Letting Go

I made a promise to myself in October of 2020, that when I started writing these posts twice a week, I would be honest. I would tell my story without holding back. Without being afraid you, as a reader, would turn away from me.

Without the truth, what do we have?

Today I want to share a poem I wrote several years ago. It was true then and is true now.

Since I was young, I’ve felt a special connection to Jesus, who I now call, Yeshiwa (Yeshua), his name in his native tongue of Aramaic. I wrote this poem as a conversation between us, a way of gaining a better understanding of my life and finding a way of letting go.

I’m sure you have your own sense of what the truth is, and I would never ask you to accept anything I have to say (ever) if it does not feel right to you. My role in this life and with these posts is to share with you what feels true to me and invite you to decide for yourself. Being connected is its own divine gift.

So, here is my conversation.

I am connected to you

I feel it all the way through me

I know I can be you

If I am prepared

If I find the way

The narrow path

I wonder

What will I have to give up

Change, surrender, abandon

I wonder

How is it possible to open

As wide as you

What sort of strength will that take

Who can help me

Can you, do you want to

Must I make a hole in my roof

To be in your presence

I am listening closely

For your voice

Your touch

Your certain peace

My heart hears you calling me

I am invited into your courtyard

You wish to speak with me

It is hard to calm my spirit

To slow the questions

Difficult to breathe

I want to give you my heart

I volunteer it

You say that it is not necessary

That you have your own

That I need mine

You want to make sure

I am listening

So you wait

Till my eyes are soft

My heart quiet

I hear your words

Inside of me

Hard words for me to understand.

You tell me not to try to be you

There is only ever going to be

One of you

I misunderstand

I think inside me

A soft scolding

How could I think I could be you

But that’s not it

It’s not what you meant

You were clear

But I am cloudy

You try again

You ask a part of me to let go

To relax into silence

So I can truly hear you

I ask my ego

To lie down

And take a nap

And when I hear it snoring

I open as wide as I can

And you start again

You say there is only ever

One of each of us

We are different grains of sand that make up the beach

This is how it is

And it is beautiful this way

You fill me

With wonder

You tell me

That all of my trying

Has both made me who I am

And kept me from being who

I can be

And that it is time

To decide

There is no wrong decision

I can stay where I am

I love and am loved

Right where I am

And no harm will come to me

From not moving

From this place

Yet

I know

There is something ahead

Calling to me

I hear the most beautiful music

Pulling me

Gently into the light

Oh, the hallowed light

No more a dream

But real

How long I have waited

For this

You smile

You guide

You take my hand in yours

I could die happily

Right now in your arms

Oh, to be with you

I look into your eyes

I hear you

I hear you tell me

We are all each other’s saviors

There are other things

You want me to know

Am I ready

To hear them

I surely hope so

It feels as though a great deal

Depends on it

I hear you speak of freedom

Of letting my spirit go

Just simply letting go

I hear you tell me

To trust you

To trust me

That all this holding

All this planning

All this fear

About the future

About my present

It is so unnecessary

There is so much pain

Doubt

So many tears

You tell me

It was never meant to be this way

And that I never meant

To live this way

But somehow

I changed my mind

And although it has taken

A long time

I see now

Where my heart truly belongs

You ask me

If I am ready

I hear my own voice

Saying

Yes, I am ready

So ready

Now what

I ask

You breathe words into me

Give it all away

You say

Every last thing

Hold nothing

Hold nothing back

Hold nothing in

Let it all be free

Part of me understands this

Part does not

How

How is this done

I want to

I want to let go

Of everything

I can not hold the weight of it any more

I don’t want to

Are you sure

I ask myself

It’s hard to let go

Even though it is what I want

What I need

So I come to this

It is up to me to choose

And so I do

I choose to let go

And I feel

Something

Sacred happen

And

It feels like home

Seeing Clearly

Do you know who you are?

Perhaps you get lost in the grand illusion of this life, making it difficult to see yourself clearly. Maybe you keep track of all of the events in your life, many of which you criticize yourself for, so that you experience challenges, and your true self remains hidden.

It is so easy to see only the surface of our lives, to score every perceived failure, to lament very unattained goal. We are tempted to regret every harsh word and gesture done by us or done to us.

Perhaps your anger holds you tightly in its grasp or you feel closed off from the world, drawn inward, needing to protect yourself. Maybe you are afraid to open to love, to be loved. Maybe the surface of your life is too real for you, and you find it hard to imagine knowing you are more than this. So much more than this.

