A quality of wholeheartedness is peace. There is a knowing of Creation’s completeness. We sense the unchanging center on which all things depend, and know it as our own center, too, as beings. We know it as the center of the bluebird on the branch, the center of a field covered with snow, the center of the Himalayan mountains, the center of the Tokyo Stock Exchange, the center of the sun. When we are wholehearted, […]
What do you think the future will be like, Hafiz? I was thinking about fusion-powered hovercrafts and molecular sequencing technologies that could produce cheeseburgers from a teaspoon of good dirt. Redrawn political borders, bullet trains that crossed the ocean, and ways to download skills and information directly into your brain. I was thinking about teleportation and glass condominiums floating in the clouds. Something you drank that allowed your body to look whatever age you desired. […]
I keep sensing this thing called Love. The leaves are whispering something about it right now. I imagine that when they all make a sound together like this, each vibrating in a crisp binding they have built in this last season of the light– one they never knew would lead to this– they hear a sound so beautiful they flood with joy and forget at last to hold on. This is how Love guides itself. […]
Shakti Ingenue began his spiritual quest during a commercial break in the Games of the Thirty-First Olympiad. Having just witnessed Katie Ledecky clean house in the women’s 800m freestyle, during which time he had consumed two-thirds of a beer and half a mushroom pesto pizza, he was riding a high and not being realistic about what it was he was hoping to accomplish. Thoughts were colliding willy-nilly in his mind. An entire spectrum of personal […]
The dream is unobtrusive, glowing where no one can see it, following beside me but deep in the ground, visible only by looking straight down through the center of myself, from the inside of my senses. It’s a thought immune to the semi-annual dental check-ups, the unsolicited catalogs that arrive in the mail, the bouts of automotive repair and immune system reconfiguration, and the dangerous lines of cars queueing behind plow trucks that plod along […]
The electric yellow moped caught my attention because it was bright as an eye exam, despite the distance, and because it was tracing a gentle line through space, humming its way along a cock-eyed geodesic around the hill. My focus collapsed, and I lost myself into a cloud of blank-faced calculations. When I came back from wherever it is I went, I was convinced the small vehicle and it’s intriguing cargo were very likely inbound. […]
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 […]
I’d like to get better at letting the unknown flow through me in ways I never could have predicted, so that I can experience my own nature in ways that might cause our experience here to soften into a panorama of endless giving, but the community college near me doesn’t offer that course. So I’m taking one on the typical practices of automotive dealers. And sometimes when I look across the sea, if the wind […]
Power is a word that evokes a strange spectrum of thought forms and connotations, reactions and prejudices. I think this is largely because the power we are most familiar with is the type that involves a victim and an oppressor. We view power as the ability to cause events to occur despite the competing will of another. That is our definition of power– a definition that makes perfect sense in the minds of the separate […]
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– […]
Embracing Forever 