All posts tagged: Perception

We Are One Body, One Life, One Mind

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Course Ideas / Reflections

In the Dialogues of A Course of Love, Jesus says, “Matter is simply another word for content.” This can be a challenging pill to swallow for students of A Course in Miracles, a text which (in part) aims to bring peace of mind by clarifying our confusion between what is real and what is not. We recover our access to peace by withdrawing our identification with particular forms and surrendering our identity to the changeless, […]

Not That At All…

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Poetry

The sky in the distance is yellow because it is saturated with the living dust that is emitted by trees, who I happen to notice are standing quite silent on the matter of this atmospheric discoloration, as if you can do a thing little-by-little and it doesn’t count. But I see you can take a thing too far. Fresh from my coursework on the dangers of coffee dust and grain silos, I note that with […]

The Engines of Experience

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Course Ideas / Reflections

I believe a lot of interesting things, things I’ve collected along the way.  I have pages and pages of notes.  Scribblings.  Arrows and half-thoughts running up and down the margins.  Ellipses and question marks.  Coffee stains.  My life is a draft copy full of edits.  I’m always circling back– leaping from one passage to another, sifting through my notes, strengthening the narrative, discovering what was and might have been. We are revealed in the living of […]

The Delicious Letdown of Losing Oneself

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Creative / Poetry

It started with an idea, as these things usually do.  “I need your help with something,” I said. Hafiz was working on his Nerf ball free throw.  “I’m listening.” His face was an expressionless intensity, but the perforated foam hope fell short of the mark.  He seemed to savor the data point.  Silent as a feather in long term storage, the ball hit the knob on the closet door, rolled across the floor and settled […]

Heaven’s Front Yard

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Christ / Poetry

Staggering through the dim light of Heaven’s front yard, slinking into the greenish shadows of distant outdoor halogens as if to hide forever, and ranting silently about the burden of makeshift woes and ramshackle postulates with which I’d saddled myself– including my favorite one about the  pending arrival of something hellish but indeterminate in nature that no being should ever have to face– why wouldn’t I accept the cocktail napkin and the nice sandwich offered to me […]

The Next One

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Course Ideas / Poetry

Hafiz came along and asked what I was doing up there in that tree with soot all over my face and my hair in greasy knots, my feet scratched, blistered and bleeding, my wick burned down to the sputtering last, my eyes wild and leering, and talking to myself in curses and run-ons about trying one last time to impregnate the sky with the signal flare seed of the holy calvary I required. The snarling, yipping […]

Unity and Relationship

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Course Ideas

A little over a week ago Linda nominated this blog for an award, and being Award Free here I graciously declined but expressed my appreciation for the recognition.  Linda’s intent was clear and heartfelt, however, and revolved around expanding relationships and the threads of connection in this virtual realm.  I felt I wanted to honor the intention in some fashion.  So, I’ve been thinking since then off and on about relationship in general, and the […]

A Peculiar Brand of Holiness

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Christ / Course Ideas

To the spotlight operator, it’s just another night.  Another show.  Another transient gathering of pinstripe suits, twinkling diamonds, and feathered boas.  They come in from all over the world, glittering and polished, to stand time still for a flickering hour, to bask in the unknown and the unpredictable, to say they were there, to hobnob beneath the halogens.  For a brief moment, nothing else will matter, as everyone’s power is handed in to the performance, […]

Two Thoughts

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Christ

I Jesus is my breath. He is the blood in my veins, the white of my bones, and the thoughts of my heart. He is the stones in the ground, the birds in the field, and the wood drifting down the river. Behind the wincing in thieves, the sighs of politicians, and the crackling static of the sherriff’s radio when no one is near, you will find him. He is the root, the marrow, the […]

Grinding Down

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Christ / Course Ideas

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 […]