What touches us is genuine connection, speaking from the heart. That it is unexpected, and seems rare, is perhaps the greatest tragedy of our time and describes much that is wrong with our lives. But that it is so powerful, and so easy, can be our salvation.
Unlike the spider, we are both blessed and cursed with a choice about the meaning we make of our life. We – you, I – have a choice, today, right now. We can lament our lot in life, or we can take it for granted. We can lord our bounty over others, or we can share it, recognizing that our riches are just as fleeting as the spider’s web.
It’s really hard to get into the holiday spirit these days while innundated with the siren call of greed, commercial profiteering, and everywhere the trappings of privilege. Ferguson. New York. Florida. Brown, Garner, Martin. Racism. Unequal pay for equal work; hell, let’s be honest, lesser pay for greater work. Rape culture. Controlled access to medicine that should be between a woman and her doctor. Sexism. Torture, for the love of all that is holy. What are we to make of a…
I am terrified of heights. More precisely, I am deathly afraid of falling from a high place. Getting up on the roof is pretty easy and I like the view. Getting on the ladder to come down, on the other hand, has been known to freeze me in place for many minutes of terror, indecision, and cold sweat. Oddly, the flip side of this terror is that I’ve never been able to stand at a high place without an impulse…
Imagine a world where we all behaved like this – both the man brave enough to ask for a blessing, and the one compassionate enough to give it! Now, let’s go build that world.
