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.

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.