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.

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.