You Touched Me

There are things that go through me 

From way beyond what's not of me 

The tonal influence of symphony

Melodies that move us in harmony

Rhythms and rhymes 

Seasons and times 

Poise and reflection 

Tenuous selection 

The choice to be friends 

To brave the distance

To love with no end  and conquer resistance 

These are things that go through me

Your life from God then to me 

A life exchanged for new me 

And a world that's better because you touched me

You touched me...

You touched me...

You touched me...

A Mood

Standing on a Prayer: A Burden for People of Color

We are still looking for trusted answers and better pathways to vulnerability and empathy. A city collective is praying for answers. Vulnerability and empathy are virtues which are categorized and sometimes caricatured as formulations of “weakness”, a subset of fear. I don’t believe for a minute that empathy or vulnerability is a sign of weakness. On the contrary, these are virtues of the strong and wealthy. However the dominant culture seems to view these as weakness. As such, we tend to realize them almost exclusively as attributes of fear. We can trade on fear. It’s a viable commodity but this need not be.

http://www.thevillagecelebration.com/standing-on-a-prayer-a-burden-for-people-of-color-part-1/

Read Part 2 Here
http://www.thevillagecelebration.com/standing-on-a-prayer-a-burden-for-people-of-color-part-2/

Path To Love

…sometimes we can’t stop betrayal even when we love without condition and sometimes, just sometimes, we’re uninterested in knowing the shame that grips many of our friends. Sometimes their suspicions about us are correct. It’s the secret we have kept to ourselves. It’s the one that says, “I am likely to abandon you, if you disappoint me.”

I have very beautiful experiences living from moment to moment. I say “moment to moment” because I live that way – from moment to moment. I have upheld some moments as more beautiful and some as the most beautiful. I’m grateful for each of them. Maybe I should stay right here – You should know how beautiful life is and how beautiful life can be. You are also very beautiful and the most wonderful thing in your world. You are powerful beyond your imagination and nothing is impossible for you. Can you believe this? Can you now feel that feeling that encourages you to believe the BEST is rightfully yours? Believing these things empowers your person-self to go out and conquer the world and anything standing in your way. Can you see it?

You can conquer anything and anyone that stands in your way! This is your Divine right – the true depiction of your Authentic-Self.

We like statements like these. We like to be reminded of our goodness, our strength, and our power more than we like to know what’s actually true. Some of us believe that because we experience ourselves as wonderful, everyone else should. If they don’t, something has to be wrong with them. When this happens or it’s brought to our attention that we’re are not being seen in the way we see ourselves, terms like “true” and “truth” become relative. When the “truth” seems to threaten what any of us think of as “good for me”, then we’re cleverly directed to believe that there is really no truth unless it’s a personal truth. We hear things like, “my truth ain’t your truth and your truth ain’t my truth.” Those words have preempted the childhood song and melody – “my friends are YOUR friends and Your friends are MY friends. The more we get together…”

Now it’s, “the more we believe our OWN thoughts, the happier we’ll be.”

Happiness, though, is not about believing your own thoughts as much as it involves being honest about them when you’re actually awake enough to really see them. Often our thoughts are spot on and are good for one and for all but what happens when they’re not? Should we keep on believing things because they are ours?
Language is beautiful and seductive, and just because it’s sounds good, doesn’t make it true. And even if it is true, it doesn’t mean you believe it. (It may not sound good to you.) Even if you believe it, it doesn’t mean you know it, and just because it’s known, doesn’t make it understood. And just because it’s understood doesn’t make it practiced. Practicing truth takes more than seeing eyes and listening ears. It takes courage, faith, humility and a genuine choice to Love. And Loving this way takes a sincere and relentless practice of personal honesty. (to be distinguished from “my” personal truth.) Personal honesty asks that I look not only at how I experience myself but how the “myself” experience really affects the world and the people I touch.

