Sep

1

Waking Up in Sixty Seconds


Phil Bolsta’s SIXTY SECONDS: ONE MOMENT CHANGES EVERYTHING, with a Foreword by Caroline Myss, is a wonderful companion to take along on anyone’s spirit journey. The book’s greatest virtues are its crackling brevity and exhilarating inspiration. It’s designed for the breakneck pace of everyday life in western culture, and its design is agreeable and friendly.

 

But what makes the book a stand-out, and star, are the 45 stories of spiritual focusing and awakening by prominent authors, healers, teachers, and business people. Reading the account of Dr. Janis Amatuzio’s life after death encounter during her hospital internship, or the incredible perseverance of Jim MacLaren and Dannion Brinkley, or the poignant, radiant accounts of living with imperiled children by James Autry and Sally Pederson, Frank Deford, and Mike Veeck, made me feel humble, reconnected to all of life, and grateful for my blessings and opportunities to be of service to others in this amazing life.

 

My personal favorites among these incandescent stories also include Donald Schnell’s relationship with a young African-American fellow soldier and Zen practitioner, Toltec teacher Don José Luis’s account of his blindness and restored eyesight, Jean Houston’s effervescent mini-memoir of an awakening in childhood, Caroline Myss’s fascinating relationship with an Indian mystic, and Deepak Chopra’s uplifting revelations during his father’s sacred cremation ritual. And, of course, I’m especially pleased to see the critical role that poetry plays in a healing revelation experienced by Dr. Wayne W. Dyer.

 

All of these stories remind us that we are all connected and not alone, that we need never fear death because where we’re going is beautiful and, well, inevitable! Many stories share common visions, centered peace, and stillness. They are also brimming with companionship and community building. I’m grateful, for instance, to learn about the Twilight Brigade, which assists dying veterans, and the Trent Tucker Non-Profit Organization, which works with young people to shape more positive futures.

 

In every way, Phil Bolsta has put together a great soul-gift! I’m enjoying reading and re-reading it. I’m sharing these stories with friends, and I’m reading them to my children. I cannot recommend the experience of this beautiful book highly enough!  

 

September 1, 2008 | 1 Comment

May

3

On Rev. Wright: Fair Comparisons, and What It Means To Belong to a Church


How does one square condemning the Rev. Wright’s incendiary comments, which should be condemned, with winking at equally divisive, vile comments by clergymen like Jerry Falwell and others who blamed 9/11 on Gays and other “degenerate” elements in society? I haven’t seen an expression of equal outrage that President Bush and Senator McCain continue to court the favor of such clergymen. Why not, do you suppose?

Too much is being made of Senator Obama’s membership in his church. For many years, I belonged to a Catholic diocese in Medford, Oregon. Three priests labored in that vineyard, and they alternated on Sundays delivering the homily (always my favorite part of the service). The oldest priest, however, always harangued us when he spoke. He was all fire and brimstone, promising each of us an everlasting roasting if we didn’t do more to oppose abortion, turn Gays into Straights (or at least shun and isolate them–odd Christ-like values, wouldn’t you say?), and support Family Values.

He made a lot of the members of the congregation uncomfortable, even angry. But none that I know of left the church because of him. I believe none did because, like me, they understood what it means to make a commitment to a church and its community. That community is always larger than one person, even if that person happens to be the face of the church on a given Sunday. A serious community church member understands that there is a much more powerful “face” of the church, and that some of the most important lessons of a spiritual path involve tolerance and forgiveness. 

I would be more inclined to suspect Senator Obama’s character if he had left the church as a result of Rev. Wright’s comments. I respect his position and admire his speech on Race, which we’ll be replaying, teaching, and talking about fifty years from now. With General Powell, I’m taking the wide, long view of this matter, and I’m moving on.

