Category Archives: The Church of What’s Happening Now

Reconciling ourselves to the world/life/the way things are is our life-long work. It is the Sisyphean Task, and the core of the Hero’s Journey. We never complete it, we always continue it. Thinking, “Now we have done it at last,” merely sets us up for “Here it comes again!” All the stages of life areContinue reading “October 10-A, 2022”

Nature is just what it is. Everything in the natural world is making out as best it can without rules and laws and conventions. Civilization pretends to be civil. We can trust nature to be nature, but we cannot trust civilization to be civil. Including the churches, the courts and the justice system. And whoContinue reading “October, 2nd Week, 2022”

We nurture, nourish, our connection with the way through routine returns to emptiness, stillness, and silence, and with regular visits to the natural world. Nature is just so, just as it is, with no pretensions or aspirations, and a reach that does not exceed its grasp. Our nature is that way as well. The BuddhaContinue reading “October 08-A, 2022”

Circumstances create, produce, generate their own outcomes, results, effects, consequences. Which, themselves, create, produce, generate new circumstances creating different outcomes, consequences… It rains and a river forms only where a river could form. “Mamma, who made the beautiful river?” “The rain, honey.” “Who made the rain?” “Circumstances and possibilities.” “Who made the circumstances and possibilities?”Continue reading “October 07-B, 2022”

We make things worse than they need to be by enlarging them beyond the absurd into the realm of things Hollywood hasn’t come up with. We scare ourselves sick with our endless “What if that then?” scenarios. I recommend that we stop it. And tell ourselves instead, “We will deal with whatever comes up.” InsteadContinue reading “October 03-A, 2022”

Our life is a string of coincidences and another string of luck intertwined and playing out, and what we make of it is our gift to the mix. It helps to have little in the way of expectations, agendas, plans, opinions, judgment, willfulness, demands and requirements. Being true to our essential nature and our innateContinue reading “October 1-A, 2022”

We want that and don’t want to give up this to get it. “You can’t have your cake and eat it, too,” gets to the heart of the matter. The only way out of the morass is bearing the pain. How well–how consciously–how deliberately– how consistently–how utterly and completely– we bear the pain of beingContinue reading “September 30-B, 2022”

When “the world is too much with us late and soon” (William Wordsworth), we have to recognize it and step back. And when we cannot step back, we have to recognize that, and let it be, because it is, and live with as it is, knowing in a “This cannot be helped, so let’s doContinue reading “September 29-A, 2022”

We live to find the still point, the safe harbor, of balance and harmony. The catch is that there are no steady states of life and being. Now we have it, now we don’t. Controlling the wobbles will have to do. Emptiness, stillness and silence can help with that. Reducing noise and complexity. Diminishing vulnerabilityContinue reading “September 28-B, 2022”

We don’t have enough wonderful in our life. We ought to make it our business to increase the Wonderful Quotient in each week. It may be too much to ask of each day, but adding wonderful to each week ought to be a doable task. We owe it to ourselves to make the effort. JustContinue reading “September 28-A, 2022”

Enlightenment is not a matter of thinking anything up, but of realizing what just occurred to us and connecting that with how we have always been told things are by those who know and are right about it. Who cannot tell us anything we don’t know when we know what we know. Which is toContinue reading “September 27-C, 2022”

Start anywhere, any time. The path begins with the next step, in any direction. Just start walking with your eyes and ears open, being aware of everything. There is nothing more to enlightenment than realization, and there is always more to realize than we realize, so we are always being enlightened, we are always wakingContinue reading “September 27-A, 2022”