Would you like to see with new eyes? With a new heart, one that sees the truth, the truth of who you really are?

Close your eyes for a moment. Imagine your eyes being washed, cleaned, refreshed, ready for new vision. Open your eyes and open your heart. Imagine you are facing a mirror. Allow your gaze to fall upon your reflection. Look deeply into your own eyes and know there is a depth to them that is infinite and that is connected to the one source of all power and love. To the divine center of all creation.

This is who you are…the eyes of love, able to see into every darkness and bring it light. Able to renew and refresh, to start again. And this time, to start with the awareness that you are made entirely of love. A radiance and brilliance beyond your present imagining. You are connected to the source of love. Connected in such a way that you will always be able to feel it.

This is who you truly are, love incarnate in the world. You are a part of the divine, living and moving in this beautiful world. In all things, you can choose the path of love. You are love.

Because you have been in this world for some time now and have listened carefully to what it says, you may be having a hard time believing this.

You might be asking yourself, how can such a claim be made? Where is the evidence…the proof of this?

You might not be prepared to take my word for it. I understand this. We’ve received so much training that opposes this perspective. We look around and notice how people are treated and can not reconcile how, if we are all love, how can so many hurtful things be happening?

So let me ask a question.

How can we see clearly that we are love and came from love when our observations of this world show us hatred, jealousy, contempt, oppression…and other manifestations of fear?

My answer is straightforward…we choose what to see and what to believe. And once the choice is made, we experience the outcome.

I believe that before we came to this earth, we existed as pure love. It is our true essence. However, since we have the gift of free will, we can choose any experience here on earth. If we choose fear, in any of its forms, we release our awareness of love and are trapped inside fear. From this place love appear unreal.

So, I invite you to choose wisely. When a decision point is reached, consider what you would like to experience the most in this world. Do you want to live in fear, or do you want to choose a loving path, one that connects you with others, supports you, encourages you, makes your life better?

It really is all about the clarity of our vision. Can we see what will come of our decisions? The better we can, the more wonderful a life we will lead. And knowing we are made of love can help us make an aligned choice, one that comes from our loving heart.

I hope you live seeing clearly.

Everyone Is Worthy

I want to share a story from my life with you.

I know from personal experience, as I’m sure you do too, that sometimes we’re not treated as if we are worthy. It isn’t a very good feeling. I try to remember this and acknowledge the innate value we each possess.

One day many years ago, during a particularly hot summer, a man rang our doorbell. As I opened the door he stepped back and began his speech. He was trying to sell magazines to fund his tuition for college. He said it was a special program designed for people like him. Before I could ask, he told me who ‘people like him’ were. He’d had a tough youth, which was another way of saying he’d been in trouble all his life. He told me he’d grown up in the projects in downtown Albany and used to sell crack. He said he was really good at it, but not good enough. He finally learned you couldn’t survive very long doing that.

I think it’s possible to tell if another person is lying to you by looking into their eyes, if you can look long enough. I also think there are people who can stand the stare for a long time without showing the truth. I knew I wouldn’t have the length of time it would take, so I just decided to believe him.

I wasn’t the only one home that day. My son, Tommy, was there too. He was playing games in his bedroom, like any other eight-year-old would do and waiting for me to come back. I guess I was gone too long, so he came looking for me. He found me sitting on the front porch talking with a man he didn’t know. He watched and listened to us through the screen door. After a couple of minutes, he came out, sat next to me, and asked what we were doing. The man showed him the magazine choices we could make and made sure Tommy saw the one all about video games. He told Tommy that the subscription prices were the best and it would help him to be able to go to college and change his life. He told Tommy a bit about how it was for him growing up and how much trouble he’d gotten into. And that he’d been really bad but was hoping to get another chance. The order form had other people’s names on it, and he hoped we’d sign up for a couple of magazines. Tommy and I looked the form over. Tommy quietly looked up at me and said, “are we really going to order these Dad?”. I told him we were, and he looked at me with a funny, questioning expression.

The man seemed pleased with our order and told me he’d accept cash or a check. I asked him if he was thirsty and when he said yes, I offered him a soda, which he happily accepted. I went inside to get the soda and a check. I gave them to him, and we talked about things for a while. He wasn’t in a big hurry and seemed to like hanging around with us. Somehow, we got on to the subject of birthdays. I asked him if he could wait a minute because I had something for him, but I had to get it from inside the house. He said he’d wait. After a minute I was back and he eyed me kind of sideways, trying to figure out what I was doing.

