Dawn peeks through my window to see if I'm awake, pink like a rose mid-bloom. The house is hushed. Beyond, lagoon waters tentatively taste sand and rock; a seagull cries. The wind hums and growls around a window down the hall. And there -- do you hear it? The space between sounds shelters Silence: the [...]
Open the clutched hand weary and veined - you’ve been holding on to yourself - fall into safety - flow from stillness - the pond’s reflection is your grail - attract what you already have become who you already are - On the vast plain of awareness, sun and stars mirror the ecstasy of being. [...]
It's March 24, 2020. The exponential math of coronavirus is starting to kick in, and I'm hunkered down in Tbilisi, Georgia. I'm realizing that I never finished writing about my travels, so I open my journal and go back to summer of 2019, in the Baltics. And I find gold. The solitude that everyone is [...]
Listen. The tick of the clock the call that doesn't come the refrigerator's hum clack stop the unsaid word. It is not silence we fear but the meaning we give it. Silence is a container we fill with worry fear anxiety. An imagined reality we create perhaps to prepare for the worst. Silence is a [...]
I’ve been quiet lately, I know. My writing ebbs and flows with cycles of introversion and extroversion, contemplation and communication. I tend to go quiet when I have nothing to figure out; my mind isn't trying to solve some giant life puzzle: I am simply living contentedly. I also go quiet when I'm busy working [...]
Release. let go. the widest vantage point has no fixed handrail. Take the backward step turn into another world. another culture, country, life. each step a wider view. set down baggage as you go. the journey is too long to carry it all. the path to enlightenment is littered with the debris of worthless trinkets [...]
After seven months on the road, I'd learned that I need a lot of time in nature; as much as I enjoy city life, it creates a plaque-like accumulation of tension that only the silence of water, air and lush earth can diffuse. While I was researching the Baltics I came across a little town [...]
I don't re-read my journal entries often enough. I went through them yesterday in a moment of boredom, and was rewarded with page after page of raw gold: insights surfaced in the moment and then evaporating from my memory, as if they were physically attached to the minutes during which they were written. Thankfully I [...]
Other than my 7:30 am soy latte addiction and omnipresent camera, I've never admitted to being a tourist. I equate it to being "spiritual but not religious:" I can travel without supporting the nearly $9 billion-per-year tourism industry that carries our commercialized way of life like a virus, infecting and ultimately killing the charming uniqueness [...]
The resistance I’ve felt writing about Riga, Latvia, is similar to that of Geneva: I didn’t want to be there. But unlike Geneva, Riga didn't give me an uncomfortable vibe. Perhaps the timing was off and I wasn’t ready for city life after my quiet time on a farm. Then I chalked it up to [...]
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