From: Love Expressing
Steve Short
July 6, 2010
Love is about relationship. I believe for love to be real it has to be exercised in relationship. I have a hard time imagining that God, however you imagine God in this infinite universe, is lonely. However, I believe there is a great deal of loneliness experienced within the body of mankind, a body that was created for God’s expression, a means for God to be in expression on this planet. To the degree that loneliness has existed within the body of mankind, I believe we have it within our power to do something about it.
There may be things that we need to overcome internally and culturally to truly love one another—to let a current of love flow between us. For love to flow it has to be more than a feeling. It needs to go to another level, the level of actually expressing love. It has to be expressed to be known by us and others—not just felt. We are designed to be the vehicle for that. It does have to get real. So let’s get real about the expression of love. Let’s get real about what is flowing between us.
I have to ask the question: Do you really want to make this real? If the answer to the question is yes, it requires commitment. It requires the willingness to overcome the obstacles in my own inner landscape, my own inner dynamic, and the cultural limitations that I may bump up against. I believe that commitment is essential: I see you, I appreciate you, I know what you love, I love what you love. Therefore I am going to stand in this with you, no matter what comes. I am not going to give up on you, and I ask that you not give up on me.
From: True Unity in the One
Phil Richardson
July 12, 2010
Sport is very powerful unifying force, and it can also be a powerful dividing force when teams and their supporters are in competition. In the political arena people are drawn together in shared agreement about policies relative to governance of an area or country, but politics can also be divisive and can lead to major conflict in a country when there are strong political differences. And so too with religion—shared beliefs can bring people closer together but create rifts between people of differing beliefs. War itself has been a unifying factor in the world over millennia but, at the same time, divisive and very destructive.
Maybe these various experiences of unity do give us a small taste of what might be possible as an ongoing experience if we were to base our oneness in something that was constant, something that was trustworthy. But the divisive forces in the world have been very strong, and right at the centre of those divisive forces are the solid structures in consciousness—the concepts and beliefs and prejudices that set people or groups of people aside from each other.
True freedom and oneness are only to be found through the unifying power of love, not by finding agreement in shared concepts and beliefs. True freedom and oneness are not found in the soccer stadium or in the churches and synagogues and temples and mosques, without the unifying power of love being present in consciousness. When that spirit of oneness is accepted into experience and expression, true freedom and oneness can be found everywhere—no division, no individuals, just unique expressions of the One.
From: Wildness
Jane Anetrini
July 19, 2010
Having drummers holding a steady beat that you are playing around, on top of, inside of—it is ecstasy! Have you ever had the experience of being wild in your own expression because something else was being held and you felt safe, and you knew that the wildness was going to serve all? We need to find a way to welcome the wildness of everybody by holding and caring for the container in which the wildness can come. Then people can say, “Hey, that’s me! I did that! We did it together, and I played my part.”
You have to be both disciplined and free to have that experience. Our cultural background or our family background may hold us back in either of those areas. And it is possible that there are ways in which you see yourself that need to be “wilded up.” There may be ways you approach your life that need to be freed up, knowing that a staid approach to life may have served you in the past, but that’s not necessarily true in this context. It may not be true for you now.
Our service to the world is to think new thoughts about how we can be creative and bring the highest and finest we have to life on earth, and then do it. That’s your heartbeat, your life beat, the highest and finest that can manifest through you when you say yes, I will. I will bring my wildness, my newness, because I love to be part of the dance.
From: Through the Storm
David Karchere
July 26, 2010
How much joy and fulfillment can you stand to have in your life? How about raising our capacity to endure joy, to endure life and fulfillment? I’m not talking about a sugar-sweet happy experience. I’m talking about real joy, real life, real fulfillment. Can we tolerate that?
All too many people have the belief that they have to trudge through life the way they have been. Maybe we could take the lid off and, in a very real way, experience something different, experience something more, share more with our friends, and blow by some of those ceilings that have been operative in our life. We prove to ourselves that it is possible when we do it. We don’t have to go looking for a storm; but if one arises, perhaps it is an opportunity for our victory.
The larger part of who we are knows that there are limitations that are unnatural to us as a human being. The larger part of us knows that we can take the actions in our life now that preserve life, that bring the deepest joy and fulfillment. We can face the storms that may arise and meet them with courage and victory.