Do you want to discover a patience you never knew you had? Do you want to cultivate that patience? Sit a few weeks or months with a dying old man who is stubborn and willful. Who can’t do the things you do with ease but insists on trying anyway. Who’s ability to think has come [...]
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I’m in a funk. I’ve completely lost my mojo. Can’t find it anywhere. Haven’t been able to write. I feel like I’m stuck in a massive, soggy swamp. I suppose I could force my way through but it would take excessive amounts of energy. For now, I’m just sort of sitting in it. Letting it [...]
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“Good manners without sincerity are like a beautiful dead lady. Straightforwardness without civility is like a surgeons knife, effective but unpleasant. Candor with courtesy is helpful and admirable.” Sri Yukteswar These words made a deep impression, and the image of the beautiful dead lady stays with me. I grew up in the south and not [...]
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“To love both the invisible God, the Repository of All Virtues, and visible man, apparently possessed of none is often baffling! But ingenuity is equal to the maze. Inner research soon exposes a unity in all human minds–the stalwart kinship of selfish motive. In one sense at least, the brotherhood of man stands revealed. An [...]
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I’ve been thinking about food a lot lately. I’ve decided it’s time to clean up my act. My diet has gone to pot in the past month with my move, Daddy’s diagnosis, and the death of Buttercup. I’ve been eating crap and I feel like crap as a result. Eating poorly also impacts me in [...]
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“If we can just quiet down all the oughts and shoulds in ourselves, if we can be finished with that whole protestant ethic trip we’ve been on, we will see that we are really already further out than we give ourselves credit for being. We keep thinking we have to get behind ourselves and push, [...]
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“What if, when I meet another person, instead of being preoccupied with our individual differences or with who I remember her as being last time, I go beyond all that, I see the soul, I see the other being who is just like me? Then every moment is a fresh moment.” Ram Dass I repeatedly [...]
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I am moved to tears as I read Ram Dass’ words, in Paths to God, about his devotion to his guru. There is something compelling and yet frightening about that kind of deep love and surrender. I had a similar kind of devotional love for my youth pastor and his wife when I was 12, [...]
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I’m visiting my Dad this week. I can hear him snoring in his bedroom as I write and sip coffee. Last night as I put medicated ointment on his rashed back and massaged his neck, he said, “Carla, I’m glad you’re here. You got here just in time. I was really getting down.” Bless his [...]
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“Still waters run deep.” English Proverb It’s been a month since I’ve written in my journal and probably that long since I’ve sat in meditation and read spiritual literature. I’ve done all three today and intend for this to be the first day of the return to my morning practices. They are important to me. [...]
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