What if Presence wasn’t just a vibe, but divine tech we forgot how to use? Jesus and Rumi ran the same spiritual OS. Hustle culture replaced it with burnout. Time to reinstall the original code.
Boy, do i know when my energy leaks - but i can’t notice without letting go of the judgement. Yet.
I need to listen twice most of the time because i hate wearing my hearing aids so that’s encouraging.
I had a magic moment today just sitting in my car absorbing the beauty of the precious individual raindrops on the windshield. Took me back to the days when i had to do acid to notice beauty like that.
I read this years ago in a magazine article - whenever you talk to someone, one on one, give them a compliment. A sincere one. It is incredibly easy to find one thing without lying about it - “that lipstick looks good on you” “nice shirt” “hope you’re having a good day” “i love your smile”. “Thank you for being here” and look them in the eye when you say it. One of the biggest blessings of my life & i have never had a negative response. And I’m isolated a lot so I converse with everyone I interact with.
And it took me getting really sick & disabled long term - with progress but no return to health promise in sight to STOP. I wallowed in the wreckage of my thoughts & finally managed to breathe anyway. Now I lie down, melt into it & am amazed at how that presence is saving my life. Can’t tell you specifically how or on what level but feeling the difference is enuf.
Thanx for pointing out what that doorway is that I’ve been ignoring.
Beth Ann, this is beautiful. The raindrops, the acid flashback, the presence that doesn’t explain but transforms—you captured it. Noticing is the doorway, and you walked through with your eyes open. Grateful you shared this.
Your writing is more than amazing — you’re channeling Jesus’ transmission of Presence. It feels as though Presence touched my third eye & flooded me in a gentle tsunami. Thank you, Good Teacher, it’s by your example that you are teaching others to “share Presence like bread.” 🌅
Karen, thank you. That line, “share Presence like bread,” landed in the silence after prayer one morning and just stayed. If it touched something deep in you, then maybe it was meant for both of us. Not mine. Just passing it on warm. May the next piece land right where it’s needed.
Thank you dear vmb. Today some dust has slowed the cooling fan, and my hardware rebooted an old operating system called not-enough. It’s slow and runs a program that just won’t stop spinning, but slowly and with a grating sound.
I rebooted and reminded, remembered this wakeful presence, hidden in the code. Your words are tattoos on presence and they shake in my inner ear, they rasp at the doors of my heart.
I loved this piece except for "You’re not a slightly smarter bear."
This is not a view of nature that Indigenous people share. They view other creatures as part of the whole that they themselves are part of. I think we created a lot of problems when we tried to set ourselves as apart from nature and "special."
Ah, wise Roo of the Great Basin, your pawprint has been noted.
You’re right to raise this. The line “You’re not a slightly smarter bear” was a cheeky jab at reductive materialism—those folks who think the pinnacle of consciousness is just opposable thumbs and tool use. But I hear you. In tossing a stone at scientism, I may have ricocheted one off Indigenous wisdom, and that’s not a wound I’m interested in inflicting.
Indigenous traditions rightly honor the bear not as a step below, but as kin. As teacher. As medicine. I’ve sat in ceremonies where the bear didn’t just symbolize strength—she was the grandmother of the circle. In many ways, the human becomes sacred again only when they remember they’re not above the bear, but of the same breath.
So thank you. You’ve helped refine the mirror.
Presence doesn’t make us special apart from nature. It reminds us we were never separate to begin with.
I love that the indigenous people have no word for alien because they know there’s nothing that’s here that doesn’t belong here. Everything is honored.
I always see his humor and love it. But in this case he was separating us from animals by saying we were not squirrels or bears. I think this is a fundamental flaw in thinking about our place in the universe. We are not separate and that way of thinking has led us to be killing our only physical home.
GreatBasinRoo, you’re absolutely right to name this as a foundational error—a split in perception that has grown into a gash across the planet. The idea that we are separate from animals, or somehow “above” nature, is the original eviction from Eden. Not by God—but by the ego.
