“...in order to answer the question, ‘Where do we go from here?’... we must first honestly recognize where we are now.”

~ Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness...because in the last analysis all moments are key moments and life itself is grace."

                                                                                                                                                                     ~ Frederick Buechner

Hello Dear Ones, how are you doing?

Many have asked for a recording of the spoken word piece I delivered at Jazz for the Holidays on December 18. The service was unrecorded but the text is available below in this longer than usual blog post:  

Life is veiled and hidden, even as your greater self is hidden and veiled. Yet when life speaks, all the winds become words; and when she speaks again, the smiles upon your lips and the tears in your eyes turn also into words.

When she sings, the deaf hear and are held; and when she comes walking the sightless behold her and are amazed and follow her in wonder and astonishment.

Thus wrote Lebanese-American poet Kahlil Gibran.

What I know for sure is that when
Life
deigns to be embodied
in the becoming
            and becoming
                        and becoming
of each one of us,
it is only then that she is truly something to behold.
The awesome beauty and magnificent terror,
the fierce strength and tender fragility of
Life
embodied as human being human
in all its glorious and terrible forms:
each one of us
bursting
into being out of the DNA of stars
now cells and sinews and bone and blood and flesh.
Life
now speaking in the high pitched wail
of we newly arrived and baby born
into human consciousness and
whatever
Life
wants to offer us
into