God is love, so might as well love back

GOD:Loving God for the hell of it

God is good. We’ve heard that. But then again, we don’t have to believe that.
We don’t have to believe in God.
I don’t have to care about or think about God.
And we like to love God, sometimes and those times are in indication of the deeper callings in Life.

Remember when you were small and looked up at the stars and it seems so amazing, that they were so many and so perfect and so brilliant and you were down here and they were up there and it was all just amazing.
That’s what loving God can be like.

Or when you sat by a stream one time, or many, and rested your back against a tree or a rock, and just did “nothing.” Just watched the water flow by and delighted in the sparkling, rippling, reflecting light bouncing from the sun off the water and into your eyes and into your brain and into your heart and your breathing and you and the stream seemed as if they were one.
All is one. All is One.
Some people say things like that. What do you think?
What do you feel?
What do you experience?
What do you love?

Say you love flowers. Is that a way to love God? Sure.
Say you love sunsets and walks on the beach. What if loving that is loving God is loving yourself in your expanding form?
Say God is something like the Whole Tamale, and so anything you love is loving God.

That makes it easy to love God. Later we’ll roam around in the scary world of God is everything, even the “bad stuff,” but let’s start easy.
Loving sunsets and puppies frolicking in the mud and babies laughing and birds singing and rainbows rainbowing these are all easy.
And that’s good, you know. We tend to forget the easy, the simple. We want God to be something fancy we have to pray hard for, or go to India to join the ashram.
We think God is some strict father, and we don’t get the goodies, the love and okay to get into heaven and whatnot, if we don’t toe some line, shape up, be good.
We don’t’ have to be good.
We might want to be kind and loving and useful to others and the Earth, and when you really feel those urges they are from that complicated and simple all at once place of All is One. The being kind to you is being kind to another part of me. The helping the Earth along is being useful to another part of me.

We appear to be apart from others and from Nature. And we appear to be a part of others and a part of Nature.
We are a part of love.
Love is a part of us.

We spend our days often, way often, forgetting that we are love.
That’s okay. God is love, some say, so that God, She or He can but us some slack when we forget to love.
Cutting us slack is called mercy.
Someone once said two things are infinite: human stupidity and God’s mercy. One kind of calls forth the other, and maybe humans are less stupid that confused and cut off from their natural intelligence.
And how do we get back to God, get back to our true selves, get back to days of more and more Love.

Start now, course. We always start now.

The love we want is in us now.
When we come to the Now, everything slows down, and we have this great swoosh of peace. Why? Because all those things lined up ahead of us don’t exist in the present.
Because all those things we remember and have told ourselves about our past, they don’t exist in the Now either.
In the now, the Now, the NOW, not much is left.
Except a peace.
A happiness.
A friend.
A sense of having come home to our true selves.

Is coming home to our true selves, our True Selves, coming home to God?

Maybe.
You don’t have to believe in any God, or anything, to feel very peaceful, happy, free by coming back to your true self, your true Self, in the Now.

And does that make the Now another name for God?

I’m not sure. I don’t think so.

I think God might be the vastness, the beauty, the ALL OF IT, that we can see and feel and merge with from the now.

But that’s just my story.

What’s your feeling when you come to the now, really now?

Does that feel like God, or a path to God, or just a great relief from all the regular ordinary everyday suffering and hurry and worry and contention and bother?

It’s your life.
It’s your feelings.
It’s you now to love and live in or not.

Try loving God, with or without believing in God. And then just coast there, without thoughts, in the Now, and see what happens.
Feel what happens.
Love what happens.
Love yourself.
Love It ALL.

Enjoy.

The Nearness

THE DAY IS LONG, THE NIGHT IS SWEET
In emptiness, God can be found

What is God?

I don’t know.

I have been reading the book of a friend of man, Fully Alive, with eh sweet idea: Jesus came not to make us Christian, but to make us Fully Alive. In it is a chapter that skims glories of believing in the God at the start of all, God as the creator, God as the Force behind all that we know. It speaks of atheists and scientists and the chances of DNA getting all that together and the Big Bang and scientists who think the Big Bang was God happening (I’d say, God farting, but the book is not, perhaps luckily, written from my sort of humor.). God is real, or God is not real.