When I said “you’re not a slightly smarter bear,” it was meant to skewer the modern myth that consciousness is just a fluke of evolution. But if that jab unintentionally reinforced human exceptionalism, then I stepped in my own koan.
Truth is, we’re not less than animals, not more than, but of the same dreaming. We emerged from the same breath, the same dirt, the same cosmic fire. When we forget this, we bulldoze forests and call it “progress.” When we remember, we move like the deer—alert, responsive, interwoven.
So thank you for pulling the thread. You didn’t critique the joke; you brought it back into right relation.
I’ll revise the teaching accordingly. Not to appease, but to realign.
Because Presence isn’t a VIP room for humans—it’s the pulse of the whole.
He was not separating us from animals. He did not say we are not squirrels or bears. He said something like “We are not just slightly smarter bears” That’s high humor and I believe that’s the way it was meant. But you can ask VMB yourself.
Think I will enjoy the sound of rain against the roof and let presence remove the "does not play well with others" sticker I woke up with today, come off.
Uni-Verse makes me grin often – every day. Sometimes I’m a grinning fool all day long. As Robert Frost wrote: “O, paladins, the lesson for today”… is: Noticing.
This is how She does it. Multiple times a day she sends people who’re noticing the shivery-shimmeryness of this Life Thing, and talking/writing/telling about it.
Okay! I grin theatrically after a few of these moments… Okay, I get it.
After a few of these today the energy was so strong I had to put my head down and take a nap, and I’m not much of a napper.
“At first it takes almost being hit by a truck to wake us up, but after a while, all it takes is the wind blowing the curtain.”
Boy, do i know when my energy leaks - but i can’t notice without letting go of the judgement. Yet.
I need to listen twice most of the time because i hate wearing my hearing aids so that’s encouraging.
I had a magic moment today just sitting in my car absorbing the beauty of the precious individual raindrops on the windshield. Took me back to the days when i had to do acid to notice beauty like that.
I read this years ago in a magazine article - whenever you talk to someone, one on one, give them a compliment. A sincere one. It is incredibly easy to find one thing without lying about it - “that lipstick looks good on you” “nice shirt” “hope you’re having a good day” “i love your smile”. “Thank you for being here” and look them in the eye when you say it. One of the biggest blessings of my life & i have never had a negative response. And I’m isolated a lot so I converse with everyone I interact with.
And it took me getting really sick & disabled long term - with progress but no return to health promise in sight to STOP. I wallowed in the wreckage of my thoughts & finally managed to breathe anyway. Now I lie down, melt into it & am amazed at how that presence is saving my life. Can’t tell you specifically how or on what level but feeling the difference is enuf.
Thanx for pointing out what that doorway is that I’ve been ignoring.
Beth Ann, this is beautiful. The raindrops, the acid flashback, the presence that doesn’t explain but transforms—you captured it. Noticing is the doorway, and you walked through with your eyes open. Grateful you shared this.
Your writing is more than amazing — you’re channeling Jesus’ transmission of Presence. It feels as though Presence touched my third eye & flooded me in a gentle tsunami. Thank you, Good Teacher, it’s by your example that you are teaching others to “share Presence like bread.” 🌅
Karen, thank you. That line, “share Presence like bread,” landed in the silence after prayer one morning and just stayed. If it touched something deep in you, then maybe it was meant for both of us. Not mine. Just passing it on warm. May the next piece land right where it’s needed.
Namaste 🙏
Beautiful! And such a great reminder to slow down and notice.
Noticing how speaking and writing from presence creates transmission, which I received reading this.
Yes, the true mirror...
Thank you dear vmb. Today some dust has slowed the cooling fan, and my hardware rebooted an old operating system called not-enough. It’s slow and runs a program that just won’t stop spinning, but slowly and with a grating sound.
I rebooted and reminded, remembered this wakeful presence, hidden in the code. Your words are tattoos on presence and they shake in my inner ear, they rasp at the doors of my heart.
