This last week an asteroid passed through my solar plexus, and I wobbled a little back and forth like a transplanted tree testing its new roots. I swallowed the asteroid whole, and mostly because I had a bet with Hafiz, I didn’t spit it out. I asked him if a star would grow inside of me now and blow me up from the inside out because I swallowed an asteroid through my solar plexus, and […]
Each of my wounds, every pain, was a withholding. Never mind the reasons. You don’t need ten plagues to make the point if you have the miracle of uncertainty in your life. It teaches unceasingly, without relent. I realized the other evening in the car: the only fear I’ve ever had is a question about what I might be asked to give. Jesus knows this question well—has explored its every angle— but no one can […]
I haven’t picked up A Course of Love for a while, but picked it up again the other day and flipped to a “random” section. I ended up opening to a page that was late in the Treatise on the Personal Self, which is a section of the Course describing the way in which the personal self becomes a living representation of the True Self—the latter being the identity we all share in unity. Through […]
My unfolding as a being has undergone a few prompt jumps in self-expression. In the 1990 time frame I went from viewing rock music as one of the influences most likely to lead to my destruction– in the same category as cigarettes, underage drinking, and not doing your homework– to buying Nirvana’s record Nevermind. And feeling somehow holy about it. It was auspicious. The lightning I had anticipated failed to strike. It takes all of thirty […]
The last half of this year, and the last two months in particular, have reduced the aperture of my life down to such a tight radius that I feel as though I’ve been scanning the field of experience and possibility one dim pixel at a time. There’s not much plot to derive from such a view– not much context or depth with which to work. Day and night are shades of brightness, but little more. […]
Sometimes Life is like you’re standing on a crowded street, oblivious to everything but a chunk of gristle encrusted steak of an idea of who you should be being that you’re politely chewing for years on end– years and years and years, utterly distracted, like it’s an antidote, like you’re a cat encumbered by a wad of something gooey and medicinal the vet jammed deep in your cheek just out of reach of the jawbone’s […]
A mind enamored of its own disguise cannot see all the imminent Buddhas– the ones stationed everywhere it looks. The Ones everywhere it can’t quite see. (Stop here for a moment and take a look around.) (Do you see?) A mind convinced of its own fabrications cannot imagine that experience itself is an omni-sided doorway– a passage to every form of grace. A passage to every glory, seated in circles. (Don’t worry where, just imagine… that you […]
The other day, unexpectedly and without provocation, because it made sense in a very incalculable kind of way, and eschewing momentarily all my previously aggregated momentum of character and personality, I responded to a clever advertisement stapled to the picture of a pet mountain goat that by some accounts had gone missing, and by other accounts been found, that was taped to a promotional photograph of a local practitioner of esoteric dietary arts involving seeds […]
Miracles work like this: we stop trying to choose a life from the menu and invite the chef to surprise us our plate arrives twenty minutes later, empty but for a once-folded, scribbled note: where have you been get your ass back here the meringue is on fire Suddenly– we remember… We enter the kitchen to hearty cheers, exploding custards, the incoming flight of a ripe tomato, a glimpse of flames from the open pit rotisserie, […]
A self is a heavy burden to carry with you across the desert. Despite being invisible and weightless in principle, it is the often overlooked, but necessary battery of accoutrements that are required to render the self manifest and functional that take their toll. There is the steamer trunk full of historical data, for instance, with its rather robust coefficient of sliding friction across the hot sand– the modern take on an old classic, a […]
Embracing Forever 