This post is part of a series of posts written by several bloggers in answer to the Blog Challenge hosted by Linda Litebeing, and I thought it would be a great way to look back upon the last year. The warmth of the holiday season has provided a nice envelope of peace and cheer from which to reflect on a year that, as Linda pointed out in her invitation, has not been without challenges. And yet so […]
I wrote this poem for you. You wonder how this could be, since we’ve never met. You think I would need to know at least a few things about your self before I could make such a claim. You think, perhaps, that our two bodies should have shared a room at least once before I could even consider such a crazy idea as writing this poem for you. Or at least they should have heard one […]
High up in a cathedral of sky, in an alcove sunken into a sheer face of towering stone where few sounds dare to reach, where first percentile vultures congregate on weekends like a caste of the chosen and on whose sunbaked ledge adolescent mountain goats dream of one day standing motionless but for the waving of their beards in the icy winds and the steady chewing rhythm induced by a mouthful of snowbells, there is […]
When asked to explain the self, the Buddha demurred. How would this help? Likewise, a trusted computer will not look too closely at division by zero, not because it is impossible, but because of the hypnotic ramifications. Caught in its beguiling web, the self resists clear understanding. Better to consider the photon. When a filament of refined metallic earth is filled to the brimming point with a humming sweetness, or space itself collapses into an incredible, […]
See if this helps: Christ is a fisherman whose nets are cast nightly into the sea of non-existence, pulling haul after haul of shimmering beings out of the abyss. The seas are black as ink, the waves like rolling hills of liquefied obsidian, impenetrable to plain sight, but the nets emerge from the deep full of wriggling, unspeakable colors. We were each caught like that, scooped out of the darkness in nets woven by angels, hauled […]
For a time it was vitally important that I witness the sunset, that I look up from whatever act of commerce or gastronomy had caught my attention that day and look west, to pause and listen to far away places that seemed, for just a moment, to pour through the offices of my heart in fleeting snippets of a cosmic dialect. That was the moment, the precise time to say it: whatever this is… I […]
A skull is a resonating chamber, a human-shaped bottle for storing echoes. A Great Mystery holds me up to its ear– who is listening to Whom? Awareness merges with such a sound, vanishes. A skull is an organic amplifier, a condenser of ethereal transmissions, an inwardly-curving bone around a hollow void, meant to be dipped daily in a field of silence– held to the ear of a Great Mystery. Over time, carefully tended, the silence […]
All our assumptions were wrong. The strangest part is realizing we always knew this, even in the hour of our deepest pain. We’re like a secret of the universe that wandered through the trees to a scenic overlook and stood slack-jawed peering into a crevasse full of stars and comets choreographing the meaning of existence, then got whacked in the back of the head with a frying pan and splattered into a corpus callosum of inter-combinant […]
Who are we? It is perhaps the fundamental question of both science and religion, and certainly of what we call “spirituality”, a catch-all word with which I resonate in steadily decreasing degrees as time passes. Spirituality is all too often a repository for that which fails to fit nicely into one of the generally accepted practices for knowledge cultivation in our dominant cultures. Definitions aside, for most of us I think the essential purpose of […]
I’ve been reflecting lately upon the nature of knowing- of knowing anything at all. How exactly do we come to know? And what is it that may be known? The context for my reflections is not a vacuum, but my life, and the way that my deepest desires have driven me to wrestle with questions of meaning, purpose and identity. As is unavoidably the case for each of us, I have had to answer the […]
Embracing Forever 