“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 […]
Last night I put on my air traveler temporarily delayed in a strange airport hat when one of those nebulous “mechanical problems” you hear about over the loudspeakers stymied the local maintenance crew for several hours. We all know what most likely transpired… A seatback got jammed slightly out of vertical, and despite the best efforts of three suddenly religious would-be body builders, the offending mechanism could not be convinced. When the crackerjack troubleshooters finally […]
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 […]
In the seamless life, Loving and everything else are indissolubly joined. We are not splintered, or fragmented- not from our selves, not from one another, not from what is. We do not endure stretches of mundane, obligatory experiences in order to earn the right to partake of transitory, joyous interludes. There are no gaps between the dreams we share and the world we inhabit. No sacrifices are asked of us. No compromises demanded. We are […]
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 […]
This past week I was shaken by an acute pain in my heart-soul-being. Like a fever in the body, it began as a dull ache, but ramped up into a full blown grippe. It was an inner aching that shook me to the core. If you have felt this, you will know the attending symptoms- the way a ghostly pallor slides over the world like a sticky film, the way we withdraw ourselves into a […]
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 […]
here’s the thing about That- (your heart’s lock). the Love inside You is the same Love that was inside Houdini. (do you see?) and fear… is a clumsy lock maker. his locks are rusty, ineffectual, and overdone hunks of metal, as functional and sophisticated as a cabal of mouse traps. sensing his own ineluctable incompetence, he applies them in copious quantities, disguising nothing at all as a vast and interwoven steel conspiracy. eschew this shammery. (those clodding forgeries […]
Embracing Forever 