A Course in Miracles and A Course of Love

A Tale of Four Books and a Few Friends

I missed a visit from a Course of Love reader who was visiting Minnesota just recently. I did so for a lot of reasons. One of them is that I’ve been in one of my hermit moods and, when I’m in a hermit mood, I’m not as diligent as usual about checking my e-mail.

Sometimes the hermit mood comes on in a way that is simply a call to honor my nature – as if I’m in need of my time for my very soul. At other times, it is caused by an urge to create. There are too, such times that come for me feeling low, or stressed. But really, in the end, they’re all kind of the same thing.

This man I missed visiting with sounded very interesting, and wrote me after getting back home to Maine, that he wanted to ask me about what it was like to hear God the way I had. He also told me about the way in which he heard God in his own life.

I wrote him back, and as part of my reply said that he might want to watch this video I’d just put up.

(Click on "up" to view.)

This isn’t one of my cabin videos. For a long while now I’ve been thinking about doing something to reach out to ACIM readership. Every time I put action with that thought though, what I created did not turn out as I wanted it to. I would sound as if I was trying to be convincing about the value of A Course of Love. That kind of thing (someone trying to convince me of the merits of their book or course) never is effective for me, so I kept abandoning whatever work I did.

Then the other day I had this idea.

This is the thing…for me. The “God thing” feels like an idea, or an intuition, or an inspiration. Like a different way of knowing. So I had this idea of doing this video as a “Tale of four books and a few friends,” and I starting running around the house with my camera photographing my stacks of books and thinking of my dearest friends, writers and otherwise.

I had barely completed the video when I decided I had to have this signed edition of a William Stafford book that I became certain I needed as I photographed Stafford’s powerful old face on the cover of “Early Morning” (one of my favorite books, written, actually, by William’s son Kim). The blurb about the autographed book said that he’d signed it to “an Irish Lass,” which is something I could qualify as.

Why this kind of thing is such a big thrill to me…who knows…but I got the book (published in 1990, Stafford is dead now), yesterday, and was enamored by holding in my hands something this hero of mine had once held. His signature is the scratchy signature of a man nearing the end of life, and I found it just so dear.

It’s a book on writing and, I swear, the way he writes about the dawning of the idea, and the thread you must follow, and the way a poem (he’s a poet) makes you FEEL, as if it touches you and calls for a response even if you don’t understand and particularly for that reason at times…it all was more descriptive of what I felt “hearing the Course” and what I’d suggest is, for me, like “hearing God” than anything I’ve written myself.

And strangely enough, it made me feel more pleased with my little video, and to want to share it with you, and to invite you to let me know if it is as welcoming (or not) as I hoped it would be.

It’s one of those things that isn’t exactly about anything in a direct way, and because of that, I hope it may speak with the kind of voice from which a person might hear whatever it is that might be awaited by her or his heart.

The title is A Course in Miracles and A Course of Love: A Tale of Four Books and a Few Friends.

Here's the URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wATWoztD7vw

Underdog...and not

The ground is getting hard beneath my feet, baseball season is over for the Twins, and the season is nearly over for the year.

I have to get one last baseball idea into the mix.

I’ve been meaning, ever since the Twins lost so handily to the Yankees (again), to write about it, and how the newspaper was full of it…but not in the same way it was when the Twins lost to the Yankees (or simply lost) in post-season play in years past.

In years past, the Twins have always been the underdog. The Twins had one of the lowest budgets in baseball…and they had to play in the worst stadium in the majors…the awful Metrodome.

This year that changed. The new outdoor stadium, Target Field opened and came with high expectations. Joe Mauer got the largest contract anyone on the team ever got. Jim Thome was added as a power hitter. It was a great season and we won the division, as we have for several years. And then…went down without a fight.

The guys had no spit, no fire. They seemed to have no drive at the end. It was almost as if they gave up before they played. They were, after all, playing the unbeatable Yankees.

Even for all that being true, I was surprised by what I read. And I was surprised by Tom Powers, a regular sports columnist, that he mentioned A. J. Perzinski. A.J. was replaced by Joe Mauer and now plays for the White Sox. A.J. is a character. I always liked him, but he’s such a character that he’s about the only guy who comes to the plate in Minnesota and gets booed. He gets booed because he’s not always nice. We’ve got a thing in Minnesota called “Minnesota nice.” And the Twins organization has had a thing, for a long time, of getting rid of the characters. Oh, we’ve had a few bigger than life guys, but always in that “nice” way.

But the main thing that surprised me, because it was true and I hadn’t really seen it, was that we’re not the underdogs anymore. The team’s not underpaid and under-housed. The fans aren’t holding low expectations.

