Patricia Pearce

Helping You Be the Change

Reaching for Stars

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The star you are reaching for will always elude you

One day, several years ago, I was thinking about a print I remembered seeing on a friend’s living room wall. I have no recollection of what brought it to mind, but the print was an illustration of a man standing tiptoe on a mountaintop reaching for a star, stretching so earnestly that he was on the verge of falling.

My friend was a very ambitious person, and I could see why she would have this on her wall; she seemed like someone who was reaching for the stars. And while I think it’s great to want to excel and be all we can be, as I remembered the print all these years later, what I remembered most was how off balance that poor fellow was, how obviously out of reach the star was, how utterly futile his effort was.

Later that same day I was taking a walk in our neighborhood and I passed by a used bookstore not far from our house. And, wouldn’t you know it, on display in the front window was a book with that very print on the cover. So I went inside and took the book from the window to take a picture of it, thinking I might want to use it in a blog someday.

The Folly of Looking Outside Ourselves

This past year, as we have been weathering this odd reclusive time of COVID, I have experienced a lot of inner shifts and insights. One of them is that I have seen at a much deeper level than ever before what folly it is to look outside of ourselves for our fulfillment.

To be reaching for a “star,” whatever that star might be for each of us, means that we believe there is something we are missing, that there is some way in which we are incomplete or inadequate, some void that can only be filled by something outside of ourselves.

But, as A Course of Love points out, we are already the Accomplished. We are already whole in ourselves. There is nothing lacking or inadequate about us.

And yet, we are so conditioned to reach for things outside of ourselves and to believe that only they can bring us ultimate fulfillment and happiness. In fact, billions and billions of dollars are spent each year trying to persuade us to look outside of ourselves for happiness and completeness.

The irony is that it is the reaching itself that keeps us in a state of dissatisfaction. It is the seeking that keeps us separated from that which we seek. It is the belief that our destiny is beyond us that prevents us from opening to the destiny that is already within us, the destiny that we already are.

So what about you? Is there a star you are reaching for, something you believe is lacking in your life or inadequate about you—something that you believe can only be fulfilled by something outside of you?

If so, take a moment now and just let yourself notice what it feels like to be constantly reaching for that star. Let yourself feel how the reaching leaves you off balance, dissatisfied, perhaps at times even despondent.

Here is what I would like you to understand: that star you are reaching for will always elude you because it is a mirage. It doesn’t exist outside of you. It is your projection onto the “external” world of the light which is already within you.

When you really dig down, what you discover is that what you have been seeking is nothing other than your Original Self, who has always been present within you, and whose brilliance can never be dimmed.

Can you let yourself accept this truth? Can you let yourself accept that you are the star you have been reaching for?

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Reflections on the George Floyd Case

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Dear One,

I know you would like insight into what wants to be said about the verdict rendered this week in the case of George Floyd’s killing.  As you know, there are various levels from which to observe this world. One is at the literal level of events themselves. Another is a higher and wider vantage point from which one can see the symbolic meaning of the events.

On the literal level, this verdict reflects what your world thinks of as justice. A great wrong was committed, and the person who committed it was held accountable. Therefore, justice has been served.

This is a variation of the eye for an eye story. In this understanding of justice, a wrong is answered with a corresponding punishment, and the belief is that this restores some sense of balance, some sense of rightness.

And yet, even from this level it is obvious that no punishment can undo what was done. No punishment can ever return George Floyd to his life and to his loved ones. In this sense, justice is never and can never be achieved.

Your own mystical experiences have shown you that this world is a dream, and as you know, dreams are symbolic. Therefore the events in your world are symbolically depicting beliefs held in the mind. This is not to say that, because it is a dream, there is no suffering. As you know, the mind that is experiencing a dream is experiencing it—all of its anguish, all of its elation.

Knowing this world to be a dream you can see that this event is revealing a belief held in the mind, and that this verdict, which sets a new precedent for your society, is a turning point because it signals that the mind has begun to change. It is beginning to divest from the erroneous idea of racism.

On the literal level, Derek Chauvin was on trial, and beyond him as an individual, the idea that police can act with impunity toward Black people was on trial, and from a broader perspective still, the idea of white supremacy was on trial.

Now this is where a distinction is to be made when it comes to the concept of judgment. Within the domain of the ego mind, judgment is that which deems something “bad,” and this idea of judgment is a crucial keystone in the ego’s thought system.

And yet you know that in right-mindedness this sort of judgment does not exist. What does exist is the ability to discern truth from falsehood, Reality from illusion. From the vantage point of Love, white supremacy isn’t “bad.” It is illusory. An error in the mind. Something that has no basis in Reality, which is absolute Love.

One of the driving desires of ego is to be special, and white supremacy is the belief that an entire “race” of people is special. (Please understand that the idea of race is yet another illusion.) This belief in specialness is what the mind is now moving away from. This is the erroneous fallacy the mind is beginning to see through.

As you also know, in dreams each element and character depict an aspect of the dreaming mind. In this sense, Derek Chauvin is a representation of this erroneous idea in the mind. His actions were not merely the actions of an individual, but an enactment of a belief. The fact that the mind is now rejecting this belief, rejecting the fallacy of white supremacy, is a hopeful sign to you that egoic consciousness is indeed waning and its grip on the mind is loosening.

So how then are you to hold this situation? As always, you are to hold it in Love. To hold the Floyd family in Love. To hold all the people of color who have been repeatedly traumatized because of this fallacy in Love. To hold the Derek Chauvins of the world in Love, for they are lost sheep who are alienated from the truth of themselves.

You and all the others who are here on the planet at this time to fortify the presence of Love are doing a great service, greater than you know. By holding Love in your Hearts you are enabling the dreaming mind to awaken to the truth of Love.

Always remember that the realm of Spirit is with you, holding you in the greatest esteem, and with unbounded gratitude.

Eternally,
Your True Self

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Spring at the Penitentiary

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It’s time we rejoin the community of Life.

In the heart of my neighborhood here in Philadelphia stands an imposing building that looks like a medieval fortress complete with turrets.

Eastern State Penitentiary, which is now a museum dedicated to raising awareness about the criminal justice system and mass incarceration, was built in the early 1800’s and was originally conceived as a visionary reform to the criminal justice system of the time, which used various means of corporal punishment as the sentences for crime.

The idea that was envisioned and which took on form at Eastern State Penitentiary was that a person found guilty would be removed from society for a period of time to contemplate, without any distractions, what they had done. The belief was that, by contemplating their wrongdoing, inmates would reform themselves. They would become penitent, hence the name penitentiary.

It was the first time that time became the sentence for a crime, and people doing time at Eastern State Penitentiary when it first opened had absolutely no contact with other human beings. They were kept in their own cells, handed their meals through small openings in the wall, provided a Bible, and given lots of time to think.

What the people running the penitentiary discovered, though, was that rather than becoming penitent, the inmates started going insane. They were subjected to what we now know as solitary confinement, something that is completely unnatural for human beings, social creatures that we are. (After a year of COVID, some of us had had a glimpse of the toll isolation can take.)

Frequently, when I pass by Eastern State, I think of how the penitentiary is a carefully architected depiction in stone of our story of separateness. Most of us, most of the time, live inside a sort of prison of the mind, believing and perceiving ourselves to be cut off from one another, from the Earth, from the Source of our Being, even from our true Self. This perception, even though it is illusory, has resulted in us feeling an existential displacement from the community of All Being.

Many years ago I got an inside glimpse into what actual incarceration is like when I was sentenced to a week in federal prison for engaging in civil disobedience when the US launched its invasion of Iraq. It seemed symbolic that I and the dozen others protesters who were sentenced with me, had to report to the Federal Detention Center on Earth Day.

Walking into that prison, leaving the spring sunshine and blossoming trees behind and stepping into the completely artificial environment of cinderblock walls, florescent lights, cell blocks and locked doors, was one of the most surreal experiences I’ve ever had.

While I was there, I reflected on what it would be like to be in this environment year after year.

Earlier in the day I had stood with my eye glued to a tiny pinprick of clear glass I had discovered on the frosted window of our cell. Smaller than the head of a pin, it was my only view to the outside world. Looking through it I could make out the basic outlines of buildings, cars, a distant highway. I realized that for me the cruelest aspect of imprisonment would be to live months and even years never seeing a moonrise or a flower opening to the sun, never feeling the breeze on my skin or breathing in the smell of the woods after a rain, never hearing birdsong or touching the rough bark of a tree or walking a beach and feeling the sand beneath my feet. Ripping people away from the web of life and caging them in a world of artificial lights and unyielding surfaces was inhumane, the antithesis of the spiritual truth of interconnection. [ excerpt from Beyond Jesus: My Spiritual Odyssey]

This is the month when we celebrate Earth Day, an observation that calls us to renew our relationship with the Earth and to restore the damage done by our dream of separateness. It is a time for us to bring down the walls of isolation that we have built within ourselves so that we can know our oneness with all life on the planet.

The other morning, I took a walk around Eastern State Penitentiary. It was a gorgeous April morning, and the flower beds in front of the prison were brimming with hundreds of daffodils, tulips and iris. Along one of the towering walls the air was full of birdsong, as birds flitted in and out of cracks and crevasses between the stones where they had found safe places to build their nests.

That this historic site, such a graphic symbol of humanity doing time in our story of separateness, should now be a place where birds can hatch new life and daffodils and tulips open their petals to the sun moved me. It reflected the shift so many of us sense is happening on the planet right now as we move beyond the egoic consciousness of separateness and into an awareness of the truth of Love.

And just as moving was coming upon a gathering of toddlers and their parents sitting on the grass, in the community garden that has been created on the penitentiary grounds, under a canopy of flowering pear trees. They were being led in song by a young woman reading a story to them that had a recurring chorus, a story titled One Love.

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Cruci-Fiction: Awakening from the False Story of Judgment, Sin and Separateness

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The resurrection is a proclamation of the impotence of the ego story.

I recently had the great delight of being interviewed by a couple of wonderful young women, Amy Breeze Cooper and Lauren Coglianese Keck, who host the Soul Path Parenting podcast. They had invited me back on their show to speak about the themes of the crucifixion and resurrection as I understand them.

You can listen to the entire interview on the Soul Path Parenting podcast. Below are a few edited excerpts.

If we think about the cross symbolically, it’s a symbol of that whole egoic story, that is, the idea of the other, the idea of enemies, the idea of dominating, controlling, attacking, violence. The cross was a tool of the empire, which is all about domination and control. So if we look at the cross symbolically, it is a symbol of that story of separateness, it’s a symbol of the ego mind.

I might have talked about this when I’ve been on the show before, but in an awakening experience that I had, it culminated with this realization that we are in a dream, that this world we are enacting is a dream, we are enacting our unconscious beliefs. And so things that are happening in the world have a symbolic content, a symbolic meaning.

So in the case of Jesus, someone who saw through the dream, he was like a lucid dreamer on the planet I guess you could say, he’d awakened from that dream state. So how do you snap people out of the idea of of separateness? How do you show them that it’s just a story?

Well, one way is you experience the cross. You go to the heart of the symbol of that story. You enact that story and something happens on the other side of it that totally negates the whole story, which is the resurrection.

So the resurrection is the evidence that the cross is our own fiction, and that separateness and judgment and sin is our own fiction. It’s a story in the human mind, that’s all it is, and he was attempting to help us awaken to our own divine nature.

What happened, though, is that when you’re working with dreams you can interpret them in many different ways, and symbols can be interpreted in many different ways.

So this event of the crucifixion and the resurrection became interpreted by the egoic mind as evidence that we are sinful. Look at this, God’s son had to die because we’re so sinful.

So it got twisted and interpreted according to the consciousness state that Jesus wanted to dissolve. . .

In a sense, you could say that the resurrection is a proclamation of the impotence of the ego story. It is impotent. It has no ultimate power.

I’m remembering this dream that I had a few years ago, where I’m visiting this convent that is closing up. It’s like all the sisters are passing on, the convent is dying, and I think it’s going to be turned into a restaurant. . .

I walk into this room—it’s part of the convent—and this room has grass. It doesn’t have a floor, it has grass, and the grass is covered and the room is filled with butterflies of every conceivable color.

Now I know that the nuns have kept this alive all this time, like at the heart of this tradition is this profound transformation. And it was hidden away. It was nurtured. It was kept safe.

And now I feel like the time is coming when when the butterflies are coming out of that room.

At the core of it all, there is something deeply transformative. And what what can be more symbolic of complete transformation than a butterfly, the total metamorphosis of a creature?

That deep, absolute transformation is at the core of this message, and it has not been understood. It has been misconstrued, again, because it was seen through the lens of the ego mind. But it’s there.

And I feel like more and more people are pulling back the curtain, pulling back the the misunderstandings and the misinterpretations and discovering what is really there, which is absolute transformation.

It is the emergence of really a new human. That is what Christ Consciousness is about. It’s about the emergence of a new humanity. And we’re in the time when this is happening, this consciousness is arising.

Listen to the entire interview here.

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Gratitude: Portal to Unitive Consciousness

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Gratitude acknowledges our interdependence with all Life.

I’ve been appreciating lately the uncanny power of gratitude to be a portal into unitive consciousness. I first became aware of the power of gratitude when it precipitated a kundalini awakening in me many years ago.

It’s an experience I write about in my memoir in much more detail, but suffice it to say that I sensed that some profound shifts I was undergoing at the time were due to my web of relationships. When I surrendered to what was happening and began to give thanks for the people in my life, the realization hit me like a lightning bolt: “I” am not a separate self.

With that, the energy chakras of my body opened, surges of energy cascaded through me, and when I came out of the intensity of the experience I saw a world I had never seen before, one in which everything is sentient, everything is interconnected, everything is Love.

In her book Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about the practice of the people of the Onondaga Nation of beginning each day acknowledging all the life forms and gifts of Mother Earth that sustain them in their bodily existence. As Kimmerer notes in her book, cultivating such gratitude and living within a culture of gratitude is revolutionary because it undermines the scarcity model upon which our capitalistic economic system is based.

The scarcity model focuses our attention on what we believe is lacking in our life (or, more often, are told is lacking), and it is this focus on lack that has caused so much unhappiness in people and led to so much devastation to the Earth.

Gratitude is a powerful antidote to this mindset because it places our attention on the overwhelming abundance that is already present. Gratitude, in other words, not only holds the key to our personal happiness; it can open the way for the healing of the planet.

The other morning, before I began my journaling, I did a practice similar to the Onondaga. I began to express my thanks to the trees, the rivers, the birds, the air, the creatures, the clouds.

I didn’t get very far into my recitation before I was in tears, overcome by the gratitude it evoked in me.

Many times I keep gratitude at arm’s length for this very reason: I know its power to transport me into an awareness of unity and Love that is almost more than I can handle. And since I have laundry to do and bills to pay and a website to maintain, and I don’t yet know how to do all of that while in a state of bliss, I let the mind retreat into its distractions, stepping away from gratitude’s blazing portal into the infinite presence of Love.

Maybe someday I will learn to stand in that fire of Love and still manage to remember to take the car in for inspection, but for now I settle for stepping back and forth across the threshold.

I experience gratitude as the language of the Heart. It’s as though, when I am in a state of gratitude, the Heart has picked up the phone to a party line (remember those?) and is in direct communication with All That Is. I feel the Heart participating in the Communion of the Cosmos, which is unmistakably filled with joy and delight.

I suppose gratitude is such a powerful portal into unitive consciousness because it acknowledges our interdependence with all Life. It also, for me at least, contains a hint of humility in it because it recognizes that this existence we participate in, that we are all part of, is a gift that is freely given. There’s nothing we need to do or even could do to earn it.

How, then, could we be anything but thankful?

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The Return to the Feminine

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Our return to the Feminine holds the key to our healing.

Each February I take about ten days away to go on spiritual retreat. It is a time when I step away from the daily routine to listen more deeply. I never go with an agenda; I allow whatever wants to arise to do so. I have been doing this annually for almost twenty years, and I am always amazed at what unfolds. Often my time is guided by dreams, and always by intuition.

This year I had been immersing myself in a book I had just received, Mirari: The Way of the Marys, which recounts a prolonged dialogue between Mother Mary and Mari Perron, who also channeled A Course of Love.

As soon as I began reading Mirari in the days before leaving on retreat I felt a deep sense of relief, and of homecoming. Having grown up in mainstream Protestantism, in which the Divine Feminine is completely absent, it was like arriving at a spring of life-giving water. My thirsty spirit was being quenched.

Decades ago, when I was in seminary, I had to grapple with how the Feminine had not only been suppressed, but demonized in the religious tradition that formed me. This exile and vilification of the Feminine had profound implications for how I saw myself and my worth as a woman.

This is a struggle that I know many, if not most, women have had to deal with, and, because all of us, no matter our gender identity or biological sex, have both the Feminine and Masculine within us, the repression of the Feminine has had devastating effects on men as well.

Thankfully, that is beginning to change. The patriarchal beliefs of the past are crumbling, the Feminine is rising, and the balance between the Masculine and Feminine is being restored.

In this moment of return and re-balancing, we are coming back into the awareness of our intrinsic, reverent relationship with all Life, including ourselves. This understanding of the inherent truth of relationship is at the core of the Feminine, and it holds the key to the healing of our species and our planet.

While I was on my retreat, I felt Mary’s presence profoundly, which was a new experience for me. I felt her guiding me, encouraging me, holding me in the gentle embrace of the Mother. Since I was already experiencing her presence so keenly, it isn’t surprising that she was also referenced in a dream I had.

I’m riding on horseback with a few other people through an open, expansive landscape of scrub brush and rolling hills when we come to a place overlooking a village. Down in the village, the people, who are also on horseback, are riding out in a procession to honor Our Lady of Guadalupe. One of the riders is carrying a large banner of her on a tall, upright pole. As I watch the processional, my own horse drops her head, and when she does her bridle falls off.

One of the most intriguing things about this dream for me is the horse dropping her head, causing her bridle to fall off.

A horse’s bridle is the means by which a horse is placed in service to a human, directed by something besides her own will. As a friend of mine noted, Horse, in the I Ching, is a feminine symbol, and bridle sounds exactly like bridal (my dreams often use word plays). In traditional patriarchal culture, bridal indicates the ownership of a woman by her husband.

Mother Mary, by contrast, is often referred to as Virgin Mary, and the deeper meaning of virgin is a woman unto herself, a woman who is her own person, not owned or controlled by another.

As I listen to this dream I see that it is depicting a movement underway in which the Feminine is being honored (the processional) and released from the legacy of patriarchal control (the falling away of the bridle/bridal).

But the symbolism of the horse dropping her head goes deeper still. To drop the head is to be released not only from being controlled, but from the need to control.

For so long, western civilization has exalted the head, has sought to control the world through the intellect: dissecting, categorizing, compartmentalizing, seeking certainty and dominance over all things. In the process, we have alienated ourselves from Mystery, and from the direct knowing of the Heart and unmediated wisdom of the Intuition.

Yet, as Mary says in Mirari, The New that is now arising emerges from the Unknown. It is not something the intellect can plan, or strategize for, or make happen. The New gestates within us, is nurtured by us, is birthed through us. It is an act of creation, not fabrication.

As we return to Feminine ways of knowing and of being, we drop the head. We release our need for certainty; the old thought patterns of domination and control fall away; we experience our reverent relationship with All That Is; we bow before Mystery.

This is Women’s History Month, a time when we acknowledge the countless contributions women have made throughout history. But at this moment of global transformation, what interests me even more than women’s history is the contribution the Feminine is bringing, even now, to our future and our mutual survival on this beautiful planet.

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QAnon and the Mind’s Illusion

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Human history is one long conspiracy theory

“An idea shared grows stronger.” ~A Course in Miracles

Over these last few years we have witnessed the truth of that statement, that an idea shared grows stronger. With the rise of QAnon and conspiracy theories we see that it doesn’t matter whether an idea has any basis in reality. What matters is how many people embrace it. If an idea is shared by enough people it gains a momentum of its own, takes on a life of its own, and actually begins to influence the world of form.

I suspect that many of us who are witnessing what seems to be a growing mass delusion are wondering what can be done to stop it. Clearly, reasoning with those who have embraced conspiracy theories in hopes it will snap them out of the spell doesn’t help. If anything, it causes them to become more resolute, doubling down on the falsehoods.

As someone who sees this world as a form of dream, I frequently look at what is happening in the world from that perspective and do dreamwork on the events of the world, engaging with them at the level of symbolic meaning to discover what the events can teach us.

Having worked with my own dreams for decades, I know that dreams come to help us understand something about ourselves that we need to know, something we need to integrate or heal or release. Given the epic moment we find ourselves in as we transition from the egoic consciousness of separateness into unitive consciousness, I also see that our collective “waking” dream is offering us essential information that can support us in this shift.

So I ask myself: What is this QAnon dream showing us that can support us in our awakening?

What QAnon Is Revealing

The most obvious thing about the QAnon phenomenon is that it is revealing how capable the mind is of believing things that are simply not true, things that may in fact be quite absurd. Just as Donald Trump has hyperbolized the ego mind, showing us what it looks like so we can recognize and release it within ourselves, QAnon unmasks the mind’s capacity to embrace illusion and take it to be reality. It also shows us how stubbornly the mind holds onto its beliefs even in the face of contradictory evidence.

This phenomenon is nothing new. If we step back and look at human history, we can see that it is one long episode of the human mind believing things that are not true: believing the gods are out to get us, believing the Earth is flat, believing sickness is a form of divine punishment, believing we can be condemned to eternal damnation, believing we can decimate the Earth and continue to survive as a species, believing people with certain skin tones, sexes, gender identifications, cultural backgrounds, investment portfolios are superior and deserve to have power over others, believing that any of us, ourselves included, could be unworthy of love.

To put it bluntly, human history is one long conspiracy theory, and at the core of all of these beliefs is an erroneous idea: separateness. This is the idea upon which our world has been built and it is the essence of the egoic consciousness that is now passing away.

A Mind-Blowing Realization

Many years ago I had an experience that I write about in my memoir Beyond Jesus in which the veil between the worlds was torn away and I saw clearly the interconnectedness and absolutely loving nature of Reality.

In that moment, I was shocked to see how deluded my own mind had been, how I had actually believed myself to be a separate self (aka ego), isolated in my own experience. I was stunned to see that I had been living my entire life within that illusion, never having the slightest inkling it was an illusion.

That awakening experience, which culminated with the mind-blowing realization that we are in a collective dream, turned my life and my understanding of the world on its head. It also colors how I see the followers of QAnon. You see, I, too, have believed ridiculous things.

One of the most remarkable things that experience revealed to me was that judgment doesn’t exist. Judgment is just part of the egoic illusion. And so to abide in unitive consciousness one must be willing to let go of judgment (a stance that is utter blasphemy to the ego mind) and to see all from the vantage point of Love, which encompasses all and rejects none.

Working with this QAnon dream I gain a great appreciation for how we humans must look from the vantage point of the divine realm: a species caught up in a story, an illusion, that causes us such great suffering.

Our Reality-Check

So if the mind is this gullible, if it is this capable of believing things that are illusory, how can we know what thoughts we can trust? How can we discern truth from fantasy in our own minds?

There is one way, and it is this: Reality is interconnectedness, mutuality, reciprocity. It is Love. So any thought, or theory, or story that points to anything other than Love is not Reality-based.

This is the Reality check we can apply to our own mind’s thoughts and beliefs. Every story the mind harbors of enemy, of fear, of exclusion, of attack, regardless of whether it is enacted in the world of form, is illusory.

What has played out on the world stage for millennia is the outward enactment of the human mind’s story of separateness. But now the jig is up. Our eyes are being opened to see the absurdity of it all, and more and more of us are coming to realize that nothing we ever do or believe can change this one simple fact: only Love is real.

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Chrysalis Wisdom in a Time of Polarization

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Metamorphosis happens.

In this moment of global transition it seems as if we are witnessing the divergence of two realities. One expresses the idea of separateness, which gives rise to all manner of exploitation, fear and domination, and the other embraces interconnection and interdependence, which prepares the way for a world based in mutuality and reciprocity.

Watching these realities diverge into increasing polarization can be disheartening. And yet I am always reminded of what occurs in the chrysalis as the caterpillar undergoes its metamorphosis into a butterfly.

As you probably know, in the chrysalis stage, the structure of the caterpillar completely dissolves, and then, from the soup of its former self, its previously latent DNA, which carries the encoding to bring forth a butterfly, becomes activated.

Once activated, this DNA causes imaginal, or organizer, cells to arise, and these imaginal cells begin to find each other, coalescing into what are called imaginal buds, the nascent organs of the butterfly.

But an interesting thing happens as these cells begin to emerge and imaginal buds begin to form. Enough of the caterpillar’s old immune system is still intact to be able to respond to this emergence, and, determining that these new cells and buds are alien intruders, it seeks to destroy them.Continue Reading

Love’s Idiots

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May you be who you are here to be.

It’s been a fascinating experience for me these past four years as I have occasionally ventured into the whirlwind of our political controversies. I’m not the sort of person who relishes conflict, so I wasn’t eager to do it, yet I felt drawn to share my own take on things.

When I wrote about Donald Trump as someone who portrays the ego mind and who is here to help us recognize and release those patterns in ourselves, I found myself in an interesting borderland. Since I haven’t seen him as evil incarnate, nor as a savior figure—both of which I believe are just egoic projections—I have stood outside the polarized perspectives about him that gained such currency in the culture.

Some people were irked that I wasn’t getting on board with the Trump-the-Savior/Trump-the-Demon dualism. One person went so far as to tell me I was an idiot for not seeing him as a lightworker.

His choice of words got me thinking, and I realized he was right. I am an idiot.

The word idiot comes from the Greek, and it originally referred to someone who goes their own way. Those of us who are supporting this global awakening are going our own way. We are walking away from the norms of an ego-oriented world, which is based in judgment, division, and attack, and we are choosing to live into something New, something more revolutionary than the planet has ever seen.

We are the idiots who we have the audacity to stand in the very real possibility of a world that depicts the truth of Love, the truth of our inherent interconnectedness, a world founded upon mutual respect and reciprocity and which celebrates our oneness with all of Life.

Why? Because we feel that world within us, and we simply can’t ignore it. We sense it stirring in our cells and claiming our imagination, even though we may not be able to see it clearly yet.

Of course we have our days when the ways of the old draw us in and we get caught up in the hoopla. But at some level of our being we have made a choice to support this planetary awakening, attuning ourselves to the frequency and the vision of a transformed world and allowing it to gain a foothold in our consciousness, in our cells, in our lives, in our world.

Crystallizing Love

Recently I was sitting in our glassed in porch watching a beautiful snowfall, big clumps of flakes floating silently from the sky. I sat there for hours, mesmerized.

Snow always blows my mind when I consider that every snowflake is unique, even though every snowflake is the same thing: water. Just as we are each unique, even though we are each the same thing: Love. And I believe this is what we are here to do: to crystallize Love in a way that is uniquely our own.

The other thing that amazes me about snow is that each snowflake, by itself, is quite unsubstantial. And yet, as I watched from our porch that morning I could see what was happening. Each unique snowflake was joined by countless other unique snowflakes, and together they blanketed the landscape with beauty and brought a hushed peace to the city.

So my wish for you is that you allow your essential Love nature to crystallize and express itself in your life in a way that is uniquely your own.

And always remember that you are not alone. There is a Love blizzard underway that you are part of. So keep the faith and be who you are here to be, no matter how strange it may seem to others.

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When the People Lead

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It’s time to direct our energy and attention toward The New.

I feel like I should write something about Donald Trump’s impeachment hearing this week, but the truth is, I’m tired of Donald Trump. I’m tired of the drama. I’m tired of the vitriol, the division, the delusions.

I’m just plain tired. This political drama isn’t where I want to focus my energies anymore. It’s like an energy vampire that feeds on the very thing it seems to demand of us: our attention.

I know that what is ready to arise on this planet isn’t going to come from you or me or any of us focusing on how screwed up the existing system is. That’s obvious. We get it. We don’t need to obsess about it.

The time has come, instead, for us to turn away from the ego’s addictive drama—whether that drama is playing out on the political stage or in the recesses of our own mind—and be willing to turn in a new direction, toward the truth of Love and its embodiment in the world.

Before Trump arrived on the scene, I wrote very little about the political landscape. I was much more interested in the inner landscape, because that’s where true transformation happens.

But when Trump erupted on our national political stage I felt drawn to speak to the phenomenon we were witnessing, because it was so obvious to me that there was much more to it than most people were recognizing on the face of things.

From the outset I saw Trump as someone who is exemplifying the egoic consciousness of separateness that humans must now leave behind, if for no other reason than that the wellbeing of the ecosystem we are part of requires it of us.

I saw that Trump was serving an important purpose, quite unintentionally I might add, by helping us see so clearly how the ego mind operates and the kind of world it fashions so that we could choose differently.

That’s really what the impeachment is all about: giving those in Congress the chance to choose differently. Whether or not they do, though, won’t have any effect on the bigger picture. Unitive consciousness is emerging, even more quickly now because of the excesses of ego that we have seen of late. (As the Tao te Ching says, “If you want to shrink something, you must first allow it to expand.”)

Here’s something for us to remember: it is often the “leaders” who are the last to get on board with big change, and the current shift in consciousness is perhaps the biggest change this planet has ever experienced.

I’m reminded of the story of Jonah, the prophet in the Hebrew Scriptures, who was commanded by God to go to Nineveh and tell them they needed to repent because otherwise they were headed for catastrophe.

Jonah didn’t want to go. He probably had no interested in saving the Ninevites, who were, from his vantage point, the enemies. In fact, he so didn’t want to go that he tried to flee his calling, ended up (long story) getting swallowed up by a big fish and then vomited out on dry land, at which point he finally went to Nineveh to fulfill his function, albeit reluctantly.

Much to his consternation, upon hearing his message the Ninevites repented and their catastrophic fate was averted, which made Jonah exceedingly unhappy.

But the thing that has always intrigued me the most about that story is how the Ninevites ended up repenting. As Jonah walked across the city preaching his message of doom and gloom, it was the people who proclaimed a fast and put on sackcloth. It was the people who turned toward a new way (which is what repent actually means).

It wasn’t until the king got word of what was going on that he too put on sackcloth, sat himself down in ashes, and decreed a time of national repentance, making what the people were already doing a “public policy.”

We get all worked up when the leaders don’t lead, when they don’t have the vision or the guts to forge a new society, or prepare the way for a new world. But the thing is, transformation is never going to come from the Oval Office or the halls of Congress. It is going to come from us, from We the People.

And true transformation, the transformation that will give rise to a world that reflects the Reality of Love, originates within each of us. It is a shift in consciousness that, as I have said before, is an inside job.

It is toward The New, not the old, that I want to direct my attention and energy now. As Buckminster Fuller famously said, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

I don’t expect the Senate to convict Donald Trump in these proceedings. They might surprise me, but I think there is way too much fear in that body to defect from the ego and its ways. The “leaders” are scared, which means we are the ones who will need to be bold enough to repent, audacious enough to choose differently, radical enough to align ourselves inwardly and outwardly with the truth of Love. And when we do, you can be assured the “leaders” will follow.

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Inauguration of a Future

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“It’s the past we step into and how we repair it.”

Watching the inauguration last week, I felt I was witnessing a mythic event, something so deeply symbolic that my rational mind couldn’t begin to fathom it all.

A ceremony taking place in front of a Capitol building so recently stormed by insurrectionists under the spell of conspiracy theories, clinging to the obsolete ideology of white supremacy, and seeking to overturn a democratic election.

Lady Gaga, larger than life, donning an enormous dove pin, proclaiming with the full power of her voice as the sun broke through the clouds that the stars and stripes had endured the perilous night.

The prophetic words of a young Black poetess downloading into us a vision of what we as a nation can be, and will be if we have the courage to be it.

A woman—a multi-racial daughter of immigrants at that—sworn into national office for the first time.

A compassionate man, unafraid to show his vulnerabilities and shed his tears, taking his place at the helm of a battered, traumatized and grieving nation.

And for me, an odd sense of gratitude for Donald Trump who had somehow managed to reinvigorate our democracy by trying to destroy it.

What was being evoked in me last Wednesday was more than patriotism, which seems much too provincial for this moment of global crisis. What was being evoked was a future that is asking to become a lived reality in our midst. And the essence of that future seemed to be the many that are one.

E pluribus unum.

On the evening of Inauguration Day, a term came to me quite spontaneously to depict what the past four years have been for us as a nation: The Great Wreckoning.

We have witnessed so much wreckage of our democratic norms and of our social fabric that we have been catapulted into a great reckoning. We have been forced to see all the ways in which racism and injustices of all kinds have gone unheeded and unaddressed, how the injuries of the past have been allowed to continue.

And now we know that our future as a nation—and as a human family—depends upon each of us doing the work that is ours to do. Grieving work. Restorative work. Healing work. Visionary work.

Our elected leaders will not and cannot create this future for us because it will be spawned within each of us, and from the depths of our own beingness will take on form in our behaviors, relationships, structures and institutions. There is no trickle down here. The new world that wants to arise is an inside job.

We know that not everyone is ready to welcome this future, that many, in fact, are afraid of it. Be that as it may, it is coming, and we can hasten it by revisiting time and time again the vision that Amanda Gorman set before us. To revisit it until it has seeped into our very cells—until it has become us, and we have become it.

The Hill We Climb

When day comes we ask ourselves

Where can we find light in this never-ending shade?

The loss we carry,

A sea we must wade.

We braved the belly of the beast;

We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace.

And the norms and notions of what just is

Isn’t always justice.

And yet the dawn is ours before we knew it.

Somehow we do it;

Somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed

A nation that isn’t broken but simply unfinished.

We, the successors of a country and a time

Where a skinny black girl descended from slaves

And raised by a single mother can dream of becoming president,

Only to find herself reciting for one.

And yes we are far from polished, far from pristine,

But that doesn’t mean we aren’t striving to form a union that is perfect.

We are striving to forge a union with purpose,

To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters and conditions of man.

And so we lift our gaze not to what stands between us,

But what stands before us.

We close the divide, because we know to put our future first,

We must first put our differences aside.

We lay down our arms

So we can reach out our arms to one another.

We seek harm to none and harmony for all.

Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true:

That even as we grieved, we grew,

That even as we hurt, we hoped,

That even as we tired, we tried,

That we’ll forever be tied together, victorious—

Not because we will never again know defeat

But because we will never again sow division.

Scripture tells us to envision

That everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree,

And no one shall make them afraid.

If we’re to live up to our own time,

then victory won’t lie in the blade but in all the bridges we’ve made.

That is the promised glade,

The hill we climb if only we dare it.

Because being American is more than a pride we inherit,

It’s the past we step into and how we repair it.

We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it,

Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy.

And this effort very nearly succeeded,

But while democracy can be periodically delayed

It can never be permanently defeated.

In this truth, in this faith we trust,

For while we have our eyes on the future, history has its eyes on us.

This is the era of just redemption.

We feared at its inception.

We did not feel prepared to be the heirs of such a terrifying hour,

But within it we found the power

To author a new chapter,

To offer hope and laughter,

To ourselves sow. While once we asked:

How could we possibly prevail over catastrophe?

Now we assert: How could catastrophe possibly prevail over us?

We will not march back to what was,

But move to what shall be,

A country that is bruised but whole,

Benevolent but bold,

Fierce and free.

We will not be turned around or interrupted by intimidation

Because we know our inaction and inertia will be the inheritance of the next generation.

Our blunders become their burdens

But one thing is certain:

If we merge mercy with might and might with right,

Then love becomes our legacy

And change our children’s birthright.

So let us leave behind a country better than the one we were left.

With every breath of my bronze pounded chest,

We will raise this wounded world into a wondrous one.

We will rise from the golden hills of the West.

We will rise from the windswept Northeast where our forefathers first realized revolution.

We will rise from the lakeland cities of the Midwestern states.

We will rise from the sunbaked South.

We will rebuild, reconcile and recover

In every known nook of our nation,

In every corner called our country,

Our people, diverse and beautiful,

Will emerge battered and beautiful.

When day comes we step out of the shade,

Aflame and unafraid.

The new dawn blooms as we free it.

For there is always light if only we’re brave enough to see it,

If only we’re brave enough to be it.

~Amanda Gorman

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White Supremacy and the Identified Patient

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I would like some wisdom on what we are seeing in our country right now, especially with the violent displays of white supremacy we have witnessed in the storming of the Capitol. I ask the Heart and greater Wisdom to guide my reflections and grant me insight.

