Uncategorized | Bonnie Barnard - Part 3

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The Reasons I Love You

Friday evening I attended a memorial service for a man who loved greatly while he was on this planet, and as a result had approximately 500 people show up for a service that lasted over two hours. His god daughter was one of the speakers who had written a letter/poem for her adopted father-figure entitled “The Reasons I Love You.” Her list included the slumber parties he and his wife hosted at their home for her, the game nights and gatherings, the teaching of principles and more. As she read her list I wanted to compile a list for everyone I love. What a beautiful way to honor oneself and the other person; both. Love is another name for God. It is the Ever-Present, Never-Exhaustible, energy of witnessing and appreciating the Only Thing that Is. As today is Father’s Day and my dad is no longer on the planet in physical form, I get the pleasure of connecting with him in the Invisible. Sometimes I experience my dad by...

Inspiration on a Hotel Bathroom Wall

In early metaphysics there is much written about Truth (with a capital T) as being a healing and restorative balm. The idea of affirmations and denials came out of the concept of speaking that which is Eternally True to the thoughts within your mind that are temporary and will not sustain themselves. For example. I am love (affirmation), hate is NOT who I am (denial). So, it was kind of fun to walk into a public bathroom in Port Townsend Washington to find a Truth to the right of the toilet paper…You are enough. When I arrived for my writing retreat, at the SeaTac airport, just outside of the terminal was a garbage can with a rock on top of it. It also brought a smile to my face … a dose of sanity in the midst of travel chaos. I pondered the most, though, at a framed print inside of my bathroom at Suncadia. There was a bicycle with the wording “Follow the Path of Life.” This...

Do Unto Others …

You know the saying, “do unto others as you would have them (or like them) to do unto you.” It catches my attention when “themes show up” for me. I have always been a big Starbucks and Howard Schultz fan and for about a decade now he has wanted to be a place for the country to have a deeper conversation about race. In 2015 Schultz initiated a “Race Together” campaign by printing “Race Together” on the cups with the intent of starting a race conversation between customers and staff. This conversation never really got started, and the backlash was HUGE. It turns out people didn’t want to have a deep conversation when they were grabbing their cup of joe. Fast forward three years and the conversation is now happening, but in a different way. A Starbucks employee called the police on two black men in one of their stores as they were sitting waiting for a friend before they ordered their coffee. Considered loiterers, they were...

A Playful Way out of a Rut

Every morning after I journal and before I meditate I read a sacred text. This morning I pulled from my bookcase a text that is sacred in its own way. It is a thin book written in 1960 by the writer Henry Miller entitled To Paint is to Love Again. “To paint is to love again. It’s only when we look with eyes of love that we see as the painter sees. He is in a love, moreover, which is free of possessiveness. What the painter sees he is duty bound to share. Usually he makes us see and feel what ordinarily we ignore or are immune to. It’s manner of approaching what the world tells us, in effect that nothing is vile or hideous, nothing is stale, flat and unpalatable unless it be our own power of vision. To see is not merely to look. One must look-see. See into and around.” Miller wrote as his profession and when he got stuck, he’d paint. Painting, though, wasn’t just...

Gobbling Up Books

The first week of January ImpulsUS Community has placed attention upon clearing, cleaning, and listening in order to receive one’s own unique theme for 2016. There is no right and wrong to theme receiving. Mine comes through a series of insights and revelations. Drops and dribbles. As a community, though, we are making our insights and revelations welcome. We can’t force them to show up, but we can woo them through our availability and attentiveness. So, we do. Part of that process for us, included a week long media/entertainment fast. For me this meant no television, internet shows (which I love to binge watch), movies, or news in any form unless it makes it way to me. And, if it is important, it always does. This practice has given me back my evenings. Now I go out of the condo (YES, and part of my 2016 theme), reach out to friends, and I read. And, I mean gobble, devour, and consume. And, the reading is not entertainment or distraction, it...

Re-learning to Say NO

Something unconscious happened on my way to becoming the spiritual leader of the new community ImpulsUS. I dressed my God-loving Self the “role” of minister/leader and then began to struggle with the role. In this struggle, my no’s and yes’ became garbled and I caught myself up in a web of confusion. It went something like this. I stepped into a Divine Idea that includes the forming of community. As a spiritual being; I know that I become a welcome space for that which resonates to show up; and that which doesn’t either doesn’t arise or does then falls away. It is simple. In addition, my commitment to the vision is to maintain my daily spiritual practice, develop the curriculum and tone for the community, lead classes and speak on the weekend. Then … I began to get social requests from the people showing up within the community (which, by the way, are people I deeply admire and love). I was asked to lunches, luncheons, dinners, game nights, karaoke, private phone conversations, coffee, walks, other...