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Designing Your Own Memorial Service

I was 19, maybe 20 years old sitting in my college classroom following the instructions of my professor. “Write down the names of the three people you love the most on the three slips of paper in front of you.” I write down “dad,” “sister,” and “best friend.” Then we are to pass the paper to the front of the room. The teacher proceeds to burn the papers and tell us that our most beloved have died. I couldn’t and wouldn’t let go. I was angry. I hated this exercise. I was only 19 and hadn’t yet experienced the death of my beloved grandmother, let alone two generations younger. I wasn’t prepared for this exercise. This was part of my intense class on Death and Dying. Fifty hours in the study of death, grief, and cultural services to honor those who pass. Our next exercise would be to plan our own memorial service. We were to chart it out. Where would we hold it? I decided on the Episcopal...

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God Wants me to Party

  My sweetheart and I have plane tickets to go to Bali. Yesterday we learned the island is being evacuated because of volcanic seismic activity. We’re thinking about changing our plans. On the news this morning the focus is Puerto Rico with the residents without water, electricity, and food. The newspaper still covers the last two hurricanes which reeked havoc in our country. As I sit here today feeling concerned over our president’s mental health and what looks like lack of stability; I get quiet and pray. I ask my Self what I can do in the world and for the world. Then I am reminded … Everything is God! Everything is Go(o)d. Another name for God is Good; or That Which is Good.I inhale and exhaled this realization. Everywhere I go God is. Everyone I see is a manifest form of God (whether they have awoken to this or not). The disturbance is in my mind reflected upon the world. It is my insides that are being called to...

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Until It’s Done: Celebrating a Big Completion

I pinch myself giggling. Close to twenty years of holding an idea and deepening into it, and two years of dedicated writing and rewriting, my book A Year of Go(o)d: Daily Lessons for the Mystic in Training is written, re-written, edited, re-written, published, and now available for sale. Pinch, pinch, pinch, pinch. Giggle, giggle, giggle. I stop, take a big deep breath, send an email to each of my friends, and celebrate this moment. It’s a big deal and I acknowledge it to myself. Until it’s done, was my mantra with this book. First came the idea. I was in a class studying the roots of the New Thought philosophy in the mid-1990s. I read Self Reliance by Emerson and felt like I was known. I read Judge Thomas Troward’s Edinburgh Lectures and had dreams of energy spirals, experiencing expansion and illumination. Then, I got to Emma Curtis Hopkins work and my body tingled, trembled, and experienced a cellular shift which I couldn’t ignore. Many in my class dismissed...

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Election Results, Rape, and Other Stuff

Tuesday night I sat in my family room, herbal tea in hand, in my pajamas and wrapped in a blanket awaiting election results. With my cell phone on the coffee table in front of me ready to text friends, I imagined it would be a long night and I possibly wouldn’t know election results until the morning. And then it happened fast. I watched MSNBC for results out of my respect for Rev. Al Sharpton. In 2008 I attended a friend’s Baptist church in downtown Los Angeles to hear the Reverend speak. I sat in the front row, the only white person in the holy house, and I rested upon every word he said. His sermon was the best I’d heard up at that point in my life, which was impressive as I had listened to thousands of talks. Since that moment, I seek him out to hear how he puts language together, uses metaphor, tells stories, inspires, and speaks raw truth as he knows it. However, there was...

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