Arcade Fire – I Love Her Shadow
November 29, 2025
Author: Joel
Free God
November 29, 2025
It’s not that I don’t believe in God. It’s that I don’t believe in your God – the one you have made in your image and that seeks to protect and preserve only the people you can tolerate, excluding the people who are not like you and do not believe like you do. God is not who you think God is. And God is not who your religion says God is. If that were so, then God would be small and containable inside your finite brain. God is not who I think God is, either. God is bigger than that.
We ...
Reaching Out
November 22, 2025
Anytime you reach a paradox, or what appears to be a dead end or an impasse, it is time to reach out for something new. This is a creative process because what you are reaching out for has not been revealed or discovered yet. It is reaching into new space and adding complexity, like cell mitosis. Complexity is what will help us now. There is too much “it has to be this way or that way,” in our discourse, too much blunt application of principles.
If you are going to build something beautiful, ...
When In Pain
September 6, 2025
When I am in pain, just let me be
I don’t need your pity or outrage or sympathy
I only need Presence
Just give me your eyes
You lived out your story, now this one’s for me
Let me be wrenched
Let me feel it myself
Let me pass through it fully
Or, rather, let it pass through me
I earned it wholeheartedly, now let it consume me
Too many people have tried to explain it
They give it a name
They give antecedents
But pain has been pure since the beginning
It’s the thing that melts wings and it’s ...
Liberation
September 1, 2025
The point of religious practice or a belief system is to set you free. If it is not doing that, it has become a hindrance to you that you should examine and maybe abandon. Remember, whatever your practice – Yoga, prayer, being part of a church, or reading sacred Scripture – was there originally to lead you to God and to liberation. Any time your practice becomes an end in itself, it fails to fully achieve its purpose, which is to set you free, even from itself. If that happens, you should ...
Mimicking Birds – Bloodlines
July 28, 2025
I will protect your shadow even though when it’s dark it slips
I’ll clean your window, make you look out and see scenery
I am a stranger, shouldn’t talk to myself in times of rearrangement or even in good mental health
And on the other side soon they’ll side with their family who hides from all the evil within their own bloodline
But you fly a different kite hovering over their heads so high
I will tie your lasso, can’t you make a knot slip?
I’ll ask your ghost if ...
Big Red Machine – Forest Green
July 27, 2025
I was gonna give you all of my timeMore timeMore timeI was gonna go and get you more timeMore timeMore timeI was gonna give you more and more timeI ain’t lyingI was gonna give you loads of more timeMy timeIt’s my time ...
Deconstructing: Your Beliefs Need to Evolve
April 27, 2025
Don’t be afraid to let your faith and beliefs evolve. Everything in us is geared toward figuring out all the “right” things to believe and then defending them and promoting them as what everyone else needs to believe, like they’re perfect in their current form and don’t need any revision or reformation. But the real truth is being uncovered, it is evolving and it is conversation. It’s not that the truth is changing necessarily; it’s that it is still emerging. You’ve just ...