Category: General Learning

I’m returning today.

From Comox, British Columbia. Through Vancouver. Home to Utah. From the company of good, wise, kind Men. To my Sweetheart, our hearth of home and heart.

Trips matter. So does the Learning. So does the Story. So does the Circle. Returns too, with an invitation to integrate and to share.

I’m a man of many good friends, colleagues, fellow learners, fellow question askers.

Today, remembering the drum for its ceremonial joy and depth. Same for the river, where a few salmon jumped. Same for the fire, where flames dance the mystery of it all.

One of the reasons that I have such conviction in me, about partnering with Life itself, is because I’ve had brave and good teachers. Which is to say, guides.

Meg Wheatley is one of those. And Meg, in her early 80s, continues to offer what is brave and good.

Says Meg recently for one of her programs:

“We inhabit a generous, conscious Universe where everything alive has intelligence, nothing becomes manifest until it’s in relationship, and nothing living lives alone.”

Christina Baldwin is another of those teachers and guides. She too lives among the voices I hear in my heart. Christina is now in her late 70s, teaching and guiding in such clear ways.

Says Christina recently, in one of her informative blog posts,

“Life hangs on a narrative thread. … The thread is slender, but strong: we trust it to hold us and allow us to swing over the edge of the known into the future we dream in words.” Never have I felt this more than true than now. I am swinging over the unknown while the threads coming at me are a tangled mess of broken narratives, soundbites, AI concoctions, manipulated information, reels and threads and phone-held videos—some of them helpful, amidst all that is not.”

I bow to these women, these guides. For what they call out in many of us restorying the story, for giving me sips and sometimes gulps of courage and clarity.

Please jump in, as inspired. My B & B programs cultivate this kind of energy.

Flow, it’s a creek in our neighborhood. Through a few houses. Between a few ponds. The sound is… comforting.

Flow, it’s a way of conceiving life. That is to say, an orientation that is a practice. I find myself continuing to both ask and assert, “not only to we live Life, but also, Life lives us.”

Flow, it’s a surrender. To something inspiring. To something life-giving.

Flow, it’s mantra, from which, many good things happen.

What a great line. It’s Martin Prechtel, American author and teacher of many things spiritual and indigenous. I got it from Lisa Hess‘ sharing (thx Lisa for your thoughtful ways).

Here’s the full quote:

“Grief and Praise are renters whose landlord is Love…Grief is a worker on life’s big highways, and Praise is Grief’s eternal freight train, forever hauling the vision of life’s bigger picture from stars whose light hasn’t got here yet, which Grief uses to refill the potholes of our losses.” (Martin Prechtel, Smell of Rain on Dust).

Oh how it matters to have relationship with grief, with praise, and with love. Notice, it’s rarely something all worked out, never to be revisited. Rather, it’s something that we tend to, that we give regular seat for at the table of our conscious evolutions.

I’m glad for many people in my life that have steered me in these directions (sometimes when I’ve been kicking and screaming), in such a way that each of these are companions. Not enemies. No foes (though sometimes it feels this way). Companions, caring ones at that.

And on we go. Life’s stream. Life’s bigger picture.