What will it be like to Remember? Rumi advises we give up on this question1. My American football analogy goes like this: this is not a first down that we’re after. We can call out the chains and ask for a measurement, but the umpire will be dumbfounded and probably feint. Our questions are all boats without bottoms. The instant replay, on closer inspection, will reveal ten million angels on the nose of the football […]
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, […]
Time’s ruse is that it appears to pass. Every appearance, even voices, are a special effect. These echoes of the Invisible deceive me not. Every instance of drowning I endured came in the flood of something special. Show me the One who never speaks, and I will fall to my knees and listen, unmasked, mute and reverent. Change is the right-hand man of time, his charlatan enabler, the fragrance of sweet liquor hanging in the […]
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 […]
Barreling down life’s asphalt highway in a vehicle of some description– a modern coup of surface rocketry whose every line represents the fulfillment of computerized crash-testing and the collected fall-out of Greek ideas, gathered like a powder, fired in the furnace of time and sculpted into the shape of silent, diving falcons– a machine built for catapulting over the ground in space-blurring borings through wind and air that leave behind a shimmering, perfectly tubular quiet […]
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 […]
I’ve been developing a condition of late, a seizure that wracks my whole identity, an electric longing spun taut within an endless Answer. Out of the blue– tears. The core of my being, a wash cloth squeezed tight. The vast hands of compassion twisting and pulling, braiding me into a rope that is twined with all beings. Mary knows what I mean, how to hold this space, how to be flooded by the riches of […]
One day the Beloved glanced over and saw me schlepping my burlap bag of memories dull dreams and weathered photos across a landscape of cars, glass bottles, and tinted-glass personalities like a lonely tortoise having a near death experience during the evening commute. Curious, She picked me up. My legs dangled awkwardly, pumping the air in their usual slow, auto-piloted circles as if nothing had happened, as if I might still actually be plodding along, […]
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 […]
If a woman walking alone in a forest experiences transfiguration, and Grace pours through every fiber of her being, does she radiate Light? Aw, geez! There I go again! Me and my non sequiturs. Does part of me really believe that beings experience transfiguration : : : alone? * * * * * Each body you see is the emanation of Holiness. The question is: do you think in terms of emanations? Or of Holiness? […]
Embracing Forever 