Today is my Birthday…

The last week, month, year have been so filled with emotion and motion…it’s hard to even encapsulate it all.
Today I’m 54, with an opportunity to look back over my life and ask myself what I’ve done.  I woke up this morning, and performed my daily meditation.  Found my heartbeat.  Visualized myself in a mirror.  Saw the light flowing within me.  Concentrated it together into a child.  Me, as an infant.  The child was happy.  I divided the  child to create its female twin.  Aged them both ten years.  Felt good.  Took them to twenty years old.  What fine young people!  Thirty years.  Strong and happy.  Forty years.  Beginning to mature.  Fifty years. Finally beginning to understand themselves.  Sixty years.  Proud of the healthy  family they’ve created, of their friends and students.  Seventy years.  Free of social programming, more connected to the light than the earth.  After that?  Not for my mind to know.  The light was good.  I collected it back into my heart, and awakened.  Forty minutes had passed.
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What is the key to the trouble in the world?  Genuine Self-love.  Not love of ego, but of the true self.  The energy from which we all sprang.  The resolution of apparent duality.  No, this doesn’t mean weakness, or allowing people to walk on us.  Anyone who knows me knows that I never let ANYONE get in my face.  No one offers me violence of any kind, ever, no matter where I go in the world.  It ain’t that kind of party, folks.  But it’s taken me many years to find that place.  I had to walk through the garden of pain and fear to find that light.  It is there.

From that place of acceptance, there is no war between male and female. I have a beautiful, loving relationship with the finest woman a man could ever want.  There is no war between black and white.  Most of my friends, students, readers, editors, and agents are white.  My family is black.  My martial arts, Asian.  There is no war between Christian and Moslem.  One of my very dearest friends is a Sufi.  Because, when I am balanced, there  is no war within myself.  My rule?  I always try to  treat anyone at least 10% better than they treat me.  I have enough love to share.  Life is good, even when it is stressful.

I love you all, and thank you for being in my life.