Wait for the door to open,
then walk through.
But this is not as passive
as it sounds.

The Colorado River waited
for the Grand Canyon to open
for thousands of years,
and all that while,
it was forcing its way
through desert rock.
Water waits in a strange way.

Be like water in your waiting.

Persistence and resiliency
are the flip side of patience.
And refusing to take "NO!" 
for an answer
in a clandestine,
imperceptible,
way,
by being you without let up,
without fail,
invisibly
and undetectably.

That means knowing yourself
and being who you are--
and trusting that to be 
all you need
to find your way 
through the desert rock
that is the world,
in an "Okay, what now?"
kind of way.

Like yeast in the dough.
Like light shining in the darkness,
in spite of the darkness.

If it were not for the darkness,
we would be irrelevant.
As it is,
we are essential.

We live into who we are.
It is easier with support and encouragement,
but even without it,
there is something in us
that craves expression
and needs us to champion its cause
against all odds.

We have to find our voice and sing,
or find our rhythm and dance,
or find our wings and fly...

The drum is beating,
calling us to march,
to live to the beat 
coursing through our veins.

We live to stand on our own two feet
and say who we are
and who we are not,
letting our yes be yes,
and our no be no,
and our cause
find its champion
before the light is done.

–0–

This is an excerpt from "The Nature of Spiritual Reality I,"
from my book, "A Handbook for the Spiritual Journey" on WordPress:

All knowing is tentative, 
conditional, 
specific to this here and this now, 
and things are always shifting, 
changing, 
calling for something different 
in the next here and now, 
or the one after that. 

Rules, 
recipes 
and roadmaps 
are of no use on the Hero’s Journey. 

A Guidebook that starts out, 
“Listen to yourself all the way, 
and when listening to yourself--
Your heart, 
your body (symptoms and 'feelings'),
your dreams,
your intuition,
your instinct--
leads to a dead end, 
keep listening to yourself 
to get out of there 
and back on the path,” 
is the best guide there is. 

Keep consulting it 
to remind yourself 
of the importance 
of remembering 
to listen to yourself.

No highs, no lows.
"Hold her steady as she goes."

There are no steady states of being,
so we opt for the next best thing,
keeping the wobbles within 
a normal distribution curve.

This is the meaning of,
"The hills and mountains
will be made low,
the valleys and the swamps
will be lifted up,"
and equality and individuality
will characterize life among all people 
and justice will be done
throughout the earth.

Of course, this requires cooperation
and mutual commitment to the good of all,
and who is going to enforce that?
And who is going to pay off the enforcers
to look the other way?
And who is going to run the black markets
and the sex trade operations?
And who is going to keep them from being run?
And, like that, things are exactly the way they are.
Because people thirst for power over people
and want to rule the world.

What is the fascination with ruling the world?
With controlling the seas
and collecting the tariffs?
With being rich beyond reckoning?
With preferring to be obeyed
over having a life?

And then, there are people like me,
sitting quietly, 
reading Chinese poetry,
wishing everybody would leave everybody alone.

–0–

Silence is a lost art
and the primary source of realization.
Things occur to us out of the silence.
We can ponder the solution to a problem
for days 
and take a shower
and there it is
with a clarity and certainty
that leave all questions answered.

Or we can wrestle with what to do
until we fall asleep,
and the right action 
comes to us in a dream.

We can enhance our creativity
by being quiet more often,
for longer periods of time.
With no agenda.
No plans. 
No schedule.
No time table for creativity to appear.
Just. Being. Still. And. Quiet.
With no end or outcome in mind,
and no possibility of "success"
or "failure."

Being silent for the joy of being silent
will turn the light around,
and enable us to see things
normally hidden from view.

Making that a new way of life
will produce unpredictable 
enhancements to the life we are living,
with surprise and wonder
becoming regular companions.

–0–

How often, 
and at what point,
does your personal gain
factor into your choices and decisions?

That is where we step into 
the story of Adam and Eve
in the Garden of Eden
and where we go from there,
what we do then, 
tells the tale.

Where we go from there,
and what we do then
has been the subject
of every sermon I ever preached,
and of everything I have ever written.
I have a WordPress site that houses
everything I have ever written,
for your browsing convenience,
and you don't have to have a WordPress
membership to access it,
but you do have to be driven 
by a hunger to know what's what
and already be searching for it everywhere.
You are looking for what clicks with you,
evoking something within you,
that recognizes "IT" when you see it.

We all live in the service of 
inklings and nudges,
pushes and shoves,
that we do not control
or understand.

Our place is to place ourselves
in their service
and do what we are told
when, where and how--
without having to know why.

Savvy?

–0–