Lorna Writes

I no longer remember who, among all the philosophers I studied at college while getting my degree in philosophy, had posited something along the lines that, in order for an action to be ethical, it must be something that, if everyone did it, the world would be a better place. But the idea stuck with me, as a valid definition of "ethical." "I am the center of the universe," on the other hand, does not sound like the basis for ethical actions. But, over the years of what I could call my "spiritual awakening," this is, in fact, a simple, boiled-down phrase that in some ways powerfully encapsulates my working ethical paradigm. This could take a lot of explaining, to connect the dots between the first and the second paragraphs. But they are, in fact, connected, given what I mean by "I am the center of the universe." Here are some of the towns along the road connecting these two seemingly foreign and opposing cities. The first is perhaps the most impor...

I've been thinking about how to write the next installment of this story for three weeks, and started writing opening paragraphs several times. Some words of Martín Prechtel are ringing in my head, about how, when the old traditionalist Mayans in his village got asked a seemingly simple and straight-forward question by a modern-minded person, like "How do I get to the market?" they would be met with a long and bewildering blizzard of eloquent beating-around-the-bush, which was meant, not to throw the visitor off the path to an answer, but to give the poor little orphan question a nest to grow up in. In other words, to put it efficiently, what is valuable is not efficiency and "getting what I want," but the intricate and delicious messiness of being related beautifully with everything. At least, that is the gist of what my poor civilized brain can remember of the pages of description he writes about this indigenous way of interacting with questions. A part of me...

What I write about in this post is how the final foundation stone of experience fell in place for the building of my worldview. It's a foundation stone that has put my relationships with humans into a whole different perspective than I had before; a perspective that is radically different from most of what I see around me, but one that I find immensely empowering. This foundation stone came along in 2009, but it took many more years after that to build the rest of the building that I gave a very brief description of in my first post about my worldview.             ------------------------- I'm going to set the stage for finding this foundation stone by taking up my chronological story where I left off. The last I wrote about where I was, I was staying with my 84-year-old dad, taking care of him at his home on the North Shore of Lake Superior. I spent August to October of 2008 living with him and bringing him back to somewhat normal health. But living with h...

Ugh, I've been trying to write a post for over a week, about becoming aware of Martín Prechtel and his books and teachings. It's been difficult because of just how much impact he has had on my life. No other author or teacher has influenced me as much as Martín, or given me such a complex and compelling view of the possibilities of being human. In some ways, it feels like my life ever since becoming aware of him, has been a tug-of-war between finding my own path in the world, and feeling inspired and magnetized and validated by the stories and worldview that he presents. So this is me starting over from the beginning, with a whole different post, trying to pare down all the things I could say, to just what I need to say at this point in my story, to introduce the first main ideas of his that impacted me.                 -------------------------- When Ed and I moved to Pine River in 2006, we were plunged into a community whose diverse people inspi...

So... I know I said my next post was going to be about Martin Prechtel... and I have started writing that one already. BUT. I just had an experience, these past two days, that perfectly demonstrates how "doing my emotions" works in real life, how powerful it is for making me feel better and my life flow better, and why I love it so much...SO, given that I just introduced the idea in my last post, I figure this is a good time to tell this story from my present day, 14 years after hearing about it from my friend Amy Sabrina. First I want to tell a short version of part of Amy's story. I still remember standing in her kitchen as we were making dinner together, and she was telling me how she responded when she got her cancer diagnosis... How she felt fear, but instead of letting it determine how she reacted, she let the fear play out in her body, and then she could make decisions from a place of greater clarity. In Amy's case, this led her to forego all the normal recomme...

I'm quite enjoying the process of writing this blog. I wasn't sure I would like it. Since I've been out of school, I've never written anything other than copious journals, which are fascinating to go back and read years later, but which entail an entirely different process from writing this blog. I finally feel like a "real" writer, because I'm not just rambling in an unedited stream of consciousness. I start out with a general idea of which story I want to tell, or what idea I want to communicate in each post, and start writing... and then go back and re-read each sentence and paragraph, to see how things flow, and change things, and take a break to let it all settle, and write some more, and revise some more, and sometimes completely change the focus, or erase whole sections I've written...It's cool to watch my mind, as it's noticing where I want to clarify, or add an important detail, or take something out, to make the story flow and somehow...

Before I get back to where I left off in the narrative of my "initiation," I feel like telling the story of the second of my three glimpses of what I call the divine dimensions. In my second blog post, I said that I've had three experiences that felt like the veils of normal reality had parted and I got a glimpse of More. I've written about the first ("the face in the sky") and the third ("the tree and I.") The one I haven't written about yet, happened in between the other two.     ------------------ In January of 2004 my mother decided she needed to see what was going on with the shortness of breath that she was experiencing. X-rays showed some masses in both lungs. Maybe it was tuberculosis.. maybe it was cancer. Yikes. By early March, a biopsy had determined it was lung cancer. She had never smoked. She had always been relatively healthy and ate well and walked a mile every day. She was 69 years old, which was 10 years younger than my dad, a...

I will return to the chronological narrative of my life in subsequent posts. For right now, I want to step back and take a little (or maybe not-so-little after all, now that I've finished this post!) look at the trajectory of my life and my thoughts after that experience with the tree, from the perspective I have now, 15 years after it happened. It has felt like a welcome cascade of remembering things I already knew, but paradoxically, I had no idea how difficult it would be to actually integrate this 9th dimensional experience into my 3-dimensional life. It is definitely a very unfinished adventure, and I'm continually reminded of how unfinished I am!     ------------------ I had never in my life felt drawn to the concept of "enlightenment." This word has more than one meaning, of course, but in the religious or philosophical realm, it always seemed to be an abstraction that I couldn't grasp enough to want. I got a double major when I was in college, in both biol...