really ballsy:  I prayed to the Creator to show me the unknowable in the knowable.  Show me grace by show me the truth as the truth, and show me the falsity as falseness.  Or said another way, Show me what YOU are really about, since God told me that he/she is not a spirit of fear!

Seemed simple enough at the time.

St. Thomas Aquinas tells us that some things that are true about God are by nature a mystery to us, unknowable, and majestic.  But he also tells us in the same treatise that humanity commences with its knowledge of God through the senses, saying, ”there are some truths which the natural reason also is able to reach…For, according to its manner of knowing in the present life, the intellect depends on the sense for the origin of knowledge; and so those things that do not fall under the senses cannot be grasped by the human intellect except in so far as the knowledge of them is gathered from sensible things.” - Contra Gentiles, I, c.3.

St. Aquinas teaches that while God is inherently unknowable because God is multi-layered, nuanced and multi-faceted, we should still use the faculties given us.   My own Mother, fearful for the salvation of my soul, never wanted for me to leave Christianity, but she more than any one person taught me that I was not to fear people, only God.  And it was with this in my heart that I set off to remove the darkness and foolishness in my mind. 

I had no idea where I would wind up (not all of it good!).

Over the next decade plus years I spent time “beholding the universe around me and observed the order and arrangement in it.” 

to be cont...

Rebellion or Holiness?

Searching for the Real, even if I had to go to China

About 15 years ago, I went through a divorce that rocked my world.  Up until that point, I was absolutely following a path that was set before me, so to speak. Unexamined, I was trying to live the life of the good girl, find a "Christian husband" and live a life like the pastors told me the Christian Bible was asking me to be.  

On the other hand I had come out of a rocky situation fettered with various types of abuses that set this girl's heart on edge and made her wary of the world.  My very young marriage to this person, (who was kind hearted and also in his early 20's and so was also very sure of his opinions) was a breaking point for me for taking responsiblity for my own life, my own actions and the consequences of my affairs.  

Having an external set up in life of things happening to me set me up to energetically just be like that, have things happening TO ME.  The LA cultural and spiritual scene in the 80's was fast paced, shifting theological ideas and currents, mixed with too expensive of fashion and racial tensions that would rock anyone's world. Moving yearly, sometimes more often, moving from one Christian church denomination to the next with each disagreeing with the last, having parents that were not on the same page as each other, and ultimately moving from region to region and having the cultures clash with each other will either break you, or you learn to move with the flow.   This was how I survived and honestly learned to get along with others.  But as a grown up, I found myself lacking in the skills to hold my own, to claim my own ideas and so found myself a slave to the church and fear system.  Each set of friends were only friends for a time until we moved and so the opinion was "I can't lose them, they are it!"  I cannot have them be mad at me.  Same with my parents, they were it, in a world that moved and shifted its core regularly.  

However, I might make a good Baptist, because I believe that this was meant to be the way.  The situation wasn't some grand mistake that my parents fuggered up and now I get to be mad at them. I could blame them, but mostly my heart blesses them. Our home life and subsequent culture shifts led to a very deep conversation about what it really means to be human, to be embodied in this world.  Where did holiness **really** lie, and what did God actually expect out of us?  We all want to say we have the answer to that, but how often are we actually getting brave and really looking at that question.  How often are we not just parroting something we were told when we asked the question in a softer earlier time of life.  

I woke up one morning and I realized that if I died at that moment that all I was doing was following my religion because I was afraid, and that I was just trying to do the right thing my church told me to do.  I woke up and discovered that my religion was fear.   When I stood before my creator, that would be the bald faced truth.  

Yes, I was trying to fall in love with God, yes I wanted to know God, yes I wanted to do the right thing.    The inner self was saying, "I don't even know who you are!"  Like a face of someone I was supposed to know with subtitles of what I was told someone was like, but had never met.

My own conscience pricked me, my spiritual discontentedness pushed me end over end to my owning up of my own spirit, my own life.  So, after my husband divorced me, I promptly left the safe sand box and started looking for God myself.  I was in my own Pilgrim's progress, so to speak, and I found myself looking for God, only this time for real. 

Pearl of Searching

I myself took up the cloak of blame;

I smashed the bottle of honor and virtue on a stone.

What if it?

Sometimes I rise up and watch the universe from above.

