The most powerful way to get someone to come towards you is to step back. Not to punish, and not to punch your way out of the paper bag. Sit back in the bag. Because you’re not going to get it any faster by punching your way out, you’ll get it less fast. Period. It doesn’t work, for one. And if you keep doing it, a part of you is just running on the tape that doesn’t work, and it’s like walking into a wall.
The ordinary is not one of the more heavily advertised images in the New Age. Promotional material for speakers, workshops, and communities emphasizes the grandiose, with an insistent sweetness that’s an easy target for the satirists and cynics: Transformation! Self-Metamorphosis! Rainbows! Sunsets! Joyous Life! Oneness is All!
Hucksters with talent exhaust me. Why, I want to ask, did you make the war beautiful? Was that your only choice?
The thing that I’ve noticed, everywhere I go, is that in every person, no matter how evolved, there is a little dark, sad, anxious place inside. No matter how cheery they are, I look in and I see that place.
Still Looking For The Key
I am involved in a process that is most similar to my experience of giving birth. Whether I live or die, I am in a transition. I want competent professional helpers, who do not lose sight of me as a person. I want to be respected as an intelligent participant in my own process. Time will eventually pass and the results of transition will be evident. Until then, patience and trust are required.
Good ideas are the stuff of inner growth and light. Bad ideas twist and stunt and darken. Either way, ideas race the mind to motion like the motorcyclist’s kick-start.
*NOTE: Original copies of this issue are no longer available. Unbound, laser-printed copies will be provided for print orders.
It was one in the afternoon, but the carnival was still in the stages of opening for the day. Only fifty or so people milled around on the circular midway. The managers of the food concessions were discussing strategies for coping with a breeze that had kicked up. Lowering the panels on the south side of each stand, they decided, would keep the dust from settling over their hot dogs, pizza, and tacos.
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