I handed him some folded bills and told him it might help with his second chance. He looked at me in a way no one else ever had. It was part surprise and part disbelief. A look I’ll never forget.

He asked me why I was doing this. I asked if he had a birthday and he said, “sure.” I told him that as far as I was concerned, today was his birthday and this was his birthday gift.

He just sat there shaking his head for a long, long time. His eyes got a little misty and he looked away. When he looked back at me, he said, “nobody has ever done anything like this for me.” It apparently was beyond him to understand why anyone would do such a thing for someone they didn’t even know. In that moment, truth came into his eyes. The truth about the magazines and the truth about his second chance. He left a little while later. As he walked away Tommy asked me whether we were ever going to see the magazines. I told him that I didn’t think so. That same puzzled look came back to him, and he looked up at me saying, “then why did you give him the money?”

The man, who was almost to the corner by now, turned back to us. He smiled and waved. I looked down at Tommy and said, “that’s why.”

We never did get the magazines. And I never saw the man again. But it really doesn’t matter to me because we all changed that day and it is still one of my favorite days ever.

Our Essential Nature

I believe that if we are open to learning, everything can teach us and that there is meaning in all that we experience. I also believe that there are valuable implications to everything in our lives.

Here’s an example from the other day. I grant you that at first glance it may not seem like much, but it helped me see deeper into my life.

I went to retrieve the newspaper from our front lawn. I opened the plastic bag our newspaper comes in to find that somehow the overnight rain had found its way through the bag and saturated one whole end.

Disappointed, I decided to hang each section on one of our drying racks, hoping it would be readable later in the day.

What struck me was the idea that each element, water and air, acts according to its nature.

The rain came and the water flowed naturally in all directions. It found the tiny pin hole in the plastic bag and seeped in, making part of the newspaper wet.

Water seeks to make all things wet.

Hanging the wet newspaper on the drying rack created space for the air to circulate, surrounding the paper from all directions. The air did what air does, it dried the paper.

Air seeks to make all things dry.

What has this got to do with you or me?

Quite a lot actually.

I wondered, what is my essential nature? What do I do regardless of my circumstances? How do I decide what directions to travel or what decisions to make about my life?

Fire seeks to burn everything. Earth seeks to return all things to itself.

What do I do? What governs my behaviors? What governs yours?

I want to feel joy, give and receive love, have adventures, connect deeply with others.

I want to do good things, be productive, help others, allow my heart to open wide.

What do you want to do in this world? What makes you feel most alive? What lifts you up and sets you free?

I want to be like water, air, fire, and earth. I want to move freely and act from my essential nature.

But what is my essential nature? Is it what I want, or what I feel I need or is it something else? Is it what rises out of me without any conscious thought?

For me, I believe I am here on earth to be an expression of the divine. I realize that may seem like a bold statement. That’s okay with me because I believe we’re all here for this reason, to live lives of connection, to be each other’s kin (family) and to live a joy-filled life.

I believe this is our essential nature.

Sure, other things get in the way. We become distracted by life’s events and demands. We become influenced by other’s actions and behaviors. But, if we look a bit deeper inside ourselves, I believe we’ll notice our essential nature is to be at peace, live in harmony, love and be loved. Acting from this place, we can naturally flow, just like water, air, fire, and earth.

Facing the Right Direction

I learned an amazing fact recently about sunflowers that has a lot to do with how to live a rich, centered, balanced life.

Imagine a field full of sunflowers. Can you see it in your mind? If you need a little help, the internet has lots of photos.

If the sun is out, take a second and see what you notice.

If you said, they’re all facing the same direction, you’re correct. And the direction they’re facing is always toward the sun. Each of their faces is upturned to capture as much sunshine as possible. They’re known as heliotropic because their heads follow the sun as it arcs through the sky.

In the morning sunflowers face east and as the day progresses, they end up facing west. Even more fantastic to me is that once the sun goes down, each sunflower turns and faces east again, waiting for the sun to come up in the morning.

What I find so compelling about this is that sunflowers know instinctively what their energy source is and orient themselves around it. They know the sun will feed them, so they follow it the whole day.

What if we oriented ourselves around what truly feeds and nourishes us?

What kind of life would that provide us?

The question that arises for me is, what is the best source of nourishment? I realize that what I choose will make all of the difference in my life. This idea makes me want to choose very carefully.