Sometimes I go down to earth and lose myself in love.

What of it?

Sometimes I study life's meaning in the holy books.

Sometimes I go to the tavern and get drunk.

What of it?

Sometimes I enter my garden to pick roses for my darling;

I grew the roses and I gathered them.

What of it?

The wine of this love is a sin, the orthodox think-

The sin is mine. I fill my glass and drink, 

What of it?

The pious bow to the niche in the mosque and cathedral.

I bow at the Beloved's doorstep, pressing my face up close.

What of it?

My enemy says loving beauty is sinful.

I love my Beloved so I'll gladly pay that price.

What of it?

They ask Nesimi,

are you and your beloved getting along?

If I am happy or I suffer, my Beloved is mine.

What does it matter?

-Nesimi, 15th C.

Grace should not be a weapon!

The concept of the connection between sin and grace is one that all of us have struggled with.  Within our tradition, it's hard to remember that our lady is compassionate and that our Lord Lights the way, and that its not about a misplaced focus that other religions may have gotten lost in. Grace is not a human construct designed to hold people down and keep them in their place.

As mystics our own remembrance must be that we were not given a spirit of fear, nor do we practice a tradition of fear and that means also not being afraid of having faults, making mistakes and at the end of the day being transparent with those to self, gods and others. This also means if we apply our theology to our daily practice then we find ourselves needing to rethink our wounds of sin and condemnation given to us by our former churches.

Like favoring an injury too long can bring on it's own injury, if we build a practice based upon our wounds given to us, then we are merely creating another wound that we will have to unwind. Spirit asks us to be deeply transparent and courageous in our loving, and this means learning to accept grace as a divine characteristic. And grace means, that when things are rough and we don't do well... that the gods are not the 2x4 just waiting to tell us we did wrong. Instead they are the loving force that aid us when we ask, and chooses not judge us when we can't figure out how to make it all come together.

At the Crossroads

Dancing with Change

My partner Shon has a very business like attitude in our vegetable garden.  With its raised beds, is for us the mother of all crossroads.  In it he evaluates our veggies as if they were the stock market and the non producing veggies as if they were his portfolio, culling both bugs and poorly producing plants.   At first, I was appalled for the little guys.  I am more sedimental, more likely to say, "awww, poor thing, he just needs another 3 months. Then he'll be a real basil plant!"  But in Oregon, that's pretty much what we have,  three months of growing…maybe.  

Having a practical sense of our true resources:  our time, our inner inclinations, and our trajectory as to where we are going, hard decisions have to be made sometimes daily.   As we move into the early fall / late summer we are starting to see the fruit of our labor and the changing understanding of our actual resource limits, our spirit starts to rattle inside our bodies with its knowledge of this: some of which we deeply yearn for and others that we wish would take a Xanax.  

Cutting out our dearly held hope images in our life is not easy.  Those little thai basil plants were our households main focus and the talk around the kitchen table for more than one morning, and darn it, last year they did so well.  What went wrong this year?   Sometimes what seemed good for previous years of our lives, are not right for this time.  Maybe our visions of where we should go were based upon old information, old dreams or old maps?  The beautiful thing about crossroads is that we can open up possibilities again.  We can take out the map study it and see where the landscape changes or where our direction might have changed.   We have a grace point built into our body and spirit to be able to check our inner alignment.  We can naturally go to the crossroads within ourselves where all the parts of us meet together and have a pow-wow!  With this inner alignment in view we can decide with our intuition, our mind and with Source as our trusty guide, where we are going next.  

When Shon culled those cute little buggers, I mourned them.  I was attached to their significance in our garden.  We had hopes attached to them, and my own value attached to what they would do and be.  But as the month went by, I realized that he was right, the bigger picture was that we were gardening to eat, to stay healthy and to keep our bills low while we do it. 

What are your hope plants doing this year?  (I know your zucc's are fine, want some of mine?!) Have you valued your family and yourself enough to visit your inner soul place of power and allowed yourself to take a good deep look at where things are going and perhaps even ask the harder reason of why?  Is it time to take some of those outdated values and sacrifice them at the crossroads?  Some crossroads *are* a crucifixion (like Jesus' or Osiris), and others are courageous midnight coin offerings and whiskey but both are the same: a trade for a trade.  A little midnight courage might go a long ways!  You just might find yourself like I did, surprised at the joys that I would have never experienced otherwise!   

