“I just feel so irritable today, I don’t know why.  Guess I just woke up on the wrong side of the bed.”  Ever said that?  Ever said, “I don’t know why I’m crying!”  Ever cried when you were mad, when all you wanted to do was cuss someone out?  We’ve been taught for so many centuries that our feelings, our emotions were just unnecessary but troublesome appendages.  Our job then, was just to pretend them away for so long that when they made themselves evident, we would not recognize them or…

Since birth we’ve heard it again and again, “Be nice!”  Our mothers said it, our fathers said it, our grandparents said it, our teachers, preachers and religious leaders of all type said it.  Be nice!  It seems to be the ultimate in being loving.  But being loving isn’t necessarily nice. 

Nice means being pleasant, being pleasing, being polite and perhaps even self-deprecating.  Being nice means that we smile even when we don’t feel like smiling.  Being nice means always saying…

When you get up in the morning and you open the blinds to look out for the first fresh time that day to your front lawn or your backyard, can you see the peace that makes up the natural world?  Can you see that the sky and its holdings are just hanging there peacefully?  Can you see that the trees in your neighborhood represent so fully the silence and the presence of stillness?  And while you are looking at the peace in the natural world, can you hear the gentle movement of the wind, or the…

The life scenarios pass by oh so quickly, run through the filter of our absence or our presence.  We are either there, really there, or we are vaguely absent as the breaths, the heartbeats, the rhythms of life pass us by.  Is there something going on in the background, the underground, the basement of our lives?  Something making meaning of our messes?  Something that is meaning itself?  

Is there some process, some illuminating movement, like background music playing to…