All

 

All the Hemispheres

Leave the familiar for a while.

Let your senses and bodies stretch out

Like a welcomed season

Onto the meadows and shores and hills.

Open up to the Roof.

Make a new water-mark on your excitement

And love.

Like a blooming night flower,

Bestow your vital fragrance of happiness

And giving

Upon our intimate assembly.

Change rooms in your mind for a day.

All the hemispheres in existence

Lie beside an equator

In your heart.

Greet Yourself

In your thousand other forms

As you mount the hidden tide and travel

Back home.

All the hemispheres in heaven

Are sitting around a fire

Chatting

While stitching themselves together

Into the Great Circle inside of

You.

From: ‘The Subject Tonight is Love’

Translated by Daniel Ladinsky

Finding Solace in a Library

 

“A library is a good place to go when you feel unhappy, for there, in a book, you may find encouragement and comfort. A library is a good place to go when you feel bewildered or undecided, for there, in a book, you may have your question answered. Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people - people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book."

[Letters of Note; Troy (MI, USA) Public Library, 1971]” 
― E.B. White

Love Out Loud!

 

Photo credit: Blake Lasater

The smoke still hangs in the warm spring air in Eureka Springs. An early morning fire in a house partitioned into apartments left five homeless, having to jump out of bed and leave with what they could grab while barely awake. One of my dear friends is among the refugees, and it has brought home to me the plight of anyone who must leave their homes quickly, and then have no place to return. Another long-time friend was taken by ambulance to the hospital this morning, with alarming symptoms and an uncertain prognosis. My heart is with them, and hence with the world in the individual and collective plights. I am reminded to love more inclusively, to reflect and absorb the infinite Love which is All. Love heals lives, because it is life. Everyone we come into contact with throughout our days has a story which involves joy and sadness. We never know what others are going through, but we do know the importance of being kind. So let’s do that, okay? “Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.” Dalai Lama XIV

“Nothing around you but is part of you. Look on it lovingly, and see the light of Heaven in it. So will you come to understand all that is given you. In kind forgiveness will the world sparkle and shine, and everything you once thought sinful now will be reinterpreted as part of Heaven. How beautiful it is to walk, clean and redeemed and happy, through a world in bitter need of the redemption that your innocence bestows upon it! What can you value more than this? For here is your salvation and your freedom. And it must be complete if you would recognize it.” A Course in Miracles T-23.in.6:1-8

Holy Relationships

Deva Premal and Miten

My thoughts turn today toward the holy relationship. We have many relationships in this life and, if you're like me, you prefer to think of all of them as holy! If God is Love, and we express that Love, then isn't every thing we do coming from that Love which is our essence? Unfortunately, this is not true. What we think of as love is often colored with human emotions such as guilt, jealousy, lust, and fear. This is a hard admission for any of us to make. A dear friend has been talking to me recently about a relationship he is ending. I have been thinking back over relationships I could have stayed in to this very day and where that would have led my life in different paths. The thing that keeps coming back time and again is that each and every relationship I have ever had was based in some way or another on the words, "I want". Maybe I wanted to be loved, maybe I wanted to be IN love, maybe I wanted a love affair like the movies and songs tell us is the be-all, end-all. My friend is feeling sad for the loss of this relationship. He liked so many things about this woman, but there were some basic differences which caused their incompatibility. He could have stayed and been contented, but there was something missing: It wasn't a holy relationship. It was based on expectation of change and other material desires. My friend innately knows there is more than settling down with someone because it's easy. And I know he will recognize, within himSelf, what it is he's waiting for.

“My holy brother, I would enter into all your relationships, and step between you and your fantasies. Let my relationship to you be real to you, and let me bring reality to your perception of your brothers. They were not created to enable you to hurt yourself through them. They were created to create with you. This is the truth that I would interpose between you and your goal of madness. Be not separate from me, and let not the holy purpose of Atonement be lost to you in dreams of vengeance. Relationships in which such dreams are cherished have excluded me. Let me enter in the Name of God and bring you peace, that you may offer peace to me.” A Course in Miracles T-17.III.10:1-8

Music Opens Perceptions

Performance at Thorncrown Chapel

Music ​opens our ​mind to things we may have forgotten​,​ or​ ​perhaps​ have​ never known. I love to sit with ​a ​symphony orchestra, opening my mind to only the music, until at some point I feel there is nothing else in the world. I recall Wayne Dyer talking about muscle testing using different items. ​Holding an organic banana ​near his heart ​allowed full strength in his son, whereas holding a CD of raucous music left him much weakened. ​We all enjoy music in many forms, and ​on multiple​ levels. Something we would ​like with friends at a party may not compare to the quiet strains of Bach, which take us deeper within ourselves prior to meditation or writing. Find the music which opens you to hearing the messages which  Life, Truth, and Love are offering you. Surround yourself with this river of salvation and see where it takes you!

