The Shore

Where is the 'inner' and where is the 'outer' life?

Like the shore that is both sand and water,

what is 'inner' and 'outer' are constantly affecting each other,

touching, merging, becoming one.

In the same way, the world that we see is created by

our awareness.

We shape the 'outer' by what we hold to be true.

Response to Life

Life flows to us, through us, and around us in an endless stream, and all of it is sacred. All of it is holy. Thus, it asks from us reverence and appreciation for what is, calling forth from us the highest and best possible response at all times, calling forth our gratitude.

How can we offer this 'best possible response'?

First, to know that we are being asked to respond to life in an interaction that takes place moment to moment. This is the dance of awareness that permits grace to enter the physical.

Second, to know that our response is shaped by deep forces within us - sometimes leading to action, sometimes leading to waiting; sometimes leading to consent to what others suggest; sometimes leading to standing alone.

There is no program written for our response to life. We write the program with each action we take, each belief we hold, each thought that we think. We can re-write the program by making different choices.

Most importantly, we need to take nothing for granted. Life that comes from God and contains the Divine within itself asks no less than a full and complete measure of awareness of its presence.

Today, choose consciously to respond where you may not have before. Notice. Be aware. Everything around you is significant. Everything in you is holy.

You are a holy being bringing your inner life to the outer so that all that is truly One can know itself as One.

Blessings.

Noticing

What do you notice of the world around you?

Beginnings

The beginning of all things is the Breath of God, exhaling so that life can come into being. So, too, is the nature of true inspiration. The invisible Breath moves as an impulse of light through our awareness, creating the action that will then create the word.

Thus, even in beginning this writing, the awareness is there that 'I' did not start it, but that an action from beyond moved through me, activating the impulse to create, joining with the source of thought and of speech so that words could be written. This impulse is not alien to the self, but joins with the innate qualities of consciousness of the self so that God's purposes and the soul's purposes are one.

Blessed is each moment of new beginning, for it reflects the creative life of the One who moves through all.

The Illusion of the Ordinary

We see with our eyes but often do not see with our hearts. What lives around us is often covered by the veil of habit and custom, preventing the authentic soul of Life and of each individual life from being revealed to us.

The heart must awaken to love or at least to the desire to love in order to penetrate the illusion of the ‘ordinary’. It must desire to see past what is habitual and familiar to the very essence of life that manifests through every person, every event, every circumstance that we encounter.

Sometimes vision awakens because love brings its own knowing of the soul of others to us. Falling in love does this in a singular and powerful way. And yet we must fall in love with the world, with God’s world, so that our hearts can love deeply enough to see past the barriers that have governed our observation, and so that we can forgive what cannot yet peep out from behind its own coverings. Indeed, this incipient seed of awareness is waiting for the right time to germinate within the human family, and the stirrings take place even now.

We must therefore not be dissuaded by the coverings that conceal, but rather wait in patience and in peace.

Love and judgment cannot go together. One excludes the other. To awaken to the Divine in the ordinary we must be free of judgment, free of personalizing responses to us that we ‘do not like’ so that we may see past the ‘doing’ to the soul of the doer.

All true vision takes us to this understanding of the soul-essence of Life and of others.

All true vision liberates us from the illusion of the ‘ordinary’. When it is time, we can allow ourselves to begin to notice things with our hearts, letting the ego slip by and loosen its grip, letting our own soul reach our conscious awareness so that we can see what is really there.

To see what is really there - this is the gift of consciousness to each being - to know that the physical and the spiritual are not separate, but that one flows into the other as God’s eternal Breath breathing Life into life.