Month: June 2013

Ecstatic Swimming Lessons

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Christ / Course Ideas / Creative

I was sitting alone on a stone bench overlooking the harbor, sipping on a latte, as I took in the sights and sounds of a strange land- (I was on vacation)- when a young woman on a scooter whipped past and let fly a paper airplane.  Judging from the sparkle, it was made from a laquer-faced card stock.  This girl meant business.  Her face bore an inscrutable expression, like the facade of an abandoned bank […]

Filling Your Self Up

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Course Ideas / Creative

I am traveling this world with a brochure in my hand for this reality called Unity.  The paper has become old and wrinkled, now, and its so soft I can hardly feel it in my back pocket.  Its edges are slowly eroding, like the boundary of a warming glacier, the words fading through years of exposure and wear.  I can’t even remember where I found it. Each day is like a recognition game.  I encounter […]

Heart Songs

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Christ / Poetry

At dusk, a colorwheel sky. It is yellow-green to the west. Overhead, a dimming into blue. The day’s earlier torrent of photons has reduced to a trickle. The last of them bounce through the atmosphere and, without any pressure behind them, scatter. Far away, the spigot has been shut– eclipsed by the rim of a spinning world. One by one, they are absorbed. Heeded. Listened to, like sacred whispers. In some cases, become flesh. The […]

Is Love Enough?

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Course Ideas

Faced with a world in which something has gone wrong, it is virtually impossible to encounter the madness and not attempt to envision a solution.  I’m not saying solutions shouldn’t be envisioned, but I think that in A Course of Love Jesus is saying, “Hey, look, if you were a fish on dry land, and your gills were burning, and you were undergoing a total metabolic catastrophe, and you were given the choice between letting […]

We Are One Heart

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Christ / Course Ideas

“Our heart is the light of the world. We are one heart. We are one mind.  One creative force gathering the atoms, establishing the order, blessing the silence, gracing the cosmos, manifesting the light of the heart.  Here we live as one body, experiencing communion, the soul’s delight, rather than otherness.” (CoL, 2nd ed., page 180, 20.4-20.6) This passage from A Course of Love always seems to reduce the vicissitudes of my life to a […]

Something Else

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Christ / Poetry

A darkening horizon at midday, swelling thunderheads, a green tinge, and muffled light. A question blown like sand over a cliff. An equilibrium turning inside out. A suspicion of trains, coal, and rust. A nail, old, once surrounded by skin, encompassed by pulsing blood and heat, alive in the minds of men, an artifact of purpose, now pitted and worn, clinging to creosote,  earth, and wood. A decaying uncertainty. A man, miles away, brow knitted. […]

For My Beloved

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Creative / Poetry

Today I wrote this to the woman I love… Hafiz might say that when a heart chooses grace and beauty and strength- i.e. chooses to be Itself- then all the world is blessed and that heart discovers that all hearts dwell within Itself. You have blessed me with your love and wisdom and compassion. You have wounded me with purity and truth, and now I am dying into your Love. Everything that is now knows […]

Air Travel Unlearning

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Course Ideas

Last night I put on my air traveler temporarily delayed in a strange airport hat when one of those nebulous “mechanical problems” you hear about over the loudspeakers stymied the local maintenance crew for several hours.  We all know what most likely transpired…  A seatback got jammed slightly out of vertical, and despite the best efforts of three suddenly religious would-be body builders, the offending mechanism could not be convinced.  When the crackerjack troubleshooters finally […]