As your inner imp voice of change, I'd like to offer a small suggestion:  get your three new dimes some whiskey and get your butt to the crossroads to pray.  You won't be sorry! 

Copyright Sophia Kyraphia 2012

   

I need a bigger basket

Peep!! 

Easter is a complex time of year for me.  With the American culture's propensity towards marketing, often times it is hard for me to see past the campy plastic eggs and our bright colorfully dressed bunny hiding them.  I also intellectually know that this holiday is a remnant of old agrarian beliefs around the ever important fertility (even today!) and significant events that are happening around us to mark that we have indeed crossed a line in nature telling us that there is going to be more sun than shadow, and that the hard line that we had to hold to make sure that we didn't freeze or starve to death is starting to fade.  

To say that fertility, light and the turning of the seasons are not important anymore is just not correct.  I found out that I cannot have children and made a choice not to do fertility treatments, and I discovered that many hurting people faced this alongside of me this year.  We have more people doing fertility treatments than ever before to have children, men or women leaving partners who are barren or cannot conceive, Martha Stewart in the last twenty years single handedly made gardening into a mainstream obsession (which is GREAT for the environment)  and eco-spirituality followed mainstream consciousness since the 1900's and later when we watched Emerson go to live deliberately in the woods.  While many of outpourings of Easter might be considered to be shallow outpourings from a unexamined soul, they are still fostered through something deeper. 

I have heard more times this spring that hearts that have been embedded in winter blues were so glad that spring was here.  I have heard that it was a hard winter and when we started seeing daffodils and crocus' our little hearts skipped a beat.  These little beauties signaled to us that the light had come back and our soul was in for a treat!  In Oregon where I live, we get very little sun, and have gotten less sun as time has gone on.  We joke about Juneuary, and the coldness that exists when it should be 65 degrees.  If we look at the deeper conversation that we are having, we are really saying that we have been in a struggle with darkness and our soul feeling the loss is ready for some help with this with the insertion of joy!   

Spring is this insertion of joy as medicine… Easter personifies this!    In Christianity, the belief is that there is a personified gift of God that opened a bridge for all of humanity to come into the light and reunite with the Life.  This gift was viewed as the bridge to the higher reality and on this day he offered this bridge to all of humanity to come out of darkness and embrace joy as a lifestyle, a birthright of sorts and to step back into the original plan for humanity which was to live in wholeness in the presence of divinity.  

In paganism we see the same thing with a different telling of it where [the] physical part of our selves (symbolically represented by the God) finally finds what He has been looking for and decides to step into his birthright and claim that he truly is eternal (Goddess is symbolic of the eternal part of humanity).  He agrees to step into full sun, and to move out of the selfish and self seeking ways that he has followed until that point and anchor himself into something deeper.  He is enticed by eternity to embrace his eternal soul as being a worthwhile enough venture to commit.  Jesus committed with his soul and brought life into the world, and the God of paganism commits with his soul and brought forth life with the Child of Promise being birthed.  Both agree to let a part of themselves die in order to have something larger.

And this bunny, in all of his caricatured glory is the representation of this fertility inserting joy into hidden places!  The eggs are personifications of the eternal truth that our Maker gives us gifts that are beautiful and full of surprises, and that after our death there is life.   

This Easter my hope is that we are looking for the hidden joys with a basket that is big enough to carry them!   I challenge you increase your inner capacity and allow joy to be part of your spiritual make up, to allow the divine  gifts to be present in our lives.  Divinity is benevolent, and wants the best for us.  The presence of pain and darkness is not an indicator of the way that god does not care, but instead is a unique opportunity to become closer to that which is Real, to find the hidden gems. Sometimes God has to stop talking so we can learn to listen better, to strengthen our spirit and ultimately realign in a real way instead of being led along by the nose like a pack animal.

This year I am going to get a bigger basket!  In that basket I am going to place the hidden gifts in my life, bring them forward and celebrate them!  By doing this, I realize that I can allow the light to overcome the darkness and heal my spirit.  It is then, when we get brave and open our hearts we allow our gifts to be seen and discovered by divinity!  

For the kingdom of God is within you! 

