Will there come a time when the memories fade
And pass on with the long, long years?
When the ties no longer bind
Lord save me from this darkest fear
Don’t let me come home a stranger
I couldn’t stand to be a stranger.

                   ~ Jerome Clark and Robin Williams

We came forth from the realm of Being into the world. We came forth but truly never leave that realm. In the arc of our life, we are like the sun that rises and ultimately sets, moving through the world. I don’t want to come home as the setting sun, to be looked at and wondered about by those who greet me: What was your life about? What were you doing? I don’t want to have forgotten myself or the origins of where I come from, what I serve and who I love. I don’t want to come home having identified myself in terms of the worldly context in which I now live. I came here, and I believe you came here too, to hold the world in the arc of heaven. In the arc of your incarnation, you have the ability to hold what the world is from a timeless place. You can hold the procession of time and the unfolding of events here in the world. I believe we all have that inherent, innate ability.

I think of Eden Valley, where Sunrise Ranch is located, in Loveland, Colorado. I drove into it the other evening. There was still twilight in the valley, and I looked around. My heart broke open. I felt the innocence of this valley. It was named Eden Valley by those who founded Sunrise Ranch. They saw it as a paradisal place, even though it didn’t look so much like it at the time. It was a dryland farm that had been farmed out. It was hard to grow anything here at the time. And yet they called it Eden Valley. They had a dream about this valley, as we have a dream about it today.

Coming into the valley, I felt the innocence of the reality of what this valley is: an innocent place to be known and shared by people who live in true, original innocence. Not naiveté, by the way. I consider myself somewhat worldly wise. But that is the art of it, isn’t it? To gain some worldly wisdom but not to lose your original innocence.

There is power in innocence. There is a primal urge in our innocence—the urge to live, to know joy, to create, to engage, to love. Those are primal urges that are born out of an original innocence. I’m not settling for a teaching or a program or an idea. I’m all about returning to original innocence and living life from there. You might think that that would make you stupid and subject to being taken advantage of. But I say our original innocence makes us strong. It makes us loving. It makes us fertile, and it makes us able to surround the world in which we live. It gives us power as creators in both our masculine and feminine dimensions—and certainly we need both, as men and women. And so we must return to our original, native, primal innocence.

For us as men, our primal innocence makes us men. It makes us strong. This world needs men who bring the power of true masculinity, of the Divine Masculine, into the world; who bring the absolute power of the love that is within them that they are connecting with—not only the idea of it, not only the teaching of it—the power of it that is born out of primal innocence.

I was thinking of the image of so-called masculinity on the world scene today. It makes you scratch your head and wonder, what is going on? And why is this shadow masculinity parading across the world stage? What comes to me is that deep in our soul as humanity, as human beings, male and female, we long to see something of masculinity portrayed. And if we don’t have the real thing, we will settle for some grotesque shadow version of masculinity. But that’s not the answer.

We need men who are in their primal innocence—undomesticated men, who are coming forth in the truth of who they are, undaunted. We live in a postmodern society, impacted by progressivism and the feminist movement, which has brought all kinds of advances into the world. And we have to ask, At what cost? And have we yet come upon the answer? For a woman who is working fifty or sixty hours a week, keeping house, raising a family, and pursuing her own avocation and her own sense of service in the world, all at the same time, burning out in the process—women’s rights! Ain’t it great? Feminism—let’s go for it! There is something missing in that picture, and certainly a more evolved balance for us as people.

I do believe that as men and as women, and as men and women together, we are on a long journey home—a long journey home in the arc of our lives, coming as human beings to a more evolved knowing of ourselves, a more evolved understanding of masculinity, a more evolved understanding of femininity, and how those dynamics play out in our lives individually and how they play out between us as human beings. We are entering a new dynamism of the Divine Masculine and the Divine Feminine playing out in us individually, and then among us as human beings, birthing Creation at every level of our human experience.

I know I may be in dangerous territory, but in good territory, I believe. This is a vital area for us as conscious evolutionaries to consider. There is no going back to the “good old days.” They’re gone. There is no going back to an old model for how we are meant to be as men and women, and men and women together, born out of an agrarian or industrial society.

What is true? The question for anyone is this: How do I embrace my primal innocence and allow what is real and true, what is creative and dynamic, between us to emerge, beyond the ideas about it or the advocacy about it? I am not putting down ideas and I am not putting down advocacy; but beyond all that, how do we push through in our lives to experience what is true and real? We can dream. But sometimes a dream or a vision can be put off until tomorrow. What does it mean to live transparently today?

Transparency is an interesting matter. Sometimes people tell us that they’ve never heard of Sunrise Ranch. We are transparent and invisible to them. Our gardeners go to the farmers market in Loveland or Fort Collins and sell a cucumber to someone, and then hear the comment, “I’ve been living in Loveland for twenty-five years and I never heard of Sunrise Ranch.” And it’s not just people at farmers markets who say that.

