The village in which I have lived my whole life is nestled along the coast. It is full of sun and figs and light breezes. Beyond our little harbor there is a great sea that stretches to the horizon and extends beyond the borders of the known world. No one has ever found the End. As children we used to go up on the roofs of our parent’s houses on calm spring days with baskets […]
I don’t know if you’ve ever imagined a state of complete and total nothingness- a field of emptiness without form or time, and most importantly, without any speck of awareness at all. It is hard enough to imagine being formless, but this is beyond formlessness. This is not being at all, which can be even harder to envision. This is picturing Nothing. This Nothing could go on forever, right? But I’m not that patient, so […]
In order to escape your prison, you will have to argue your case. No one can argue it for you. I’ve got a hearing coming up- Docket 249 in the Court of Self Appeals- and I’m getting antsy. I can tell you it’s no cake walk. I’m prowling around this cage like a tiger fresh off the jungle, drowning myself in images of freedom that induce feelings of freedom, that induce tears one instant, and […]
It began with thickets and brambles. I was mired neck-deep in a conclave of every manner of growing thing possessive of sharp, pointed, prickly, skin-penetrating armor. I was hacking a path to nowhere with a partly rusted machete, swearing, sweltering in the mid-day sun, growing increasingly angry at the steady rain of recently hacked-in-two, thorn-laden vines that seemed bound and determined to fall down on top of me. I was way behind schedule. My arms […]
Strange. Strangely familiar, I mean, this coming back. It’s a lurching free-fall and a hot cup of tea all at once. At first I don’t recall ever enrolling in this University of Unceasing Joys, but then my feelings and memories, even my very identity and my deepest sense of Self, snap back into their real shape, like that shape memory polymer when you heat it back up. I’m taking one of two required semesters of […]
I went through a stage in this journey without distance in which I sought to find the ‘right path’ for myself. It was like I was evaluating a major purchase. I was given some good advice at the time, which basically went like this: “Pick one.” It was the best advice I could have received, because nothing really gets started without commitment. In fact, without commitment, it is impossible to learn to see what is […]
We are on “a journey without distance to a goal that has never changed.” We are, in other words, on a journey of inner transformation. There is nowhere for us to go, because in Truth we have never left our Home in God, but our experience tells us otherwise. Our experiences of our separated state- moments marked by or laden with fear in any of its forms- are painful, and contrasted with the deeply buried […]
I’d been wanderin’ ‘et desert fer longer ‘an I could remember. It’s all I knew. Don’t ask me how I got ‘ere, crawlin’ on my belly suckin’ the dew off o’ rocks at dawn, fishin’ m’self ‘tween ‘e shadows o’ boulders, doin’ nothin’ but doin’ an’ re-doin’, ‘cuz I cain’t reckon it. Cain’t say as how I got there. The soles o’ my boots ‘es thin as parchment. I could feel each ‘n every grain […]
Embracing Forever 