What you are seeing now in the eruption of white supremacist groups has been long in the making, and while you might be alarmed to see the momentum, virulence, and violence of this movement, please understand that it is simply bringing to the surface what has long needed to be acknowledged, faced and healed.

We have spoken before of covid meaning “to see together,” and this is something that you are seeing together. Something that has sorely needed to be seen.

You understand that in family systems theory there is something called the identified patient. The identified patient in a family is that person who is outwardly manifesting a dysfunction that exists in the entire family system. Please do not be tempted to see white supremacists as the problem, but to see white supremacy as the dysfunction in the entire system that they are acting out, the dysfunction that needs to be corrected. As the system is healed, the identified patient is restored to health.

The awareness is growing in your country that racism has been a long and destructive influence in the establishment of your systems and that it needs to be eradicated for the new world and new society to arise.

Just as Donald Trump has allowed you to see in vivid display what ego-mind looks like, the insurrectionists are bringing to your full awareness this endemic pattern of racism that is at the core of so much suffering and injustice in your culture.

What is needed now is a massive truth and reconciliation movement in your country to heal this disease. You know that in a medical crisis the symptoms of a disease must be addressed, but that for true health to manifest, the entire body needs to come into its wholeness. Without this, the illness will continue to express itself.

This is an illness that has been growing unchecked and unacknowledged for a very long time, since the inception of this county. And now you are seeing the urgency with which it needs to be faced and healed with grace.

This is not to say that those who have carried out this act of violence are not to be held accountable for their actions. Indeed it is important that they be, but not out of anger or vilification, but out of Love and a commitment to heal the whole. What they are portraying, the belief system and ideology they are enacting, is a fallacy, and the body as a whole must acknowledge that.

It is then the task of all people, especially white people in this country, to address the roots of this assumed supremacy, roots which exist in the mind.

Do you recall how, when you have done meditations envisioning an awakened Philadelphia, how easily you have been able to envision many ethnic groups giving expression to their unique cultural heritage in a beautiful tapestry of multi-culturalism, but when it came to the white people of the city you could not see it clearly?

This is because white culture does not exist as any true expression of identity. Instead, white culture has rested on the idea of dominating those of other ethnicities and cultures. White culture in itself, apart from this role of domination, seems to be a void. A non-thing.

This in part is what is occurring in the uprising of white supremacy. As the nation becomes increasingly multi-cultural, there is no sense of identity, no sense of selfhood for white people apart from that of the dominator. It it this restoration of a true and life-affirming identity that is needed now.

Who are you as a “white” person? You are immigrants of many cultures, lands in which the skin color of the people happened to be fair. Can you see the absolute absence of meaning in this? How fragile an identity it is that relies upon skin color?

Revisit your ancestral roots. Who were you before you became “white”? Before you became “white” you were many things. You were the speakers of Gaelic and had a sacred relationship with the land, which you understood to be inhabited by entities not visible to the human eye. You were dancers around the bonfire at the winter solstice. You were creators of sublime music that touched the soul. You were tellers of stories that spoke of the transcendence of the human spirit.

Shed this empty identity of being “white” and go deeper into your being. Celebrate who you are in your core, not in the color of your skin.

You received a phrase recently in a dream: systemic gracism. This is where your society is headed if you will it to be so, toward the establishment of systems that reflect goodwill toward one another and which support all in their mutual thriving. A society that exemplifies and manifests grace.

What you are witnessing at this turbulent moment in your country is that which must be seen and acknowledged in order for it to be healed, released and transcended. It is opening the way for gracism to take root.

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Love’s Insurrection

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We are here to participate in Love’s long-awaited insurrection.

Dear One,

I know you are feeling anxious and disturbed about all that you see happening in the country right now, how it seems that ominous forces have burst out of the shadows and are threatening the fabric of the social order. Your fear is amplified by your awareness of how other countries have descended into chaos in conditions such as these, when people have been led astray by falsehoods and mobilized to violently impose their way upon the world.

Your fear is understandable. The old ways are dying, causing tremendous anxiety and tumult, and you sense that this could be a moment that breaks the spell of division, or a moment when falsehood, hatred, and violence gain momentum.

Let me begin by reminding you that violence is a stance of weakness. It is what people resort to when they sense that their cause is lost. And indeed there is a lost cause in all of this, a cause that has been lost from the beginning of time because it could never truly exist. This attempt to secede from Reality, secede from the truth of Union, of Love, has been a lost cause from the moment it dawned in the human mind.

I know this may not be the time to try to offer you reassurances that the turmoil you are seeing isn’t ultimately real, that it is a projection of the mind. I know that in this moment, as you look at the news, it seems frighteningly real.

It has always seemed real to the aspect of mind that generates and participates in this human drama of good versus evil, of enemies and battles that has played itself out in so many ways over so many centuries. Surely these last months have shown you how capable the mind is of fully believing something that isn’t true.

There is little point in trying to talk this aspect of mind out of its fear, because for it, the story is true, just as a nightmare is real to the mind that is dreaming it. Simply hold it, along with its fear, in absolute compassion. Cradle it in kindness.

Neither try to try to persuade those who remain loyal to the ways of ego that Love is the only Truth. Attempting to convince them will only be a distraction to you now. Simply hold them in compassion, and do not tether yourself to their disbelief.

What is needed now is for you, and all who are willing, to turn your awareness to the Self within that knows that, despite what you see playing out on the world stage, there is only one Reality, and it is Love. In Reality, you are safe and always have been. In Reality, there are no enemies, and never could be. This is the greatest service you can offer in this time of transformation into the New.

Even though you may feel unprepared for this moment, you are not. You have been preparing for eons. Join now with the Truth that is within you. Allow it to inhabit every fiber of your being. Allow the Joy and Gladness of Reality to resonate in your own being and radiate from your own Heart. Do not be timid about experiencing this Joy, for It is what you are.

I know that many will believe that it is naïve in such a moment as this to abide in Love. But what is truly naïve, and indeed absurd, is the the idea that anything but Love could exist, or that division could ever be real except for in the very fertile human imagination.

Place that imagination in the service of Love now. Imagine the world that you know wants to come forth. Imagine what it looks like when humans have been restored to their right minds, knowing themselves to be Love incarnate, a world in which each knows that they are a precious and unique expression of the Infinite Life here to give expression to the Love that is the Source of All That Is.

Imagine such a world in which these countless incarnations of Love are celebrating one another, thriving together, bringing forth the essence of their beautiful Beingness, rejoicing in the web of Life that is this magnificent planet.

Then allow yourself to feel that world in your body. Allow it to come alive in your cells. Be that world, because the new world that is arising does not come forth by battling with the old, but by joining with the New.

This is the only true insurrection—a word which means “to rise up.” As you transcend (trance end) the ways of ego, forgoing all judgment and all concept of enemy, and as you align yourself only with Love you help this new world to arise. You become a participant in Love’s long-awaited insurrection.

Eternally,
Your True Self

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The Ego’s Last Stand

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Are we willing to walk off the battlefield of the mind?

As I look out over our political landscape this week, I see what is happening from two levels. One is the literal level of a democracy under siege, in which a minority faction is attempting to overturn the will of the majority and commandeer the mechanisms of power.

The other level is the symbolic, the mythic, the story of our journey toward awakening. On that level I see an epic drama playing out in which the mind is coming face to face with the ego of its own making and wrestling with the choice before it: to continue to live in allegiance to the ego and adhere to its ways or to claim its freedom and step into the Reality of Love, into the unitive consciousness that is its true nature.

In this unfolding drama the mind is beginning to recognize the ego for what it is—a “separate self” that is itself an illusion—and is seeing how ego operates behind the scenes, relentlessly asserting its own “reality” and sustaining that “reality” through blame, attack, coercion, division, intimidation, threats.

Shocking though it may be, this is an important step in the mind’s awakening, because it must first see the illusion it has believed in in order to leave it behind.Continue Reading

Yielding: The Way of the Christ-Bearer

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By yielding to the Reality of Love, Mary births Its expression in form.

Ever since Donald Trump appeared on the political scene I have seen him as symbolizing the ego patterns that we must now leave behind if we are to survive as a species on this planet. By depicting in such an overt manner how the ego mind operates, what it believes, and how it plays out in the world, Trump has precipitated a jump into warp speed of our awakening process.

Recently, there have been reports that his mental health is deteriorating due to the loss of the election and his waning ability to bend circumstances to conform to his will—something that in the past he has always seemed to manage.

Symbolically, this is showing us the ultimate impotence of ego. Other than within the confines of its own fabricated alternative world, it has never been able to alter Reality, which is Love. The attempt to do so—to fracture Reality, to overturn Love—has been the great egoic escapade humanity undertook, and we have failed. Not for lack of effort, but simply because it can’t be done. Continue Reading

The Great Conjunction

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It is the conjunction within that opens the way for a new world.

When I was a child, one summer evening I was out in our front yard with my mother watching a sky ablaze with spectacular pinks and oranges. It was one of those sunsets where you feel like you are witnessing the otherworldly.

My mother was a woman of deep faith, although she rarely spoke about it. But that evening, gazing at the sunset, she confided in me, “This is how I imagine the Second Coming will be. Jesus will descend on clouds like these.”

As far fetched as it may sound, her understanding of the Second Coming was quite conventional. In the Second Coming, Jesus—who was understood to be the one and only embodiment of Christ—would descend to earth again and establish a long-awaited reign of peace.

The Second Coming has been anticipated for centuries, since the time of the first followers of Jesus who expected his return to occur at any moment, and certainly during their lifetimes. That no such dramatic re-appearance happened caused some consternation among the emerging community. There was no intervention from the heavens. No overthrow of the worldly powers-that-be—and all these centuries later we are still waiting.Continue Reading

Ode to Darkness

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As a culture we are starved for Mystery.

I love this time of year. I love the long quiet nights, the candles, the turning inward. For me, the winter solstice, when the days begin to grow longer, always comes too soon. I want more time to immerse myself in the darkness.

I know this is a difficult season for many people, when the lengthening nights seem to evoke feelings of despair and dread. Yet I find the darkness beautiful. I experience it as the Mystery, the Unknown, the Numinous that is so much vaster than my conscious awareness can fathom.

This morning I got up early, before the first daylight. The crescent moon cradled itself toward the eastern horizon and the morning star gleamed in the pre-dawn sky—and it was the darkness that bestowed upon them their beauty.

I am awed by the fact that the universe is comprised mostly of dark matter. It is overwhelmingly made up of something that is hidden to us, undetectable to us, and yet unmistakably present.

That’s the way I experience the darkness. There is a Presence in it that transcends the reach of my ordinary senses. In the darkness I perceive the limitations of my knowing. I bow before the Mystery.

I suppose it is our fear of the unknown that makes us fear the darkness and want to drive it away, dispel it with whatever feeble torches we can fashion. We are so afraid of not knowing.

And yet turning toward the Mystery is so essential. To apprehend that there is so much we do not know is the beginning of wisdom, the portal to awe.

I had a dream once, years ago, in which I am out in the wilderness, in the mountains, staying at a lodge. It is night, and I step out onto a balcony and look up. When I see the canopy of the Milky Way overhead, a deep relief washes over me, and I realize that, having lived for so long in the city, I have been suffering from star-vation.

As a culture we are starved for Mystery, starved for the awe that comes when we accept our inability to comprehend the vastness of our existence, starved for the parts of ourselves that linger beyond the light of our awareness.

In the winter months, we sometimes don’t get enough sunlight to meet our body’s need for vitamin D. But in our contemporary society, in which we go to such great lengths to banish the night, there is another sort of deficiency that inflicts our spirits: darkness deprivation.

This alienation from the Unknown, this estrangement from Mystery, is making this planetary time so much more difficult than it needs to be.

We find ourselves collectively in a time of darkness, of unknowing. Having watched in shock the sunset of our certainties, we no longer know what to expect, and we cannot see what is before us.

And yet Love encompasses All. It is as present in the darkness as it is in the light.

In this season, many of us celebrate the incarnation of Christ-consciousness. And while traditionally that consciousness has been ascribed to a single individual, it is a consciousness that lies within us all. Dormant perhaps, as the seed lies dormant in the dark soil, but present nonetheless.

Christ-consciousness has been described as the awareness of existing in relationship with All That Is, which means being aware of existing in relationship with the darkness as well as the light, the unknown as well as the known. This is the awareness that flowers into trust, into faith.

May this season of the long nights bestow upon you the blessing of the darkness. May you experience awe in the face of the unknown, and bow before the Mystery of your existence with All That Is.

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Dismantling: An Act of Creation

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The new world simply can’t be built upon our past beliefs.

Over the Thanksgiving weekend my husband, Kip, and I pulled out our Bananagrams game and started playing. If you aren’t familiar with Bananagrams, it’s sort of like Scrabble in that it has little tiles with letters on them, but it has no board. You use the tiles to build your own grid of interlocking words based on the letters you’ve drawn, like a crossword puzzle.

But the other thing about Bananagrams that’s different is that you can rearrange your words at any time. If you draw a letter that you can’t fit into your existing grid, you can tear apart any or all parts of your puzzle and start over.

Kip and I played collaboratively rather than competitively, because it’s just more fun that way. We would draw the next letter and then we would both look at how it could be incorporated into the grid we had built together.

What I learned in the process is that Kip is totally fine with tearing things apart. He has no compunction about dismantling entire regions of the grid if there’s a word he sees could be built with the latest letter, and he always trusts that it will all turn out okay, that there’s a way all the letters can be reconfigured into something new.Continue Reading

The Reality of Oneness

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You are the eyes through which the Universal Mind sees Itself.

A friend emailed me recently asking if I could clarify what I mean when I use the term “oneness.” It’s a term she finds quite distasteful because to her it smacks of an amorphous, undifferentiated blob.

Although in my writing I often use terms like inter-existence, inter-beingness, interdependence or interconnectedness rather than oneness, I thought I would take some time to describe in more detail what I mean by all of it.

To do that, though, I need to give some autobiographical context, because when I speak of this it isn’t an abstract concept for me. It comes from a very formative experience I had years ago.

Almost two decades ago, a very close friend of mine died, and her death prompted me to resolve to open to deeper dimensions of my existence that I sensed were there but had never known.

Some while later I began to experience an onslaught of synchronicities too numerous and implausible for my worldview to accommodate. It felt like my reality was cracking apart.Continue Reading

Joy Lessons from Philly

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Joy opens a portal for a new possibility to come forth.

It’s been an interesting time here in Philadelphia in recent days as the whole world watched and waited to see if Philly would deliver the needed votes to tip the outcome of the election. Given that this is the place where our democratic form of government was conceived, I don’t think the significance has been lost on anyone that this is the place where its future seemed to be hanging in the balance.

I moved here in 1997, and as a native of Denver it was a big adjustment for me to come here to the densely populated East Coast, far from the open spaces and Rocky Mountains that I love. It was also devastating to see the extent of the poverty in Philadelphia, the poorest of the major cities in the US, which was once a thriving hub of the Industrial Revolution. But when the factories closed to relocate, they left behind working class neighborhoods that became vast wastelands of unemployment and despair.

And yet, when I moved here I fell in love with Philly. I loved the racial diversity, and how this city is such a microcosm of the world. I loved the expansive parks here that have been set aside as a protected watershed, including the Wissahickon woods where the soil sparkles with with traces of mica.

I loved the art and culture, and that I could go hear the Philadelphia Orchestra in their concert hall a mere 15 minutes from my house, an orchestra I used to listen to recordings of when I was a music major in college.

I was also captivated by Philadelphia’s history, by the cobblestone streets of Old City where redbrick colonial houses still stand, by William Penn’s vision that this place be a Holy Experiment where people of all faiths could live in harmony, by Independence Hall where a new vision of government was conceived that dethroned the idea of monarchy.

Funny, Tough, and Joyful

In recent weeks, during this election season, I’ve found myself falling in love with Philly all over again, but in new ways. I have loved the playfulness and humor that is endemic to this place, and how people took President Trump’s comment that “bad things happen in Philadelphia” and ran with it.

And speaking of running, I love that they just organized a benefit run to raise money for Philabundance, our local hunger relief organization, which they are calling the Fraud Street Run (a word play on our long-standing annual tradition of the Broad Street Run).

The Fraud Street Run will start at the now famous Four Seasons Total Landscaping and end at the Four Seasons Hotel in Center City. (If you’ve been appreciating Philly lately too, you might consider donating here.)

In recent weeks I’ve even fallen in love with Philly’s gritty toughness, which I never fully appreciated until now. Here people don’t engage in the gratuitous niceties that I was accustomed to, having grown up in the West. Here people call things the way they see them, and they aren’t easily intimidated or bullied. Lately I have come to understand that when the stakes are high, you want a good dose of that don’t-mess-with-me energy that is core to Philly’s culture.

But I think the thing that has inspired me the most about my adopted city in this whole election drama has been the Joy that has been set loose here—people dancing while waiting in line to vote; people of all colors, shapes, gender orientations and religions dancing outside the Convention Center in what became a block party to protect the vote count.

This eruption of Joy was intentional. The organizers here who have been preparing for this moment understand the power of Joy to de-escalate tensions and shift the narrative of confrontation, and they made sure the d.j. booth was ready so the party could begin.

Joy is a very high-frequency energy. In its presence fear, hate, and anger melt away. Joy dethrones the idea of division, overthrows the idea of oppression. It opens a portal for a new possibility to come forth and take hold.

We know we’re not out of the woods yet. We can see how the old order does not go quietly into the night. But when the people start dancing, the new world is already well on its way.

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Election Day 2020

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What will we do with what we have learned?

On this Election Day I’ve been contemplating how far we have come over the last four years. I know it is easy to look at these last four years and bemoan all that has happened—all the cruelties and crudities that have been unleashed, all the suffering.

And yet I am well aware that everything that we encounter in life, all the adversities and challenges, can either be seen as a curse or as a teacher. I choose to look at things as the latter.

It’s easy enough to vilify Donald Trump as someone who has hijacked and corrupted our institutions of government, glorified bullying and greed, given the green light to racism and sexism. It’s easy enough to blame him and those who support him for destroying all semblance of decency.

That’s an easy road to take, and I would argue one that leads us nowhere.

If we want to go deeper, we can see that Trump is a reflection of an inner state we would rather not look at, and has brought to the surface things that were there all along but had been lurking in the shadows, repressed by our collective cultural denial.

Consider all that has happened over these four years. We have seen the MeToo movement and the Black Lives Matter movement. We have become increasingly aware of the obscene inequity of wealth in our country and how the political establishment exists now to serve that inequity. We have seen how readily we latch onto the idea of enemy and how gleefully we embrace and disseminate any “information” that comes our way that supports our preconceptions about “those people.”

Over these past four years, Donald Trump has forced us to face our shadow. Now the question is, what will we do with this information?

Will we refuse to be satisfied with simply removing public monuments to white supremacy and continue do the challenging and essential work of eradicating the insidious and absurd ideas of racism, sexism, and classism from our minds and institutions?

Will we revitalize a democracy that was already perilously close to dying?

Will we unequivocally claim for ourselves a future that excludes and oppresses no one—a future that unleashes the creativity of the human spirit and allows the Earth and all of her beings to thrive?

Or will we try to sweep it all under the rug again? Reboot our comfortable denial? Indulge ourselves with a belief in our “powerlessness”?

If so, the lesson that these past four years came to teach us will need to come again, and again, and again.

On this Election Day, as I look at the US I see a nation that has matured at light speed these last four years. So many of us understand now that it isn’t up to our “leaders” to save us. So many of us understand that the United States isn’t a collection of governmental institutions, but We the People. So many of us are firmly committed not to be bystanders in this crucial moment of our precious planet’s history.

My prayer on this day and the days to come, as we await the election results, is that the outcome be in the highest good of this country and our world, and that these past four years will not have been wasted, that we will have seen what we needed to see, and learned what we needed to learn in order to create the more perfect Union that is ours to create.

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Remembering Our Oneness

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All of us have come to the planet to either remember or to forget.

A few weeks ago I had a dream that seemed quite significant for me personally, but I wanted to share the ending of the dream because I think it has universal meaning.

At the very end of the dream I am with a couple other women who begin to sing a song. One of the women, to help me sing along, holds up the lyrics. But actually what she holds up is an empty frame.

The song they are singing says, “We are one. We are one. Some choose to remember. Some choose to forget.” It isn’t conveying any judgment about this choice. The song is simply stating a fact: some choose to remember; some choose to forget.

All of us have come to this planet to experience one of those two things, and in a sense Earth is a vast playground for us to explore and live out our choice. Here we can experience what it is to live as embodied beings in awareness of our oneness, or we can experience the impossible—separateness—which requires that we forget the truth of oneness. And this is a choice we each make for ourselves, a soul choice that we cannot force on anyone else.

We see both of these choices playing out in our world today. It is almost as if two different, parallel worlds are arising, one which continues to play out the illusion of separateness and one which is exploring ways in which to bring forth into full expression and manifestation the truth of our oneness.

As for myself, I am quite clear that I have chosen to discover what it is to live in embodied form fully aware of my oneness with All, fully aware that I exist only in relationship.

Do I get lost sometimes in the machinations of the mind, caught up in the stories and illusions of separateness and division? Sure I do. But I am able to see them now for what they are and I am able to disengage from them because I no longer believe in them. They have simply lost their credibility for me.

I have written many times that at the core of the illusion of separateness is judgment, and that without judgment the egoic thought structure collapses. That is why the most significant message for me of the song in the dream wasn’t that we are one, which isn’t news to me, nor that some remember and some forget, which is pretty obvious if you look around. The essential teaching was that there is no judgment about the choice that we make.

The woman in the dream offered me a frame, and this is the gift we are all given, isn’t it? We are given the power to frame how we see our lives, how we see this time we are in, how we see this soul choice we and others have made. Will we place all things within the frame of the absolute nature of Love?

For those of us who have come here to remember our oneness, I see this time on the planet as our initiation. Can we be in the midst of this drama of division that is playing out on the world stage and remember that it isn’t Real? Can we recognize division as the illusion that it is? Can we opt out of the temptation to rail against it, which only gives the illusion credence in our minds, and instead dispel it with the Light of Love?

And are we willing to make space for those who want to be on this planet experiencing separateness? Can we hold them and their choice in Love? Not joining them in their illusion, certainly, but honoring that this is their choice to make? And are we willing to steadfastly hold our awareness in the truth of our union with the All even when some may reject and attack that understanding?

And are we willing to join together to bring forth the world that reflects the truth of oneness, that reflects the truth of Love, and not allow ourselves to be dissuaded or hindered by those who have chosen differently?

We who have come to remember, who have chosen to realize our divine nature and awaken to the Christ consciousness that we are, have also chosen this initiation for ourselves. We have chosen to be present on the planet at this precise moment because we are ready and willing to leave all forgetfulness behind. We are ready and willing to be Heaven on Earth.

And it just may be that as we do so, some of our kindred souls may remember that they, too, chose to remember.

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The Inner Election

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The most significant vote you will ever cast is the one within yourself.

I’ve written before that in this time of global awakening Donald Trump is a figure who is helping us see clearly what the ego mind looks like, how it thinks, what it values and how it behaves so that we can choose whether we want it sitting in the Oval Office of our own executive function.

What is transpiring inside the mind as we make this epic movement from one consciousness—the egoic consciousness of separateness—to the unitive consciousness of oneness is being reflected right now on the political stage during this election season. And because the events in the “external” world are depicting what is taking place on the inner plane, they can be very instructive for you in your own awakening process if you are willing to be open to what they have to teach you. So let’s take a look, shall we?

First of all, you can see how the ego mind keeps alive the idea of separateness by creating doubt and confusion in the mind, encouraging the mind to see the world through the divisive lens of us/them, gaslighting the mind to convince it that what is false is true and what is true is false, promoting the idea of enemy, spreading fear. You can also see the drama of the ego mind and how it constantly churns out fictitious narratives to distract you from the present Moment where you would inevitably encounter the Reality of Love and realize that the ego is a meaningless illusion, a story in the mind.

On the political stage it is also significant that during this election season there is such a frantic scramble to fill the vacant seat on the Supreme Court. This is, if you’ll excuse the pun, supremely symbolic because judgment is the very thing that keeps ego in control of the mind. It is judgment that creates the perception of separateness, and without it the whole egoic illusion would collapse in an instant. It makes perfect sense then, that, in this moment of decision, ego would turn to the institution that represents judgment to provide its last line of defense.

Now this is where you can begin to see the seemingly paradoxical nature of your transition out of egoic consciousness: it is the ego mind’s nature to judge and fight, so if you choose to judge and fight ego you have actually aligned yourself with it. You have, de facto, voted in favor of it.

Ego is not the enemy. (In fact, there are no enemies except in the egoic worldview.) Ego is simply a glitch in the matrix of the mind, an erroneous anomaly, a pseudo-self playing out the illusion of separateness that the mind mistook to be real.

Just so, Trump is not the enemy. He is simply exhibiting what this error of the mind looks like. If you see him as the enemy you are actually viewing him from the ego mind itself and are reinforcing the egoic patterns in your own mind.

The same goes for yourself. In what ways do you see yourself as the enemy? In what ways do you judge and try to fight against some aspect of yourself? How willing are you to relinquish such self-attack and to accept that you are and always have been one with Love?

So while the movement beyond ego is not about fighting, it is very much about choosing, and the key question is: Are you willing?

Are you willing to allow the egoic patterns in your own mind to dissolve?

Are you willing to release the concept of enemy?

Are you willing to yield to the Reality of Love?

The ego would have you believe you have to make all of this happen. But that simply isn’t true. In the Reality of Love, of inter-beingness, there are countless entities and energies available to help, and all they need from you is the go-ahead.

Yes, this is a confusing and turbulent time. How could it not be? The ground we’re standing on is shifting beneath our feet as one reality gives way to another, or more accurately, a false understanding of reality gives way to Reality itself.

And yet I am very hopeful, because, turbulent though these times may be, they are giving us exactly what we need in this moment of choice. More and more of us are seeing what is at stake, realizing we can’t go on like this, recognizing that the changes we wish to see in the world begin within us. And when a critical mass of us have cast our inner ballot to opt out of the ego mind and its version of reality, the world will change profoundly, and far more quickly than we ever could have imagined.

So please, vote. Vote in the national election, of course. But also remember that the most significant vote you will ever cast is the one within yourself.

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The Quiet Coup

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The coup that will change the world is already well underway.

For as long as I can remember, the ritual in our national political theater that has always moved me to tears is the moment after a presidential inauguration when the outgoing president boards the helicopter and flies away. It is an enactment of what is perhaps the most extraordinary characteristic of democracy: the peaceful transition of power.

It brings me to tears because I am aware of how precious it is, how novel it is, in a world that has for so long been governed by egoic drives for power and control, and it exemplifies the fundamental break with the past that the founders of our country made when they decided the United States would not be a monarchy.

Knowing that Donald Trump is completely beholden to the ego-mind, I have always had a hard time envisioning him peaceably getting on that helicopter and flying away, honoring the will of the people and the democratic process. This is not a condemnation of him. It is simply an observation of him. It is not in his constitution to yield power and control.Continue Reading

Our Collective Exhaustion

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It requires an enormous amount of energy to deny the undeniable

When I got up this morning and saw the news bulletin on my phone that Trump announced last night that he and Melania have tested positive for COVID-19, my immediate and instinctual response was concern for them both. Empathy, I suppose. Even though I disagree with Trump’s positions on, well, just about everything, I do not wish him ill. In fact, I wish him wholeness.

But along with the empathy, this morning I feel exhaustion. I think many of us do. This has been grueling. The body-blows that the daily news delivers are almost more than we can handle.  Day. After day. After day. After day. It has been relentless.

What I’m noticing, though, is that the exhaustion I feel doesn’t seem like it belongs to “me.” It feels like a collective exhaustion that is in the collective energy field.

It’s as if we’re trying to hold back a tsunami—frantically trying to plug the cracks that keep opening up in the dikes—to keep the world we’ve known from being inundated by a force that seems so much bigger than we are.Continue Reading

The Media and the Egoic Need for Enemies

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The media delivers what the ego wants.

I read a very interesting article recently by Matt Taibbi that summarized his book Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another. In it, Taibbi, a journalist, talks about the evolution of the media in recent decades, and how it has become financially dependent upon peddling the idea of enemy.

Taibbi explains how, before the advent of the internet and the proliferation of news outlets, the media’s strategy was to reach the widest possible audience, because the wider their audience, the more advertising revenue they received. As a result, the news media presented information that was acceptable to the largest segment of the population and avoided extremist angles or ideologies.

But with the introduction of 24 hour news channels and the Internet, which led to a proliferation of news sources and the decimation of classified ad revenue, the media’s strategy changed. Now the objective became to identify a niche demographic and give them what they wanted.

One thing they discovered is that most people want news that confirms their biases about people they don’t like.Continue Reading

Our Great Task: To Abide In Love

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The only future available to us is a world based in Love.

Decades ago I attended a Faith and Resistance retreat in preparation for an action of nonviolent civil disobedience protesting the nuclear arms race. During the retreat we did role plays to prepare ourselves for the action, which we would carry out on an Air Force Base in Wyoming. We practiced maintaining a stance of nonviolence in the face of people screaming at us, shoving us, and threatening us.

We also heard from several insightful speakers, one of whom was a nun whose words of caution have stayed with me all these years. She told us, “The danger in confronting evil is that it brings out the evil in us.”

At this point in my life I would use a different vocabulary. Rather than evil I would say unconsciousness, or the shadow, or the ego-mind, but the message is the same. When we attempt to confront something that we see as harmful and destructive, the danger is that we become the very thing we want to vanquish.Continue Reading

Is Donald Trump a Lightworker?

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A lightworker is someone who has seen through the error of ego and retracted their belief in it.

I first started noticing several weeks ago that people were Googling the question “is trump a lightworker” and finding their way to my website. It’s a question that has also come up recently in a couple of personal communications, so I wanted to offer my perspective on that question.

If you have followed my work at all, you know that I see Trump as someone who is serving as a catalyst for our collective awakening. He is creating the ideal conditions for us to examine our own unconscious behaviors and become aware of how the ego mind operates within ourselves.

By ego, I mean a false self that the mind generates when it adopts the fallacious idea of separateness. Separateness isn’t real, and so, for the mind to experience separateness it must generate a self that isn’t real that can play out that fallacy. Hence, the ego.

It is the illusion of separateness that gives rise to all the things we are now, in this age of COVID and Trump, having to acknowledge: the racism, misogyny, greed, exploitation, devastation of the environment, injustices of every kind. All of it is the story the ego weaves out of this fallacious idea of separateness, and for us to move into the age before us, they are things that must be acknowledged and released.Continue Reading

De-Inventing Yourself

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The essential Self is not something you invent. It is something you are.

Lately the phrase “de-inventing myself” has been rolling around in my mind. It’s a potent phrase for me because I feel as though that’s exactly what I’m doing at this stage in my life.

Over the last many years I have become acutely aware of the identity that I inherited, an invented identity that conformed to societal and familial expectations, but which wasn’t really me.

We all inherit an identity, handed down to us by our ancestors and societies that reflect the beliefs they developed. This inherited, invented identity isn’t ever truly us. It is a sort of pseudo-self we are given and from which we unconsciously live—until we don’t.

There comes a time when the impulse within us to be true to ourselves, to be truly our Self, becomes too insistent. It is like a shoot pushing up through compacted soil that will not be deterred. It will express itself. And in order to do that it must break through the crust of the invented self.

We can try to keep it down. We can try to hold onto who we have thought ourselves to be out of fear. But deep down we know that’s not what we are here for.Continue Reading

Tree Wisdom

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As I listened, I began to sense what the Tree knew.

Last week Kip and I were on vacation in the Adirondacks where we had rented a small cabin next to a fork of the Moose River. Every morning I would get up early, make myself a mug of tea and take my journal down by the river bank to journal and watch the morning mist rise from the water. Most evenings Kip and I would see a beaver swimming up or down the river, and once we saw a mink scurrying along the bank.

During the day we hiked through forests along trails that led to sparkling blue lakes and, finding a log or boulder to sit on, would settle in to have our picnic lunch.

One of the most memorable moments for me, though, was a visit to a small stand of old growth forest, one of the few remaining areas of old growth that had escaped the clear cutting that had taken place throughout the region over a century and a half ago.

In this remaining pocket of old growth forest the energy was noticeably different from the areas that had been reforested. The moment I stepped onto the trail I could feel the presence of the trees that had stood there for hundreds of years—the serenity was palpable.Continue Reading

America’s Healing Crisis

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The US is in a healing crisis, and we each play a part in determining its outcome.

I write and speak a lot about the illusory nature of the egoic mind that perceives all things through a concept called “separateness.” In the mystical experience this idea is revealed to be a fallacy, a trick of the mind. When the veil of illusory separateness is lifted, we see that everything is an interconnected whole. One could say that the mystical state is a united state in which all is seen to be inextricably interwoven and where the separate self we have always thought ourselves to be simply doesn’t exist.

At the dawn of this new millennium, as people all across the globe are increasingly awakening from the trance of the separate self, we suddenly find ourselves in the midst of a pandemic that is accelerating the process by revealing in unmistakable terms the inescapable nature of our interconnectedness.

We are coming to see, thanks to COVID-19, that we must care for our neighbor not simply out of a moral obligation to do so, but out of the recognition that at a fundamental level our neighbor is ourself, and our personal wellbeing is inextricably tied to the wellbeing of all.

Continue Reading

How History Repents

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We have the power to set the future free

This 4th of July was strangely quiet here in Philadelphia. Normally the holiday is a very big deal in this city. People flock to our neighborhood in droves to attend a massive, booming, concert on the Parkway, followed by a spectacular, equally booming, fireworks display over the Art Museum. But because of the pandemic, neither happened this year.

Sitting on my roof deck that afternoon, the quiet made it feel like we were a city and a nation deep in introspection, as indeed we need to be. These last weeks and months have brought to light so much that is crying out for healing in our nation, so many erroneous beliefs that need to be let go, so many injustices that need to be dismantled.

Every year on the 4th of July, the Declaration of Independence is read aloud in front of Independence Hall in Old City Philadelphia—a yearly ritual which I suppose took place virtually this year—and I have to say that despite all the injustices and flaws of our nation, I still believe in the words put forth in that Declaration. Just because they have never been enacted doesn’t minimize for me the importance of the vision they set forth.Continue Reading

The Power of Joy

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Joy is the most transformative power we can imagine.

This past week a message came across my path by White Eagle, a Hopi Elder, who was offering counsel on how to be in these times. She talked about the potential of this time as being a portal for us, and she emphasized the importance of taking care of ourselves, because when we take care of ourselves we are taking care of the whole.

She also talked about the importance of joy, and about joy as an act of resistance in the face of oppression. Here are some of her words:

. . . if you take this opportunity to look at yourself, rethink life and death, take care of yourself and others, you will cross the portal. . .

When you are taking care of yourselves, you are taking care of everything else. Do not lose the spiritual dimension of this crisis; have the eagle aspect from above and see the whole; see more broadly.

There is a social demand in this crisis, but there is also a spiritual demand — the two go hand in hand. . .

Learn about resistance of the indigenous and African peoples; we have always been, and continue to be, exterminated. But we still haven’t stopped singing, dancing, lighting a fire, and having fun. Don’t feel guilty about being happy during this difficult time.

You do not help at all being sad and without energy. You help if good things emanate from the Universe now. It is through joy that one resists. Also, when the storm passes, each of you will be very important in the reconstruction of this new world.

You need to be well and strong. And for that, there is no other way than to maintain a beautiful, happy, and bright vibration. . .

What world do you want to build for you? For now, this is what you can do — serenity in the storm. Calm down, pray every day. Establish a routine to meet the sacred every day.

Good things emanate; what you emanate now is the most important thing. And sing, dance, resist through art, joy, faith, and love.

Continue Reading

Bringing in the Light

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This is the time for new patterns to become anchored in form.

Last Tuesday morning I was meditating, holding in the energy of Love all that has been happening here in Philadelphia in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, all the anger, the pain, the public outcry for justice, and as I sat I wondered what it would be like to be able to join with other energy workers in Philadelphia to hold this collectively on behalf of our city.

As soon as I was finished meditating I texted my friend Zoana, a gifted energy worker, and asked if she knew of any local groups that are joining together with this intention. She didn’t, but said she would be happy to help organize something.

