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 […]
There is a desert inside of me where I wander, like a hermit, my vocabulary reduced to variations in the salinity of my tears and one Name that I give to everything. I found myself there again last night, sheltered against the wind by a robe of old rags, walking alone amidst an endless quilt of rolling dunes beneath the stars. I know I am not the Originator of this place, even though it is […]
Once when I was a boy I asked my father for a Rubik’s Cube. My wish was granted, and when I arrived home I took it out of the package and played around for a little while making small, easily recovered changes, frequently restoring the original hexi-color symmetry. I didn’t want to lose my way back to the original, “correct” state, so I made four or five moves to “scramble” the puzzle, then put it […]
I think we should begin with a bit of Rumi. This is like stretching out briefly before we tear ass across a back yard still slick with a morning dew. It’s a best practice, and it just might prevent us from ripping ligaments or pulling hamstrings in the recklessness that follows. It’s a safe beginning. Sort of. “We tremble, thinking we’re about to dissolve into non-existence, but non-existence fears even more that it might be […]
When I read Bucky Fuller, I tend to laugh out loud in joy at least once per page. I’m a geek, yes- that is surely a contributing factor to this physiognomic response- but it is the joy of recognizing Bucky’s mind that really sets into motion the cascading processes that result in air being fired from my lungs in short bursts. His writing bristles with intelligence, connection, humility and honesty. One reason I enjoy reading […]
Who is studying the Course? And to what end? Who hears the words? Who is stirred to hope for a new life? Who recognizes Love and surrenders, turning round then to confront their darkness? Who finds it too complicated or difficult? Who knows? My little, egoic self is a Seeker. The starting point for this little one is the deeply held belief that my unique and particular historically-derived collection of personal experiences is all that […]
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 […]
In the Creation, God is a tea plant. She is a tea plant and also the soil in which the tea plant grows, and the air in which the tea plant breathes, and the rains in which the tea plant drinks, and the Light in which the tea plant Knows. We were a leaf on God’s tea plant, and the Life of the tea plant lived in us and through us. It was beautiful and […]
Perception is the only mode of awareness available to the separated mind. To say it another way, perception is a way of consciously viewing ourselves and the world that is based upon the a priori assumption- or belief- that separation is real. Once we have accepted this false premise- that we are truly separate from God and from one another, that the ‘I’ within ‘me’ is an island unto itself- then perception is the primary […]
Embracing Forever 