It Is Good, It Is Very Good

 

IT IS GOOD, IT IS VERY GOOD

So much to do!  

So much to contemplate.

So many lives to impact.

So much love needed.

So many people needing the touch of God.

God’s will be done, and we have to do it.

So much to learn.

So much damaged by ignorance.

Actions of love,

actions of life misdirected,

competence and effort,

incompetence and effort,

comfort level and skill level,

how to reach, how to touch,

each doing a job,

each of us doing our job,

wondering, guessing,

the art of life,

the ambiguous, desperate art of life.

A hand reached out,

a hand clenched,

both trying,

overcoming fear,

testing, testing,

testing the soul,

the children showing the way,

our desperation driving the effort,

and through it all

growth,

growth while waiting,

waiting to understand,

doing something anyway,

running forward toward flickering Light,

beauty in the effort,

the blind, loving effort,

charging out of our defensive bunkers to act in the name of caring,

taking the chance,

accepting the risk,

in order to help as best we can,

playing to strengths,

dealing with weakness,

the human drama, the human creation.

Will God ever again be able to look and say, “it is good, it is very good.”

God’s will waiting to be done……

…….by us.

Copyright 2025 Don Ray.  Please share.

Inevitable War?

INEVITABLE WAR? 

Is it inevitable, the wars?  Is it built into God's unholy system? 

In our holiest expression of universal Purpose, we connect with - bond with - unite with other human souls, connection facilitated by shared experience – beliefs - identity.  We are naturally and rightly drawn to support these family members – teammates - comrades.  Then, in the process of that mutual support, we inflict atrocities on those in that other competing family – sect - or army.  

Is it inevitable?  Can we not be loyal to our nation without being party to destruction of the other nation?  Can we love and support and be loyal to the warrior while not supporting and condoning the war?  

Individually, in some situations, we can abjure war while embracing the warrior.  But surely many cases demand supporting the active combat or else watching the loved comrade or family member fall victim.  

in spite of entropy and resource shortages, God's Creation does not dictate inevitable wars.  Wars arise from freely chosen evil in the hearts of malevolent and politically popular leaders.  These leaders are in turn enthusiastically empowered by the willful evil in our hearts, we the humanity that eagerly follow.  The ensuing conflagration then sweeps up individuals, participation motivated by loyalty to family, tribe, and comrades,...... inevitable participation in the not inevitable wars.

Opportunity in the Darkness

 Copyright 2025 Don Ray

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OPPORTUNITY IN THE DARKNESS

 

We, these nominally freewill individual elements of consciousness, find ourselves in this world of entropy, inevitable death, need, hunger, suffering, and evil.  We exist in more or less solitary confinement, our experience of life singular and isolated, with no way to share the essence of what it deeply feels like to be you and me.  

This might initially seem discouraging, and then depressing, and then abjectly hopeless.  ……but only because we miss the point.  Perceived from a different perspective, a distinct Light becomes evident in the undeniable darkness.

We are placed in a form of existence with boundless opportunity to do good and practice Love.  Yet our individual corporeal existence is all about us, all about our birth, all about our survival, all about our destiny.

We are given ample, indeed boundless, opportunity to do good, to help, to alleviate suffering, to rescue, to heal, to comfort.  Anywhere we turn there is need, which is to say, opportunity.

We do not have to save the world.  We cannot save the world.  But we can save someone or something, and in the process accept the gift of our own salvation.

There need be little torment about exactly what to do.  In this world of suffering the opportunities are boundless.  Raise your children, do a good job, or rescue animals, or shelter the homeless, or serve on church committees, or be politically informed and active.  But for God's sake, for your sake, do something.  There is no single right path.  There is no way for you to save the world.  But there are endless ways to save something and someone.  

That is the nature and Purpose of this world of entropy, to provide opportunity, to provide the Choice.  At its core foundational structure, below the infinite mathematical sequences that can only tease at a pseudo-determinism, resides entropy, the statistically not quite impossible, and hence inevitable, evolution of conscious life, and the inexorable death of that life.  The resulting overall perceived image is a grisly panoply of carnivorous cruelty.  Yet at the pixilated level of the individual elements of isolated consciousness, there we see the Purpose, the beautiful Purpose, the redeeming Purpose, in the opportunity to  choose Love and beauty in whichever direction we turn.  

