222 Foundation – Page 2

The BIG reset

April 6, 2020 566 Comments

“If you’re thinking, ‘but my life is upside down,’ don’t worry. How do you know down is not better than up?—Shams of Tabriz

taz-sunflower2 — This is the beautiful light that inspired the 222 Foundation. Taz Grout! 222 Forever!

We used to have lions and tigers and bears (Oh my!) to frighten us on our journey through life. Now we’ve got a little device no bigger than a deck of cards. As we navigate this new time in our planet’s history, it’s vital that we don’t debilitate our nervous system, that we don’t let thoughts of fear pitch a tent in our minds.

By all means, check in on the latest health and safety recommendations, but right now, while things are going down on the planet, it’s more important than ever to practice spiritual principles.

A Course in Miracles asks me to focus on this: I am complete and healed and whole. I am united with my brothers and sisters, secure in light and joy and peace.

In this week’s lessons, I am asked to remember these Truths for five minutes every hour. Now that sounds like a huge commitment (and in the interest of complete transparency, I’ve never once, in all my years of practicing the Course, remembered every waking hour), but making the intention to put spiritual principles above my addiction to my phone helps me retrain my mind. It makes it more likely that when some fear tries to flag me down, my automatic response is not panic, but a proclamation of the truth the Course is teaching me: That I am safe, that I am in perfect harmony with all there is and all there ever will be. Today’s lesson goes so far as urging me to do my part in bringing happiness to all the world.

While on the subject of happiness, I must tell you I have had SO. MUCH. FUN watching all the Stay-at-Home dances that have been posted throughout webland. So far Taz’s 222 Foundation, thanks to the first 22 dancers, has given money to orphans in Ghana, No Kid Hungry, Trans Lifeline, Reece’s Rainbow, an Emergency Rescue in upstate New York, a House of Hope, Warrior Dogs and a bunch of other amazing organizations. As Mr. Rogers advised us, Look for the Helpers!

Thanks one and all for playing along. It is my belief that our greatest longing is to be of service, to make the world a better place. And why not have fun while doing it!

So I’ll end today’s post with a quick question. How are you spending your mental time? Are you dodging lions and tigers and bears or are you stepping up your spiritual game?

Okay, one more question. I have considered moving these posts to my FB page. They automatically post there anyway, but I’d love to hear in the comments section below if you enjoy getting them as an email in your inbox (like this) or if you’d rather just find them on my FB page when you’re so inclined.

Love you guys! Stay safe! Stay happy! Stay kind!

Pam Grout is the author of 20 books including E-Squared, E-Cubed, Thank & Grow Rich and her latest book, The Course in Miracles Experiment: A Starter Kit for Rewiring Your Mind (And Therefore Your World).

Uplifting the Planet, One Dance at a Time

April 2, 2020 75 Comments

“Nobody cares if you can’t dance well. Just get up and dance–Martha Graham

Two days ago, I woke up discouraged and lethargic. The crazy uncle in my head was concocting a major soap opera. Act I: Woe is Me, starring Pam Grout. Act II: We’re all going to die.

And then, during the commercial break, I remembered: “Oh yea, you’re a Course in Miracles student. This is the time to ask for a miracle. This is when you ask J.C. and the Holy S to replace the grievance in your head with true perception. I uttered a hesitant, mousy “Help!”

I turned to my phone (not normally recommended for escaping soap operas) and there, awaiting me on Twitter, was Jack Black dancing in his skivvies, cowboy boots and cowboy hat. He called his masterpiece a “Stay-at-Home” dance. It was the exact miracle I needed.

I immediately shared on Facebook, proclaiming his gift to the world a more potent morning pick-me-up than my A.A. 2.0 program.

So thank you, Holy S! Thank you, true perception! And especially thank you, Jack Black, for reminding me that one of the best ways to serve the planet is to get on a higher energetic frequency. Especially right now. Those of us who know about the power of consciousness, who know it’s our energetic vibration that creates the framework for our lives owe it to the world to radiate glee, joy and well, goofiness.

