Bird song morning

Awakened by bird song and a soft rustling of the leaves in the tree overhanging my treehouse apartment deck, I checked the clock: 4:40 a.m. "awhile before sunrise," I thought. For a moment, I laid there trying to decide if I wanted to get up and do some writing or if I wanted to go back to sleep for another hour or so. It felt like something extra was in the morning air, a subtle kind of electricity, which wakened me further. I got up.

The cats were circling like sharks, watching me carefully to be sure I’d open their can before I started the coffee. They were delighted, as they are always delighted, to hear the can pop and their portions divided onto their large dinner plate on the floor. As I made the coffee ideas were competing for my attention.
 
I turned on the desk lamp, deliberately avoiding the temptation to check on the morning news.   I felt like I was hiding from the violence, news of searing heat in the southeast, forest fires from California to Washington State, terrible floods in Pakistan and China. All those and even more natural and unnatural disasters worse than anything I’ve ever heard of in my life seemed to engulf my consciousness when I let them. The gun shots that rang out in the street outside my apartment a couple nights ago were beginning to be the regular sounds of the night, followed by sirens, loud fighting, some in foreign languages, in the street. On other nights there was the strange singing from someone who was either drunk of high on meth. He kept us all awake. Even if you could fall asleep despite his singing, there was also the occasional yelling from another neighbor to him to shut up as he also announced the time. 

"It's 12:30, SHUT UP!!"  

All night, every hour or so, I learned what time it was. I saw my neighborhood changing, becoming more violent, criminal. The guy next door was arrested one day. The sheriff came, showed me a picture and asked me to identify the person, and then banged on the door until the young man, barely out of his teens and covered with tatoos, was handcuffed and led away.

I had hoped my writing would be a voice among many in the vast universe of the web for a real and lasting inner peace, leading to an outer peace. It was a call to listen to the heart, to shift the brain from its mean me-ness, its self centered pursuit of pleasure and profit, and tune in to the soft, subtle longing of the heart, which, for me, had too often  lately been leading me to tears. I cry for my children’s future. I cry for my world. I am homesick for my home and yet know I can’t go back. My home town was the site of a drive by shooting which killed four young people outside a restaurant this weekend.

I don’t understand violence. I only ever wanted for there to be peace – first in my home as a child, then in school, then at work. As a fifth grader, in a Buffalo public school, I remember being shocked when I learned about apartheid in South Africa and then later at home when I became aware the church was subdivided into various factions none of which agreed. I am acutely aware now that I have always known that this is a very scary world. 

I am afraid to turn on the news. I can’t bear to see the scenes of people struggling to survive as the raging flood waters drag them down stream, most certainly drowning them. I worry about the children I know who were hungry, whose parents don’t have jobs. The children will be the ones who won’t understand why they are going to bed hungry. I am heartbroken over the children who are abducted, hurt and even killed, brutally, by human monsters. Many of the mothers wait with hearts full of longing and hope for their little ones to come home or be returned.  And then, when and if they are, their souls are broken and wounded beyond human ability to heal them. The terrible times have been underway for some time. 

I wanted to write words of hope this morning. I wanted to write that if we open our hearts, let go of our selfishness, if we truly love ourselves, we can love each other. I wanted to help people, through my writing, to find a moment of enlightenment, even if it's just for the few moments it takes to read my blog. I was grateful for my own peace of mind, for the love that bubbles up within my own heart these days, for the great pervasive expansion and depth of peace I experience now. I long to experience a real encounter with Christ. All the other stuff that used to occupy my mind has now long left my life. My greatest wish this morning, as in all mornings lately, is to experience Christ.

I looked at the clock. It was 5 a.m. and still dark. No sunrise yet, but the birds were singing even louder, some landing on the balcony of my deck. The cats were at the large glass sliding door, which was open, allowing the early morning breezes in through the screen.
 
An unusual energy permeated the air, something different, in the way it gets just before a rain storm. I thought the sunrise was beginning since the birds were singing louder and then the squirrels were on the deck now, also. The odd thing about the sunrise was that it seemed to start too quickly, not that slow orb of golden light rising gently and majestically in the eastern sky. And, this light wasn’t coming from the eastern sky. It was in the southern sky. It didn’t seem to rise either. It seemed to emerge slowly out of the black canopy of night.

