I met Jesus while crawling on my belly beneath a rock, scratched and bleeding, panting with the effort to catch a single drop of dew with my swollen tongue, straining to taste its coolness before it swelled, and gravity plucked it out from under me. I’d been trying the same stunt every morning at this spot for three days. Now I was too weak to move on. At the last moment, I hesitated. It was […]
Who are we? It is perhaps the fundamental question of both science and religion, and certainly of what we call “spirituality”, a catch-all word with which I resonate in steadily decreasing degrees as time passes. Spirituality is all too often a repository for that which fails to fit nicely into one of the generally accepted practices for knowledge cultivation in our dominant cultures. Definitions aside, for most of us I think the essential purpose of […]
There’s a poverty I sometimes settle into, a clawing for connection. It’s a painful question that picks me out of the world’s line-up of chiefs and princetains, captains and raconteurs, the divas and the daring, and squares me up for examination. Him. He’s hiding something for sure– a limp of some sort, a wound that hasn’t healed, one eye that betrays him with its flickering tic, a slow, creeping failing he strives to ignore. Protectiveness […]
I’ve been reflecting lately upon the nature of knowing- of knowing anything at all. How exactly do we come to know? And what is it that may be known? The context for my reflections is not a vacuum, but my life, and the way that my deepest desires have driven me to wrestle with questions of meaning, purpose and identity. As is unavoidably the case for each of us, I have had to answer the […]
However you came to this point, however you made contact with your inner geometry, whatever brought you to the point of finally placing all your stock into who you are, into that infinitesimal droplet of radiance lurking in your chest of which you’ve but caught fleeting glimpses, not yet even knowing what they might be, it doesn’t really matter. You’re here. Let’s leave it at that. However you came to this point, all we can […]
Like that movie where the “bad guys” cast cocaine into the shape of statues and beautiful figurines so it could be hidden right out in the open, so the Beloved has smuggled Herself into this world. She is all around us, in plain sight, frozen into the shapes of all those hot-eyed, over-blown, sweaty, market-gaming, child-loving, war-fighting, family-valued, finger-pointing, smarter-than, smiling-laughing, loving, drop-kicking, device-wielding, stressed-out costumed beings who can’t quite figure out how the hell […]
Sometimes me and the boys like to go on jaunts. Get outta’ the office. Fact-finding missions what we call ’em. Get a handful of shirt, press crumpled cotton fists towards unsuspecting chins and make eyes into accusatory coals. Speak calmly while turning the place upside down to shake it for loose evidence. This will only take a moment, sir. See what coins fall out and jangle to rest on the pavement like glaring statements of […]
One day recently I stepped outside into a hive of birdsong. The sun was filtering down between the branches of trees at the edge of the yard, and the birds were dotted amongst the boughs, positioned instinctively behind leaf and shadow. It was like entering a Bev Doolittle painting that had come to life. Soprano spirals curled into the air, sounds that had been scribbled by the practiced hand of a master, as if Matisse […]
Roughly a week ago I wrote about acceptance and not looking back. It was fun. It felt good. I felt whole, and alive. I was aware of a nurturing Invisibility with which I was joined, as if I was wading into a body of water that has no opposite shore, shaking my arms loose, wiggling my head around, and generally preparing to dive forward and start doing a Michael Phelps impersonation at a right angle […]
A glowing vector shot across the sky, the last, illumined fragment of a shattered world, screaming in octaves of fire and dissolution. I peered into the majesty left behind, into that gathering field of stars and distances beyond measure, of potency and shimmering songs, feeling its Invitation draw the life within me to the surface the way the moon pulls the water up through stone beneath the land, the way tears rise to the surface […]
Embracing Forever 