“Mozart experienced more than he expressed. The rapture of his grandest symphonies was never heard. He was a musician beyond what the world knew.​ ​This was even more strikingly true of Beethoven, who was so long hopelessly deaf. Mental melodies and strains of sweetest music supersede conscious sound. Music is the rhythm of head and heart. Mortal mind is the harp of many strings, discoursing either discord or harmony according as the hand, which sweeps over it, is human or divine.” Mary Baker Eddy - Science & Health Page 213:19-29

Solution is Love

It can be quite depressing to watch the lengths people are willing to go in order to justify evil actions. As long as history has been recorded, we have heard irrational words being used to excuse bad behavior. Politics, religion, bullies seeking importance — well, I’m preaching to the choir here, and so I won’t go on giving examples. Also, the quote attributed to Einstein about only wanting to hear about a problem as an identifier, and then only being interested in solutions — that speaks to my heart. The solution is Love. Anything which is abhorrent to our sensibilities is a product of fear — false evidence appearing real. The guiding force of the universe is Love and this recognition is ours to claim. 

“This material world is even now becoming the arena for conflicting forces. On one side there will be discord and dismay; on the other side there will be Science and peace. The breaking up of material beliefs may seem to be famine and pestilence, want and woe, sin, sickness, and death, which assume new phases until their nothingness appears. These disturbances will continue until the end of error, when all discord will be swallowed up in spiritual Truth.” 

Mary Baker Eddy - Science & Health Page 96:12-20

“It seems to be the enemy without that you attack. Yet your defense sets up an enemy within; an alien thought at war with you, depriving you of peace, splitting your mind into two camps which seem wholly irreconcilable. For love now has an ‘enemy,’an opposite; and fear, the alien, now needs your defense against the threat of what you really are. 

If you consider carefully the means by which your fancied self-defense proceeds on its imagined way, you will perceive the premises on which the idea stands. First, it is obvious ideas must leave their source, for it is you who make attack, and must have first conceived of it. Yet you attack outside yourself, and separate your mind from him who is to be attacked, with perfect faith the split you made is real.”

 A Course in Miracles W-170.3-4

We Are All Sculptors

Photo credit: Blake Lasater

The first thought we have in the morning shapes the way our day develops. I’ve visited this topic more than once in past writings. Having spent years training myself to stay away from worry and busy-ness, it’s disheartening to find myself waking up in the morning to wandering thoughts. For a few weeks, I've been having vivid dreams and I wake up thinking about what they mean. I've forgotten to bring thought to Spirit, instead allowing a wandering brain to slog through a maze of odd events featuring people, animals, and places which are well-known to me. This seems to be affecting the way I think about things all day long. It doesn't matter how much I try to push and pull my thoughts in other directions, they insist on making judgments, comparisons, and searching for hidden meanings. And so I’m going to return to training tools I’ve used in the past, insisting that my brain repeat well-loved verses from Mary Baker Eddy, pondering their meaning, and taking a stand for Good even before I get out of bed.

“The sculptor turns from the marble to his model in order to perfect his conception. We are all sculptors, working at various forms, moulding and chiseling thought. What is the model before mortal mind? Is it imperfection, joy, sorrow, sin, suffering? Have you accepted the mortal model? Are you reproducing it? Then you are haunted in your work by vicious sculptors and hideous forms. Do you not hear from all mankind of the imperfect model? The world is holding it before your gaze continually. The result is that you are liable to follow those lower patterns, limit your lifework, and adopt into your experience the angular outline and deformity of matter models. To remedy this, we must first turn our gaze in the right direction, and then walk that way. We must form perfect models in thought and look at them continually, or we shall never carve them out in grand and noble lives.” Mary Baker Eddy - Science & Health Page 248:12-29