It grew from a pin size to a golf ball, a softball, to a basketball, and then, within a minute, it burst into the most glorious radiant flash of light, brighter than the sun, white light, silently expanding over the entire horizon, filling the sky with a brightness that would make noon time in the summer look dark. I didn’t know what it was. It was beautiful, it was peaceful. I don’t know how to describe such a brilliant light that suddenly filled the sky, illuminating the predawn with a nuclear sunlight. Moments later, I heard some people down in the street. They were probably early morning runners who were startled by the sudden bright light, I thought.

I ran downstairs and out into the street. A kind of magnetic pull seemed to lead me down the street, along with a growing number of other people. They seemed excited and frightened. Some were lingering there, looking up at the sky. Some were standing in the doorways to their homes, others were in the street in their nightclothes. I just kept on walking. I wanted to break into a run. My heart was beating faster and faster. The excitement rose in my mind and heart.  Everyone was focused on the sky. I didn’t’ know where I was going. It was like an invisible force was drawing me.

I rounded the corner, started running down the next street and the next, and then I realized I was being led deep into the inner city.  People were streaming into the streets near me. I would have said there was a crowd, but it was like a massive river of humanity flowing in the same direction I was going. There were also people up on the roof tops. One man, in a long white robe, was shouting, “Allah,” and pointing. Another was crying, "It's the end of days." We were all experiencing something spectacular, something ineffable in light, sound and energy.

As I got into an area that I knew was a hot bed of drug gang warfare, the brilliant light began to withdraw, again slowly forming into a mass from the outer horizon perimeters, then into a beach ball, basketball until it became a small dot in the sky and then blinked out. In the time that the area was blinded by the ball of light, the sun had risen and now was streaming golden rays over the mountains. On any other morning, I would be quietly typing away at my computer, pausing to sip my coffee and admire a beautiful sunrise. This morning, I was moving in a crowd of people through the inner city drawn by a mysterious magnetic force to an uncertain destination.

I kept up my pace, and with each step the energy and incandescent power within me seemed to grow stronger. I felt as if I was being pulled by a force of such power and love.

As I came around the corner of an old deli, with its windows protected with rod iron bars, I noticed whiskey bottles along the curb, cigarette butts casually tossed, all kinds of litter on the street. Children in the dirtiest of clothes, stood in the doorways in bare feet.

And, then, there he was.

A young man who looked in his late 20s, long dark hair, wet with sweat, his face dirty and tear streaked, carrying the limp body of a young child whose blood was streaming down his right arm which swayed as the man strode up the street. He looked tired. He looked sad. He looked at the masses of people that were crowding around him, but none too close. The sunrise cast a halo around him and he slowly walked illuminated by a light that was from nowhere. He seemed almost to be a shadow himself, and yet he was real.

He looked at me and in that glance we met silently soul to soul. I knelt down in the street, bowing to him. My heart was bursting with so much love and yet I saw this tragedy. A child had been shot by a gang leader – not because the child got in the way – but because the gang leader wanted to show his power, his cruel power to take life into his hands.

The young man knelt down in front of me and placed the child in my arms. He stood up. Looking at the people, who were silently watching, he said,

“I asked you to bring the children to me, but not this way. I asked you to seek the kingdom of God within your hearts and there you will meet the child who will lead you to my father’s kingdom. I am bitterly grieved that you have sold your soul to the evil one and killed one of my children as payment. I didn’t want to come to you this way or this time. But, I have come and I am taking with me all the children of this earth. As of this moment, all the children will leave with me and you will be left alone with your decision.”

As he looked at me, my heart filled with love.The little boy who I thought was dead, began to move slightly, weeping softly. I hugged him close to me and together we were enveloped by a beautiful white cloud, radiant in the kind of light we’d seen earlier, only this was only a cloud. It wasn’t the great light that had brought the man here.

