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Good-Bye Summer, Hello Fall

    God, The Infinite, Potent, Almighty, is referred to as “The Presence” for a reason. The Present is ripe with aliveness and is where God lives. It is as though each moment you and I are living in a rich surprise custom made for each of us. I can relish in this or I can focus instead on the past (how it has been), opinion (how I think it ought to be), or the future (my wants). In doing this, I miss out on this rich, potent moment of what is. I can carry around unresolved energies waiting to be exalted and freed up from stories based upon my perception, based upon my stories. Eeeeek. I find that throughout the year, I stop and do some defragging of my own internal hard drive that I may be more available to experience the inlet and the outlet of God as me. How do I defrag? I look back at the most recent season, summer, and I do a mental review. Where did I see...

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Super Bowl (and a lot more) is In the Air

  Helicopters above my condo woke me up this morning. The Super Bowl is in town changing the way the city and I both operate. Yesterday, my twenty minute drive to the hairdresser was 45 minutes long. Stopped at a light I saw thirty or forty Seahawk fans cross the street. My attention was on one Seahawk fan with this blue 12 t-shirt on signifying he is a fan;  the 12th ingredient to the team’s success. Brown and grey speckled hair, slight belly pouch, surrounded by guy friends; he was carrying a blue and clear plastic purse. A man-bag. No longer metrosexual. Now, practical. I giggled. Once my body rolled from the bed and my feet hit the tiled floor, along with this memory, I hear John 3:16 in my head, “for God so love the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whomever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” Taken literally, this passage is saying God loves me so much he murdered his son so...

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The Eternal, The Changing, and Being Content

I moved to Los Angeles this past week. After twenty years of visits and numerous friendships in this big city, I packed up my belongings for storage, rented out my home in Phoenix, and headed south to Los Angeles. Getting up this morning, like every morning, I begin my spiritual practice with sacred reading. Today I read Emerson’s essay on The Oversoul. The following jumps off the page and enters into my contemplation: We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE. And from his essay Compensation he says: I contrast this to a grouping of articles written in this month’s issue of Vanity Fair reviewing the culture of the past hundred years by decade. In essence, each contributing writer mentioned the good and the bad of the ten year span. Bill Maher said of the 2000’s “We gained Facebook. Like....

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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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Drinking In Emerson

The last two years have been full of taking Emerson breaks.  Not coffee or tea breaks, well maybe those to, but taking time by myself to sit quietly and ingest Ralph Waldo Emerson. My favorite is of his essays is Self Reliance.  Many years ago, maybe ten, I took a trip to Concord Massachusetts and toured Emerson’s home where I touched his black robe when no one was looking.  I am not sure what I expected to happen, it wasn’t like Jesus touching the hem of the woman’s garment, but I touched it none-the-less and for a moment breathed deeply.  In my imagination I was indulging in an energy transfusion. I went on to take a “Transcendentalist Tour” and was the only one who showed up, which meant I had a history professor turned tour guide all to myself.  Did you know the Transcendentalists believe God is an inner experience and connected with through intuition?  This, now, commonly held belief was revolutionary at the time. Concord was a hotbed of...

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