We're all ok. No excuses. No explanations. No apologies. We're all ok.

Questions are good. Just don't expect answers. Just listen to the silence responding with breath and presence.

Happy Birthday Dad!

What to do about stories?

Story
Tell me the one
about the sick girl —
not terminally ill, just years in bed
with this mysterious fever —
who hires a man
to murder her — you know,
so the family is spared
the blight of a suicide —
and the man comes
in the night, a strong man,
and nothing is spoken
—he takes the pillow
to her face — tell me
how he is haunted the rest
of his life — did he
or didn't he
do the right thing — tell me
how he is forgiven,
and marries, and has
2 daughters, and is happy —
no, tell me she doesn't
die, but is cured and
gives her life to God,
and becomes a hand-holder for
men on death row —
tell me the one where the man
falls in love with the girl
and can't do it, or
the girl falls in love
with a dog and calls
the man to tell him
not to come, or
how each sees their pain
mirrored in the other's eyes —
tell me how everyone is already
forgiven every story
they ever told themselves
about living
or not living —
tell me, oh tell me
the one where love wins, again
and again and again.
(--Poem, "Story" by Sabine Miller, from Circumference of Mercy. © Mountains and Rivers Press, 2010.)

Tell them. Let them be heard.

They, too, are only passing through.

If the kingdom of heaven is between us, we'd best keep the gate open.

Imagine there's no heaven...elsewhere.

In the center of our being is a point of nothingness
which is untouched by sin and by illusion,

a point of pure truth,
a point or spark which belongs entirely to God,
which is never at our disposal,
from which God disposes of our lives,
which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind
or the brutalities of our own will.

This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty
is the pure glory of God in us.
[Merton says] It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven.
It is in everybody, and if we could see it
we would see these billions of points of light
coming together in the face and blaze of a sun
that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely.

I have no program for this seeing. [says Merton]
It is only given.
But the gate of heaven is everywhere.
                         (--by Thomas Merton, from Conjectures of Guilty Bystander, p.158)

Here or nowhere.

Here or now here.

I like this point of view!

Who is it lives our life while we are busy doing something else?

We have got to learn to pay attention.

Presence is the great revelation.