It seemed awhile that we were in that cloud. When it cleared, I realized I was kneeling on a lovely grassy mound, flowers and birds were all around me. The little boy looked up at me and snuggled closer. In a moment, he was up and out of my arms and dancing around on the grass. Then, the young man, now clean and fresh looking radiant and beautiful, was walking toward me with a small group of people. He was smiling and walked with a strong stride in his pace. While he walked with authority he also had a friendly lightness in his step. The little boy ran to him. He stooped to lift the boy up, swinging him up into the air, laughing and then playfully setting the boy back down. The people who were with him gathered around the little boy and began playing with him, some sitting on the ground, some bending over. The little boy seemed happy.

The young man walked up to me. He wrapped his arms around me.  I felt wrapped in a blanket of the purest most beautiful love, unlike anything I’d ever felt before.



“Tell your people that it is not through their good works that they will find me. If everyone were to enter their hearts, seek love of their true self and others, and wait for me, quietly in prayer or in meditation, I would come to them. All  violence will cease when people open their hearts to each other and to heaven.  Then they will find the peace that passes all understanding. And, then, they will all find all they are seeking.

Please return and tell them this. They must do this. They must stop the violence and hate, the competition, the ego-driven selfishness, that has poisoned the earth and the souls of the people.

I will return soon. Until them, I will come in meditations and prayers. "

He was still holding me as the grassy place began to fade as the cloud gathered around me. In moments, I was back on the street, kneeling there, in a blood soaked shirt. The people were weeping. Some were kneeling near me. One woman, possibly the little boy’s mother, was sitting in the street rocking writhing with inconsolable weeping.

I stood up and looked around at all the faces. They didn’t really even know what had just happened. All that remained from his presence was a piece of white cloth that had been torn from his shirt by a parked car antennae. The street looked dim and erie as if a storm had ripped through it.

The light had dimmed there, but shone brightly in my heart. I walked away and never looked back.

Love is a prayer

When you pray, if you pray, how do you pray?

Do you close your eyes and think thoughts upwards to God, intentions such as peace in Afghanistan, a meaningful job, peace in your home, healing of a physical problem?  Do you talk to God as if you were on the phone or sending an email?  I guess the question I'm asking is, looking back at how you pray, how would you describe what is actually happening in you when you pray?  

How effective are your prayers?  

Given the enormous number of miracles being reported everywhere: the end of the war, the healing of the environment, the end of fossil fuel usage and the propagation of a new means of energy that doesn't rely on earth's resources, the end of poverty and disease around the world, fair and equitable jobs for everyone, the end of cruel animal slaughter in the factory farms across the world, the end of pollution, the end of domestic violence, the implementation of new schools that focus on the whole child with a soul development aspect that teaches meditation and peaceful conflict resolution, it seems our prayers have been effective,  just the way they are.  Or not!

Since we've been praying for all these years, in all the churches (temples, mosques and ashrams) across the country (and world) I know we must not be praying effectively because all these things have not been granted to us. I wonder why not?

I'm no expert at this because I still don't have that job I'm waiting for or my house by the water, but things could be a lot worse.  Yet, I've come to realize that if the heart is five times more powerful electro-magnetically than the brain, wouldn't it make sense to use our heart rather than our brain to send prayers out to God/the universe/creator/Divine Mother?  (Many, many of you have been truly dedicated and devoted to doing that so this post is more for those of us who don't know, were never taught how to pray from the heart.)

We've been listening to our brain, feeding our brain all kinds of good technological information, science, math, etc. for several hundred years and especially in the last 100 years, the scales have tipped in favor of brain usage over heart.  We've slipped into the habit of using our brain, rather than our hearts most of the time. We've been training ourselves to enter the job market, to step up to the socio/economic bat to make a living, buy that house, marry that person,  raise a family, and when we have time, maybe go to a place of worship on Sunday (or Friday or Saturday) and do get down on our knees and seek the divine.

If we are making the time to pray, I am wondering when we reach out to connect to the divine, do we send up words formed in the brain or do we tap into our heart, access the love frequency and combined with the thoughts from the brain, send that prayer to heaven on a double rocket booster?

I remember when I was working as a chaplain last year at one of Portland's hospitals, I felt a great deal of love for many of the patients.  I would literally go home, get into that sense of love for them, even sometimes end up in tears, and pray fervently, passionately out of that love, and soon I started to discover that some of those patients for whom I prayed got better. 

