LITTLE MIRACLES BEGET LOVE AND LAUGHTER

The following is straight from my journal that I wrote at 6:00 AM today:

I will go before you and make the crooked places straight -- Isaiah 45:2

"He doesn't stop me from my rues, regrets and remorses, he smoothes their effects on others and/or on me...showing me why I invited them so I can let them go. 

"Example: Yesterday at the memorial, Mortimore and I were saying how great each other looks now, all these years later. I wound up by jokingly saying that we can quit lying to each other now. By his startled look, I later realized he must've thought I was serious, that I don't think he looks all that good. I do regret that. 

"Lesson a-learning: By saying and seeing, I realize that I do that a lot, and probably offend without realizing it. Blinding flash of new thought: God has already remedied it. I just need to bear his remedy in mind to let my behavior be changed." 

Less than one minute later, I began reading Rohr's Meditation. The following is the first thing I read,  and I quote directly: 

Richard Rohr honors how painful transformation can be and reminds us to be patient with ourselves and the process: The word change normally refers to new beginnings. But the mystery of transformation more often happens not when something new begins, but when something old falls apart.

Spiritual transformation always includes a disconcerting reorientation....Change happens, but transformation is always a process of letting go, and living in the confusing, shadowy, transitional space for a while. Eventually, we are spit up on a new and unexpected shore. 

I was...still am...utterly astounded. That is immediately answered prayer...prayer that was still in regret form. Without that inner awakening, chances are I would even now be beating me up for hurting another albeit inadvertently.

Little miracles birth our inner changes that show forth with love and laughter.

Thank you.

LIFE ITSELF IS SPIRITUAL IN NATURE

 Blinding flash of the obvious: Just because we don't feel it, doesn't mean we don't have it.

The block we build on...the angels' wings that lift us up deeper...is that fleeting thought, akin to Holy  Writ: Not feeling God in our belly does not mean there is no God. 

Maybe that was the beginning of understanding this life, lived in God's mirror image. Truth begins to gel with the realization that life itself is spiritual in nature. 

Looking back, we recognize God was...is...always present, but until we were opened to God, we could not believe. Could not believe that opening to God would come by way of our reasoning mind's unanswered prayer...i.e., necessary suffering. 

We pray not to be the way we are, and discover that the way we are is God's will, God's way. 

All our rues, regrets and remorses are God's slivers of gold, leading us back to God...which explains why love and laughter are the always answer.

Thank you.

ON EARNING OUR GOD-FOCUS

We hear often that to be in the world but not of it is the epitome of grace. We do not doubt it, but doing it is a whole 'nother story. 

We're finding that it's all about detaching which has no inborn gene. Learning to trust God and doing better than we want to when we're not feeling it is detachment's starter course. 

My spiritual awakening began when I saw, realized and accepted that I am a good and decent person...with enough mud on my tires to earn my God focus. 

What an eye-opener...all of our rues, regrets and remorses are God's slivers of gold that led us out of self-absorption into an unselfconscious care and concern for others.   

Backing off of our eyebrows-up idea of goodness with its unreachable demands allowed us to hear the inner voice with its occasional atta girl!  There it is...humble awe.

In learning this detached way, a word of warning comes from James Finley, a teacher at Fr Richard Rohr's Center, who nailed it when he said, We have to be very careful not to become attached to the goal of becoming detached!

Our human condition all but guarantees we will sail too close to attaching. In that regard, Fr Richard's words show us the way: We don't get to God by doing it right, we get to God by doing it wrong. 

Thank you.

TO BECOME SMALLER, LESS FILLED WITH SELF

...detachment sounds like losing, but...it’s the part of us that is Love, and all we have to do is let go and fall into it. It’s already there. -- Fr Richard Rohr, Daily Meditation, April 27, 2023

I feel like I've hit the spiritual Bingo. This was my yesterday's blinding flash: I already have within me that which I am seeking. Again, our blinding flashes validated are gifts of gold. 

We are aware that, eyebrows up, we have been thinking, saying, writing those very words for some time now. Ah, but yesterday they presented themselves without pre-thought or preplanning. In an aura of Love, we realized Fr Richard's words of detachment...we let go and fall into it. 

