What a magnificent post, Jamie!  Going to join right in with you to see GOD FIRST!

This morning's quiet time brought an interesting realization around God First, and Be Willing.

I love to dance.  I always have. I haven't danced in more than a year, and it was probably much longer than that before.

So why don't I dance?

I immediately got an image of native tribes (to whatever they're native TO) dancing around a roaring fire.  Twenty, thirty, fifty, a hundred, all dancing, yes, maybe all to the left or all to the right, but doing their own thing.

Then I remembered the video that went out a year or so ago about some intrepid young man who started dancing on the open grass of a park, and one brave soul joined him, then a couple more, and soon the whole park was dancing, doing their own thing.

Then I remembered my step daughter saying to me, "I can't dance without a male partner!" and so she waited on the sidelines for one of her cousins to invite her to dance, so she could stop tapping her toe on the sidelines and take part fully in the dance.

WHO SAID YOU HAVE TO HAVE A PARTNER TO DANCE?????

God is my partner, and my inspiration and my movement and my impulsion.

I am NEVER dancing alone, because we are all partners in the Spiritual World, the Real World.

They say that to be a good Hopi is to have a quiet heart and take part in all the dances.

I just became a Hopi, so to speak.  I just realized I've always been Real, not real,

and I'm Willing!

I read a page or two in The Power of Silence by Carlos Castaneda yesterday.  I was so struck by it that I thought I would share:

"And right there I had, for the first time in my life, a clear knowledge of a dualism in me.  Two obviously separate parts were within my being.  One was extremely old, at ease, indifferent.  It was heavy, dark, and connected to everything else.  It was the part of me that did not care, because it was equal to anything.  It enjoyed things with no expectation. The other part was light, new, fluffy, agitated.  It was nervous, fast.  It cared about itself because it was insecure and did not enjoy anything, simply because it lacked the capacity to connect itself to anything.  It was alone, on the surface, vulnerable.  That was the part with which I looked at the world.

"I deliberately looked around with that part.  Everywhere I looked I saw extensive farmlands.  And that insecure, fluffy, and caring part of me got caught between being proud of the industriousness of man and being sad at the sight of the magnificent old Sonoran desert turned into an orderly scene of furrows and domesticated plants.

"The old, dark, heavy part of me did not care.  And the two parts entered into a debate.  The fluffy part wanted the heavy part to care, and the heavy part wanted the other one to stop fretting, and to enjoy."

I was beyond this part in the book, but when I picked it up to continue from my bookmark, the page fell open to this and I read.  So not only was I intrigued with the passage and no memory of having read it before, but with the apparently coincidental act that opened to that particular page when I most needed to read it.

To me, the fluffy side is our personality, our ego, which thinks it has to do something, or that it can actually make a difference in the world.  Which it can, in our small perception of the world.  The older, dark side represents Divine Mind, and the Joy and Love in every act, every thought, every image.

I realized that in the Larger View, nothing I do or say makes a difference to that Joy and Love.  It is there, always, whether I see it or not.  And all the pain and stress and responsibility of what I do or don't do, past or future, fell away and I could Witness, rather than judge.