This Terrible Love, a journal of nonduality

Here it seems like life sings ‘This’ in as many ways as it creates flowers. There is no correct interpretation, any more than we can say opera is more truly music than rap (and I know some might say that!). The way it seems to be seen here: Preferences. Seems as if we like to attribute intention and motivation and personal traits to everyone, the same way we do for characters on a TV show. There is a bird that alights on the third highest branch of the tree just outside my window every morning. I suppose we could say she prefers it. And the wind, on a clear day, blows from the southeast in the world of imaginary points on a pointless landscape. We could say it prefers to blow that way. I don't know. Why do I seem to sit in the morning with a cup of tea facing the east reading Nancy Neithercut’s poems rather than facing the west and reading Eckhart Tolle's New Earth book? No reason, but the very act of looking for reasons and imagining they exist if only I could ponder deeply e...

  There are a million ways to talk about this and there are no ways at all. People who write me from indigenous cultures tell me they always knew separation was a lie, and someone tells me that when Native people from a tribe in northern California were asked to record their autobiography, they never even mentioned personal details as the personal self was not seen as important. They would simply describe the awe and beauty of life. When the anthropologist Knud Rasmussen asked an elderly Greenland native her life story, she recounted times of famine and storms where hunters were lost and children were born and hungry and old people died. He thought her life had been marked by tragedy, but when she was finished talking, she simply said, "yes, life was good.” Not because it had been filled with good or bad events, but because life itself was enough. My correspondents from such cultures are always a bit surprised when they hear nonduality speakers and find them obsessively ponti...