If you sat back in this moment, what would you choose?

There are a lot of things to pick from. Money, fame, job advancement, athletic excellence, social influence, strong relationships, popularity.

How do you decide what to choose? Maybe, you don’t want to choose only one. Maybe you want or need more. Maybe you want them all.

Thinking about my answer prompts me to consider whether the list is complete. Are there other things more important than the ones that first came to me?

It only takes a second to reveal my answer. None of these is what I want most. None of these will nourish me over the course of my life and I would be wise to look deeper.

So, I do and discover that what truly is the source of everything valuable in my life is love. If I connect to love in every situation, like the sunflowers connect to the sun, I will always have what I need and want. I will always be fulfilled.

Recently my nine-year-old grandson asked me a fascinating question. He was in the living room and called out to me in the kitchen asking, “What’s the most powerful thing in the world?”

I thought for a moment and said, “love”.

My thirteen-year-old granddaughter overheard both his question and my answer and said to me, “I knew you’d choose that.”

So, there it was, perhaps 30 seconds of elapsed time to reveal some magic and magnificence. He asked an incredibly important question and she reflected to me her awareness, her insight into me, with my answer. I felt ‘seen’. I was touched deeply by this impromptu exchange, and I thought about sunflowers and the way they move with the sun and recognized I am like them because I move to see and feel love.

Love centers me, balances me, and gives me everything I could ever hope for.

If I was ever asked, I would encourage anyone to find their sources of love and follow them throughout the day, then sit waiting for them to appear the next morning, like the sun gazing down on a field of sunflowers.

What Are You Looking For

Do you suppose that everyone is looking for something? Some extra portion of life? Some new spice, experience, dimension, or transition?

Are you?

If you are, do you know where to look?

This seems like a simple question, but it’s more than that. It’s the essential question. We have so many places and directions we can move, but how do we know for sure which will lead us toward what we want?

As you’ve observed by now if you’ve been with me for a while, asking questions is one of the main ways that helps me plot my course through life. Without questions, I wander, moving about aimlessly. I need focus and questions create pathways for me.

So, if you are willing, I’m going to take you on one of my journeys. In this case, it’s a somewhat poetic journey which starts with an important question. Because none of us is more important than another, sometimes it seems we don’t feel we can share what feels true to us.

I am taking a step. A step beyond my comfort level and placing words on a page, with the idea in mind that they may offer you something of value.

Who am I to speak to you?

And yet, who do I have to be?

Who do any of us have to be?

We all know a part of the whole.

I am wondering…

What do we look for in each other?

To be someone to help fill us up,

Someone to hear us,

To know why our heart beats?

Someone to touch our soul,

Someone to stand next to,

Or lean up against,

To help weather life’s storms?

Someone to remind us about love,

About why we’re here,

To ask us about our dreams,

To lead us forward,

And to catch us when we fall?

Someone to remind us that we are family,

That we’ve chosen each other,

To support, to suggest,

To increase our range and

Help us see beyond ourselves?

And someone to help us know love

Through both human and divine touch.

To me, what each of us may be looking for is found both inside of us and inside of others. When we connect, we’re bigger, brighter, bolder than we are alone. We need each other. We want each other.

Solely looking outside doesn’t work for me. Neither does looking only on my inside. I need both. I need insight and reflection.

How about you?

What do you need and where are you looking?

After years of searching, I settled back, relaxed my mind and heart, and waited for an answer. A divine connection appeared, and a voice spoke.

“You can look wherever you like, but there is one sure, true path.”

“Tell me please,” I asked, “what is this path?”

“Always choose love. Open your heart and offer love, to yourself and to all others. From here you will find all that you seek.”

Making A Difference

I wanted to share some thoughts about making a difference. It could be in someone else’s life, but the one that really, truly matters, is making a difference in your own life.

To me the reason for that seems to be because once you find the inner strength to make shifts in your own life, it automatically changes the way you approach life…and everyone you come into contact with benefits from this.

I’m not saying this is easy. I know it’s not, but when you see value and worth in shifting some of your beliefs, everything can change for you in a good way. There might be some discomfort as you adjust, but life can be so much better than we imagine it.

My offering comes by way of a poem I wrote many years ago.

Imagine you had a chance

To make a difference in someone’s life

Would you take it?

(or) would you stand back

At a Distance

And ask yourself questions?

What would you need to know?

Would it matter what they were like?

(or) what they believed in?

If they were nice to their friends?

If they were mean to their enemies?

