"Love Your Enemies"

"Love your enemies."

Why?

Why should we care about people who seek our demise? Why should we love those who would do us harm? Why should we concern ourselves with their well-being?

When we love those who oppose us, we are recognizing that even though we are separate and in conflict here and now, we are also inextricably one in the divine. When we love our enemies, we are loving ourselves. When we protect ourselves from our enemies, we are also helping to protect our enemies from the destructiveness of their own fears.

Why should we love our enemies? Because it is another way to love and respect ourselves.

Go figure.

Decades in the Wilderness

The distance from one point along our spiritual journey to another may look short, but it can take decades of wandering in the wilderness to travel the space between them.

The reason is because it can take decades for our original ideas about the journey to die off, one by one.

No way into the promised land before then.

High Water

When a river overflows its banks,
it scours the landscape like a thief
and carries away what it does not own.

When my desires overflow my needs,
I become a river of selfishness
drowning any thought of others.

When my needs overflow my desires,
I become a dry valley with no memory
of how I should go about praying for rain.

I Am an Island

I am an island joined
to the rest of the chain
under the surface of the ocean.

So I am not really an island.
It only feels that way because
I am surrounded by water.

I am not an island,
and yet no other island
offers a view just like mine.

The Simple Life

As I grow older, it becomes easier to see the bones of my life. I come to realize how simple it all is.

My needs become stripped down like winter trees. My grievances turn into dry twigs. And every moment is filled to overflowing if I will only open my eyes.

Another Day

Moment by moment, another day begins somewhere on the planet. Light and shadow shifting across a turning world. We are hung out in space like an electron circling a giant burning nucleus.

How do we know we aren't also part of a carbon atom in a little girl's knee in some alternate universe?

How do we know we aren't made up of countless galaxies of atomic worlds ourselves?

For now, this world is more than enough for me.

Prove It

If our conscious awareness of the world is based on electrical impulses racing through our brains, what happens when those subatomic streaks take a different path?

How do we know that we know what we think we know? What can we really prove? What can we truly know at all? Why do we want "proof" anyway?

Proof is about confirming our inner experience by some exterior means. It gives us a sense of equilibrium, of time and space.

After all, without a clock or horizon line, how can we know we even exist at all?

Expanding Universe

Grass and people.
Crows and seeds.
Water and mindfulness.
Laughter and bitterness.
Arrows and pigs.

Each expands the other.

Letting Go of Who I Am

When I let go of who I am,
I allow myself to come into being.

Fame

Fame is the price of being known.
It is the residue of a separate journey --
a journey deeper into the singular self.

When our journey within leads
to the universe without, we become
known through what we bring back.

When our journey within leads only within,
we become known for what we take.

Stillness in the Meadow

Stillness in the meadow.
Stillness in the hills.
Stillness in the fields.
Stillness in the valley.
Stillness in the forest.
Stillness in the river bottoms.
Stillness in the lowest places.
Stillness in the heart.
Stillness in the mind.
Stillness in the hands.
Stillness in the spirit.
Stillness in the fabric of time.

Stillness begins in the stillness
of that which cannot be expressed.

Four Houses

The first is the dwelling of the powerless.
The second is the dwelling of the determined.
The third is the dwelling of the selfish.
The fourth is the dwelling of the tolerant.

When you enter the first, be full of respect.
When you enter the second, be full of questions.
When you enter the third, be full of praise.
When you enter the fourth, be full of thanks.