We're on the way toward understanding our previous thinking was necessary prep for our deeper journey higher. The way toward that understanding is paved with thoughts of What to do? How to do it? 

There's our proof: Not knowing aborning as Unknowing...we are doing it right.

We are not fully there yet. Wait...we are fully there, have ever been fully there. It is our material mind that is still processing the gift of detaching. 

All our "right" words are giving over, giving up, giving in, and we are growing into Truth: We cannot search for what we already have. We cannot talk God into coming “to” us by longer and more urgent prayers. All we can do is become quieter, smaller, and less filled with our own self and our constant flurry of ideas and feelings. (Ibid.)

Thank you.

THE QUIETUDE OF GOD'S LOVE

The Desert Fathers and Mothers understood detachment as the practice of letting go of everything that draws us away from God....Concern for reputation was discarded. -- Fr Richard's Daily Meditation, April 25, 2023

Reputation. There...the root of our angst. What did I look like? What did I sound like? What did s/he/they think of me when I whateverwhateverwhatever? 

Until we inner know Self acceptance, self-acceptance is going to be based on concern for others' opinions about us...or more honestly our interpretation of others' opinions about us. 

The mare's nest is in our misdirected focus...out rather than in. 

Hard lesson to learn...then to remember...others' opinions...good or not so good...are of no matter to us. The answer to all life's problems is within, in our heart, our Soul. It is not reachable by thought alone.  

The answer, then, is self-acceptance. Transmuted. From self to Self. 

Acceptance of Self encompasses others...all others. No longer is there angst because Sally said or Billy did or Mom never or, or, or. There is only the quietude of God's love...calm exhilaration...with the occasional speed bump of humility. 

Thank you. 

MISSTEPS IN PROVING TRUTH...LOVE & LAUGH

It is not the state of the world today, it is not a possible diagnosis of Stage 4 cancer, it is not our best friend's sudden and wholly unexpected death, it is not the broken fingernail...it is us. Pogo was right. -- from a long-ago Ari of Aslan post. 

In owning that fact, that it is us that is our problem, the thought flashes that the accepted fact that I am the source of all my woes is now mine to prove. 

We have a decision to make...to choose our proof spiritually, with love and laughter, or materially, still seriously trying to figure it out. We realize there is no decision to make...go with self and delay the inevitable...God's will, God's way. Go with God and the inevitable, God's will, God's way, comes in our time. 

We commit to live, breathe and welcome the rough and rutted road under our feet now, walking it with a welcoming attitude, thank you not just on our lips but from our innermost being...with naught but Yes! guiding us...and knowing full well we will stumble, bumble and fail repeatedly if we're doing it right.  

Ours is to seek to do God's will, God's way, in God's perfect time...failing, flailing, loving and laughing and sharing with others our seemingly upside-down journey.

Resist not evil...love, laugh and be free. 

Thank you.

THE GIFT OF UNKNOWING, II

[The following is a reprint of my post of December 31, 2015.]

The more we know, the more we know we don't know...reasoning mind weeps, Spirit exults.

Thank you.

GOD'S WILL, GOD'S WAY, GOD'S TIME

There is a great truth in Fr Richard's Daily Meditation today; namely, All great spirituality is about letting go....True spirituality echoes the paradox of life itself.  

The paradox of life itself, to me, came to me with the realization that there are two ways of seeing everything...materially or spiritually. Materially we are self centered; spiritually we are Self centered. 

Being self centered is focused outward. It is not that we are wholly egotistical, or do not think at all about the well-being of others...no. It is that our mind is centered on the care and feeding, the safety and security, of our own self...others are side effects and get our attention, but peripherally.

Being Self centered is focused inward...on the higher Power within from which flows all good...no matter how life events look to us arriving. The less-than-wonderful turns out to be our pearl beyond price...purely by way of thank you...God's will, God's way, God's time. 

It is what we do in the meantime...when the less-than-wonderful is taking its turn around our life. We make ourself available to others...the care and feeding of those in need, of animals in the street, of the sick, the lame, the elderly...the young. 

The secret to "we make ourself available" is in our mindset, not in doing by overdoing. 

We sit and wait on the Lord...by staying our mind on the higher Power within. The door is opening to intuition and inspiration. Not fathomable but true, one inspired thought comes and the act is done with the thought. We are moved on and fully realize only later...as we look back...how perfectly the less-than-wonderful worked out.