So we wrote an email that same day letting people know that we would be tuning in three times each day, and we sent it out to energy workers we knew inviting them to join us, and asked them to forward the invitation to others.

Clearing the Way

The next day when we were tuning in, the energy that Zoana and I both sensed coming through felt extremely intense. I wouldn’t describe it as angry. I would describe it as fierce, a Kali energy come to clear out old patterns so that the new can arise.Continue Reading

Of Looting and Love

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Beneath it all, racism is a denial of Love

It’s early Sunday morning and I’m sitting on my roof deck. It’s a beautiful morning, cool, sunny. The flowers in the pots lining the edge of the deck are starting to come into bloom: bright yellows, reds, purples. The birds are singing. A gentle breeze is blowing.

Over Center City Philadelphia, about a mile and a half to the south, a helicopter is hovering, only one. Last night, when I could see the smoke coming from the building the protestors had set on fire, there were half a dozen.

To loot (v): to rob especially on a large scale and usually by violence or corruption.

1619: The first ship bringing human beings abducted from the continent of Africa arrives in Point Comfort, in the colony of Virginia.

Last night an old friend of mine, Tyrone, emailed me from Denver to say he was thinking of me. He’d seen the news coverage from Philadelphia, and he told me and Kip, my husband, to stay put and stay safe.

Tyrone and I first met in high school when mandatory bussing in Denver started. He had to get up hours before dawn to catch the school bus that took him across town so he could get to our white suburban school and integrate it before the first bell rang.Continue Reading

Grief as a Portal for Our Awakening

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Humanity’s only future is that of the awakened mind and open heart.

Yesterday the front page of the New York Times listed the names of 1000 people who have died of COVID-19 and one sentence about each of them. They were only one percent of the 100,000 lives lost so far in the US, and there are no doubt tens of thousands more who have died as a result of this pandemic but who were never diagnosed.

Clara Louise Bennett, 91, Albany, GA, sang her grandchildren a song on the first day of school each year.

Valentina Blackhorse, 28, Kayenta, AZ, aspiring leader in the Navajo Nation.

Merrick Dowson, 67, San Francisco Bay Area, nothing delighted him more than picking up the bill.

Arthur Winthrop Barstow, 93, Hadley, MA, there is not a Louie L’Amour Western he had not read three times.

Ruth Skapinock, 85, Roseville, CA, backyard birds were known to eat from her hand.

I doubt it was coincidental that also yesterday morning, during my journaling time, I found myself weeping profusely. There is nothing happening in my own immediate life that would warrant such intense grief, and I don’t personally know anyone who has died from this pandemic. But the tears were nonetheless streaming down my cheeks, issuing forth from this reservoir of collective sorrow.Continue Reading

Donald Trump: Catalyst for Our Awakening

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The new world is ready to arise

Dear Mr. Trump,

At the risk of blowing your cover I want to express my deepest gratitude to you for the monumental challenge you took on in this lifetime to be a catalyst for our awakening.

You have been the asteroid that slammed into the world ego built, and your timing was impeccable because we had gotten so out of alignment with the balance of life on this planet that prior to your arrival our future was very much up in the air.

It was unfathomable to most of us that things could implode so quickly. We have been aghast to see just how fragile our social contract had become, how much our sense of responsibility for one another had unraveled, how shaky the girders were that held this country together. Seeing it all fall apart so quickly has been as shocking as seeing the World Trade Towers collapse into a storm of debris in a matter of hours on a bright September morning.Continue Reading

Our Moment of Clarity

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We are experiencing a moment of global clarity

Who would have guessed even four months ago that we would see the planetary changes that we have witnessed in recent weeks? For the first time in a generation people in India can see the Himalayas from hundreds of miles away. People in China can step out of their homes and see a blue sky for the first time in their memory. Turtles are storming the empty beaches to lay their eggs, lions are lazing in the deserted highways of South Africa, fish are frolicking in the clean canals of Venice.

With the cessation of human activity, the crust of the Earth has even grown quieter, and seismologists have a chance now to detect the Earth’s natural movements, like a doctor with a stethoscope finally able to hear the subtle nuances of a heartbeat.

A Moment of Clarity

We are experiencing, globally, a moment of clarity, and the clarity isn’t only what we are witnessing in the natural environment. We are also experiencing a growing clarity in the mind—clarity that we are interconnected in ways we can’t even begin to fathom, clarity about what is essential and what isn’t, clarity that we humans have been so consumed (consider the word) by the world we had fashioned that we had lost touch with who we really are or what we really desire.Continue Reading

A Pandemic’s Good Friday

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Without the benefit of hindsight, could anyone deem it “good”?

Today is Good Friday, and in my journaling this morning I was contemplating how strange and subversive the name given this day is:

Good Friday.

It’s hard to see how a cruel, torturous execution at the hands of imperial forces could be called “good.”

It’s easier, of course, with the benefit of resurrection hindsight. But without that, without the advantage of remembering this day from the other side of the tomb, could anyone ever have deemed it “good”?

I know all about the historic interpretations that Jesus’ crucifixion was the atoning sacrifice that reconciled humanity with our divine Source. But I don’t buy it. In fact, I would go so far as to say it is one of the greatest misconceptions ever told.

Why? Because Love is indivisible. Love is all there is. Humanity could never be alienated from our divine Source (aka Love) except in our own minds and fantasies. Nothing was ever broken, and no sacrifice was ever needed.Continue Reading

Ode to Trump and the GOP

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You have proven yourselves once again to be the party that liberates the enslaved.

Dear Mr. Trump and the GOP,

I want to thank you for all you have done in such a short period of time to help me come to clarity about the world I want to live in and for showing me that I don’t need to let any rule or precedent from the past stand in my way.

Your astounding ability to envision, claim and fashion the world you want has prompted me to ask myself: What does the world I want to live in look like? I don’t have the complete answer yet—it’s still coming into focus—but here’s what I can see so far:

The world I want to live in and help create is joyful and kind. It’s a world where everyone has the opportunity to express their unique genius and radiant Self. It’s a playful and creative place where all are flourishing together, celebrating one another, and living in constant wonder of the miraculous Now and of themselves as one-of-a-kind expressions of Existence itself. Mine is a world where the Earth is abundant and thriving, and we humans are fully aware of our oneness and interdependence with all Life on the planet.

In short, it’s a world where Love reigns.Continue Reading

Letter to the Frightened Self

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It is precisely in the tempest that your Peace and Love are most urgently needed.

Dear One,

I know you are troubled by what you see happening in the world, and how desperately you want to do something to help stop the madness. I know how you do not want to sit this out, that it is unconscionable to you to do nothing in the face of so much discord and the alarming rise in authoritarianism.

You compare this moment to historical events, and this adds to your anxiety. You have been troubled all your life about what happened in Germany, wondering both how it could have happened and how it could have been stopped. I know how desperately you want to know what to do, and how powerless you feel that, as a solitary person, you can do anything that will make a difference.

I see this unsettledness in you. Let’s name it for what it is. It is fear.

You are experiencing and witnessing the escalation of fear, fear that is amplified as you see the containment walls that might have checked this tide of hatred and abuse collapsing, fear that is, as you know, the inverse of Love, a contractive force, a divisive force, a desperate force.

Take a moment now and let yourself feel the fear. Do not try to push it away. Notice it. Feel it. Then hold it in the utmost compassion. Hold that frightened part of yourself in absolute Love and compassion and gentleness, as you would a frightened child. Cradle it. Console it. Cherish it.Continue Reading

An Open Letter to Future Generations

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All is interconnected. One Life. Indra’s Web.

Dear Future Human Inhabitants of Earth,

I am writing to you from the early 21st century guessing you may be looking back on our time and wondering how we could have made such a mess of our world. I’d like to try to give you some insight into that question.

One of the huge breakthroughs in our recent understanding has been to recognize that everything we see, touch, experience—and even things that we cannot—is woven into a single system. All is interconnected. Interwoven. One Life. Indra’s Web.

I understand this is not news to you. It is obvious. But for us, for a very long time, it was far from obvious.

You see, the mind state most of us lived in was very different from yours. This will seem alien to you, but I’m going to try to explain.Continue Reading

Eudomy: The Land Where Truth Reigns

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tree at sunset
In Eudomy there is no judgment.

I once had a dream where I am transported into the future. I look around and I see a thriving Earth and a world at peace. And I think, elatedly, we did it! We humans did it! We made the transformation into the new consciousness!

As I walk around, I see a woman with the most interesting garb. It has a traditional feel, colorful, and somehow it conveys wholeness and wisdom.

Around her on the ground are seated several children and I realize she is their teacher.

The students are reading passages that they have written and one of them reads something that refers to or implies judgment.

The teacher gently explains to the child that in Eudomy, which is the name of the land where they live, there isn’t any judgment. I understand that she doesn’t mean we don’t do judgment because it’s bad. She means in Eudomy judgment simply doesn’t exist. It has no reality.Continue Reading

Squandering Time: A Spiritual Practice

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pocket watch in sand
What does it really mean to squander time?

Benjamin Franklin once famously said, “Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of.” It’s not surprising, given such a philosophy, that Franklin accomplished an amazing amount during his lifetime. Inventor. Statesman. Author. Public Servant. Founding Father.

But as much as Franklin is revered here in Philadelphia where I live—the city Franklin also called home—and as grateful as I am for all of his contributions to our city and society, I’ve come to question his premise that time is the stuff life is made of. More and more I see that life is made of a kind of attention that takes us into a dimension where time doesn’t even exist.

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The Counterintuitive Path of Transformation

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Are you ready to explore the path of transformation?
Are you ready to explore the path of transformation?

Imagine you woke up tomorrow to a life that was reflecting the fullness of the potential that you always knew was in you. What does your life look like? What sort of person have you become? Let yourself inhabit that vision for a moment.

You no doubt know that there is far more inside you than you have ever brought forth—more creativity, more contribution, more joy, more love, more life. You probably also understand that you have the capacity—as all human beings do—to consciously choose who you will become and to actively participate in how your life unfolds. The question is: How can you let go of the limiting beliefs and behaviors that prevent that potential from coming forth?

Why Personal Transformation Can Be Challenging

There are a couple of reasons why personal transformation can be challenging: we misunderstand what is real, and we misunderstand the nature of power. First, let’s consider our misunderstanding of what is real.

What Is Real?

Until you have achieved a certain level of self-awareness, you accept as true ideas about who and what you are that you have inherited or been socialized into. Even though these ideas are arbitrary, you take them to be reality: accurate and unchangeable.

You live as someone others believe you to be, and more important, you perceive yourself to be who others believe you are. These ideas and beliefs comprise your mental operating system, and it never even occurs to you to question them.

At the root of this operating system lies a fundamental error that almost all of us have inherited: the idea that we exist as solitary entities separate from one another and the rest of Life. This notion of being separate gives rise to a false self, often referred to as the ego, which we mistake for our true self.

And that brings me to our misunderstanding of power.

What Is Power?

As long as we are living from this ego perspective, we see ourselves as lonely strivers who must prevail over all obstacles through our own effort, and we see power as the ability to force things to happen—the ability to dominate, dictate and control.

This egoic understanding of power is what we see playing out on the national and global stage, and if we pay close attention we will see it within ourselves in our approach to personal transformation: once we realize that the beliefs we have inherited about ourselves are false, we try to overcome them through judgment and resistance and we try to become the person we wish to become through the energy of striving and grasping.

Ironically, this ego approach of force, with its judgment, resistance, striving, and grasping, is the very thing that assures that the old patterns stay locked in place. The ego approach to change keeps transformation at bay.

Transformation Arises from Acceptance

Despite our misperceptions, domination, force, and control are not power. Power is what has brought forth Life itself—it is an attribute of Love. Nor can transformation ever be achieved by the ego. It is a natural process which occurs in the presence of acceptance, appreciation, and blessing.

If you think about your own experience, you will probably recall times when being in the presence of judgment had the effect of shutting you down and inhibiting you from expressing your potential.

You will probably also remember times when being in the presence of love, acceptance, and appreciation allowed you to thrive. This loving energy is precisely the power we can bring to bear to support our own personal evolution.

Three Ways to Cooperate with Transformation

So how can you cooperate with the natural process of transformation? Here are three things you can do:

Lay Claim to Your Intention

You begin by affirming your intention to open to transformation, recognizing that it is not something you personally bring about. You move beyond your limited ego perspective and call upon the power of Love to assist you.

Setting an intention is very much like setting coordinates in your GPS. You use a GPS precisely because you don’t know how to get where you want to go.

What sort of person do you want to be? What sort of life do you want to live? What sort of contribution do you want to make in the world? These things make up your GPS setting.

You don’t dictate how your journey unfolds (which is what the ego would like to do). Rather, you lay claim to the person you want to be and the life you want to live, accepting that there is a greater Wisdom that is supporting you.

Accept and Bless

After laying claim to your intention, you practice something that seems counterintuitive and paradoxical, but which is extremely potent: accepting and blessing what is while simultaneously accepting and blessing what can be.

It sounds quite simple, and in a way it is. But it is also quite challenging because in order to do this you have to surrender resistance and disbelief. You begin to discover that you can yield to what wants to come forth, rather than strive to make it happen. You also begin to discover that you really aren’t in this life alone.

Become an Improv Partner with Life

Having assumed a stance of acceptance and blessing you enter into an improvisational partnership with Life, employing the improv maxim of yes. . . and. . .

You say yes to what Life has given you, and you offer up your own creative response to it without any attachment to specific outcomes.

Entering the Dance of Becoming

Through laying claim to your intention, accepting and blessing what is and what can be, and engaging in the improvisational practice of yes, and you open the way for transformation to occur.

Partnering with the power of Love, you enter into the dance of becoming. You allow your life to unfold in surprising ways that you neither dictate nor control, but in which you play a vital creative role.

Like what you read?

Click the circle.

Why Resistance Isn’t Radical Enough

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We_One

[This article was also published on the Huffington Post.]

The other day I was having coffee with a friend, and as we got to talking about what is going on in our political arena she asked me, “Do you ever say ‘no’?”

What she was asking was whether, in my way of seeing things, there a place for resistance, for saying “no.”

Her question got me thinking, because—as someone who has been arrested more than once for engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience and who went to prison for doing so when the US invaded Iraq, and as someone who all my life has been haunted by the Holocaust and wondered how it could have been prevented—I am not a stranger to these questions.

And yet in recent years I have strongly sensed that at this juncture, given the political and environmental challenges we face, something far more radical than resistance is called for. We have reached a point where we need nothing less than an entirely new understanding of who we are and why we are here, because it is the stories we hold that generate the world we create.

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Money: Ally in Our Spiritual Awakening

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Money: Ally in Awakening
What if money could serve our spiritual awakening?

 

[This article has also been published on the Huffington Post.]

Now that the president has released his proposed budget, I thought I would take the opportunity to talk about something that for a lot of spiritually-oriented people is anathema—money. More specifically, I’d like to talk about how money was hijacked to serve the purposes of ego.

When I talk about ego, I am talking about a thought system based upon the idea of separateness. Because separateness is an illusion (the only place it exists is in the mind) the ego itself is an illusion. Yet this illusion has shaped the world in which we live.

Believing separateness to be real, ego constantly fears for its survival, and its deepest hungers are for security, worth, power, and status. Money came to be seen as the provider of all of those things.

By its very nature ego is insatiable. No matter the present circumstances, it always wants more. More power, more influence, more security, more status. Ego, in other words, is an addictive thought system, and money is one of its drugs of choice.Continue Reading

Solidarity Topples an Old Story

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Mt. Carmel Cemetery vandalism

[This article has also been published on the Huffington Post.]

Last week I paid my respects at Mt. Carmel cemetery in Philadelphia, a Jewish cemetery that recently, like others in St. Louis and Rochester, was severely vandalized. Seeing gravestone after gravestone—estimates now say more than 500—toppled with such brute force was sobering. But one thing it wasn’t was news.

News—as the word implies—refers to the new, and bigotry in all its many guises is a very old story. The real news is how thousands upon thousands of people are responding to these acts of bigotry.

In a previous post, Three Ways to Be a Peacemaker in a Time of Hatred, I talked about the importance of solidarity in the face of hatred, and solidarity is exactly what we are seeing take hold. Organizations such as Southern Poverty Law Center have been tracking the rise in hate crimes, but it would be far more telling to track the rise in acts of solidarity.Continue Reading

Hate Crimes and Humanity’s Metamorphosis

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"Metamorphogenesis" painting by Sara Steele.
Metamorphogenesis Nacimiento, c. 2016 by Sara Steele, All Rights Reserved. Used by permission.

[This article has also been published on the Huffington Post.]

As fear and turmoil engulf our nation, there is a metaphor that has been on my mind which I would like to share with you. It is the story of what happens to a caterpillar when it undergoes its metamorphosis into a butterfly.

I am indebted to David Korten, who, in his excellent book The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community, spoke about the work of evolution biologist Elisabet Sahtouris who has studied this mysterious and miraculous transformation.

Before its transformation, the earthbound caterpillar is focused on consuming. It engorges itself, devouring as much as it can, until it is so bloated it can do nothing but hang upside down and give itself over to its destiny. It forms around itself a chrysalis where it undergoes a metamorphosis that, if you had never known of it, would seem completely implausible.

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Fear: Passage to Liberation

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facing fear

[This article has also been published on the Huffington Post.]

In the wake of our recent presidential election, many people are feeling deeply afraid about what the future holds, and understandably so. We have already seen an alarming rise in hate crimes now that bigotry has seemingly been legitimated through our electoral process.

In upcoming posts I will say more about the bigger picture that I see unfolding and the unprecedented opportunities now before us to come together in ways the world has never seen. But for now, I want to speak about fear and offer some ways we can work with it to become the mindful, liberated agents for change these times need us to be.

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Election 2016 and Our Evolutionary Task

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election 2016 evolutionary task

[This article has also been published on the Huffington Post.]

Many of us are heaving a sigh of relief that this presidential election 2016 is drawing to a close, yet we also know that the hostilities that have been playing out in our nation these last many months are not simply going to evaporate after the last poll has closed and the last vote tallied.

We are going to be left with some important work to do — and we are going to need to be clear about what we are dealing with.

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Three Ways to Be a Peacemaker in a Time of Hatred

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flag and dove

[This article has also been published on the Huffington Post.]

In the face of escalating hatred and violence that is tearing at the seams of our country, many of us are left wondering how to be a peacemaker. How can we counteract the alarming anger and violence without engaging in further attack? How do we unleash the power of peace?

The fundamental misunderstanding about reality beneath all the xenophobia, Islamophobia, homophobia, racism and sexism we are witnessing is that something called separateness exists.

The question is, how do we respond to this erroneous idea without engaging in the same posture of attack that such an idea engenders? I am going to suggest three ways, based on the principles of nonviolence.Continue Reading

Donald Trump: Your Spiritual Teacher in Disguise

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Behold your spiritual teacher

With this presidency you may feel you are in the midst of a nightmare. The crucial question is, do you know how to work with nightmares?

According to the late dream expert and author Jeremy Taylor, who worked with dreams for over 40 years, all dreams come in the interest of health and wholeness. All dreams—including nightmares, which bring information so crucial and urgent that they scare the bejesus out of us to get our attention.

This presidency nightmare is no different. It is offering us exactly what we need at this precise moment to grow and evolve as a species. But first we have to be willing to look at what is happening beneath the contentious headlines to discover the deeper wisdom being offered us.

So let’s do some dream work, shall we?Continue Reading

Your Radiant Nature Can Never Be Diminished

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Your worth can never be diminished

 

Do you accept the idea that Love is all there is, yet see yourself as the Lone Cosmic Exception (i.e. special)—the only being in the entire cosmos who is excluded from the circle of Love because, unlike everybody else, you are too unworthy or simply too irrelevant to be included?Continue Reading

Activating Our Spiritual Capacity

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labyrinth_central_high res_cropped_1If you’ve landed on this website, chances are you’re a spiritual explorer, as am I. I hope you’ll look around, and if what you find here resonates with you, perhaps we are meant to travel this journey together.

First, let me tell you a little bit about how I landed here, starting with the photo you see here.

That’s me, kneeling in the labyrinth. It was 2010. I was in Denver, staying with my mother who was in hospice. About the time I learned of her cancer diagnosis, I also learned—through a series of dreams, synchronicities and intuitions—that it was time for me to leave my vocation as a pastor. It was time for me to step onto an unknown path.

I went to the labyrinth that day because I was facing monumental losses—that of my mother, my vocation, and my spiritual community. I needed guidance. I needed reassurance.

When I got to the church, a photographer from The Denver Post told me they were doing an article for an upcoming workshop about the labyrinth, and he asked if he could photograph me walking it. I wasn’t thrilled—this was an intensely personal moment—but I agreed.Continue Reading

Preparing to Take Down My Website

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For a lot of people, fall is a difficult season. As the darkness grows and the trees shed their leaves, autumn serves as a reminder of the impermanence of our temporal lives, and this reminder can bring with it a painful melancholy, perhaps even a hint of depression.

For me, though, fall is a welcome teacher. Yes, it brings a tinge of loss, but that loss has a sweetness to it. Each year autumn teaches me that life is a cycle I can trust, that letting go into the long, dark hibernation of winter, where unseen possibilities can gestate, makes way for future birth, and the splendor of the fall colors — and the vividness of the light this time  of year — reveal that there is a remarkable beauty in this act of letting go.

All of this is why this season seems like the fitting time for me to be shedding some things in my life, including this website that I will be soon be taking down. This site and the writings I have offered here have served their purpose, and if they’ve touched you in any way, if they’ve nourished you on your spiritual path, I’m very grateful. I also know, though, that it’s time now to let it go in order to make way for what is to come.

In a few weeks, maybe months, I’ll be launching a new website with a different focus. I will still be addressing the spiritual life, but in a way that is more aligned with what I believe wants to come through me at this period of my life.

For some of you, the writings and teachings I will be offering may no longer be in alignment with your personal path or what you need most in your spiritual life. Believe me when I say: I understand, and I offer you my blessing as you journey on.

For others, I believe what is coming will be deeply resonant — perhaps even exciting — and I look forward to us continuing to be in touch so that we can travel this journey together. If you are a subscriber to my email list I will be in touch with you during the interim via email, and I may even ask for your engagement with this new vision along the way.

I really do believe that now, more than ever, the Earth (including her human offspring) needs us all to be attending to our spiritual maturation, for the conflicts and environmental devastation we are witnessing will not be healed by the consciousness that created them (to paraphrase Einstein), nor can that new consciousness emerge with mere  spiritual dabbling. It will require a deep commitment on our part.

I believe the time is now for us to give this our all, because we each have a role to play in the process of healing that our planet so desperately needs. Part of what will be asked of us is to shed old identities and beliefs that cannot serve the future so that we can make way for what Being will bring to birth on this planet.

Fortunately, in autumn we have a wise teacher that shows us what letting go can look like  when we reside in trust:  a season of grace, beauty and splendor.

 

Are You Making Your Best Contribution to the World?

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be your pixel 1
Are you being your pixel?

I’ve been thinking a lot about pixels lately. It might seem like a strange thing to think about, but it will make sense once I tell you the backstory.

I’ve been taking a couple of online classes to help me build a more robust author platform in preparation for some book launches down the road. One of the classes talks about finding your niche and positioning yourself against the competition.

Needless to say, I’ve been doing a lot of translating—trying to straddle the worlds of marketing and spirituality.

They emerge out of two very different worldviews. Conventional marketing focuses on competition and setting yourself apart. Spirituality, where my interest lies, is rooted in the realization of our oneness.

The way I see it, each of us is like a pixel in a larger picture. We each have our own authentic, unique attributes which the big picture needs. This is why I don’t need to think of my compatriot pixels (those who are offering similar teachings) as competitors, because we’re all doing our part to bring forth the big, beautiful picture. After all, an image of a dahlia needs more than one yellow pixel.

I was talking to a friend about all of this recently and she reminded me of that old Hassidic tale of the rabbi Zusya who died and went to stand before the judgment seat of God. As he waited for God to appear, he grew nervous thinking about his life and how little he had done.

He began to imagine that God was going to ask him, “Why weren’t you Moses?” or “Why weren’t you Solomon?” or “Why weren’t you David?”

But when God appeared, God simply asked, “Why weren’t you Zusya?”

We’re each here to be our authentic, unique pixel. Nothing else.

Despite what you may have been taught, it isn’t self-centered or arrogant to simply to be who you are and offer the world what you have to offer. In fact, if enough of us withhold our true hue and try to shine as a different sort of pixel, the big picture becomes nothing but a chaotic, indecipherable jumble.

So here’s my bumper sticker advice: Be your pixel. Go down deep into your essence, beneath all the beliefs that you’re supposed to be like somebody else or act like somebody else. Search for your authentic Self and let it shine—because the world needs you.

 

Are You Looking for a Good Resource on Mindfulness?

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Rather than posting a blog of my own writing this week, I’d like to share with you a wonderful resource I recently came upon through Shambala Sun‘s website. In case you aren’t familiar with it, Shambala Sun is a magazine that features teachings from the Buddhist and other contemplative traditions.

This free eBook (PDF), The Mindfulness Sampler, contains chapters by some of the pre-eminent teachers of mindfulness in our day, such as Thich Nhat Hanh, Pema Chodron, Jack Kornfield, and many more, all writing about the power of awareness in daily life.

You can access the PDF here: The Mindfulness Sampler.

Peace,

Patricia

Finding the Quiet Beneath the Clamor

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sugar packet
Tune in to a different drummer: your soul.

I have a friend who is an exceptional drummer. She told me a story once of being in a drumming competition and advancing until it was just her and one other drummer remaining. During the break before the final round, she went to a cafe to get a cup of coffee and try to figure out what she could do to wow the judges that she hadn’t already done.

As she reached for a packet of sugar she thought, “That’s it!!”

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Recognizing the Praying Ego

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[This post is the fourth in a blog series on prayer. If you haven’t yet, I recommend you read the previous three posts first, beginning with Learning How to Pray.]

dawn clouds
It’s best to let the ego’s clouds of fear dissolve until the spacious, open Self can pray.

Before I launch into this week’s theme on prayer, let me tell you an old Zen story.

Once upon the time there was an old farmer who had worked his crops for many years. One day his horse ran away. Upon hearing the news, his neighbors came to visit. “Such bad luck,” they said sympathetically.

“Maybe,” the farmer replied.

The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses. “How wonderful,” the neighbors exclaimed.

“Maybe,” replied the old man.

The following day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. The neighbors again came to offer their sympathy on his misfortune.

“Maybe,” answered the farmer.

The day after, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army. Seeing that the son’s leg was broken, they passed him by. The neighbors congratulated the farmer on how well things had turned out.

“Maybe,” said the farmer.

I love that story because it reminds me that I can never see the big picture enough to judge whether something is “good” or “bad.” Things that at first seems like hardships can end up opening the way for blessings, and vice versa.Continue Reading

Being the Prayer Bowl

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[This post is the third in a series on prayer. If you haven’t yet, I recommend you read the previous two posts first: “Learning How to Pray” and “Praying With the Heart.”]

crystal prayer bowl
Praying with the heart, we empty ourselves like a prayer bowl.

Last week I talked about how I go about prayer as an act of the heart, not the head, and about how when I pray I let my awareness rest in my heart, which is the part of me that is always aware of my connection with all things. OK. But then what?Continue Reading

Praying With the Heart

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[This post is the second in a series on prayer. If you haven’t yet, I recommend you read last week’s post — Learning to Pray — as an introduction.]

disconnected telephone_prayer
How’s your prayer connection working out for you?

Down the street from our house is a booth for a pay phone that’s no longer there (another casualty of the cell phone age) that somebody decided to have fun with. They glued a fake paper phone on the back wall of the booth and stuck a tin can on the end of the cord. Anybody who walks up to that booth expecting to place a call is in for a surprise.

I’ve been walking by this faux phone for a while now, appreciating the humor of it, but recently it occurred to me that it’s an apt symbol for the way a lot of people feel about their prayer life — like they’re trying to connect with the divine realm and it’s just not working. If this describes your experience, it might be an invitation to change your way of approaching prayer.

Before I get into the details of how I go about praying, let me clarify something that you’ll need to know about me. I often use the word “Reality” to describe what monotheistic religions usually call “God,” and the reason I do comes out of my own spiritual experiences that have shown me that all is One, that nothing exists outside of the Great Love, that all of our notions of separateness are illusion, as well as any apparent forms that arise from that notion. Because the word “God” can conjure up ideas of a Being that stands apart from the world and humankind (think Sistene Chapel), I don’t often use it.

This perspective about Reality has significant implications for how I go about prayer, because I no longer approach prayer as though I were placing a phone call to request help from an external being. When I pray, I move inward, to the part of my being that already knows my oneness with Reality and with the situation or people for whom I’m praying.Continue Reading

Learning How to Pray

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prayer bowl
Prayer isn’t a technique or a formula. It’s more like an inner orientation.

Several years ago, when I was still working as a pastor, I traveled to California to attend a conference of church leaders. The keynote speaker was a man who had made a name for himself as a director in the movie industry, and one thing he said has stayed with me all these years. He told the clergy gathered there what he thought lay people really want from their pastors: “Teach us how to pray.”

To be honest, I was surprised. Is that really what people wanted to know? How to pray?

His comment struck me not only because of what he said, but how he said it. It was obvious he wasn’t just making a request. He was pleading with us. He truly wanted to know how to pray.Continue Reading

When Uncanny Coincidences Challenge Our Worldview

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A couple weeks ago I posted a blog about overhearing an 80-year-old woman talking in my dentist’s office about her plans to do the next thing on her bucket list the following day: go skydiving.

This week I’d like to share a delightful coincidence that occurred while I was writing that post.

I’d gotten my first draft done Monday morning and then stopped for lunch, and after I ate I stepped outside to get the mail. There, tucked between the bills and the fund-raising appeals, was a handwritten envelop, a rarity I always welcome.

I recognized the handwriting as my friend Susan’s, who was away on vacation, and when I opened the envelop and pulled out the card I laughed out loud. On the front of it was a picture of a well-dressed, dignified older woman posing for her mugshot.

I figured the reason Susan had sent me this card was that I was arrested once (well, okay, more than once) for doing nonviolent civil disobedience, and after one of those arrests Susan came to visit me while I was doing a week in jail.

But when I opened the card I laughed even harder. Inside it read: “Here’s to another check on the bucket list!”Continue Reading

Ferguson and Other Nightmares

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Like most people, I have found the recent events in Ferguson, Missouri, deeply disturbing. One of the most troubling things I learned this morning didn’t have to do with the ongoing violence, looting and arrests. It was the results of a Pew survey that showed a wide disparity of opinion between whites and blacks about whether Mike Brown’s murder points to deep racial issues in our country.

I think part of the disparity of opinion is because many white people don’t understand the difference between racism and prejudice. Prejudice is holding negative stereotypes about others. Anybody can be prejudiced, and most of us are in some way or another.

Racism, though, is far more insidious because it couples prejudice with institutional power. It places people in the dominant group in the position of being able to carry out their prejudice through institutional systems.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t recall a time when an unarmed white youth was gunned down in similar fashion by a black member of a police force. The judicial system in this country is certainly racist as well. The evidence? Blacks are incarcerated at overwhelming rates and for far longer compared to whites for similar crimes.

Someone has said that racism is a disease white people catch, but black people die from. And black people are dying.

As a white person, therefore, it is incumbent on me not only to speak out about injustice, but just as important to heal myself of the disease of racism. It is a highly contagious disease that everyone in our society is exposed to from an early age. It landed on our shores with the arrival of slave ships unloading their emaciated cargo onto the auction blocks, and unlike so many diseases that our medical establishment has managed to banish, racism is one that continues to inflict us all, sometimes with deadly results. [Along those lines, let me recommend an excellent book: Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing, by Joy DeGruy]

Every now and then in this blog I talk about this world we live in being a dream. That isn’t an abstract concept for me. It was something that I saw to be the case at the height of an intense awakening I experienced over a decade ago. We are literally living out a story based on our unconsciousness. At the root of this dream’s plot is a very simple, erroneous premise: that something called “separateness” exists.

Anyone who knows me well knows that dream work has been a central feature of my spiritual life. Some of the most important decisions of my life have been informed by dreams, and much of my own healing has come about because of the insights dreams have brought me.

While I was in seminary, when “big dreams” first started coming to me, I studied dream interpretation with Jeremy Taylor, author of several books on dream work, and one of Taylor’s central premises is that all dreams come in the interest of health and wholeness. All dreams.

So let’s imagine for a moment that what’s happening in Ferguson is a dream, that it’s our dream. Better yet, look at it as your dream, because if separateness doesn’t exist, then it is your dream as much as it is mine, as much as it is the people’s on the embattled streets of Ferguson.

What does it mean in your dream that a white police officer has just gunned down an unarmed black teenager? What part of you is that officer? What is at the root of his hatred? What does he really fear?

And what part of you is that black teenager, despised, vilified as dangerous, the target for your psyche’s rage and fear?

How might the battle happening on the streets of Ferguson point to the same divisions that play out in your own psyche, and what must you do to reconcile those factions so that true peace can come? In other words, how can you bring the truth of Love (which is, simply put, the Reality of Oneness) to bear in this hostile, volatile situation?

These are not idle questions. The peace of the world rests on each of us doing this difficult work, of seeing the “other” as an aspect of ourselves no matter how hard it may be to accept. I, too, must embrace the unpleasant truth that inside of me is an armed racist policeman who needs healing, and a despised black teenager who needs respect.

What’s happening in Ferguson is a nightmare. What’s happening in Gaza is a nightmare. What’s happening in Syria and the Ukraine are nightmares. They are all extreme cases of the fallacy of otherness playing itself out in deadly fashion.

And nightmares, like all dreams, come in the interest of health and wholeness. They come in extreme form because the information they bring is important, and because the time has come for us to accept it. They are invitations to us to wake, finally, from our illusions.

 

The Inner Bucket List

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skydiver in free fall
What’s on your bucket list?

Last week, waiting for a dentist appointment, I couldn’t help but overhear an 80 year old woman standing in front of the receptionist’s window of the medical building, loudly explaining that she needed a note from her doctor. She planned to go skydiving the next morning, but the skydiving company wouldn’t let her unless her doctor could confirm that she had no major medical issues.

It seems this woman had a bucket list. “I’ve already done the hot air balloon and the whitewater rafting,” she said. Now she was on to skydiving, and she made it a point to let the receptionist know that her priest was going along (maybe so he’d be on hand to administer Last Rites if needed?). She also said she’d be wearing a girdle, though I missed the reasoning behind that one.

After making her case, she walked out, and as the door closed behind her the woman sitting next to me, who had been holding her head in disbelief while listening to this conversation, looked up and said, “Good for her!”Continue Reading

Spiritual Teachings From the Garden: The Purslane Parable

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My spouse and I have a plot in a nearby community garden that a number of weeds would like to call their home — dandelions, thistles, morning glory — and keeping them in check is a never-ending task.

There’s also another weed whose name I’ve never known that grows like crazy. Like most weeds, it’s hardy. It doesn’t seem to mind heat waves or dry spells, nor torrential rains for that matter, and try as we may to pull it all one week, the next week it’s always back, spreading its long red stems, with their shiny oblong leaves, low to the ground.

So you can imagine my surprise a few weeks ago when I saw bundles of this weed for sale at our local farmer’s market. “You’re kidding me,” I thought. “This stuff that I’ve been tossing onto our compost pile for years sells for $2.50 a bunch?!”

The vendor, an Asian man who apparently didn’t feel compelled to follow American rules about what is a weed and what is a vegetable, knew that purslane (such a dignified name!) is loaded with vitamin A and C, and is delicious in salads and stir fry. He recommended sautéing it with garlic and a pinch of chili powder.Continue Reading

Sabbath-Keeping: Nurturing the Spirit

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When was the last time you stepped back?
When was the last time you stepped back?

This past weekend my spouse, Kip, and I agreed to observe Sabbath by not doing anything that felt like work on Sunday. We’ve been very busy lately completing some household projects and it just seems like there’s never an end to it. The weekend comes and goes, Monday arrives and we’ve had no time to rest.

When I was a pastor — which I was for 17 years — I was much more committed to Sabbath-keeping. Pastoring, like many occupations, is a job that’s never done, and recognizing the dangers of burnout (which pastors suffer from in large numbers) I was diligent about taking a day off.