In recognition of this truth, the directors of the 222 Foundation (Taz and me) convened and decided to offer a new challenge for changing the current consciousness of the planet. To reiterate our mission, we believe all people long to be generous and create beautiful things, we believe all humans are interconnected (even when they’re home alone) and we believe tiny actions have great significance.

Right now, for example, I’m enjoying the notes and pictures from the Random Acts of Money project we funded in Snohomish, Washington. The inimitable Kimmy Rhoads, who pitched the project, is turning money into art, adding encouraging notes and changing people’s lives.

Speaking of changing lives, the Taz Grout 222 Foundation is offering $222 to the charity of choice to the first 22 daring dancers who are willing to post a video of their own Stay-at-Home Dance. Maybe you want us to reward your local food bank? Your free health center? Your community art center?

Post your dance here or on FB, Twitter or Instagram. Tag the @TazGrout222Foundation. Just make sure to send a link in the comments below. Weird costumes are encouraged.

For those who are thinking, you want me to do what?$%!!!!, I offer this video interpretation of my own interpretation of Jack Black’s now viral dance. I look forward to seeing your creations!!!

222 Forever: Celebrating Taz with 3 New Projects

February 22, 2020 26 Comments

“Let us not look for you only in memory. You would want us to find you in presence, beside us when beauty brightens, when kindness glows and music echoes eternal tones.”– John O’Donohue

Yes, my friends, it’s here. The auspicious date for announcing the 2020 recipients of Taz Grout’s 222 Foundation. Every year, to honor my radiant, brilliant daughter, Tasman McKay Grout, the 222 Foundation gives a grant to an imaginative project with the chutzpah to radically change the consciousness of the planet.

I’m a sharp P on the Myers-Briggs scale which indicates I tend toward being flexible, spontaneous and open-minded. Good qualities, right?

Except when you need to narrow down options, to make decisions. So receiving 100 applications for this year’s grant was well, way outside my comfort zone. I wanted to fund them all.

Thanks to some assistance from my “board” (that is to say a coffee consultation with my friend, Never-Say-No-to-Fun Rhonda), I finally picked these three:

1. A Taz Grout forest of 2222 trees in southern India. The tree planting idea started when someone nominated climate activist Greta Thunberg. I love that she’s young, brutally honest and 100 percent committed.

Plus what could be more imperative right now than changing our climate story? Particularly, the story that humankind is separate from the natural world, that material possessions are more important than our planet’s air, water, soil and trees. This home of ours is alive, sentient and we must do everything we can to exit the feedback loops that tell us we are lord and master.

Greta made this wonderful video detailing a natural climate solution. This magical tool sucks carbon out of the air, costs very little and has the ability to repair our natural environment.

The Taz Grout 222 Foundation will plant 2222 trees this year through Project GreenHands, a grassroots ecological initiative established by the Isha Foundation. I chose GreenHands because it was started by the illustrious Sadhguru (check him out if you haven’t already) and because Taz’s forest will be in India near some of her ashes and last year’s 222 project.

2. A Taz Grout school library in the Annapurna region of Nepal. Taz was an avid reader, maybe because I started reading to her when she was still in the womb. She kept lists of all the books she read each year. In college, she worked at the library. So supporting literacy for girls in rural and impoverished Nepal is the perfect fit for the 222 Foundation.

I fell in love with Hands in Nepal from the moment I opened the email from director, Jan Sprague. HANDS (it stands for Humanitarian Acts in Nepal Developing Schools) does amazing, heartfelt work. Everyone in the organization is a volunteer.

Jan, like me, lost a child and doesn’t belief in death. She knows our children will always be with us, here and now. It was her other son, Danny, who actually started this wonderful nonprofit that builds schools and libraries. My plans are to go to Nepal later this year for the installation of the plaque honoring Taz. I look forward to extending Taz’s family into the rural Himalayas. This video is the perfect primer of this outstanding organization.

3. Last project honors Taz’s commitment to relentless creativity. If you read my books, you know Taz and I had a thing about anonymously gifting small bills and leaving encouraging notes about the wildly abundant universe. Kimmy Rhoades, a kindergarten teacher in Snohomish, Washington, applied for the 222 grant with her visionary Random Acts of Money project.

