“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. […]
Today I wrote this to the woman I love… Hafiz might say that when a heart chooses grace and beauty and strength- i.e. chooses to be Itself- then all the world is blessed and that heart discovers that all hearts dwell within Itself. You have blessed me with your love and wisdom and compassion. You have wounded me with purity and truth, and now I am dying into your Love. Everything that is now knows […]
Last night I put on my air traveler temporarily delayed in a strange airport hat when one of those nebulous “mechanical problems” you hear about over the loudspeakers stymied the local maintenance crew for several hours. We all know what most likely transpired… A seatback got jammed slightly out of vertical, and despite the best efforts of three suddenly religious would-be body builders, the offending mechanism could not be convinced. When the crackerjack troubleshooters finally […]
I can remember my Heart. It was not a blood-pumping battery of striated, biochemical filaments. It was a star. I can remember it was all I ever had- all I ever knew or needed. It was not the kind of star that you see in the heavens that burn so hot all forms dissolve in their embrace. It was the kind of star you could hold in the palm of your hand, and watch its […]
If you have ever felt the presence of Jesus as he slips within your heart to offer you His embrace, which is to say, if you have ever felt Love completely fill the hollow of your being until you overflowed, which is to say, if peace has ever expanded the silence between your thoughts into a silent compassion for all that exists- then you have experienced the marrow from which all beings arise. You have […]
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 […]
In the seamless life, Loving and everything else are indissolubly joined. We are not splintered, or fragmented- not from our selves, not from one another, not from what is. We do not endure stretches of mundane, obligatory experiences in order to earn the right to partake of transitory, joyous interludes. There are no gaps between the dreams we share and the world we inhabit. No sacrifices are asked of us. No compromises demanded. We are […]
Unsure of how to proceed, the fabric of my inner experience the tattered banner of yet another failed self-concept, snapping and flapping in the rushing wind, I was washing dishes. One by one. Soak, scrub, wash, rinse, dry. Repeat. There was the hope that performing this activity manually, with ritual focus, would result in my being permeated by a bygone purity, one that would cool my smoldering core. The dishwasher was a pace or two […]
This past week I was shaken by an acute pain in my heart-soul-being. Like a fever in the body, it began as a dull ache, but ramped up into a full blown grippe. It was an inner aching that shook me to the core. If you have felt this, you will know the attending symptoms- the way a ghostly pallor slides over the world like a sticky film, the way we withdraw ourselves into a […]
Embracing Forever 