Living a self centered life is living to get; living an other-centered life is living to give...and brings us love and laughter. 

Thank you.

WHEN WILL WE EVER LEARN?

If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.— woman cabdriver to Florynce Kennedy and Gloria Steinem, 1971

Free-flowing thoughts: 

If men could get pregnant, war would cease to be The Answer.

If men could get pregnant, contraception would be available in churches...and free.

If men could get pregnant, they'd be the better for it.

If men could get pregnant, grateful women would fetch them their dill pickles and ice cream.

God knew better...men cannot get pregnant, they impregnate. Ponder that when looking for someone to punish.

Thank you.

MOURNING...WITH HOPE IN OUR HEART

To mourn is to speak that truth to the lies that prop up the denial on which the status quo depends.….Mourning together, in true solidarity, we name the truth of what’s wrong. And in so doing, we begin to make it right. -- Ecologist and pastor Andi Lloyd, Daily Meditation, April 21, 2023

Thoughts of mine from April 10, 2023: This unknowing state I am in now...I wonder if it isn't grief. Not just grief for the deaths of Uncle Charlie and of Paul so long ago, but grief for my unknowing...of being "sheltered" from the fact of death.

The following answered prayer then came to my hand...and I am grateful: 

[We]

can only pray
that this waiting
might yet be a blessing
and this grieving
yet a blessing
and this stone
yet a blessing
and this silence
yet a blessing
still.
-- “Therefore I Will Hope” © Jan Richardson

Thank you.

THE GREAT RISK...TO GO BEYOND REASON, II

[The following is a reworked reprint of my post of  October 19, 2017.]

It is impossible to describe spiritual growth, or, who's kidding whom, God. Yet, if we don't try, we die. Only our ego will live on, gaining strength through fear...and a fearful ego is death to the peace, love and joy that is already ours.

It is counterintuitive but we grow spiritually stronger by giving in, detaching from, ever seeking to be smaller never larger.

Our reasoning mind fears that is growing us weaker, is being conquered by our (imagined) enemies, is never getting our own. "Our own," of course, is exactly what we need give up, detach from...loose it and let it go. "Our own" is our ego's feedbag

Still more spiritual growth does not come by way of thinking about it. Paradox alert! We must think on it in order to realize that thinking is not the answer. The answer is earned trust. That's how we get that two-ton mental door to our Soul opened. Opened to the fourth dimension. Opened in order for a Higher Power to flow forth.

It is living that earned trust that lifts us to the place where God lives our life. The great, gettin' up morning is when we realize that God has ever lived our life. In our inability to see or to touch that Higher Power our reasoning mind will ever balk at believing.

That is the great risk...living our earned trust. Ah, we must go beyond reason to Love. 

Thank you.

FEAR IS GOD CALLING---THY WILL, THY WAY

Our hope of Heaven is birthed in an instant...whether we know it in that instant or not. In truth, that hope is often disguised as crash-and-burn, as Oh, No!  

The instant our minds are changed from fighting the feelings of alone and afraid and unaided and believing our security is in fighting that fear, to our surrender of the fight to a Power greater than our self...then, then we are home. 

By that surrender we cease fighting, we resist not; only then can we be embraced by God's will, God's way. 

Our deepest fear is God's gold...for nothing turns us to God faster than fear. 

Thank you.

TO SEEK GOD IS TO BE FOUND BY GOD

Blinding flash of the obvious: Spiritual growth seems difficult because to 'win' we must 'lose' --- our egoic mind resists losing, our spiritual mind knows naught of winning.

Looking back, it seems to me that all the spiritual books, articles, tracts and the like that have spoken to me have one theme...to surrender our momentary wants in exchange for the forever peace that passes understanding. 

Face it, to the egoic mind "the peace that passes understanding" has no high dollar value...no dollar value at all!..cannot be bartered or paraded for all the world to admire or warm us on a cold night. Whoa! Isn't that asking us to lose our wants to get what may be just another want? Or possibly a figment of our imagination?   

Then one fine day in a flash or a crash...after years of slowly learning...we realize that to honor, to respect, the other, whomever they may be, opens us to the love of our Father within. 

