When I was a child and my mother’s mother visited, she would sleep in my double bed, regaling me with stories lifted from The Arabian Nights before veering off into more intimate, romanticized terrain. Describing her life growing up in the Midwest among legions of older, mischievous, albeit adoring brothers, later marrying my French Canadian grandfather, and eking out a living on a dairy farm hugging the New York/Canadian border where they managed to raise seven children, seemingly…

“Our Love awaits us as we go to Him, and walks beside us showing us the way. He fails in nothing. He the End we seek, and he the Means by which we go to Him.” (A Course in Miracles workbook lesson 302, from paragraph 2)

When I was a kid our road-trip vacations inevitably began with my mother–staring straight ahead, shoulders hugging her ears–saying something like this in a flat voice about 10 minutes into the drive: “Do you know if I left the iron on?”

And my father…

Another Monday and another snowstorm predicted to hover over Denver, dispensing its unseasonably frigid gloom through Wednesday. Icing rush-hour thoroughfares and nixing my plans to attend the tai chi classes upon which I had—after only a few months of practice—already begun to depend for restoring my ever unsteady equilibrium. Suffice it to say the world was too much with me. There was too much work to be done, too many emails to answer, too many projects to complete, too many inexplicably…

I rapped softly on the mottled glass of the ajar door to my imaginary professor’s office, a courtesy; really, since I could tell he was not inside. Not inside and not outside either, on a day like this, as far as I could tell. But I no longer fully trusted these observations of mine, and was willing, for once, to wait. I pushed the door open and paused, soaking in the lingering starlight of his presence unencumbered by the bare overhead fluorescent currently switched off. He deserved a…