Would it matter

If they paid you

With money or

With kind words?

Would your eyes ask any questions?

Would your heart move you forward

Or hold you back?

Would you question your skill?

(or) wonder about your motives?

Would you ask yourself

If you were

Good enough?

Or do you know

That you already are?

Do you know how precious,

How priceless you are?

How every good thing is within you already?

How we are meant to be connected

To everyone else

With no lines,

No fences

And no hesitation

We are all a part of the same dream,

The same human form

The same essential heart

Imagine

You gave yourself

The chance to make a difference

In someone’s life

Imagine

That you realize

You always can.

A hope of mine is that you choose to shift and open to a wider world, one where you offer yourself a chance to make a difference in your own life and the lives of others. Bon voyage.

Why

As a kid I used to ask my parents, “why?”

I rarely received a satisfactory answer. I wasn’t sure what that meant. Maybe they didn’t know either. More likely, they didn’t feel it necessary to answer or they just plain didn’t want to. They were probably too busy for the onslaught of follow up questions I was no doubt going to ask.

In order to avoid this, I was told, “because I said so.” And that was supposed to be that…done deal…conversation over.

Well, I’m a grown up (mostly) and I still want to know, “why?”

The issue is, who do I ask now?

Do I have to answer all of my own questions from here on in? If so, I’m going to be in trouble because this world is far too complicated for me to figure everything out that I’m curious about.

I have a mile long list of questions I’d like the answers to. Maybe you have a few on your list too. It would be fun to compare notes sometime. But until then, here’s something I’d like to understand.

Why can’t we all get along?

I try to sit back and listen so that I might discern some of the reasons. The first thing that jumps out at me is that we’ve all received strong cultural training, whether from our parents, other family members, teachers, bosses, leaders, really everyone that surrounds us.

We seem to start out with a blank baby slate. Nothing on it at all, just some inner coding to help us get what we feel we need: food, tender loving care, clean diapers, a nice crib. “Why” doesn’t seem to matter.

But as we grow older, we become a part of an opinion factory. We are told what to think and how to act or we observe it. Either way it becomes a part of us. We absorb everything around us and filter it through our training. If it doesn’t fit, we set it aside.

And in that very moment, “why” becomes lost. We act by rote.

I wonder, how could it be different from this? How might we be trained so that we could be open and so that we could listen and ask questions and hear answers?

And while it would be nice to start over, fresh and clean, that’s not very realistic, so I search for an alternative. From the place I am right now, can I become a blank slate, ready to have an open dialogue with others, ready to talk about all of the “whys”?

What would make this possible?

My first impression is that compassion, sympathy, and empathy need to take center stage. I need to acknowledge that I have pre-formed opinions about almost everything. And further, I need to consider that none of them might be accurate or fair.

If I can accept this starting place, I think I have a chance. I think I can ask real questions and hear real answers. I think I can fit the new answers in around all the other things I’ve been told and let them influence each other.

And perhaps I’m asking the wrong question.

Maybe the question ought to be…”how” can we get along? Maybe “why” is a rabbit hole, a deep set of tunnels where everyone gets lost.

I like the idea of “how” because it’s active and leads me forward, rather than “why” that often leads me in circles.

“How” is hopeful and full of potential. “How” is worth exploring. It’s connective and alive. So, I think I’ll release needing to know “why” and focus my time and energy on “how”. Maybe you’ll want to join me.

“How” is a way forward that folks can work on together. We can explore our views and preconceptions with each other and seek commonalities, then build from there, believing that there are answers and solutions for everything.

Would A Smile Help

I pulled a card from my Four Word Question deck at random and ended up with this card…Would A Smile Help?

My first reaction was, yes, of course a smile would help no matter what was happening. Smiles are awesome.

I wondered why. What is it about them that is so appealing?

My answer is…because they change how I feel inside me. They brighten my day and connect me, to the world, to others and perhaps most importantly, to the divine.

It feels like a smile is an extension of the love that is offered to the world. Smiles feel like they are filled with good intentions.

I don’t think I ever smile and still have negative feeling toward the world. I suppose it’s possible, but not very likely.

Smiles are definite mood shifters. They may be difficult to put on your face during challenging times. When this happens, they prompt a question for me. Given the choice, where would I rather be, in a happy or unhappy state of mind?

The trick might be whether I can answer this simple question while in a bad mood, a sad mood, after a fight with someone, a depressing day or during a sickness.

