Creating Heaven

the alarm clock rings

sleep opens

simultaneously

the journey bends

side-tracking, no

instead a full fleshed trip

inspired by friends of faith

their soul arms hanging low

with gifts

time is right

though it was never wrong

nor was

angels, clouds and sun

conspire, collaborate

to make heaven

together with my

willing, non-resistant

yes

Vision Expansion

I sat in the small group anticipating a life-giving discussion. Little did I know...

The leader of the group steered us into a time of quiet and urged us to hold in mind something that we desire...to hold it...to hold it...to see it clearly. My desire came to me easily, and it pleasantly filled my view. Then she asked us to expand that desire, to let it get as huge as it could get...AND IT DID!

My desire was something I have been envisioning for a long time and am eager to see show up in my life. You see, I have a dental challenge, and what I really want is to have complete dental implants, no small thing, but something I have been seeing for quite some time. I have the dentist picked out...the best dentist I have ever had. Only one small hitch...his practice is in South India.

So, as I gave my attention to my desire, and then allowed it to expand...it exploded! Suddenly my quest for dental treatment turned into a trip with 20 friends, an experience of spirit and wellness. I clearly saw our group visiting India, being renewed by a 2 week ayurvedic rejuvenation, tapping into the spiritual energy of the ages, imbued with the peace of watching the sun set over the Arabian Sea, and getting a bit of dental work done on the side. Wow!

And almost immediately, the components to make it possible began lining up, and they continue to do so.

Amazing what can happen when vision is clear, and expansion is allowed.

Reclaiming Integrity

Never saw a baby that wasn't full of integrity. Come to think of it, it must have been so for me as well. We all burst onto the planet 100% true to ourselves. We knew our purpose - to be deliriously happy in the special way that pleased us.

In due course, we set about the inevitable task of growing up. And here our clear purpose comes into question. Happy babies are just fine, but they have to adapt to a cruel world, so parents and other adults teach them the skills they need.

The foremost skill is the skill of getting along. There are all those other separate bodies and personalities to get along with, and older ones, who have absorbed the counsel of generations and know how to use the system for getting along, will help to teach a baby that system. If only babies will comply.

So babies do learn to comply, (or suffer the consequences) and in learning how to comply they offer up bits of their integrity. Bit by bit they set aside pieces of their authentic selves in order to get along. Innocence is lost early, replaced by judgment of self and others. Creativity is cut back, cooperation is traded in for competition, and play is diminished.

Though it didn't start out that way, by the time a child goes to school, she or he has betrayed much of themselves, probably thinking that every other child fits in the system, and it is only they who do not, who cannot not have their deepest desires and still get along. So it was with me. I sacrificed the parts of me that family and community asked and I was left with a hollow place in me.

You know the rest of the story, the search for identity, the quest for purpose in life, the great sadnesses and the self destructive choices. This is true for all of us.

What you may not know so clearly is that the child remains within us, and even though our real life parenting may not have always served us well, now that we are parents or of parenting age, we can redo the faulty parenting. We can reclaim the integrity that we began with.

All is not lost. The sacrifices we made in our first years on the planet have merely been set aside. They wait for us and are begging to be ransomed. Our mission in life, our fantastic aptitude for cooperation, our predilection for forgiveness, our unbounded creativity and even our sense of play await.

Time to reclaim our integrity!

Time to Shine

I suppose I just shined naturally when I was very young. It's pretty hard for a young child not to do that. I don't remember it though. I do remember learning not to shine, however. I learned not to shine so that I would not eclipse things more important than I.

I became good at compliance, ready to stand in the wings while the stars of the show recited their lines over and over to measured applause. I learned to know my place in the scheme of things, to be just a child, to let experienced adults take the lead.

And with that posture, a certain sadness set in for me. A sadness that who I really was, what I really loved, how I wanted to be in the world was deemed inappropriate at least, but worse for me, wrong after due consideration.

All that was and is hogwash!