 Robert

www.robertmcdowell.net

May 3, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Mar

24

Gretchen Fletcher’s Poem


Today I’m delighted to share this wonderful poem by Gretchen Fletcher, who send this our way from “snowless Florida.” Gretchen’s “Why I Write Poems” perfectly expresses the isolation, resolve, presence in the moment, and wisdom awareness that the act of writing entails.Enjoy this poem in contemplation! If you are moved to do so, write in and share with us why you write poems.

WHY I WRITE POEMS

I have this vision of ancient poets
hunkered around a pile of kindling,
rubbing words together in the dark,
hoping their friction will bring some heat.
I see a later one strike his flinty phrases
against another’s steel, hoping the spark
of a poem will fly off into the night
because the poets know in their guts that
a cold and lonely world will someday need
to sit around the fire they build and bask
in the warmth and light they create.
Somewhere in the dark I hear a wolf howl,
and I go back to writing my poems.

March 24, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Jan

27

Carol Aronoff’s Poems


Just before dawn over the next seven days, enjoy Venus, Jupiter, and the moon as they line up to visit each other in our eastern sky. It’s a rare celestial moment! Consider the wonders of our universe, the endless teachings and surprises of our blessed lives!

*

            Here are three poems by Hawaiian poet, artist, and caretaker of trees, Carol Aronoff. We can see our own spiritual journeys reflected in the inspiring pools of Carol’s wonderful poems! Visit

http://www.bluedolphinpublishing.com/Cornsilk.html

to find and purchase Carol’s books, which are also available at www.amazon.com.

Winter Offering

 

Under a harsh light moon, trees huddle

together on the cusp of hill, draped in sage

and olive wool to mute the whispering chill.

Even rocks are dressed for winter,

flaunting moss blankets.

 

I wander among silvered leaves, amid silence

so stark, my thoughts are shrill notes

of comic opera. If I could banish them

to a cave where brown bears hibernate,

what would I be left with?

 

My mind stills, as snow not yet fallen;

for a moment there is only space,

radiant joy which warms the cloud-banked

dark with faintest light, a subtle reminder

of sacred ground.

 

I open myself–arms, great wings–

to soften brittle wind that threatens

to upend nests of thrush, send

shivering rose petals to an early death.

Who will read my body as living prayer?

 

*

 

Ocean Voices

 

Some nights, I hear the ocean weeping

out my window, down fern-leafed hill.

Long sighs, followed by sobbing soft

as wind’s murmur at the end of summer.

 

Tears welling up in waves of sorrow

flood tide pools and turtle ponds,

brush shoreline’s cheek leaving streaks

of wet sand and sea-licked rock.

 

When I walk the beach next morning,

wounded are scattered like soldiers

along water’s edge: crabs missing

legs, stones with bullet-sized holes,

 

clams and mussels with only half a shell.

Among bits of brown and green broken glass,

rounded  by the pounding of waves, I find

shipwrecks and the power of solitude.

 

 

Praying for Freedom

 

I wonder sometimes on moonless nights

if I can hitchhike on the prayers

of others when I cannot form my own,

when fear has taken even words

I might have used and wrung from them

a paltry harvest of pears and pomegranate.

 

I know about surrender, the need for trust,

the presence of angels. I can see it in nature,

in the pale-faced beauty of peony so attractive

to bees, the wonder of red-tailed hawk

on the farthest reach of delicate branch,

the lift of heron wing.

 

Petrels and terns plunge into sea dark

without hesitation. Some swallows free fall

to reach their nests in lightless caves.

They don’t waver; they don’t ask themselves,

what if I miss? They are born to fly, to float,

to dive; they are born to let go–just as I am.

January 27, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Dec

31

New Year 2008


New Year 2008

Once again, those of us who are aware of it are blessed with that trick of the calendar, the turning into a new year.

For me, this day—December 31st—is always bittersweet. It’s a day to prepare a special place at the table for my innate Irish melancholia and leanings toward solitude. Going down into the dark places and making friends with the shadows there, I resurface to embrace a good day for reflection and contemplation, a day of stillness, mist shrouding the Cascades, and frost everywhere.

