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 […]
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 […]
“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 […]
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. […]
I can remember my Heart. It was not a blood-pumping battery of striated, biochemical filaments. It was a star. I can remember it was all I ever had- all I ever knew or needed. It was not the kind of star that you see in the heavens that burn so hot all forms dissolve in their embrace. It was the kind of star you could hold in the palm of your hand, and watch its […]
If you have ever felt the presence of Jesus as he slips within your heart to offer you His embrace, which is to say, if you have ever felt Love completely fill the hollow of your being until you overflowed, which is to say, if peace has ever expanded the silence between your thoughts into a silent compassion for all that exists- then you have experienced the marrow from which all beings arise. You have […]
Sometime around the third grade I must have read the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis. Shortly thereafter I was at a friend’s house, and our game of Monopoly had basically ground down to that stage of painstaking, asymptotic approach to closure that takes three-quarters of the game play and offers one-tenth of the fun, when we began talking about whether or not our mental powers might be strong enough to forge […]
I was seated on a tall aluminum stool, in the middle of a high school gymnasium, at three in the morning. I wore a silk beanie on my head from which there stood a single aplomado falcon feather, pointed straight up like an antenna. My eyes were closed in concentration. Hafiz was seated opposite me on a stack of encyclopedias he had built just outside of the circle at midcourt. In front of him stood […]
Unsure of how to proceed, the fabric of my inner experience the tattered banner of yet another failed self-concept, snapping and flapping in the rushing wind, I was washing dishes. One by one. Soak, scrub, wash, rinse, dry. Repeat. There was the hope that performing this activity manually, with ritual focus, would result in my being permeated by a bygone purity, one that would cool my smoldering core. The dishwasher was a pace or two […]
I can imagine a life after this one, in which I am the same, but different. I can sense the timelessness of Being- the possibility of not ending, of becoming a long vista of compassionate quietude, of hearing every Moment as it arises with simple clarity: because Love is a seashell placed over the Heart. but I can’t remember beginning or being born or ever having been anyone else. Somewhere, along this way, the being […]
Embracing Forever 