Author Archives: jimwdollar

Being the right kind of people is well within our reach, yet far exceeds our grasp, as Abraham Heschel might have said. We have better things to do. Being the right kind of people gets in our way. Asks hard things of us. Is always inconvenient and an imposition of outlandish proportions. We aren’t interested.Continue reading “October 10, 2023 – A”

If we can put people on the moon, “Why can’t we just get along?” On May 1, 1992, Rodney King nailed it. And we still can’t get along. We have never gotten along. We will never get along. Why not? John the Baptist couldn’t get along with Herod. Jesus couldn’t get along with the Sanhedrin.Continue reading “October 09, 2023 – A”

Beauty is both escape and immersion. Both distraction/diversion and connection/alignment. Anything is/can be all things. Everything comes with manifold sides/aspects. Reality is a shape shifting collection of appearances/perceptions. All it takes is looking to see that it is so. How we think things are is always only how they seem to be. Wait long enoughContinue reading “October 08, 2023 – A”

Finding our work and doing it is a matter of allowing our work to come to us and not rejecting it when it does. Our work finds us, appears to us, occurs to us, calls us. If we want to “find” our work, the place to start is by digging through our pile of rejects.Continue reading “October 07, 2023 – A”

One way of assessing our Aliveness Quotient is to be accurate and honest about our degree of: Balance Harmony Integrity Sincerity Spontaneity Vitality Emptiness Stillness Silence This is a check-list for maintaining and regaining our alignment with the way of life everlasting in seeing what’s what, knowing what is called for, being right about whatContinue reading “October 06, 2023 – B”

Growing up comes down to bearing graciously the legitimate pain of being alive. Nature is against nature! The ocean against the beach, the lion against the antelope, the big fish against the little fish… The system feeds on itself, attacks itself, destroys itself! It makes no sense whatsoever! So, we get in there and doContinue reading “October 06, 2023 – A”

Growing up is growing in our ability to take “No” for an answer. This is “dying” to the way we wish things were, want things to be. This is the kind of “death” Adam and Eve are required to “die” in getting back to the Garden of Eden, and it is the kind of “death”Continue reading “October 05, 2023 – A”

It isn’t what happens to us that makes the difference in our life, but how we respond to what happens to us. The most important thing is how we respond the moment right here, right now, and what it is asking of us. The more noise, complexity, drama, trauma characterize our life, the less capableContinue reading “October 04, 2023 – A”

Don’t settle down with anything as The Right Way To Live! Unless your Right Way To Live is doing what it takes to get things done the way they need to be done, when they need to be done, where they need to be done, through all of the circumstances and situations of your life.Continue reading “October 03, 2023 – A”

We live in the service of corrections and adjustments all the way to the grave. Each situation as it arises presents us with new opportunities to amend, modify and reform our batting stance or our pitching motion, to tweak our golf swing or the ratio of seasonings in the soup. Experience produces alterations and improvementsContinue reading “October 02, 2023 – A”

The horse is our life waiting to carry us along the way that is our way if only we will get in the saddle and say, “Let’s go,” and mean it.

We trust ourselves to the road that chooses us, and to the kindness of strangers we meet along the way. Those who know do it that way– by not having a way, but being open to the way that is the way for them, personally, individually, uniquely theirs and theirs alone, like their fingerprints andContinue reading “October 01, 2023 – A”