On this day I make time for regrets. I acknowledge words I should have said but didn’t, work I did not complete, or abandoned, or did, just not as well as I should have; people I disappointed, situations I neglected, gifts and dreams I did not properly honor.

On this day I remember the long-dead and those who departed in 2007. I play back the times we had, happy days and other days, and relish the memory-doors in me that still spring open so quickly! I miss Manhattan and County Galway, and the old farm up north in the Willamette Valley, yet I close my eyes and I’m so swiftly transported, walking among the people and animals, the sounds and smells of those places!

Mostly, though, on this day I look around me, right here, and am grateful for so many blessings! I enjoy the company of my beautiful, wise stargazer-partner and my unique, individualist, lovely children. I delight in the rooms of the house I live in, the bird feeders and hummingbirds, and the buzzing, chattering community in the gigantic butterfly bush. I thrill to the challenge, insights, and rewards of my daily spiritual practice, and I savor the work I do, my constant companion.

On this day, I allow myself a little looking ahead, too. I dream of a new year of wider peace and greater understanding and compassion for all. I visualize good health, and health care for everyone. I pray for an end to the madness of policies that encroach on the rights of others, that elevate profit to the status of a god, that incinerate the earth, that crush and trample dreams. I imagine bright days (even when the sun is in hiding) of beneficial work, and unashamed love and passion.

What does this day mean to you, and how do you spend it? 

May all sweetness and blessings be yours!

Robert

December 31, 2007 | 1 Comment

Dec

10

VENUS/MOTHER OF AMERICAN POETRY


Today is the 177th birthday of Emily Dickinson! She was and is as aware and awake as any poet who ever lived. Here is her Poem #1726:

If all the griefs I am to have

Would only come today,

I am so happy I believe

They’d laugh and run away.

 

If all the joys I am to have

Would only come today,

They could not be so big as this

That happens to me now.

Perhaps you’ll pause in your busy day to contemplate the miracle of Emily Dickinson’s life and work! If you feel so inspired, please share a comment or insight or poem with us! Blessings Always,Robert McDowell  

December 10, 2007 | 2 Comments

Nov

14

Patience, patience


Yesterday I was up very early to prepare for a video-interview with a group of eight people back east. I drove into Medford–ten miles from my home–to a prearranged facility, and met Charles Wright in the office where my end of the video-interview would take place.

Charles is a man in his seventies who is affable and earnest. He rather reminded me of the actor James Whitmore about ten years ago. I appreciated that he’d arrived early, as I did, and it appeared that we were ready to go with fifteen minutes to spare. That was good because a representative of the group I was meeting with had stressed punctuality in a brief talk the day before. The group was on a tight schedule and could not afford to run overtime.

At precisely 8:30, the group appeared on screen, and I appeared to them. We smiled, said good morning. I could see myself–how I looked to them–in a box in the righthand corner of my screen. I’ve nevr been keen about seeing myself on TV, and this moment proved no exception. But I quickly put that negative thought where it belonged and entered the meeting, which I’d been looking forward to. My opening comments, though, were greeted with blank looks, then confusion, then mild irritation. Technical difficulties! They could not hear me.

The meeting was scheduled for forty-five minutes. Charles Wright spent the first twenty minutes calling numbers on his cell phone and reading the manual for the tele-video system. A wave of anxiety washed over me, through me. Charles, bless him, was doing his best. Nothing worked, but he was doing his best. A couple of times in those first five minutes, I caught a glimpse of myself on screen. There I was with my arms folded tightly across my chest, a look of exasperation on my face. A minute later I was grimacing.

What a marvelous opportunity for practice! Was I feeling anger? Frustration? Yes! But why? Did anger and frustration fix the problem? Did they make me or anyone else involved feel better? Of course not. Why, then, was I allowing them to take over the experience in that meeting room?