© 2012 By Terradon Iler 

Seeing Through the Veil to Eternity

Moses and the Shepherd (Rumi)

Moses heard a shepherd on the road praying,
“God,
where are you? I want to help You, to fix Your shoes
and comb your hair. I want to wash Your clothes
and pick the lice off. I want to bring You milk,
to kiss Your little hands and feet when it’s time
for You to go to bed. I want to sweep Your room
and keep it neat. God, my sheep and my goats
are Yours. All I can say, remembering You,
is ayyyyyyy and ahhhhhhhh.”

Moses could stand it no longer.
“Who are you talking to?”

“The one who made us,
and made the earth and made the sky.”
“Don’t talk about shoes and socks with God!
And what’s this with Your little hands and feet?
Such blasphemous familiarity sounds like
you’re chatting with your uncles.
Only something that grows needs milk.
Only someone with feet needs shoes. Not God!
Even if you meant God’s human representatives,
as when God said, ‘I was sick, and you did not visit me,’
even then this tone would be foolish and irreverent.

Use appropriate terms. Fatima is a fine name
for a woman, but if you call a man Fatima,
it’s an insult. Body-and-birth language
are right for us on this side of the river,
but not for addressing the Origin,
not for Allah.”

The shepherd repented and tore his clothes and sighed
and wandered out into the desert.

A sudden revelation
came then to Moses. God’s voice:
You have separated Me
from one of my own. Did you come as a prophet to unite,
or to sever?
I have given each being a separate and unique way
of seeing and knowing and saying that knowledge.
What seems wrong to you is right for him.
What is poison to one is honey to someone else.

Purity and impurity, sloth and diligence in worship,
these mean nothing to Me.
I am apart from all that.
Ways of worshipping are not to be ranked as better
or worse than one another.
Hindus do Hindu things.
The Dravidian Muslims in India do what they do.
It’s all praise, and it’s all right.

It’s not Me that’s glorified in acts of worship.
It’s the worshippers! I don’t hear the words
They say. I look inside at the humility.
That broken-open lowliness is the Reality,
not the language! Forget phraseology.
I want burning, burning.
Be friends
with your burning. Burn up your thinking
and your forms of expression!
Moses,
those who pay attention to ways of behaving
and speaking are one sort.
Lovers who burn are another.”

Don’t impose a property tax
on a burned out village. Don’t scold the Lover.
The “wrong” way he talks is better than a hundred
“right” ways of others.
Inside the Kaaba
it doesn’t matter which direction you point
your prayer rug!
The ocean diver doesn’t need snowshoes!
The Love-Religion has no code or doctrine.
Only God.
So the ruby has nothing engraved on it!
It doesn’t need markings.
God began speaking
deeper mysteries to Moses. Vision and words,
which cannot be recorded here, poured into
and through him. He left himself and came back.
He went to eternity and came back here.
Many times this happened.
It’s foolish of me
to try and say this. If I did say it,
it would uproot our human intelligences.
It would shatter all writing pens.

Moses ran after the shepherd.
He followed the bewildered footprints,
in one place moving straight like a castle
across a chessboard. In another, sideways,
like a bishop.
Now surging like a wave cresting,
now sliding down like a fish,
with always his feet
making geomancy symbols in the sand,
recording his wandering state.

Moses finally caught up with him.
“I was wrong. God has revealed to me
that there are no rules for worship.
Say whatever
and however your loving tells you to. Your sweet blasphemy
is the truest devotion.
Through you a whole world is freed.
Loosen your tongue and don’t worry what comes out.
It’s all the light of the Spirit.”

The shepherd replied,
“Moses, Moses,
I’ve gone beyond even that.
You applied the whip and my horse shied and jumped
out of itself. The Divine Nature and my human nature
came together.
Bless your scolding hand and your arm.
I can’t say what has happened.
What I’m saying now
is not my real condition. It can’t be said.”

The shepherd grew quiet.

When you look in a mirror,
you see yourself, not the state of the mirror.
The fluteplayer puts breath into a flute,
and who makes the music? Not the flute.
The Fluteplayer!

Whenever you speak praise or thanksgiving to God, it’s always like this dear shepherd’s simplicity.
When you eventually see
through the veils to how things really are,
you will keep saying again and again,

“This is certainly not like we thought it was!”