It is a Universe and Creation of suffering.  It is a Universe and Creator suffering…...all for us, for each of us…..we children being born into what seems darkness because our eyes are still closed, we children of a Light awaiting our Choice to let it shine through us.

Copyright 2025 Don Ray

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Conflicted Choice

 Copyright 2025 Don Ray

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CONFLICTED CHOICE

Conflicts, between nations and people, inevitable.

Collapse of systems, inevitable.

Conflict internally, inevitable.

Conflict, what to do, the assessment of what is right.  Leaving one’s  children to earn money to feed those children.  Choosing among overlapping demands of friends, family, obligations, God, church, team, patriotism, pets, colleagues.

Conflict and choice…..there is the core nature of this worldly life.  Each moment at work, playing with children, helping a friend, supporting the team, is a moment not given to all the others.

Law and order, compassion, enforcement, acceptance…...each of them right, each justifiable.  Each choice of what to do bringing to light everything not done.

We defer the choice to holy texts, to imams and preachers, to team colors, to authority, blessed authority, anyone, anyone to save us from the torment of choice.

There will be suffering, and we don't want to make it worse, but the lovingly purchased pet food entailed suffering and death of natural resources or confined domesticated livestock.

Conflict and choices, enough choice by one group of people leading to conflict with that other group who made a different choice.

It is all good.  It will all induce suffering.

Some agonize over the choices.  Others don't.

"Just make them" time and mortality demand.  Decide who will suffer, who you will neglect, while trying to love and help the others.  

Every opportunity is from God?.....but the "ruler of this world", satan or coyote or crow, confuses the issue.

Note and observe, record without judgement, then adjust as feels right.  That is a way to avoid taking control.  It is a way to make informed decisions.  

This is a finite world.  It is so in order to promote values and awareness.  It is the big Choice that matters.  

It is a world of mortality.  Only in the limitations of mortality do values and priorities arise.

God does indeed place before us opportunities, but we cannot take advantage of all of them.  The real opportunity is the Choice…..and there is no right answer for that Choice.  Manifold opportunities to rescue mean manifold necessities to neglect.  It is simply so in this world.  It is important,  critically important, to recognize that.

Give up control, but don't think that means escaping terrible choices.  The desire to escape moral choices leads to horrors of ISIS, Taliban, and Baptists.  Make informed decisions.  Be aware of what you are doing.  Accept, and this is critical, what you cannot do as determined by each choice of what to do.  

Yes, each life opportunity, each opportunity to serve and help and heal and rescue is from God, personally delivered to you, demanding your response.  And you cannot do it all.  It is a huge act of faith and spiritual growth to recognize and accept that.  

Mortality demands faith to accept what cannot be.  Eternity assures all good will be.  

Copyright 2025 Don Ray

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Riding Darkness

 

RIDING DARKNESS

Now dark, quickly dark.

Gentle motion reveals the presence of darkly invisible waves just out that window.  

We ride the dark surface, just as our lives ride the boundary between life and death, sensing motion, trying to maintain our balance, something out of our control rippling by our soul, sensed not seen, treading an unseen surface separating life from an utterly unknowable depth into which we will inevitably sink.  The darkness, the unknowable depth, the unseen ripples we sense and dark tsunamis we dread, the darkness, the blankness, the unknowable depths, that is our canvas, the great blank canvas of life without answers on which we decide what matters.

Touch

 

Touch 

So precious, so precious.

Warm, soft, fuzzy, miraculous gift of God, watching the screen in the dark as I type.

Intense, this awareness of touch.

Peace, calm peace,

before another day in the world.

A cord connecting that moment past,

a song connecting to that moment past,

all focused, all coalescing, in this moment.

Always surprising, the revelations of presence.

Never bidden, pure gift, a precursor to timelessness

when all will be gift, pure gift,

finally, finally aware that

nothing is of our own.

 

Rippling breath,

abiding touch,

touch of the angels,

when all will be touch,

enduring touch,

connecting the then 

to a timeless now,

connection 

across a no longer extant space,

separation no longer possible.