I’m finally writing about it because when I was watching the Rangers beat the Yankees one of the commentators said, “You can’t hope a pitch; you’ve got to convict a pitch.”

This all spoke to me, the way baseball often does, creating some kind of a metaphor for my life.

Oh, how I identified with the underdog Twins. Them and me. That’s what we were: the underdogs.

Things change. Times change. And the thing about me is that I’m slow. I’m slow to see the changes that actually happen as they happen. Something has to spark me to notice. Maybe this is true for all of us. Maybe it’s the way it happens. You have some inner change take place and then a month or year later, something calls your attention in that direction and you say, “Gosh, I’m not like that anymore. When did that happen?”

Somewhere in the last year, or maybe the last month – I don’t really know – I quit being the underdog. I quit on the inside anyway. My actions haven’t quite caught up yet. I’m still doing the Minnesota nice thing, and I’m still hoping and not playing with conviction. But now that I’ve seen it, I’m ready for my actions to catch up.

Oomph...actually

Henry’s always trying out new words and one of his newest is “actually.”

He asked about his yogurt this morning, “Do you think this is cherry or strawberry?” and then he answered himself, “Actually, I think it is cherry.”

“Actually” sounds so funny coming from him – like in that movie, “Love actually.” Maybe he’s got a little British flavor to the way he says it. It’s a redundant word and I actually like redundant words. They give flavor, like spice to a hot-dish. Nothing fancy, just a dash of something that makes for a little oomph.

I’ve been lacking in oomph lately but it’s started coming back.

I’ve gotten this idea, living next to the freeway as I do, of the freeway as metaphor for the busy life. For a while now, I’ve been taking pictures of the freeway fence – the sunrise against the fence, the afternoon shadows against the fence – that kind of thing, and I came up with this idea of doing a video with these images and thoughts on the busy life.

Then one morning, I had a ladder up against the fence, and was standing on it taking pictures, when the light came on in the bathroom window, signaling that Angie was awake. I thought how peculiar she’d find it, if she were to look out the window, and see me up on a ladder hanging, in the just-after-sunrise hour, over the fence, with my camera.

It made me smile, and I thought – this is the way I’m like my dad, a thought that filled me with pleasure.

My dad was a character, even an eccentric character. I’ve said it all before. He was particularly this way later in life when he became what I call a gentleman farmer. Who knows what those two words together mean – and yet – they call up a certain image: a farmer, but not completely of the earth; not too rustic; not so earthy that he couldn’t also be charming; not so practical that he was tied to neat rows and a productive yield. Not so homespun that he couldn’t get all dressed up and go out on the town polka dancing and kissing ladies’ hands.

I saw an old friend/arm chair cousin of his this summer. I was telling him how I had this one picture of dad when he was the boy, and he had the kindest look on his face. I said, “Even then, he had that kindness.”

Marty said, “Oh, that Joe, he was a tricky one. He had his wild days.” He was saying, “Don’t fool yourself. Joe was more than nice.” He was more than nice, more than a dad, more than a farmer, more than a gentleman. He was no saint. He was a character.

As I thought of Angie catching me on the ladder, I thought how neat it would be if she delighted in my quirky ways. And then I thought, ‘Maybe she will; maybe she won’t. She might…someday. She might not.’ And then I thought that it’s enough, more than enough, actually, if I can delight in myself.

When you're feeling low...

The first edition of The Dialogues.


I have this one friend who, whenever she doesn’t hear from me for a while, checks out my blog. Then she e-mails me and says, “I can’t tell where you’re at.”

I realize that sometimes the blog allows me to just write some little oddity, like the one I last posted about the push lawn mower. That kind of writing relaxes me. It’s like looking at the small stuff. What my friend sees, I suppose, is that “smallness” … too small a picture to tell her what’s going on with me.

I wrote, in The Given Self, about the wisdom that is there right within our hard times. How our hard times aren’t just a bridge to better times. That there’s something deeper in them…something, maybe, for our souls. My own writing prompts me not to hide out, to go ahead and be vulnerable, to seek wisdom (of any sort at all) in what I'm going through...for me...maybe for you too.

I’ve been having a hard time lately.

There. I’ve said it. Do you think poorly of me? Have I become lower in your estimation of me?

I doubt it.

It’s tough, when you’re feeling frazzled and frayed, depressed, or even “not on the top of the world,” to be public about it. It’s so bizarre – all the things that run through your mind – the sort of loop it gets on when you’re feeling low, and how you can get yourself real confused about that. Wonder if you you’re really missing the mark, need to do whatever it takes to get still…or whether there might be something there that you need to listen to.

When you listen, I feel at least, you begin to get clues to how you need to move. But I’ll admit: it’s a different kind of listening.