I remember listening to a motivational speaker who encouraged her audience to imagine being wealthy and what that would feel like. She gave them a very simple instruction. “If you want to be wealthy you should hang around people who are wealthy and even wealthier than you.” The crowd was feeling this. She went on to tell them that if they were the most successful person in their crowd they should look for a crowd that could pull them up because their current clique would likely pull them away from what they truly wanted. The crowd went up in a roar after hearing this.

Can you imagine the encouragement this audience felt knowing the only thing they had to do to get better was to distance themselves from the people who were beneath them? The seduction of the statement wasn’t that there were people actually beneath them but that they could rise higher than they were. Sounds like good advice though doesn’t it?

Consider this...

What happens when the person that’s wealthier than you follows the same advice and keeps YOU out?

It sounds good but it really doesn’t work for anything but a good fix and unconscious movement toward further discrimination, war and dysfunction – the very things that a life of Love and true awareness are designed to render impotent.

Imagine someone – anyone – telling you that they have conquered everything standing in their way. This person could be your sister, your spouse, your father, your boss, or your best friend. You naturally want to celebrate with them. You go out and have a party and dance the victory dance. Life is beautiful and you rule the world. Later on as you both become high on life and drunk in your victory and the inhibitions become the free flowing celebration of uninhibited, raw naked boasting and you find out that not only have they conquered everything standing in their way they’ve also conquered “everyone” standing in their way -including YOU. You’ve been conquered too! You didn’t know that though, did you? Did you know you were the enemy of their personal truth, their personal path to freedom, their personal success story?

This is what betrayal looks like but betrayal is still an illusion.

I want you happy – for real. Bliss is my earnest desire for your life.

Truthfully, neither I, nor anyone else is responsible for your happiness. You’re not responsible for mine or ours either but we do participate in our joint experiences. We supply everyone in our lives with successive and sequential opportunities to consider whether we are really living our lives in ways that genuinely consider their presence in it.

We live in this age with so much talk of Self, YOU, Divinity, Authenticity, Transparency, Translucence, Source. It is perhaps more prominent than it’s ever been. It’s attractive, alluring and some of it is seducing us to avoid community while we think we are building safe ones. Waking to Self might be the most important thing any of us will ever do yet the movement toward "Self" should be synonymous with the movement toward "Source". That One who truly finds Self is progressively less interested in withholding and progressively more interested in extending. This is one way the Source-Self is distinguished from the false-self. It's not in the words or the platitudes we offer; It’s in the Love we are and choose to be.

Your capacity to love is limitless and when you are challenged to not believe this, Love Anyway.

Loving Anyway is the act of Genius. It is the evidence of Authenticity and Mindfulness. It is the function of Brilliance. It is Who You Truly Are & if you ever want to know if you have truly discovered YOU...Love Anyway…

Marquis

(This is an excerpt from my upcoming book on Love and Relationships. Stay tuned as I follow up with the question:

So how do we know when it’s time to step away or abandon a relationship? When is love not enough? When is it clear that there is no possible shred of hope to procure better ways of relating and being with partners, friends and lovers?)

Still

I loved her and I saw her again

Still I love her

She didn’t look my way

Still I love her

She’s free… from Me…

Still I love her

Plant Me A Tree

Long time since I touched my Lover
Still the truth though
Love is and I think of her at every dawn
It’s different though in the evenings
There are no road trips
No sliding into smells and skin
But the truth Remains and Love still is…
Ever wonder where hope goes and if it ever returns
I’m told it’s a tree of Life when it shows up
Long time since I touched my Lover
Vanished
It was good though – not just the touch
The hand, Yes… but the words too with
Smile lines and glistening eyes
No more words – Just silence
No more moments – just memories
Plant me a tree

Process: The Paradox of the Divine Dialogue (Cont)

"Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of joy you must have somebody to divide it with."- Mark Twain.

I would say it, “…joy must have somebody to share it with.”

“Grief is selfish in nature, it centered around you. Joy is the enrichment of inner grace that cries out "Our Father." – Mark Eaton

I would say, “…joy is the enrichment of inner grace that cries out for community.”

It’s not that my edits are better, they’re just the way I see it. Either way, I’m convinced that joy has always dealt me a better dose of life than grief. The only thing separating grief from joy is a moment of awareness and this is what we want when we’re grieving. We won’t out of it; we want out of the pain and suffering. But how?

