Number Twenty Nine

From hope is born the images of a life between lives.  The gates, the gardens, the hall of judgment.  Roman columns grace facades lost in the clouds.  All lovely.  All wrong.  A physical mind invents physical forms .

Hope looks for the familiar landscape, a place made from vacation post cards.  Mediums send greetings from the dead.  We seek angels who will guide us to the face of god.

But god is busy.  And when we get there, the scene is whatever we make up.  The only thing real is the soul itself.  Which holds some sense of the divine, and must wait for love to set in.  For the truth to dawn above the delusion of each abandoned life. 

In this world, hope is not some imagined heaven.  It is the sense of our purpose, the drive to uncover the plan we came with, the moment when the thing we have waited to do presents itself -- and we look for the strength to act.

The next life arrives in whatever form.  True and unimaginable.  At the last station, the landscape is strange but familiar, a home we cannot remember.  It doesn't matter.  Hope is for this world -- that of all possible roads, we take the one we'd already chosen.

Number Twenty Eight

The circus closes.  The great tent is taken down and just the field is left.  Time stops out where the grass is bent and walked upon.

Just the field is left -- a space between each possible world, where time waits for the next show to arrive.  Waiting for the barker, clowns, and roustabouts.

When the show starts, performers say their lines and prance across the ring.  Then time begins again -- holding all that was ever said or done.

Number Twenty Seven

The relentless light arrives.  There's no thought, no awareness that isn't touched by it.  Quite suddenly the lie of time is gone.  Before and after is gone.  The reasons are gone.

There are only the choices.  All now; all forever.  Each choice shines in the light.  Like a house on the plain -- individual and yet connected to every other house.

The light shows the choice for what it is -- something that cannot be taken back.  Something that lives.  Something that pushes every other soul -- somewhere.

In the house on the plain one thing happens that pushes the whole world together or farther apart.

Number Twenty Six

We travel to see something new.  But every moment is new.  We travel to be in the moment, to see it finally for what it is: the creation.

Choice is what creates the soul, how it evolves.  But the choice in every moment is gone with that moment.  The choice unseen is always lost.

We travel thinking that only in a foreign place will something new exist.  But it is there when we are dropping off the dog, packing, waiting for the taxi.  It's in that moment, the moment which is creating us.

Number Twenty Five

There is nothing done to us.  There is nothing taken, nothing broken, nothing stained.  What happens, no matter how sad or painful, is just the color, the motif of this moment in life.  The moment has its purpose, what long ago we agreed to, what we needed to fully use our days.

There is nothing done to us that wasn't necessary for the lesson we came to learn.  The life we had planned or wanted is no more than a source of necessary disappointment.  The love we expected, looked for , becomes no more than a turn down some empty road, weeds and branches choking the way.

In the darkness, the place we never thought we'd arrive comes like a sudden warning, like a dog barking in a lonely farmyard. The place feels wrong, as if we were the victim of something.  But despite its strangeness, it was our own plan.  It is what we needed to know, to feel, to embrace.

Number Twenty Four

The left hand doesn't know the right hand.  The conscious mind doesn't remember what the unconscious holds.  All around the voices of the dead are speaking.  But we are afraid because it's considered madness to listen.

On the right side of the brain we listen -- because that's where we intuit; know wisdom.  On the left side we make up the story of being alone.  Invisible.  With no destination.

Our hands join in prayer.  But the prayer is speaking without listening.  And god doesn't know us.  Only the souls who love us do.  The mind finds words for love.  Describing it.  Seeking the beauty of being known, accepted.  But we remain deaf to the chorus that bathes us.  Holds us.  Takes each step with us.

Number Twenty Three

Something breaks.  The feelings we've kept hidden flood across our lives.  And the pain gathered from every loss rises; becomes a shout.

This is the way pain works: whatever pain has been disowned, closeted, will finally knock down doors.  Then, in the mind's last try for control, the judgments come.  Someone is responsible, someone has done wrong, someone caused this suffering.  So pain becomes anger.

Still resisted, still disowned the pain is first turned on what we hate and finally what we love. This is how things fall apart.