In the Christian world, Sunday is the Sabbath, but for pastors of course Sunday is a work day. So I decided Friday would be my Sabbath. On Fridays I would do nothing work related. No email. No sermon preparation. No planning. No phone calls. The only exceptions were the rare pastoral emergencies or wedding rehearsals.

After I left the pastorate I became more lax about my Sabbath-keeping, in part because I felt the weight of trying to figure out what was next for me and building a container for my new vocational work. There was too much to learn and too much to do, and I no longer felt entitled to take time off.

And yet, deep down I knew that was a foolish and counterproductive way to live.

The Counterintuitive Wisdom of Sabbath-Keeping

Many years ago I heard a lecture by Marva Dawn, author of Keeping the Sabbath Wholly, and during the lecture she told an account she’d come upon in her research of a group of pioneers who set out for the Pacific Northwest on the Oregon Trail. They were a religious bunch, and each Saturday, when it was time to stop their traveling for the night, they would unhitch the mules from the covered wagons, set up camp and stay put until Monday.

But as summer waned, the days began getting shorter and the weather cooler and they started to worry that they weren’t going to make it to Oregon before the snow. Wrestling with what to do, they wondered if they should continue observing the Sabbath or just push ahead in hopes of beating the winter.Continue Reading

Mindfulness and Facebook’s Emotion Experiment

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emoticon face wearing headphones
Maybe the takeaway from Facebook’s experiment isn’t what we think it is.

There has been lots of press in the last week about the recent experiment conducted on Facebook in which 700,000 people, unbeknownst to them, were assigned to groups in which they received either negative or positive posts in their newsfeed. The purpose of the experiment was to see what effect that would have on the things they themselves shared in their Facebook updates.

Not surprisingly, the study found that people who were exposed to negative news were more likely to share negative news, and those who were exposed to positive stories shared more upbeat postings.

People have understandably been outraged that the subjects for the study weren’t notified ahead of time, nor obviously had anyone given their consent. It seems it isn’t so much that we mind being guinea pigs; it’s that we mind not being asked if we’d mind being guinea pigs.

There are a few helpful lessons to be learned in all of this, although I don’t think one of them is that we are affected by the emotional content we’re subjected to. If you’ve ever been in the company of someone who chronically focuses on the negative (and who among us hasn’t), you know how difficult it is not to be affected.

I’m also not sure it serves us to come away from this incident with the simplistic lesson that Facebook is a corporate villain not to be trusted. The truth is we are being emotionally manipulated all the time, though not usually in such a scientific way. Many, if not most, media outlets, as well as many corporations and politicians engage in this behavior on a regular basis.

For me the important lessons have to do with our responsibility for what we do with our own minds.Continue Reading

The Mind Game We’re Playing

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woman's face painted with American flag
What game are we really playing?

This past Tuesday, sitting with my spouse, Kip, in a packed sports bar watching the World Cup soccer match between the U.S.A. and Belgium, I was delighting in the comedy of the situation.

The gathering, mostly young people, many of them decked out in red, white and blue, beers in hand, crowded around the large flatscreen televisions, cheering and groaning together as though they were many bodies ruled by one mind.

The excitement was palpable. Maybe, just maybe the U.S. could pull off an upset and defeat the Belgian team to move on to the next round. Anything seemed possible in this World Cup that has already seen the dethroning of some of the world’s soccer powerhouses.

Thanks in large part to the extraordinary performance of their goal keeper, Tim Howard, the U.S. team managed to hold their own through the 90 minutes of play, and when the whistle sounded to end regular play the game was tied 0-0. During the break before overtime, we all took a breather. The T.V. volume was turned down, the bass-heavy music turned up, people mingled and, in the case of several of us women, stood in line for the restroom.

Not long after the 30 minutes of extra time began, Belgium scored its first goal, and the mood of the crowd instantly plummeted from excitement to disappointment, and then to resignation when Belgium scored yet again. A man behind me, angry, began using expletives more liberally and another young man within ear shot, clinging to the possibility of victory, said, “You gotta believe!”Continue Reading

Simply Noticing — A Path to Mindfulness

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shadow on wall
Do you see what there is to see?

Each morning I begin my day reading a poem by Mary Oliver. Yesterday morning I read “Humpback,” from her book American Primitive. The poem brought me to tears.

Oliver has a unique gift of opening herself to Reality—the Reality so many of us spend our days asleep to—and of finding words to convey it such that its radiance can pierce our own minds.

It got me thinking about how the poet’s foremost job is to be awake to life, to notice things that most of us don’t. Only by being awake does the poet have anything to say. Only after her raw encounter with Reality does she turn her attention to the difficult work of finding the words to describe what she has witnessed, words that have the power to stir her readers into our own wakefulness.

All of this made me think of Ellen Langer, a professor of psychology at Harvard, who for over 35 years has been researching the effects of mindfulness on health and happiness.

Langer takes a different approach to mindfulness than most of us are accustomed to. For her, mindfulness doesn’t require a rigorous practice of meditation or yoga. And in her opinion admonitions such as “Be present” are useless, because when we aren’t present, we aren’t present to know we aren’t present.

For Langer mindfulness is quite simple. It’s simply noticing, setting the intention to go about our day noticing things we’ve never noticed before. This practice pulls us out of the sleepwalker’s life in which our body is on automatic pilot while our mind wanders through the maze of its own fictions.

Later on yesterday I was walking home, following Langer’s advice to notice things. As I walked by a flowerbed near our house I noticed the shadow that the cap stone cast on the stuccoed wall. Its dance of light and shadow looked like an inverted mountain range.

I had walked by that flowerbed countless times. But this time, having set my intention to notice, I saw something beautiful I’d never seen before.

Langer is right. Noticing is a path to mindfulness, one that doesn’t demand we squeeze yet one more thing into our crowded schedule. After all, it takes just as long to walk home mindlessly as it does mindfully.

This simple practice can help us live more like poets—awake to the radiant Reality that is always present when we let ourselves see.

 

 

John Brooks’ Dream Come True: Cracking Open Our Reality

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soccer ball in goal
How can we account for Brooks’ dream?

My spouse, Kip, is an avid soccer fan, and for the last several days life in our household has revolved around World Cup soccer games. On Monday night I returned home from a lecture at the library to find Kip elated over the U.S. team’s win over Ghana, the “nemesis” that had eliminated the U.S. from the last two World Cups.

John Brooks, an unexpected substitute who came into the game after one of the lead players for the U.S. left with an injury, scored the winning goal with a perfectly executed header.

For those who pay attention to soccer this was a fairly remarkable moment, because John Brooks had never played in any competitive game for the U.S. national team and he was the first substitute player to score for the U.S. in any World Cup game. But what made his winning goal even more interesting, at least to me, is that it was a dream come true, literally.

A few nights before the match Brooks had a dream in which he won the game for the U.S. with a header, very much like the one he carried out in waking life, in the 88th minute of the game. In waking life his goal occurred in the 86th minute. Close enough.Continue Reading

Facing Diverging Paths

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Is there a path beckoning you?
Is there a path beckoning you?

In one of my morning meditation times this week, an image from a famous poem by Robert Frost came to my mind.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth

I knew why this image of diverging paths had come to me at this particular time, since I am facing some important decisions, so I took the image as an invitation to do as Frost did, to take time to pause and consider.

I imagined myself sitting down in the woods at a place where two paths part to see what I could see, knowing as Frost did that by choosing one I was saying no to the other, leaving it untraveled, a life I might have lived and chose not to.

Choices can be difficult because we know we will forever wonder about the paths we chose not to take, all those roads that we have left unexplored. We must accept this particular kind of loss so inherent to life — the loss of what might have been. Frost alludes to this in the title of his poem. Rather than calling it “The Road Taken,” he titled it, “The Road Not Taken.”

Choices can also be difficult because when we face diverging paths we can only see so far. We may be able to see what might lie ahead in the near future, but beyond that the path bends out of sight, into the undergrowth of uncertainty. This means we must always make our choices in the absence of full knowledge. We must make them guided by a deeper wisdom instead, one that we can only access within ourselves. Rather than merely deciding, we must discern which way to go.

In my meditation, letting any sense of urgency recede, I invited that deeper wisdom to come forth and show me what these diverging paths were representing.

As I gazed at them in my mind’s eye, what I saw was that one of the paths, the one slightly more traveled, was the path I would choose if I allowed fear to govern my choices. It was the safer path in so far as it was the way of conformity, the way of blending in with cultural norms and abiding by other people’s expectations.

The other path, the one less traveled, followed a different course. It followed the contours of the Self (not to be confused with self, or ego) rather than the contours of external expectations, and because it wasn’t beholden to accepted norms it was the path that could also lead to controversy.

Controversy literally means turning against. Ideas are controversial when they turn against established norms, challenging viewpoints or worldviews that have become accepted as reality.

Taking time in meditation to listen to my inner wisdom helped me see the choices before me more clearly and understand the dynamics at play in my ambivalence. I could recognize how fear had been whispering to me to take the “safer” road.

While some people thrive on controversy, I am not one of them. Nonetheless I know, and can sense that I have always known, which path I will choose, and that, for me, will make all the difference.

 

Becoming a Practicing Creative

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clay revelation
What in you is paralyzed, longing to be set free?

Whether I was weeping outwardly I don’t recall. What I do know is that inwardly I was — from gratitude and a deep sense of relief for what the lump of clay in my hands was revealing to me.

I was at a workshop led by theologian Walter Wink and his wife June Keener-Wink, a potter. We had just been studying a biblical story about Jesus healing a paralytic whose friends had hauled him up onto the roof of a house, dug through it, and lowered their friend down on his mat to get him near Jesus, who was teaching in a crowded room below.

After we studied the text, we did a role play, and then June gave us each a lump of clay and instructed us to go find a quiet place and simply work the clay as we held the question: What in me is paralyzed?Continue Reading

It’s Just One Thing After Another

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paintbrush
The great task is nothing but a series of small acts.

At our house, construction has been going on since last fall. After two years of planning we finally took the leap and had a roof deck built, and due to several factors — among them the most severe winter in recent memory — the project, which was supposed to have taken two months, has taken nearly eight.

It’s been grueling living in a construction zone, dealing with the dust and the disruption, although the end product is turning out to be everything we’d hoped for.

Part of the project included gutting, insulating and sheet rocking our home office, as well as ripping out and replacing the bathroom ceiling, and since the contractors finished their part of the interior work several weeks ago I’ve been very busy reclaiming our inner space: spackling walls, sanding, painting rooms and doors, and vacuuming up the plaster dust that managed to float into every nook and cranny.

Fortunately, an out of town guest was coming to stay with us a couple of weeks ago, and I say fortunately because having a firm deadline did wonders to keep me focused. I didn’t have the luxury of indulging the temptation to become overwhelmed, throw up my hands and fall into the pit of paralysis.Continue Reading

My Teacher, the Peace Lily

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peace lily
Sometimes giving up opens the way.

I knew something was wrong with my beloved peace lily when its leaves began to droop. It had been thriving in its little corner of the living room for years, getting just the right amount of reflected light coming down the stairwell from the skylight in the hallway upstairs.

The plant meant a lot to me and I didn’t want to lose it: it had been a gift given to me under poignant circumstances by someone dear to me (though perhaps that’s a story for another day). I had always appreciated how it graced the space with its presence, being the first thing I saw whenever I walked in the front door.

So I did my best to nurse it back to health. I set it out on our enclosed porch where it could get a bit more light and could be in the company of several other plants — I believe community is important when it comes to healing — and I took care not to water it too much or too little.

But my efforts were to no avail. It continued to languish until it became obvious it was never going to bounce back.

Reluctantly, I accepted that that it was time to let it go, so I set it outside our back door until I could get around to taking it over to the community garden and add it to the compost pile.Continue Reading

The Cross Is Empty and Always Has Been

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cross of matchesEvery summer growing up I attended Vacation Bible School at our Presbyterian church in downtown Denver. We would do crafts, sing songs, memorize scripture verses about God’s love, and try to cream each other in games of dodge ball in the church basement.

One summer one of our craft projects was to make a cross out of matches. We took partially burned matches and pasted them onto a cross-shaped piece of cardboard. Then our teacher had us glue the cardboard cross to a piece of contact-paper-covered plywood and told us to find an appropriate scripture passage to write on it.

I loved doing crafts, and this project was right up my alley. Painstakingly, I pasted my matches onto the cardboard, lining them up neatly, then glued the cross onto the backing. Then I thumbed through my Bible to find just the right scripture verse.

I was excited when I landed on the perfect verse. I carefully wrote it out, and proudly took my project to my teacher to show her.

As soon as she looked at it I could tell by her expression that I had done something wrong. She didn’t say what it was, but there seemed to be a problem with the verse I had chosen: “If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross.”Continue Reading

Gonna Lay Down My Sword and Shield

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shield
What do you think you need to defend?

Several years ago I was attending a Quaker meeting when a young woman stood up and began singing, slowly, the old gospel song “Down By the Riverside.”

I’m gonna lay down my sword and shield down by the riverside…

After singing a few lines, she spoke the first few words of the lyric, adding an emphasis that opened up the song in a new way for me. “I’m gonna lay down my sword — and shield.” 

In all the years I’d sung that song I’d scarcely paid any attention to the shield part. After all, it was a song about studying war no more, and war, as we all know, is about swords.

But when she emphasized those words — “and shield” — I realized that laying down the shield is even more radical than laying down the sword, because to lay down one’s shield is to lay down one’s fear.

In truth, we rarely lay down our shield. We spend a lot of energy trying to defend ourselves  against the threat of attack, whether it be of terrorists, lawsuits, or even personal embarrassment. If you start paying attention, you’ll probably notice how often you use the shield in everyday interactions. Every time you feel the impulse to defend your opinion, or your experience, or your worth you are holding forth the shield.Continue Reading

Casting Love upon the Water

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IMG_3373This week we had what will probably be the last trace of snow for the season here in Philadelphia, something a lot of people are happy about. Personally, I have mixed feelings. Sure, the spring is gorgeous, but I also love the winter and have especially enjoyed this one with all of the snow days it brought with it.

One sunny February morning, while I was out shoveling our front sidewalk after one of our big snow storms, I enjoyed watching a Dad and his two young children down the block gleefully piling snow into an enormous mound in front of their house.

Later that day I found out what they had been so excited about when I walked down the block and saw an enormous snow person in front of their house. With kale for hair, clementines for eyes, lemons for buttons, sporting a purple scarf around its neck and a street tree coming out of its head, it drew the admiration of parents and grandparents from all over the neighborhood who brought their little ones by to take a look.

The snow person, of course, is long gone. During the following week, when the weather warmed up, it joined the rest of the melting snow trickling down into the storm sewer, and by now it is surely wending its way across the Atlantic ocean.Continue Reading

The Taoist Lesson of My Handleless Coffee Mug

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handleless coffee mug
Are there areas of your life in which you need to let go of control?

I’ve been taking pottery classes this past year, and a few weeks ago, as I was finishing up a mug, I told my teacher I wasn’t going to put a handle on it.

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

I didn’t explain my rationale to him, mostly because I thought it might seem too weird.

You see, I’ve been drinking my morning coffee from a handleless mug for over a decade now, ever since one of my winter retreats in New Mexico.

One evening I was sitting in my room reading a book of poetry by Rumi when, for no apparent reason, the books on the shelf over the fireplace shifted and knocked the mug I’d brought with me onto the floor. It was a sturdy mug and survived the fall, or so I thought. I went over to pick it up and when I lifted it by the handle, the handle broke off.

It felt like one of those waking dream moments when outer circumstances mirror inner realities, because on that retreat, which came at an especially tumultuous time in my life, I’d been doing some challenging inner work that had to do with letting go. I was being asked to release some things that were precious to me, things that felt core to my identity and essential to what I perceived as my reason for being. Letting go of them felt like a death.Continue Reading

The Sacrament of Civil Disobedience

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Handcuffs_on_table
There are two types of civil disobedience. One originates with the ego, the other with the soul.

In response to a reader’s comment on last week’s blog post,  The Ultimate Keystone Demonstration: Love, I said I often use the word “sacramental” to describe some of my experiences of engaging in civil disobedience. In that post I talked about what seem to me to be limitations of conventional civil disobedience, and yet over these past days I’ve also been thinking more about those moments when c.d. felt sacramental to me and why.

I think of a sacrament as a visible action using tangible elements that touches upon an intangible truth. A sacrament has the power to transcend the action and objects themselves, opening a portal to a Reality that is beyond our ordinary consciousness, and it always has at its heart the understanding that we are one with something much greater than ourselves.

As I’ve thought more about why certain moments of civil disobedience have felt sacramental to me, I realized that it wasn’t because of the actions in and of themselves: crossing the property line of a military base singing Amazing Grace or sitting in front of the doors to a Federal Building reading the Beatitudes. Rather it was because I and those I was with were choosing to abide within the understanding that we were one with each other, with those arresting us, and with a Reality that transcends us all.Continue Reading

The Ultimate Keystone Demonstration: Love

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The question I find myself asking is: What are we demonstrating?
The question I find myself asking is: What are we demonstrating?

A few weeks ago I ventured out into a snowstorm to attend a demonstration concerning the Keystone XL Pipeline. The State Department had just issued its environmental report which said the pipeline would have a negligible effect on climate change, and now the ball’s in President Obama’s court to decide whether to approve the pipeline’s construction.

Contrary to the State Department’s report downplaying the environmental consequences, the pipeline has been described by some environmentalists as the “line in the sand” in terms of our energy policy because the greenhouse gasses that would result from refining and burning the tar sands oil “would tip the scales toward dire climate change”. Climate scientist James Hanson has gone as far as saying if the pipeline moves forward and the tar sands extraction continues, the “game’s over” in our efforts to avoid runaway global warming.

Those of us who braved the cold and the snow that day to express our concern about the pipeline huddled next to the Federal Building in Center City Philadelphia listening to a handful of speakers talk about the implications of the pipeline and about the pledge that thousands of people across the country are signing, committing themselves to civil disobedience should the pipeline be approved. The organizers then said they would lead us in a training in which we would role play getting arrested. Some of them would play the role of police and the rest of us would come forward in groups, simulating a blockade of the Federal Building doors, and be “arrested.”Continue Reading

Toxic Thought Remediation

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What kind of thoughts are you spewing into the noosphere?
What kind of thoughts are you spewing into the noosphere?

A vortex of plastic twice the size of Texas is floating in the North Pacific Ocean, and a similar one in the Atlantic. Because of the way the ocean currents converge, these locations have become the aquatic dumping grounds of all the plastics we toss onto our streets and into our streams that eventually find their way to the ocean. Over time those plastics, some of which break down into small polymers, are ingested by birds and aquatic life, becoming part of the food chain of the entire planet.

I’m mentioning this because the plastic vortex floated through my mind in meditation recently, offering itself as a visible depiction of the effect of our thoughts.

Thoughts, like plastics, are energy, and thoughts are what we cast out into the ocean of consciousness encircling the planet, the noosphere as Teilhard de Chardin called it. When we generate thoughts that carry the toxicity of hatred and violence we are polluting the environment of Earth’s consciousness, which of course includes our own consciousness as well.

This toxicity of thought is extremely intense right now in the political sphere and becomes amplified in social media, and the disregard and disdain for the so-called “other” that we witness in our public sphere is the same disregard and disdain that is threatening the biosphere. Our thought pollution and the pollution that is choking the oceans are completely intertwined.

Helping Restore the Planet by Cleaning Up Your Mind

On this blog I often talk about our need to move beyond the prevailing consciousness which sees the world through the lens of separateness, the consciousness of the ego. I talk about this for a good reason, because the unprecedented challenges Earth faces right now can only be met if we humans undergo a radical shift in our consciousness. In fact, I believe this is the most essential task facing us in our day. If we are going to make it through this initiation into adulthood as a species we will have to move beyond the ego consciousness that has created the crises we now face. In other words, our future rests on what we do with our minds every bit as much as what we do with our plastics.

Like the biosphere, Earth’s noosphere has been polluted over centuries, and the thought legacy we’ve inherited of violence, oppression, prejudice and exploitation is something we all have a role in cleaning up, just as we each have a role to play in helping clean up the water, soil and air.

Obviously the most important thing each of us can do — and the one thing nobody can do for us — is to clean up our own mind, our own mental backyard so to speak, and the way we do that is by simply refusing to feed negative thoughts that float through our minds. We deny them the nutrients they need of attention (which can also come in the form of resistance), and by doing so we allow them to begin to dissipate.

Please notice that I didn’t say that we stop having negative thoughts. The truth is we all have them from time to time; they come to us quite unbidden. But when they come we have a choice whether we will indulge them with a good juicy story they can feed on.

One of those juicy stories, and the one that’s often the hardest to detect because on the surface it seems so righteous, is the story that says you’re a bad person for having negative thoughts. When you judge yourself (in the interest of improving yourself, of course) you’re actually generating more toxic thoughts, causing your and the planet’s suffering to continue.

Rather than practicing judgment we have the power to practice compassion, acceptance and forgiveness, which are the only things capable of dispelling the pollutants of violence and hatred that swirl within and around us. By practicing compassion, acceptance and forgiveness we begin to transcend the ego’s story of otherness and in so doing we begin to heal the fragmentation that lies at the heart of so much of the suffering on Earth.

So the next time you hear about something like a plastic vortex in the ocean, or politicians duking it out over ideological differences, or read a post on Facebook that vilifies or ridicules the “other”, see if you can hold the situation and all the players in your heart, encircling them all love. Because truthfully, their fragmentation is our fragmentation, just as the ocean’s pollution belongs to us all.

The Parable of the Resilient Christmas Tree

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IMG_3255We’ve had construction going on at our house since October and our first floor living space was in disarray until well into December. Consequently, I wasn’t able to get our holiday decorations up until a few days before Christmas, and I decided to leave them up for awhile to make up for lost time.

This past weekend, though, it seemed like enough was enough and I was just getting ready to take everything down when I noticed something that astounded me. The Christmas tree was sprouting new growth. All over.

“How is this possible?!” I thought. The tree, although it had continued to drink water, had also begun to drop its needles. How could something that was dying also be putting forth new shoots?

Needless to say, although the other decorations came down, I didn’t have the heart to toss this brave, resilient tree out into the bleak midwinter.Continue Reading

When Snow Claims the City

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IMG_3241Yesterday we got about a foot of snow in Philadelphia, and most of us are enjoying a snow day today as the city digs itself out.

Throughout the snowstorm yesterday, sitting in the comfort of my home watching the fat flakes accumulating on the sidewalks and cars, I was grateful I didn’t have to go anywhere. After dinner, though, I put on my boots and bundled up to take a walk around the block.

The neighborhood was peacefully quiet, the only sound that of a snow shovel scraping the sidewalk in the next block. When I got to the corner I stopped near a street lamp and watched the flakes swirling in its light. Mesmerized by their random movements as they swooped this way and that on the currents of air I settled into that experience of timelessness that is always present but which I miss when I’m immersed in the daily tasks of life.Continue Reading

From Manipulation to Manifestation

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What possibilities do you wish to invite into manifestation?
At the heart of reality is a field of infinite possibilities.

This post is the third in a series based on the prayer practice I introduced in The Problem with New Year’s Resolutions. Last week I wrote about the first part of the practice, accepting and blessing what is. This week I will explore in more detail the second part: blessing and welcoming what could be.

My approach to this is based in the scientific and spiritual understanding that at the heart of reality is a field of infinite possibilities and that, because all things are interconnected, we cannot help but influence this field.

Sensing the Limits of Our Senses

In our daily lives we operate mostly based on what our five senses perceive. We tend to believe, out of laziness or convention, that reality only consists of that which we can see, hear, taste, touch or smell. But our senses are only able to detect a tiny fraction of reality. Take ultraviolet light. Until we had the technological equipment to measure it, it was invisible to humans. For us it simply didn’t exist. For some other creatures though, like bumblebees, it was quite real because they could see it. Or consider the high-frequency sound waves that are beyond the range of the human ear to detect. Just because they may not exist within our boundaries of perception doesn’t mean they won’t drive a dog crazy.Continue Reading

From Resolution to Re-Solution

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By shifting our own energy we allow our circumstances to become more fluid.
By shifting our own energy we allow our circumstances to become more fluid.

Several people have been in touch with me this past week expressing their enthusiasm for the prayer practice I introduced in last week’s blog, The Problem with New Year’s Resolutions, and their interest has inspired me to share a bit more about what the practice has meant to me and how I understand it.

One thing to remember is that even though I use this practice when there is something in my life I’d like to transform, perhaps the most important aspect of the practice — and maybe the thing most of us would like to skip over — is the complete acceptance of my present circumstances, whatever they may be.

If I want to tap into the full power of the practice I can’t look at acceptance of what is as simply a means to an end. If I do that I haven’t really accepted the present circumstances fully. Full acceptance means just that. I let myself come to peace with what is, I let myself come to love it in fact.

What I’ve discovered is that just doing that much is transformative in and of itself. When I move into a stance of true acceptance I will feel something shift within me, and I will sense that the simple act of loving what is has opened a portal to the realm of possibility, the realm of what could be.Continue Reading

The Problem with New Year’s Resolutions

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The secret to change is counterintuitive and paradoxical.
The secret to change is counterintuitive and paradoxical.

This is the time of year when many of us think about what we want for ourselves and make New Year’s resolutions about the things we’d like to do differently.  Hanging a fresh, new calendar on the wall has a way of prompting us to assess where we are in our lives and in relation to our goals.

As we all know though, New Year’s resolutions are usually so ineffective that they are standard material for comedians and cartoonists. The comedy works because we can all relate to our endearingly earnest yet perennially futile efforts at change. It seems that for every resolution there is an equal and opposite inner resistance.

So what’s the deal? Why is it that what we begin with a sense of possibility and conviction ends up leaving us feeling even more imprisoned in the very patterns of behavior we want to change?

I believe the reason change often seems impossible to us is because we don’t understand the basic spiritual dynamics at work.Continue Reading

Solstice Greetings

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Rather than sharing a written post in honor of the Solstice, when we in the northern hemisphere experience the planet turning back toward the light, I thought I would share one of my collages instead.

May this season fill you with the knowing that mystery is real and possibilities are endless.

 

 

Happy Solstice to You All!

Patricia

 

 

Christmas Cruelties and the Gift Economy

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Amazon-warehouse-with candle 610x406
True wealth increases when it’s shared.

Given that Christmas is a week away, I’d really love to be writing about good cheer, about love and joy, but recently I read a disturbing article in Mother Jones magazine, “I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave“, that just won’t let me go.

The article described working conditions in a warehouse that stocks and ships merchandise for online commerce. I was horrified by what Mac McClelland, a journalist who took a job there as an undercover reporter, described. Not only were the demands placed on her as a worker physically exhausting and sometimes dangerous, but she and her co-workers were subjected to emotional abuse as well.

The article was published in the spring of 2012, so you could say it’s old news. Except it isn’t. Just last month an undercover reporter for the BBC took a job at an Amazon warehouse in England and secretly videotaped conditions there which have been described as brutal. And in Germany, Amazon workers have gone on strike because of the working conditions and wages.

I do most of my shopping online these days, so even though not every online merchandiser exploits their workers, I found the scenario MacClelland describes deeply disturbing. I don’t want to support cruel distribution systems any more than I want to support the sweatshop manufacturing economy. But as we all know, in this globally connected, interdependent economy it’s not easy to know which companies are acting responsibly and which aren’t, and it’s pretty much impossible to extract yourself entirely from the injustices of the system.Continue Reading

Scandalous Halos and the Incarnation

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Nativity icon
What a difference it would make if we asserted the sacredness of the entire cosmos.

A couple of years ago, while sitting in the balcony of a church waiting for a concert to begin, I was pondering a mural of the Nativity that was painted on the back wall of the chancel.

In the painting Joseph and Mary were kneeling beside the infant Jesus who was lying in the manger. Nearby were a donkey and a cow, and off to the right the magi. But more than the figures themselves, it was the halos that caught my attention, halos that only appeared around the heads of Mary, Joseph and Jesus.

“That’s exactly the problem,” I thought to myself. The mural, placed in the position of the holy of holies, was inadvertently broadcasting the very belief that has led to so much devastation and suffering on our planet: the belief that humans alone carry the divine light, and not just that, but only certain humans.

Christmas is the season in which Christians celebrate the Incarnation, the Divine breaking into our earthly existence, taking on human form and the fullness of human experience. Yet over the course of my life, as a result of my own spiritual explorations and experiences, I have come to believe that traditional Christian understandings of the Incarnation obscure its radical implications.

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Mandela: Liberator of the Future

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Thank you, Nelson, for showing us the way.
Thank you, Nelson, for showing us the way.

Thursday afternoon, while I was sitting in a coffee shop reading, for some reason Nelson Mandela crossed my mind. I wondered how he was doing after his hospitalization several months ago when it seemed he was on his deathbed. “Is he still alive?” I thought to myself, wondering if somehow I might have missed the news of his death.

An hour later I got in my car to head home and heard on the radio the breaking news that he had died.

On one level it’s surprising that I thought about him at that particular time even though I hadn’t heard the news yet, but on another level it isn’t surprising at all. When he crossed my mind, millions of people across the globe were finding out that one of our wisest leaders and greatest peacemakers had left us. Madiba was on a lot of people’s minds, and the information that was flooding the collective consciousness broke through into my thoughts as well.

And that in itself speaks to the wisdom that Nelson Mandela embodied: that humanity is one and that the artificial divisions we have erected between us must become a thing of the past.Continue Reading

Parable of the Renegade Squash

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Kip standing in the heart of abundance.
Kip standing in the heart of abundance.

Late last summer in Kip’s and my community garden plot a mystery plant sprouted from our compost pile, and curious to find out what it might be, we decided to let grow.

And grow it did! Within a few weeks it had spread out to cover almost the whole garden, and since most of the other plants had begun to die down by then we just let it have its way. Judging by the leaves we thought it might be a pumpkin, a suspicion that seemed to be confirmed when small round fruits began to form.

As it turned out, though, they weren’t pumpkins. They were some kind of squash we were unfamiliar with, the name of which I discovered quite by accident while visiting a botanical gardens recently: Sweet Dumpling Squash.Continue Reading

Dreaming of Earth’s Awakening

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I recently had a dream whose vivid imagery continues to linger in my mind. In the dream I and a few other people are witnessing an extraordinary phenomenon.

A huge spider web is being lifted up like a cloth by numerous butterflies of many colors and varieties. The web is composed of a multiplicity of hexagons, like a honeycomb, and inside each, made of the same filament as the rest of the web, is the outline of a burning candle. The web is breathtakingly beautiful and all of us know how amazing it is to be present to witness it.

The phenomenon we’re witnessing, I realize, has to do with the evolution of consciousness on the planet, a sign that it has reached a new level, and I find that I am now able to levitate, though I know it has nothing to do with me personally but is part of this cosmic unfolding. Continue Reading

A Deity Within

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I rolled my eyes when I learned that the conference cocktail reception would be facilitated by a get-to-know-you game. I was ready to decompress with a glass of wine in hand – but as one of the conference organizers I felt obliged to participate. The task was to randomly draw a card with an image that represented a time of major cultural transition in your life. You could trade with others until you had a card that really spoke to you – and share with each other why.

I reluctantly participated. The first card I drew was that of a strong runner facing forward in her starting position, waiting for the signal to launch her race. I scanned my brain for the most significant cross-cultural transition I had completed – my family’s move from northern Germany to Vienna, Austria, when I was twelve years old. Thinking back to that time in my life, I did not feel powerful like an athlete, nor that I was running my own race, so I set out to trade cards.

I noticed that many attendees of the conference (aptly titled Families In Global Transition) chose cards with strong or romantic images to reflect their first overseas experience, presumably when they were adults. My childhood relocation has shaped me in beautiful ways, but it did not feel romantic, and I did not feel in control of my destiny. It had been my mother’s decision to move, not mine.

A fellow attendee walked past me holding a card with the image of an ancient, uninhabited desert building with openings for doors and windows leading into darkness. I was immediately drawn to it.

 

 

 

 

Photo: Courtesy of Anne P. Copeland, The Interchange Institute

My colleague seemed all too relieved to get rid of the card, as if thinking that she’d drawn from the figurative bottom of the pile. I started to feel a bit self-conscious about choosing an unwanted image. Would it reveal my inner demons? I decided to run with it.

We broke into groups and introduced the picture we chose. I explained that as a teenager in Vienna, I felt I’d landed in an ancient culture that I couldn’t figure out how to access. Every time I would open my mouth and reveal my high-pitched German accent, I felt treated like an outsider. In response, I created my own world, at first in the solitude of my room, and eventually with friends who were also “different.”

Someone asked me whether I imagined myself on the outside of the building – and yes, that’s exactly how it felt! I was free to roam around, unenclosed, not bound to one place; yet terrified, in fact, to enter the building whose interior I could not see. I’d gotten so used to being home-less, I feared I’d be trapped inside.

I took a sip of my wine. The afternoon sun illuminated the glass-and-steel conference center. That’s when it hit me: I still felt this way today! Even after years of building strong friendships and investing in the places I inhabited, a part of me remained on the outside looking in.

I was free to roam the world, dabble in any profession, endlessly follow my curiosity, dip in and out of communities – but at the same time I’d been terrified that choosing a “home” would consume me, restrict me, hold me captive. Since graduating high school and leaving Vienna, I had moved house more than twenty times in five different countries. I easily maintained long-distance ties to friends, teachers and employers, but felt reluctant to commit to a romantic relationship or a “permanent” job. Entering that building was not an option for me.

Despite my incessant craving for freedom and non-attachment, subconsciously I looked to other people, institutions, cities or countries to provide me with a sense of identity. I became unable to articulate my personal needs and viewpoints, felt easily misunderstood, and quick to leave when I was trapped between my conscious drive to keep all options open and my subconscious desire to belong.

The metaphor of this game became all too obvious to me: I was still unwilling to pack up my tent in the desert to reside inside the building. That building was not mine.

I put my wine glass down and left.

* * *

On the Metro ride home, I felt perturbed by my discovery. I kept looking at the image of the deserted building, wondering what I had missed all my life by not going inside. Love, belonging, self-worthiness? If I was being really honest with myself, I didn’t even want to enter that dark, lifeless structure – I’d prefer the nomadic life out in the wild.

The doors opened at the next station and people got on. I briefly emerged from my introspection to become a passenger on the train. I imagined myself as a coach asking his client what would have to change about this building that would make him want to go inside?

Immediately, the image of the Parthenon came to me: the ancient Greek column structure that lets you enter and exit with ease, see through to the other side. A place where gossip, food and ideas are exchanged. A place where life bustles. A place that attracts life, transforms it, and allows it to move on naturally. An open-air home.

This new image gave me a sense of relief. I started thinking of other column structures, like in The Neverending Story, where the mystical Uyulála gives the young hero Atréju a riddle to solve. Uyulála exists only as a voice within her forest of columns, a place of divine mystery.

I pulled out my phone and looked up images for the Parthenon. One of the first was a reconstruction of the ancient Greek site, with this golden deity at its center:

In a flash I knew that the deity at the center of my house is me. “Home” is not just a place common to a bunch of people I know, but an ancient site that anchors me wherever I am. Home is not a trap, but an invitation. Home is where I am inside and outside at once. There resides a power at its center – my center – that is both still and eternal.

I decided that evening to move back to Vienna after fifteen years abroad. I had tried returning before, but now I knew that no person, no city, no culture can provide me with a deep sense of belonging. In the past, I kept wanting the deserted building to invite me in! Now I started to realize that this building had been my own projection, and that only I can change the structure of this house.

* * *

 

 

kilian head shotKilian Kröll, Certified Executive Coach, dancer, published writer and President of Third Culture Coach, earned a B.A. in English from Haverford College and an M.A. in Cultural Studies from the University of East London. Kilian grew up in a bilingual family of classical musicians in Germany, Austria and the U.S. He just signed an indefinite lease in Vienna, Austria.

Crow Feathers, Red Ochre, Green Tea

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Crow FeathersI’m excited to let my “tribe” know about the publishing of a book of poetry by one of the guest bloggers on this site. Gwendolyn Morgan was one of two winners of the 2013 Wild Earth Poetry Prize,  and her book Crow Feathers, Red Ochre, Green Tea is being published by Hiraeth Press.

There are so many wonderful poems in the collection that I had a hard time deciding which ones to share with you. “Window, Winter” spoke to me deeply, especially on this anniversary of 9/11 and in light of the current situation in Syria. I’m guessing many of us are feeling the tug of tragedy on our hearts.

