Cracking Open

When your heart is breaking it feels like the pieces will never fit together again. They won’t, not in the same way. That’s is an unavoidable consequence of life. The breaking always leaves cracks, spaces where the light of loss pours itself into the world and what a gift that is!  You don’t let the …

I Do Love a Good Mystery

Does it matter? There’s nothing here appearing as everything. I have no input into what happens even though everything that happens is influenced by what I do or do not do. Each experience instantly — no more than that and less — repopulates the data field of manifestation with each new breath, each new thought, …

Laughing Buddha

Life is so strange. One moment I am fascinated with this crazy, unnameable Isness, in awe of this unreasonable aliveness, fractured to my very soul, unwilling and literally unable to even try to comprehend why there is anything here at all … and the next moment I am sighing, laughing, crying, feeling my humanity, adoring …

The Hero’s Journey

Life is a mystically magical tangle of highs and lows, shadow and light, happiness and sorrow. Most of us want the highs and light and happiness without that other stuff. It may be natural, but it isn’t possible. Desiring the good without any of the bad, devising ways to win and conquer, or at least …

It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way

Life’s basic building block is consciousness, or at the least, that is as much as this appearance in consciousness at present is able to grok. Consciousness, a word, not unlike every word, can only point to that which is inconceivable since it is as deep or shallow as its perceiver. What we perceive is a …

Can You Hear the Roar?

We live in a world that teaches, expects, commands exclusion. Competition, boundaries, judgement, winners and losers, families – those we love and those we don’t, is built right in, the silent, or not so silent, operating structure of separation. What we are, what this is, is inclusion, simple, basic, all-in, never was two, actuality. To …

Voyeuristic Delight

How could we ever be strangers. Even the idea of it strays far from the actuality of life. It seems true, appears to be so, and at the same time is an utter impossibility. When we slide into home plate, fresh from our sojourn into form, will we look at one another and see strangers, …

Maybe There is No Definition and No Way

Real or not real? That is the question, and it seems to be much discussed these days. What is enlightenment? Listen to me … this is what it is. No … it’s not that, it’s this. If we can’t even agree on a definition of what it is, how in the world would we ever …

Always Pointed at the Target

Life is an interactive simulation with a gazillion options. Do you want to play out the life of a successful businessperson? Yay. How about mister or miss popularity? Hoorah. Maybe a pilgrim on the spiritual path fits or even one who awakens. Are you playing the role of victim, the one who everyone abuses? Does …

The Cosmic Bubblegum Machine

What would your life be like if you knew that you couldn’t do anything other than what you are doing? That may include dithering back and forth, trying to make the best decision or being impulsive and taking no heed of consequences. It could encompass getting frustrated and filled with doubt or seemingly breezing effortlessly …

Rolling in Clover

Here I go again … loving me some what ifs! What if there’s nothing wrong? What if you’ve never made a mistake? What if everything is as it is and couldn’t be any other way … or it would be? Can you relax into that? Can you let the hard times be hard, let the …

As Long as There’s An Other …

… the rattlesnake must strike I may not agree with you. Regardless of the width of the chasm separating us, why would I try to make you feel bad about your version of life? Wouldn’t that widen the gap, making it even more uncrossable? The only reason I would try to overpower your idea is …

Home Sick

I’ve been home sick since Friday, filling the hours with writing, reading and watching the tv. Not a lot of energy – not covid – some other unnamed virus. Today I celebrate the 5 acres Sophia and I live on, without which my 19-month-old girl would be going stir crazy. It’s so out of the …

Just Like Jason Bourne

I love movie analogies. Having enjoyed the Bourne movies — yeah, I liked them a lot — it suddenly came to me that they are great spiritual quest analogies. I don’t know why it took me so long to see it. When I caught it this afternoon, I started laughing. Maybe it’s just that I …

A Bug in Amber

It’s such a paradox. We are caught in the middle, trapped like a bug in amber, capable of feeling joy in the midst of sweet sorrow, sorrow in the midst of joyful acceptance. Here, living a human life, we are not only capable, but it seems fated, destined to experience the pull of two. The …