Earlier this week I discovered Ka’s invitation to write a few blog pieces around favorite quotations. The challenge was framed as three posts, each built around one quotation, or as one post with three quotations. I realized quickly it would be enjoyable to find a few quotes that I like, and to share them and explain my enthusiasm for them, but then found it was quite a difficult task to narrow down my selections. I […]
Jesus is a condiment you can sprinkle onto any moment, to give it life. This is, I think, his greatest miracle. While most condiments come in glass jars or plastic bottles, Jesus comes inside of people. He’s a salt that melts the ice around the heart. He’s a sauce that turns every pain into delectable mystery. When you dunk those french-fried ideas of who you are into him, they become something else entirely… Lotus blossoms. Sea glass. Abandoned […]
I’ve been thinking lately about things I have no business thinking about, like how to reconcile the capital-‘S’ Self from A Course of Love with what I’ve glimpsed of the Buddhist teaching of anatta, or no-self. Let me say right at the outset that this is not purely an intellectual exercise. One of the great miracles of starting this blog has been the dialogue with people whose words, and possibly (though it remains hard to […]
There is a being inside of me, perpetually spilling over the banks– One whose color I cannot name, whose voice patterns the sky with tender pulsations. I, myself, cannot direct the geese, but the One inside of me points the way. Whisking through a cold half-light, each feathered movement unerring in its answer to the previous, they glide from one world into the next and back again in one full beat of their wings. When I […]
This is Part 4 of 5. One more to go… Part 1 is here, if you wish to start at the beginning. * * * * * He must have gone for help, the little junco, because when I awoke there were two of them. One on my side of the window, inspecting the sill– making those erratic steps that come in packs of four or five– and the other one outside, moving only its […]
The limited predictive intelligence of nuance can sometimes permit the obfuscation of the glaringly obvious. Said another way: forecasts predicated on the data typically accrued during the life span of a single human being are known to be astoundingly flawed. This may explain why Hafiz and Rumi stare at me like a pair of dispassionate fieldstones on the verge of sprouting horns when I wax extemporaneously about the day’s events— as if my mouth is moving, […]
I love me some Treatises1. Mmmm-mm! I love me some Jesus breakin’ it down, makin’ that holy road clear. I love me some Truth expo-zishuns! I love me some brotherly tutelage, some way pointin’, some little bing-bang dose of reality checkin’. I do, I do, I do– I do love me some Treat-sies… * * * * * 1In the second book of A Course of Love there are four Treatises, the first of which is entitled […]
I was weaving my way through the desert, trailing just behind them, warmed by their presence, soaking in their words– a particle being carried across the sea by a raft of delicious intelligence. I came into a violent world, the first said. I came into a world without a future– a world on the brink, a world on fire, a world outflanked by death… God “the Father” was this idea I came up with. Alone […]
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 […]
This year I realized that in so many ways, I have scarcely begun. The difference this time, is that having orienteered my way around the mountain in a great and unwitting circle– riding out storms and then reveling in the graceful vacuum of their departure, plotting the next day’s course based on a strange mash of signs, principles and self-argument, being nourished by glimpses of colored bird and flower, by moments of heartfelt communion with […]
Embracing Forever 