Earth Hour 2009

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Air Mail

PO Box 106125
Auckland City Postshop
Auckland, New Zealand
1143

Please try to refrain from mailing me your dirty socks

hi there

In the past year I have visited a few different cultures, and repeatedly seen how little I really know about what is “right”. It has been a time of growth and change, totally eclipsing the period prior to it in realizations and wisdom. And still I wonder, will learning continue like this? Does what I know now always increase what I learn next? Will today’s beliefs and ideas simply serve as the stepping stones to the next truth I am to discover?

Over and over I read of a repeating idea…that I-that all of us, all of mankind-already possess the answers and the truths inside of us. That we ask questions and search for knowledge-but that the external sources we find are simply reflections of what we carried with us all along. Bill Wilson and friends wrote that “…deep down in every man, woman, and child, is the fundamental idea of God. It may be obscured by calamity, by pomp, by worship of other things, but in some form or the other it is there. For faith in a power greater than ourselves, and miraculous demonstrations of that power in human lives, are facts as old as man himself.”

Over and over authors and scholars of our times have repeated this idea…even as I type this I feel a sense of deja-vu, as if I have written this same idea before, maybe even in this blog. Nevertheless, it is powerful and liberating. My current belief, for what it is worth…I don’t need any “new” books or teachings. I can go back through the ones I have read before and recognize truths that I couldn’t the last time I read them. I don’t need a new mentor, parent or counselor. The ones that I have already can teach me more if I change how I ask, and how I listen. I don’t need a new relationship, I simply need to recognize that God is inside of them as well as me.

Hadn’t written anything in quite a while, but if you are reading this than I love you-and the God within you too.

A New Kind of Life

On November 8th, in a friend's backyard underneath gorgeous autumn trees that dropped their leaves on us, Ashley Horn and I were married. We had a small ceremony and our closest family and friends, although Ashley's brother Shaun & his wife and children couldn't be there...

I feel like I am having a gradual change in my thinking, rather than an immediate switch to thinking like a married man. I had no idea what it was going to feel like and how I would view it....

I love you Ashley.

The Sur-Real Life

Surreal...overused and misunderstood--at least by me.
I won't get into my issues with this word as a descriptive tool...

Yesterday played out in an almost theater-like way...as the morning began with the graveside service for a woman who a month-and-a-half ago I wouldn't have described as extremely close, but who I would today describe as the most inspiring teacher I have ever had--like a second mother even. Although we have had quite a bit of interaction over the past six weeks, I think that maybe my perspective is what underwent the most radical change, as opposed to any effort on her part to shift our relationship. I stood with her family and friends as we celebrated the beginning of her soul's journey into the next world of God.

Less than an hour after her body was lowered into the ground and covered with earth, I was at my mother's house for a party to celebrate my upcoming marriage. Many of the same people came to both events...

Journeys 2 Gether

Many thanks to my wonderful friend, Justin Nevill, for creating this website...

to check it out-to see what we are up to-go to

this website!

Love Rio

Exultation

Many of the world religions teach us that the passing of the soul from the body to the next world is not cause for despair and sadness, but for happiness and rejoicing. As a dear friend put it to me...our inability to comprehend this truth is reflective of the duality of the human existence, the balance that we are all striving for. It also is in keeping with the crumbling of the old world order and the synchronous rising of the new-as more and more our spiritual sides mature and become aware that our physical bodies and our mortal existence is not the pinnacle of our being that our materialistic society portrays it to be.

I have been given a gift too precious to fully describe. I have seen a friend's battle to remain focused on the ultimate objective of God's will as the crude housing that we call our body failed. I have watched living become difficult, the most taken for granted, simple tasks become arduous labors, resulting in exhaustion and nausea. Sat alongside a bed while pain and agony repeatedly beat away at the mental reserves and willpower to die gracefully.

But most of all, I watched the trembling hands, and wandering mind return to the prayers; the mouth-sometimes silently and through dry, parched lips-repeatedly offer forth the exhortation "Ya Baha El-Abha!" I have listened to the holy words of God uttered with a waning voice, but a spirit that was desperately trying to burst freee from its earthly confines and shout its praises aloud so that all could hear the beauty!

I don't know how this works either, but I know that she will always be watching and assisting us. Thank you for giving me this wonderful part of life, and thank you for all the secrets you have given me-and most importantly for the assurance that our souls do not rely on our bodies to sing their song to the heavens.

Please say a prayer-any kind that you can-for a dear friend and sister who has been freed from this plane of existence and is now moving onward in her journey.