 

The briefest of eternal previews

enters even here,

even in this world,

in defiance of the illusion of time,

a deep and penetrating glimpse,

a gift, unbidden, unsought,

for you cannot seek 

what you cannot imagine.

Touch - warm, soft, all encompassing,

teaching its gentle lesson

of what will be and is,

when touch will no longer 

be localized and momentary,

but enduring, unending,

never again to seemingly end,

but always building, ever growing,

life finally come even to us.

 

There is no sharing of this experience,

no words can convey 

the meaning of touch

that fills and fulfills.

"Touch" seems 

so physical, so carnal, so temporal.

How can it possibly convey anything eternal?

Yet in that moment of warmth and softness,

in a tiny area of contact,

all meaning and Purpose abide,

for a moment,

the eternal moment.

It All Makes Sense

 It All Makes Sense

Copyright 2025 Don Ray (But feel free to copy and quote.  Just give credit.)

Somehow it all kind of make sense, which is profoundly surprising.

All this conflict, the conflicts between people, and even the conflicts within our own minds.

It all seems quite unavoidably necessary if we are to be truly free and individual. 

Were we all the same, even a little more the same, even prone to a slighter degree of similarity, we would not truly be individual. 

The absolutely unfathomable, jaw-dropping, perplexing behaviors of those people a millennia ago, or around the world, or next door, or in the next cubicle, are an inescapable part of our nature as individuals.

The cacophony of voices vying for attention in our heads, the temptations and distractions and loss of attention and lack of discipline, that also necessary if we are to be free, freedom meaning choices, not mere choices of responses to circumstances, but choices regarding the very essence of who and what we want to be.

It is all necessary, and almost kind of begins to make sense.

And one can even imagine that it is all OK.

We must just have patience, patience and faith.

After all, we have all eternity to grow into what we want to be, and to live in that existence modeled around and consistent with what we want to be.

In its role as the incubator for these free and individual beings this world has through recent millennia fulfilled a surprisingly consistent function.  I can see a striking consistency in the Choice faced by ancient Greeks and modern scientists, plains Indians and marketing psychologists…..always the same Choice,….whether to care or not……whether to listen to the whispers of higher callings to Unity or the shrill threats demanding collapse into the self.

And through those millennia occasionally appeared teachings and prophecies and revelations, each of them of course deformed and warped by our insistent demands, but still fulfilling the essential need of providing some glimmer of hope, some relevant incarnation to gently assist us in our attempts to spiritually survive in the peculiar and perverse society of the moment.

Surprisingly it all makes sense, not that it has to.

All the conflicts are the inescapable, perhaps inevitable, consequence of birth into freedom and individuality. 

The conflicts must not endure, for once free and individual we are empowered to choose Unity.

This world must be what it is.

Those who choose to seek Unity must actualize their Choice by trying to heal and love, by accepting and tolerating, all within the clashing madness of the world around and the roiling conflicts of the mind within.

Copyright 2025 Don Ray (But feel free to copy and quote.  Just give credit.)

Pre-dawn ragged blanket

Pre-dawn Ragged Blanket

Copyright 2021 Don Ray.  Feel free to print and share

Oh the enormity of it all!…..and that said about even the infinitesimal fraction of existence we perceive…..all focused around our own miniscule perception of our individual life experience.

Something as trivial as a slightly uncomfortable temperature suffices to erase any thought of the struggles of the immediately surrounding world, much less the greater world.  

The enormity of it all…..the intensity of every life experience…….every fleeting life experience…...all God's Creation culminating in each sensation of each moment lived…….until to our inexplicable surprise the life ends.

If anything should not be a surprise it is the ending of life, yet each time it never seems quite normal, never quite as it should 

The intensity of it all…...unless never experienced, never perceived, never discerned.

Perhaps it is necessary to reel in the discernment, to temper the intensity of life.  Perhaps there is no peace to be found in that doomed intensity.  Turn from it, dampen the senses, pull a ragged blanket over awareness, like the homeless do on the cold nights in the park.  It is necessary, a little tempering, a little distraction, from the overwhelming intensity of doomed life…...for now…..while the dawn is such a faint, almost but not quite imperceptible distant glow.

Copyright 2021 Don Ray.  Feel free to print and share