“Let the gratefulness overflow into blessing all around you. Then it will really be a good day.” ~ Br. David Steindle-Rast, from the Insight Meditation: A Good Day, A Grateful Day To feel that the world is beautiful, that life is beautiful, is to experience pure joy. To open your heart fully. To share that experience requires complete vulnerability. One of my closest friends shares seemingly everything that brings her joy – her favorite music,…
During meditation today, I felt myself in a heaven/earth moment with the universe. Akin to the Aikido movement of the same name, the moment pivoted on an exchange of energy. But instead of being thrown to the floor, the universe and I danced. Aikido is often translated as “the way of unifying with life energy” or “the way of harmonious spirit” – a fitting metaphor for this experience. Rather than resisting the universe, I harmonized…
In a recorded seminar I watched today, the presenter asked: What are the five best things you’ve learned about life? Here’s my current list. What’s yours? 1. Be patient during the rough times and grateful for the moments of grace and wonder.Everything — no matter how horrible, no matter how glorious — changes eventually. Our very lives are defined by our mortal, fleeting natures. 2. Be open to the unexpected and curious about the shifts. We…
Today the grief is pervasive. It shifts my body into some liminal plane between floating and groundedness. I place my hands on my heart and breathe until I feel them solidly there, feel their warmth, feel my heart beating.
What you call “salvation” belongs to the time before death. If you don’t break your ropes while you’re alive,do you think ghosts will do it after? The idea that the soul will join with the ecstaticjust because the body is rotten —that is all fantasy.What is found now is found then. ~ From Kabir’s “The Time Before Death“ Stephen Levine quotes a portion of this poem in his book A…
Welcome to a new year. And with it, the pressure to do better, to be better. To set grand goals and turn over as many leaves as possible. Or maybe not. Setting goals isn’t always the best approach, and certainly it isn’t for everyone despite the pervasiveness of it in our culture. One of my favorite alternative frameworks is the concept of “Lily padding it”, a phrase inspired entirely by Stephen Shapiro’s conversation with one…
Of her title character, Bitter, Akwaeke Emezi writes: Bitter had bounced around foster homes since she was a baby, ending up with a steady foster family when she was eight, and she had removed all memories of the years before that, on purpose, because she needed to stay sane and some memories were like poison. ~ It isn’t strength, necessarily, but strategy that has helped me be a mostly functional human in a mostly dysfunctional…
My poor wife has been person zero in my continued commitment to discovering who I am and what the world could be like without the confines of survival mode. Turns out that much of the time I’m like a kid who has had far too much sugar… I’m talking. A lot. About whatever I’m reading or thinking at any given moment. I keep asking Gwennie if I’m boring her, and she gives me the oddest…
In today’s AI Adventures, I fed ChatGPT4 an article summary created by another AI tool, Perplexity. Perplexity does a great job with summarizing, is available right from any page I’m reading, and is a great tool for research and understanding. You can use it to ask questions about the source page you are on as well. Like all AI tools, the better the prompt (“summarize and include bullet points for the main talking points”), the…
Late Autumn: when the air turns crisp and the leaves turn from soft greens into sharp reds and fall from limbs to land. After the first frost hits, I move through the world with far more tenderness, more tears, more depth. Despite having grown up in Florida, this time of year feels like a homecoming. And a graduation. As if all of the efforts propelling forward with the first buds of spring and blooming in…