People believe in God or don’t believe in God.

All this you know and it don’t make no difference.

God is what you can love when you want something to love and you don’t know what to call it.

God is what you can “explain” the “big picture” with when you want to blame the starting/ creating/ beginning of “it all.”

God is a story that has enthralled millions over the ages.

Or God is the Reality that hold us all is His/ Its hands.


And still, it don’t make no difference.

I keep riffing out this grammatically incorrect phrase because it is the title of a book that will lead you closer to God than a hundred Bibles, a tale of two friends, one rich and white and learning how to give and heal and serve and the other black and illiterate and full of street wisdom understanding of life and of “real religion” and formerly homeless (he now lives with the white art dealer guy, whose amazing and love filled wife died in the book before this book. Well, didn’t die in the book. Died in Texas. Her story was reborn in the first book, Same Kind of Different as Me.)


So God is out there, or God is in us.

Don’t make no difference, no how.

Life is pulsing through us right this moment. That makes a difference. If we find God in that, or feel this living-ness as God, or sense that a God is responsible for this living-ness, that is all good.

And since I’m so slippery about “God,” why did I even subtitle this chapter: In Silence we can find God.

And looking back, that isn’t the “right” words: In Emptiness, God can be found.

Silence, emptiness, and Buddha’s question: who are you really?


It’s a good question and any set of words that you string together for the answer, won’t be an answer. So, what is left?

Ask the question and answer without words?

How can we do that?

This is meditation, perhaps, or contemplation, of “just” Being Here Now.

Think about it, a bit. Any now, is just: What Is. Any set of words to describe the table or the sky or your nose or your fingers is a set of words pulled out of the past, out of our brains and our learning. The sky will keep being whatever it is whether we call it sky or cielo or ciel or der himmel or sora, it’s that stuff up there, and up is a word, and it’s usually blue, and blue is a word, and its blue in the day, and day is a word and there’s the sun/ word up there, and there’s the sun.

See the “problem” when we try to pin down the What Is of the world, the What Is of this miracle in which we appear to be drifting, or floating, or clawing, or dancing, or scheming, or rushing through, or playing in, or working in and around and about.


It’s about you?

And me.

And what is it about?

That’s another question, for another day, and I suspect it has no answer.

But the “sun” just came “out,” and it’s time to climb on my “bicycle” and move across the Earth a little.


If my mind is soft and quiet and silent or near silent, chances are that the bike ride will bring me close to God.

Or will be God?

What do you think?


If you empty your mind of words, what do you think?

Who are you, when you empty your mind of words?

Are you still you?

Do you feel nearer to God, even if you don’t know what God is?

63: Seeing the tree, part 2

Looking at a tree, 2

Some have said: if you want to learn about Love, spend time in Nature.

I am one of those people.

We’ve had one look at a tree day, already, back some thirty days, so time to put Nature in our hearts and minds and awareness as the center of our day.

(Of course, if we are playing the sensing our 5 lines game, the two arms, two legs and one spine, we are in the nature of being alive in a human body, and the nature of having an awareness to be aware of being alive and to be aware of our 5 lines. This is a particularly useful way to live one’s live.
End of mini-sermon.)

Today, sensing our five lines or not, let’s turn a sweet and useful part of our attention on nature outside our windows, nature outside our homes, nature outside our eyes and skulls and brains.

Of course, this body, this long tall skeleton on two feet with the look see listen hear smell and taste stuff up top was designed in Nature and by Nature, so hey, let’s make today a day of:

“Be aware of the miracle of being in a human body while being out in Nature, or looking out at Nature, or imagining Nature.”

What’s out there to look at touch listen to feel smell taste? Depends on where you are the season your cloths and time and space and spirit.

And, get out some, even ten minutes, no matter how cold, even in the gosh darn rain, a little bit, and see what you can do to fall in love with the source of Earthly life.

Let Nature remind you of God. Let your connection to God remind you of Nature. Let one spill into each other in the silence and peace and ease that is being in the present.

Do your best, but don’t try too hard. Just be awake to Now, Nature and Love/ God. See how they flow in and out together.