This generous soul loves giving money away to strangers, proving that old school financial assumptions, traditions and habits block the more accurate truth that freedom is available for everyone. She drops bills of all denominations–on hiking trails, biking paths, in parking lots and stores. Often in the form of origami fish or paper airplanes, her money bombs blast, as she says, the ridiculous notion of scarcity right out of the water.

With the help of a 222 grant, her kindergartners’ natural creativity and the love notes she plans to attach, her secret mission will seed 222 messages of hope for all.

This video isn’t Kimmy’s project, but you get the idea:

What Brad Pitt taught me about forgiveness

January 24, 2020 25 Comments

“We made the world we’re living in and we have to make it over.”–James Baldwin

So my new book about A Course in Miracles debuts in exactly four days.

So while I’d love to tell you about my travels, my upcoming speaking gigs, the 100 applicants for this year’s 222 Foundation award, I figure I owe a mention to those of you who insisted I turn my ACIM musings into this book.

More than anything, the Course is about the F word. Everything, it tells us, boils down to forgiveness.

But like most important concepts, forgiveness is widely misunderstood.

So I’ll let this story about Brad Pitt illustrate what the Course means when it suggests making forgiveness our chief goal.

The hunky heartthrob’s first job in Hollywood was dancing in a chicken suit in front of El Pollo Loco restaurant.

If he’d have stayed in that job, he’d have never landed his role in Thelma & Louise, he’d have never stunned us all in A River Runs Through It. He’d have never…well, I’ll let you look up his IMDb for yourself.

Brad’s willingness to surrender his first “acting” job is a classic case of forgiveness. All forgiveness means is letting go of where you are now. Letting go of what you’re just sure is true.

When we hang on to our certainty, to our beliefs that this is just the “way the world is,” we literally imprison ourselves. Life, the Divine Buzz, can’t get in.

Forgiveness simply means recognizing that today is a completely new day and that anything–absolutely anything–is possible. Forgiveness breaks the pattern of false perceptions. It allows us to experience reality unblinded by yesterday, unblinded by past beliefs.

It means letting go of the chicken suit.

Relinquish your map of the universe

January 9, 2020 11 Comments

“Put all your knowledge and assumptions aside and start fresh.”–Jed McKenna 1 ab

Although my new book doesn’t start with the above epigraph, it could. It’s the perfect summary of what the Course in Miracles teaches. Start fresh. Let go of past beliefs. Release the ridiculous idea that just because something happened yesterday, it’s bound to happen again today.

We are literally blinded by our preconceptions, our damned fooled stubbornness that we know for certain that this is all we can expect from life, this is how this person’s gonna act.

Cognitive scientists tell us we develop perceptual shorthand that pre-processes everything we encounter. The upside is it keeps us from having to remember what size pants to buy. Or how to get to our favorite coffee shop.

The downside is it greatly limits what we’re able to see. Or rather what we don’t. We notice we’re looking at say, a dog or a sunrise or a chair and then we fill in the blanks with our stereotypes, our caricatures, the stuff we “already know” about dogs and sunrises and chairs.

We’re so used to seeing life in this way that we grow unwitting of its influence on our vision, on our way of being, on our regard for others. Particularly certain “others” who we coded a particular way in our cultural coloring book.

Doing the lessons in the Course opens our eyes, helps us see what Virginia Woolf called “a revelation of some order behind the daily wool of cotton life.”

Believe me, it’s extremely liberating when you start to realize life is SO MUCH MORE than you’ve believed it to be.

On another note, I’ve begun reviewing the applications for this year’s 222 Foundation grant. And wow! There are a lot of cool projects out there. Naturally, I want to fund every single one. I finally managed to narrow it down to 15 candidates, all of which I’ve contacted for more information.

One of the applicants sent this beautiful quote from Erich Fromm that seems like the perfect period for ending this post. Take it away, Erich Fromm.

