This Week’s Quotation:

And you will be held
In heaven’s love,
As the light of the stars
Enters each earthly door,
Opening you
To the sacred reality
Of your inmost Being.

Becoming a Sun, p. 128

We Will Open

My first attempt at writing Becoming a Sun was a failure. I wrote 50 pages and decided it didn’t say what I wanted to say. It’s not that anything I wrote was wrong. It’s just that it was too heady. And we don’t understand the most important stuff in our life just with our heads.  

And then I remembered, I’m a poet! I remembered how vital poetry writing was for my own journey and how it gave me a way to express the essential parts of my human experience.

So I scrapped my 50 pages and started over, interweaving poems with the prose I wrote.

Globally, many people live in a post-religious world. In the U.S.A., the Pew Research Center identified a large segment of the American population as “Nones.” When asked about their religious affiliation, they answered, “None.” Many of those people indicated that they were nonetheless deeply interested in spirituality.

But how do we find a way to speak of our spirituality without falling prey to the dogma and dysfunctional structure that can sometimes come with religion?

Writing my book, I was looking for a way to share the depth of the spiritual journey without creating more dogma or dysfunctionality. I was looking for a way to name that depth in words. And I sought to follow the spiritual path with the reader, dropping breadcrumbs that lead the way home. I knew I couldn’t do that just by sharing intellectual ideas.

Poetry to the rescue!

Good poetry accesses the language of the heart. It opens the heart to share what it already knows, even though we often can’t consciously find that knowledge. It’s like losing an important document somewhere within the four walls of your own home.

That brings me to We Will Open, the poem I’ve quoted in this article. I know that as our heart opens, we find the treasure it holds, and we discover the magical realms it can access.  

When we open our hearts, we are held in a love that transcends this human experience—in “heaven’s love.” And I know that the inmost Being—the Wonderful One Within every human being—is sacred. I can testify from my own experience that opening to that reality is precious beyond words.

So I invite you to say this with me in the words of my poem, We Will Open. Let’s discover what we already know when we do.

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.