The instruction to just be myself resulted in a pretty meandering to-and-fro up-over-and-down there and back again maybe, but maybe not, should I educate myself better or get a few more life skills first type of thing until one day when I was brushing my teeth I came to a scrunchy halt, arm cocked like a frozen piston, and I looked into the silvered plate hung on the wall, the one framed by garishly bright […]
One night when Hafiz was working the phones, a call came in. The man began by announcing that he had a few questions, as if he were preparing his counter party for a barrage of heavy artillery. The way he said it made it sound like he had a few answers, too. Look, he said, you can’t really know if there is anything beyond this life or not, but consider: if there isn’t a God, […]
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 […]
None of us really knows what kind of stunt Creation is going to pull next. The thing to do is avoid being reactionary. If you like to fly, for instance, put on your leather aviator’s helmet, your trusted goggles, and a long, flowing white scarf. Then sneak into the Situation Room and thrust up your hand to volunteer. Don’t worry, They’ll know for what.
There’s a poverty I sometimes settle into, a clawing for connection. It’s a painful question that picks me out of the world’s line-up of chiefs and princetains, captains and raconteurs, the divas and the daring, and squares me up for examination. Him. He’s hiding something for sure– a limp of some sort, a wound that hasn’t healed, one eye that betrays him with its flickering tic, a slow, creeping failing he strives to ignore. Protectiveness […]
There’s a kindness that isn’t about doing the right thing, or being good. It’s not about holding the door open for a stranger to be polite, or even nice. There’s a kindness that’s about upping the ante and challenging the status quo, about asking the kind of question that provokes a crisp rebuke from your inner skeptic, that elicits a little wait and see because here comes another sweet dose of I told you so– […]
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 […]
However you came to this point, however you made contact with your inner geometry, whatever brought you to the point of finally placing all your stock into who you are, into that infinitesimal droplet of radiance lurking in your chest of which you’ve but caught fleeting glimpses, not yet even knowing what they might be, it doesn’t really matter. You’re here. Let’s leave it at that. However you came to this point, all we can […]
Like that movie where the “bad guys” cast cocaine into the shape of statues and beautiful figurines so it could be hidden right out in the open, so the Beloved has smuggled Herself into this world. She is all around us, in plain sight, frozen into the shapes of all those hot-eyed, over-blown, sweaty, market-gaming, child-loving, war-fighting, family-valued, finger-pointing, smarter-than, smiling-laughing, loving, drop-kicking, device-wielding, stressed-out costumed beings who can’t quite figure out how the hell […]
If you make a plot of human population over the past few thousand years, the results are– well listen, let’s speak plainly here, as friends who have not the time for posturing or taking offense: the results are startling. If you are inclined towards levity you may even have a chuckle as you gape at the steeply rising curve and reflect upon the multiplicative industriousness of the recent age. Experts in prognostication and the statistical arts such as […]
Embracing Forever 