Sometimes when I think of Jesus my heart swells into a tear, a solitary drop of the purest intimacy- to where does it flow? to whom does it not? Coyotes howling in the night- they understand me. They speak the language that has no grammar. Souls congregate in a darkness punctuated by lonesome howling. Jesus walks among them- softly. Presence can ignite a fire. Our world is a negotiation with premises, unrelenting- but a Silence […]
It’s an incredible marketing campaign, that Dos Equis Most Interesting Man bonanza, and if that’s what it takes to remind ourselves in a non-threatening way that we are the living, breathing manifestations of perfection, I’m all for it. Let’s set aside the social commentary about the way the message is dressed up, and the product it is selling, and for just a moment savor the delight that is engendered when a character is willing to […]
I wrote recently about thought systems, and then I got to thinking… There’s a prevalent concept in our still predominate worldview that goes like this, “Use it. Or Lose it.” Use the budget allocation your department has been given within the current fiscal year, or it will be taken away. Use your bicep to lift hunks of metal once or twice a week until your arm is burning like a sonuvagun, or it will atrophy. […]
If you haven’t tried everything yet, by all means keep trying. That is, if there is still something you wish to say or do that seems it might just be the thing to establish the veracity of your special amazing carefully hidden sparkling inner superhero identity- the one only you really understand, the one you feel that you and you alone must forge in the fires of your achievement and then quench in your cool […]
Jesus is, among other things, a systems thinker. Throughout A Course in Miracles he reminds us that one of his goals is to help us change our thought system, an approach to healing that he extends beautifully in A Course of Love wherein he invites us to consider that we have arrived, and left the ego behind, but may still be prone to move about in old patterns. He asks us to consider abandoning those […]
Grace has the consistency of wakefulness. You can rub it between your fingers and never even feel it. But the problem, is that it gets into your bloodstream, and later- when you’re driving in your car, or listening to foreign language tapes, or standing on your tippy toes trying to hang a skillet on a hook- it travels to your brain and shuts out the lights. You have a near death experience, and forget momentarily […]
We were born adrift, resilient beads of awareness shimmering on a high sea, buoyant. Sparkling. No land in sight. The residue of saturated space- meaning that cooling Emptiness could no longer hold in solution, dew drops from the Night’s sold out Vacancy, falling, caught – splat!- upon a blank canvas. No land in sight. We were all swaddling vulnerabilities, nascent and curious Futures-in-Training, fields of Potential whose every vector pointed away from a singular Discontinuity: the […]
Early on in A Course of Love, Jesus assures us that we are not alone in our experience of shock and dismay at what the world we see seems to offer. He says, “There is not a soul that walks this earth that does not weep at what it sees.” (CoL, 2.10) Recognizing that we might be reluctant to accept this sweeping statement at face value, he also says, “Think not that those who seem […]
Sometimes after a period of engagement with the world- of rummaging through a serpentine forest of excessively close-packed motorists, of defusing tasks that have been thrown headlong like live grenades towards the hard wall of Deadline, of displaying all the requisite attributes of a trained specialist embroiled in the local deluge of a world economy – I take a deep breath and return to the Beginning. I stop and take a drink of the Solace that […]
There’s nothing quite like a good paradox to peel the shrink wrap off your inner life and release the beautiful flavors that you are, or to suggest the intersection of hidden dimensions with the particular version of Flatland we’ve been calling our own. Let’s try one. Consulting the book of Rumi, as translated by Coleman Barks and John Moyne (The Essential Rumi), we find the following lyrical paradox poised atop the 105th page, like a […]
Embracing Forever 