One was a tiny premie in the neonatal intensive care unit who was so tiny you could see his little heart beating through his paper thin skin and he wasn't expected to make it. I sat with his mother and heard her hope, her faith, her doubt, her fears and tears. As I listened to her heart, my own was filled with love for the baby and compassion for the mother.  I went home and prayed,  holding both my crystals and a lighted candle. I earnestly prayed until tears streamed down my face.  Two months later, I celebrated with the family as I said the going home prayers for the baby who was healthy, miraculously without any damage to his brain. He was going home to his life and a long and potentially healthy and happy future. (By the way, the baby's name was/is Benjamin and even now I still hold him in a corner of my heart.)

Another was was a young man, about 26, who had been in a very serious car accident and was in the trauma unit's intensive care unit.  I don't even want to tell you how seriously wounded he was.  His mother had flown in from Idaho that night before.  He was in an intentional hypothermic coma to prevent brain swelling, to "give his brain a rest," the nurse told us.

"You can't believe the severity of the head trauma from when he went through that windshield," she said to me, sparing the young man's mother.  

The patient had returned from Iraq recently and had broken up with his girlfiend that night. He was so drunk, he never knew what happened to him. His problems went beyond the physical. The ICU nurse gave me that kind look of, "well, do a miracle if you can, this one's really not going to make it and if he does, we're talking vegetable." For the next hour or so, I listened to the mom through her tears, and felt my own tears stinging behind my eyes.  I have a son the same age.  My heart was just wrenched in compassion.  

That night, I did the same thing as I did with the premie. I lit a candle, held onto my two crystals (just to add some energy to my prayers) and prayed in deep earnest for the young man.  The next morning, before devotions, I rushed up to his room on the second floor, and he wasn't there.  I asked the head nurse where he was and she said he had been transferred down to the trauma unit because he was stable after they brought him out of the coma. He was responding so well, that they moved him out of ICU. I tried to catch up with the mom later, but couldn't find her.  I didn't need to.  It was then, and there, somewhere on the elevator between floors, or maybe down one of the long hallways of the hospital, that I learned a very important lesson about prayer. Those tears that come from our heart, streaming liquid compassion, are prayers offered by the heart and from the heart, the most powerful command center we have, are heard and often answered.

I am NOT saying here that all prayers are answered and I don't know if my prayers really made the difference in these cases or if it was just the great medical care alone the people received.  I don't know why some prayers are answered and some aren't, but I believe that my prayers may have helped in those situations and that if we truly love, allow ourselves to feel love, empathy and compassion, and enter into a true state of devotion and love and sincerely ask heaven to heal a situation, we just might find our prayers answered.  

So, the invitation to us, if we do want to start healing our world, is for all of us to ask our brilliant brains to take a back seat while we enter into our hearts and open them to another person, a wounded piece of the Earth, the water, the animals. 

I am also a believer that if we genuinely want to open our hearts, still our overactive brains, and be more love-filled, God is happy to help with that request.  The only thing we need really, is a will to move into the heart.  First we need will, then dedication to seeking the kingdom of heaven within our heart, and then allowing God's love to flow into that amazing tank in the center of our being.  

If we seek and center our will, breathe in the love that's everywhere, invisibly present in the air, we may be able to make a difference in our world, for all the hungry impoverished children and people throughout the world, all who are suffering from floods, fires,  joblessness, homelessness, lovelessness.  

My prayer is that we would all reach out from our open hearts spiritually holding hands, and send our love from our hearts around the world. Imagine it like a huge, global laser light of love from our huge collective heart going into the wounded places, the floods in Pakistan, the starving children in Haiti.  We can do this in our mind's eye, in our imagination. First we feel the love for these precious children of God, our own children and brothers and sisters, then imagine what it would be like for you if this happened to you, feel your own pain, and then feel theirs. Then, send your prayer on the wings of your own love and compassion, joined with their need.  Those are strong wings.  They will make it through heaven's gate.   

