Number Thirty Six

The angels sit in doorways asking for change.  If encouraged, they tell the truth.  They're waiting to show us the pain we're afraid to see, the pain which connects us.

While the angels sleep, everything they have is taken.  What they keep is their hope to be seen.  Recognized.  They die of exposure to our illusion that we're alone.  Yet all they were here to do is teach us -- that we are all drawing from the same breath.

Number Thirty Five

The truth waits to become action.

It cannot be found in going back to the beginning.  Or the last thought.  The truth cannot be found in the familiar rooms of a house, or the emotion as the sun throws shadows at dusk.

The truth waits to become action.  It is not the certainty.  Not the righteousness or the anger.  It is not the word of god.

The truth is the embrace.  Without need or expectation.  Without hope.  Without response.  Without anything.

Number Thirty Four

Here in the darkest regions, where we can't know the truth, we sense a weight and power that cannot be contained by language.  Or thought.  Something transmitted by light.  But beyond the threshold of ordinary vision.

The galaxies emit that light, a visual echo of the big bang.  The light at the beginning, the first willed explosion, suggests the source.  As the universe expands, each galaxy more and more alone, the light speaks with less clarity.  Less remembrance.

The rock we live on flies further and further from the truth.  No telescope can find the source.  It is too late; we are too far away.  We are alone.

And all that is left is the next choice; the next act of will.  Out here in the night we look for the truth that comes from doing or not doing.  As if the light, the source, can be seen somehow in every intention.  Every act.

Number Thirty Three

The angels wait for us to listen, for the moment we are ready.  They are the teachers among us.  We are deaf with pain.  They tell the story of where we come from; what we're here to do.  We tell the story of how we were broken.

We make pictures of angels -- tall with alabaster wings.  We give them roles -- the angel of death, the angel at the gate.  But they are just us, survivors of birth and loss, coming to work at this difficult school.  With children who will not sit still, who run through the halls.

In the way we seek to be heard, they seek to be heard.  In the ways we watch helplessly while ones we love devolve, collapse, they watch us go blithely on.  Consumed with the illusion; fixing, fixing, fixing what has no remedy.

Number Thirty Two

Our will is fragile.  It resists facing pain.  The will wants relief, satience.  It tends to seek what's immediate; within reach.

Two things strengthen the will: clarity about what is good, and willingness to have pain for the sake of what is good.

True choice grows from holding an enduring image of our highest value.  Even in pain.  Even when afraid.

True choice comes from making friends with pain, knowing it will show up with each real step in the direction of what matters.

Number Thirty One

Time is loss.  Grief depends on believing we can keep what we have; on believing that we have anything.  We lose everything.  Threaded into the weave of love is losing everything.  In time.  Love holds what has been, what will be taken.

Number Thirty

What is the truth?  Each of us holds a piece of the truth.  And although the "truth" of two people may seem to contradict, it is usually a dialectic.  And each truth becomes a surveyor's stake that we sight along, to see at a distance where the lines intersect.  And where they intersect is a gathering of all human awareness, a place where the truth of each individual experience becomes a wellspring.  Where it is becoming god.