Thank you dear one. Thank you
Namaste
Love
❤️❤️
So beautiful and enlightening. 🙏 Thank you!
I loved this piece except for "You’re not a slightly smarter bear."
This is not a view of nature that Indigenous people share. They view other creatures as part of the whole that they themselves are part of. I think we created a lot of problems when we tried to set ourselves as apart from nature and "special."
Ah, wise Roo of the Great Basin, your pawprint has been noted.
You’re right to raise this. The line “You’re not a slightly smarter bear” was a cheeky jab at reductive materialism—those folks who think the pinnacle of consciousness is just opposable thumbs and tool use. But I hear you. In tossing a stone at scientism, I may have ricocheted one off Indigenous wisdom, and that’s not a wound I’m interested in inflicting.
Indigenous traditions rightly honor the bear not as a step below, but as kin. As teacher. As medicine. I’ve sat in ceremonies where the bear didn’t just symbolize strength—she was the grandmother of the circle. In many ways, the human becomes sacred again only when they remember they’re not above the bear, but of the same breath.
So thank you. You’ve helped refine the mirror.
Presence doesn’t make us special apart from nature. It reminds us we were never separate to begin with.
And bears, as well as the woods they live in teach us what we are.
I love that the indigenous people have no word for alien because they know there’s nothing that’s here that doesn’t belong here. Everything is honored.
You didn’t see the humor?
I always see his humor and love it. But in this case he was separating us from animals by saying we were not squirrels or bears. I think this is a fundamental flaw in thinking about our place in the universe. We are not separate and that way of thinking has led us to be killing our only physical home.
GreatBasinRoo, you’re absolutely right to name this as a foundational error—a split in perception that has grown into a gash across the planet. The idea that we are separate from animals, or somehow “above” nature, is the original eviction from Eden. Not by God—but by the ego.
When I said “you’re not a slightly smarter bear,” it was meant to skewer the modern myth that consciousness is just a fluke of evolution. But if that jab unintentionally reinforced human exceptionalism, then I stepped in my own koan.
Truth is, we’re not less than animals, not more than, but of the same dreaming. We emerged from the same breath, the same dirt, the same cosmic fire. When we forget this, we bulldoze forests and call it “progress.” When we remember, we move like the deer—alert, responsive, interwoven.
So thank you for pulling the thread. You didn’t critique the joke; you brought it back into right relation.
I’ll revise the teaching accordingly. Not to appease, but to realign.
Because Presence isn’t a VIP room for humans—it’s the pulse of the whole.
Out of total sight, vmb.
When words are used to describe what has nothing to do with words, this confusion of planes sometimes happens.
He was not separating us from animals. He did not say we are not squirrels or bears. He said something like “We are not just slightly smarter bears” That’s high humor and I believe that’s the way it was meant. But you can ask VMB yourself.
Thanks for the reminder, Alek
Think I will enjoy the sound of rain against the roof and let presence remove the "does not play well with others" sticker I woke up with today, come off.
So it was you! I found that sticker & put it on after you let presence take it off. Thanx for the guidance & knowledge xo
Very inventive, and also deep and meaningful. Thanks! You launched a bunch of my subroutines.
Uni-Verse makes me grin often – every day. Sometimes I’m a grinning fool all day long. As Robert Frost wrote: “O, paladins, the lesson for today”… is: Noticing.
This is how She does it. Multiple times a day she sends people who’re noticing the shivery-shimmeryness of this Life Thing, and talking/writing/telling about it.
Okay! I grin theatrically after a few of these moments… Okay, I get it.
After a few of these today the energy was so strong I had to put my head down and take a nap, and I’m not much of a napper.
“At first it takes almost being hit by a truck to wake us up, but after a while, all it takes is the wind blowing the curtain.”
• Trungpa Rinpoche
Thank you, O, Monk. 🙏😉
Beautiful points about noticing Presence, VBM.
Your writing is..Fresh. Inspired. Edgy. I love it. Thank you!!!