“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…

I recently sat down again to interview Ken Wapnick while attending a weeklong Academy class at the Foundation for a Course in Miracles (FACIM) in Temecula, California, in which Ken emphasized more clearly than ever the importance of looking at the ego’s guilty story of separation realized through the eyes of the part of our mind that knows nothing really happened. He also urged us to make asking that inner teacher of forgiveness to show us…

“In looking at the special relationship, it is necessary first to realize that it involves a great amount of pain. Anxiety, despair, guilt, and attack all enter into it, broken into by periods in which they seem to be gone. All these must be understood for what they are. Whatever form they take, they are always an attack on the self to make the other guilty. …” (A Course in Miracles text, Chapter 16, V. The Choice for Completion, paragraph 1)

I sat in his office in front of his…

As a college student one summer, for reasons I still can’t quite fathom given my colossal lack of experience, I somehow landed a job working as a case aide in a social rehabilitation center in upstate New York, part of an on-going effort to release long institutionalized patients into alternative settings such as halfway houses, and eventually into independent-living venues. …

Entertaining absolution

Last weekend I taught an A Course in Miracles forgiveness workshop in which I shared my ever-strengthening conviction that learning to follow the inner teacher of love instead of fear is leading me home, however convoluted the journey sometimes seems. Home to a peace beyond its shackled version in this dualistic world where even its shabby imitation is always purchased at a steep price, experienced by the buyer as a loss of personal identity filled with remorse.

During the workshop…

Suffice it to say the day had not gotten off to an auspicious start. I’d arisen consumed with repetitive judgments of imaginary external events no amount of vowing to make peace of mind my only goal seemed to dispel. Then, too, while brushing my teeth, the mere mention of the recent movie Rock of Ages on NPR had triggered the song We Built this Cityto lodge itself unbidden in my head, replaying over and over again! As the tune echoed on in the scant chambers of my gray…

As I caught myself once more attempting to shout down the ego last week, I experienced a shift in perspective that helped me compassionately witness the fear we all share of finding our way home to a Love we’re really not sure wants us back.

“I’m not going anywhere with you,” he repeated, stomping his little, bare foot.

I ignored him. “I told you to get dressed.”

He stuck out his tongue.

“Now,” I said.

He was wearing…

I don’t often hear voices—well, I mean, except for the imaginary cast of characters with whom I appear to interact on a daily basis here on hallucinated planet crazy—but this morning I awoke with a clear directive that, trust me, was not the kind of thing the self I still mostly think I am would ever in a gazillion years make up.

“Give up control,” the voice said, “and let one who knows the way guide you.”

“Seriously?” the ego asked.

But I ignored him. A wave of joyful…

“… Think of your mind as a vast circle, surrounded by a layer of heavy, dark clouds. You can see only the clouds because you seem to be standing outside the circle and quite apart from it. … From where you stand, you can see no reason to believe there is a brilliant light hidden by the clouds. The clouds seem to be the only reality. They seem to be all there is to see. Therefore, you do not attempt to go through them and past them, which is the only way in which you would be really convinced…

I stood at the white board in front of my classroom, Sharpie in hand, finally assuming the teaching role to which I was rightfully born.

Jesus had crammed himself into my little desk--a jumble of cramped, Picasso-like limbs--at my request. I’d asked him to switch places with me today, literally and figuratively, in an effort to raise his awareness (to put it politely since today’s lesson had apparently not even entered his airspace) about what it was like to walk in my…

Standing in line with my family outside the Musee d’Orsay restaurant waiting to be seated for lunch during our recent vacation in Paris, I found myself privy like everyone else in the general vicinity to a colossal meltdown on the part of an American man standing just behind us with his adolescent daughter.

“Give me that phone,” he demanded, in a loud voice.

His daughter shook her head, dropped the phone into her purse, and hugged it to her chest.

“I want the phone. I…

“Don’t make me go back out there again,” I said, resurrecting my “tiny voice.” The one I used to use as a kid in the confessional, reciting a rote list of venial sins, the tip of an iceberg I’d kept in the freezer for, well; ever. I couldn’t tell how long I’d been sitting outside my imaginary Jesus’ imaginary office, unable to rise to my feet and enter that ever-open door. I’d been emailing him all week and getting an out-of-office reply but obviously he was in there, grading papers maybe or…

I sat at my desk, cross-legged in my chair, eyes closed; calling to mind the face of someone I’ve been struggling to forgive for a long time. Offering a silent apology with as much sincerity as I could find in my slowly unfurling heart for the many ways in which I had used him to embellish my story of seeking and never finding. The tale of ill-fated suffering I was learning I had woven in an effort to keep the fiction of a separate me alive all these years, while denying responsibility for…

Shhhh … Lean in a little closer. I have a confession to make. I killed a spider the other day in cold blood. I spotted it immediately on entering my bathroom to prepare for bed. A large, brown, hairy, I suspect non-poisonous creature; it appeared to have rappelled into the center of my bathtub. It froze as I flipped on the light. To me, it seemed a no-brainer.  I turned on the forceful faucet to wash it away, watching, detached and lost in thought about a problem I couldn’t seem to solve as…

“Let me get this straight,” I said, as my inner imaginary Jesus and I rode up the chairlift at Loveland Ski Area together last weekend. “You want me to make friends with my projections? You still haven’t met them, have you?”

He just laughed, swinging his skis like he’d been doing this all his life. Minus ski boots, of course, sans helmet, same old nubby robe, those signature hot pink shades rimmed with sparkles he’d gotten so fond of last summer. He should have made quite the…