“Answers!!!! Give me answers.”

I suppose it would be simply easy to just tell the world the "Truth"(the answer) in its most sublime and complete form, although it eludes us what that is. Sometimes, though, there’s the push to do just that – speak of truth in the ultimate sense. It’s similar to planning a trip and knowing the destination, but knowing the destination is not the synonymous with actually getting there. Getting there is what I call “process”, and there is definitely “process”; however, there can be several ways or paths to getting “there” and each of them can and will carry its own discipline. These disciplines involve several mini-truths so to speak. Some of them are faster, some more tedious, but each with its own reason for being. Some of them are at times, timeless and seamless. In these moments (the timeless and seamless moments) we are more closely aware or awakened to that inescapable Oneness although it may be unknown to our amnesiatic “person self” that we are living in such sync or synchronicity.

Sometimes we like to “cheat” the process. We just want the answer without learning how to master the question. The problem with this is that we cheat ourselves of actually “knowing” our Divinehood (that powerful person-self) and we are stuck with only believing it. (Those of us who are lucky enough to even get that far. Some of us just remain illiterate). The process is there nonetheless to create for our person-self this dynamic experience of being human. Humanity is nothing if it is not designed as the consciousness of exploration; it IS the mastery of the question – Love/God/Universe asking itself, “who/what am I?” Not that we don’t really know but we want to SEE.

"I got what I asked for, the chance to love no matter what, and to see what that is gonna take."

Matthew Glenn Krepps

This is the brilliance of loving anyway. We get to remember and experience our limitless capacity to love, to emerge and to just BE. We, humanity, are still in the beginning stages of our self discovery and it is not a beginning to despise but rather one to explore. That’s it!!!!! The exploration takes time. Like the trip or the journey we are waiting to arrive so in the meantime we experience and we explore. This “meantime” though is better felt when we do it with joy rather than with grief. In grieving, yes, we DO feel alone. Sometimes we are convinced of this aloneness. It doesn’t matter that we “really” aren’t alone; we FEEL alone.

How can there be joy when we feel this way? But we don’t have to feel this way even if we are in the experience of solitude. We know that we are joined by the many – the ONE, and this reality will show itself as we share ourselves and withhold not. Joy is the hope of the shared experience; it is the remembering of our Divine selves and the discovery of nothing missing and nothing broken. God will not deny him/her/itself.

We know this and yet we are learning this.

My Redeemer Lives

You’ve believed you could only go so far. You’ve believed there was only so much you could take. You’ve been convinced you have an emotional cap that when reached will force you to explode, take prisoners and demand your right to freedom and power. You did not consider you could outlast your pain or be stronger than your grievance. You secretly gave what came to destroy you, the keys to your freedom. What you didn’t know, is your enemy is and always has been afraid of eviction. The enemy has always seen you as its Landlord. Your enemies have always known you have the power. The reason they relentlessly threaten you is to convince you that you are weaker than the Truth, insufficient to Love, and unqualified to Evolve.

The one who seeks to destroy you is paying tribute to your Power. How could someone feel threatened by weakness? If you would just see this, you would not believe their delusion but you would accept their Truth. To accept this honor would grant you the privilege of becoming THEIR Savior.

One day you will believe you do not have to forecast a limitation on to yourself. One day you will no longer use your imagination to contemplate the possibility of failure. If you do not like enemies, be only a friend and if you have difficulty believing you can be such a Redeemer, remember this: You have always been bigger than your experience and you have experienced no limitation which has nullified the “Beauty of Your Becoming.” You Are Here!!!!!!

Your capacity to Love is limitless and when you are challenged to not believe this, Love Anyway

Step into your life! Come out of the Shadows! Welcome to the LifeXchange!

Have this dialogue with me and many others Sundays @ 4p.m. when the LifeXchange gathers.

Mediums Art Lounge

516 Center Street,

Little Rock, AR

(501)749-2110

L2L,
The Seer.