This is not to say that you will find this Course or the end of learning to be easy. Yet it is your difficulty in giving up your attachment to learning through the application of thought and effort that creates the perception of this Course’s difficulty. Thus it is said to you to take this Course with as little attachment to your old means of learning as is possible for you. If you do not understand, accept that you do not understand and go on. Listen to the words as if they are spoken to you, for such they are. Listen as you would listen to a friend in conversation. Listen simply to hear what is being said. Listen simply to let the words enter you. A.5

I went for a walk around the horn today. I saw the lady at the end of the block whose first name I do not remember but whose last name I do (go figure). I know she is the mom in a blended family and now have learned that she has had a new baby, a 10 month old girl named Delores after her husband’s grandma. As we visited she talked of the hibernation of winter concealing our changes. It felt so true.

It felt true for me. The ways in which I’ve changed are unknown to me, even while I know I’ve changed. The spring, I do believe, is going to do the revealing of the change.

After turning the corner, I saw Charlie’s family out playing basketball. He’s the boy my grandson Henry’s age and made me think of him and how he needs his “young” family now, and not to be with me so much. This is happening as I move into a more active life out in the world. Me and him too. (Change #1)

I rounded another curve where the master gardener lives and realized in a month the garden will begin to bloom. It is early March and feels like we’ve bi-passed spring and are heading for summer. Summer blue skies, mid-fifties temperatures. It seems to me that something similar happened last year and that we all awaited the one last storm that always seems to come in March, just after the snow has melted and the promise of green is already in our eyes. It didn’t come. (Change #2, early gardens and global warming)

As my “life in the world” fast approaches I feel more strongly the effects of my life outside of the world, my quiet, my not so much “chosen” as innerly-directed and necessary life of solitude. A life lived between house and cabin and taking my mom to church for weeks on end. (Change #3)

It feels ridiculously boring to mention the events that herald this change for me, and to do so for weeks on end—maybe it has even been months. One day there will be an Events page on this website that goes beyond Vegas, but I doubt I’ll ever again feel as if it means as much as it does to mention them now. They may become “the usual,” if I can take it, if I can  feel like “me” as I do this stepping out, and that I can truly connect with the people I meet. The thing is . . . I do not know. I do not know what it will be like. Right now it is like a grand experiment, or in ACOL’s language, it’s a time of discovery, and a time of expressing myself newly. What the new will be, for me, feels as if it is about to be revealed.

What I do know is that there is a feeling of momentum building, as if this is A Course of Love’s moment. As if this Course herself is coming out into the world because it is time. It is time. That’s the way it feels. (Change #4)

As this happens I’ve been having the “end of learning” come to me a lot, and before that the “end of studying.” On this website, “study group” is not used. We call the groups ACOL Groups, and speak of the ACOL Community. Jesus calls the end of learning a change of enormous proportions. It is in “A Treatise on the New” that this ending is announced.

Two changes of enormous proportion are upon you. The first is the end of learning, the ramifications of which will only slowly occur to your mind and be surprising revelations there. The second is the beginning of sharing in unity, a change that your heart will gladly accept but that your mind, once again, will be continuously surprised to encounter. T4:12.5 (Change #5)

But the end of learning is mentioned first in the Prelude:

The ego is what you made. Christ is what God made. The ego is your extension of who you think you are. Christ is God’s extension of who He is. In order to end the need for learning, you must know who you are and what this means. Where the original Course in Miracles was a course in thought reversal and mind training, a course to point out the insanity of the identity crisis and dislodge the ego’s hold, this is a course to establish your identity and to end the reign of the ego. p.8 (emphasis mine)

The establishment of our true identity will be among the topics I will share next  weekend in St. Louis.  St. Louis  has turned out to be the inaugural event of the spring, and  the first public presentation I will do since the new combined volume came out. It’s been an amazingly productive few years, really hunkering down with ACOL’s publisher Glenn Hovemann, to do not only the editing and publishing but all those infrastructure sort of things that allow for a smooth run once a time brimming with possibility spills over.

I look forward to meeting all of those I will be meeting there, and beyond St. Louis in Vegas and California. Look for an Events page soon. Here you can read the info on Saturday’s event:

http://acimstlouis.org/sites/default/files/MariPerron2016Flyer.pdf