There are people who come to Sunrise Ranch and stay here for days who cannot see Sunrise Ranch. They can see the buildings, they can see the fields, they can see the cows, and they can see the people, but they cannot see Sunrise Ranch. They do not see the innocence of Eden Valley. They walk around in it but they can’t see it. And why? They have ideas, they have dreams, they have teachings, they have advocacy, but they can’t see it. No wonder that for some in the world who have never even been here we are invisible.

And so it is, wherever you go around the world. There are people who cannot see reality. They have ideas and dreams, some of which are very evolved and very beautiful, and it is going to happen one day. But until a person pushes through all the façade of their life, including all espoused ideas and all the teachings and all the beliefs—until they push through and actually emerge in their primal innocence into the world, exposing that innocence and acting as that in the world, they cannot see. They are not bringing primal innocence into the world and they cannot see it in the world. They are not holding the arc of heaven for the world, and they do not see the arc of heaven in the world. They do not see home.

If somebody has a brilliant idea about the future of humanity that doesn’t contain home, I’m not buying. I don’t want to go there. How about you? If someone’s version of the future of humanity is a business venture, I would ask that person to keep the business venture to themselves—I’m not interested. I could be interested in business, but not if that is the portrait of the future of humanity. True home is the arc of heaven that holds all of human affairs, that holds the world. We see home when we are bringing home. We see Sunrise Ranch when we are bringing Sunrise Ranch. We see Eden Valley when we are bringing the reality of Eden Valley to the world, wherever we are.

When we are not doing that, what are we left with? Discouragement and disappointment. Somebody could come here and say, “I am disappointed in this place. You don’t have all the latest bells and whistles of innovation here. And by the way, the people here are not perfect.” Someone could even live at Sunrise Ranch and come to that same conclusion. Disappointment and discouragement are evidence of a person’s lack of pushing through, of settling for ideas and dreams and not living the reality of those ideas and dreams. Because when you live the reality of them, they are real to you. You see Sunrise Ranch, you see the innocence of Eden Valley, wherever you are. And I am not making this all about Sunrise Ranch or this physical valley. This ranch, this community, this valley, is a symbol of the whole world.

When a person is bringing the arc of heaven, which is the true home, and holding their world in that, disappointment and discouragement are as foreign as holding your own young child in your arms and being disappointed and discouraged in that child. It doesn’t enter your head, does it? For any of you who have been parents, when you’re comforting and holding your own small child or infant, do you think how discouraged and disappointed you are in them? Shame on you if you do! No, you’re not thinking that. You’re just loving them into the wholeness of who they are.

There is a beautiful quote from the Book of Malachi:

But unto you…shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings….  

That’s you and that’s me: the Sun of righteousness coming with healing in our wings. The sun rises in the east and sets in the west, symbolic of the arc of a human life. We rightly rise in our life like the sun, and we spread our wings out over the world in which we live, and we bring healing to that world. We hold it with the heavenly home that we know. We bring the enfoldment of heaven. Heaven is simply a word for the true home of the Divine. It is where God lives. And when we are knowing the Divine, when we are innocently connected to it, we are knowing the home of that reality, and then we are bringing the enfolding, healing power of the Divine into the world.

This quote from Malachi speaks of the sun of righteousness coming “with healing in his wings.” It seems to me that the healing, enfolding presence of home and heaven is a quality of Mother God, of the Divine Feminine that we carry as either a man or a woman. When we show up in our primal innocence, we inherit the power of those healing, enfolding wings. Do you feel them now? Your wings, my wings, in the arc of a human life. The Sun of righteousness rises with healing in her wings, his wings. And when we look upon Eden Valley, we see it.

The world, wherever you are, is in a state of evolution in the manifest range of things. It has always been so, and I think we could assume it will always be so. And yet we find ourselves in a place of beauty and perfection that fosters that evolution and carries it forward and allows it to come ’round right, to come into what it is meant to be in manifest form. That is happening here at Sunrise Ranch, and there is all the diligence of all of us who live here that helps that to happen. But that diligence, that activity, is most importantly an expression of something that is happening in conscious awareness. It is happening in our spirits. We are fostering that manifestation, that evolution of form, through what we think, feel, say and do.

While there is a need for plans to allow it to come—forethought is good to assist its emergence— Sunrise Ranch is not a business plan and is not a business. It is not a creation of money, even though we need money to operate. It is a reality born out of the spiritual, born out of the primal innocence of people who live here. And everything else is serving that reality. Without that, we have nothing—nothing. And with that, we are empowered to have everything.