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.

Beware Beliefs

 

BEWARE BELIEFS

 

Beware your beliefs, 

beware your bonds, 

lest they turn without warning,

into bullets and bombs.

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.

Fading Chime

 

FADING CHIME

A chime, 

a single chime.

Each life a single chime,

seldom heard,

barely recognized before fading,

fading, leaving us to wonder,

did we really hear it?

Copyright 2025 Don Ray.  Please share.

Breeze of Color

 BREEZE OF COLOR

I sit on the stones content, blessedly content, to watch the beautiful fall colors waving in the warm breeze heralding approaching weather.

Observe….savor Nature….as I did as a small child in dad's navy hammock under the cottonwood tree.  

I might seem a far different person now than when a student.  But not so at all.  I have simply shed the worldly dreams and hopes of younger days, revealing the person that was always there.

Spectacular fall colors this year, cherished as I cherished them as a child.

Then it was necessary to have aspirations, to get grades, to have career objectives.  It was all necessary, all my response to the world in which I was placed.  The infatuation with cars and TV shows was necessary, until seeing through them.  But I was always there, underneath the thick blankets of plans and schedules and hopes, always ready to pause to savor the colors in the breeze.

Occasionally, in order to be me, I momentarily eschew discipline and goals and allow exploration of what I really want …...and I am back outside, immersed in the colors, absorbing the sun, as I did when I had nothing to do.  

I was Home then, and Home now, the same Home.

Here, basking in light filtered through reds and coppers and greens and yellows and golds, here, without having to defend or justify my inactions, here, the healing here, I am who I was then, then far away and long ago, when I seemed so different, when I still wore the world's demands.

Copyright 2025 Don Ray.  Please share.

Opportunity in the Darkness

 Copyright 2025 Don Ray

Feel free to share.

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

Please share.

Conflicted Choice

 Copyright 2025 Don Ray

Feel free to print and share.

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

Feel free to print and share.

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.

Children of the Cast Off God

 

Children of the Cast Off God

Wondrous things are happening, people, even these people, doing wondrous things.

They are terribly disappointing, these people, yet the potential of God resides within them.

Do not look for perfection.  Do not look for control.  But define for them a need and direction, and give them some freedom, opportunity, and encouragement, and sometimes miraculous things will unfold.  

A frightening, even terrifying lot, magnanimous generosity and irrational cruelty keeping close company in their hearts.  Expect little.  Hope for much.  Give up all hope of understanding them or explaining their behavior.  Love them, but don't get too close.

Fear them.  Do not condemn them.  Forget any pretensions of teaching them.

Somewhere in their self-perpetuated chaos resides the Kingdom of Heaven.  Don't frustrate yourself trying to make sense of that.  

Curse them, bless them, flee from them, embrace them.  The Universe orbits about them, all Creation exists for them, and they will steadfastly lay claim to their central position while not bothering with gratitude for it.

Wondrous things are happening, and the children of the cast-off-God are doing wondrous things.  Marvel at it all and smile along with their neglected God.  

Candles

 Candles

What fragments will survive, what remnant of touch.

Blessed, blessed,

immersion in Source and holiness,

those first safe moments of the day.

None can share, 

not yet,

blessed, blessed ritual,

not hollow ritual of things and mumbled words and smoke that promptly disappears,

but ritual of soul for the moment embraced.

The world, the world, 

terrible and terrifying,

potential unrealized.

But in the still of pre-dawn

the madness abates,

and blessed, blessed Communion

is enabled.

A touch,

reminding touch,

safe touch,

and the soul remembers

what was and

what will be.

Time finally slows.

The torrent of needs and hungers and demands is set aside.

Finally, finally,

miracle returns,

or better said,

eyes are opened to perceive the miracles always present.

None will wonder at such words.

They will prompt only momentary curiosity.

But surely there is more.

Surely those hints are of meaning.

Celebrate them,

though the soul longs to celebrate so much more.

While waiting for sunrise even a flickering candle is comfort in the cold and dark.

Yes, it is cold and dark.

Yes, those are beautiful candles, those imperfect children struggling to immerge from the spiritual womb of this carnal existence.  

Do not look to them for sunrise.  But in the midst of the isolation in the cold dark, do not miss the beauty of their tiny candle flames, though they cast even darker shadows.

