Author: Michael

On Turning Inside Out

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Course Ideas / Poetry

I work away in my castle of thought, jolly as a clam, surrounded by parchment stacks, withered ledgers, flat screen monitors speckled by looping video clips of the past- (for research purposes)- key chains full of memory sticks, key chains full of keys to foot lockers, desk drawers, leather-bound briefcases, bulkhead doors, bicycle locks, motor vehicles, and a big-wheeled red tractor that gurgles when it idles, plus there are reams of photographs, black and white, […]

Something Beyond Thinking Right

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Christ / Course Ideas

The Truth is True.  That we can say for sure.  Beyond that, it gets kind of prickly.  Consider, for instance… …when a being who has latched onto a thought that is out of accord with the Truth is enjoying a period of relative satisfaction, expansion, and accomplishment in the world, it might be noted by some that things are going well, and concluded by others that a general condition of harmony must therefore reign in […]

Looking Beyond Meaninglessness

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Christ / Course Ideas

For nearly a fortnight this little outpost in the electronic landscape has been a purveyor of radio silence- a dot of ink indistinguishable from the backdrop of the night sky.  Only an expert in this tiny slice of the night sky would have noticed the absence of a star in the heavens, the one eclipsed by my corpuscle blot of quiet.  Jesus, for instance, standing in a meadow beneath the night sky, observing the vast, banded […]

A Dangling Becoming

comments 6
Christ / Poetry

I cling yet to the known, no longer panicked, but bemused by the early warning signs of my precipitous departure, dangling auspiciously over the side of this ledge, fingers clenching the last tufts of what has been as I hang in a state of white-knuckled longing for what will be, waving gently to and fro over all of space like a piñata awaiting the strike of some holy timber. This reluctance to all out surrender, […]

Two Beings on a Wire

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Poetry

Wings aflutter, like a curious dart connecting invisible dots across the sky, a collage of frozen frames- a beak, a wingtip, an eye- excerpted from whirling Possibility, a solitary thrush comes in for a landing on a crackling braid of steel, a stranded iron dance hall populated by troupe after troupe of Hertzian dervishes, a fire brigade of magnetic flowers opening, blooming, and then collapsing into electric echoes. Twenty stories above the desert floor, head […]

The First Step…

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Christ / Course Ideas

The first step in accepting your True nature is to look up from what you are doing, to disengage from the volition that you have become, to take one step back from the thread of responsibility and longing to which you are responding, and consider that the space into which you have stepped is more real, more alive, and more “you” than any place you have previously occupied.  There is no encounter or situation in […]

Not a Choice At All…

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Christ / Course Ideas

Sometimes we lose sight of the sheer unprecedentedness of our awareness.  We are aware.  It’s a worthy subject of reflection.  Some would say, perhaps, that at one point in “time” there was no such thing as awareness, and somewhere along the way, there was.  Thinking this way causes my neurons to enter states of quantum superposition… and get stuck.  I can imagine unawareness, somehow.  As if it existed, and maybe still exists.  I know that […]

Boyhood Ontology and the Promise of Salvation

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Christ / Course Ideas

Time capsules are intriguing.  Your elementary school teacher encourages you to round up some receipts, a few movie tickets, maybe a back-of-the-envelope journal entry with your favorite candy bar or song written on it, along with a note of encouragement to your future self, and then you and your classmates shove all these notions into a box or a tube and bury it.  Kickball, the old standby, would probably have been a more thrilling recess […]

Superposition

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Christ / Poetry

You… Is that you? Inside of me? I can feel you passing from one world to the next, the way the sun passes between the days, with shadows fleeing from the brilliance. I go about my day.  You go about yours. We are entangled without intersection. What do you call this superposition? I looked but you were gone. I saw moonlight beaming on a field of curled grass and a wooden hatch- another one of […]

Obstacles to Choosing Love

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Christ / Course Ideas

One of the more challenging topics for me to write about recently was the topic of suffering, and the idea that what Jesus describes as “the choice of love” can end suffering.  It was challenging because I could anticipate resistance to this idea, even as I wrote about it.  I could anticipate potentially alienating a reader or two, (and when you have three readers, all of whom you value dearly, this is indeed a risk), […]