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