I got High Again.
I didn’t know how much I needed a “fix” until my head slumped on my chest and I “awoke” to a restful, calm, and peaceful world I had been away from for what seemed a lifetime. I felt.
I didn’t know how much I needed a “fix” until my head slumped on my chest and I “awoke” to a restful, calm, and peaceful world I had been away from for what seemed a lifetime. I felt.
I’ll take them in all shapes and sizes, the old and the young, the rich and the poor.
If it wasn’t for women, I — and a lot of guys I know — wouldn’t even be here! Continue reading
Am I un-American or anti-religious when I tell you something I’ve been trying to say for years, but have been afraid of hurting your feelings?
The answer is: because I have to. I need the therapy to look deep inside to provide me. I’m not talking about surface writing. You know, the kind a reporter might type when covering some disaster, a meeting, or a political event that might include both. I write only after communing with some sort of truth that bubbles up from within.  Continue reading
No matter how hard I try, I can never count to 20 before an unbidden thought arises from inside of me. I get to three or four while meditating, and images pop up on an internal screen, capturing my attention.
“Did you hear what I said? I’m pregnant.
Aren’t you going to say anything Joseph?”
I saw more of the Divine in a beggar on the road to Calvary last year than I did in the three religions occupying Jerusalem. The beggar’s blindness beamed into me, and I’ll never forget the look on his face as I offered him Israeli shekels, and he bowed to me in thanks.
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My best friend died before I could tell him how much he meant to me. Continue reading
I want to give “thanks” today, but don’t want to offer it the Norman-Rockwell, “fake-it-‘til-you-make-it” way of the holidays. Instead, I want to share how grateful I am for such taken-for-granted “gifts” that I am only beginning to realize most of us have been given. Continue reading
On this Veterans Day, 11-11-11, what would you tell yourself if you could go back in time and greet that young man recently returned home from the war?
It snowed along the East Coast of the United States today (October 29, 2011), making it the first time in more than 30 years the white stuff appeared this early outside my Conshohocken, PA, window.
I never thought I’d be thankful for a stuffy nose, but it helped me to meditate without really trying. It all started on a day I was off from work, and I stayed in bed as ten thousand thoughts ran through my mind. I noticed a clogged nostril and focused all of my attention on trying to reopen it.  Continue reading
I looked into the other side of the political spectrum, and I saw something I hardly recognized.
When I read the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators were unfocused and without a coherent message, I took a closer look at them in Philadelphia, and discovered some were disheveled street persons looking for handouts, and one was a graduate school political science major spouting Marxist teaching.
The greatest protest of our generation is seeking change in all shapes and sizes. You can see it in the signs the demonstrators carry, writing the letters out really big with magic markers so that passersby need not squint to get the messages.
As my world started to close in on me, demanding its immediate attention toward responsibilities, affairs of work, and needs in my house, I found an oasis inside of myself and in the thoughts of friends in my Kabbalah group.
Tone it down, America. You are cutting off your nose to spite your face. The face of the body politic, that is, we are creating needless hurt for the countrymen we’d like to lead to our mutual goal: the pursuit of happiness.  Continue reading
What do Israel and India have in common with Istanbul and Amsterdam? Other than all starting with a vowel?
A student at the WON Institute performed acupuncture, penetrating into my psyche as well as my epidermis. More importantly, she opened her heart with such compassion I wept, feeling her healing spread throughout my body and soul.  Continue reading
I saw you as a little girl with a smile as bright as Shirley Temple, a chocolate-haired “Annie,” a young Rosie Perez.
How many times have you heard this? How many times have you said it? “Give something back.” Not sure what that “something“ is, but you know you got it, and you got a “need” to share “it.”
Jobs have a way of defining us. We become “the job,” or rather grow into what we perceive to be the “ideal performer“ of that job. Whether we like it or not. The job. Or ourselves.  Continue reading
Another Reality exists within the here and now, if I can disengage and step out of the World that I am sleep-walking in.
Each drew me like an oasis to a man walking alone in a desert.
Never thought an affair I had with a married woman before turning 21 would qualify for “conduct unbecoming,” but looking back, I see how conflicted parties to such an act could become.
Lord, I’m One, Lord, I’m Two, Lord, I’m Three, Lord, I’m Four,
Lord, I’m Five Hundred Miles
Away from Home. Continue reading
Wearing a chest full of ribbons on a khaki-colored shirt with Russian-like epaulets on the shoulders, I grew lots of attention at the Russian Appreciation Day at Penn’s Landing in Philadelphia yesterday.
I wanted so much to be the Queen’s Concert.
But at what age? What stage of her life called out to me the most, as we, the audience members, watched her grow into a Spiritual goddess, one I desired to be like, to become with as One?
“Make yourself a Rav, and buy for yourself a friend.”
— Rabbi Yehoshua Ben Perachya
All these feelings flashed through me as I slowly came out of what seemed like a trance, halfway between sleep and wakefulness, only to notice growth at a part of my body where there was none before.
Swimming meditation can work. You heard it here first. One can “nudge” out most thoughts and focus on the “here and now” as you swim one lap after another. I did.
“I love you” was not in the way you said it, but how you said it.
Bless me Father, for I have sinned. I have cursed out drivers on the open highway and prayed their mothers had never conceived them. In or at of wedlock, those dirty b . . . . . .
I dove into a World of Make Believe, changing from one past life to another while underwater and on land yesterday.
When my father spoke Greek with the disciplinarian of the Catholic High School where I played hooky at age 14, I thought I had it made.