Grim the moment, but bright the promise.

The sun will rise,

all will rise.

Do not pretend it is not dark and cold.

But do not miss the beauty of the candles,

do not miss the essential, though for now meager, light and warmth they cast.

See the Wholeness in all its darkness,

this birth of individual children of One loving Source

Foolish Faith

 

FOOLISH FAITH

 

Run, run away!  Flee, flee from the horrors of the human world,

the willing cruelty, the chosen stupidity.

It is, all in all,

compared to the Source Garden and Destiny Home,

a horrible place.

Demons and devils have been loosed,

and they are in human form,

intent on inflicting suffering on the children of God,

intent on deceiving the children of God,

intent on convincing us we are not children of the non-existent God and we should and will succumb to the cold reality of this world and will become like them.

The demons and devils, the creatures of this world, have a most convincing argument.  Their taunts and cruelties are tangible and demanding, inescapable and tactile.  In contrast, the call to have faith in some well hidden Light is nebulous and tremulous, lacking any convincing argument or rational justification.

Can any faith possibly survive?....real faith, sacrificial faith, questioning and doubting faith that is, as opposed to the blind, unquestioning,  and fundamentalist "faith" that serves the purposes of the worldly demons and devils.  

Simple fact: sacrificial faith has survived so far.  It has survived in the face of these very demons and devils.  It has survived times just as bad and worse.  If there is to be proof of miracles, it is in the survival of this faith, this irrational and unprofitable kindness and compassion.

Demons and devils are loosed, evangelists and terrorists, marketers and politicians, media personalities and drug dealers, ayatollahs and sports heroes, all proclaiming the gospel of profits, entertainment, vengeance, consumption, and worldly victory.

Faith, real faith, compassionate faith, best give up, or at least hide.  But it doesn't.  It can't.  That indiscernible whisper still drowns out the amplified cacophony of the world and its loudly yelling demons.  That soft and subtle Light still overwhelms the flashing glare of the burning world.  

Faith abides, in sorrowing and grieving hearts, hearts waiting, hearts knowing.

One Constant

 

ONE CONSTANT 

Last night I watched the spectacular and heavily favored Mikella Shiffrin ski out and disqualify for the second race in a row.  In shock she sat at the edge of the run for twenty-five minutes.

For the vast majority of us, plans and expectations are a momentary solace, an illusion of predictability, a delusion of our own empowerment.  Of course we hear of the Bezos's and Musks who plan, predict,  and control each detail of their obscenely successful lives.  That makes us feel either inadequate about our intelligence and discipline or bitter about our personal persecution by fate.  But the successful planners of their own lives did not raise their grandkids or have the stroke or get trapped in the car wreck or watch incoming artillery fire set their children ablaze.

Consequently rules of sports, Masonic rituals, and religion belief are our desperate attempt to erect some momentary facade of predictability.  Of course fundamentalisms flourish in times of rampant change.  We are frantic for something, anything, to grab onto to stay afloat in the white-water chaos of perfectly normal life.  Political flags or convenient scripture will do as long as it resists personal or societal  changes out of our control.

Death of course is the penultimate insult to our plans.  We are ultimately revealed as powerless.  The future beyond that event is utterly unknowable.  So we avoid thinking about it.  But if we accepted that the maelstrom of unpredictability that is our daily lives was merely a preview of and practice for that ultimate waiting unpredictability so utterly out of our control, to what might we turn for consolation?  When no worldly plan or expectation is reliable, what still abides as real?  Whether experienced or only wished for, what was it that felt real and substantive once every plan and expectation was crushed to dust and burned to ashes? 

Look back, look forward, see the world that so resolutely refused to be predicted or controlled, and sense the one constant that was all you really wanted all along.  All the plans were illusory, deceptions by self and the world.  Only the one hunger, only one essence, one joy, remained constant, then and in this moment.  Accept the chaos and unpredictability and uncertainty.  Accept the one constant hunger.  Discover that through it all, Love was the lesson, Love was the constant, Love was the plan fulfilled through the dissolution, even the penultimate insult,  of our insistent plans.

I am Right, You are Wrong

 

Human conflict is utterly inevitable. 

·        We each live in our personal world of imagined values. 

