You can respond to love with love. D:7.10

I so wish I had been walking each morning of this lovely long fall. I walked today. It was just about 7:00, I suppose, that I went around the horn. It was almost light, but not quite, the sky sitting close, keeping her eye on the street. The street keeping an eye on the children. The sense of a benevolent eye, a friendly watcher of the neighborhood, the presence of a kind of care. Straight away, the man who smokes in his neat garage gave me a friendly wave. Around the corner, the house with the fire pit, lined up with bench, chair and toddler’s chair sat still and quiet. Then Charlie, Freddie, Ruby and Adelaide, out with their mom in front of a big truck that from a distance worried me that they were moving. Closer, the sense that their mom, who home schools, was holding a lesson there on the street as they looked into the vast holding space—who knows, perhaps also awaiting some bit of furniture to be unloaded, but at the same time getting a “life” lesson. Continuing on, the memory arising of my dad pulling up in the alley in his truck and treating us “neighborhood” kids to a ride on the lift.

Back in the cabin it is still so damn beautiful! It’s a beauty different from the early days of color and sun. The trees wave their bare arms in light that never seems to arrive. Perfect memory weather. Fall and remembrances of fall get mixed together. The mornings when Mom would shove graham crackers spread with peanut butter and wrapped in a paper towel into my hand so that I would have “something in my stomach” after having been too late getting ready for school to eat breakfast. The sluggish and rushing quality of the start of it all, the change of seasons within a chain of seasons, school years, times of life, now.

Then. Now.

An ode to reverie. To its melting of time. Farther back. Mom tying my kerchief or hood beneath my chin (how long it took me to gain that skill!) The way Dad hitched up his pants as he walked. The burning of fall leaves. The tarring and sanding of the road and the way it spit under the tires of my bike.

[M]emory allows relationship. Memory, or how you relate to past experiences, is what makes each individual unique. A family can share many similar experiences without relating to them in the same way. It is the way experience is related to, through memory, which shapes the different personalities, paths, and thus future experiences of each of you. T1:6.7

Even as I browse old memories as they arrive (don’t we only rarely go seeking them?) I’ve been making new memories with the conversations I’m having for the new Dialogue Series about to launch on the Center for A Course of Love website—“spoken” dialogues I’ll not only remember but get to share and to revisit. Although the idea initially arose from the thought of wanting to capture some memories of how A Course of Love began, I found so much more to cherish in the first of these that ACOL’s history became secondary to relishing and sharing the joy of dialogue.

Jesus first mentions dialogue in “A Treatise on the Art of Thought.”

Creation is but a dialogue to which you have not responded. The art of thought will free you to respond. T1:2.12

We hear of dialogue alongside the practice of informing and being informed in Day 15. “What does this mean? It means to join together with others who have the ability to maintain Christ-consciousness in your company. This creates the joining together of spacious Selves. It is a joining without boundaries. You become clear pools flowing into each other. You make your spirits known.”

In 15.13 Jesus says that if you don’ feel ready to enter dialogue, examine what you fear: “Is it really the stones [as of regret] within your pool, or is it the challenge of moving with the current that you know will be generated by the joining of spacious Selves? Do you fear your power even though you have been told it cannot be misused? Do you feel unworthy and seek to keep your unworthiness hidden? Do you still fear being known?”

And then in 15.14: “If so, enter the dialogue with the purpose of your final preparations in mind. Bring your fears into the light of oneness and see how the light dispels the darkness.”

I would call reverie a dialogue with one’s self and one’s memories, a softening of the edges of the past, a preparation for the future and for the free-flow of life, love and dialogue.

I have now completed six dialogues. Each one is so incredibly unique. So personal. So universal. They remind me, and perhaps will remind you, that when we speak Christ-self to Christ-self, we still look like ourselves, sound like ourselves, also are our Selves. Both/and. The beloved and the accomplished no matter what. No need to fear (not even sharing what we fear!). Being who we are is so beautiful!

Realize that this is a call to love all of yourself. You who once could love spirit or mind, mind or body—because of the dualistic nature associated with them—now can love all of your Self, all of God, all of creation. You can respond to love with love. D:7.10

Watch for the link to the new Center website and for the first two of these video dialogues to be shared this week. With luck the site will “be live” by Thanksgiving and I’ll skip my Sunday routine forward and post amidst the slicing of apples and baking of pie, brimming with thankfulness for all those who share who they are with me.