All in Fun
I met a lady at a workshop in Hawaii decades ago who had the most marvelous way of expressing her philosophy, “Isn’t life a giggle?”.
What a wonderful way to live! She was a serious seeker. At 65 she had left her family in England for a year to study in India. Every morning for that year, she climbed several hundred stairs up a mountain to meet with her guru, and now she was studying with a shaman in Hawaii. Life is a giggle, but it’s also an adventure when we let go!
I was wandering around the island of Mikonos with my head buried in a map trying to find the next little church on the tour when I asked for directions (the streets are not well marked on those Greek islands). The man on the corner kindly pointed out the correct street, but then suggested that I discard the map and follow my heart. I decided to give that a try and look where life has led me!
Living just for the fun of it. Savoring the adventures that present themselves. Allowing Life to live through me instead of marching toward some self-inflicted outcome.“If it feels good, do it” is an invitation to preachiness from the Woodstock days. I read it as ‘if it feels good to your heart, then it’s the best course to follow’.
My Hawaiian teacher once suggested, shamans never tell or preach, that I might want to reduce the amount of time I spent “living in my head”. In my 20s I was directed by my idea of what others thought I should do, and what I thought I needed to do to “get ahead”. The idea of what is important tends to shift as we gain experience. As I gained “maturity” I realized that the only important opinion of me is the one that I have of myself.
From that point I began to understand that our self judgement is more destructive than other’s judgement of us. We allow ourselves to be driven by the fear of criticism and in the process surrender our happiness.
Wisdom is where you find it, and I often find it in popular songs. “Don’t worry, be Happy” and “The Secret O’ Life” are two of my favorite oracles. Over time, I have managed to learn to live by those words. Bobby McFerren reminds us to live life lightly “when you worry, you make it double” and James Taylor provides us with a whole manual for living joyfully. “The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time”.
Simple thoughts that can lead us out of our struggle with life. The Buddha tells us that when we resist the flow of life, we suffer. The force of the universal flow is infinite, yet we try to struggle against it rather than allowing it to carry us.
To do that we need only learn to trust in the goodness of Life and allow ourselves to follow our hearts.
Crafting the Perfect Line Break
At first glance, a line break in a poem might seem like a mere structural necessity—a place to pause, to carry the eye to the next line, to make the poem fit the page. But anyone who has ever written or read poetry with intention knows: the line break is not a pause. It is a choice . And more than that, it is an instrument—a subtle, powerful tool capable of shifting everything: tone, pace, emotion, and even meaning.
Finding Poetry in Ordinary Moments
There is a quiet kind of alchemy that exists in the world. Not the sort that turns lead into gold or conjures storms from spells, but a subtler, more intimate kind—one that transforms the ordinary into something luminous, simply by the way we look at it. This is the kind of magic born from attention, presence, and wonder.