I didn’t have to, and I made a choice not to. Observing myself in the split screen, I made myself smile and uncrossed my arms. I watched Charles’s futility as he continued to troubleshoot, and I felt compassion rising in me like tree sap. He was trying! He was doing everything he could think of to make the system work. He was doing his very best. I admired that! Even though he was not successful, I admired his work, his effort. Wouldn’t we all be happier if we could make a daily practice of this?

In the end, we rigged up a telephone interview. No video, but we got our work done. We made necessary adjustments, and I succeeded in not making an earnest man feel awful because initial expectations weren’t met. In a very important way, I’m glad they weren’t.

Have you recently experienced something like this? We’d love to hear about it!

Blessings always,

Robert

November 14, 2007 | Leave a Comment

Oct

17

Waking Up


Waking up can be a dangerous moment in spiritual practice.

One morning last week I overslept a little. I noted how agitated I felt as I swam up into consciousness. My mind raced, already playing out how I could catch up in my delayed morning routine. I forced myself to lie back, semi-relaxed, and recite my daily aspirations, which I always do before getting up to perform my daily Ngondro practice. Plowing through my aspirations, I knew I was hardly holding appropriate intentions for them to mean anything. I was doing exactly what every spiritual practitioner dreads and beats herself up for. I was just going through the motions, and worse, at warp speed, too! By the time I finished, I was slapping myself not only for sleeping late, but for praying poorly, too. My day was off to a lousy start.

As I lay in bed giving up to failure and exasperation, my head turned to the right on my pillow so that I could see out the row of small windows high up on my bedroom’s south wall. When lying on the bed, I can see the sky and the upper branches of a butterfly tree. Deep in my funk, I could feel my motivation for the day draining out of me. And then the sky exploded. Sunrise. But not just any sunrise. Perhaps one of the half dozen most spectacular sunrises I’ve ever witnessed unfolded for ten minutes as I lay there, awestruck. The turquoise blue, azure, gold, pinks and reds were that spectacular. Adequate description fails. It was the sort of sunset that makes you tingle all over. You feel as if you’re music, the most beautiful song ever sung.

By the time the colors muted and the sun was up, I felt fully restored. I was overjoyed. I jumped out of bed and embraced the day like a lover who has been away too long. It was a wonderful day!

And then I remembered, and bowed, and gave thanks. I jumped so quickly to despair! It was so easy to lose my spiritual poise, to buy into the worst about everything! Then the world itself reminded me: be in the moment! Be nimble, be flexible! If I had awakened at my usual time, I would have been up, in the bathrom or in prayer, and I would have missed that amazing dawn. Clearly my inner energy, my intuition, and my body knew better than I what I needed that morning. I was humbled. I felt grateful, and I still do.

Have you recently experienced something like this?

Blessings!

Robert

October 17, 2007 | Leave a Comment

Oct

4

what sound does god make?


In the early eighties I taught creative writing and literature at the University of Southern Indiana, which back then called itself Indiana State University Evansville.

I’ve always enjoyed driving places. Long trips in a car give you a chance to see the countryside, to stop in strange towns and villages, or just pull over and take a nap in a serene meadow. Because I grew up in southern California, the Midwest seemed foreign to me in many ways. The hills were smaller, the weather more severe, and people’s accents were unusual. “Ls” disappeared for example, so the word told became toad in the mouths of natives. The accent wasn’t unpleasant or difficult for me to get with because it had a lot in common with accents of the San Fernando Valley.

When I drove next door to Kentucky, though, the native accent became thicker, sweeter, and sometimes hard to follow. But like a new landscape, new accents always excite me. I love the diverse sound of the human voice! Don’t you? I suppose that’s one answer to my initial question above. The beautiful human voice…that’s a sound that God makes!