·        Our individual imaginations are sufficiently independent and creative to conjure beliefs and opinions that conflict with the other guy’s beliefs and opinions. 

·        We are too self-absorbed to compromise and incorporate aspects of the other guy's opinion.

So, the Bolsheviks create a civil war amongst themselves, the Christians schism, Muslims wage war among competing caliphates, political parties splinter, Masons concoct different orders, spouses divorce, empires divide, and congregations split.  

In the newly minted age of digitally spawned social media, our natural proclivity for conflict over arbitrary differences of belief and opinion has accelerated overnight from the equivalent of tossing sticks and stones to launching thermonuclear weapons.  This is an unforeseen and existential shock to civilization and society.  

Such shocks used to transpire over centuries or at least decades.  Empires in east and west and their associated belief systems would eventually grow large enough that their borders would begin to irritate each other.    

Sooner or later, at the behest of our overactive imaginations combined with our stubborn rejection of anything differing from the product of those imaginations, conflict will inevitably arise.  Shia and Sunni proclaimed their analysis of inheritance was worth dying for. Calvinists and Popes proclaimed their version of God was worth killing for.  

But never have arbitrary differences of opinion over contrived topics had the power to spread worldwide in milliseconds.  Never have individuals been so utterly isolated and malleable  as their fears and ignorance are deftly manipulated by rants and screeds delivered through their screens.  

Civilization will soon face the unprecedented stressor of three billion of its kind fleeing as refugees from coastal and arid locales rendered uninhabitable in the coming decades.  This hammer-blow will strike a human society already fractured down to the local level by digital amplification of our tendency to elevate disagreements over imagined beliefs, elevate them to life and death causes.  

The contrived political and religious conflicts that have always been so, are now more so. 

This century will likely see exponentially growing physical hunger.  Will it suffice to ameliorate our perennial hunger to prove ourselves right?

Threads of Smoke

Threads of Smoke

Copyright 2021 Don Ray.  Feel free to print and share.

Life.  Death.  Defining time.

Moments gone before recognized,

cherished only in their departure.

There is no holding them. 

There is no conveying them.

We see them only as fading images,

each already past,

leaving its dimming imprint,

dissolving to wipe the sand clean,

making room for the next experience,

a curious assemblage of rapidly fading images

sewn together with wisps of smoke

to create what we call

our life.

Copyright 2021 Don Ray.  Feel free to print and share.

Stream of Consciousness

STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Copyright 2021 Don Ray.  Feel free to print and share.

There is of course only consciousness.  Our individual consciousness, this ensemble of experiences and choices, seamlessly flows through the temporal reality that provides the opportunities for contact and interaction with other individual elements of consciousness.

This material world accommodatingly provides some nominally rational continuity to facilitate that contact and interaction among we elements of consciousness.

It is all only consciousness, nothing but consciousness, though the material reality that serves as connective tissue binding together the elements of consciousness would seem to have the flexibility of concrete.

All our attention to the material world at the exclusion of prioritizing the Unity bond with other elements of consciousness misses the point, neglecting the opportunity for connection provided by that material world.  

We have only consciousness, incarcerated and blinded as it may be in this carnal existence, and that consciousness attains instantiation only to the degree it experiences interaction and Unity with Consciousness as a Whole (succinctly captured in the appellation “Christos”).  The opportunity for that interaction arises in no small part through the opportunities for interaction with other individual elements of consciousness (i.e. people).

The actual structure of Reality?:

• The foundation Word, the Source, that preceded this particular version of time in which we reside, 

• The individual elements of consciousness (us) that in the matrix of their interactions form the structure of the Whole Consciousness

• The continuity of flow of each of those elements as they segway through the ages  that we perceive as our lives, 

• The transition that we call death, though it is the antithesis of ending, 

This is the structure of Reality, a Reality necessarily flowing through the girders of this temporal/ physical framework , but a Reality not to be mistaken for being just this temporal/physical framework.

Don't be enslaved, deluded, and deceived by the temporal and physical and carnal.  Use the temporal to create the eternal, apply the physical to touch the spiritual, accept this carnal as opportunity to embrace each others’ souls.

Copyright 2021 Don Ray.  Feel free to print and share.

A Higher Perspective

The ants flew this morning on their colony's annual matrimonial breeding flight!