“The Way the Soul Crosses” touched me with its mingling of the tangible and temporal with the mysterious and eternal.

I hope you enjoy these poems, and I encourage you to visit the Hiraeth Press website to read more about Crow Feathers, Red Ochre, Green Tea and the glowing reviews it is receiving, of which this is one:

“Reading these poems is like taking a dip in a cool moun­tain stream. We are refreshed by the poet’s sen­si­tivity to the move­ments and rhythms of soul. Gwen is able to embrace a wide expanse of life, pulling in the wild sur­rounds of nature as well as tender moments of loss and sorrow. These poems sat­isfy a thirst for some­thing real and sub­stan­tial. A rare gift indeed.” —Francis Weller, author of Entering the Healing Ground: Grief, Ritual and the Soul of the World.

 

Window, Winter

Each day I wander through the landscape of spirit: this evening painting
dry bamboo, watercolor blocks, four months in my studio, restless,
thoughts lengthening with the shadows.

Body, stalk, limb, weary with winter.
Together with the OBGYNs, I witness three babies die,
one SIDS death with the Midwives, then, a man my age of cancer,

a nine year old child unnecessarily killed when towed
on a wooden sleigh behind a sap green SUV; she was not pulled
by the Fjord ponies who neigh at my window, waiting for grain.

Our neighbor’s twenty-three year old grandson
comes home from Iraq, Afghanistan,
back to Stumptown with a stump (not a leg)
and a wheelchair (not a cobalt skateboard)
Seven colors of paint on my palette.
How many years have we been at war now?

Another neighbor chops down a row of apple and pear trees
I stare at the lovely rounds of wood in disbelief
they were dead,” he says. I shake my head, “no, they needed pruning.”

The kestrel, robins, chickadees, juncos
the hummingbirds, raccoons and dragonflies
all shared the canopy of these trees as their homes.

Compassion fatigue: intuitive grief, instrumental grief,
no. 2 sable brush.

 

The Way the Soul Crosses

St. Mary’s, Alaska

Look, the moon is pure light.
It swells, translucent.
That’s how it will always be
held in your belly.

We cross the tundra,
kneel on moss and lichen,
pray wild roses, red berries.
Questions rise dense as mosquitoes.

There are so many things we can’t change,
so many things that change anyway.
Transfiguration: the grain becomes
bread, the berries become wine.

The way the soul
crosses over the Yukon River
in a small aluminum dinghy.
The way the seal gut
is painted with red ochre.

The way we remember
one another when faith is
stretched like skin on a drum.
The way we remember
the taste of light, wine, bread.

 

 

Gwendolyn MorganGwendolyn Morgan learned the names of birds and wild­flowers and inher­ited paint brushes and boxes from her grand­mothers.  With a M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Goddard College, and a M.Div. from San Francisco Theological Seminary, she has been a recip­ient of writing res­i­den­cies at Artsmith, Caldera and Soapstone. Her poems appear in: Calyx, Dakotah, Kalliope,  Kinesis,  Manzanita Quarterly,  Mudfish,  Tributaries: a Journal of Nature  Writing,  VoiceCatcher, Written River as well as antholo­gies and other lit­erary jour­nals.  She is a member of the Unitarian Universalist Society of Community Ministries and is a board cer­ti­fied chap­lain with the Association of Professional Chaplains.  She serves as the man­ager of inter­faith Spiritual Care at Legacy Salmon Creek Medical Center.  Gwendolyn and Judy A. Rose, her partner, share their home with Abbey Skye, a res­cued Pembroke Welsh Corgi. | Photo by Kim Campbell-​​Salgado

Finding the Still Point

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Can you feel the still point within?
Can you feel the still point within?

Recently I’ve started taking pottery classes, something I did about 12 years ago and loved. For the first few months I focused on hand building, but this summer I’ve been throwing pots on the wheel.

For most people, especially beginners, the most challenging thing about working on the wheel is centering the clay. You start with a lump of clay which you’ve wedged, kneading it thoroughly to get all the air bubbles out, then you throw the lump down onto the center of the wheel and start the wheel spinning fast.

But the problem is when you throw the clay onto the wheel it’s never completely in the middle of the wheel, nor is it a perfectly shaped mound, both of which are essential or you’ll end up with a lopsided mess. So before you start to shape it into anything, a bowl, a mug, a jar, you must first wet the spinning clay and press against it with the palms of your hands to center it.Continue Reading

Tuning to Love: The Third Aspect of the Spiritual Life

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What aspects of your life need to be tuned to love?
What aspects of your life need to be tuned to love?

Last week I took a trip to the outskirts of Baltimore to visit an old friend, someone I first met in 1990 in Tucson where I was doing my internship at the church where she was a member. Since we both liked to sing, during that year I was in Tucson we got together now and then to practice duets, accompanying ourselves on our guitars and enjoying how well our voices blended.

So this past week I loaded up my guitar to take along with me, and during my visit she and I had a couple of singing sessions, trying our best to remember the songs and harmonies we used to sing and, even though we were both rusty, we had a blast.

Of course, before we started singing we had to tune our guitars, which is why I’m telling you all this.

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve written about what I see as the essential aspects of the spiritual life. First I wrote about knowing oneself as foundational, then last week I spoke about opening to the Great Love and shared a watershed moment in my own spiritual life.

But it’s the third aspect in which it all comes together, when we bring our way of being into closer and closer alignment with what the first two aspects of the spiritual life have revealed to us. We can have all the depth of self-awareness and all the profound moments of awakening imaginable, but unless those things play out in our daily lives they are meaningless. Which brings me back to the guitars.Continue Reading

Opening to the Great Love: The Second Aspect of the Spiritual Life

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How do you open to the Great Love?
How do you open to the Great Love?

In last week’s blog, Knowing Yourself, I wrote about what I see as the first aspect of the spiritual life and I offered some practices to help us grow in self-awareness. This week I’d like to explore what I see as the next aspect of the spiritual life: opening to the Great Love, by which I mean the consciousness that animates the Universe and each of us, the Reality in which everything is being birthed, nurtured into its fullness, and received back again in complete acceptance. This second aspect of the spiritual journey is one in which we come to the real, experiential awareness that we are not living our lives as isolated individuals alone in the cosmos.Continue Reading

Knowing Yourself: The First Step in the Spiritual Life

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The more we know ourselves, the more we can experience life as a meaningful adventure.

In this blog I write a lot about the spiritual life, which I see as having three components:

  • coming to know yourself
  • nurturing a relationship with the Reality beyond yourself
  • bringing your way of being in the world into closer and closer alignment with what the first two reveal to you

In this post I’m going to share some of my thoughts on the first aspect: coming to know yourself.

Why Bother Knowing Yourself?

In my view, coming to know yourself is an essential aspect of the spiritual life because the more we know ourselves the more accurate our perceptions will be of everything else. Conversely, the less we know about ourselves, the more distorted our perceptions will be and the less able we will be to live into our fullest potential because we’ll be imprisoned by the scripts and identities that have been given us by others.

Although in this age of psychology and self-help programs we might be inclined to see self-knowledge as a Johnny-come-lately concern, knowing oneself has in fact been a focus of spiritual teachings for thousands of years.

The ancient Chinese text the Tao te Ching says: “Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom.” Self-knowledge takes us beyond mere information into that elusive thing called wisdom, wisdom that can never be attained, no matter how intelligent we may be, if we remain ignorant about ourselves.

Jesus was touching on a similar theme when he said, “Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye?” In other words, only by becoming aware of and dealing with our own shortcomings will we be able to see clearly enough to be helpful to others.

When we become aware of the “log” in our own eye we won’t make the mistake of going around trying to “fix” other people. Rather, we will relate to them with the compassion that comes from having faced our own struggles honestly, the compassion without which healing can never happen.

Knowing ourselves also opens the door to our freedom. When we are ignorant of the belief systems, assumptions and behavioral patterns that are operating within us (and that we often mistake for being us), we remain in captivity to them, unable to make wise decisions for ourselves, unable to overcome the self-limitations that may have been instilled in us, unable to recognize when we are being manipulated by those who may consciously or unconsciously seek to activate our fear and prejudice for their own purposes.

The more we come to know ourselves the more we will be able to invite healing and transformation into our lives, to embody compassion, to face our challenges as opportunities for growth, and to experience life as a meaningful adventure.

How Do You Come to Know Yourself?

So knowing yourself is helpful. Fine. But the obvious question is: How do we do it? How do we cultivate self-knowledge? There are probably as many ways as there are people, and in the end I think each of us has to discover and develop what works best for us. I’ll share with you some of the ways I do it.

I’m sure you can guess the first: meditation. Meditation helps me foster the ability to notice my thoughts and feelings without getting caught up in them, a crucial skill to have if I ever hope to live in the world as a free, non-reactive, peaceful presence.

Another practice I employ is working with my dreams. My dreams never fail to give me ample insights about myself, pointing out inner dynamics that are ready to be recognized and transformed.

A third practice I use is active imagination. This is a practice Carl Jung introduced, and it is a way to enter into intentional dialogue with the many aspects of myself. We each embody multiple facets, interests and desires, and they can sometimes engage in an inner tug-of-war that keeps us paralyzed and confused about our priorities and the life direction we want to take. Active imagination helps us listen to each of those aspects whose voices need to be heard and honored before they will join together as allies rather than adversaries.

Creative expression can also be a portal for self-knowledge. Nearly 20 years ago I happened upon a book which has since become well-known and which changed my life: The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. The reasons why it was the right book at the right time for me is a longer story that perhaps I’ll tell at another time. For now, suffice it to say that over these last two decades, as I’ve explored my creativity, I have discovered aspects of myself I would never otherwise have gotten to know.

Journaling is yet another practice which I do daily, and it grew out doing of The Artist’s Way. Through journaling I often uncover inner dynamics, priorities, assumptions and motivations that I was previously unaware of.

Another powerful way to cultivate self-knowledge is closely tied to meditation: non-judgmental witnessing. By non-judgmental witnessing I mean simply noticing the thoughts, feelings and reactions that are arising in me in any given moment and — this is key — witnessing them without judging them as good or bad. Coming to know yourself, in the end, can lead to personal transformation, but in my experience that transformation comes only through acceptance and love, not through self-condemnation or striving.

The Spiritual Life Is Life

I suspect many of us think of our spiritual life as the time that we set apart from our daily activities to focus on our spirituality, the time we spend sitting on the meditation cushion, or in the pew. But I see the spiritual life as a life that is centered in spiritual awareness, and the time on the cushion or in the pew is just the beginning. That is simply the time when we let ourselves be reminded of who we are, where we came from, and why we’re here. Unless we take that awareness into the rest of our lives, it serves little purpose.

Likewise, you can have spiritual teachers by the dozens, but unless you implement the teachings for yourself they won’t do a thing for you. You have to care deeply enough about your own freedom and growth that you’re willing to do what is necessary to water the seeds of your spiritual awareness, the way you would water the flowers in your flowerbed. Nobody can do it for you.

Knowing yourself, of course, is a major theme in Buddhism, and, as the Buddha taught, the more you come to know yourself the more you will realize there is no self. After peeling back the layers of constructed identity, eventually we discover all that’s left is Mystery — a Mystery we are part of.

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Collage by Patricia Pearce. All rights reserved.

The Philadelphia Love Experiment: Bridging the Cultural Chasm

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Why not?
Why not?

One Sunday I was getting hot under the collar reading an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer about an ongoing budget battle in the Pennsylvania legislature. The article cited one state representative from rural PA who was talking about our mass transit system as a fiscal black hole. He said our buses don’t do a thing for his constituents.

Another representative from one of Philadelphia’s suburbs went on the counterattack, citing a study that shows that the Philadelphia region generates 40 percent of Pennsylvania’s revenue, even though we have only 32 percent of the population—and we receive only 27 percent of the transportation funds.

I looked up from the newspaper and said to Kip, “Philadelphia ought to secede from Pennsylvania!” It was not my most spiritually enlightened moment.

But the frustration was real. Our city’s public schools are on the verge of collapse. Our roads and bridges are deteriorating. We need gun control laws to keep illegal handguns off our streets. And without SEPTA—our mass transit system—the city would be paralyzed by gridlock. Thousands of people who don’t own cars would be stranded, unable to get to work to help generate that 40 percent of Pennsylvania’s revenue.

Yes, our buses do do something for rural constituents.

But at every turn, when Philadelphia tries to move legislation to address our urban problems and improve the quality of life here, we are thwarted by legislators in Harrisburg who see the city as nothing but a cesspool of welfare leeches, drug addicts, and morally corrupt hedonists.

Not surprisingly, most of us who live here see things differently. We see the brokenness and challenges of the city, sure, and sometimes it breaks our hearts. But we also love the vibrant tapestry of cultures and traditions here. We love the spunky innovations, the world-class orchestra, theaters and art museums, historic Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell that people travel from around the world to see. We love the visionary steps our city is taking to make Philadelphia a green, sustainable city. The list could go on and on.

Just think, if we seceded, we could keep that 40 percent of revenue to ourselves, and we’d be golden.

Deep down though, even as I said it, I knew that seceding wasn’t the answer, even if it were legally possible. There’s enough division already in this country, and the way forward isn’t to create more, but to find ways to bridge the chasm that divides us.

Loving Enemies

Yesterday morning, as I was reflecting on this sad state in Pennsylvania I wondered, what is the answer? We seem so locked into this us-them frame of mind. How can we stand down? Soften the lines in the sand? Lay down our swords and shields and find some common ground?

I feel a sense of urgency about this because I know these divisions aren’t just plaguing our region. They are the greatest obstacle to our nation meeting the many formidable challenges before us.

It doesn’t help that our differences have been christened “The Culture Wars.” (Does everything have to be a war for us? War on Poverty, War on Drugs, War on Terror, War on Women?) And yet I don’t think I’m overstating it to say that many people in rural America and many people in urban America see each other as enemies.

Kip and I co-pastored for nearly five years behind “enemy” lines in a small, rural Missouri town, 65 miles south of Kansas City. One of our parishioners laughingly told us a story of when she was a child growing up during WWII. One Sunday the pastor asked one of the church elders to pray for their enemies. The elder got up and prayed, “Dear God, please remove our enemies from the face of the earth.”

I don’t think that’s what the pastor meant, but I bet a lot of us would pray pretty much the same way given the chance. Life would be so much simpler if our enemies just, oh, I don’t know, got raptured up one day.

Living in that small town was a cross-cultural experience, and like all the other cross-cultural experiences I’ve had I’m very glad I had it. I got to see up close, through the eyes of people who had lived there all their lives, the struggles they were facing:

  • Farms that had been in families for generations were being foreclosed on because small farmers couldn’t compete with corporate agriculture.
  • With the influx of corporate retail stores, family businesses were going under.
  • Job opportunities were scarce, and mostly minimum wage.
  • Towns throughout the region were decaying because their young people, seeing no future for themselves, were moving away never to return.

People were feeling powerless before cultural and global forces they couldn’t control. They were watching a cherished way of life slowly dying. And yet in the midst of it all they kept the faith, kept taking care of each other, kept holding potlucks, and kept trying to think of ways to protect and resurrect what they once had.

When you know what other people are dealing with, it’s really not hard to pray for them. Love them even.

All of this got me thinking about our current situation here in the commonwealth. (By the way, I love that Pennsylvania is a commonwealth. It just kinda says it all.) What if people in Philadelphia started praying for people in rural PA? Not because we want to guilt-trip them into being nice to us, nor show them that we can take the moral high ground, but because we have listened to their struggles. We sincerely want the best for them, as much as we do for ourselves.

I can’t help but believe such a movement would help repair our relationships and open a path forward in a way politics never will. We are Philadelphia, after all, the City of Brotherly/Sisterly Love, and brotherhood and sisterhood don’t stop at municipal boundaries.

Can you imagine if congregations all over the city started a prayer movement for our rural siblings? Maybe it could be called The Philadelphia Love Experiment. Maybe we could make animosities vanish into thin air.

Somebody has to take the first step—refuse to participate in the warmongering anymore and reach out the hand of friendship. Why not us?

I also think about how Pennsylvania is known as the Keystone State. Take that in for a moment. A keystone, that one crucial stone at the top of an arch that keeps the whole structure from collapsing in on itself. It sure seems to me this tottering, torn country could use something like that.

A very famous declaration came out of Philadelphia once that completely rocked the world. We could do it again if we wanted to, but this time we wouldn’t be declaring independence. We would be honoring the reality that we are all, like it or not, interdependent.

Let’s we the people just do it.

 

Weeding the Garden of the Mind

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What's growing in your garden?
What’s growing in your garden?

My spouse, Kip, and I have a plot in a community garden. A few weeks ago one of our fellow gardeners asked me how we manage to keep the weeds under control. When I told Kip, his quick response was, “We weed!”

Easier said than done. Early this spring we had to dig up dozens of strawberry plants we’d planted last year, because over the winter, weeds had encroached into the patch. That’s actually putting it mildly. The weeds had invaded—and they had conquered.

I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to grow strawberries, but they’re a monster to weed, and I understand now why some ingenious and probably frustrated person came up with the idea of a strawberry jar. The plants propagate by sending out dozens of little runners that make using a hoe between them impossible.

After struggling to clear out the weeds by hand and getting nowhere, I realized it would be easier to dig up the whole strawberry patch, extricate the weeds, and transplant the strawberries all over again.

The experience of weeding our garden got me thinking. Which most everything does. Which brings me to my point.

My mind is a lot like a garden plot. Thoughts of all varieties can grow there, some of them fruitful and nourishing and some of them thorny and nettlesome. My job is to pay attention to what’s growing there and decide which sorts of thoughts are going to stay.

You’ve probably known people who, despite tremendous hardships in life, grow into their old age full of gratitude and generosity. You can usually tell them by the wrinkles around their eyes—they’ve made such a habit of smiling. You’ve probably also known people who have grown bitter over the years and whose chronic scowl has become etched in flesh.

Neither of those outcomes happen by accident. Sure, we’re probably genetically predisposed one way or the other, but blaming it all on genes I think is a cop out. I believe our disposition is due, to a large degree, on whether we have been good gardeners of our mind.

When it really comes down to it, I think tending the mind—choosing what sorts of thoughts we are going to allow to grow there—is the most important responsibility any of us have. The thoughts you cultivate will express themselves in every action you take. Our thoughts, quite literally, determine the shape of the world.

Sometimes people see see themselves as victims of their thoughts, and there may be instances—such as in cases of trauma or biochemical imbalances in the brain—where that’s the case. But for most of us, when our minds are overgrown with all manner of nastiness it’s just because we’ve been lazy. With attention, dedication, and practice, most any of us can cultivate the sort of mind we want to live in. After all, you’re the gardener. You have the power.

But how do we manage the mind? How do we keep the weeds from taking over? Well, that’s where spiritual practices like meditation come in. Meditation cultivates in us the ability to notice thoughts as they appear—like seeds floating by on the breeze—and then let them drift on by rather than landing in the fertile soil of our imagination.

But here’s the tricky thing. We’re all living in a community garden, so to speak. Unless you’re a hermit up on a mountainside (and if you’re reading this, you’re not) you are constantly exposed to what’s growing inside other people’s minds. Just like the solid mass of dandelions that were flourishing in the garden plot next to ours a couple years back, the unhelpful thoughts that have established themselves in someone else’s mind will launch their irksome seeds into the air and some of them are going to land in you. You may as well get used to it.

But here’s another thing. When that happens, you still get to make a choice. You can either resent them (the thoughts, the person) in which case you’re letting those seeds sprout and root inside you, or you can patiently, deliberately, and compassionately go to the garden shed, get the hoe, and start reclaiming the only mental territory you’re responsible for: your own.

I say patiently, deliberately, and compassionately because compassion really is the key. We need to be compassionate with ourselves, because we’re never going to do this perfectly—and that’s okay. And we need to be compassionate with one another because, as I try to remind myself, when someone is launching the seeds of anger, hostility, and judgmentalism it’s because that’s the plot they live in, the plot they themselves have to endure. What could be more unpleasant than that?

Just like weeding our garden, this mind-weeding work is never done. But look at it this way: life’s simple frustrations are simply giving us the chance to practice.

Here’s a case in point. I had just finished my final edits to this post and was just about to click the “Publish” button when WordPress wigged out on me. It lost the final draft. I was very unhappy. And then I got it.

It was just one more chance to practice, and in this case my hoe consisted of facing the facts of the situation and not trying to fight what was. Once I did that, I could return to my task with focus, patience, and serenity.

By the way, just this week I harvested the first of our strawberries. They’re red and juicy and sweet—and they’ve convinced me that all that weeding a few months ago was worth it.

 

Jailed for Earth’s Sake

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How shall we each put our bodies on the line for Earth's future?
How shall we each put our bodies on the line for Earth’s future?

Nine years ago today I went to prison. Along with hundreds of other people in Philadelphia, I had engaged in nonviolent civil disobedience when the US launched its invasion of Iraq in 2003, and a year later we received our summons to appear in court. Those of us who refused to pay the $250 fine were sentenced to a week in maximum security federal prison and kept in lock-down in our cells 24 hours a day.

When we stepped through the doors of the prison on that sunny April day, with Philadelphia’s blossoming springtime in full swing, we entered a world unto itself, cut off from the outside by its thick concrete walls, locked doors, and glaring florescent lights.

We went through several hours of intake, including two strip searches, before we were finally issued our orange jumpsuits and escorted handcuffed to our cells. (My cellmate, Janeal Ravndal, was a Quaker woman who later wrote about our experience in her booklet, A Very Good Week Behind Bars, published by Pendle Hill Press.)

Our only connection to the outside was a narrow vertical frosted window, and a day or two after our arrival I discovered a tiny pinprick of clear glass where the frosted glaze hadn’t adhered. Smaller than the head of a pin, it was my only view to the out-of-doors. Peering through it I could make out the basic outlines of buildings, cars, a distant highway.Continue Reading

Love’s Marathon

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Martin
Martin, age 8, died in the Boston marathon bombing. He was at the finish line with his family, waiting for his dad to cross. (photo from Facebook)

The evening of the bombing at the Boston marathon, I went to my meditation space to pray for the people of Boston. As I sat down on my cushion, something took hold of my mind insisting I pray for those who placed the bombs. Something—I’ll call it Love—was aching for the wholeness of the perpetrators. Something—I’ll call it Love—was asking that I embody it by refusing to exile anyone from its circle of care.

At first I found it offensive. How could I pray for people who do such things, who plot the killing and maiming of innocent people? And yet I sensed there was a wiser spirit at work that I trusted and wanted to heed, and so I did.

As I prayed for them, I seemed to be taken to another plane— to Love’s vantage point—where I could see the tragedy in its entirety. Not only the horror of the casualties, but the tragic brokenness of anyone who could carry out such an abhorrent act. My heart ached for them all.

In my understanding, the fundamental spiritual truth is that all things and all beings are interconnected. We are all part of one Reality—I’ll call it Love—that animates the Universe. Atrocities such as the marathon bombing do violence to that fundamental truth of interconnection by enacting a story of division. They are assaults on Love.

But because Love is the Reality of complete oneness, even those who enact the story of division are not—cannot—be cast out of Love, because there is no “outside” of Love.

Once when I was walking a labyrinth on retreat, I received a teaching. “There are no enemies,” it said. “There are only those who do not know who they are.” There are only those who are not conscious that they are cells, as we all are, in the one body of Love.

And yet it’s hard to hold onto the consciousness of Love when we witness actions that inflict devastating suffering. In the face of attack we tend to go on attack, and thus lend our energy and intention to the very script of violence and division we abhor. In other words, we, too, take on the role of enemy. We, too, forget who we are.

In moments like these I remember that Jesus told people to love their enemies and to pray for their persecutors. There was a time when I understood his words as a command, something we should do if we wanted to be good people (better, that is, than our “enemies”).

But now I see that he wasn’t issuing a command or even admonishing people to claim the moral high ground. He was pointing the way out of the madness, like an illuminated exit sign above the door of a burning theater. “Here is the way out of the nightmare,” he was saying. “Love those who are playing the role of enemy and enacting the violent story of division and, by the very act of loving them, you nullify the story that has them in its grip.”

I wonder what it would be like if, whenever one of these horrific attacks occurred, we all banded together to pray not only for the victims, but just as fervently for the perpetrators—for their wholeness and that they might remember who they truly are. I know that those who engaged in such prayer would be changed. So too, I suspect, would the perpetrators.

I’ve never run a marathon, but I know people who have. I’ve heard how grueling it can be, how intense the training is, how you have to press on through the pain, how you have to keep running just when everything in you is screaming to quit.

And I’ve been thinking how maybe the reason we’re all here on this planet is because we’re in training for Love’s marathon. We’re here to press on through the pain, and the weariness, and the heartache. We’re here to learn how to stay the course of Love—to remain in the truth of Love—no matter what.

I’m pretty certain that whenever any of us manages to cross the finish line of Love’s marathon, we bring Martin’s dream of peace that much closer.

Of Crosses and Crocuses

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of crosses and crocuses
There are two realities available to us: imperial reality and divine reality.

Last week on March 21st Kip and I celebrated our 21st anniversary. These last couple of weeks I’ve been recalling our wedding, which was a small, intimate gathering of immediate family and close friends. The ceremony was nontraditional. We wrote our own vows, friends and family members sang and played music, read poems, did liturgical dance and at the end of the ceremony each person came forward and gave us a blessing as they placed ribbons across our shoulders.

It was a wonderful gift to be showered with the well-wishes of our loved ones, and later Kip wove the ribbons of blessing into a wall hanging that hangs in our home to this day.

Of the many blessings we received that day, two stand out clearly in my mind. The first was, “May you have many crosses to bear.”Continue Reading

Which Dove Will You Feed?

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The power to choose is in your hands.

Several summers ago, when Kip and I had just gotten home from vacation, I went into our second floor office that evening, flipped on the overhead light and startled something that fluttered outside our window. I went over to look and there, lying on the window ledge, was a bird’s nest with two small eggs.

I didn’t know what kind of birds they might be, since the adult that had been sitting on the nest had been startled away when I turned on the light, so the next morning I tiptoed into the room to find out who was roosting there. I was amazed to see a mourning dove sitting on the nest, peering in the window.Continue Reading

The Beauty Inside You

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Imagine if we were all taught to see the beauty within.
Imagine if we were all taught to see the beauty within.

This past Sunday I attended worship at a Quaker meeting. Quakers, who believe that the divine light is inside each of us and can be accessed by each of us without need of a mediator, usually don’t have a structured worship service, nor a clergy person who delivers a sermon. Instead, the community gathers and settles into a prolonged period of silence, and then, out of that silence, anyone who feels prompted by the Spirit will rise and speak what is on their heart.

Although it was a chilly morning outside, the meeting house was warm and made warmer by the crackling fire that was lit in the fireplace as worship began.

After a prolonged period of deep silence a few people began to rise and speak, and one of them delivered a message that moved me to tears.

She described how, when her son was three years old, they had a bedtime routine that included her reminding him, just as he was preparing to go to bed, to look for the beauty inside himself.

One night, unexpectedly, he changed the routine. Wide-eyed, he pressed his forehead against hers and reported the beauty he saw in her.  “It’s like diamonds, mama!”

I was overcome by the beauty of the whole scenario: by the beauty of such wise parenting that trains a child to see his inner beauty — and consequently nurtures his capacity to see beauty in others — and by the thought of what the world would be like if each of us had been taught to look for the beauty within.Continue Reading

Waking Up to the Waking Dream

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Have you ever experienced a moment that felt like a waking dream?

A couple of weeks ago I scheduled a blog post — Unplugged — to be published while I was away on retreat. The following week, when I was back, I went on my website and had a little surprise.

My website displays my most recent blog posts on the homepage, along with the image that corresponds to each of them. For the Unplugged post, I used a photo of an electrical cord, unplugged, lying on the red carpet of our living room.

But somehow on the homepage a different photo appeared: a photo of a white feather (also on our red carpet) which I had used in a collage once in which the feather was representing a writing quill.

Now, I’m sure there is some logical explanation of how that happened, some glitch in the software program that accounts for it, but when weird things like that happen I like to pay attention to them, because often they are communicating something at a symbolic level.

Nighttime dreams, of course, weave elaborate and sometimes bizarre symbolic narratives that reveal something about our lives, our souls, our reality that is outside the view of our conscious mind.  When I take the time to listen to my nighttime dreams and work on them, I find they can be tremendously helpful, and in some instances life-changing.

Every now and then, though, my waking life has bizarre moments too that feel like a dream — in fact I call them waking dream moments — and I frequently work on them much the same way I do my nighttime dreams, pondering their symbolism and interpreting what they might be conveying to me at this point in my life.Continue Reading

Living by Heart

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The Heart creates from the limitless possibilities of uncertainty.

I’m recently back from retreat, and once again I am convinced that taking time away from the incessant noise of our society is good for my soul. I can hear myself so much more clearly when I’m unplugged than when I am constantly navigating and responding to external communications and distractions. I can tune in more completely to the wisdom of my heart that perceives possibilities that my analytical mind is simply unable to access.

While on retreat I always do a drawing or two by heart — meaning, I let my intuition guide the process — something I wrote about in a previous post, The Life of a Heartist. This year on retreat I again immersed myself in the fluid ways of intuitive knowing, and in the process I saw more clearly that when we live guided by the heart, we must by definition live in the field of uncertainty.

Our society values certainty. We live in a very left-brained culture that believes that in order to accomplish anything you must have a clearly laid out plan and you must focus your attention on numbers, statistics and “proven” strategies. All of that has its place, but only if it is in service to the heart’s desires and the heart’s guidance. To live a life in alignment with our deepest values and soul purpose, the heart must be in the driver’s seat.

I suspect one reason we prefer to live out of the analytical left-brain is that we feel more secure. If we can head out the door knowing exactly where we’re going and how we’re going to get there, we feel safe.

To live by heart is to live very differently. When we live by heart we center our lives not in certainty, but in trust. We don’t know ahead of time what the outcome of our actions nor the destination of our path will be. We simply follow the step-by-step leading of our intuition.Continue Reading

Unplugged

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Information and wisdom are two different things.

Each year in early February I take time out for a spiritual retreat. It’s a time when I unplug from just about all the external sources of information — news, Internet, email, phone — so that I can plug into the inner sources of wisdom that come from journaling, meditation, prayer, dream work and other spiritual practices, and the rejuvenation that comes from walks in nature.

So much of our life is spent responding to external stimuli, and when we’re constantly attending to what’s coming at us we can’t really listen to what’s already in us.

The plugged-in world is a fabulous source of information, and I learn a lot from what it has to offer. But information and wisdom are two different things, and I know I have to get in touch with my internal bearings on a regular basis so that I can be selective about what I take in from other sources.  Otherwise it’s just too easy to get lost in the deluge of trivia that, in spite of its fascination, may not benefit my own development or nurture my own spirit.

How, you might ask, am I posting a blog while I’m unplugged? Well, I wrote it before my retreat and scheduled it to be published automatically. It’s a wonder, isn’t it, what we are able to do these days?

So, during this time of winter, when nature invites us to hibernate and go inward, I wish for you moments when you too can unplug so that you can tap into your inner wisdom, the wisdom of your soul.


Walking Through the Invisible Fence

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Are you ready to take off the collar?

I like to go for hikes in the woods along the creek of the Wissahickon that flows through the northwestern part of Philadelphia. The place where I often enter the park has a large home surrounded by a lot of land where a couple of large dogs roam. Every now and then the dogs get excited when someone walks by and they race toward the road barking ferociously, but because there is an invisible fence around the yard they never go any further.

The way invisible fences work, in case you’re unfamiliar with them, is a wire is buried along the edge of the yard that emits a warning signal and then a shock which is picked up by a small receiver on the dog’s collar. Both of those elements need to be in place for the fence to operate: the wire hooked up to a source of electricity, and the collar on the dog.

In last week’s blog I wrote about limiting beliefs and how we can become more conscious of them so that we can begin to move beyond them. Sometimes that movement will happen naturally. As we become aware of them, the limiting beliefs will just fall away and we will experience freedom.

Sometimes, though, they don’t. Sometimes, even when we know they’re there, our limiting beliefs continue to confine us, like a dog that’s held captive by an invisible fence.Continue Reading

Shedding Light on Our Limiting Beliefs

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Salt can’t lose its essence, and neither can you.

The other day, while I was salting my eggs at breakfast, I had an insight about one of Jesus’ teachings that had always eluded me. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is quoted as saying: “You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot.”

Even though in our day we take salt for granted, in ancient times it was precious for many reasons. It had purifying qualities, was frequently used in religious rituals and sacrifices, and it was used to preserve food, which in the days before refrigeration and canning could mean the difference between survival and starvation. Salt was so highly prized, in fact, that Roman soldiers were paid in part with salt, which is how we ended up with the word salary.

Jesus was speaking to uneducated Jewish peasants who struggled to survive under the brutality of Roman imperial rule. By saying, “You are the salt of the earth,” he was telling them they were precious, sacred, valuable beyond measure, which was probably not the message they got from the elite of their homeland and certainly not from their Roman occupiers.

Okay. That makes sense, but it’s the next part that’s puzzling. “But if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot.”

That’s the part I never understood. How could salt ever lose its taste? Salt is a stable mineral, and it just doesn’t go bad. If you’re like me, you’ve had to toss out plenty of seasonings in your day, jars of herbs and powders that have been sitting in the spice rack for years, but never have I had to toss out salt because it wasn’t salty anymore.

As the salt tumbled from the salt grinder onto my eggs, though, it started to make sense.Continue Reading

Walking Away From the Game

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Let me begin by saying two things. First, I’m not really into sports. Second, my spouse, Kip, is a soccer aficianado, and because of that I sometimes learn about the inspiring things that can happen in the world of sports, one of which took place a couple weeks ago at a soccer match in Italy.

The game was being played by two Italian teams, and on the visiting team from Milan was a player, Kevin-Prince Boateng, who is a German-Ghanian. Whenever he got the ball, some of the fans in the stands would start making racist taunts. Finally, Boateng had had enough. He threw the ball into the stands at the hecklers, pulled off his jersey and walked off the field.

That alone would have made for an inspiring tale of personal courage, but it wasn’t the end of the story. Soon all his teammates followed him off the field, then the players on the home team did as well.Continue Reading

Yes, And: Life As Spiritual Improv

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What would Yes, And look like for you?

This past summer I met a woman who teaches comedy improv, and our conversation piqued my curiosity since I teach extemporaneous preaching, which is its own sort of improv. So I started doing a bit of research into improv, and what I discovered is that many of its principles — just as in the case of extemporaneous preaching — are the very same things that make for a spiritually aligned life.

The most important principle in improv is known as “Yes, And.” What it means is that when your improv partner does or says something during a scene, you accept what has been offered and then build on it with your own interesting response. By doing so you keep the action moving forward in an unexpected, creative and sometime hilarious direction.

One thing that kills improv is if one of the players takes a stance of “Yes, but” or simply “No,” refusing or ignoring what has been offered and instead forcing the scene to move in a direction based on his or her own desires which have nothing to do with what their partners have already created.

I see life as spiritual improv. It presents us with situations, sometimes quite unexpected, and it’s up to us what we do with them. If we let go of our resistance to what is and accept our situation, then we are able to respond imaginatively in a way that allows circumstances to evolve in an innovative direction.Continue Reading

Rainbow in the Night Sky

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Do you believe in rainbows?

At the end of each year and the beginning of a new one, I like to look back and do a year-end review to remind myself of the path I’ve traveled and set my intentions for the year to come. When I was reviewing my journals from this past year, I came across a dream I had last New Year’s Eve that I want to share with you.

I’m in a large gathering of people engaged in a group ritual. Each person is holding a candle, and I and the other adults are looking into the eyes of young people and singing to them. The intent of the ritual is to encourage the younger generation as they face the global challenges before them.

Then something unexpected takes place that wasn’t part of the planned ritual: the younger people reciprocate. Looking into our eyes, they sing for us, letting us know that they recognize that we too inherited warfare and other challenging problems from the past and we have worked with them as best we could. Their kindness and generosity moves me to tears.

Later, I am outside. It is night and the sky is dark. I am standing in a location that feels like the site of old ruins. Then, suddenly and improbably, a rainbow appears across the night sky. It is an incredible sight, and I weep, overcome with gratitude.