“Man does not suffer so much from poverty today as he suffers from the fact that he has become a cog in a large machine, an automaton, that his life has become empty and lost its meaning.

“Giving is the highest expression of potency. In the very act of giving, I experience my strength, my wealth, my power. This experience of heightened vitality and potency fills me with joy. I experience myself as overflowing, spending, alive, hence as joyous. Giving is more joyous than receiving, not because it is a deprivation, but because in the act of giving lies the expression of my aliveness.

“What does one person give to another? He gives of himself, of the most precious he has, he gives of his life. This does not necessarily mean that he sacrifices his life for the other – but that he gives him of that which is alive in him; he gives him of his joy, of his interest, of his understanding, of his knowledge, of his humor, of his sadness — of all expressions and manifestations of that which is alive in him. In thus giving of his life, he enriches the other person, he enhances the other’s sense of aliveness by enhancing his own sense of aliveness. He does not give in order to receive; giving is in itself exquisite joy. But in giving he cannot help bringing something to life in the other person, and this which is brought to life reflects back to him.”

Magic is afoot!

December 27, 2019 21 Comments

“Through it all, I keep coming back to love as the answer, the golden repair that lasts.”–Sue Cochrane

You know those bobble head dogs that people put in their back car window?

That’s what it’s like for me here at the Namaste community in Ajijic, Mexico. I keep hearing things that resonate so deeply and I can’t help but nod and nod. And smile. And pump my fists.

Every morning, we gather together for satsang and it’s just so beautiful the things that are shared. Yesterday, James Twyman, who started this community, sang a song that he wrote just that morning, 30 minutes before group. This is nothing unusual. Because he’s so on fire with Spirit’s call, music flows through him. He seems to have a new song every morning.

Yesterday’s song, however, came straight from Taz. Several community members came up and said they felt her presence.

Here are some of the lyrics:

“You may think I’m leaving, but where would I go? I’m right here inside. Your heart might be grieving but there’s one thing you should know. What you feel inside is yours for all time. It will never fade. It will never fade away. For your heart is now mine. Don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid. I am with you. Always.”

“I’ll be there when you call. There through it all. Your heart is safe with me.
“Just choose to believe. That love always finds a way. It finds a way. When your heart is open wide.”

“Watch for me. In the signs. Dream is now ending. It fades before your eyes. There’s no need for defending. You never really die. All you have to do is feel. My hand upon your own. Always there. Always there.”

If that wasn’t enough, several of us went out to a French bakery for cappuccinos and quiche, and my coffee cup, the only one of six, had E=MC2 on it. Everybody else got different logos, sayings, pictures. We all laughed at the clarity of the sign and I couldn’t help but exclaim ‘Thank you, Tazmosky!”–one of several nicknames I gave her over the years. In fact, Lisa Natoli, my new mighty companion, bought the cup straight from the restaurant and gifted it to me.

Lisa Natoli, if you haven’t already been introduced, is somebody you definitely need to know. She’s a powerful, incredible Course in Miracles teacher. I was so moved by her words that I literally walked up to her out of the blue and asked her to co-lead a week-long workshop/playshop at the Omega Institute from July 5-10. We’re calling it “All heaven will break loose.” Look for it in the upcoming catalog.

The other thing I’d like to announce is that my brother, James Twyman, is heading back to the States tomorrow. On January 4, he launches a radical, two-month tour of his “Brother Sun/Sister Moon” musical. Even better, he and cohort Bill Free are doing it just the way Saint Francis of Assisi did it back in the 12th century. They’re going penniless, on foot, trusting completely in God and the generosity of God’s children.

Here’s why I think it’ll change the world.

These two are all in, 100 percent. Like the original St. Francis, they’re completely on fire with love, with truth, with trust. The tour kicks off in Portland, Oregon, goes south to California and eventually will end with a two-week tour in New York off-Broadway.

They’ll be at Unity Village near me end of January, but, sadly, I’m giving a talk in Boston at that time. I hope to meet up with them in Phoenix in mid-January.

