Hope

The year was 1968.

The Vietnam War was raging. The US was reeling from recent tragedies—J F Kennedy was killed, we saw Lee Harvey Oswald shot in real time on television, Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated while making a run for the white house, the Apollo 1 module burned in a simulated test, killing three astronauts.

The country was in shock and grief.

Yet three men climbed aboard a flaming rocket and aimed for the moon—an orbit, to prepare for the future landing on the moon. They filmed the famous earth-rise, that incredible blue marble that is us, rising over the moon’s horizon.

We were in awe and it gave this country hope.

And what happened?

Kennedy’s dream materialized. “We will put a man on the moon by the end of the decade and bring him home safely.”

What an affirmation!

In 1969 they did it.

“Have a dream that’s bigger than you can accomplish in your lifetime,” Michael Beckwith told us that Sunday in L.A. Kennedy didn’t live to see the moon landing. Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t see his dream of the day his four little children would one day live in a nation where they would not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

We won’t get it all done, but we will go for it anyway.

Somebody will get it done.

Hope is alive and well and comes riding in on white horses. I saw a woman do it at Cavalia in Dallas Texas. One diminutive woman came streaking into the arena with a whoop that brought everybody out of their seats. She was standing one foot on one horse one on another as the two horses careened down a slope, over a small embankment, and galloped full-out in front of a gaping audience. She stood, knees flexed, taking up the rise and fall of each horse, one rein in each hand. I can feel it now, the weightless feeling, rather like jumping on a trampoline, of a horse racing, half of the time with all four feet off the ground at the same time—rather like a rocket isn’t it?

P.S. Talk about standing in awe, you will if you watch FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON a 12 part HBO series produced and narrated by Tom Hanks. Ron Howard was another producer, their objective was to show people what they had never seen before—behind the scenes of the NASA Apollo Mission. This ought to be required viewing for every red-blooded person. Rent it or buy it, you won’t be sorry.

From home: If you ask BABY D—Oh yes, little Boy D, now 23 months—what he is grateful for he says, “My life.”

A New Year

“Don’t touch it!” Baby D’s battle cry when he bumps his head or skins a knee. Oh yes, and his mantra? “Soy Sauce, soy sauce!--In a wasabi bowl.”
This is a far cry from the little baby we had a year ago.

A new year. What lies ahead?

I have felt inspired to write something, but what? I’m trying to wrap my mind around what has been going into it lately. Books, and watching The Secret again—you know how it made such a flourish, and then it was gone. A flash. We went to LA on Sunday and heard Michael Beckwith—one of the spiritual leaders featured in The Secret. “We are complete,” he said, “We are only uncovering our completeness. And we will never get it done--if we do our vision was too small."

We read, we listen, we become inspired and then it melts with the first flash of morning. We talk ourselves out of the enthusiasm we once felt, or else we are just plain lazy and don’t pay attention. We don’t believe we can be do or have whatever we want. “It’s not working,” we say.

And what is “Working?’ What is The Secret of the ages? People have hid knowledge regarding how life works, people have suppressed it, kept it hidden, told the secret to only a select few, kept it in secret societies. Do you think all that effort was for naught? That it was the absurd dribbling of wishful thinking? Or do you think there is something there to uplift the hearts of humankind, to inspire, to charge into greatness, and yes to tell them how it works?

Mindless dribble, is that what this is? I read one blogger who called blogging just that, or could this be a forum in which we can connect, in which we share our fears, beliefs, and desires?

If we go back to the spiritual underpinnings of our civilization, of America, of ancient cultures we see a golden thread shining through—the secret, that it lies within us. That God is within. That we need to understand that built into us is a brain, a subconscious, a God-force that drives us steadily onward, and says “Yes,” to our requests.

Ask the greats, Plato, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Sir Isaac Newton, Leonardo Da Vinci, they knew the secret.


TIME IS A RIVER…AND BOOKS ARE BOATS. MANY VOLUMES START DOWN THAT STREAM, ONLY TO BE WRECKED AND LOST BEYOND RECALL IN ITS SANDS. ONLY A FEW, A VERY FEW, ENDURE THE TESTINGS OF TIME AND LIVE TO BLESS THE AGES FOLLOWING.--An ancient spiritual text