You were so sick that afterward on that first nice day, I meant to say, “I can’t bear to lose you,” but what spilled out was, “Why do you have to go to that tonight?” You dug in. I tried to explain. Like two cats fall- ing off the kitchen table, we scrapped and hissed and sput- tered the whole way home. You stared out the window and I wanted to say that sometimes to be here at... Read more
I don’t know why I was born with this belief in something deeper and larger than we can see. But it’s always called. Even as a boy, I knew that trees and light and sky all point to some timeless center out of view. I have spent my life listening to that center and filter- ing it through my heart. This listening and filtering is the music of my soul, of all souls. After sixty years, I’ve run out of... Read more
Mark’s view from Cortes Island at Hollyhock this morning. Wishing him and his participants a wonderful and fulfilling weekend on the topic of Staying Awake. Read more
If I don’t try to behold the Universe, to see how the Universe holds me, I will be a pinball in the game of life: ever-reacting, trying to ring bells and not fall into holes. What if I’m a bird in an ever-growing forest? Or a wave in a bottomless ocean? Or a root in a soil that I can’t see? If the soul is a window— How to keep the window clean? How to open the window?... Read more
Our love needs to be bigger than our insanity. —Henk Brandt There are three covenants that keep us engaged in the work of love. To begin with, when we see something true and beautiful in someone, it is not the work of love to change them or force their growth in our direction. It is the work of love to create conditions by which what is true and beautiful in all we behold can grow and blossom, bringing forth its... Read more
A hundred years ago, a composer wrote music about a puppet who comes alive when his strings are cut. Then a poet who delivered babies wrote a poem stirred by the same thing; confessing to his grotesque loneliness, to his tangle of strings in the middle of the day. And I confess to my own blunt meanderings like a bear without food in a glass forest. Forget being original. If cut free, we are drawn to the Origins where the... Read more
You broke my favorite glass. Now you feel bad. It was my favorite because I touched it so many times. I looked at its pieces you so carefully gathered. I think it was tired and wanted to go. I held the largest shard and it glittered. I held it to my ear and it said, “I am now free.” What makes things special is who brings them and what they carry. You are special. Our dog is special. The wind... Read more
Imagine a river of fire and you are a piece of wood in which someone has hidden a jewel and no matter how you try, you are destined to burn your way to the falls where just when you feel certain you are to die, the weight of the wood has burned off and only the jewel floats over the edge and lightly the pool cleanses what has been hidden for so long. Beyond the fall the deep is just... Read more
Faith is not an insurance, but a constant effort, a constant listening to the eternal voice. —Abraham Heschel I needed to have blood drawn for my annual physical and even though it’s been twenty years since I’ve been spit out from the mouth of the whale of cancer, it’s never very far. I kept telling myself that was then, this is now. But in the early morning waiting room, I could feel my breath speed up, higher in my chest,... Read more
Words of wisdom from Mark Nepo. Read more
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