Here’s one that really got to me. I wasn’t at home, and didn’t have any books with me, and suddenly remembered that I had my old copy of The Dialogues in the trunk of my car. I don’t know how many of you have that version. It’s white, and it has a painting called “Flood of Compassion” on the front. It was the first edition of The Dialogues and I designed it all myself. It’s smaller than the “blue books”…like a trade edition paperback. I’d decided not to put the numbers on the paragraphs or to make it look like the other books, because I felt it was so different. This one, this third volume of A Course of Love, just wasn’t the same. By then we were to be done with studying. What did we need numbers for? By then, it was personal, equal, a dialogue. I didn’t want it to look heavy and scholarly.

Anyway, I went out and got it.

I wrote an introduction in it, and when I went to bed that night I read it. It was the weirdest thing. It sounded like something I could have written now, even though I’d written it eight years ago.

Next morning, I’m reading how my favorite editorialist, Leonard Pitts, is about to turn 53. He’s writing on the first, second and third arcs of life. He claims the first to be finding yourself and getting your education, the second the rat race, and that the third is for “having some fun, trying something new, for being of service, and for doing some of those things you always said you’d do, someday.”

It reminded me of what I was writing at 47 but the arcs would look a little different in that I’d put “finding yourself” in the third arc. I'd written about the change of life during menopause as described by Christiane Northrup:

“Many of the changes she was describing as menopausal mirrored the changes I’d been feeling as a result of The Dialogues. Northrup spoke of menopause as a transformation, as a giving up of illusions, as a crossroads where an old way and a new way merge and must be chosen between, and as a rekindling of youthful fire, spirit, and creative drive.

“She also spoke of menopause as a time marked by impatience and intolerance with “life as usual.” As a forty-seven year old woman, I suddenly became aware that my body, along with my brain, my mind, my heart, and my soul, were all undergoing similar transformations. It was no wonder that my experience of The Dialogues felt so total and all encompassing, as if there wasn’t a corner of my life or psyche that had not only been touched but rewired.”

Change. Transitions. Irritability. I didn’t know whether to see an old pattern, to feel as if I was stuck and hadn’t changed in years, or to feel as if I’d gotten something I needed. But that was my mind talking. My heart felt comforted.

These are the things that can bring me joy when I’m low. Getting up to close the window and spotting a bright crescent moon in the dark 4 a.m. sky, finding an editorial that mirrors my thoughts, reading something surprising.

Then I was on-line, researching something, and found this amazing little paragraph in a blog that I can’t remember how the heck I got to:

House of Prayer Blog

I’ve been thinking about our spiritual work…. There seems to be a kind of shift going on amongst us. A movement into the depths is the way it feels. I know it means letting go of pet beliefs and even "orthodox" ones sometimes. This is often expressed, however, by uneasiness or discontent. This reminds me of what Jesus said about us becoming “as little children” in order to enter into the Kingdom of God. I suspect this is also what Meister Eckhart means when he emphatically teaches that IF we are to come to an experiential knowledge of God, then we also have to come to a place of “unknowing.” How does one do this? How do we go back when we’ve come so far? How do we become “little” again? How do we “unlearn” when we’ve spent so much of our lives seeking intellectually, believing rationally, and holding tightly to our so called “truths”? It feels to me that this is what is being experienced by many of us. We just don’t know things the way we once did. We are no longer clinging so tightly to our belief systems and entrenched positions. There’s a loosening of sorts; a release from the moorings of security. We’re launching out into deeper, unknown waters. And we’re also feeling the cost of that . . . “coming to an unknowing” place.

Ward Bauman, House of Prayer Blog, Episcopal House of Prayer

"Feeling the cost of that." Feeling the "unease and the discontent."

I call this kind of thing intuitive listening, sort of going where you’re led. Getting reminded of what you know. There’s nothing quite like it to make you feel gifted and heard – as if a power greater than your own, or a bigger ear, is listening and even answering.

This is not about heart alone. This is about the combining of mind and heart, and I swear that once in a while, when your heart is feeling in the dumps, your mind can shed a little light on why this is so. You might not want to hear it, but it’s there…rattling around amidst the rubble.

You’ve got to do something else then, to start the movement, and that is, for me, the hardest piece to find when I’m low, and that's what I was feeling tonight when this arrived in my e-mail in-box:

Come to me all you who labor and are burdened
and I will give you rest.
-Matthew 11: 28

"Rest refers to interior quiet, tranquility, peace, rootedness
of being one with the Divine Presence.

Rest is our reassurance at the deepest level that everything is okay.
The ultimate freedom is to rest in God in suffering, as well as in joy.
God was just as present to Jesus on the cross, as on the mountain of the
Transfiguration."

-Thomas Keating, Reawakenings

Sometimes, when you’re low, you’ve just got to rest. Message received.