The love which is of God is born within us, is ever present, silent and seemingly stationary. Then comes the change, usually via our own crash-and-burn, and we accept the loss of our want, the self-determined objective. Slowly we are peaced through that loss, winning love and laughter, God's will, God's way.

Our life is changed...we can only realize how completely it is changed when we look back over the years. We recognize our original rues, regrets and remorses, that the humility of love and laughter has transformed them, and we begin to grow our wings, self-respect.   

We know joy complete when we recognize resist not evil as the source of our giving over, giving up, giving in to the person, act or memory that we prayed God would kill. God's always better idea was to replace our resistance with respect.

We now respect that hated person, act or memory for without that one we would never have sought God so diligently, urgently, unceasingly...to be found by him so readily.  

 

To surrender our momentary wants in exchange for the forever peace that passes understanding is to resist not evil for there is God.

Thank you.

THERE'S A NEW STAR IN HEAVEN TONIGHT

This morning we remember our beloved Jeff who has now left this world. 

Here are my imaginings of Jeff in Heaven: 

All our friends who have gone before are at the Gates to high-five him and welcome him home. 

Laughing and scratching, he starts walking across Heaven with all his favorite pets or any other animal or friend who chooses to share the stroll. 

He finds the seat that's been saved for him and gratefully shares his peace. He is at home in love and laughter.

That's my high hope for Jeff in Heaven, but we know it is way better than that. We cannot fully picture Jeff's glory now, but we can hug him and kiss him and let him go...and try not to be envious. Gratitude works.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. -- Matthew 5:4

Thank you.

GOING DEEPER TO A HIGHER CONSCIOUSNESS

When you and I embrace the essential paradox—that to lose is to gain and to die is to live—we come to God, who gathers up the broken pieces of the world and makes them more complete and beautiful than they were before they broke. —Rachel M. Srubas

There are no "mixed" messages when one has made a decision to have but one message, and that message is love. Looking back we realize the gift of our decision is to release the spiritual love...ours before conception...that resides not in our head but our heart.  

Our life now is to act on our shaky conviction that there are no mixed messages with love. Good news, not good news, others' response to us...even no response...we meet with our newly discovered love.

Blinding flash of the obvious: The reasoning mind will always oppose the spiritual mind. The spiritual mind will always embrace the reasoning mind...as it makes its way deeper to higher consciousness. 

Thank you.

RADICAL ACCEPTANCE...GOD'S WILL, GOD'S WAY

We absolutely need conflicts, moral failures, defeats to our grandiosity, even seeming enemies. These are necessary mirrors, or we will have no way to ever spot our shadow self. -- Fr Richard Rohr, Daily Meditation, November 24, 2021

These "necessary mirrors" are the very "defects of character" that we pray will be lifted out of us.

God's answered prayer changes us not the conflict we perceive but the conflict within us. Resistance to the enemy is resistance to our own self. 

Love, hate, fear...love of hate and fear...transformed for the glory of Self, accepted. This then is self-acceptance transmuted into acceptance of Self...Love and Laughter. 

Thank you.

THE ENEMY WITHIN IS THE ENEMY WITHOUT, II

[The following is a reprint of my post of October 14, 2012, slightly reworked.]

So the [Seeker], too, belongs not in the seclusion of a cloistered life but in the thick of foes. And The Kingdom is to be in the midst of your enemies. -- "Life Together," Dietrich Bonhoeffer, at p. 17.

It seems that most everything that is true is a paradox...on its face, it does not make sense, yet meditate on it, and it becomes clear.

I have ever been taken with the 23rd Psalm...in particular, "Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies." Whose reasoning mind would think that's a good idea? And yet, what better way to walk free of our enemies than by sitting down to, literally or metaphorically, break bread with them?

It seems to me that, in the end, and after trying everything else possible, the path to peace is quite simply the overcoming of self, or, ego reduction in depth. 

There is no more lasting way to that end than making peace with our enemies, our enemies within and without...for there are no enemies without that do not originate within.

Thank you.

ON MELDING INTO SPIRITUAL

Recently, the word I have been hearing...a lot...is, Sit and wait on the Lord.

Well, now. Clearly, my take on sit and wait on the Lord needed to be expanded way deeper. 

