Silhouette of a group of people mid-air jumping for joy.

“The business of life is to be happy, active and whole; to express the Divine Life with joy and in fulfillment.”
- Ernest Holmes -

“I arise in the AM torn between a desire to save the world & a desire to savor the world. That makes it hard to plan the day”
- ee cummings -

Each day we have a new opportunity to live a completely different life, or we can choose to repeat the recent patterns of the previous days and weeks.  Or we can choose to bring the best forward and leave the rest behind.  

When I look back on what I want to bring forward, it’s the ideas and activities that helped me savor Life and those sharing it with me.  What I eventually realize is that by savoring the best, celebrating the best, I am promoting and bringing the best to the attention to others.  When enough of us are promoting and sharing the best, we realize this is much more conducive to a greater collective experience than any attempt to ‘save’ the world.  

The Truth is that the world doesn’t need saving, just as our soul doesn’t need saving, both are perfect and Divine as they are.  What needs our attention, and our continued attention is our underlying belief about who and what we really are.  Once we get clear about our innate Intelligence, Creativity and Potential, we free up an inordinate amount of energy and can redirect it into greater ideas and expectations for ourselves and those around us.  

Once we spend more of our time celebrating the Good in us, in others, in Life, we won’t feel the need to save the world or anyone else.  We will move beyond the save or savor question.  The Good will grow and expand and transcend all the small minded things that stood in the way of its consistent expression.  

If we are to block out time for anything on a daily basis, let’s make sure we are taking time to love, to awaken, to share the one thing that has made a difference for us recently.  If it’s worked for us, we have found yet another way to work more effectively with Life and our best plan is to look for opportunities to help others do the same.  

Life is truly wonderful!

“The man at the top of the mountain didn’t fall there.”
- Vince Lombardi -

A lot of times we look at someone’s current position and lose sight of their journey to get there.  It can be quite tempting to think that they just got ‘lucky’ or were ‘in the right place at the right time’.  When something wiser inside of us knows that luck is just the moment where preparation meets opportunity.

The success others are experiencing isn’t on display to make us feel bad or insufficient.  It can be that if we choose, but it can also be an inspiration to persevere when we run into turbulence.

Where they are and how different it seems to where we are, is entirely dependent upon our current location and perspective.  At one time, that position would have been inconceivable, but now it’s not that much further.

The truth is that what really matters most in our experience is our personal progress on multiple levels.  Am I further along now than I was last week, last year?  Am I still on the right path for me?

Our journey to where we are in this moment didn’t happen overnight.  There were many steps from where we were to where we are.  There were a lot of stops in between.  A lot of obstacles, distractions, tangents vying for our attention.  A lot of the obstacles were quite compelling; tangible, real problems screaming to convince us that where we were headed wasn’t possible for someone like us.

Each step we take moves us either closer to or further away from the mountain top, whatever that is for us at the moment.  Our individual and collective mountain tops change over time as we keep revealing and understanding more of the Infinite.

Once we get to our current mountain top, we can look back and appreciate the journey.  Not all of it was puppies and rainbows, but we now identify ourselves as one who made it here.  With that certainty, we can relax for a moment, breathe in the joy, soak in the wide open view and then look for the next mountain and all we’ll reveal about and within us along the way there.

Life is truly wonderful!

“When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown-up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability. To be alive is to be vulnerable.”
- Madeleine L’Engle -

As we find ourselves focusing on Love a little more openly in February, it’s a good time to remind ourselves the prerequisite for Love, an open heart.  For a wide variety of seemingly very good reasons, along the way we’ve all shut our hearts to one degree or another.  

The pain of loss, betrayal, prolonged loneliness and some accepted beliefs and expectations about relationship justified the shuttering of our heart.  If I’m not vulnerable, I can’t be hurt.  That logic is about as useful as ‘I’ll show you, I’ll hurt me’.  

The truth is that we are all vulnerable.  Not only when we are opening to relationship, but each time we venture out in any way, shape or form.  Even our best efforts to avoid confrontation or just barely stepping over the line of our comfort zone, we are still vulnerable because Life is not static and Life will not be denied.  

What we identify as feeling vulnerable is really just another version of uncertainty.  Whenever we are trying something new, learning and expanding, we are engaging ourselves and Life on a new level.  

It’s not so much as to whether we are vulnerable, we are.  Maybe we’re a little more sensitive about it in certain areas more than others, but we are always moving through a completely new set of possibilities, even in the most familiar surroundings.  

It’s more about whether we’ll decide that being vulnerable is a convenient excuse to retreat from living fully.  We can sell that to ourselves for a while, but eventually, we realize that the next opportunity to open is upon us.

Life is truly wonderful!

“True genius sees with the eyes of a child and thinks with the brain of a genie.”  - Puzant Kevork Thomajan -

We usually think of a genius as the stereotypical mad scientist or someone completely different than what we collectively agree is ‘normal’.  But when you think back to the true geniuses, a lot of them displayed a childlike curiosity and a hyper-active imagination.  

It’s pretty easy to be childlike in our emotional interactions.  Throwing fits and temper tantrums, pouting, needing to get even.  Surely by this time we’ve figured out the inefficiency of those responses.

But keeping that childlike curiosity in the midst of a world that is being explained and dissected down to the subatomic level and out to the edges of the Universe, demands a lot more from us.  We have to remind ourselves that all the new ‘discoveries’ came from someone paying a little closer attention, wondering or imagining something beyond the current experience or observation.  

A child seems to see everything for the first time, even things that are familiar still bring a sense of wonder and examination.  Watch how they juxtapose the traditional use or position for something completely different, just to see what it’s like.  

Once we play with the current perspective, turning it this way and that, we can engage our true genius, our ‘genie’, and let the creative juices flow.  With the confines of current understanding set aside, our imagination can come out to play and the sky is the limit.  And as soon as we get to the sky, we realize that the sky is nothing more than the limit of our previous paradigm.  Now things really begin to open up!

Life is truly wonderful!

“FAITH is the head chemist of the mind. When FAITH is blended with the vibration of thought, the subconscious mind instantly picks up the vibration, translates it into its spiritual equivalent, and transmits it to Infinite Intelligence, as in the case of prayer.”
- Napoleon Hill -