We happen to be living in an age in which old structures, systems and beliefs are crumbling into ruins. The world around us can seem dark and foreboding, and we may wonder how those who will come after us will be able to make their way through the world they are inheriting.Continue Reading

Spread Your Wings

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What would your life be like if you spread your wings fully?

A few months ago, artist Sara Steele wrote a post for this blog, Pas de Deux, describing her experience of watching a hawk take flight from its perch on a tree branch. It spread its wings, fell onto the wind and soared away. After reading it, I had a realization that has stayed with me as an important teaching.

What I realized is that, in order for the hawk to be able to soar so effortlessly on the wind it has to spread its wings — fully. Otherwise, there is no way the wind can support it, and its flight becomes aerodynamically impossible.

It’s such an obvious point, but one I hadn’t ever thought about before.

The wind is often thought of as a metaphor for the divine Spirit, the invisible force that moves through our lives, and I happen to believe that the Spirit, the Divine, the Universe, God, whatever name you choose to give that Reality which is greater than ourselves, is a force that supports us as we seek to manifest our dreams and give expression to our soul’s purpose. It is like the wind that carries the hawk to its destination.

But in order for our dreams to be supported we have to to do our part.  We have to offer the fullness of our gifts and essence, in other words, we have to spread our wings wide.  If we hold back because we aren’t certain how we or our gifts will be received we are like the hawk stepping off the branch with its wings tucked in tight.  Playing it safe, we jeopardize our own success.

Since having this realization, I have become more aware of the ways in which I sometimes hold myself back, and as this new year begins I am more deeply committed to spreading my wings fully.

How about you? Are there areas in your life in which you are “playing it safe” by withholding your gifts and who you truly are? If so, feel for a moment what your life would be like if you spread your wings fully and gave yourself over to the spirit realm whose nature it is to support you and enable your dreams to take flight.

 

 

Opening Our Veins for Newtown

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Who can fathom the “why”?

After the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary, my spouse, Kip, pulled his high school letter jacket out of the closet and hung it on the back of his dining room chair. I think it was his quiet act of solidarity with the community he once lived in, and the school his little sister once attended. His blue and yellow jacket hanging in our dining room was a vivid symbol of how tragedy, even when it seems far away, ripples out to us all.

I cannot begin to fathom the immensity of the anguish the families of the children and educators who were killed in the shooting were experiencing. I cannot imagine the nightmare images that must have continued to haunt those who witnessed the massacre.

For me, the tragedy reawakened the shock and grief I felt in 1999 when a similar nightmare visited the halls and classrooms of Columbine High School, a place where I had taught briefly in the 1980’s after returning from the Peace Corps. It was so inconceivable that such an ordinary school where ordinary teenagers showed up every day and did what teenagers do — teased each other, went out for the football team, played in the band, griped about having to learn Spanish verbs conjugations — would become the scene of such senseless carnage, where SWAT teams converged, racing against time to stem the slaughter.

Given these personal connections, I have felt a desire to write about what happened last week, but I have been unable. The truth is, I don’t know what to say. I could talk about the horror of these tender, innocent lives being annihilated in such a meaningless, violent way, but there is no need for me to state the obvious. I could talk about the violent nature of our culture and the danger of free access to guns, but others are speaking about that more powerfully than I ever could. I could talk about the roots of fear that give rise to our need for guns, but that would be a book, not a blog. I could talk about our deep longing for safety which we seek in different ways, some people by arming themselves, other people by wanting to do away with arms.

I could talk about how safety is an illusion we cling to in this temporal life. And yet, on the spiritual plane, it is a given. To paraphrase the apostle Paul, there is nothing that can separate us from the Love from which we have arisen and to which we shall return. Nothing. Not even a mentally unstable person wielding an automatic weapon loaded with 30 rounds.

When these tragedies unfold I am always reminded of the phone conversation I had with my mother the night of the Columbine shooting. She was with some friends at a mall about a quarter of a mile from the school when it happened, and she described the sirens of police cars racing to the scene, and the din of helicopters circling overhead. “Now,” she said, “they’re asking the people of Denver to go to the blood banks.”

It was that last sentence that got me. When there is nothing more that can be done, we open our veins.

I don’t know what to say about what happened at Newtown or at Columbine. I can’t get my mind around the “why” of any of it. All I know is how I wept when I heard the news, how my heart felt so broken for the vibrant lives lost and the shattered lives of those who remain. All I know is that, in the end, what I really want from this life of mine is to find a way to stretch out my own arms and bare my own veins, to somehow offer myself for the healing of a broken, frightened world.

 

Hurricanes, Nightmares and the Ego’s Illusion

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Climate change isn’t simply a political or economic issue. It’s a spiritual issue.

As I write these words, I, along with millions of other people on the East Coast are wondering just how bad Hurricane Sandy will prove to be. Outside my front window I see a gray, steady rain. The branches of the trees are beginning to sway and bend with the increasing force of the wind. I am hoping our old, very large sycamore tree in front of our house can weather this storm.

Last night I had a dream. In the dream I was in West Philly. The sky was clear and sunny, and I thought perhaps all the hype about the storm had been just that: hype. But then I looked to the east and saw an enormous dark funnel cloud moving through the heart of Center City. The glass debris of skyscrapers was flying through the air. I wondered if Independence Hall would also be destroyed, and I considered the symbolic weight, should that happen, of seeing the very icon of the United States’ democracy being ripped apart in the juggernaut of nature’s force. In the dream I knew that the magnitude of the storm was related to global warming. I managed to get on a bus headed safely north of the city, but I and my fellow passengers watched with disbelief and horror as we witnessed our city being destroyed. The devastation we were witnessing paled the attacks of 9/11.Continue Reading

The Mind’s Haunted House

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What monsters populate your Terror Within the Mind?

The other evening, just before sunset, I was walking down our street to meet my spouse, Kip, for dinner at a neighborhood restaurant. Coming towards me on the sidewalk was a man dressed in a black and white striped prison uniform cradling a large mallet with both hands. His face was painted white, fake blood dripped from the corners of his mouth.

The first thought that crossed my mind was how bizarre this would seem to someone from another culture who had no context for this scenario. As for us, we’re used to ghosts and ghouls wandering our neighborhood this time of year. We live near a historic prison, now a museum, and every fall as a fundraiser the Friends of Eastern State Penitentiary put on a haunted house inside the prison’s massive stone walls that loom like a fortress in the heart of our neighborhood. They hire actors to play the parts of gruesome prison guards, blood-thirsty convicts, and all manner of haunted and haunting characters.

People flock to Terror Behind the Walls from all over the region, many arriving on the Ghost Bus that shuttles them back and forth from outlying parking areas. As Halloween draws nearer they often stand in line for hours, their anticipation mounting as they get closer and closer to the smoke-breathing gargoyles lurking above the gateway to the prison.Continue Reading

Leading the Way

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What terrain do you know like the back of your hand?

A couple weeks ago Kip and I were headed home after having dinner at some friends’ house. As as we were driving along a curvy road that follows the bank of the Schuylkill River, a car ahead of us with Maryland plates was weaving all over the road.

It being Saturday night, we assumed the driver was drunk and kept our distance. When we pulled up alongside him at a red light, the driver honked and motioned to Kip to roll down his window.

“Can I get to 76 from here?” he called out.

It turns out he’d been swerving all over the road because he was lost. He was probably trying to find the route on his smart phone, or his car’s GPS, or who knows, maybe reaching for a map in the glove compartment.

“Yes. Follow us.”

We weren’t headed for I-76, but it wasn’t far out of our way, and it’s a very tricky ramp to find.

So we led him around the traffic circle in front of the Art Museum, onto the Ben Franklin Parkway for a couple of blocks, then took three more quick turns until we reached the inconspicuous, unmarked ramp onto the freeway he needed.

As Kip and I pulled off to head home our Maryland friend zoomed past us to merge onto the highway, and we honked and waved our goodbyes.

We were elated. It felt so good to help a visitor to our city find his way. It was definitely worth the detour.

One lesson of the experience hardly needs mentioning: it feels good to help other people. For me, though, it was more specific than that. It made me realize I don’t just like helping people. I like helping people who are lost.

I’ve been known to stop on many occasions to ask bewildered tourists standing on city sidewalks studying their maps if I can help them find the Liberty Bell, or Ben Franklin’s grave, or the Rodin museum, or whatever they might be looking for. Maybe I have a special place in my heart for people who are trying to find their way around because I’ve visited many unfamiliar places in my life. I know how confusing and overwhelming it can be.

But it’s not just helping people navigate city streets that I find enjoyable. I like helping people who are feeling inwardly lost. I’ve been exploring the inner terrain for most of my life and have come to know a thing or two about the lay of the land.

Just like that confusing route onto 76, I’ve had to navigate plenty of bewildering twists and turns along my spiritual journey—sometimes in the dark of night—until I finally discovered a hidden entrance to the “free” way.

I think, though, the most beautiful thing I took away from our encounter with the man from Maryland was that it reminded me that we all have some area of expertise in which we feel completely at home but that would be totally confusing and overwhelming to someone else. I wonder what that would be for you. What terrain has life taught you so well that you know it like the back of your hand? It doesn’t matter if it’s something that seems simple to you, because chances are it isn’t so simple to somebody else.

Whatever it is, I hope you’ll share it, not only because you’ll make someone else’s life easier, but because you’ll probably feel just as elated as we did when that driver from Maryland safely merged onto the highway, headed for home.

Miss Leach and the Butterfly Effect

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Who changed the course of your life?

I went into the ministry and now live in Philadelphia because Miss Leach, my third grade teacher, loved the French Horn. The story has a lot of twists and turns, and it’s too long for me to tell you many details right now, but in general it went like this: I moved to Philadelphia 15 years ago because I took a call to serve as pastor of a church here. I went into the ministry because of some of the experiences I had as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Ecuador. I went into the Peace Corps because of the ways my horizons were expanded while I was an exchange student in West Germany. I was an exchange student in West Germany because of the influence of some of my fellow French Horn players in college. And I played French Horn because of an off-handed comment made one day by Miss Leach.

I loved Miss Leach. She was one of those teachers a child is very lucky to have. She taught us well. In her class we made colored pencil drawings of grasshoppers, labeling all the parts of their anatomy, in our spiral notebooks; we drew cross-sections of the Earth, learning the names of all its layers; we learned about fulcrums and levers, resistance and strength.

But I loved her not because of what she taught us, but how. I still remember the day she started teaching us how to write in cursive. She told all the left-handed kids to cover their ears for a moment while she explained to the right-handed kids how to position our paper and how to hold our pencils. Then she had the right-handed kids cover our ears while she instructed the left-handed kids how they needed to do it. She taught us about much more than handwriting that day; she demonstrated to us that she understood and valued our differences.

Most of all I remember a day when we were playing Password. The classroom was divided into two teams. One person from each team would come up front and Miss Leach would show them the word they were to help their teams guess by giving one word clues. When it was my turn, I went up and she showed me and the girl from the other team our word, which was carefully written out in black magic marker lettering on a strip of tag board. Then, taking turns, the other girl and I began giving our clues.

I don’t remember whether the word we were given was “headache” or “hedge”. All I know is that I misread it, thinking it was the other, and, as you can imagine, began giving my team bizarre clues. It wasn’t long before the other team guessed the correct word, whereupon all the kids in the class started mocking and ridiculing me for the absurd clues I’d been giving.  Shame descended upon me.

That’s when Miss Leach, bless her soul, came to my rescue. She admonished my peers, telling them that I may have understood something they didn’t. She was insinuating that perhaps my clues were so sophisticated that nobody else was comprehending them, which instantly quieted everybody in the class. Because of her brilliant intervention I was able to return to my desk with my head held high and my delicate 8 year-old ego still intact.

Maybe you can understand, then, why I was so devoted to her and why my life changed one day when a girl in the class asked Miss Leach what her favorite instrument was and she said the French Horn. Since Miss Leach was so wonderful, I concluded that the French Horn (which I’d never heard of) must also be wonderful, and so that spring, when we had the chance to sign up to learn to play instruments for the band, I chose the French Horn.

There’s a lot of talk these days about the butterfly effect, which describes the uncanny way whole systems can be altered as a consequence of one small event. A butterfly flapping its wings in China, for instance, can cause a storm on the Eastern Seaboard of the U.S. I wonder, though, if we ever really think about and marvel at the wondrous influence we have on one another, how, for instance, one off-handed comment made by a third grade teacher we love and admire can alter the trajectory of a lifetime.

I googled Miss Leach yesterday and found out she died January 5, 2000 at the age of 84. The short obituary in the newspaper said she had no survivors, but it was mistaken. She survives in the lives of all the students she touched, including my own. She is alive in the words I write and the things I teach, because all of it is an outgrowth of the influence she had on my life.

I know the effect Miss Leach had on me, though she never did, just as you may not know about the lives you have altered. But if you think back, you just might be able to remember a moment when someone you loved and admired did or said something that caused an ever-so-slight alteration in your life’s path that, in the end, changed everything.

 

 

Are You Doing It, or Just Getting It Done?

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The way I come alive is to actually do what I’m doing.

I find one of the great things about To Do lists is being able to check things off when they’re finished. It gives me such a sense of satisfaction to know that I’ve actually accomplished something. My To Do list, with all of its checked off items, is proof of my productivity.

But lately I’ve become aware of something: To Do lists have a shadow side. They encourage me to get things done rather than actually do them. Let me explain.

When I’m doing something just to get it done, I’m not really doing it. I’m not stepping into the moment and relating to whatever I’m doing as I’m doing it. I am not in an I-Thou relationship with the people I’m with, or the objects I’m touching.

When I’m focused on checking things off my To Do list, I’m not living my day. I’m just getting it done.

I’ve noticed something else: when I’m trying to get something done, I start feeling agitated, irritated, bored. These feelings are signals for me to wake up, bring myself back to the moment, and actually do what I am doing.

Here’s an example.

Kip and I garden, and August is a month that demands a lot when you grow your own food. It’s the time of year when you’ve got pounds and pounds of potatoes, pounds and pounds of tomatoes, pounds and pounds of carrots, and you’ve got to do something with all that abundance. You’ve got to cook it, can it, freeze it, use it, or you’ll lose it.

So one day not too long ago I pulled out the heavy bag of carrots I’d harvested, and I started to make a big pot of spiced carrot soup. I figured we’d eat some of it right away, and the rest I’d freeze for one of those winter days when I don’t want to cook.

So I began chopping and sauteing onions, peeling and chopping carrots, tossing all of it and the spices into a big pot, along with some stock, and I let it simmer for a while. When it was ready, I pulled out my hand blender and started pureeing.

And that’s when I noticed it. I wasn’t enjoying making the soup. I was just getting it done—and feeling irritated that I had to do it.

That was my wake-up call. I started doing what I was doing. I let myself drop into the timelessness of the moment, and I beheld the most amazing thing.

The blender, its blades whirring just beneath the surface, was creating a  vortex of the most astounding patterns. The chunks of carrots and onion got smaller and smaller, until they had combined into a velvety, gurgling current swirling gracefully within the shiny stainless steel pot.

It was magical. I was filled with wonder at such physical marvels and overcome with gratitude for Earth’s plenty.

Can you believe I almost missed it?

I know this: when I actually do what I’m doing, when I sink into the pure experience of it, when I let myself truly relate to the moment at hand, I come alive.

I’m no longer an automaton going about her daily tasks. My “tasks” become spiritual portals—blessed opportunities to delight in life’s simple mysteries.

I enter what Buddhists call beginner’s mind, that state of awareness and engagement that is filled with the wonder of experiencing life anew in each moment.

What I’d like to do is let my To Do list become an aid, rather than a hindrance, to my spiritual practice. I’d like to use it as a tool to help me stay awake to my life by posing the question, whenever I check something off the list, did I actually do this thing? Or did I settle for just getting it done?

It might be one of the most important questions any of us can ask, because there’s a huge difference between the two. It’s the difference between missing our experiences or living them. Just between you and me, I’d rather not get to the end of my days and have the painful realization that I didn’t actually live my life. I just got it done.

 

Pas de Deux

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Where did the expression “leap and the net will appear” come from? When did it come into use? Is there evidence for its veracity? I guess I don’t have enough faith to assume that this vast Universe cares enough about any particular leap of mine to put a net under me in the nick of time.

They say spider’s silk has a relative tensile strength greater than steel cable. It is certainly far less visible and weighs a fraction of it. Is the tensile strength of the theoretical net-to-appear as strong as spider’s silk? Is it as invisible as wind?

Several years ago I was driving along a familiar road when out of the corner of my eye I saw a large hawk, high on a branch in a cluster of pines. I pulled over immediately and shut off the engine to watch this bird sitting silently amidst wind invisibly setting needles and branches dancing.

The bird was quite still. I watched. Time telescoped. I don’t know how long we stayed that way, in spacious time.

Spaciousness feels liberating –– a big inhale, ribs expanding, arms extending wide, followed by an exhalation of great relief. So comforting. A friend once explained her experience of Sabbath as “A Palace in Time.” In the luxury of spaciousness I can float, buoyed by invisible currents of thought or creativity or simply being. Yet without a center that can hold, vast openness can provoke anxiety.Continue Reading

Instinct

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a pair of Vibrams lying on wood chips
We are born instinctively knowing a lot of stuff.

When I lived with my wife in small-town Missouri in the 90’s, I tended a big garden where I grew edible yummies:  snap peas, string beans, tomatoes, onions, southwestern chilies and Silver Queen corn – the works.  I loved picking the corn and running it straight indoors to the boiling kettle on the stove.  During one of my periodic telephone garden reports to my Pop, he once kidded me that he had half-expected me to say that I had taken the boiling kettle outside to the garden so as to reduce the ‘pick-to-pot’ time so that the sugars of corn ears wouldn’t turn as quickly to starch.  As a meticulous gardener, over the years I amended the soil with gypsum, sand and compost, ogling the tilth like John Deere himself and fretting over slugs, cucumber beetles and aphids.

The small town gardener has only one potential problem associated with tending lovely  soil:  feral cats love to shit in it.  After doing so they then scratch up the soil surface  — along with recently planted seeds and seedlings – entire rows of carrots, destroyed.  Have you ever planted a carrot seed?  It’s no more than a fleck of dust under a thin film of sifted soil. One cat swipe buries those tiny seeds too deep for the sprouts to ever surface.Continue Reading

Regarding Mr. Akin

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This, Mr. Akin, is what rape feels like.
This, Mr. Akin, is what rape feels like.

It has never been my intention in my writing to enter the political fray. I prefer to draw people’s attention to the life of mindfulness, compassion, and wonder. But the recent uproar about the comments of Rep. Todd Akin regarding rape has prompted me to make an exception to my norm and say a word or two.

I can understand why Mr. Akin’s comments have offended, incensed, and wounded so many people. Along with millions of women in this country, I, too, have experienced rape, and Mr. Akin’s beliefs about rape and pregnancy reveal a profound level of ignorance and insensitivity on his part. Others have written eloquently and powerfully about that, so I won’t go into it.

But as a former pastor, what I have found myself asking is why he and so many other devoutly religious people cling to beliefs that are simply erroneous. Why are facts so blithely tossed aside and ignorance so aggressively guarded?

I think to answer that question I need to look not at their political views or even ideology, but at their theology. I suspect that Mr. Akin’s belief that women can’t get pregnant from rape arises out of a firm belief that God will protect the righteous. God, in this worldview, is the Intelligent Designer and therefore “He” must have built into women’s anatomy a protection mechanism against the catastrophe of pregnancy resulting from rape. God, in this worldview, is omnipotent, just, and good, therefore, if bad things happen it must be because the person had it coming to them.

It is a simplistic, Pollyanna theology that simply refuses to accommodate itself to the very real facts of oppression and cruelty. Rather than facing the hard challenges that theodicy presents, this theology skirts the issue by blaming suffering on those who suffer. It may well be that Mr. Akin and those who hold similar viewpoints aren’t simply trying to prevent unwanted fetuses from being aborted. They are trying to protect their understanding of God.

This understanding of God, however, is not a Judeo-Christian understanding. The book of Job, perhaps the most ancient piece of writing in the Judeo-Christian canon, addresses this very issue, and it is unwaveringly clear: bad things happen to good people; God does not necessarily protect the righteous.

If Job had been written with a woman protagonist, one of the horrors visited upon her may very well have been rape, with the compounding catastrophe of a resulting pregnancy, and her friends would have tried to convince her that she must have done something wrong or this never would have happened, or that perhaps her rape wasn’t really legitimately rape or she wouldn’t have gotten pregnant.

Jesus, too, challenged those who would blame suffering on the victims, and of course his own crucifixion at the hands of the Roman Empire was a graphic display of the truth that God doesn’t protect the righteous.  The conventional Christian resolution of this dilemma has been to claim that, instead of protecting those who suffer, God suffers with them, which is the literal meaning of compassion, something that has become tremendously lacking in the politics of our day.

Anyone who advocates for the idea that this should be a Christian nation would, by definition, have to have compassion — suffering with the suffering — at the centerpiece of their political platform.

I was fortunate. I didn’t get pregnant. But it never entered my mind that if I had I would have been forced to carry the fetus of my rapist in my body. Such a sentence was unthinkable, unconscionable, and the belief that such cruel and unusual punishment should be written into the Constitution, as some would like it to be, is abhorrent to me. Whether or not a woman seeks an abortion in such circumstances is not Rep. Akin’s decision, nor any other politician’s, to make. It is hers, and hers alone.

But there is something else that has been present in my mind these last few days. It is a memory I carry with me from a time, several years ago, when I was on spiritual retreat.

I was walking the labyrinth one day and a message came to me saying: “Release all concept of enemy.” It was a revelation, because it was telling me that “enemy” is a concept I hold, a frame of reference in my mind, not something inherently real. Since then I must have taken the teaching to heart because, even though I vehemently disagree with Mr. Akin’s stance and I do not want him to be in a position of political power nor his beliefs codified into legislation, I have been unable to see him as an enemy. In an odd way, I can even sympathize with him. I can understand his desire to live in a world where things make sense, where complexities, such as abortion, can be boiled down to simple absolutes, where rape and other such atrocities can be explained away. That is not the world we live in, but the point I want to make is that I see him as someone not entirely dissimilar to myself, someone who, like me, wants his life to have meaning and needs something to believe in, a human being who is not more and not less than any other.

If I want him to do the hard work of wrestling honestly with the suffering of others and the complexities it presents, I must be willing to do the hard work that my beliefs demand of me: recognizing that we are all members of one human family. His name itself places the challenge before me: to see him as a kin.

 

 

Praying for Rain

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“Pray for Rain. Please pray for Rain.”

In the dream Thunder and Lightening came to introduce me to their daughter Rain. Rain was in her late 20’s, a thin woman, dressed in a knee length tunic made of long torn strips of fabric in muted hues of light blues and greens, exactly the colors, I discovered, of Van Gogh’s painting titled “Rain.” She looked like the colors of the painting, except that this was not Rain falling on a French countryside in 1889. The woman, Rain, had streams of watery soot that ran down the strips of cloth. She looked quite ill. Thunder and Lightening saw that I saw that and they asked me, as only parents of a very sick child can, “Pray for Rain. Please pray for Rain.”

I have been praying for Rain for the last several years. Praying, not that Rain come, not that it rains, but for Rain herself, daughter of Thunder and Lightening. Sometimes I meditate and then when my thoughts are dancing around a little less, I invite Rain into the quiet space. I sit with Rain and listen. Sometimes she speaks, usually she’s quiet. I have sometimes prayed for her soot streaked dress, held out my hands to allow a wave of small kindness to wash through the poison. It was then I discovered that the black rivers weren’t just on the cloth, they had seeped into Rain herself, ran in her blood. This week, I want to make a healing place in my garden for Rain, a place where she is welcome, a spot to rest in, soot streaked and all.

We know, of course, why Rain is ill. The sulfur and nitrogen from our cars, factories, and sources of electrical generation have changed her. Yet Rain, in order to be who she is, must fall. Rain cannot not Rain. This I can tell you from the times I’ve sat with her, she grieves when she falls. She knows she is ill and she does not want to carry the poison in her blood into the trout filled streams or the mountains’ trees or the soil’s loam. She knows, also, that she’s needed.

Praying for Rain is not about results. There’s no “so that” in this prayer. It is, if anything, about taking ourselves out of the mode of efficacy and entering into the place where we are unfettered enough in our thoughts and assumptions and desires to hear what is: the world, whom the Lakota call mitakuye oyasin, “all our relations”; brothers and sisters who fly and swim, who hop and run and crawl; Mother and Father, Earth and Sky; Grandparents, among them, Lightening and Thunder; and, of course, their daughter, Rain.

So we pray for Rain or for Earth or for that particular Cardinal or Finch or Tree outside our window. We pray for them, not as one in charge, but as one of them; a being of sentience, intelligence and beauty. Who knows, we might surprise ourselves. We might discover that it is we who change.

 

Lawrie Hartt is a dreamer and tender of dreams. She works with those seeking healing and a soul-filled life, listening for what will assist the journey towards balance, beauty and sustainability. She has been a spiritual counselor, retreat and workshop leader for over 25 years. She co-teaches SoulWisdom with Patricia.

 

Listen to the Birds, and They Will Tell You

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May you have time this season to listen to the birds.

“Listen to the animals and they will teach you
the birds of the air and they will tell you…”

— from The Book of Job

 

At five o’clock in the morning, the Robins sit on the peak of the neighbor’s house facing the east, singing their morning song. Sometimes each house has a Robin heralding the dawn.  Sometimes it is only one bird for the whole cul-de-sac. At times the House Finches take the place of, or join the Robins.  For the past three decades I have been out running or walking early in the morning, often before the sun rises.  I had never noticed the consistency of the placement of birds on the peaks of rooftops of houses until recently.  It seems that their singing facing the direction of East is particular to the spring and early summer months.Continue Reading

Keur Ibrah Fall

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We are here to learn with our bodies and our minds so that we can enter into a new level of relationship with the world.

Senegal

Sunday in June

A young girl, fifteen, takes my hand and leads me to her house. “Baila” she says. Baila means dance in Spanish, a language I do understand. She is, however, speaking Wolof. She hands me a broom made out of sticks, with no handle and I understand that Baila means sweep in Wolof. She motions to me in a gesture saying, “Sweep my house.”  Then I imagine the translation of the stream of words in Wolof: “I live here with my parents and seven or eight brothers. You came to help. We need the house to be cleaned so get started. I will show you how.” She has the smooth skin of youth, the color of bittersweet chocolate. She is wearing an orange nylon tee-shirt and a long cotton skirt with swirling lines of green and blue. It is tied at her waist. No shoes.

I take the broom and start to sweep. She frowns and shows me again. “Use the side of the twigs,” she says in Wolof as far as I know. She is moderately impatient with me. I smile weakly and try again.

The floor is dirt plastered over. There are a lot of holes and cracks where sand collects. It is Senegal, the Sahel. The soil is dry. Dust is everywhere. The desert is encroaching daily. “Baila” Somehow I understand the young girl’s name is Hilda or Hulda. She is insistent, directive but not mean with me. I am older than her grandmother by a few years I judge. I am ok with it all.Continue Reading

Sweet Pea

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How shall I live?

1.
My cat is named, Sweet Pea.
Inappropriately.

2.
She was outside for the first time in a while recently
(we’re trying to spare the song birds)

But once in a while
Under careful supervision
We let her out to feel the sunshine unpaned by glass,
Free to tap her inner lion by nibbling on green grass.

3.
Suddenly, a strong breeze kicked up,
but she had forgotten what it was like to feel the wind.

Can you imagine?Continue Reading

We the Poets

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How long will it be until you call me sister?

It’s a typical afternoon at Al Aqsa Academy in South Kensington, Philadelphia. Back from recess, 30 third-graders burst into the classroom, carrying stories, alliances, and scuffles that began in the playground. Calmly, their teacher reminds them that it’s time for poetry, and we begin. I tape up a poster of N. Scott Momaday’s The Delight Song of Tsoai-Talee, which uses metaphor to capture the poet’s self-awareness and relationship to the world outside himself.

I am a feather on the bright sky
I am the blue horse that runs in the plain. . .

Its powerful repetitions are very pleasing. Students tap their feet to the rhythm of each line. Thinking of Walt Whitman, as well as my own Hebrew Sabbath prayers, I wonder if the children are reminded of Islamic prayers. Walking around the classroom, I glance at first drafts as students compose. Two wonderful poems stand out, written Zubair and Zayd. These thoughtful twins have written poetry for three years, since I begin lessons in first grade at this large Islamic day school.  When asked about the title of his poem, Zubair says that this is the poem of his life. His brother, Zayd, is quite concerned with the environment and what he can do to care for it.Continue Reading

lightfastness

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What brings your soul to life?

What brings your soul to life? How are you taking time to heal and be whole?

For me, what is essential is spending time outside in the early morning hours. Being awake at first light gives me sustenance and kindles my hope and joy. Those early morning hours are when I can best hear the Spotted Towhee scratching in the dry leaves and grasses beneath the Sumac as it repeats its buzzy trill che zheee, che zhee. They’re when I can most clearly listen to the Pacific Tree Frogs announcing the imminent arrival of rain. In the dawn hours, I can watch the stars fade and the firmament of sky move from violet-blue to pale silk blue

“Take the breath of the new dawn
and make it part of you.
It will give you strength.”

This Hopi prayer fills me with gratitude. I continue to learn what it is to live in the “new dawn,” to “take the breath” and allow the prana, the life force of the morning to flow through me. And in those moments, I remember that the universe is synchronistic, and that I am a part of the whole. In those moments, I am healing.Continue Reading

“Where Are You From?” Is a Transcendent Question

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Where are you from?

Two years ago, a colleague suggested I check out a Washington-based conference called Families In Global Transition. I was intrigued. I had grown up in Germany and Austria, in a family with three nationalities and four last names, before I moved to the United States to study. As an adult in America, I learned to blend into society quite well, but I hesitated and stumbled over my answer each time someone asked “Where are you from?”

I had an inkling that attendees at Families In Global Transition (FIGT) might know what it’s like to feel at home everywhere and nowhere at once. As I searched through their website my hunger to meet a whole conference full of globally minded people became strong. And since I was an executive coach wanting to bring his leadership development skills to the intercultural field, I quickly decided not only to attend FIGT, but to also present a session.Continue Reading

Virtual Is Its Own Reward

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Entering that hushed place

Now in my 75th year, I finally got myself into spiritual direction.  Or just as likely, it’s gotten itself into me.  Even that modest move required overcoming of a long-standing preference to manage my spiritual journey without needing outside assistance.  Then one of the first problems to arise was the recurrence of a long-standing difficulty with meditation, namely that I couldn’t sustain the silent centering and breathing for more than 2 or 3 minutes before the brain teased and pestered me back into thoughts and schedules.  After a week or two of this roadblock, I began to recall that when I’ve shared a silence with others—on retreat or in a small group—I could comfortably deepen into the silence for longer stretches of time without giving in to the distractions.  Not having such a group at hand, I hit on a practice that’s helping the meditation problem but bringing other benefits as well.  I’ve been calling that practice my “Virtual Meditation  Group.”Continue Reading

Your Spiritual Animal Twin

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Be a pig.

“You’re a pig.  Don’t take that personally.”  He tried to warn her that it wasn’t a physical likeness to which he was referring.

I have a friend that has the self-proclaimed gift of recognizing people’s “spiritual animal twins.”  In relatively short time, he can sense someone’s nature and pair it with an animal.  It’s rather remarkable.  He calls someone a Meer cat and you think to yourself, “She’s totally a Meer cat.”  He says to someone else, “You’re an alligator,” and now you understand why he always has his soul out sunning itself on the sawgrass.

According to my friend, I’m a land turtle.  It’s probably the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.  And, yes, people have said nice things before.  “You’re steady.”  I’ll take it.  I pick up my shell and move on…slowly.Continue Reading

Let the Practice Carry You

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Eternity is right here inside the practice, carrying us down river.

Sometimes when the Givers of Dreams want to make sure I get it, they don’t create story lines or images; nothing radiant, troubling or obscure to be left to my interpretation. They give me a word, a phrase or a sentence. Straight up. Several weeks ago it was this: Let the Practice Carry You. I heard it, and I also saw it in capital letters, for emphasis. As I emerged into waking, an image arrived: ‘Practice’ was a boat on a river, something to carry me down stream. I needed only to get on board. If I wandered off onto shore, I needed only to retrieve the boat from the bank and get back on the river.

Hours later, I was getting in my car with a cup of coffee from the local convenient store. Turning the radio on, I heard another sentence, “Don’t Try to Be Great,” (also in capital letters, for emphasis, I was sure.) A man was talking about wisdom that graduation speakers bestow upon their college graduates. It all came in a moment. Don’t Try to Be Great and Let the Practice Carry You both gathered in a second that stretched out far and wide, one of those moments of infinite stillness where linear time becomes fiction.Continue Reading

Bearing Witness

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Together hopefully we will share the light of love.

When Patricia asked me if I’d be willing to write a guest blog, I was honored and also a bit daunted. I didn’t quite know where to start, or how to follow her beautifully laid path. She suggested that I might write about my work as spiritual practice, and possibly share an excerpt from my newly written book Find the Medicine: How Theater of Witness Reveals Stories of Suffering, Transformation and Peace. So I offer the Prelude of the book and some subsequent thoughts:

I am crouching in the wings of the theater watching the performance of Children of Cambodia/Children of War. From the side angle I see Hong Peach’s graceful silhouette balance as she perches on her right leg and her hands glide through the air in slow motion. Her fingers touch and trace invisible lines in the soft blue light. Her beauty is pure and lingers like perfume. Then with a boisterous shout, the Cambodian teen boys bound through the space, cajoling each other as they flip and jump over higher and higher ropes before collapsing into a pile of limbs on the floor, laughing before one turns serious:Continue Reading

One Christ Is Not Enough

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It’s about time.

A few years ago, my spouse, Kip, and I signed up for a retreat in Estes Park, Colorado led by Thich Nhat Hanh. I have long admired this Vietnamese Buddhist master who, with his quiet, humble demeanor, teaches that mindfulness and peace can be cultivated in every moment and every act.

We arrived in the Denver airport and boarded the chartered bus to the YMCA of the Rockies. Once there, we settled into our room, then headed for the opening gathering, joining a thousand others who had traveled from far and wide. Finding a place on the floor of the large convocation hall, we sat, waiting expectantly for Thich Nhat Hanh to appear and give the opening talk.

After awhile, one of the brown-robed monks with shaven head approached the microphone and began reading a letter from Thay—as Thich Nhat Hanh is affectionately called. It was a beautiful, loving letter. But I was confused. Why was he communicating with us in writing rather than just addressing us in person? Was this customary in Buddhist retreats?

As the monk continued reading, it sank in. Thich Nhat Hanh would not be joining us. He was hospitalized in Boston, receiving treatment for a lung infection. His community—the nuns and monks from France and their sister monasteries in New York and California—would lead the retreat.

Even though I was concerned for Thay’s wellbeing, this was an immense disappointment. I’d been looking forward to this retreat for months. But I came to a reluctant acceptance. Perhaps this was the retreat’s first teaching: to release my attachment to something I had desired so much.

The nuns and monks did a beautiful job. They gave insightful and moving Dharma talks, and although they surely must have felt trepidation about having to fill Thay’s shoes, their sincerity, the depth of their presence, and the authenticity of their teaching was an inspiration. Over the course of our days together we coalesced into a supportive community, sharing our meals in silence, joining in our small group conversations, accepting the situation and one another with grace and humor. In the absence of the revered master, the community discovered its strength.

The experience made us all more aware of how we so often project onto a single leader the capacities that lie within each of us. Had we really come to see a Buddhist super star? Or had we gathered to become a community—practicing mindfulness, compassion and peace?

As though to express the collective shift we’d undergone, at our joyous closing celebration a spontaneous dance erupted as Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror” played over the sound system. (“If you wanna make the world a better place, take a look at yourself, and then make a change.”) The energy in the room was extraordinary. Something powerful had been unleashed during that retreat, not despite Thay’s absence, but because of it.

The event became known as the miracle of the Rockies, a story of collective awakening when the master became embodied in the Sangha. The teaching was no longer the purview of one individual; it had become the gift of and to the collective.

It shouldn’t be surprising that the retreat had been billed: One Buddha Is Not Enough.

One of the most meaningful moments for me personally was when I was initiated into the Five Mindfulness Trainings—practices that give concrete expression to the Buddha’s teachings about right understanding and true love.