I finally Googled that phrase and found Psalm 27:14:  Wait on the LORD: Be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart: Wait, I say, on the LORD

I am experiencing a spiritual peace even as I am actively making changes in my walking-around world...where Just Do It is working even as yet I have no idea of the results of my changes. Until shown better, I am letting this be the melding of the material mind into the spiritual.

To me, this all boils down to trust. Trusting God lets the material me tend to earthly business; the spiritual I Am is the Spirit’s work. 

My lack of concern or undue curiosity about the results is evidence of God's will, God's way. That is proof enough that God is on the job.

Thank you.

THE PEARL IS IN OUR IMPERFECTION

Thank You that I am an imperfect instrument of Thy peace -- my every-morning prayer to the God of my own understanding. 

The "imperfect instrument" is our material self that ensures that we need always seek.

"Thy peace" is the pearl of great price, the promise that as we seek ever higher we know love more deeply.

When we have exhausted our store of endurance,  

When our strength has failed ere the day is half done, 
When we reach the end of our hoarded resources, 
Our Father’s full giving is only begun. 
-- Howard Thurman, Meditations of the Heart

Thank you.

RAISED CONSCIOUSNESS IS EVER DEEPER

I awoke this morning with a flash of feels-like truth: The less I am mentally 'connected' with the material world...feeling inept, unsocialized, all alone...the deeper I am being raised in consciousness. 

In my quiet time later, I read Fr Richard's Daily Meditation where I found theologian Beatrice Bruteau has written: We are looking now from a point of view that is rooted in our sense of our own reality in God.

Answered prayer...God's will, God's way.

Thank you.

LOVE AND LAUGH...AND DANCE IF YOU WANT TO

But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil.... -- Matthew 5:39 

According to me, it is a given that the Sermon on the Mount defies reason. There are, however, three words in the Sermon that take that defiance of reason to the outside of enough. Those three words...resist not evil.

I had to study those three words, resist not evil, until I got it. It was not easy, and it took as long as it took...in fact, until they owned me. Until my reasoning mind gave up the ghost, and I realized nonresistance is to exchange self-determined objectives for God-consciousness. 

Often, we must needs go back there, say when a less-than-wonderful looms, and we're halfway into taking it personally. We get reminded that the basis of our truth is to live a nonresistant life, a spiritually based life.

To live a spiritually based life is to become willing to live not for self but for others with a sincere desire to take nothing personally.

As we seek for willingness and a sincere desire, our primary goal remains to love and laugh...and dance if the Spirit moves us.  

[God's] essential paradox—that to lose is to gain and to die is to live. -- Fr Richard's Daily Meditation, September 16, 2021

Thank you.

ON BECOMING ONED, II

[The following is a reprint of my blog of November 13, 2016.]

To walk free in my own head. That is my one, my only, my unifying goal.

If I am not free in my own head, all the spiritual education I have or think I have...all the sacred tomes ever written, read or to be read...will, to quote the late and beloved Sen. Everett Dirksen, "have all the force and effect of a snowflake on the bosom of the Potomac."

To walk free in my own head is the Father within flowing freely from me, to and through thee...ever flowing like the sea.

And we are unified, Oned. 

Thank you.

ON SEEKING THE PERFECT OBJECTIVE

Sometimes, it is only in the midst of the “tempest,” in the heart of a storm of circumstances which we can’t control, that we come finally to realize something of the wonderful mystery of God. —Paul Murray 

What is so difficult for the reasoning mind to accept is that the "tempest" is whatever we are resisting at the moment...anthill or mountain. In our walking-around world, the common dailies of life are our "tempests." 

A "daily" is a broken shoestring when we're in a hurry...a redlight when we're in a hurry. Comes the light...when we're in a hurry is code for self-determined objective. 

Living by spiritual solutions today, we (slowly...eventually) detach from our self-determined objective so as to seek the perfect objective which is of God...God's will, God's way. 

Ah, there it is...we come finally to realize something of the wonderful mystery of God. 

Thank you.

NOT BY REASON, BUT BY GRACE

My still-in-bed blinding flash of the obvious: God is our presence, not a Being out there for us to pray to, but consciousness...a part of us, alive within us, and already active as us whether we know it or not.

Then I read God Calling today, "Search until you meet Me face to face...." 

There's assurance that the BFO was a meeting with God face-to-face. Ah, but our living it will tell the rest of the story. 

