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 […]
The day to end all days begins like any other. I awaken in the same bed. I begin an awkward stumble down the hall, but… even before my synapses have warmed, I can sense it. Something is strange. Nice strange. Really nice strange. I am filled with the abiding sensation that everything is worked out. The center of my being is a field of possibility and satisfaction. Nothing hangs over me and nothing begs for […]
Jesus suggests in the Treatise of the New- (of the Treatises on A Course of Love)- that we stand poised to enter the causative formation of the new world we have so long sought. It’s right here, now, awaiting our response. I feel like I’m in it up to my neck- but neck deep isn’t enough. I can’t stand on the end of the high dive, bouncing in place, and just imagine what it would […]
I was sitting alone on a stone bench overlooking the harbor, sipping on a latte, as I took in the sights and sounds of a strange land- (I was on vacation)- when a young woman on a scooter whipped past and let fly a paper airplane. Judging from the sparkle, it was made from a laquer-faced card stock. This girl meant business. Her face bore an inscrutable expression, like the facade of an abandoned bank […]
At dusk, a colorwheel sky. It is yellow-green to the west. Overhead, a dimming into blue. The day’s earlier torrent of photons has reduced to a trickle. The last of them bounce through the atmosphere and, without any pressure behind them, scatter. Far away, the spigot has been shut– eclipsed by the rim of a spinning world. One by one, they are absorbed. Heeded. Listened to, like sacred whispers. In some cases, become flesh. The […]
Faced with a world in which something has gone wrong, it is virtually impossible to encounter the madness and not attempt to envision a solution. I’m not saying solutions shouldn’t be envisioned, but I think that in A Course of Love Jesus is saying, “Hey, look, if you were a fish on dry land, and your gills were burning, and you were undergoing a total metabolic catastrophe, and you were given the choice between letting […]
“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 […]
A darkening horizon at midday, swelling thunderheads, a green tinge, and muffled light. A question blown like sand over a cliff. An equilibrium turning inside out. A suspicion of trains, coal, and rust. A nail, old, once surrounded by skin, encompassed by pulsing blood and heat, alive in the minds of men, an artifact of purpose, now pitted and worn, clinging to creosote, earth, and wood. A decaying uncertainty. A man, miles away, brow knitted. […]
Sometime around the third grade I must have read the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis. Shortly thereafter I was at a friend’s house, and our game of Monopoly had basically ground down to that stage of painstaking, asymptotic approach to closure that takes three-quarters of the game play and offers one-tenth of the fun, when we began talking about whether or not our mental powers might be strong enough to forge […]
The banana yellow 1960 Impala convertible drifted to a stop about ten feet from my front porch. The top was down and Hafiz was perched behind the steering wheel, motionless as a statue, wearing an over-sized floral shirt, an Oakland Raiders ballcap turned backwards, and a pair of mirrored sunglasses. Near as I could tell he was staring straight down the boulevard, waiting, as if I knew what the hell was going on and would […]
Embracing Forever 