There is a story I want to tell it well.

I saw a flower growing, it was a tiny sprig,

I reached forth my hand which began to work

on behalf of the flower

so brave was that flower

to even show up in that dry wasteland as a sprig,

now, my hands work joyously

in a garden

as hands that belong to

the source of all flowers of courage

Now you have heard my story I warn you. Do not let your mind turn you down a dark hallway presuming I should take the credit for this garden or you will remain in the dark until you turn around and carefully retrace your steps to where you made that turn. There you will find me. I am the humility in human being whose meekness has inherited Earth. Did you know such wisdom resides in meekness? Once I was in the exact spot to allow a tiny flower to hit me sideways. As I recall it now, I was there as if by accident, but, an accident that seemed to know me better than I know me. In fact, I would say that accident somehow introduced me to myself as I know me to be. I am.

What Separates Us?

Chapter 1

One thing about humans is keeping us apart. It has us thinking we are impotent in the face of those who would divide and dominate us.

A strange tendency, which follows shortly initial incarceration inside a social institution, (a family for instance, a clan, a city, a nation, a school, a ball team, a job, any gang really) is to become a voluntary self jailer who maintains his assigned station as if it were his very own dream. Yet, it is not. We need an alternative way of looking at things.

Oddly, the hook keeping us apart is the strong wish to be a part of something grand. On the surface that seems absurd. The bait we bite on keeps us dreaming of a tomorrow that will never come. Is it a paradox? Maybe. Depends on what that term means to you. What is certain is we seek something we have. When you are in that fix, having already what you desire, but not recognizing that fact, you are at a complete loss to know what to do except to keep looking for it, only harder. Strive! Strive! And since you have it, you will never find it by seeking it and no matter how well intentioned your search nor how desperately one searches life, for you, becomes futile. You know this.

Chapter 2

It happens unseen. It is practically impossible to detect and correct. People become radical slaves to football teams, for example, upon moving a family to a new city where they become devout fans of the one named for the City and buy all the merchandise that the corporate franchise will sell to them that they might feel justified. So clever is the process it is never even mentioned. It appears to be taken for granted. Everybody does it, so the story goes.

I watched a movie in which a family of daughters is being placed with respectable bachelors into marriages they want not to be in as wives who are expected to bear children for a lifetime of service. All the while, in the background, WWII arises, flares, and as it does so, extinguishes the lives of many of the men. In the film nobody winds up happy. And, no one sees that marriages and wars are related. The film suggests to me that one cannot have a war unless one first invents the institution of marriage. With that, someone has a family to protect. Against whom? Others with families to protect? Preposterous! Yet, it is so. Warring populations send children off with bombs and guns to annihilate families in need of protection from them.

Marriage is the name for a certain type of purchase of both parties to it. In fact, all attempts to manufacture a feeling of belonging are always going to be as a practical matter a sellout on both sides. Selling one's integrity is never a good idea. But, what we need is not a program to change or repair systems as we know them into something better. We need an alternative way of looking at the world. Wise men point to a fountain not made by the hands of men, a fountain that those already fastened to social fountains made by men do not see.

People have adopted lifetime careers for themselves from a prepared list handed them like assignments handed to the inmates of a work camp. Once at work, people quickly require of themselves a duty to report on a schedule not their own and to do work they do not like and to do it in ways they are told they are supposed to do it that seem to them corrupted, tainted, dishonest. They buy things advertised to them as appropriate at prices that keep them tied to their posts like helpless, frightened prisoners. Again someone points to the other fountain from which blessings flow freely.

Musicians in a band ride on buses to gigs booked on a schedule prepared by agents who sell tickets expecting band members to show up on time and perform on cue. These same kids never once cleaned their room at home. How quickly they change just to please others who are using them to grow rich themselves with little concern for whether it kills the performers. (Note: These same musicians blame others for the evils of the world in songs they sing on stages all around the world. How strange.)

I heard a world class actress with many awards to her credit tell that she felt her one advantage was that she did not choose her work but it came to her sort of sideways, day after day, year after year. Opportunities appeared which she accepted. She likened it to the common experience of forgetting a name then trying directly to recall it with no success and then giving that approach up to allow the name to quickly and easily appear sideways. That is the fountain! It is not about religion. It is not spiritual. It is practical as dirt is for planting seeds. It is simple truth that the fountain is here.






We do not need advice or counsel or teachers or leaders so much as we need an alternative way of looking at what is actually happening in the world we actually live in. Certainly, we are in need of no bag of beliefs.

Chapter 3

Christ: Do not assume that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.
For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law'.

And, a man's foes will be those of his own household. Matthew 10:34-36

A sword of truth cuts souls free from foolishness and the hypnotic desire for what is just out of reach. Peace is already here. Like a small dove of peace in constant flight you are nobody else. The Kingdom is in your hands. It has always been so.

And when the fact of death stretches forth its hand to where I stand

viewing the last remains of my dearest friend

a captive of love meets a stranger-

and then- myself- and in that meeting- I saw a forsaken man chained in a dungeon

Weird music playing all around our heads that it might strangle wicked demons and free all our friends is bringing an alternative way of looking at the world.

All hate is a misplaced champion of love; and there is naught to defeat; no storm to rise above. No one has taken life; life, it has taken you; all faith is a knowing within, it's true!
Revenge is a two-faced warrior, disgraced; all has been lost in a bloody foot race; but nothing's replaced. It's true!