If you feel moved (and believe me, being with these two is such a gift), check out their schedule and offer to feed them, house them, help them get from place to place. They’re trusting in Divine Providence, but, as Paul and John said, it never hurts to accept “a little help from my friends.”

Being in their presence is an experience I have so treasured. And I know you will, too.

I’ll end with the ACIM quote Lisa shared this morning. “If you knew who walked with you, fear would be impossible.”

Have the best weekend of your lives, my friends. I love you to the Planet Zorpia and back.

Feliz Navidad and Happy Adam Day

December 23, 2019 36 Comments

“Dancing and prancing in Jingle Bell Square.” –Bobby Helms

Happy Adam Day! Which, as I learned this morning at Satsang, is today since Adam came before Eve.

And if you’ll humor me, here’s another.

What is the favorite music of Santa’s elves? See answer below.

Just wanted to wish everyone a beautiful, mystical holiday and remind you that the deadline to apply for 2020’s 222 award is December 31.

Lastly, in honor of Ram Dass who is “Being Here Now” with my beloved Taz, here are a few of my favorite Ram Dass quotes:

“When you know how to listen, everybody is the guru.”

“The quieter you become, the more you hear.”

“Dying is absolutely safe.”

“We’re all just walking each other home.”

And a story that has given me much comfort as I’m invited into a different kind of relationship with my daughter:

After Timothy Leary died, Ram Dass, his colleague at Harvard in the 60’s, was asked how he felt about the loss of his long-time associate?

Ram Dass answered, “What loss? He’s still with me.”

May we all be together this holiday season. And know that loss is not possible in the Kingdom! Love you all!

Answer: Favorite elf music? Wrap.

Big, fat juicy thanks all around

November 5, 2019 121 Comments

“If you have the right music very loud on the radio, you get about 50 more miles from your tank.”—Hunter S. Thompson

It’s gratitude month, my friends. And as I do every morning with my possibility posse, I simply must share three amazingly awesome things that recently transpired.

Numero uno. Dr. Christiane Northrup who may just be the most generous person in the world recently made an Instagram video about my new book. My editor asked her to possibly provide an endorsement (after all, she’s a well-known and very famous expert) and wow! Not only did she provide kudos, but she made this fun little video, completely unprompted. She even said this was the first time she’d ever been able to embrace A Course in Miracles and she wanted my book (when it comes out in January) on her nightstand. As I said, WOW!

Second really cool thing is that Karen Drucker, the uber famous touring musician, speaker and retreat leader (and winner of the Tarzan calling competition when she was 13) has offered to throw a benefit concert for the 222 Foundation.

The Unity Temple on the Plaza has agreed to host this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity on May 3 in Kansas City. Karen, who will be playing and singing songs from her 15 albums, will present along with Greg Tamblyn, me, Emmy-nominated Stowe-Good and other like-minded friends. And, just so you know, we’ll be presenting the song Karen and I wrote called, “Something amazingly awesome is going to happen to me today.”

We are hereby affirming that this consciousness-bending show will alter the world forevah!!! The 222 Foundation is all about moving the needle and this benefit concert is guaranteed to rev up the engine. Make plans now to be there.

Third reason I can barely sit here in my chair is that an auction has just begun for the 52 paintings that were created by the German artist, Sigrid Drobner, for the 222 Foundation.

flower2 After Taz passed last October, this artist who I had never met promised to paint a special flower (and make a 3-D butterfly) every week of the year in Taz’s honor.

People sometimes say they’re going to do things, but this amazing artist actually followed through. She sent me one of these gorgeous paintings every single Saturday for 52 weeks. I can’t even begin to express how much her generosity has meant to me, how often it picked me up when I was wondering what in the heck I’m still doing on this planet.

And now she is auctioning them off with ALL PROCEEDS going to the 222 Foundation. Here’s what she says: “If anybody wants to make an offer, they can easily write an email to my address s.drobner@buntezeiten.de.” The auction, she says, will end December 1.

Again, my friends, never forget that support, love, generosity and abundance is the reality of the world. We simply have to let go of old school ideas that tell us otherwise.

