When my nephew was two years old, he told his mother about “purgatory”. Neither of his parents were religious and he had never been to church. His grandparents were Protestant and would have had no reason to discuss purgatory with him. Then he told his mother, “everything is wuv, (love), mommy.” Today he has no…
My friend, Michael Dowd, sent me a blog post by John Michael Greer, an author who writes on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society from a Druid perspective. Mr. Greer draws a compelling distinction between predicaments and problems. Predicaments, by definition, are not merely unpleasant situations. They are unpleasant situations from which there…
I was awake at 3 am. My dog was anxious, whining. Maybe I tapped into his field. Or more likely he tapped into mine. My mind was whirling with everything that’s wrong in my life. Story after story, scenario after scenario, all reinforcing the “truth” that my life was teetering on a precipice. Everything, I…
During a sacred plant ceremony I found myself on the receiving end of a temporary gift of clairvoyance, ( “clear seeing”). I was in a room with twenty-five others, sitting with an open, clear mind, listening to the beautiful suffering. Strange as this latter phrase might sound, it’s an apt description of the experience of being…
I came across the term “the watcher” reading the late and controversial, Buddhist monk, Chogyam Trungpa’s book, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism. The watcher is the expression of self that learns, over decades of socialization, to watch what s/he says, watch how he acts, watch what he wears, watch his tone of voice, watch whether he…