When hate is restored to the palaces of love
on the back of a fugitive, wing-ed turtle dove
souls come together
where all we thought lost lasts forever.

Dignity, astride a gentle donkey, forfeits the race;
and so shuns every crown tethered athletes chase.

Oh, I am about to gain all from the deep rigors of pain; with the faith of the laboring mother who strains...and,
who, holding a stillborn trophy, her primary memory hard rain,
knows a love that remains as a death not in vain as she feels in a secret which blows through her ear; this one, gone before it began, came as a mirr'r.

What's all this talk

in religious or spiritual language? I do not trust lingo that presumes in advance I agree it has meaning.

Its direction seems always to be pointing out that I should be more than I am. I suspect it is the language of people who are sure of themselves and who want something. If the only purpose of it is to lure minds into a nonexistent world of imagination and belief I am not interested. I have been there. I consider myself fortunate, blessed even, to have escaped such nonsense with my life. Perhaps the allure of all that language to a human being is a promise someday things will change and I will understand. But if it cannot deliver the goods, what then? It has been spoken and written for a very long time without those hoped for results materializing. For many the promise is all about a life after death. What about now? I am alive. I yearn. Somebody said, life has no purpose, make one up. That makes no sense. Purpose by definition, cannot be falsified. Has anybody here seen dignity? Bob?

I choose one term out of the bag of words with either no meaning or 1000 meanings, take your pick. The same. The word I choose is soul. I will look for mine. When I find it, I will say, Oh, there you are. And caress it and in that caress give myself to it where I find it and be done with all else that is not it.

I look for what in me is restless, discontent. What I find I will console and make content, or die in the attempt. I seek something or someone who has been rejected, left out, abandoned. I need some realization not some pacifier. It is not in the word soul I will find it. I seek to know me as I am where I am in the situation I find myself to be doing what I am doing with my chance called life. I want the truth of it.

In that yearning I sense what is stirring me to seek it. It is not too late. Nor is it too soon.

The Gift of a Restless Soul, the wanderer


Everybody, everybody has a restless soul 
How do I know?
My soul. 

It says, I was restless until you found me where I was and for the first time did not expect me to go where you wanted me to go and I appreciated that more than words can tell. And, in that deep and silent appreciation, lies my contentment. And our nobility.

This is not a one shot deal, though, a soul 
can be counted on to grow restless
as life unfolds. It is the nature
and you will be vexed
until you remember 
again and again
what is to be done.

The heartfelt singer (he may not even know one right chord) sings only for one reason

to find some place (where that feels like home)

-where his heart beats as it should-

where both lungs breathe as they should

where both feet stand where they should

is betting the farm on the last hope to be found in a voice that comes round
just before one leaves town and it told him the profound is not to be found
on stages the world round but at the silent defeat of a small naked clown
that's a deafening applause sounds have no power to magnify or compound 

and it comes from the place where the sky meets the ground
which opens as a home for the Sun going down,
a splendid reminder, be me, as I am

Everybody, everybody lives inside a perfect body-

how do I know?

I have hated mine so often and have abused it very badly and still

when I am wholly one within it as I am at this sweet moment who I am now knows

all about doubt free dancing in a sea of all-consuming presence and the outline of my skin shell swells as a band of light dances around its perim

eter into an an ever-broadening awareness

a thousand light years into the heavens brandished ever more outward and waving in a musical extravaganza that takes me with it on its mission soaring forth a once forsaken now a passenger of some secret capsule sent to God

courtesy rocket fuel engendered by a spotlighted brave and oh, so fragile human singer and a song

where I remain for half a moment seeming to last forever spellbound in the Presence while an unseen kindness fills my lungs with sparklers

(hush) from within this magic body

Everybody, everybody lives inside a perfect body

how do I know?

When I let go-

and when will I choose to remain inside this knowledge as one would who walks always a starry pathway across all strata of being in perfection glorified, yielding, weightless, flawless, and unburdened?

What can force one who has seen the Face to return to the imperfect body of the burdened fellow? I hear a voice saying, it's up to you now.

Everybody, everybody lives inside a perfect body,

and we know It!

The Nature Of What Is Happening

Frequently is heard, Why does God permit such atrocities?

Such thought arises is in a complete misunderstanding of what is happening. Something we had has been forgotten. We forget. Human beings forget. How? We become fascinated with what we are told we do not have but ought to have. Really, then, it is not so much a forgetting of truth as it is a foolish remembrance of what is not happening. In discomfort and confusion you are surely going to overlook what you have.

When you have forgotten the meanings behind the different clouds speaking in a language you once understood in the skyway you are hopelessly lost. You will not prepare for what is coming. God is speaking, we are ignorant and thus no longer listening. That is what is happening.

Someone blames God. Someone thinks God is cursing us and proposes to make sacrificial offerings to appease an angry Creator. But someone looks to the sky and foretells, Tomorrow is going to be a good day for fishing. (The Old Man and The Sea, a movie based on a novel by Ernest Hemingway.)

We might concern ourselves mutually with the question, Can I learn to remember? Regain what I had? Clouds remain. Interested? If something stirred in you, pay attention. Next day, remember. Pay attention. Keep it up. You will be aided from countless resources you did not know were available.