I love and appreciate you all SO, SO much. I’d love if, in the comments section below, you share three of your own blessings. Let’s keep watering those seeds. course experiment

In collaboration with “the other side”

October 21, 2019 25 Comments

“End? No, the journey doesn’t end here. Death is just another path. The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass.”—J.R.R. Tolkien

I’m not big on labels, but if anyone asked, I’d normally sum up my book’s main topic as miracles or gratitude or maybe how to manifest.

When I wanted assistance from the other side, I’d usually appeal to the generic universe or the Holy Spirit or what I often call “The Dude.”

Last thing I expected is the journey I’m on now. A journey of collaboration with loved ones who have a much bigger perspective.

The universe is sneaky like that.

Last week, I mentioned a guest post from a dear friend who has been communing with the other side for a lot longer than me. We connected after Taz passed. Among other things, he has a podcast called “You Bet Your Afterlife.” He’s an incredible writer with great depths of wisdom and humor. Please enjoy this piece from Keith Boyer that I begged him to let me post here. It’s a letter to his dad:

“Happy” as a descriptor isn’t generally applied to death. Not in our spoiled and materialistic Western culture, anyway, blinded by the shine of gold as it is. But now, a half century later, thanks to you, I see the Light and I feel you, everywhere.

When you graduated Earth School I thought my world had ended. Your little buddy, your “George,” the last of the immediate breed, was lost, lost, lost with your last breath, never to be found.

Seeing the family gathered around the living room when I arrived home that evening, their faces told the tale I couldn’t bear to hear. It was no surprise, yet it was abruptly shocking. I was 12, you 42. Your life’s mission was, seemingly, prematurely accomplished and suddenly I felt older than time itself.

The boy was lost and no one could find him, not even himself. But guess what, Dad? I found a new me.

Not necessarily improved, at least not noticeably until many more miles had accumulated on my odometer, but new and different, with adventures that lay before me over roads that would take me places I’d never before dreamed. I wandered aimlessly down Bereavement Avenue to Terror Street, around Mystery Circle to Ecstasy Highway, and ultimately arrived via Grateful Valley back to the Land of Love, my birthplace, my homeland.

Your love was lost to me, or so I thought then, but guess what, Dad?

Others have taken up your love torch during my lifetime, often to my utter surprise and always to my total delight.

To no one’s surprise, Mom — my heroine, my earthly savior — instantly took up yours and carried it with hers, higher and brighter than any other, to my eternal gratitude. Bless her, she carries it still. You chose well, sir, the best of the best, and I thank you.

More unmistakable, unconditional love was provided just in the nick of time– humbly, graciously, and freely by grateful survivors of one of your diseases, the one I inherited.

I thank you for it all.

For the laughs and the joys and the games with the boys, for the kisses from the girls.

For the feasts, for the drink, for the hunger for more, for the unquenchable thirst for truth wherever it lay hidden.

For the gathering storms of self-inflicted trouble, for the questions with no answers, for the sickness, for the wounds, for the healing.

For the fears, for the tears, for the nights under bright lights, for the creeping, short-lived shadows.

For the grief, for the rage, for the simmering bitterness — the toxic cocktail I guzzled so long that ultimately, helplessly erupted from my guts like St. Helens herself and jolted loose my miracle out of nowhere. Shoot, thanks for the siblings, even. Wink/nudge.

You’ve known all along, and you came back. You knew time and space were powerless to stop you, so, by and through Conquering Love you reappeared to save me from myself.

You demonstrated with dizzying dazzle three decades and change after your departure that, after all, you’ve gone exactly nowhere. Then the best lessons began to rain down on me, drenching me with developing insights and visions that have ripped a lifetime of scales from my eyes and allowed me to see you and everything in existence as we all really are, as we’ve been since before time was birthed.

Light. Energy. Vibrational beings, all. Love taking form, just for awhile.

When I sang my impromptu concert for you tonight, you were there, front and center, thrilling with love and compassion for your new George. And guess what, Dad?

I felt it in every song. I’ve been feeling you again for many years now, at long last, after burying you inside myself for so, so long while I wandered, lost, in search of US.

