Number Forty One

The storms roll down, washing away what holds us.  What protects us.  Taking the walls and rooms of a world we counted on.  As clouds obscure the sky, storms of the spirit obscure the truth.  Hiding the knowledge that nothing is lost; that the self is constant, never broken.

Damage is an illusion.  The idea of safety or protection is an illusion.  There is nothing to be safe from.  Nothing we need to protect.  It is all safe -- everything we love.

The storm is mere forgetting.  A momentary blindness.  The truth waits, eternal and untouched, until we remember it again.

Number Forty

Everything outside seems dangerous.  The rooms where we feel safe are defined by the familiar, the faces we know.

The people we don't know could do anything, say anything.  We protect ourselves by deciding they are evil.

But the mere thought that there is good and evil creates evil.  Because it is the means by which we separate ourselves from the other.  Reject the other.  Dehumanize the other. Separation -- the delusion that we are not all one -- is what evil is made of.

There is no them.  The room that seemed so small it contained just a single life holds everyone.

Number Thirty Nine

We speak to ourselves like politicians at a rally.  Full of judgments about what's wrong, and demands for action.  Nothing happens.  Nothing changes.

We carry images of the perfect self, what we will never be.  We pretend it's possible, but the ideal becomes less a goal than a source of damage.  A way to dehumanize.  The perfect self is a despot, ready for carnage.  Ready to find failure in every choice.

Seeing the self as it is, flawed, full of pain and the compensations to escape pain, is the only path to something new, and a way to the divine.

Number Thirty Eight

Objects link us to the past.  They are alive with the souls we love.  They let us travel back and forth between here and the time we come from.

The voices of my parents, at the moment of a gift -- this desk -- do not reach here.  There is no way to keep them except through the weight of every object we have in common.

I ask them to come to me -- in the table and the dresser, in the candlesticks and the yellowed papers.  Do I recognize their handwriting -- yes.  Do I see their pain -- yes.

Let me gather these things and live among them.  Quietly.  With love.  So I can hear what they are saying.

Number Thirty Seven

This is the land of zero visibility.  We see only the immediate -- to the next problem, the next solution.  And the moments of struggle and solving spill one into another.  Gathering like a lowland mist that hangs close to the ground and makes it impossible to see in any direction.

The fog of days is made from problems and solutions.  From fixing what is broken in front of us.  And running to the next broken thing, the next remedy.  The fog of days doesn't lift.  It lays in the forks and crossroads, covering all but the next step.

There is no way to see except to climb.  Above the answers and the plans.  Up where there is no next thing.  Where there is only the breath.  Where the hills are rutted with the random paths of animals.  Where the ridges and gullies could lead anywhere.

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.