Continue readingEach day for twenty years, the spirit of Don Quixote welcomed me into my law office. This picture hung above my desk reminding me that it was the “impossible cases” a good public defender relished. The ones you didn’t expect to win, but somehow, now and then, you’d convince a jury to see the facts your way, which in most cases, was the right way.
Continue readingYou invited me to your House, and I broke confidence in you.
Thank You Amy. Let the Good Times Roll!You don’t know how hard this is for me. To do nothing! Forget about the better part. The word “better“ implies you’ve been able to do “nothing” sometime in the past. Or that you can do nothing “better” than someone else.
Music touched an emotional chord in me that may have been different from most folks.
Rain pours on me outside, while soft music warms me on the inside. “Abraham, Martin, and John,” the song, plays from this relatively new gadget called a portable, hand-held, transistor radio.
What’s the difference between Shame and Embarrassment? Are they joined at the hip? Like twins?
Be careful what you wish for. You could get your heart’s desire and wish you had never asked for it in the first place.
How do I explain the feelings that have come “over me?” They’re like ocean waves ebbing and flowing in each breath. Continue reading
Sat next to a long hair, skinny, “Hippie” guy at an orientation in a community college yesterday, and felt thrown back to a time years ago, sitting cross-legged on the floor across from a similar fellow wondering what the hell I was doing there.
I felt like Alice falling in the hole after chasing a White Rabbit. But, falling “upwards” defying the laws of Gravity and Rational Sense.
Got Blanket Absolution yesterday. And, it felt so good, I became a 12-year-old again. Ready to face the world with a clear conscious and a pure heart.
How do you explain “unexplainable” events?
Although you “passed on” after your 17th birthday, you’ll remain alive for me forever. I see you in my dreams. I “feel” your presence as I walk with you, watch you, and hear the footsteps on the steps leading from the dining room to the bedroom upstairs.
Grace suffocated and I retaliated by smashing my ego to help free up her passageway during group meditation this morning.
The pain feels like someone thrust a spear in my back. That I was in battle. At the city of Troy. Fighting with fellow Greeks for the foolish prize of a minor King’s run-a-way, but lovely, wife, Helen. She with a face that will launch a thousand ships.
The hawk glides across the sky, soaring high above us as the first person to notice shouts, “there’s one.” Like children, we stare toward the heavens, at the beautiful blue sky. A normally humid August has graced us with a mild and glorious summer day, blending light breezes and the scent of flowers that drift our way from below the wooden platform we look out from.
A gentle “pull” manifested in my Life recently. I noticed it last night while driving and wanted no more than to live in each passing moment.
I’m going to confess. I played hooky in seventh grade and refused to “squeal” on the kid I stayed out of class with that day.
There’s a true “pecking order” that’s developing in my back yard. And all I have to do is be patient and watch it unfold moment by moment.
How can I divert pleasure I “receive” into pleasure I can “give?”
You can keep the promotion. Wouldn’t take it, even if offered. Not if I have to make “achievements” my aim, to set a new “goal” in Life.
Start over. That’s all I gotta do . . . Say it to myself and simply “START OVER!”
It’s just like heaven . . . Being here with you . . . You’re like an Angel. Too good to be true. When You are near me. My heart skips a beat. I can hardly stand on. My own two feet. Because I Love You; I Love You, I Do.
‘Angel Baby‘. My ‘Angel Baby‘. Oh, Ooh, I Love You, Oh, Ooh, I Do . . . No One Could Love You . . . Like I Do!
Hello! Anybody here? It sure is dark inside. Like a huge cavern with hardly any light.
Fell head over heels in love the past few weeks. Didn’t want to do it. Had always gotten “hurt” in relationships, knowing from the start they’d come to an end one day. Love seemed to change that way. To peter out. End not with a “bang,” but with a “whimper.”
I started seeing angels again. No, hold off on the straight jacket, don’t reserve a room at an asylum. I’m not totally crazy. Yet . . .
The snake slithered along the bed of the forest, winding its way beneath a pine tree. Climbing upwards, it twirled around the trunk, moving ever so slowly, centimeter after centimeter, as it sought the “higher ground” where it could shimmy onto a tree branch and make its way closer to my eye level.
Did the Creator make a mistake in His design of women’s “purpose?“
Thought I was dying Monday morning.
The Greatest Weekend — No. II
Uncanny coincidences kept cropping up yesterday as I attended a gathering of one of those “Meet-Up” groups.
Glenda “laid hands” on me; I lost track of who I was and why!
Psalm 46:
9 — He maketh wars to cease unto the end of the earth; he breaketh the bow, and cutteth the spear in sunder; he burneth the chariot in the fire.
10 — Be still and know that I am God.
“There is none else besides Him.”
Who am I? Am I this body, this mind, this soul? Perhaps, all three?
Wouldn’t it be great to make a phone call and ask a receptionist to put you through to the Creator? The next time you have a problem, and you want to do the right thing, you could simply dial “G . . . O . . . D” long distance.
Walked a Labyrinth and stepped back into the Vietnam War last night.
Trouble is . . . I liked it. Did not want to leave the maze despite what lay ahead. Strangely, I felt “safe” there. Secure in my “skills.” Didn’t want to come home. Just like years earlier.
Who are we but a bunch of words? Letters strung together, broken up in efforts to make sense of a message we try to convey.
Never thought “revenge“ had anything good to say about itself. It’s a negative trait. Falls in with Anger, Rage and “getting even.”
Let me give all of my Blog post readers a hint at what my next Spiritual Journey will Involve:
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