I discovered another God sound the first time I visited Claiborne Farm in Paris, Kentucky, which was one of my favorite day-trips. It was rather a long way for a day-trip, but there was no place else to stay between Paris and Evansville, so I’d do it that way.
I visited Claiborne Farm three or four times a year because that’s where the greatest racehorse ever, Secretariat, lived in regal retirement. I was not alone in traveling far to visit a horse. My first time there a groom told me that thousands of people came through every year to see Big Red, the nickname that those close to Secretariat affectionately called him.

He spent a lot of his outdoor time on a beautiful fenced acre of lush Kentucky bluegrass, and it was there that I first saw that legendary animal in person. As I approached the gate with my friend and teaching colleague, the painter Katie Waters, Secretariat stood clear across the field under a shade tree. I’d come right up to the gate and leaned over it, fascinated.

“You’re going to want to stand back,” the groom said.

At first, I didn’t move, thinking he’s not talking to me! Stand back from what? Then I realized he was talking to me. I looked at him inquisitively.

“When I call him, he’ll come over, and he’ll come real quick.”

Ok, I thought, this is just part of the show. Try to inject a little drama into a pretty quiet event; like the guide on the jungle boat at Disneyland firing his pistol at emerging plastic hippos. The grooms must have talked about this, reasoning that people like me had come a long way to see something, and maybe it wasn’t enough—a horse an acre away under a shade tree. I took two steps back from the gate.

The groom made a soft, clucking sound. Time stopped. A miracle occurred. Faster than I had ever dreamed possible, Secretariat had sprinted across that field and come to a screeching, dead stop right up against the gate, his head and divine breath inches from my face, which I’m certain froze in an expression of awe.

The sound of that horse, the sound and feel of the ground under me as he came on, stays with me to this moment. Though that first encounter took place more than twenty-five years ago, I have never heard or felt anything quite like it. It was magical. It was divine. My knees had buckled as I stood my ground, locking eyes with Secretariat as he charged straight at me, and I knew the power and the sound of God.

Ever since that day, I’ve tried to recreate that sound and that feeling in some of the poems I write, and I love it when I recognize it in the poems of others, or in some other life event or context (as in the awareness of accents I mentioned earlier).

It’s a question worth pondering and perhaps writing about. Won’t you share it with us here? In your experience, what sound or sounds has God made?

October 4, 2007 | 3 Comments

Oct

3

Tommy Hawkins, Mentor


When I was growing up in Southern California, I never missed an opportunity to see my beloved Dodgers play. After all, this was the team that Jackie Robinson had played for, the team that had broken the shameful ‘Color Barrier’ in the sport that was then our primary national game.

One day as a teen I was on the concourse at Dodgers Stadium buying Dodger Dogs when I noticed two fans in wheelchairs struggling to negotiate a large bump on the walkway. I started over to help, but someone beat me to it. To my surprise, it was Dodgers vice president Tommy Hawkins. I recognized him because he’d also been an award-winning broadcaster after a ten-year NBA career with the Royals (now Kings) and Lakers. A handsome man with a zillion-watt smile, Hawkins not only assisted those two fans, but he took the time to talk to them, to connect, and to make sure that they were ok.

I was so impressed by his behavior I wrote a letter to him describing the incident and thanking him for being so thoughtful. To my surprise, I got a long letter right back in which Tommy Hawkins thanked me for taking the time to write to him!

I’ve never forgotten something he said in that letter. He told me he’d learned early in life that you never knew who might be observing you in any moment, so it was wise to be aware of your conduct. “Never do anything you’d be ashamed of if someone played it back to you,” he wrote.

I’ve never forgotten that. Though I haven’t always been successful living up to it, it’s lodged in my mind and has saved me on several occasions from thoughtless acts or words. To this day, I am grateful to Tommy Hawkins for his kindness to those fans, and for unintentionally mentoring me in compassion and awareness.

Who are the mentors, unintentional or intentional, who have shaped you?

October 3, 2007 | Leave a Comment


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