Sister Pine, the nun who facilitated our small group, assigned Dharma names to everyone in her group who had adopted the trainings. The morning she passed out the certificates she gestured me aside to quietly whisper something to me. She told me that the Dharma name she had heard for me was Living Christ of the Heart, but she didn’t know if I would be able to use it publicly, so on my certificate she wrote Joyful Gift of the Heart. When she told me, she emphasized the word Living, repeating it emphatically to convey to me that the name she’d heard didn’t refer to something or someone in the past, but to a present, living reality.

I have held the Dharma name at arms length. There’s so much baggage associated with the term “Christ.” It can so easily be misconstrued—becoming a mine field for the ego. After all, how many mentally unstable people have claimed themselves to be the Christ, sometimes with catastrophic consequences?

And therein lies the problem: people believing themselves to be the Christ, as though there can only be one. In fact, the belief in one’s specialness—that one is somehow set apart from the rest of humanity—is an indication that the mind is still operating from an ego perspective, not a Christ perspective.

As I understand it at this point in my life, Christ isn’t a person but a state of being, a state of dwelling in the reality of one’s oneness with the All. Yes, it is a state of being Jesus inhabited, and one he wanted others to experience as well.

We have now reached a point where our collective survival may well depend on all of us awakening to our Christ nature, understanding that it the fullest expression of what it is to be human.

This, I believe, is Christianity’s new calling, metamorphosing into a religion that helps awaken the Christ capacity in us all, just as Thay wished to awaken the Buddha capacity in those of us who gathered on retreat.

While I was at the retreat that summer I bought a watch designed by Thich Nhat Hanh. In the center is the word “it’s” in Thay’s calligraphy, and in the four quadrants is written the word “now.” I’m sure he intended it to be a constant reminder to be in the moment, present to the eternal now.

And yet, against the backdrop of my experience at the retreat I hear it also as a proclamation that we all have the capacity to be Buddhas, that we are all the Christ we’ve been waiting for. The time for us to awaken to that truth is now.

Imagination: Our Super Power

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How are you using your super power?

I had a dream once in which I was attending a conference where a couple of speakers had connections with Fanta. One had established a Fanta distribution center as a form of ministry. The other was the chemist who developed Fanta and understood its molecular structure.

Sitting on a table next to the podium where they were speaking was a bottle of Fanta. Its label read: Renewing Energy.

It felt like an important dream, so I spent some time working on it. Fanta implied the word “fantasy,” which led me to investigate the etymology of that word. It comes from a Greek word meaning: to cause to appear, make visible, expose to view, show.

Fantasy, often disparaged as being “out of touch with reality,” is actually the imaginative impulse out of which all that we create—all that we make visible—arises.

I believe, as human beings, our imagination is perhaps our greatest super power. Some would say it is the divine image in us. It is what has enabled us vulnerable weaklings without tooth or claw to survive on this earth.

Human history is really the story of the human imagination. How it has built empires, created vaccines, invented language, and calculus, composed symphonies, penned poems. Human history is the story of our collective fantasy—our power to cause to appear that which has never before existed.

Many who have left their mark on human civilization and culture have extolled the power of the imagination:

Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions. ~ Albert Einstein

Imagination rules the world. ~Napoleon Bonaparte

It is through imagination that we transcend understanding and travel into the world of possibilities. ~Danielle Pierre

Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.  ~John Dewey

Live out of your imagination, not your history. ~Stephen Covey

This super power will shape our future, and if there’s anything the future needs of us now it’s that we engage our imaginations in positive, life-enhancing fantasy. It’s the only way we can break out of the gravity of an old story that is leading us to destruction.

Fantasy is not to be taken lightly, and the collective leap of imagination into the new world we must create together begins with each of us. Just as we go to the gym to build up our physical strength, we need to exercise the muscles of our—perhaps flabby—imagination if we hope to meet the global challenges before us.

It isn’t enough to just sit around expecting someone else to step in and save the day. We are that someone. As Madeleine L’Engle said, “It might be a good idea if, like the White Queen, we practiced believing six impossible things every morning before breakfast, for we are called on to believe what to many people is impossible.”

My Fanta dream helped me see that part of my calling is to help people discover and unleash the power of their imaginations. It showed me that fantasy is Renewing Energy—the capacity to make new. If that isn’t a super power, I don’t know what is.

 

 

WYNT: Station of Possibilities

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What’s your default setting?

Recently I woke up with negative thoughts on my mind. It was as if a radio in my brain had tuned into a station of negativity. I knew it wasn’t how I wanted to start my day, so I asked myself—if my mind were a radio, what station would I want it tuned to?

I decided I wanted to tune my mind to WYNT-–“Why Not?” I imagined an upbeat d.j. announcing, “Good morning! You’re tuned to WYNT—the Radio Station of Possibilities!”

I discovered it’s a really great station. Whenever a new possibility floats through my mind, the upbeat announcer proclaims, “Why not?!” Tuned into WYNT I feel energized, enthused.

It’s so much nicer than KNNT—the alternative station where nothing is possible. Tuned into KNNT, life seems like one big futile effort.  The KNNT announcer is a real downer. He goes on and on about how the future is doomed, life is pointless. He instantly shoots down any new idea.

As unpleasant as KNNT is though, I discovered it’s useful in its own bizarre way. It gives me one more chance to practice mindfulness and self-compassion.

It’s really no different than meditation. By noticing what energy I’m tuning into, I’m able to exercise my power not to buy into the negative thoughts that want to take root in my mind. I can patiently and compassionately bring my mind back to the here and now where peace is found.

It’s definitely a practice, and some days I’m better at it than others. But I’m committed to stick with it because I think it’s one of the most important things I can learn in life.

Still, if I had my choice (and actually I do) I’d really prefer to hang out listening to WYNT. It’s just so much more fun.  The horizon becomes wide-open. Life feels like an exciting adventure.

It’s the playfulness of WYNT I like the best.  Why Not invites me into the sand box of possibilities where I feel like a kid again—open, adaptable, willing to take risks and explore new things. I get to hang out in beginner’s mind where the arteries of my imagination haven’t been hardened by cynicism or certainty.

When I’m tuned into WYNT I don’t know what the future holds, and that feels exciting rather than anxiety-provoking. The destination isn’t the point anyway.  The point is about being alive and open to the moment itself.

How about you?  Which station is your default?  If you don’t care too much for it, you might want to start playing with the dial. I mean, it’s your radio, so why not?

The Power of Blessing

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Blessing evokes a new understanding.

When we moved into our house ten years ago, it needed a lot of work. In fact, the home inspector said in his report that, while the house didn’t have any huge structural problems, it was remarkable in the number of things that needed attention: crumbling masonry, rotting window sills, open junction boxes, worn roofing, a garage door that wouldn’t close. . .

Of course, he made no mention of all the aesthetic shortcomings of the space: ripped linoleum in the kitchen, porch windows covered over with plywood, a dining room painted goldenrod with lavender trim, a bedroom painted royal blue with silver trim. I could go on, but I won’t bore you with the details.

We’d been looking for a house for months, right when the housing market was at its peak and competition among buyers was fierce. We were running out of time. We needed a place to live and we needed it now. So we bought a fixer-upper—which had not been our plan—and we’ve been working on it ever since.

We worked on the basement first, because we knew if we didn’t it would never get done. We parged and waterproofing the walls, stripped the paint from the overhead joists and the concrete floor, installed new lighting, rebuilt the staircase, put in a new window and door, painted the walls, the floor, the ceiling. All the while, as the months dragged on and on, stacks and stacks of boxes—the stuff that was destined for the basement—sat in the living room and dining room having no place else to go.

Beauty Matters

I’m a person for whom my living space matters. The space I inhabit doesn’t have to be fancy, but it does have to be welcoming. When I was in the Peace Corps I lived in a cinderblock house with a tin roof and no running water, and I did simple things to make it feel like a home. On the walls I taped up photographs of nature scenes from an old calendar, I tacked up reed mats on the exposed roof joists to create a ceiling, I built simple tables and stools from unfinished lumber, and sewed tablecloths to brighten them up. It was nothing elegant, but it was home.

So I was having a very hard time those first few years in our house. I dreaded coming home at the end of the day and being assaulted by the ugliness and clutter.

After more than a year of this I was finally at my wit’s end.  Renting another space to live in while we finished the work would be too expensive, but the renovations were taking far longer than we had ever anticipated.

I recognized that, since I could do so little to change the situation, I had to do something to make peace with it. So one day I gathered up some scarves, feathers, and ornamental objects that were beautiful to me, and I went through the house setting up altars on the stacks of boxes. I went through with my prayer bowl and a smudge stick and blessed it all, lingering over every box, every crack in the plaster, every unsightly patch of paint, holding it all in love.

It was miraculous. While the altars brought a touch of beauty, which is important in and of itself, it was the act of blessing that really changed things.  By blessing all the things I’d been resenting I moved into a relationship of acceptance with them. I stopped seeing the boxes and paint jobs as enemies to be vanquished and more as companions in a challenging time of transition. This was perhaps the most important renovation of all—making new my perception of the situation.

It really brought home to me (no pun intended) what a radical and transformational act blessing is. When we bless something just as it is, including all of its “flaws,” we are enacting a different sort of reality, one that doesn’t depend on “perfection” or hold out for the future to make everything right. Blessing brings fulfillment into the here and now.

Just because we bless something doesn’t mean we don’t do what we can to improve the situation, any more than Kip and I ceased our home renovations after the altars were set up. But when we operate out of the energy of blessing, our efforts arise from a field of love and possibility rather than judgment and disdain.

Having learned of its power, since then every now and then I practice blessing in other situations, like when I’m riding the bus or walking down a city street. I don’t say my blessings out loud—that would probably alarm most people—but I say them silently to myself. I’ll look at someone as they board the bus or pass me on the street, and say in my heart, “Be blessed.” I don’t know if it has any effect on them in the cosmic scheme of things, though it might. What I do know is that it changes me. It makes me see the person as a person—not just as one more anonymous stranger, but as a fellow traveler through life.

 

Be 101

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Who are your teachers of Being?

There is a soft rock radio station here in Philadelphia called B101. A few years ago, driving, I pulled up behind a bus at a stop light. On the back of the bus was an ad for B101—a picture of a bright bumble bee next to the call letters.

It occurred to me that it would make a great name for a course—one we could probably all benefit from.

Be 101.

Our culture specializes in doing. Most of us have the equivalent of an advanced degree in it, in fact. But being? Well, that’s just not something we’re taught.

So an introductory course in being might be just the ticket.  Unlike all those courses we took whose textbooks and notes—if we even still have them—are gathering dust in our attic, I imagine we would consult our notes from Be 101 quite often.  We could pull them out whenever we found ourselves in the throes of anxiety about our circumstances or despair about all the ways we are failing at life.

In fact, our Be 101 notebook might rest on our nightstand like a sacred text—pages dog-eared, favorite passages highlighted in yellow, margins full of scribbled comments.

In Be 101 we would learn that we are not our thoughts. We are not our accomplishments. We are not our looks. We are not our possessions. We are not our professions.

Come to think of it, in a culture as ego and achievement driven as ours—with an economy built upon the principle of dissatisfaction—Be 101 would be the most subversive course in the entire curriculum.

Turning to the Teachers

Who are the experts among us who could teach us about being?

I’m sure you have your own favorite teachers. As for myself, I look to the Trees.

Trees are amazing instructors in the art of being. They stay put, root themselves deeply in their own place in the world, and simply go about becoming more of what they already are. They stand. They breathe. They become.

Some trees have been breathing and becoming for hundreds of years, some for thousands.  In California there is a Great Basin Bristlecone Pine that’s been alive for more than 48oo years. Think of it. That Bristlecone was already 2300 years old when the Buddha sat down under another tree and became enlightened.

Can you imagine standing in the same place for 4800 years with no place you had to go and nothing you had to do but be yourself?

Sometimes when I’m in the woods I’ll lean my body up against a tree trunk to take in its energy. Invariably it reconnects me with a quiet, centered place in me that has no agenda and no anxiety.  There, at the feet of these great ones, I am reminded of my intrinsic worth and my timeless essence.  There I am reminded that—despite all of our human activities, ambitions, and aspirations—there is really nothing more precious than Being itself.

Follow Your Tail

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If you had a tail, when would it wag?

Recently I was going out for coffee with a friend. As we walked across the cobblestone avenue to get to the bakery where we were headed, I saw furry black dog standing on a stoop, happily wagging its tail at the woman petting it.

I wondered what it would be like to have a tail to wag when happiness welled up in me.

“If I had a tail,” I thought, “what would make it wag?”

I know a dog, Jazz, who gets so excited when friends come to visit that even a wagging tail isn’t enough to express her delight. She fetches her stuffed rabbit whenever she sees them approaching, then dances in a circle in the living room when they step through the door.

Her joy is simply irrepressible.

In contrast to Jazz’s unabashed expression of joy, a few months ago I was driving cross-country when an idea floated into my mind: I ought to start writing music again. It was something I used to do a lot of, and it brought me great joy.

When the idea arose, I felt a gleeful delight fill my being. If I’d had a tail it would have been wagging like nobody’s business. But immediately, another part of me slammed down like a sledgehammer, telling me that writing music was an impractical and illegitimate use of my time.

The joyful part of me was crushed, tucked its tail between its legs and whimpered back into a shadowy corner of my being.

Fortunately, I had the presence of mind to notice what had just happened, and I was horrified. I mean, for decades I’ve been exploring my own creativity and encouraging others to do the same, and even worse, what had just transpired in me felt like an act of violence.

I did some inner work on it. I listened to that part of myself that had squelched the joyful idea to find out what was going on, and I couldn’t help but feel compassion. It was so anxious, and truly believed that following my joy was a frivolous, irresponsible luxury that would lead to disaster.

Since then I’ve been coaxing my joy back out of the dark corner where it had retreated, because I sense that the things that bring me joy are precisely the things the Universe wants to bring forth in and through me. A few months ago I even took my guitar out of its case and have added to my morning array of spiritual practices one more: improvising melodies and harmonies on my guitar. Nothing yet has evolved into a full-fledged song, but my heart is happy.

So, let me put the same question to you: What things bring you joy? If you had a tail, what would make it wag?

I hope you’ll honor those things, because I’m pretty sure that if you follow your tail, you’ll end up where you belong.

Enough Already

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Do you still think you’re inadequate?

If I had to characterize the dominant belief that orchestrates our society it would be: Not Enough Yet. If you think about it, this basic belief drives just about everything we do. In fact, it forms the foundation of our entire economy. Stock prices aren’t high enough yet. Profits haven’t been maximized enough yet. Jobs haven’t been outsourced enough yet. The Gross National Product isn’t high enough yet.

The belief shows up in our individual lives too. Our income isn’t big enough yet. Our house isn’t elegant enough yet. Our car isn’t sophisticated enough yet. Our clothes aren’t stylish enough yet. Our computer isn’t fast enough yet.

The harm this belief causes is obvious. In our frantic efforts to reach that elusive state of enoughness, we raze more forests to build new tracts of bigger houses, displace more workers to maximize corporate profits, lead more stressed out lives trying to keep up with the bills and the Joneses.

Imagine what would happen if we all stopped buying into the myth of Not Enough Yet. We would only buy clothes when we actually needed them. We would be content with a simple home. We would no longer demand that the corporations we hold stock in exploit workers and the environment in order to give us a slightly higher return. We would enjoy the local fruits of the season rather than going to the grocery store expecting to find fresh asparagus in November shipped in from Chile. We, and the Earth, would be far healthier and happier.

This belief in Not Enough Yet is something that spiritual teachers have been trying to help people get beyond for a very long time. The Tao te Ching teaches, “If you realize that you have enough, you are truly rich.” Jesus said, “Don’t worry about your life, what you’ll eat or what you’ll drink, or about your body, what you’ll wear. Isn’t life more than food, and the body more than clothing?”

I think we’re missing the point, though, if we think all of this is about believing we don’t have enough yet. I think the real issue is that we believe we aren’t enough yet. Our drive to acquire more is often a coverup for our desire to be more. We haven’t yet accepted that the sheer miracle of our existence is enough in itself.

Let me put the question to you: How do you think you aren’t enough? Do you think you aren’t successful enough? Not popular enough? Not confident enough? Not smart enough? Not strong enough? Not talented enough? Not pretty enough? Not happy enough?

Or how about this: Not spiritual enough? Not enlightened enough? Not evolved enough yet?

Pause for just a moment, if you would, and really think about how you would complete the sentence, “I believe I’m not _______________ enough yet.”

Now, let’s set that aside for one moment while I ask you a few more questions.

Has it ever occurred to you that the cells in your body, yes, the cells in your optic nerves that are sending the images of these words to your brain, are made of material that originated in stars that went supernova and spewed their matter out into the cosmos billions of years ago?

Has it ever occurred to you that the water in your body—which makes up most of your material form—has been traveling the world for eons? It has flowed countless times through the Amazon jungle, fallen as snow on the Himalayas, been breathed out by redwoods on the California coast, poured down as rain on the Great Plains, drifted across the sky as thunderclouds, descended into the oceans’ deep?

Just for this moment, consider the places, experiences, substances, beings that the matter in your body has seen and been.

Or how about the DNA that right now is replicating itself in your cells, carrying information that is the creative masterpiece of millions of years of evolution?

And that’s just your physical body. We haven’t even gotten started on the miracle of your consciousness and that this physical matter that was generated in the stars can think and create and love and weep and laugh.

Do you understand that you are nothing less than the miracle of rivers and stars and eons of years now taking on human form that can breathe, dance, write poetry, cook a meal, read a blog?

The miraculous nature of our being was on my mind a few years ago when I was taking a day trip on a gorgeous spring day to Cape May, New Jersey. Come noontime I stopped at a restaurant to get some lunch and sat down on the sunny patio. When the waitress walked up I saw her in her essence—a child of the Universe in every way—and when she began reciting the specials for the day it was all I could do not to bust out laughing.

There was something so wonderfully comical about the moment, that this being in front of me who was living, walking, talking star dust was telling me about the Reuben sandwich and the soup du jour, completely unaware of the fact that she was the Universe in microcosm, a miracle beyond comprehension.

The same goes for you, of course. You are an expression of this Life, this Universe, this Reality that has been expanding and evolving for billions of years. There is no part of you that is not part of that most amazing whole. The sheer fact that you are is beyond amazing.

So. Tell me again. How is it that you’re not enough yet?

The Silent Tomb

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All I heard was silence.

Last week, in observance of Good Friday, I posted a blog titled The Cross Speaks, listening to the story of the tree that was destroyed in order to make a cross. This week, in observance of Easter, I considered writing one titled The Tomb Speaks. I found myself wondering what the empty tomb in the Christian resurrection story might have to say to us.

So I allowed myself to go there. In my imagination I entered a dark, empty chamber hewn out of the side of a hill. It was cool. I was alone. I sat down on the ground to listen for the words that the tomb might want to speak, but all I heard was silence. The silence was deep, and it was filled with wisdom that was beyond words. It’s wisdom was of a mystery, of an unfathomable transformation. It was not a chamber of endings, as we usually believe it to be, but a container for profound metamorphosis.

I realized then how hard we try to ward off the tomb’s silence with our trumpet voluntaries and fill its emptiness with our certainties and dogmas. But Mystery cannot be defined, its nature cannot be grasped.

This past Easter Sunday, I was taking an afternoon walk in the woods with some friends along Ridley Creek outside of Philadelphia, and towards the end of our walk I stopped for a moment, standing next to the creek as the brilliant late-day sunlight slanted through the trees. I soon found myself opening to that state of Oneness in which there is no barrier between myself and the All, between the “living” and the “dead”. I felt the presence of dear ones who have left this world — the familiar energy signatures of their love — and felt myself one with the trees, the creek, the birds, the sunlight reflecting off the water. The beauty of it moved me to tears.

It was a moment in which I perceived the mysterious truth that the empty tomb in its silence taught. In resurrection it isn’t death that is vanquished, for death is the natural culmination of life, but rather it is our fear of death, our misunderstanding of death that is overcome. This, I believe, is what the early Christians meant when they said that death had lost its sting.

May that incomprehensible Mystery that is beyond the reach of all our words hold you in its gentle, beautiful, silent truth.

The Cross Speaks

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Not long ago I was thriving on a hill in Galilee. My roots reached deep into the rocky soil.  Sunlight shone upon my leaves, the wind danced though my branches.  In the winter, rain fell cool upon my body, seeping into the soil of my thirsty roots. I drank gladly of that living water.

I witnessed the dawn of each day. At night I reached up to the Moon in her silent cycles, and the slow swirling of stars.

My body shuddered when the thunder cracked. I stood naked in the raging storm—bending with the tempest so as not to break—and when it passed I held the birds, singing in my branches.

I knew the breath of life.

But then they came for me.  Not with swords, but axes, and I was silent, like a lamb led to the slaughter.

Half of my body is still there on that distant hill, decaying in the soil of Galilee.  The other half they dragged here for their tortuous display.

The emperor isn’t satisfied with what he already has. He wants more land, more wealth, more power. Lives have to be sacrificed.

Golgotha they call it. Place of the skull. As if it were only humans whose broken bodies hang here.

Entire forests of my kin are destroyed because humans are never content with what they have, with what they are.  You would call it genocide if the victims looked like you.

I have a question for you.  Why are you dissatisfied?  Why is nothing ever enough for you?  Why are you always striving for more?

Can you not stop for once in your anxious striving and just let yourselves be still? Can you not feel yourselves rooted in the Earth? Can you not let the miracle of the sunlight, the rain, the soil, the song of the birds and the dance of the wind be enough for you?

Do you not understand that your task on this Earth is to witness its magnificence, to delight in the wonder of existence, to be the I Am-ness—the awake presence that marvels at the unfolding of life?

You are living in a falsehood, believing your destiny is separate from my own life.  I am the other one sacrificed on this windswept hill, and I suppose that has never even occurred to you.

You seem to believe you can destroy us and not destroy yourselves as well. But consider this: the man’s blood that even now is seeping into my grain carries the oxygen once breathed out by my leaves.  Are you so blind?

The one you call Jesus tried to show you what power truly is—not domination and violence, but healing, acceptance, compassion, Life.  He wanted you to see that you don’t need riches because you are already enough.  The way the birds of the air are enough and the lilies of the field are enough.

But you remained asleep in your dream of separateness and striving, and now the Earth is hanging on the cross of your empires and your egos.

We are weary, so weary.  We cannot endure your illusion much longer. It is right that you have sung “Hosanna,” for it means “save us.”

I implore you to sing it again from your heart. Sing it for yourselves. Sing it for all of us.

Sing it for me.

Hoodies, Menorahs and Rainbow Flags

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Have you ever experienced the power of solidarity?

Since the news about the senseless murder of Trayvon Martin has erupted into our collective consciousness, several people of all races and genders have taken to wearing hoodies as a symbolic act of solidarity with young black men who are violently attacked and even killed simply because of their gender and race. Although the donning of hoodies will not make racism go away overnight, and in fact will do little to address the insidious forms systemic racism can take, I see it as a meaningful gesture if it is an authentic expression that people are not willing to stand by and allow minority groups to continue to be the target of ruthless attacks.

Solidarity as a means of nonviolent resistance goes way back. Jesus’ table solidarity with the marginalized people in his society — eating with tax collectors and “sinners” (those too poor to participate in their religion’s sacrificial requirements) — was one of the things that led to his crucifixion. Gandhi, although a well-educated lawyer who could have lived a life of comfort and privilege, chose instead to practice solidarity with the poor and untouchables of India, living a life of simplicity, wearing a loincloth, and ultimately paying with his life for his stance of solidarity with the Muslim minority in what had become a divided India. Julia Butterfly practiced solidarity when she lived for more than two years 180 feet off the ground in the branches of Luna, a 1500 year old giant redwood tree, to save the redwood forest from being clear cut. And, of course, there is the story about King Christian X and the people of Denmark foiling the Nazis’ attempts to round up the Jews in their country by collectively wearing the Star of David.

The latter example, by the way, never happened. Not in a literal sense that is. Neither the Danish Jews nor the Danish King ever wore the Star of David, but even though the story isn’t factually true, it is metaphorically true in that most of the Jews in Denmark were spared because the majority of Danes protected them, demonstrating that when enough people practice nonviolent solidarity, oppressive forces become powerless.

The story about King Christian, even though not factual, helped stem anti-Semitic violence in Billings, Montana in 1993 when a white supremacist threw a cinder block through the window of a Jewish family that was displaying a menorah during Chanukah. Margaret McDonald, executive director of the Montana Association of Churches, was inspired by the story of King Christian and launched a movement that resulted in thousands of non-Jewish residents of Billings displaying menorahs in their windows in defense of their Jewish neighbors. For a while the bigotry intensified. White supremacist vandals broke windows and threatened some of the people who had taken up the cause, but in the end the violence and intimidation ceased.

I was in turn inspired by the example of the people of Billings when we had a similar experience in our neighborhood in 1999. In that case it was a gay man who was being singled out. The rainbow flag he had flying outside his home was repeatedly ripped down by college students who lived in the area who were also taunting him with homophobic slurs. When he told me what was going on, I asked our landlady if we could fly a rainbow flag outside our apartment as well. She took the idea to the neighborhood association and soon there were dozens of rainbow flags hanging outside homes in our neighborhood, and the homophobic attacks subsided.

Practicing solidarity is always uncomfortable and sometimes dangerous because we place ourselves alongside those being targeted, coming to understand more deeply the fear, discrimination and hatred that many have to deal with on a daily basis.  That’s why a white man walking down the street wearing a hoodie isn’t really doing much to challenge racist attitudes, but if he’s wearing a hoodie walking alongside a black man wearing a hoodie and they’re walking through a gated community, well, that’s another story.

All bigots and oppressive systems depend first and foremost on one thing: that people in the majority group who are not being targeted will sit quietly by while others are. The whole system of oppression expects that people will put their own safety first rather than risking their well being to ally themselves with the oppressed. When enough people in the majority group are willing to stand alongside those who are being singled out, however, the cycles of violence grind to a halt.

Solidarity gains its power because at its heart it erodes the fundamental belief that underlies all bigotry and oppression: that separateness is real. In that sense, practicing solidarity is a profoundly spiritual act because it overtly enacts the underlying truth that all life originates from and is an expression of the same Source.

Yet if we believe that the only goal of nonviolent solidarity is to protect the vulnerable we miss what is perhaps the most potent potential outcome: the healing of the bigot. The bigot is someone who is trapped in the illusion of separateness. When faced with acts of solidarity, his worldview is challenged and sometimes even overturned. This is why, if solidarity is to be effective, it must be nonviolent, for to engage in violence against the oppressor is to buy into the same falsehood that he himself is caught in, that of otherness.

The word solidarity itself conveys the essential reality that in the end we cannot be divided along lines of race, gender, class, orientation, or any other category because these divisions are simply the product of our minds’ illusion.  Solidarity is based in the knowing that when one of us bleeds, we all bleed.

The Inner Climate Change

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The butterfly emerges out of an experience of dissolution.

A few nights ago I had a dream that has lingered with me. I didn’t remember the whole dream, but in the part that I did remember I was looking through a window at a row of enormous butterfly bushes that were teeming with hundreds of butterflies large and small. Some had blue wings, some orange and black, others yellow and black, and several of them had markings I had never seen before. Somehow in the dream I knew that the cause of this explosive outbreak of butterflies was global warming.

Global warming has certainly been on my mind since, like much of the nation, we’ve been having a heat wave in Philadelphia. The daffodils and forsythia bloomed more than a month early, the azaleas are already opening and many of the flowering trees, including the magnolias, peaked before winter had even officially ended.

I know I’m not alone in my concern about the situation and what it forebodes about what’s to come. Shawn Lawrence Otto wrote in his March 19th Huffington Post article “Cherry Blossoms, Ice Boxes, BMWs and Climate Change” that this heat wave is “one of the most extreme meteorological events in US history.” Temperatures across much of the nation have been running 20 to 40 degrees above normal, and at the time when the article was released 2000 U.S. temperature records had already been broken this year.

With extreme weather becoming the new norm it’s becoming harder and harder to live in the illusion that climate change isn’t upon us. Those of us who have recognized for years that our policies and behaviors must change are probably not surprised by the disturbing way 2012 has begun, but even so it is unsettling to witness the predictions coming true. I suppose many of us are wondering if it’s already too late, if our species has dawdled so long, refusing out of greed or laziness or lack of imagination to make the radical changes necessary, that we have already passed Earth’s tipping point and life as we have known it is over.

One would think this heat wave, as well as the other climate catastrophes that we’ve been witnessing in recent years — droughts, tornadoes, hurricanes, fires — would be a wake up call to our leaders, but sadly the political conversation in this election year has, if anything, turned even more toward rhetoric bolstering the status quo of our fossil fuel economy. This fact is sad, though not surprising since, as we are well aware, the political process is fueled by corporate interests. More and more, the government has no stake in leading us toward a viable future, but rather in simply amassing wealth for the wealthy. (A situation, I might add, which could be rectified if The People demand the passage of the Constitutional Amendment that has recently been introduced which states that corporations are not people.)

So if things are so dire, why in the world did my dream depict an explosion of butterflies resulting from global warming?

Over the last twenty years I have worked with my dreams and I have found them to be an extraordinary source of wisdom. They have often, in fact, provided me with information that has changed my life. Dreams, like mythology, use the language of symbol, and if we want to understand what they are trying to say to us we have to step out of our literalistic mindset. This dream that I had was not saying that there will be a literal explosion of butterflies upon the planet due to global warming. (In fact, it is far more likely that butterfly populations will plummet.) But the Butterfly as an archetypal symbol is one of the most potent symbols imaginable for radical transformation.

David Korten, in his book The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community, refers to the work of biologist Elisabet Sahtouris who explored the metamorphosis that the monarch caterpillar undergoes in becoming a butterfly. Korten writes:

The caterpillar is a voracious consumer that devotes its life to gorging itself on nature’s bounty. When it has had its fill, it fastens itself to a convenient twig and encloses itself in a chrysalis. Once snug inside, it undergoes a crisis as the structures of its cellular tissue begin to dissolve into an organic soup.

Yet guided by some deep inner wisdom, a number of organizer cells begin to rush around gathering other cells to form imaginal buds, initially independent multicellular structures that begin to give form to the organs of a new creature. Correctly perceiving a threat to the old order, but misdiagnosing the source, the caterpillars’ still intact immune system attributes the threat to the imaginal buds and attacks them as alien intruders.

The imaginal buds prevail by linking up with one another in a cooperative effort that brings forth a new being of great beauty, wondrous possibilities, and little identifiable resemblance to its progenitor. In its rebirth, the monarch butterfly lives lightly on Earth, serves the regeneration of life as a pollinator, and migrates thousands of miles to experience life’s possibilities in ways the earthbound caterpillar could not imagine. [p. 74-75]

I believe this is what the dream was wanting to convey: that global warming is bringing a transformation upon the planet just as radical as that of the caterpillar metamorphosing into a butterfly. The prevailing ego paradigm (Caterpillar) that currently governs the human world and which asserts a distorted understanding of “self-interest” is dissolving, and a new consciousness of oneness, of unity with the Earth, with all of Life (Butterfly) is emerging. It can be no other way, because once eco-systems begin to collapse the illusion that any of us are distinct individuals separate from the rest of the web of life collapses as well.

The way I see it though, once this new consciousness emerges, possibilities will present themselves that we are, at this point, unable to imagine. I believe that, like the caterpillar, we have encoded into us a destiny quite extraordinary that will only come into being when the old self dies.

As extreme as the climate change happening on the planet may be, there is an equally extreme shift happening within the climate of the human mind and the consciousness through which we perceive ourselves and the world. The two climate changes are not distinct from one another. They are intricately intertwined, and one of the most potent ways each of us can contribute to the transformation on Earth is to attend to the transformation within, surrendering our ego attachments, releasing our us/them ways of thinking, and trusting that there are far greater forces at work here than just the human will, forces which are helping to birth a new reality on this planet.

 

The Life of a Heartist

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For many years I have done drawings, usually when I’m on retreat, that help me tune into my intuitive knowing.  We get plenty of practice in our culture tuning into the analytical aspects of ourselves, but rarely are we taught how to listen to other ways of knowing, and that concerns me because there is much our analytical minds cannot do.  They cannot tell us what we really value, what our life’s purpose really is, what our soul really desires.  The analytical mind can dissect information, but it can never provide us with true wisdom.

In this drawing practice, which is a spiritual practice more than an artistic one, I begin by drawing a circle on a piece of paper, then I lay out all of my colored pencils before me.  When they are all spread out in front of me I scan them, letting my eye rest on each one in turn, and as I do I listen inwardly for an intuitive prompting, a nudge that says yes, this one.  Or no, not that one.  I pull out each of the yes pencils as I am being guided and then put the other pencils away.

Then I begin.  I look at the colors and listen for which of them wants to be picked up first, then I pick the pencil up, put its point to the paper and begin to draw, continually listening inwardly, sensing which direction the line wants to go and when it wants to stop.  Then I set it down, and look again at the colors, asking which one wants to go next.  As the image continues to evolve I listen for where the growing edge is as well, and that is where I focus next.  The image itself isn’t intended to depict anything, but the practice is a potent way for me of accessing my deeper Self and listening to my heart.

When I was on retreat last month I was contemplating what it means to live a life like that, guided by the heart, to be a heartist.  It can be frightening for the ego and the analytical mind to let go and let the heart lead, because when the heart leads, you never know where it is all headed.  The path, just as the drawing’s pattern, isn’t nicely laid out ahead of time.  It is only revealed as you follow the inner guidance, one step at a time.

There is an interesting thing that has happened to me in the last few years.  Somewhere along the line I started to experience what I call Heart Glow.  I have a sensation in my heart chakra that I can only describe as a sensation of glowing that comes in response to certain ideas that float into my mind or certain encounters I have.  My heart has become a divining rod for me telling me when I’m on track with something that is true to my core, true to my deeper Self.  And as I move forward with my life path I am listening for that Heart Glow to tell me what the next step is, trusting my heart’s wisdom even though I cannot see the full picture.

Follow your heart.

I find that when I let go of the ego anxieties and the analytical mind’s priorities and listen to my heart, I am led.  All that is asked of me is that I listen and trust, and take the next step.

Listen and trust, and take the next step.

Listen and trust, and take the next step.

And suddenly, unexpectedly, when I step back and look at things from a different angle, something quite surprising is revealed that had been emerging all along, even though I didn’t consciously realize it.

The startling teaching that my retreat drawing gave me this time was just how trustworthy my heart is as a guide and that, in fact, it can create far more beauty than I ever could have knowingly planned.

 

 

Crossing the Sea

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Which shore do you see yourself on?

Several years ago an artist friend of mine was looking across a field and suddenly the field appeared to him as a red sea. Bo sensed the vision was intended for me, so he painted a water color wash of what he had seen and gave it to me.

When I contemplated the painting, the sea looked like an enormous, unsurmountable obstacle, as the Red Sea must have appeared to the Hebrews in the mythic story of the Exodus. Fleeing Pharaoh’s army, horses and chariots bearing down on them, the Hebrews’ situation appeared absolutely hopeless.

One day as I meditated on the painting, something extraordinary happened. I saw the sea as something that was behind me. I was on the other side of it, looking back. I had left behind the life of bondage. I was in the land of freedom.

What I experienced in that moment was a quantum leap of perception, and I realized how, when one’s perception changes, so does one’s inner reality.Continue Reading

Dream. Then Do.

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In some Native American circles, Lizard represents the capacity to dream.

One of our local colleges has launched a new ad campaign which I first noticed a few weeks ago while riding the bus. In the front of the bus behind the driver there is a plexiglass panel which is where they often display ad posters. That day there was a poster with a picture of a young woman, dreamily gazing upward, smiling, and next to her the words: “Don’t Dream. Do.”

While I understand the intent of the campaign — to encourage people to get off their duffs and do what needs doing to activate their potential — I think they are making a tremendous mistake in telling people not to dream.

A lot of us are actually pretty good at doing, the problem is that so often our doing isn’t in accord with our true selves or highest good. We may just be living out the expectations others have of us rather than really exploring what it is we want for ourselves. If I were designing the college’s ad campaign it would say: “Dream. Then Do.”