We are meant to shine! We are best when we know and show ourselves completely. We do not eclipse anyone or anything. We only add glorious detail to the picture of life as it is created to be. And our shining allows others to shine as well.

So, why not shine with all my brightness? Imagine the world where we all do that.

Time to shine, friends!

In Praise of Praise

Praise is somewhat of an old-fashioned word, and an even more old-fashioned practice. And for me, I grew up thinking that it mostly referred to a God quite significantly removed from insignificant me. It was a Sunday sort of thing.

But I am not thinking about that kind of praise today. Today I am engaged with a praise that gives merit, value, even esteem to aspects of my life, and to the qualities that seek to flower.

Praise is the act of making positive statements about a person, an object, or an idea. It contrasts to criticism and banishes blame. And I am focusing on making positive statements about my mind, my emotions, my intuition, and my body.

I praise my mind as the perfect creation of the divine. I praise my emotions as my perfect guidance mechanism. I praise my intuition as my never failing source of knowing, and my body as the incomparably beautiful and infinitely capable vehicle of my vitality.

I praise my every increasing wisdom, my power to communicate, my ability to care, my skill in sharing what is given me, and the growing energy that empowers me; that energy is zeal stirred up by words of praise.

I am unapologetic, and unconcerned about what others think of me. Today I lift my hands in total praise to the divine in me.

Getting into the Gush

Life gushes. The sea's waves gush shoreward. The droplet of rain joins with others and gushes to the sea. (or directly into the earth) New life gushes out everywhere, in predictable cycles and in spontaneous events. Energy bundles and builds and spews itself out in demonstrations sometimes welcome, but often feared. But life does gush, without seeming limit.

I'm afraid that I have often put myself outside of the gush of life. I have not expected it, I have sat in a stupor, undeserving of its benefit, or I have feared it for I knew I could not control it. In effect, I have kept in place the resistance that keeps it from spilling over me.

But life still wants to gush. I look at others who have accepted the limitlessness of life, and I reason that they are lucky, or that they don't have the hindrances that I do, and my glance into their experience carries a hint of jealousy. I see all that is beautiful and bountiful, but it has only momentary benefit for me, for I soon sink back into the quagmire of my muddles and my troubles.

By my way of thinking about it, I have taken myself out of the flow of life, and have often actively resisted it when I could not get out of it's way.

No more. Today I surrender. Today I flip all the switches that serve to hold back the energy of heaven, the gushing life of great good that flows to and over me if only I allow it. Today I'm risking all and getting into the gush.

Love You Are...

Love you are...and to love you shall return. Just imagine those words, and how great and all encompassing and uniting they are. Maybe we have gotten it all wrong focusing on dust. Maybe we've been looking at it in a backward way.

For me, being has become so much more than what my religious schooling taught me. Oh, I was given a framework to contain my trials and my struggles, somewhat of a place for properly scaled down hopes and dreams. I was pointed to my physical body, composed of elements from the periodic table, told how exquisite yet finite it was, and left with that very ship to sail the sea of life.

Oh, yes...I was also given the hope that when my body finally deteriorated, I might have put an escape clause into effect, and an other worldly force might pull me up to heaven, where I really could live happily ever after, that is my soul, or some other non-physical component of me. The message that I got most strongly, however, was the one that was reinforced each Ash Wednesday...that my essence to begin with was ashes, or dust, and after a life in which I got to make a few moves, I returned to dust.

Rebel that I am...I have come to know otherwise. I did not begin my existence when I was born, nor will it I end it when someone intones 'ashes to ashes...and dust to dust.' I am so many billions of times more than that. I am as big as it gets, unbounded by time and space as we experience it on this planet. The me that I experience in this body is only a tiny bit of the me that is unlimited, the me that is Love. And that me, the Grand I Am is right up there with the God that is, one with Him/Her and all the others that Are, including you. You might call that unthinkably large idea Love.

Love I am...and to Love I shall return.