It is the acting on it that is the will-o'-the-wisp. Acting on it is to sit and wait on the Lord to make known to us by our actions His will, His way. That's the holy paradox...to sit and wait on the Lord is the spiritually required action. 

Uh-oh...to spiritually sit and wait on the Lord is not to sit on our keister and wait to be gifted with rainbows and roses. This is when, where and how we prove Fr Richard's we don't get to God by doing it right, we get to God by doing it wrong. 

We need to walk through the muck and the mire of doing it wrong, i.e., our own mistakes, to realize them as God's gold...all our uglies are blessed by God even as we live them.

Just as nothing turns us to God faster than fear, the muck and the mire are for our benefit...to experience God's will, God's way. Or, not by reason, but by grace.

Thank you.

VULNERABILITY -- GOD'S WILL, GOD'S WAY

His fear was seemingly transmuted into what we call 'beginner’s mind,' which is what grace always does—it turns our vices into another way to love and serve God’s reality....This ever-rediscovered beginner’s mind, which is a deathlike vulnerability before reality, keeps each of us forever growing and forever young. -- Fr Richard's Daily Meditation, March 21, 2023 (slightly altered) 

I have come to love the descriptive "beginner's mind"...it is clearly before we know...and there's the common sense glitch to spiritual growth. 

We seek, we study, we ponder, we think, we meditate...which for a long time is just a fancy word for think. All the while our need is the vulnerability of the beginner's mind...open, needing to be filled not by learned words but by inspiration and intuitive grace. 

Seeking to become wholly vulnerable is on no one's To-Do list...at best, it's a Should, and, face it, "should" is the skunk in the closet. Who's kidding whom? Vulnerability takes us by surprise, feels less than wonderful...usually embarrassing...and exposes our secret secrets, those even unbeknownst to us. 

Yet it is by way of our studying, our meditating, that we are opened to the vulnerability of God's will, God's way. There...vulnerability is God's will, God's way, the beginner's mind, utterly unavailable to self-will as it does what grace always does—it turns our vices into another way to love and serve God’s reality.

Thank you.

THE BLESSED DISGUISE OF DOWNSIDE BEING UP

[E]verything shows itself...to be a disguise: weakness is really strength, wisdom is really foolishness, death is really life, matter is really spirit, religion is often slavery, and sin itself is actually the trapdoor into salvation. -- from Fr Richard Rohr's "Daily Meditation" of December 14, 2013

I do not recall when first I heard this life-in-reverse word, but it confirmed my then-new way of thinking, feeling, doing, being. I do remember the healing I felt when I read the above paragraph for I knew it for my truth. It described what I'd been calling "mirror image."

"Mirror image" is how I believe God sees the material world...what to our egoic mind is "No!" is often his "Yes!" 

 

Looking back, I am happily amazed at how often I have relied on "mirror image" when the less-than-wonderful events of my life were attacking my mind. Likewise, I am not overly shocked to experience the difficulty in remembering that first thing when the need arises.

Time takes time as does a raising consciousness. I am grateful today to remember that, too. I am currently walking through a virtual briar patch, and whether it be of the material mind or spiritual mind has yet to be determined. 

I am accepting the root of my briar patch as spiritual growth that's been overrun by nearly three years of pandemic isolation. My need to be resocialized is my work cut out for me while allowing my spiritual nature to lead the way (accepting my goofs with love and laughter). Whoa...a new venture for me, and easy it is not. Ah, and it is not supposed to be. 

To (gr)ease the way, here comes gratitude all aglow and whispering, He goes before me to make the crooked places straight.

Thank you. 

FINDING GOD IN ALL-NEW PLACES

We need to begin to recognize God in places where we would never, perhaps, have suspected [God’s] presence before, and not only in the big city or in the places of our enemies, but also in the many seemingly banal and bizarre circumstances of our lives. * * * * * But to learn this lesson, really to learn it, we need to undergo the grace and mystery of bewilderment. --Dominican priest and poet Paul Murray, in Fr Richard's Daily Meditation, today

What a gift that priest-poet's quote is to me. His topic is Jonah in the whale, and he goes on to say how Jonah’s journey of transformation is one that all of us must undergo.

