Spirituality
The Center is Everywhere and Nowhere
At the center of the universe dwells the Great Spirit. And that center is really everywhere. It is within each of us.~Black Elk I am regularly astonished at the vast number of people seeking outside themselves for the godhead that dwells within each being from the nearly permanent rocks to the ephemeral damselfly that dies […]
The Power of Prayer
I am learning to pray again, not in the way I was taught as a child, but in all the ways the desert has taught me to listen.~Terry Tempest Williams Growing up Catholic in the 60s and 70s, I attended parochial grammar and high schools. Prayer was required at various times, particularly on First Fridays […]
Knowing Trumps Believing
God is best known in not knowing Him.~Saint Augustine I have heard many, many people tell me they believe in God. Generally, the statement feels as if the speaker is trying to convince me of a supreme power existence as much as they are trying to convince themselves. As if repeating a statement ad nauseum […]
The Venus Divine
Her facelessness is the impersonality of primitive sex and religion. There is no psychology or identity yet, because there is no society or cohesion. Men cower and scatter at the blast of the elements. Venus of Willendorf is eyeless because nature can be seen but not known.~Camille Paglia The Venus of Willendorf is believed to […]
Undergirding Mythology
Religions began as a salve to mystery, not a manifesto of truth.~Terry Tempest Williams Lately, I’ve been rewatching for probably the third time since my twenties the splendid teachings of Joseph Campbell. In his day, he was the preeminent scholar on world religions past and present. And, I would say, few, if any, surpass his […]
Screaming Trees
If I listened, I might hear the chaos of those trees being dismembered, their bark peeled, their tendons sliced, and the unbearable noise of nail guns assaulting their limbs.~Gretel Ehrlich There is debate in the scientific community regarding whether or not fish feel pain. The don’t feel side claims fish lack the sufficient density of […]
Spiritual Strangulation
I am not an atheist, but an earthiest~Edward Abbey, Prophet I have struggled most of my life centering on a personal philosophy integrating my physical and spiritual into a cohesive whole. I have danced with monotheism, polytheism, no-theism experiencing moments of wonder-ism before seeing fully and returning to confusion-ism wrapped tightly around nothing-ism. I tried […]
To Soul or Not to Soul?
If place is stripped of geography, and if geography is stripped of spirit, any destructive scheme for profit will fly.~Barry Lopez The US has been at war for more than 500 years between two factions. One that wholeheartedly believes land is imbued with a soul and the other side believing just as strongly the land […]
Smokewater
I drove by two ponds this morning on my way to the ‘burbs’ for my annual appointment to get the orifices probed. Not my favorite way to spend a morning. That was counterbalanced by the relaxing, pre-rush hour drive including a side excursion into a wooded area with ponds. I do try to make the […]
Personal Godhood
I’m not everything I want to be, but I’m more than I was, and I’m still learning.~Charlotte Eriksson Being everything we want to be betrays a stagnation of the imagination, a deprecation of ambition, a soul colonized by sloth. One might as well be dead to the world, worm food, dead to the self. There […]
Soul Sharing
The cure for soul loss is in the mist of morning, the grass that grew a little through the night, the first warmth of this morning’s sunlight, and the human walking in a world infused with intelligence and spirits.~Linda Hogan I feel my soul slipping away like the sand pulled out to sea by incessantly […]
The Prayer Delusion
I did not always understand her prayers; I believe they were made of an older language than that of ordinary speech.~N. Scott Momaday The problem with prayer in any language is the incantations and utterances tend to be untrustworthy, a heart list born of self-delusion unaware the self is even being deluded. After all, those […]
Meditating In The Moment
We are the only animal on the planet to reject ourselves. We tell ourselves we are not good enough, that we are not worthy of love, and we replay stories of regret from our past fears of what might happen in the future.~Don Jose Ruiz I occasionally meditate on how it would feel to exist […]
Three Gifts
On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him. Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.~Matthew 2:11 Of the three synoptic gospels, only one mentions the wise men, Magi, visiting the swaddling Jesús, an infant they […]
Cultivating Sacred Spaces
A sacred place is an absolute necessity for anybody today. You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to […]
Full Circle
In the oldest religion, everything was alive, not supernaturally but naturally alive. There were only deeper and deeper streams of life, vibrations of life more and more vast. ~D. H. Lawrence Does it count as coming full circle to the beginning if one started in the middle? Actually, the travel is more a decaying toroid (Think […]
Divinely Superfluous Beauty
An art object by definition is “Divinely superfluous beauty.”~Joseph Campbell As far as I can tell, Art, the creation and consumption, has no effect on the physiological well-being of a human being. It can’t be eaten nor can it be planted to grow into sumptuous edibles. Nor does it address our needs for safety or […]
Developing Spiritual Hypertrophy
IHave learnedSo much from GodThat I can no longerCallMyselfA Christian, a Hindu, a Muslim,A Buddhist, A Jew~Hafiz, Great Sufi Master Following years of study and investigation and, in some cases, deep immersion, I have come to realize organized religion is training wheels for authentic spiritual life. Those who grow the strongest spiritual muscles have shed the […]
The Making of a Bible
Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.~Ralph Waldo Emerson In the early 1980s, I started highlighting fascinating quotes (prompted by reading the amazing works of the Prophet, Edward Abbey), in books I read for pleasure. These […]
Soul Print
To encounter the sacred is to be alive at the deepest center of human existence~N. Scott Momaday A few years back, we visited the highly overrated Sedona area in central Arizona. It was beautiful in a more abused sense than the lower third of Utah. Because of its proximity to Phoenix, it was overrun with […]
Musings of a Middle Aged Man 