There are so many amazing things a person could choose to learn about in this world, enough to fill whole lifetimes– like the way photons make decisions when faced with the conundrum of a diffraction grating, or the way high-speed traders manipulate the flow of money on time scales that make the pace of human thought seem like canyon-making, or how the fashion industry unraveled the mystery of the neons. There was a time when […]
With each breath the possibility exists that your heart will no longer merely window shop along the shores of Eternity, sneaking peaks into that vista of marbled light, self-tending gardens and pain-free childbirth, imagining with aching joy all the wonders doo-dads and luxuriant, long-lasting features that you probably can’t even begin to comprehend that come standard with the Wholeness package, but will pull open the door, step inside and ask itself, really ask itself, to […]
Here in the Meanwhile, on the shores of Forever dotted with the charcoal stumps of forgotten fires, the mossy walls of collapsing wooden shanties and various debris of antiquity, such as: half-buried edges of glass, torn diary pages, ice picks, the bones of dead birds bleached by the sun, and a curious face caught in sepia, the faint notes of song drift past on the breeze, pastel tones that have nowhere else to go and so […]
I remember once when I was a boy, wondering if my knee would ever heal. A baseball slide on hard-packed dirt had torn it open. Then I had fallen off a bike. Mashed it into the ground in a soccer game. Made a heroic dive across the playground during PE. Every few days, the same. Finally, infection set in, and with it came the reality of an uncertain outcome. The improvement from one day to […]
The other day I had some old friends drop by for a visit– unannounced. I was sitting in the plaza having a sandwich, reading or reflecting or some such thing, when Depression slid one of the free chairs out from beneath the table, making a real show of it– dragged it along in a gritty clattering of metal across stone that sent all the pigeons fleeing, and then flopped down like a rubbery fish. Unshaven, […]
I don’t believe there is any greater power than that of an idea, deeply held, and slowly it is becoming clear to me that all we behold is the product of these generative seeds. In the three books of A Course of Love, Jesus speaks frequently about ideas, and in a passage that I love he says, “Giving ideas life is the role of creatorship.” This statement comes in a section of the Dialogues– the […]
Jesus has been known to suggest that one’s experience of our collective dream of separation is marked by an upside down, inside out view of things. We experience Love… as bound up with our pain, or perhaps we are afraid of what Love would offer us. We fear the things that offer us peace and eternal happiness, because of what we think they will cost us, and we are drawn into attachments with those things […]
When I stepped out of the building in which I work this evening, my head seemed to have been pressed into a perfect, steaming cube– a polished alloy ingot of ordered rectilinear thoughts. You could have bounced a laser off it. My normally fluid mind had been sintered by the heat of prolonged concentration into a dazed ceramic. Even my cells had conformed to the geometric demands of the day’s efforts, having tugged their cytoskeletons […]
One thing I’ve been observing recently is the weather pattern of my psyche. There are dominant feelings that arise and then linger like a slowly fading echo, serving as the backdrop to a strand of days. It’s like visiting a foreign country. You’re still you, but everything feels a little different at the same time. This inner weather is always moving around, always shifting. Unpredictable. The weather of three weeks ago is long forgotten, but […]
Some would say that faith is like a padded suit you put on because you’re too scared to face the obvious reality that your life is a swift, knee-scuffing blood-curdling tumble down a steep and rock-strewn escarpment towards the waiting gaping dark, ugly and hungry empty irreversible vacuum-powered inescapable abyss of non-existence. You’re afraid to die, they say. Some of those same ones would say there’s a real sweetness to the glimpses of wild flowers […]
Embracing Forever 