It’s essential for us, after all, to engage our dreaming capacity because it is the first step in manifesting the future we want, and actually the picture on the ad is instructive in one way: it shows that the young woman, as she dreams, is smiling. That, my friends, is the key because it is our joy that leads us to our true path. It is like an exuberant, tail-wagging dog that is taking us for a walk, leading us with its own gleeful nose to our truest treasures.

Rather than squelching our capacity to dream we need to cultivate it. When we are stepping into a new life for ourselves we need a vigorous and bold imagination to help catapult us beyond the restrictive boundaries imposed by self or society; only in that way can we begin to live into our fullest potential.

Then, yes, doing becomes essential. Taking the dream and translating it into actions, no matter how small, is the way we honor it and begin to prepare the way for it to come forth. When we’ve taken time to dream in order to get in touch with our own inner wisdom and true direction, then our doing will be in the service of manifesting our own life purpose, rather than settling for the life others have told us to live.

Into the Quiet

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In the quiet I can listen.

I spent the better part of the last two weeks on retreat at Ghost Ranch in the high desert of northern New Mexico, where the land is spacious and quiet, where often the only sound is that of the echoing caw of ravens flying along the cliff face of the surrounding mesas, where the night sky, unobscured by city lights, displays thousands upon thousands of stars and the soft whisper of the Milky Way can be seen stretching from horizon to horizon.

I have been going there for a couple of weeks most winters for the past 11 years, and I would not be overstating the case to say that those times of retreat have been a lifeline to my soul. While I’m there I hike, do dream work and make art, walk the labyrinth and listen for its wisdom for me.

A couple of nights after I arrived was the night of the full moon. After the sun went down and the land began to grow darker, I left my room and hiked to the labyrinth that sits in front of the cliff of a high mesa. In the dimming light I walked its slow, winding path which is always a powerful symbol for me of the journey of life that wends this way this way and that. I finally reached the labyrinth’s center and there I waited. The edge of moonlight was making its way slowly across the landscape from the west as the moon rose higher and higher, first illuminating the far hills and rock formations in the distance with an ethereal silver light that gradually made its way toward me. The light gathered, brighter and brighter, behind the rim of the mesa in front of me, until finally a sliver of moon slid above the cliff, piercing my eyes with its brilliance, and I stood there weeping with amazement and gratitude.

My time of retreat reminded me, as it always does, of how cluttered my life can become. How, like the artificial lights of the city that drown out the mystery of the night, my culture’s priorities on productivity, activity, and being constantly plugged-in crowd out the wisdom of my own heart and soul. I think it’s a common dilemma; most of us live our lives deluged by external messages and demands, rarely making time or space to quiet and replenish ourselves at the well of our own Being.

The challenge, as always, in returning from a time of retreat is to find ways to weave its lessons and wisdom into my daily life. Since I’ve been back, one thing I’ve been doing is limiting my time on-line to 30 minutes a day. (I even set the timer!) I’m looking at it as a spiritual practice, a pre-Lenten fast if you will, which I intend to continue. What I am discovering is that it allows me to stay in touch more consistently with the calm clarity that resides in my core.

On retreat, whenever I step out into the night to stargaze I have to let my eyes adjust for a while to the darkness before I can take in the wonder of what is overhead. That process is a metaphor for me of what is required if I want to connect with my soul. I have to remove myself from the onslaught of all the “artificial lights” that surround me, the values and messages that bombard me with shallow understandings of what’s important, worthy, and most of all, real. Only then, when I let myself stand in the mystery of the inner quiet and abide in the darkness of Unknowing can I begin to perceive the true, numinous light of my existence. Only then can I gaze out from the center of my timeless self upon a cosmos from which I have come and with which I am completely and forever one.

Just Sow

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By not attaching to results we help release abundance.

Many years ago, when I was living in the Andes of Ecuador as a Peace Corps Volunteer, one day I was accompanying a Quichua farmer as he went out to  sow barley. When we got to his field high up on a hillside, he loaded the barley seed into a metal canister he had that had a crank on the side with a mechanism that flung the seed out in all directions.  After he’d loaded up the canister, he started walking along the edge of his field, turning the crank as he walked. The seed went everywhere, some of it far beyond the edges of the field, into the weeds and the rocks and the road, and my first thought was, “Oh no! He’s wasting seed!” But he didn’t seem to care about that.  He just kept walking deliberately, back and forth across his field, letting the barley fly where it would, interested only in letting a good bit of it land in the fertile soil where it would be able to root in and grow.

Watching him work, I was reminded of one of Jesus’ teachings. He once told a parable about a sower who went out to sow seed. Some of the seed fell onto the path where it was eaten by birds, some fell on rocky soil, and some on weed-infested soil, none of which, obviously, bore any fruit. But some of the seed fell on fertile soil and produced a bumper crop.

I had always heard the parable interpreted in its traditional — rather judgmental — way, as an analogy for different types of people, some of whom are receptive to divine wisdom and some who aren’t. But watching the Quichua farmer sow his seed that day, I came to realize that Jesus was probably making a point about the sower as much as about the soil, encouraging people to live their lives as the sower sows the seed, casting their gifts out into the world with abandon and not being preoccupied with the outcome.

The term non-attachment has found its way into the mainstream, usually within Buddhist contexts although it was at the heart of Jesus’ teaching as well, and this parable of his makes me wonder how often we hold back on sharing our gifts because we are overly attached to the results. Oftentimes, if we aren’t entirely sure our gifts will be well received or will bear fruit we may not share them at all, and in our attempts to direct and control the outcome of our efforts, we end up withholding the best of ourselves.

It can be discouraging, after all, when you offer something and it comes to naught; it can make you want to hold back the next time around. But Jesus’ parable and the lesson of my Quichua friend encourage me to offer what I have anyway, knowing it’s not my place to try to dictate the outcome of my efforts or try to control onto what sort of soil they might land.

It isn’t always discouragement, though, that gets in the way of us sharing ourselves freely.  Sometimes our withholding comes out of a scarcity mentality.  We can fall into the trap of believing that if we “squander” our gifts in unreceptive environments, we’ll somehow deplete our supply.  That isn’t possible of course, because, unlike the farmer whose seed is in fact finite, our innate gifts flow from an abundant, infinite Source, so the more we let them flow, the more they flow.

Letting go of results can be tremendously liberating, and over time I’ve come to see that the only way the Universe can unleash abundance in and through my life is for me to live like the sower, releasing all my attachment to the outcome.  The only thing that’s asked of me is that I just sow.

 

 

The Gift of Surrender

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When have you surrendered to something you could no longer fight?

Many years ago my spouse and I took a vacation in the Ozarks during an unusually warm spell in late December. One day, since it was so mild, we decided to go canoeing. We located a canoe rental place and one of the employees loaded the canoe in his truck and drove us up river.

Just as he was dropping us off, he told us that nobody had canoed down since the severe floods that had come through earlier that year, so there might be debris in the river. His warning made me uneasy because, although my husband had experience canoeing, it was my first time.

We got our canoe into the water–I managed to climb in without tipping it over–and once we set out my anxiety began to lift. It was a gorgeous day and I was enjoying paddling along with the gentle current. We came on a few mild rapids that made the ride a bit more exciting, but for the most part  the river was tranquil.

We came to a bend in the river where it forked around a small island. Because the riverbank obstructed our view of the left fork and the island obstructed our view of the right we couldn’t see which side was the better to take, so we just took a chance and steered to the left.

Just as we came around the bend, we saw that there was a fallen tree blocking most of the channel. We both started paddling as hard as we could to get the canoe far enough over to the right to clear the tree, and for a moment it looked like we were going to make it. The bow and I cleared the snag but the back of the canoe didn’t. A branch caught my husband in the chest, and we capsized.

We grabbed the canoe and were dragging it toward the island when I saw that my backpack was floating away. I reached out to grab it. The current caught me and started carrying me downstream.

I tried as hard as I could to swim to the shore, but the current was too strong. Even though it was a mild day, it was December and the frigid water saturated my jeans, my parka, my shoes. It flowed beneath my clothing, against my bare skin. I was frantic. As the river carried me further and further downstream, I knew there was a very real possibility I could die.

I couldn’t fight the current. It was simply stronger than I was. So eventually I did the only thing I could do. I let the river have me. I surrendered.

Just as I surrendered, the most profound peace came over me. I was awestruck at the beauty surrounding me–the rolling landscape, the bare trees, the blue sky, the music of the water lapping against my body. “I might die,”I thought, “but this is so beautiful!”

It was a moment of revelation for me. My circumstances were just as dire as they had been a moment before, but by surrendering to them my panic had instantly shifted into a profound peace.

Eventually there was a piece of land jutting out into the river that I managed to grab hold of and I was able to climb ashore, and though what happened next is a story unto itself, with its own lesson that perhaps I’ll tell about some other time, for now I am letting myself revisit the deep peace that came upon me in that moment of complete surrender.

As I look back over my life I can safely say that the most significant spiritual moments I have ever had have not come as a result of my striving, but as a result of my surrendering. It makes me wonder if people in our society often feel spiritually unfulfilled because surrender is not something we are taught to do. We idolize the fighters and disdain the “quitters.” But there are times when quitting is the only sane choice.

Buddhists call this surrender to what is non-resistance. The Tao te Ching speaks of it as yielding. Jesus spoke of it as giving oneself over to the divine will. This willingness to let go–so terrifying to the ego–is at the heart of all spiritual life.

Christian theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote the prayer which was made famous by Alcoholics Anonymous. Known as the Serenity Prayer, the first four lines are the most familiar:

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

I appreciate the insight in Niebuhr’s prayer because it articulates the dance we do as humans. Sometimes we need to do what is required to correct circumstances that need correcting. But oftentimes the harder thing is to surrender to that which is.

In my experience though, it isn’t serenity that makes me able to accept the things that I cannot change. Serenity is what comes when I do.

 

Home Field Advantage

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Are you in need of cheering?

Along with a lot of other people in the country I’ve been thinking about football lately, though not for the same reasons as most everybody else. If the truth be told, I don’t even know which teams are still in the running for the Super Bowl.

What I’ve been thinking about, rather than teams’ records and the playoff results, is home field advantage.

Everybody knows that teams stand a higher chance of winning when they’re playing at home where the stands are filled with people who want them to succeed and are yelling, ringing cowbells and blowing horns to cheer them on. It’s actually surprising that teams ever manage to win their away games when they are playing in the presence of people who are rooting for their demise. But then, they are a team after all, and at least if every last person in the stands would like nothing more than to see them fall flat on their faces, they still have each other to turn to for encouragement.

In spite of our culture’s cult of individualism that tells us we should all be completely self-reliant, the truth is that most of us play our best game when we are in the company of people who believe in us and who are encouraging us to bring our best selves forth.

It reminds me of geese when they are flying long distances in formation. The lead goose in the V formation has the hardest job because he or she has to fly into the greatest resistance, while the geese behind have it easier because they are able to ride the air currents created by the lead goose. Those following in formation encourage the lead goose by honking, and eventually, when the lead goose gets tired it drops back into the formation and another takes its place to be urged on by the rest of the flock.

I love that image of being followed by a great honking chorus encouraging me on as I fly into the challenge of a difficult task.  I know that kind of affirmation can make all the difference. There have been many times in my life when I could have easily become disheartened and given into weariness and discouragement were it not for the presence of people who believed in me and were cheering me on.  For them I am grateful beyond words.

If you don’t have already have a community of affirmation in your life, can you imagine creating one? Are there people you know who might need you to be part of their honking chorus, calling forth their best efforts and greatest gifts? If the answer to either of those questions is yes, I hope you’ll act on the invitation, because affirmation and encouragement can be just as essential to our success as the talents we have and the visions we hold.

The Art of Being Afraid

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emerald heart on white cloth
When have you done something you were afraid to do?

I used to think that courage was the absence of fear, and I thought courageous people could do brave things because they weren’t afraid of doing them. I have come to see, though, that courage isn’t the absence of fear at all, but the willingness to step into it.

In spite of F.D.R.’s famous injunction, fear is not something to fear. It is a normal, universal human experience. In fact, being afraid of fear only amplifies its effect.

Rather than fearing fear, I have found the most helpful approach is to learn how to be with it, yet not allow it to dictate my actions.

Maggie Kuhn, founder of the Gray Panthers, famously said, “Stand before the people you fear and speak your mind—even if your voice shakes.” Maggie’s words exemplify what courage really is: the willingness to feel fear and still do what we must do.

Fear is uncomfortable, which is why we try to avoid it. It makes us feel queasy. Our voice trembles, our hands shake, we sweat. It is not a pleasant experience—and it’s not supposed to be. It is part of our hardwiring, designed to keep us out of harm’s way. It serves a useful evolutionary purpose.

But it can become an obstacle if we allow it to keep us from living into our full potential—from doing something that needs to be done, or speaking a truth that needs to be spoken.

Several years ago, I was on an airplane going to Denver. As the plane began its descent, a woman across the aisle and a couple rows behind me began to hyperventilate, clearly in distress. She told the people around her that she had survived a plane crash. This was the first time she’d flown since, something her therapist had encouraged her to do to help her heal from the trauma.

For most of us, getting on the plane that day had just been a matter of course. For that woman, though, it had been an act of tremendous courage. She may have been hyperventilating and clutching the armrests for all she was worth, but let me tell you, she was the most courageous person on the plane that day. It was her fear that made her so.

As the airplane safely touched down, the passengers around her applauded her for her courage. She was visibly relieved—and also empowered. She had done the very thing she was most afraid of doing.

Sometimes we believe that before we attempt something scary we need to get over our fear of doing it. But that isn’t how it works. We get over our fear by doing the thing we’re afraid to do.

It helps to approach fear like a curious observer, taking note of the physical sensations of being afraid. This engages the witnessing mind that can stand apart from the experience and watch what is happening without being caught in it. The more we observe the physiological effects of fear, the more we discover how similar it is to the physiological sensations of exhilaration. Simply noticing that can help us reframe the experience as something exciting rather than frightful.

Courage comes from the French word for heart, which I find quite beautiful. It suggests to me that courage is the willingness to live our lives guided by the heart regardless of the risks. Just as we do cardiovascular exercises to strengthen our physical heart, we can exercise our heart of courage by incrementally and regularly stepping into our fear.

That way, if we are ever called upon to do a truly daring thing, we will be ready—because we will have mastered the art of being afraid.

Getting to the Roots

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Without its roots the tree will die.

Christmastide is ending today, the twelfth day of Christmas, and this weekend our Christmas tree will be coming down to be recycled. Surprisingly, even though it’s been up for almost three weeks, it is still drinking water and hasn’t yet begun dropping its needles. I know, though, if I left it long enough it would eventually lose the capacity to pull up the moisture it needs to remain supple and green and would begin to turn brittle and brown.

A few years ago, early one Sunday morning in December, I was parking my car near a place in our neighborhood where they sell Christmas trees just as the workers were unloading the trees from their truck and setting them up on the sidewalk to sell. As I watched them, I had a visceral feeling of repulsion. I saw Christmas trees in a way I never had before: as living beings whose bodies had been cut in half. Suddenly this yuletide practice seemed brutal and irrational to me, that we should slaughter trees by amputating them from their roots in order to celebrate a spiritual holiday.

And yet, in spite of my ambivalence about it, we have continued to buy a tree each year not only because we love the beauty of a decorated Christmas tree, but because it helps support the tree farmers in our region who would otherwise be selling their land off to developers. In an ironic way, the slaughter of trees helps save the land. Realizing this strange paradox, I feel enormous gratitude for the tree that stands in our living room, and in my heart I thank it for its sacrifice.

I think we are more like trees than we know. We have an outer, visible aspect of ourselves that everyone can see, the aspect that interacts with the external world and is engaged in activities, and, just like we do with our Christmas trees, we usually take great care to attend to its appearance. But there’s also the inward, hidden part of us that is just as essential to our well being but from which too many of us are cut off. It is the aspect of ourselves that taps into mystery, the unseen dimension out of which the outer being arises. Jungians would speak of it in terms of the unconscious that has access to the archetypal energies that fuel our psyches.

Ours is an externally oriented culture, and seems to be more so than ever now that we have technologies that keep us plugged into the external world 24/7. Trying to live constantly attentive to the external world, though, is like trying to live like a tree cut off from its roots. We lose our connection with something vital and life-giving and, over time, we begin to wither and die.

Some cultures are much wiser than ours about staying connected with their roots. In some cultures, for instance, people wouldn’t dream of starting their day before they’d gathered to talk about the dreams that had visited them at night. They understand that it is the unseen realm of mystery that offers them the wisdom they need to live well, and that only by being rooted in and nourished by that dark, unseen realm can the external self thrive.

People in the Western world might be wising up, though, to the fact that having to be at the beck and call of the external world round the clock is simply unsustainable. Last week, the Volkswagon company made a landmark agreement with their workers’ union that the company’s email servers would shut down after the work day so that workers will no longer receive work messages on their BlackBerries when they are off-duty. Hopefully it’s the beginning of a trend.

They say that a tree’s roots underground are as extensive as the trunk and branches that are visible above ground. Can you imagine how much healthier, happier and stable we would be — individually and collectively — if we lived our lives as balanced as trees do in their natural state, tending to growing our roots as much as we do our outer selves?

 

2012: More Than a New Year

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If the leaders won’t lead, then it’s up to the people.

Well, here we are, embarking on the auspicious year of 2012, the year in which the current cycle (baktun) of the Long Count of the Mayan calendar comes to its conclusion. A lot of people have been speculating for some time about what that means, including some in Hollywood who have cashed in with their own special effects movie about a 2012 apocalypse. (The ancient Mayans would probably get a kick out of that Judeo-Christian overlay onto their tracking of long cycles of time, and our culture’s curious love of End Times scenarios. The Mayan calendar has, after all, gone through a dozen of these cycles before and the world is still here.)

Mayan calendar or not, I think it is true that we are reaching the culmination of a cycle and that the beginning of something new is at hand. Far from dreading it, though, we ought to be popping the champagne bottles and dancing our welcome to the changes on the horizon because, quite frankly, it’s about time. As we come to grips with the consequences of several centuries of exploitation — including devastating exploitation of the Earth — most everyone recognizes that we won’t be doing “business as usual” for much longer if we want to have a life-supporting planet to live on.Continue Reading

Jumping to New Year’s Conclusions

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What future do you want to imagine?

I am not a big fan of New Year’s resolutions even though I am a firm believer in the power of setting intentions and visions for the future. That’s why my practice, when the year rolls to a close, is not to make a list of “shoulds” for the upcoming year, but to jump ahead and imagine what it is I want to be celebrating a year from now.

I take out a pen and paper and write a letter of thanks to the Universe for all that has come to pass in the year ahead, as though the coming year were not commencing, but concluding. The more I write, the more I can feel myself entering into the reality that I am envisioning. Then, when the new year begins, I feel as though my dreams have already come to pass and all I have to do is cooperate and do my part to let them express themselves.

My New Year’s practice draws on the wisdom of Jesus, that great guru of imagination and intention, who said that whenever we pray for something, we should believe we have already received it and it will be ours. It is our willingness to receive what we ask for, without reservation or resistance, that makes all the difference.Continue Reading

Returning Light

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Do you ever doubt that the light will return?

Some years back we had a lot of rewiring done in our house, which was a huge project. For days on end, the house was crawling with electricians pulling wires through walls, and installing outlets and switches. The basement ceiling looked like a rat’s nest of conduit and copper. To a layperson’s eye it looked like complete chaos, and the work just seemed to go on and on.

One day, just as I was beginning to wonder if this would ever end, our electrician comforted us by saying, “It always looks the worst right before it’s done.” And sure enough, in a couple of days the chaos settled into an orderly array that magically lit up the house with the flip of a switch.

That experience came to my mind probably because tonight is the winter solstice, the longest night of the year for us in the northern hemisphere. Although I love the long nights, I realize that a lot of people don’t. The season seems bleak and depressing to them and they long for the return of the light.Continue Reading

What You See Is What You Get

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Decades ago when I was first learning to drive, one of the first things my driving instructor cautioned me about as soon as I got behind the wheel was that I would instinctively drive towards wherever I was looking. His words of warning have stayed with me over the years not only as an instruction for driving, but as an instruction for living.

One of the challenges we face in our society is that we are constantly bombarded by the news media with stories of catastrophe and violence that draw our attention towards an image of a world fraught with danger. Sure there is danger, that’s part of life. But there is also exquisite beauty, miraculous possibilities, innumerable instances of goodwill, heroic compassion, and just simple kindness.Continue Reading

Precious Gifts

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What are your greatest treasures?

One of the ironies of the human condition is that oftentimes the more we have, the less grateful we become. When I lived as a Peace Corps Volunteer in a village high in the Andes of Ecuador, among the Quichua people who lived in earthen huts, had no running water and little access to medical care, I saw how for them nothing was taken for granted. Food was precious. Health was precious. The thatched roof over their heads was precious. A child who survived infancy was precious.

In our country, as we approach Thanksgiving, the holiday catalogs are already beginning to pour in, inundating us with glossy pictures of all the things we can buy. But before the Christmas deluge I want to step back and take stock of all the things that I already have that are the true treasures in my life: friends and loved ones, food to eat, a place to call home, my beating heart, the sound of the rain falling outside my window, the air that fills my lungs, the ability to wake each morning to live the miracle of another day. For all of these precious gifts and more, I say, “Thank you.”

Making Meaning

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How are you connecting the dots?

Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl wrote in his book Man’s Search for Meaning about his observation, from his time in a Nazi concentration camp, that those people who could find meaning in their suffering were more likely to survive than those who could not. He came to the conclusion that meaning is an essential human need.

One of the things that makes that so remarkable is how much power we have to create meaning. We may not always be able to control our circumstances, but how we interpret those circumstances and relate to them is by and large up to us.

When the ancients looked up at the nighttime sky, they connected the stars into pictures, constellations, that conveyed entire mythologies. Each of us in our own lives experiences moments of hardship, sorrow, blessing and happiness, which are like stars scattered across the sky of our lives. It is our choice how we will connect them, and, in so doing, what personal mythologies we will create.Continue Reading

Occupy the New Mind

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Which operating system are you feeding?

Suppose just for a moment that we are all living in a false reality, an illusion that has been generated by a collective misconception, very much like a program that’s running on a holodeck on one of the ships on Star Trek. This false reality is the creation of the human mind out of touch with our true nature as timeless, divine beings. Everything that you witness in the world around you that constricts or annihilates the ongoing creativity and diversity of Life is the mind’s illusion taking on manifested form.

Let’s call this false reality the emperor’s world. The emperor’s world constructs systems that benefit a small minority by dominating, conquering or enslaving others. In the emperor’s world, nature is understood as a commodity to be exploited, and the goal of life is to accumulate power and wealth.

The misconception at the root of this false reality — the operating system, if you will, running beneath the emperor’s world program — is that there exists in this Universe something called “separateness”: “separateness” between people, “separateness” between humans and other species, between humans and the Earth, “separateness” between the physical dimension and the non-physical.Continue Reading

Autumn’s Wisdom

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May the autumn trees be our spiritual teachers.

I love the season of autumn, the brilliance of the sunlight, the golden trees that blaze so gloriously before the onset of winter, the graceful dance of leaves riding the wind. Every year this season reminds me to trust in nature’s cycles, not to hold onto what is ready to pass away but to let the necessary shedding occur so that emptiness can hold the space for something new to emerge. Continue Reading

All Structures Are Unstable

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Are we willing to let the structures collapse?

A few years ago I was on spiritual retreat in New Mexico and one day, while sitting, reading, up on a mesa overlooking a valley, I suddenly heard a thunderous roaring sound and I looked up. Across the valley a billowing cloud of dust was rising high up into the air as an enormous landslide cascaded down the side of the mesa across the valley.

I was in awe. This geological formation had stood there for millions of years, and here I was witnessing it as it began to reshape itself.

As if that wasn’t incredible enough, the book I was reading was Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth.

And if all of that wasn’t incredible enough, after the dust from the landslide settled and I continued my reading, I turned the page and found that the next section of the book was headed: “All Structures Are Unstable.”Continue Reading

Release All Concept of Enemy

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What would it be like to release all concept of “enemy”?

Several years ago, while on retreat, I was meditating as I walked an outdoor labyrinth. Suddenly, the words came to me: “Release all concept of enemy.”

I was startled. I hadn’t been thinking at all about enemies. In fact, having been on retreat for several days, I hadn’t even had a disagreeable encounter all week.

More surprising than that, though, was what the message was telling me: enemy is nothing more than a concept—just an idea in the mind.

Thanks to that labyrinth revelation, I have become more aware of how often the concept of enemy is invoked. There are the obvious examples, of course—people of other nationalities, ethnicities, religions, socio-economic classes or worldviews are often seen as enemies—and the concept of enemy fuels much of our current politics.

But it doesn’t stop with people. We can see all kinds of things as enemy: the weeds in the garden, the stain on the shirt, the morning commute, the cold virus that’s paying a visit.

People sometimes look to the natural world for evidence that having enemies is, well, natural. Isn’t the lion an enemy to the gazelle, the hawk an enemy to the rabbit? Well, no. They are participating in the food chain that we’re all part of—life sustaining itself on itself. Enemy has nothing to do with the food chain. It’s a category we use to justify malevolent actions towards another.

To release the concept of enemy we first have to notice it. We have to be aware of when we are caught in the concept ourselves, and also notice when it is being used to manipulate us. How many times have you received a phone call from a fundraiser invoking the concept of enemy in order to raise money for a candidate or cause? Can you imagine if we all rejected the whole concept and politely asked them to come up with a different strategy for making their case?

Of course there will be people with whom you disagree. There may even be people whose actions you feel you must oppose. But the only way they become an enemy is if you make them one in your own mind.

One of the most famous sayings of Jesus is, “Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you.” By saying this, Jesus was actually negating the concept of enemy. It’s not possible to love someone and at the same time place them in a category called enemy.

Maybe one reason we cling so tenaciously to this concept of enemy is that it enables us to project all the traits we don’t like in ourselves onto other, avoiding the hard work of healing ourselves. But as the Tao te Ching so wisely states:

A great nation is like a great man:

. . .He considers those who point out his faults

as his most benevolent teachers.

He thinks of his enemy

as the shadow that he himself casts.

(translation by Stephen Mitchell)

Who falls in your category of enemy? CEOs? ISIS? Wall Street bankers? Right-to-Lifers? Immigrants? Marines? Fox News Anchors? Democrats? Your neighbor? Your boss? Humanity?

Yourself?

Can you imagine for just a moment how profoundly your life—and the whole world—would instantly change if this concept of enemy simply vanished from our minds?

All Big Things

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What is one tiny seed you could plant today?

We’ve been harvesting chilis from our garden and so far have canned 34 jars and the plants are still producing. We started the plants last winter from small seeds, no more than a quarter of an inch across, but now, from those few tiny seeds, we have chilis to last us for at least the next couple of years, and plenty to share.

Is there something you envision for your life, but you feel immobilized because it seems too big and you don’t know where to begin? Or is there some shift in the world you long to see, but because the status quo is so entrenched there just seems no possibility of it ever becoming a reality? If so, take a lesson from the seed: all big things start small.

Let me repeat that, because it’s so easy to forget. All big things start small.

 

Imagine That: Reflecting on 9/11

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Imagine what will happen when we tap the most potent resource of all.

If someone had told you on September 10, 2001 that it was possible, using nothing but a handful of box cutters and careful planning, to take thousands of lives, send the world’s largest economy into a tailspin and cause its most technologically advanced military to get mired down in an endless, impoverishing war, would you have believed it?

Doubtful. Most of us probably would have written the person off as a member of the fantasy-based community.

But then we woke up on that sunny September morning shocked to discover that one person’s fantasy can become another person’s reality.

Box cutters. Imagine that.

The attack of September 11th was, first and foremost, an act of imagination. A violent imagination, true, but imagination nonetheless. The great irony was that most of us allowed our own imaginations to be highjacked by our attackers’ narrative. Assuming our assigned role in the script we were handed, we eviscerated our principles of Constitutional law and human rights, launched a military attack, bled off our economic resources to the “War on Terror,” gave the green light to torture, and embraced government surveillance on all of us.  In other words, we began to live as a terrorized people.Continue Reading

Dump the Pushing

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Ready to dump the pushing?

Once, driving down the freeway, I got behind a dump truck that had the words “Do Not Push” on the tailgate. It looked like the Tao on wheels.

For those who may not be familiar with the Tao te Ching, it’s an ancient Chinese wisdom text–one of my favorite pieces of spiritual writing–which emphasizes living in accord with the Tao (roughly translated “the Way”), the guiding principle of the Universe.

The wisdom in this writing at first glance seems to be foolishness because it speaks of the potency of non-action, the power of yielding, and the effectiveness of letting things follow their natural course.Continue Reading

Thinker in a Cage

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Do you ever feel trapped in thought?

This summer they were renovating the grounds of the Rodin Museum here in Philadelphia where the largest collection of Rodin sculptures outside Paris reside. One of the casts of Rodin’s renowned statue The Thinker sits in the courtyard entrance to the museum. In order to protect it during the renovations, they enclosed the sculpture in a mesh cage.

It seemed apropos.

Most of us spend our days so caught up in our thoughts that we are oblivious to the world around us. Cut off from the raw experience of life, we spend our days trapped inside the prison of our own minds.Continue Reading

Looking Out for One Another

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Do we have the courage to bless and share?

One day I was riding the bus back home from Center City. We had pulled over at a stop to let some passengers on, and it was taking much longer than usual. Curious, I looked out the window and saw that a couple of people were trying to help a woman onto the bus.

When the woman boarded, wearing dark glasses and carrying a white cane, I understood the delay. She sat down up front, and the woman following her sat down next to me.

“We’ve got to look out for one another,” she told me. It seemed the driver hadn’t noticed the blind woman, so this woman and her husband had intervened.

Let me pause to interject an important contextual note. The blind woman was white. The woman sitting next to me was Black. I’m white. None of which should matter, except that in a society still divided along lines of race, it does.

“We all come from one Creator you know,” she continued. “Some people think God’s a man, some people think God’s a woman.” She waved her hand as if to dismiss such a trivial question, her enormous bling ring catching the light. “Doesn’t matter.”

Then she laughed, her face beaming. “Or maybe we’re all descended from the apes.” From the same apes, that is.

“We’re all in the same boat,” I replied, offering up my feeble cliche and marveling at the incredible encounters one can have on public transportation.

“That’s right,” she said.

Then she started telling me a story. She ran into a woman once who had gone through some terrible struggles. She was down on her luck with no place to go and no money. My bus companion had only forty dollars herself, but she took out twenty and gave it to the woman.

Later on that day, something drew her attention to a listing of winning lottery numbers. She noticed one that she was sure she had played recently. She went fishing for her ticket and sure enough, she’d won $250. She was certain she never would have discovered it if she hadn’t given the twenty away.

“I always tell my friends, ‘Now I’m not sayin’ you should go out and play the lottery!'” She laughed again. “It’s not like that. God does something different every time.”

As we spoke, I remembered the story about Jesus wanting to feed a hungry crowd out in the middle of nowhere and asking the disciples how much food they had. Five loaves of bread and two fish. Enough for the thirteen of them and their inner circle of friends to have a meager meal, but nowhere near enough for a crowd of thousands.

Jesus seemed completely immune to their scarcity mentality. He took the bread, blessed it, broke it, shared it. His trust, expressed through that act of generosity, unleashed their collective abundance. The hungry masses were fed.

Some people look at that story as a demonstration of Jesus’ greatness as a miracle worker, but I see it differently. For one thing, I don’t believe Jesus was at all interested in demonstrating his greatness. If he had he would have been a charlatan, not a spiritual teacher. Instead, what I think this “feeding of the multitude” is about is Jesus embodying a teaching: this is how it’s done. When the crowds are hungry and it seems there’s not enough to go around, that’s precisely when you truly need to bless, to share.

Our instinctual inclination—especially in the midst of bleak economic circumstances—is to contract our circle of concern, curse the hungry masses and hang onto whatever we might have. Lean times can make for mean times.

Or, they can make for the most miraculous times imaginable—when acts of selfless generosity turn the whole scarcity storyline on its head.

It wasn’t long before the bus reached the stop where my dharma teacher and her husband were getting off. We wished each other well as we parted ways. But her teaching hasn’t left me: we’ve got to look out for one another.

The Most Perfect Moment

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Will you accept that this the most perfect moment of your life?

Several years ago as I was getting ready for bed a thought dropped into my mind: “This is the most perfect moment of my life.”

The idea was absurd.

I mean, I’ve had plenty of moments that might be in the running for the most perfect of my life. The time I got to watch a meteor shower streaking hundreds of trails of light across the night sky. The first time I went snorkeling in the Carribbean and saw the spectacular world of coral and tropical fish. The times camping out in the Rockies under the canopy of the Milky Way. The bright September day of horseback riding in the Tetons.

Not to mention all the times I’ve laughed with a friend over a cup of coffee, or witnessed a rainbow paint itself across stormy clouds, or wept while I listened to the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

I could go on with my litany of perfect moments, but I think you get the idea. Brushing my teeth would never have made the list.

But I suspect that was precisely the point. I wasn’t standing on a mountain peak looking out over a stunning vista. I wasn’t sitting in a concert hall listening to a breathtaking orchestral work. I wasn’t celebrating around a dinner table with good friends.

I was doing something completely mundane that I do every single day of my life.

The unbidden realization made me aware of how much I evaluate my experiences according to some scale in my mind about what constitutes perfection. Anything that doesn’t exhibit some extraordinary quality is not worthy of notice, and certainly not reverence.

But there it was, this spontaneous teaching that has stayed with me ever since: This is the most perfect moment of my life.

Since then, from time to time I repeat the phrase to myself. It almost always shifts my awareness. It opens my eyes to the absolutely amazing miracle of any moment, no matter how mundane it may seem.

You just might try this teaching yourself and see what happens. While doing some mundane act say to yourself, “This is the most perfect moment of my life.” Repeat it until its truth finally begins to break through.

Feeding the Soul In No Time

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It takes no more time to experience life than not to experience it.

So often we don’t attend to our souls because think we don’t have the time. But here’s the thing: the soul doesn’t need time so much as it needs No Time.

You have undoubtedly experienced No Time. It’s where you are when you are so completely, mindfully present that time itself drops away. It’s not the same as losing yourself in an engrossing activity that causes you to lose track of time. Stepping through the portal into No Time requires awareness, and when it happens you find yourself in the presence of something eternal which exists beyond the confines of your small self. Continue Reading

You Are Not an Indentured Servant

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irisDo you ever have a secret dread that you are going to die without ever having fulfilled your life purpose? Your soul will rise up from your expired body saying, “Dang! I blew it! That collection of choral works I was supposed to write never happened!” Or, “That breakthrough in cancer research that I was supposed to bring into the world somehow got lost in the shuffle of paperwork.” Or, “I was too busy surfing the Web checking out what everybody else was writing to ever get my own poems down on paper.” Continue Reading

“Me Doy”

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What would it mean for you to give yourself?

A word in Spanish that I find to be both poetic and insightful is me doy. It is a reflexive verb translated as “I surrender.” Literally it means, “I give myself.”

Ours is not a culture that deals well with surrender. We equate it with failure. But in the spiritual life, surrender is essential. There is an aspect of ourselves that wants to have its way no matter what, and cannot even entertain the notion of surrender. It strives and pushes, fights and struggles to attain its own desires and assure its own survival, and that striving, willfulness and grasping become the great barriers to our spiritual development.Continue Reading

Spreading the Light

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How might you spread the light?

The other afternoon I boarded the bus into Center City and was delighted to see the World’s Most Enlightened Bus Driver behind the wheel.

OK, she may not be the one and only. All I know is whenever I get on her bus I feel instantly cared for. I love this woman whose name I don’t even know but whose sparkling hazel eyes radiate a joy one rarely encounters. She welcomes people onto her bus with a smile and warm greeting, then carries out her fierce determination to get us to our destinations in one piece and on time.

It seems for her we aren’t just passengers, we’re her passengers. We aren’t just a random collection of strangers traveling as isolated individuals. We’re on her bus together.

Continue Reading

Beyond Story

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Are your stories maps or traps?
Are your stories maps or traps?

If you’re like me, you loved stories when you were a child. I still love them. I love entering into an imaginative world where characters come to life. I love wondering how the story will unfold and where will the characters be by the end. How will they have changed? How will their problems have resolved themselves, or gotten worse?

Stories can be helpful. They can serve as maps that guide us through confusion, reassuring us that others have struggled with the same things we do. Continue Reading