There is a path we all walk in life. All the places we go when the path gets too rocky and exhausting and brutal and beautiful are dead-end detours. If you take these detours you are not bad, but you are wasting your time and energy.
The path looks like this:
Come back to the path.
There’s no other way.
You will never find your perfect life “balance” on the path for the same reason you will never find a unicorn on the path – because these things don’t exist. Forget unicorns and balance. If you were perfectly balanced, you’d never have to take anyone’s hand to steady yourself, and that would be a tragedy.
There is no solid ground on the path — so don’t hold your breath till you find it. Breathe deeply and keep moving forward awkwardly. You can make it down the whole path imbalanced and flailing. When you fall, give thanks for the opportunity to rest. While you’re down, send love to every other path walker who’s down with you at that moment.
Then get back up.
Or crawl. Crawling is encouraged and respected. Path running is fine, but crawling is much better. Crawlers travel with their eyes close to the ground — so they never miss an inch of the beautiful, rocky path. Crawlers get less glory but learn the most about the path’s terrain.
And know your fellow travelers are both your teachers and students. Your relationships with them will be the hardest part of path walking. To avoid humbling oneself into the role of student and having the courage to position oneself into the role of teacher — many try to walk the path alone.
But the path was not designed for solo treks.
The path was designed to teach Love. Whenever you introduce your true self to a fellow path traveler and listen and speak and learn and stay with her for a while – that is called Love. Walking with and staying with messy fellow path travelers for any length of time is Love. Love is the most brutal and beautiful part of path traveling. Participate. Learn from and teach every path traveler you encounter. Exchanging love with fellow path travelers is how we gather the wisdom and strength we’ll need to overcome the next obstacle on our path.
Note: You do not teach by teaching — you teach by loving. Be humble and courageous.
You always have enough strength.
And courage and wisdom. You always have exactly what you need for your daily trek. Sometimes you won’t believe this, because you will encounter stretches of the path that are treacherous and terrifying, but if you give up in the middle of those stretches — if you sit down permanently in them — then you have to live there. Don’t live in the dark, scary parts. Trust and keep moving. There will be a clearing soon and you will feel the warm sun again.
The One who created your path is outside of time, so your life is an epic movie that has already been scripted. So don’t plan or worry — your job is to trust your path and participate fully and notice as much as you possibly can and keep on moving.
But don’t become proud or ashamed.
Don’t become proud that you are further along than many travelers or ashamed that you are far behind others. Your position on the path relative to other travelers has nothing to do with your strength or stamina or wisdom or cunning. We are all in different places because we all have different entry points to the path.
Where you are and where everyone else is along the path is none of your concern or business.
Let that go.
You are exactly where you are supposed to be, always, and so is everyone else. The portion of the path you wake up to today was written for you.
Everyone is exactly where he or she is supposed to be. You are not your own or anyone else’s path-planner. You are just a traveler. You just keep moving. Trust the Path. Follow in the footsteps of a billion other mighty travelers who have walked and run and crawled the path before you.
Quote of the Day: Virtue
Next to the seven deadly sins, the seven cardinal virtues are apt to look pale and unenterprising, but appearances are notoriously untrustworthy.
Prudence and temperance, taken separately, may not be apt to get you to your feet cheering, but when they go together, as they almost always do, that’s a different matter. The chain smoker or the junkie, for instance, who exemplifies both by managing to kick the habit, can very well have you throwing your hat in the air, especially if it happens to be somebody whom for personal reasons you’d like to have around a few years longer. And the courage involved isn’t likely to leave you cold either. Often it’s the habit kicker’s variety that seems the most courageous.
If you think of justice as sitting blindfolded with a scale in her hand, you may have to stifle a yawn, but if you think of a black judge acquitting a white racist of a false murder charge, it can give you gooseflesh.
The faith of a child taking your hand in the night is as moving as the faith of Mother Teresa among the untouchables, or Bernadette facing the skeptics at Lourdes, or Abraham, age seventy-five, packing up his bags for the Promised Land. And hope is the glimmer on the horizon that keeps faith plugging forward, of course, the wings that keep it more or less in the air.
Maybe it’s only love that turns things around and makes the seven deadly sins be the ones to look pale and unenterprising for a change. Greed, gluttony, lust, envy, and pride are no more than sad efforts to fill the empty place where love belongs, and anger and sloth just two things that may happen when you find that not even all seven of them at their deadliest ever can.
⚜
~ Frederick Bruechner originally published in Whistling in the Dark and later in Beyond Words
We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.
🕊
-Kurt Vonnegut
how little I understand
about life
how small is my vision
how tiny my wings
my experience negligible
my brain so under developed
my travels so limited
even as I attempt to smash the box of my learning
as I fight to open to all good things
as the mystery,
the dream,
gets bigger
my desire to see,
touch,
taste,
handle,
hear,
experience
burns me to the ground
carries me to the sky
fills me with longing
empties me of myself
allows me to be a part of the whole miracle producing she-bang
calls me to be courageous-
a brilliant dancer, even
in spite of my fear,
my limiting inheritance
my illusion of having two left feet
stop thinking so much
just be
just dance
just fly
🕊
AL
You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing, and dance, and write poems, and suffer, and understand, for all that is life.
We can’t find our path without getting messy. Messy comes with the territory. We came in messy. We learn messy. We love messy. We leave messy. I never found my way to clarity without first befriending confusion, in all its chaotic forms. I never found a path that felt like home before falling into quicksand. I never established a new way of being without trying the wrong way of being on for size. I never found the light without stumbling around in the dark. I never tasted God before getting a little dirt in my mouth. In the heart of the chaos is the clay that shapes us home.
Chaotic Magnificence!
🌀
– Jeff Brown an excerpt from the book Love it Forward
to be right, of course.
How do we live with the reality of ‘seeing in part’,
through a ‘dark veil’,
with just glimpses of the light in the night sky,
we fish in the darkness,
trying to catch one small piece of a star at a time,
just to have it burn out,
leaving us to go back and try again?
This is the life of the seekers,
the mystics,
the warriors,
who have been seized with the firm belief –
that life matters.
That love is the way to healing.
That there is always more of God to be had.
The mystery gets bigger with each illumination.
The balance comes from allowing it all.
Good. Bad.
Joy. Sorrow.
Sickness. Pain.
Poverty. Wealth.
Even the broken path,
the truth and the lies,
have eternal divine purpose.
Our task to
learn,
open,
love,
trust,
forgive,
heal,
move,
sing,
dance,
create,
keep letting go,
keep changing,
be present,
through it all.
We dream the large dreams of living into our best selves.
We focus intently on each small task before us.
We think,
We listen,
We give,
We receive.
We speak, when necessary.
We walk daily in vigilance.
Letting the legacy of each day stand on it’s own.
We live knowing our next choice is always our most important….
and so it goes
and so it goes
🌀
AL
Sometimes you have to leave
what you think you know
behind.
No one ever really wants to do this.
Knowing things
can be very comforting.
All day, soul whispers
what I need to know.
I don’t hear her
until I lay aside
cherished beliefs and assumptions
until I dare to be with the not-knowing.
And then. . . .
Well, that’s the risky part, isn’t it?
There is no telling
what living an ensouled life
might ask of us.
~Oriah “Mountain Dreamer” House
So this is where I am in writing the book, “The Choice,” -on the great plain of not knowing, offering myself- pen in hand- anyway. Each day, the darkness yields to the light, and words hit the page, surprising me. This is what it’s like: the light coming again and again, the darkness making the illumination breath-taking.
life: acoustic & amplified 