WORDS Even as I begin to type these words I am aware that I have little to say. As a minister preparing for one of the busiest and most profound seasons of the year, I sense a bit of weariness around finding yet another way to tell a story that is vastly beyond words. So why am I writing this, and why am I continuing to take up space on a platform that could perhaps better be filled by someone more articulate than I? Because the images of this season have taken root deep within my consciousness, and the shoots of embodied expression are pushing up through the ground of my humanity. Presence is seeking to be particularized. The wonder of Advent is seeking to become word

HAPPY THANKS-LIVING I love the very specific felt-sense surrounding the holiday of Thanksgiving. For me it has little to do with eating or parades, and nothing to do multiple football games. There is energy around and permeating it that I have grown to deeply relish. It wasn’t always so. It used to be the precursor to the far more elaborate Christmas season. Symbolically, the Macy’s parade said it all: get through Thanksgiving and on to Santa! The Thanksgiving energy that is so precious to me now is the result of some very specific practices. I have shared many of these practices with the church that I now lead. I have for the past three years invited those interested into an experience I call the “Grat-I-Challenge.” There are

CONTEXTUAL APPRECIATION For the past three years here at the church I serve I have invited people to join me in what I call a month long Grat-I-Challenge. We begin on November 1st , and the invitation is to engage seven different practices, most daily, that will heighten the awareness and experience of gratitude. As I write this blog it is the eighth day of the month and I already feel a palpable and vital increased aliveness within me as a result of these practices. I have kept a daily gratitude journal for many years. I make it a consistent practice to look for the good in every challenge. These are two facets of the Grat-I-Challenge which certainly are not new to me. It does seem, however,

IS IT HEARTBREAK? With all the tragedies and devastation that have been unfolding in our world lately, I have been feeling waves of discomfort in my heart center like I haven’t felt in quite some time. Several years ago I had a series of losses in a very short period of time. I began to have sometimes serious chest pains that resulted in a visit to a cardiologist. The doctor confirmed my suspicions that the pain had nothing to do with the physical organ of my heart. “There is nothing wrong with your heart other than heartbreak.” I guess that was supposed to be comforting. Today as I type these words I feel a vague tightening in my chest and back. I am more than certain that

MY PERSONAL STORM TRACKING Everything is energy. Everything. I am energy. I am a field of energy in an Infinite Energy Field. When energy becomes informed it becomes matter. Always. When I interact with matter I interact with energy within my field and within THE Field. So how I interact has a direct effect on what I am interacting with. My attention energizes. Not only my attention, but the WAY in which I attend. This is the physics of attention. As I awaken spiritually I become more and more responsible for what happens in my personal energy field. I claim responsibility for what I am focusing on and most importantly HOW. My quality of attention is always and in all ways a contribution. HOW I focus informs

WHAT MATTERS MOST From this sixty year old perspective I sometimes look wistfully back on what feel like a whole lot of lost opportunities. It feels as if there were so many wasted years in which I was lost in my own limiting story. I lived years with a closed, protected heart. I always felt like I was here on this planet to serve and to make a difference. But I was too fearful, too cut off, to hidden to really be effective. There was an internal battle being waged between what was seeking expression within me and how willing or capable I was to be seen and heard and really felt. And so I hid. I medicated in countless ways, pretended, defended, and played small while

MY UNDOING In an age of internet and social media, the ability to join energies and co-create experience is profound. And it could well be my undoing. With an increasing barrage of information and energy, it is a full-time job to stay awake and present. Chaotic forces are blurring the mind and shuttering the heart. This is happening at the macro level and has a direct effect within every living micro-being. As dualistic humans, we have an equal opportunity to generate either darkness or light. We are receivers and transmitters both. Everything in manifest creation is energy, and so energy is always moving and being transformed. This can happen as darkness being transformed to Light, and it also happens as Light being drawn to darkness. The current

LET IT GO? The Academy Award winning song from the movie Frozen is looping through my consciousness today. While its singer Idina Menzel is one of my favorites I never saw the movie nor do I have a recording of the song Let It Go. And yet it is informing my inner environment today, and so I embrace that it is in some way a message meant for me. Or is it? To think in terms of trying to let something go indeed freezes me. It just isn’t a helpful admonition for me personally. It invokes a bit of the dear-in-headlights dynamic. Whenever my mind goes to the concept of letting go I immediately feel an increased level of stress regarding whatever the current stimulus is. Seeking

ODE TO MR. STILLINGS As much as social media can sometimes be off-putting it is also frequently a valuable source of information. Such was the case this week when I happened to see an obituary posted for my high school choral director Mr. Stillings. I am fully aware of his first name and yet forty-two years after graduation it still doesn’t feel seemly to use it in reference to him. He is still and always my teacher and one of my first mentors; my Mr. Stillings. I began singing at an early age and had already recorded a gospel album by the time I was fifteen. When I got into high school I was a pre-college arts major, heavily involved in the schools vocal music programs. Though