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    Too easily, even now, thirty-five years later I weep in memory of my children who left me. But then too I laugh with tears of joyful gratitude their brief lives gave me. The ebb and flow between thanksgiving and sorrow define our becoming fully conscious and can only be known to us in the uniqueness of our lives through surrender.
    186,282 miles per second, the speed of light measures a common rule in our communal life. And it measures the vast spread between Ideal & Real.
    Trauma & Grief are a violent, often instant, shift in how we define ourselves as safe or threatened. My emotional landscape, what I lovingly, and humorously call the cyclorama of perception and perspective, was torn asunder as if the sun had gone dark; water turned to stone the air become tar.
    Degrees of perception/perspective change as they must. This is the only measure of real life: being fully alive.    
    "Blessed are they who mourn for they will be comforted."
    I live and write from experience, not theory, and would, if I could, give you who suffer the violent collisions, convulsions, vicissitudes of the inevitable my humble peace now. I have found the end of my grief. . . . "God grant me the serenity to accept that which I cannot change” has evolved to 'God thank your for giving me the serenity. . . " coupled with an absence of fear in each and every precious moment of the infinite now. i ask that you forgive my trespass, pouring salty tears of either joy or sorrow into your shred heart. i can only say, in closing, that to me your heart is a sacred place, a cathedral domed by the starry, starry night and the glory of dawn.

"To live a spiritual life we must first find the courage to enter into the desert of our loneliness and to change it by gentle and persistent efforts into a garden of solitude." --Henri Nouwen

    . . . "Spiritual", Think: whole, wholeness, holiness forged from the hammers blows. Do no harm to anyone or anything especially yourself. And in the end we will be no longer an ego. Becoming I am not this body, face, life . . . this pain and suffering is not about me, or you, but us. Though devastated now, the garden of our heart will be renewed in time.

“This life of separateness may be compared to a dream, a phantasm, a bubble, a shadow, a drop of dew, a flash of lightning.” --Buddha

“If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will (suffice) be enough.” --Meister Eckhart

120318 11:00
    In the not too distant past--or so to say--’Once-Upon-A-Time’ . . . I was as closed as a chrome plated, high tinsel strength, trailer hitch; impenetrable. More like, than unalike, the metaphor describing my parents. Who then seemed lawn ornament gazing balls adoring the yards of my childhood, reflecting the world spherically and shedding my love as rain indifferent.
    Then too, escaping my unconscious projection, now apparent, the imagery is incomplete without the pedestal upon which they were elevated God like and omniscient to my vision/version of them.
    It is my nature to deconstruct relationships, events and psyches. What arrogance! A blind man groping experience attempting to describe the meaning of life. The oddest part is that the numinous doesn’t mind and responds with hints, suggestions and manifestations slaking my greed to be loved . . . and if by God’s will . . . be love for/to others.
    It is a process available to all people (nearly fell into the feminist trap of “Mankind”, in this context it would have been generic or vernacular for consciousness. Before God we are neutered souls . . . as Einstein fabulously said: “Equally foolish and wise.” Humor being the best antidote to “Divine Rights” self derived or subjugated by.
    The Shepard’s Crook is about to sweep me from life’s stage, as are my mentors, soon to slumber in apparent death. It is for me “The sound of one hand clapping.”
    I am moved from my silent integration of tectonic shifts ongoing from various sources in the ordinary of my life.     Today I discovered a reminder of the women who loved me in ways independent of pleasure. Who in moments of converse penetrated my distemper and malevolent self-disregard forged between the inconvenience of my birth and these latter days. The distance between pleasure and joy are measured in light years.

. . . 120325 discovered this date and placed in my ‘Quote Diary”:

 “On its outer surface time is vulnerable to transience. Regardless of its sadness or beauty, each day empties and vanishes. In its deeper heart, time is transfiguration. Time minds possibility and makes sure that nothing is lost or forgotten. That which seems to pass away on the surface of time is in fact transfigured and housed in the tabernacle of memory.”  ― John O'Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

 “Transience is the force of time that makes a ghost of every experience. There was never a dawn, regardless how beautiful or promising, that did not grow into a noontime. There was never a noon that did not fall into afternoon. There was never an afternoon that did not fade toward evening. There never was a day yet that did not get buried in the graveyard of the night. In this way transience makes a ghost out of everything that happens to us.”
 ― John O'Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

 “When you look at some faces, you can see the turbulence of the infinite beginning to gather to the surface. This moment can open in a gaze from a stranger, or in a conversation with someone you know well. Suddenly, without their intending it or being conscious of it, their gaze lasts for only a second. In that slightest interim, something more than the person looks out.”  ― John O'Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

 “...to gaze into the face of another is to gaze into the depth and entirety of his life.”
 ― John O'Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom