This Week’s Quotation:

It was a remarkable contrast for me personally—a profound awakening to a mystical experience available within art and within all of life, and all the painful emotions of a community of people falling out of love.

Becoming a Sun p. 199

Profound Awakening

When I wrote Becoming a Sun, I looked for someone to advise me. I met Amanda Johnson, who was holding new-author conferences in Southern California, and I hired her as my coach.

Amanda had great advice. She urged me to tell stories from my life throughout the book. So I added them to the poetry and prose I already had planned. The result—at least for some people who have read it—is that the book comes across as real, and even a little raw at times. But isn’t that how life is?

This short excerpt from Chapter 5 is from one of those raw and real stories.

From my own experience and observation, profound awakenings often occur in the middle of some kind of social fracturing—amidst rupture within a family, a relationship, or a community. It is hard to say what causes what. Does the fracturing unleash the awakening? Or does the awakening cause the fracturing?

However it works, it is good to find a way to talk about such things, as Amanda urged me to do.

If you are experiencing anything like that now, I urge you to know that life is having its way; that something larger than you is at work to create a fulfillment at a higher level than you have known..

You can’t stop the process, can you? And why should you? Trusting it is leading you to something beautiful and right, probably the best you can do is offer your love, your willingness, your care, and your faith into what is transpiring.

What does it mean to become a sun?

Every human being is already a sun on the inside—a being of intense love and light. The difference is that some people have the vision and courage to become a sun on the outside. This difference is our human destiny.