Breathing in love

Sometimes I think there's a war raging between the brain and the heart, a war that is being fought down on Main St. as much as in the human soul.

As much as the heart longs for connectivity with another, reaching out with its own unique rays of love, seeking communion, the brain cooly cautions against getting too close, being too vulnerable to rejection.  The brain moves in the art and dance of aloof behavior in its own hypnotic trance of manipulation. The heart sings a love song, lamenting its terrible isolation and lonliness due to the power of the egoic brain to keep everyone tied up in their homes, separated from each other, alone, afraid and conformed to this machine-run world.  The heart cries for humanity and divinity.  The brain asks how to update the machine's programming. 

The brain is a selfish organ which believes it runs the show and wants all the accolades so it can puff itself up in its own estimation and worth. In many ways, the ego's chief organ is the brain.  The soul's is the heart. The heart, which is at least five times more powerful electrically than the brain, does the exact opposite.  The more it loves, the less it thinks of itself and finds its sole purpose is to be open and to share its substance of life-giving love.  It doesn't judge.  It doesn't criticize.  It doesn't plot or get lost in twisted schemes for narcissistic fame.  It simply surges with love, like the waves on the ocean, rthymically drumming, chanting love every second, every minute of every hour and day of its life, longing only for the return of its lover in a cyclical embrace of giving and receiving.  

Lately scientists are finding the heart contains cellular memory.*  The energy of life events are fused into the cells of the heart, as well as other organs, and are recalled or unpacked as memories. This was realized when  people who had received hearts in a heart transplant almost all were able to pick up memories and behaviors of the donor's life.  Some were able to even describe what happened just at their donor's death. In one case in which the donor had been murdered, the recipient was able to recall vividly who the murderer was and where he lived.  She then led the police to him and they arrested the guy. Some have complete change in music and food tastes.  Some, who didn't know the age of the donor, will exhibit behavior of someone much younger than them.  In one story, a man who had received a new heart came away with an extremely strong craving for tacos and spicy foods, which he'd never liked before.  He learned later the donor was a young Latino man.

It seems today, we have found our world run almost completely by the brain, cool, efficient, scientifically, at the cost of something deeper, more profound, warmer, more holy, more human.  As in all things, we may want to seek a kind of truce between these two mighty forces within us, and yet the heart has been the underdog for too long.  We obviously need more sensitivity, more magic, more love in our world.  We also need much more courage.  

It's interesting that the force of the heart, its conviction, loyalty, search and need for meaning, and depth and power of character have been championed throughout the ages.  The stronger, wiser, more integrated person, was hailed as the courageous one, the one who had "heart."  Usually the one with heart, as in Richard the Lionhearted, is the victor.  The power of the heart is unfailing. Simply, without sounding too hard on poor old brain, the brain is a machine, designed to serve the goals and needs of the heart, which is the voice of the soul.  It seems to me, we may have that a bit backwards today.

Perhaps, if you have been doing meditation you might know exactly what I mean.  In the beginning, as you seek the silence, the sheer rich velvet beauty of pure silence, you realize your overactive brain is chattering away in the background, as a petulant child anxiously awaiting its mother to get off the phone.  In that moment, you realize your need to refocus your attention away from the chatter, tune it out, but at the same time,  you understand the power and domination the brain has had over you all along.  Now you  realize the need to listen to the heart, to give the heart a chance to speak, to be. You realize the need for your soul to fall in love again, with life, with God, with each other. 

So the war is slowly eased as you, in silence, breathe in the love encased in the very air around you, and give it back as you exhale.  Rocking, saturating your body, heart and mind, with the pure essence of love, you feed your heart, you nurture your physical heart, which mysteriously harbors something of your soul.  You may not be able to change the world, delete the power of the ego brain, but you can strengthen your own heart, your own capacity to love - if only because you want to love and be loved and because you want our world to be filled with love. And not the valentine kind of love, but a powerfully charged world, conscious with a kind of electric connectivity on a soul to soul level.  And with that thought, just imagine  the magnificent wonderful world we might all live in together if we ran it on heart energy.

As for today, breathe deeply in love.

* The Heart's Code by Paul Pearsall, Ph.D., (Broadway Books, NY: 1998)