For whatever reason...rightly, God's will, God's way, or wrongly, self-determined objective...my life today seems to me to be going upside down and backward. 

Many of my friends are doubling their exercise time...walking five miles, ten miles, etc., daily. My bum knees get me to my car, and that's close enough to perfect for me. So I've decided to start exercising my mind...and this time of upside-down ankle-biters is my journey of transformation.

I speak true when I say it is hard. Very hard. Interestingly, detaching my thoughts is coming fairly easy, but the likes of getting my new electric blanket turned OFF? Could not do it...so I went back to bed and slept for an hour, and it's preset time shut the blanket off. 

Then, my preferred cable channel could not be reached...that channel is the sole reason I signed up with my new provider. I finally unplugged the TV set...it may or may not be working now. Peace. 

All of this is me "exercising my mind." Trying to think my way to the factory-approved right answers, and with neither temper nor tears, accepting those cut-and-paste results fills me with gratitude. When the end result is gratitude, I get an Atta Girl!

I start anew tomorrow...I'm reading a trashy romance this afternoon.

Thank you.

SEEKING OTHER GRATEFUL HEARTS, 2

[The following is a reprint of my post of October 31, 2013, slightly reworked.]

Gratitude must be lived. 

A living attitude of gratitude shows forth as a beacon, drawing others to It. It especially draws grateful people who are as yet unaware...seeking they know not what.

I have read that the measure of our gratitude is proportional to the amount of time and effort we give to others, to other seekers.

That for sure keeps our gratitude replenished. In that way, it's like a hug...we must needs give it to get it. What better reason to live in gratitude than knowing It will seek other grateful hearts.

Thank you.

OUR COMFORT IS THY ROD AND THY STAFF

In my yesterday's post, I wrote, It feels kinda like attempting to scale a sheer, towering cliff, this detaching from material mind, aiming for spiritual.  

In looking back...to just yesterday!...I realize my "feels like" was a projection of how I expect detaching from material mind upgrading to spiritual to feel. 

Coming from my material mind, this morning I journaled that I feel like a scared child, afraid to be, just to be...which feeling morphed into seeing me as an immature adult, unsocialized, with little to no conversational ability...to say "unappealing" is being very kind.

I sat in the silence and saw me as a child, unpolished, a raw being, moving upward by every immature, unsocialized regret of mine. There...each rue, every regret, all my remorses form my golden goose moving me back toward my raised consciousness. 

Mentally, when self alone is in charge, layers of lacquered self-will seem essential to our security...we live and breathe for our unimpaired self-determined objectives.

Spiritually, we loose them and let them go. We are now living thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. There is no greater security.

Thank you.

DESPAIR REAPS UNFORESEEABLE BLESSINGS

May each of us learn in moments when everything seems lost that our unknown tomorrows will bring yet more perils from which will arise yet more unforeseeable blessings. -- James Finley, teacher. 

Recently I journaled about the various happenings in my life lately that appeared to be less-thans...meaning, not for my ego's benefit...that are now blessings. 

The latest was this morning with my new electric blanket. Sunbeam has "improved" the set-up "for my benefit," according to Sunbeam.

I could feel despair beating on the bars of my brain...fretting over the wreckage of the future. Or despair in a word. I have to return this thing. I'll need to repackage it, send off for a return label, rebox and rewrap, then take it to the post office all the while I'll be without a blanket...or, declare myself aged and ask someone else to do it for me...uh-oh, that is the behavior I'm trying to upgrade.

I did not go there...I out loud said, "This is for the raising of my consciousness. Trust and try." 

It feels kinda like attempting to scale a sheer, towering cliff, this detaching from material mind, aiming for spiritual. We don't get to choose our show-and-tell, we go with what is in front of us. When wrong, make a U-bie and continue to trust and try.

It took me a little over 30 minutes, but  I  we did it! I have my new electric blanket on my bed, trial-tested, good to go when I hit the sack later. I don't count it as unbelieving if just a tish of doubt clings to those brain bars, at least until I am comfortably asleep tonight. 

More will be revealed...that's my spoken-word tranquilizer. I am comforted by that since that which will be revealed may come wrapped in toilet tissue but, like despair, it will hold another pearl beyond price for my benefit. 

Sit and wait on the Lord...and pray thank you.  

Thank you.