Now this afternoon an alate (winged ant) lands on me as I write!  What a little surprise blessing!  What a marvelous and miraculous focal point of life, that shiny black body with silvery wings.

Life arising from life.  We see life the way we do because of our experience of consciousness as an individual.   Viewed without the lens of individual experience Life becomes a wholeness, a flowing reaction.  Viewed from a distance, life is akin to a fire or a rising cumulus cloud, complex but comprehensible self-driving exothermic chemical reactions and thermo-dynamic processes.

Take away our individual awareness of pain and fear and death, and Life becomes a wondrous phenomenon to marvel at as it spreads across the planet and changes and evolves and adapts.  Viewed in detachment, all the carnivorous consumption and competitive combat become academic functionalities in a localized entropy storm.  .

But being part of that consumption and combat makes us look at life with other than detached academic objectivity.  We know all too well what it feels like to be prey and target.  Curiosity at the ability of chains of nucleic acids to self-replicate becomes our personal imperative to replicate.  

A biochemical process on a singularly rare blue marble orbiting a propitiously located star has been infused with conscious awareness, and henceforth demands that it, at least the individual elements of conscious experience, i.e. humanity, be taken into account in any speculation about universal Purpose and meaning.  

The little alate still sits on my shirt.  Its wings are now extended out perpendicular to its body instead of held along the length of its body.  I touch it.  It does not move in response.  Its life seems to have expired since landing on me minutes ago.  

I doubt it mused about meaning or Purpose.  I suspect it unambiguously, wholly, and completely knew its meaning and Purpose, and that was enough.  I, on the other hand, am not so sanguine about the whole Life, death, meaning, and Purpose thing, so I keep closely watching the tiny proboscis for signs of movement and life.  I watch to no avail.  

Now expired, but she-he-it did fly, earlier this morning, a triumphant launch carrying the  colony's hopes into the unattainable sky.  The colony will never know this particular genetic package of hope lies now upside-down on a purple t-shirt.

This morning I cleaned out old files with records of students I had taught.  Those students would now be in their thirties.  Did my lessons help launch their lives on successful careers?  How many have kids of their own?  How many are under indictment?  How many are dead?  I will never know, just aa the ant colony cannot know the fate of its hundreds of winged messengers launched this morning.

Surely localized, individual, and personal meaning and purpose must be part and parcel of universal meaning and Purpose.  But the extrapolation from this season or this semester to the eternal seems deucedly indirect, leaving us wondering, if we can ask the question must there necessarily be an answer?

My little deceased alate buddy would chuckle at my naivety.  Maybe asking the question is the meaning and Purpose.  Maybe that's our version of the ant-colony's' matrimonial flight.  Let us launch forth in our conjectures, a triumph of this exothermic self-propogating life process, launching our questions and speculations, landing we know not where, but fulfilling, perchance even defining, even dare we say choosing, meaning and Purpose for the individual elements of conscious awareness infusing the sheen of organic material coating this exquisitely rare blue marble. 

Pachinko Minds

Pachinko Minds

( Copyright 2021 Don Ray.  Feel free to print and share.)

Our minds rattle through their pachinko (a Japanese vertical pinball game) path of development, bouncing this way and that, sometimes literally bouncing, starting from circumstances of childhood.  From that starting point the aggregate human perception evolves as inexorably as biological evolution, a progression (as distinguished from progress) dictated by a statistical mish-mosh of influences subtle and jarring.  Along this path,  a new philosophy, religion, or life-perspective may be as useful as tapioca to a tomato..

The fracking field worker beaten by their alcoholic father, the woman raised with a mother’s emotional denigration, these and countless victims of human parents, each and all of us, have trodden their spiritual evolutionary path to their specific point that can accept only certain forms of spiritual nourishment.

Evolutionary selection also shapes spiritual messages, incomprehensible foundational truth being filtered, distilled, and distorted to accommodate the capacity of the populace.

An accidental mutation in a random environment allows a lucky species to thrive.  An eccentric teaching in a destabilized society allows a religion to take root.

Ironically the statistically random results are majestic, revealing a structure of Life embedded in the primal foundations of the universe, unveiling loving Purpose patiently waiting on the free choice of its battered and misled children. 

( Copyright 2021 Don Ray.  Feel free to print and share.)