Love and Fear a Letter to the Editor from Peace Rider 4/26/2013

Dear Friends,

                                                                    Love and Fear

It has been said at the ultimate root of all human interactions is either love or fear.  Love motivates to selfless service and sacrifice.  We saw this played out most recently, in the aftermath of the tragic Boston bombings.  Love impels, it does not compel.  It asks nothing for itself. It is coherent energy flowing from the heart.  By its very nature it unifies and heals. This too we have seen in recent days and in the aftermath of other tragedies.   Only love has the power to drive out or transform energies of lower frequency or vibration -  fear, hate, anger and the like.

Fear is incoherent energy.  It separates, alienates and can paralyze.  Fear is energy of the mind, and ego driven consciousness - without heart.  It manifests as violence in its many forms.  It virtually shutdown the city of Boston, it imprisons without hope of release, it justifies state sanctioned killing of perceived enemies in the name of "freedom."  It makes war. 

We have become a nation more driven by out fears than by love for one another and ourselves.  Yet in our finest hour,  in the aftermath of tragedy, we unite for a higher good.  In the moment, we move out of our heads and into our hearts.  Love is our true nature, if we allow it. 

What can we do individually and collectively to transform ourselves and nation - LOVE -  fear not?  This we have been told repeatedly. 

Only love has the power of transformation, to heal our ourselves, our nation and the world.  Love or fear, the choice is ours???  On this we will rise or fall. 

Don

"Leadings" and Recent Readings 4/14/2013

Dear Friends,

For those of you still occasionally checking for signs of life from Peace Rider, just know that I'm only on a temporary sabbatical between assignments.  I continue riding my bicycle around town, on studded snow tires, lest the legs become too detuned. 

Spring is late here with snow and cold still lingering.  That didn't deter some of us crazies, actually quite a lot, showing up for the first race of the season called Beat Beethoven.  It's a five ker, not so far but far enough on legs more accustomed to revolving a bicycle crank than pounding over hard pavement.  This is my favorite, I suppose for it's off beat character, so to speak.  The idea is to finish before a playing of Mr. B's 5th Symphony ends, about 32 minutes.  The runner wearing bib number Uno is dressed up as Mr. B complete with top hat.  It was below freezing so wearing a long black coat may not been too uncomfortable.  The symphony begins playing at race start through loud speakers and at several places around the 3 mile or so course. 

I made it over the line before the end of the 5th (of Beethoven) with hundreds of others to receive a free ticket to one of the next U of Fairbanks Symphony concerts, if I'm here to use it. 

Back one weekend I was in Talkeetna, AK, a six hour drive south of here, to attend a Quaker retreat about following "Leadings."  A quote from Bill and Ruthie the facilitators will give you a flavor of the gathering but not of the personal sharing of journeys that went on around the subject,

"Often we sit and get lost in our own minds and lives.  This is understandable, it is part of what we live in. The reality is also that we sometimes loose site of deeper truth.  We carry on as if our minds and lives are actually the center of reality.

The deeper truth is that God, or the Divine or whatever we choose to call what connects us and binds us, has given us our lives and souls themselves.  Along with this fundamental gift God also EXPECTS something of us.  This is not a concept or proposition.  This is the deeper truth. It is as true as the reality that we are loved, held and have constantly available to us access to the flow of Divine Light.

"Leadings" are not "maybes," they are ready for us now when we ready ourselves for them." 

It is in the readying process that I am now engaged in and will have more to say about when what comes next solidifies. 

Readings!   Where have I found pages of interest to turn since my return that I have found helpful in different ways?  Falling Upwards, A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life by Richard Rohr, a Benedictine priest. Twenty Affordable Sailboats to take you Anywhere by Nestor and Twenty Small Sailboats to Take You Anywhere, by Vigor, Awakening the World, A global Dimension to Spiritual Practice by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, a contemporary Sufi mystic,  The Great Shift by Tom Kenyon and others, New Age;  Soulcraft, Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche by Bill Plotkin,  The Golden Spruce, A True Story of Myth Madness and Greed by Vaillant;  the latter a contemporary tale about an exceptionally rare Sitka Spruce with golden needles that grew on the Queen Charlotte islands of British Columbia, sacred to the indigenous Haida. 

More books about sailing and sailboats fueling a life long passion for boats in general.  But one person's passion may be another's bore so just a smattering here.

Peace Rider - Don

Mary Oliver, "Tell me, what it is you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"