But I don’t have to tell you that WE are now found, and new George is okay. Nay, blessed beyond measure. With friends in spirit I don’t always feel I deserved in life, yet here they are. Have you met Mark the mountain man, Carrie the tattooed hippie chic, my Colombian sparkplug Adriana? And Big Rod makes a mean pizza from scratch, so be sure to look him up. All gone-but-not-gone, too soon.

“Daddy” Dick and Joyce will blow your mind with their talents, their genius, both singly and combined. Your spirit hands will be red from applause, if they’re not already. Joyce is a new arrival, but things happen mighty fast in your dimensions, or so I’m told, and she’s quite the quick study.

Oh, Dad! What an amazing, getting-my-money’s-worth life it’s been so far. In its own time, the reunion to end all reunions will be ours. I so look forward to the concert you and I and our friends will perform, that royal bash I’ve been planning on the far side of the moon, and to the zippy trips we’ll take across the cosmos and back. Finally, to maybe give it a go in other lives with new stories to live.

Hope you’re well rested by then. We’ve got 50 Earth years and counting to make up for.

Thanks again, Dad. Love beyond words to you, good sir. You and I may be the only ones who appreciate our paradox, but the life you launched me into, with all its apparent imperfections, is precisely perfect, and I wouldn’t change a thing.

Happy anniversary, Dad. Mission accomplished, indeed.

An invitation to a whole new story

October 19, 2019 51 Comments

“It’s time for something that was beautiful to turn into something else that is beautiful.”—Elizabeth Gilbert

When Taz died last October, I wondered if, like spouses often do, I’d be gone within the year. But here it is, an entire 12 months later, and I’m still here on Planet Earth, breathing and creating yet another blog post, another book.

Since we last talked, I’ve even performed comedy karaoke, driven on a NASCAR race track and visited the bridge where George Bailey first met Clarence.

I also threw a party for what would have been Tasman’s 26th birthday.

Her friends came over, we ate cake and wrote messages on bright paper lanterns that we flew up into the heavens over the Kansas River. Four of her friends got tattoos that day in her honor. I’m gathering my nerve for my own tattoo of the 222 Foundation logo. For those new to this party, I started the 222 Foundation in Taz’s honor.

So far, I’ve received dozens of pitches for the 2020 award that will be given out February 22, 2020. The call for pitches is open until December 31. If you or anyone you know has a big idea to move the world away from its old school money, money, money orientation, please send it my way.

The mission of the 222 Foundation is to change the rules of the game. We believe our culture’s near-sighted focus on financial wealth breeds a sense of scarcity and fails to amplify the full range of human experience. It causes us to commoditize things we used to generously give for free. It causes us to forget that our deepest longing is to be generous, to connect, to love each other.

Taz certainly knew that truth. azul

Among her many legacies, is this relationship with my “Little” (from Big Brothers/Big Sisters) and her sister. The three of us made Halloween cookies on Wednesday. Taz, of course, set the two of us up nearly 18 months ago.

Taz, as I’ve written before, was pure love. Her heart was wide open to everyone. I never once heard her judge another person or gossip or utter a negative word. If you were in Taz’s vicinity, you were accepted, you were loved and you felt this joy that emanated from her very being. Every time I saw her, I literally had to catch my breath. She was that beautiful–inside and out.

I’ve been practicing the Course in Miracles for 30 years and still, I aspire to be as open-hearted and kind and full of grace as my daughter.

The Course is about changing perceptions. Instead of identifying with the ego, which is an illusory construct for dealing with the temporary world, it teaches us to embrace our immortal self, which sounds all airy-fairy, but is actually the true nature of reality.

My focus these days is on this bigger cosmic reality. It’s what I think about. It’s what I’ll be writing about going forward. It helps me understand that Taz could no more be gone than I could be wounded by Darth Vader’s light saber.

Stayed tuned for a really cool guest post by a friend who has developed a magical relationship with his father who, if you believe the old school reality, died many years ago.

Life, I’m happily learning, is SO. MUCH. BIGGER than I ever imagined.