Sure, when I’m feeling fine, smiling is easy and fun and I think anyone can do it, but what about during the tough times in my life? I wonder, what would it take to remind myself to smile? What trigger would shift me from frowning to smiling? Could I set some kind of internal alarm that would go off, sparking me to remember to smile?

I want that to be the case.

I’m not talking about a Pollyanna approach where I tell myself that all is right with the world even though it’s not. I don’t find lying to myself to ever be the answer.

Recognizing that at any time in my life I have a choice of how I want to live and experience the world opens me and offers me the opportunity to choose. I find I choose much better when there’s a smile on my face. How about you?

I’m not denying that things can feel out of control and sometimes miserable. They can be and at times, they are.

What a smile does is it sends a message to me and to the world that I am exercising my ability to choose how to see and experience the world. It’s an opportunity to shift my consciousness.

This is an incredibly easy solution for me. Afterall, how many simple, easily controllable things can any one of us do? One answer is that every one of us can smile.

I also think to myself, I am not alone in this world. I ask what sort of message do I want to send out? If given the choice, what do I want to offer others?

My answer is often the same. I want to channel the love I feel running through me from my divine source.

It is such a simple thing to do. All I have to do is…smile.

It feels good and connects me to others. And it’s also great when you receive a smile in return. It’s actually life giving and life affirming and one of my most treasured things.

I invite you to test this out for yourself if it intrigues you. See what happens when you smile, even during your most difficult experiences. I bet you’ll find it lifts you up and brightens your day. I ask you, who couldn’t use that in their life?

An Important Look Back

It was three years ago yesterday that I began writing these posts and I’m surprised and delighted that I’ve been doing them twice a week since then.

When I sat and thought about this, I realized that a lot has happened in the world over the last three years, especially due to COVID. And whereas that was and is hugely impactful, it’s not the only thing that matters.

If I asked you, what would you tell me about what has happened in your life? What would make it onto your personal highlight reel?

Have you found or lost someone significant in your life? Been released from a job or signed onto a new one? Have you traveled? Read a good book that still captivates you? Learned something new? Added to your family? Grown taller or shorter? I’ve lost a half inch in height, maybe you have too.

There is so much going on in our daily lives, it’s easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. We get wrapped up in all of the little stuff and sometimes miss what we ourselves say is most important to us.

When I stop for a moment and broaden my view, I find it enlightening. Opening up to a longer time span helps me to put things into better perspective. So, when I recognized that I’ve been offering my commentary through these posts for three years, I wanted to settle back and take a look at some highlights, and perhaps learn something important about myself.

I decided to write down some events and see if any patterns emerged.

Maybe you’ve done this same thing or perhaps you’d like to do it now and join me in a little life review.

Before I share some of my observations with you, I’d like to suggest a framework for us to use. It consists of four parts: 1) physical wellness, 2) human relationships, 3) creative expression and 4) spiritual connections. Of course, please feel free to use whatever framework you find most comfortable and let it guide your way.

During the last three years I’ve experienced a significant increase in my attention to my physical health and wellbeing, especially over the last year. Visiting my mom at the Nursing Home twice a week clearly had an impact on me and shifted my attention. I’ve made radical changes to my approach to health and have adopted many new (and better) practices to support my wellbeing.

While reviewing for highlights I recognized how fundamentally important human relationships are to me. Being with family and friends, sharing adventures, eating, laughing, traveling, doing arts and crafts, and just plain old spending time doing nothing together. The act of connecting is both sacred and special to me and a center piece of my existence. Despite some sadness in losing folks, there is great happiness and joy in connecting with those who are here, knowing there is deep love between us.

The last three years has been filled with meaningful creative expressions for me. During that time, I wrote three books, co-created an oracle deck, directed, and participated in a play performed at our church, and opened wide to my artistic self, creating what I consider to be beautiful acrylic art pours.

When I had finished focusing on these three aspects, I shifted my attention to the spiritual part of my life. When I am deeply connected spiritually, everything else in my life glows radiantly. Knowing I am part of the divine essence of creation (as are you) allows me to give and receive with joy and love in my heart. This is my lifeblood and I daily nourish my spiritual relationships and connections. This is what gives my life its meaning and value and I am a much better human being because of it.

So, what did you learn during your review? Are there ripe places to be explored? Gaps to be filled in? Wonderful, meaningful ideas to be pursued?

I hope that you found this to be as enlightening an exercise as I did and gained some valuable insight and inspiration.