Don’t Look Away

“As you know, I follow the war every day. I’m not going numb… and will do everything I can to stop it. This is not just Ukrainian PR. I’ve seen pics from all over the country of Ukrainian soldiers protecting animals.” Sky Otter. For lifetimes, we have survived by going numb … and in our …

Stuffed Inside

How much anger is stuffed inside? Every time someone hurt me and I didn’t know how to respond … when I didn’t say something and held my tongue while my insides were slashed open … when I let the hurt pass, forcing a laugh at a friend’s joke — a friend’s not a stranger’s or …

Deliverance

“Knowing what something is, is not the same as feeling it.” The Giver What would make you willing to feel all the pain and suffering inside of you? What would make you insatiably hungry to feel all of your life? You close off. It is natural to protect yourself from pain. It is painful to …

What is Heaven?

Lately everything seems unreal. I keep waiting for it all to fall apart into tiny pixels of color and light, myself included. Earth feels unreal; Heaven, or what I conceive as God (the dissolution of self) seems closer, ever closer. I still exist; I haven’t dissolved. Ready. Willing. Still here. And yet, the detachment from …

Celebrate the Suffering

There is an interesting story about a guru who sets up a little shop selling pick axes and shovels to all the seekers who are trying to get to the top of the mountain to find whatever it is they believe is there. (I wish I remembered where I heard this story, but I don’t.) …

Raw Nerve, Part II

Up early again a drive ahead of rush hour needing to be first in line only a two-hour wait the doctor’s worried look a free-falling slide down the muddy hole of the medical system In only 2 days I was back the antibiotics prescribed not working, if anything my cheek getting bigger infection spreading further, …