Spirit Gives Birth To Spirit

I cannot deny I screamed out into the void And the whisper came back "I love you" It never ends This time here Even when our bones Are buried In the ground. We yet persist. We persist In the way we were From now on So how do you exist? How do you run When you cannot stand And all is lost? What love Do you call on In the deep, dark, cold Watches of the night? Or do you live In perpetual sunshine Denying the decay Of your heart? On the walls Of this prison  I scrawl This is heaven. And so it is Sweet explosions Of life and joy Are now mine And I will love this way Until eternity Because, you see I have found heaven in me. Love, Sweet love, Mercy has set me free To find thee.

Beech trees And soft grass I stretch out  On a rolling green hill Beneath the sun Out of the shadows There is no desolation To trouble my soul. Leaves and branches Undulate In the warm Spring wind. And I sink deep  In this invisible river that runs Through it all. Just for a minute I have stopped running. Stitched up the wrists And headed for home. Give me sleep Give me myself Give me my neighbor, The stranger To welcome him in. But most of all Fill me with the sweet Sweet sweet succulent scent Of love. Water the root And send the sweet sap Running to the ends Of the soft green leaves. Fill me Remake me Engorge this heart With life-giving, giving-love.

Henry David Thoreau wrote, "When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip. We rarely meet a man who can tell us any news which he has not read in a newspaper, or been told by his neighbor; and, for the most part, the only difference between us and our fellow is that he has seen the newspaper, or been out to tea, and we have not.  In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post office (modern readers could read Facebook, instagram or twitter or email).  You may depend on it, that the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters (read likes or reads or emails) proud of his extensive correspondence has not heard from himself in a long while." I am reading a book about solitude, hospitality, and prayer by Henri Nouwen called "Reaching Out" and two other books including Walden by Henry David Thoreau.  Walden keeps coming up in all the books I have read lately, ...

I think that we are living a primarily spiritual existence.  Our bodies are just a byproduct of a spiritual life.  Jew, Christian, Buddhist, agnostic, atheist, Universalist, Muslim, Hindu - we cannot escape this. Our bodies are not static.  We are actually more like waterfalls of molecules.  We are skin cells and organ cells that are constantly falling away and being replaced.  We are not solid. Besides being physically not solid, our genes read the environment and switch on or switch off to change our bodies' response to the environment. The only thing that stays constant is our soul. Our soul gives us identity and carries through the waterfall of our bodies cells changing out.  As our soul grows and changes, so do our bodies as they age, following the prompts from our soul.  To make this concrete, I'll take an example from my life. I have an addiction to smoking.  It is a soul disease.  My body, as I age, ...

Everything I ever needed to know about life, I learned from watching my dog.  You think that is a silly statement, but once you have eyes to see it, I think you'll agree.  Let me give you an example. Today I came home from the hospital.  I have my life.  I have a beautiful wife who loves me very much.  And I have a best friend and faithful companion that depends on me to come home every day and love on her.  She is my four legged spiritual reminder and comrade who has been at my side for 9 years.  9 years of pain and joy and finding myself enough that I could be there for my wonderful wife when the time was right. When I came home from the hospital, she was at the window wagging her tail.  I had been gone a few days.  She greeted me at the door, my week of necessary possessions in brown paper bags in my arms.  I walked into the bedroom that my wife had cleaned for us.  I set the brown pap...

I am writing this as I watch a situation unfolding in Paris where many people have died due to terrorist attacks. The news and controversy we get piped to our living rooms is a cause for despair.  There is only one hope for man, I believe - that each individual person begins to focus on positive action.  Positive action, I believe comes from a well that we need to choose to fill daily with positive input.  I get this positive input from positive news feeds in facebook and from reading scripture and devotionals and from meditation. I have learned through hard lessons, that if I fill myself up with positive news and meditate on positive things in my spiritual life, I do not subject myself to the negative influence of controversy and negativity that pervades our culture and is especially noticeable on facebook.  For me this is a journey and it starts every day with spending time meditating on scripture and the things of God.  I am a Christian and in my...

 When I was a young child, my parents poured endless love into me.  I soaked it up and asked for more and more.  I was an empty vessel asking to be filled. As I grew older, slights from circumstances in my life caused cracks, so that love poured into me would run out.  I looked for love anywhere I could find it, and could never get enough because all that was poured into me, more or less, ran right out. Personally, I looked for approval from my peers.  I had a particular affinity for finding people who would constantly build me up.  This is not a bad thing in itself.  But I began rejecting positive praise - writing it off.  This progressed in my life and I came to a point in my late teens and twenties when I would actually counter positive affirmation with negative thoughts about myself.      This progressed. It wasn't until I found myself heavily addicted to nicotine by the time I was 40 that I began looking for a way out. ...