“If you’re filled with joy and filled with love, you’re a blessing on this planet.”—Michael Singer
Writing this post was also an excuse to post a picture of my amazing daughter when she was still in manifested particle form. She was and still is my best teacher!
Hello, you gorgeous beams of light. I’ve missed you.
When I’m writing (read: doing one of the things I love most in the world), time gets away from me.
WHAT!! It has been a WHOLE month since I last said hello!
So, howdy, friends, and here are some thoughts I wrote today that may or may not go into the new book. Enjoy!
It sounds like a platitude. Happiness is within. But it’s actually true.
As a brand-new human, before your family and culture got ahold of you, you were curious about and overjoyed with everything. You had zero preferences.
Oh look, a spiderweb! You could watch bugs flying into spiderwebs for hours.
Oh, and there’s another little human about my age! Let’s be friends
Oh, and now, mom’s buckling me into a car seat! It’s so exciting. I can watch new scenery outside the car window and wow! imagine the number of treasures I’ll find at whatever venue she’s taking me to.
Oh, it’s the post office. Andthere’s a long line. How marvelous! I’ll be able to observe and smile at countless other versions of me. Wonder why they all look so impatient?
Within a few years, brand-new humans are fully-programmed, fully-trained (Good boy, Johnny!) to know which things make them happy. Having a good job, for example! Or owning a BMW.
And which things make them impatient, frustrated. Avoid those at all costs.
It doesn’t take long to match the energetic frequency of our culture, to collect an extensive list of what is necessary to be happy.
Sorry to break it to you, but it’s all bullsh*t. You can be happy doing anything. Vacuuming the rug, for example, or standing in lines. Even sitting for hours at a computer writing a book.
Trying to force life to match your specific criteria for happiness never works. Programmed preferences are not where happiness lives.
Surrender all preferences, all attachments and look for happiness where it really is: everywhere!
“Chasing the light doesn’t necessarily look good on paper.”—Heidi Hook
Many years ago, I created an iPhone app called “Planet Goodwill: 365 Ways to Share the Love.” For each day of the year, it suggested a simple (very simple) act of random kindness that anybody could do anywhere.
It included leaving a cupcake for your mailman or taking a flower to your favorite barista. When I say I created it, I came up with the idea, wrote the copy and secured the photos that popped up to announce each day’s fun new act of generosity.
The technical part of the app was handled by a company in California that soon went under and the app disappeared, although I still have its beautiful icon on my phone.
And I still hang on to the intention of spreading a little bit of light each day whether it’s a simple “thinking of you” text or a secret love note left on a stranger’s car windshield or — as I’m choosing to do today –a blog post that celebrates the ridiculously beautiful things that keep landing in my inbox. Like the video of the crow helping a hedgehog across the street or the note of synchronicity from a reader whose bill for 22 things at Costco came to exactly $222 at :22 after the hour.
I especially got a kick out of this story of synchronicity, shared with me by John Milton Branton at JMB Films:
“Dear Pam
I’m driving my sons to school when I notice a mini-trampoline that someone has placed beside the road. I decide I’ll come back and scope it out later, which I do.
I park a few houses away and notice, directly across from where I’ve parked, a little free library. Now I’ve driven down this street many times, probably daily for the last month, and I never saw this take-one/leave-one library before.
I’m going through the books and I see this E-Cubed title, decide it’s some kind of math book – ugh – and pass over it. Nothing interests me, but as I’m about to leave E-Cubed falls off the shelf and I catch it. Okay, so maybe it leaped into my hands. I see it’s not a math book and, well, it’s calling “take me home, take me home.” Which I do.
Part 2. I have a lot of books and a lot of rewriting to do so E-Cubed ends up on a table beside my desk for a day or two. As I’m not reading anything for pleasure at the moment, I pick it up and start browsing. Pretty soon, I’m reading huge chunks of it at a time. It’s definitely got my attention.
Part 3. I read the part about the butterfly experiment from E-Squared. And I think, well I’ll give that a try. And I’m thinking, it’s January in Vancouver and there’s snow in the forecast so “there ain’t gonna be no butterflies. “Bring it on, Universe,” I say anyway. “Show yourself.”
Part 4. My son and I make a trip to Urgent Care because we both have coughs that aren’t going away. His blood work comes back showing pneumonia. I’ve just got the normal respiratory virus that’s making the rounds so I’ll just have to tough it out. He gets the drugs.
My dear friend Martha Creek sat next to this tattooed friend for her entire cruise to Antarctica.
A few hours later the prescription’s ready and I hop into the car to head to the pharmacy. I start the car, the radio comes on with a song I’ve never heard before. It’s soft and soulful and makes me calm and peaceful. I look at the readout of the song title on the screen, “God, will heal you,” it says. Whoa. Message from the Universe? Pretty hard to deny but it ain’t no butterfly!
Part 5. I’m wandering through my local Shopper’s Drug Mart and decide I better stock up on Kleenex. I pass a shelf full of Kleenex but decide to pick it up on my way out since my hands are full and I don’t have a shopping cart. I’m on a completely different aisle and there’s a smaller Kleenex display on a low shelf – packages of six wrapped together. And they’re on sale. I bend down to grab a pack and I notice the design on the boxes is butterflies – lots and lots of big fat butterflies! And not just butterflies but words in Latin. Maximus: highest; Purus-pure; vitae-life; Highest pure life! And butterflies. On a Kleenex box.
I surrender.”
Thank you, John, for sharing the love. And for reminding us all that miracles are always around for those with the eyes to see them.
And thanks to each of you for promising to have the very best weekend of your life.
“Once you meet the God of love, you tend to fire all the others.”—Mirabai Starr
First, I want to say that I love you all SO MUCH. I love your comments, your insights, your willingness to join me on this crazy, rocking peace train.
I’m just home after an 8-day road trip with my mister. Our ultimate destination was Taz’s Hot Dirt, a regenerative farm that sits a couple hours north of Toronto. We had the great fortune to meet the magic woman behind the project that the 222 Foundation chose to honor in 2022.
Dawna Wightman is a dreamer, a creative, a nonstop force for good and a catalyst for new possibilities. She designed Taz’s Hot Dirt to not only feed people’s bellies, but to nourish the hunger of their soul. Volunteers harvest the produce and then take a bag of it to someone who could use a friend, someone who maybe doesn’t feel connected. Not everybody knows quite yet that it’s impossible to be separate or to be outside the circle of care.
I especially love that Dawna consults with Taz out at the farm and that they’re both expecting worker fairies any day. Don’t laugh. Penny Kelly at Lilly Hill Farms worked with a group of elves to produce 100 tons of grapes on 13 acres, an utter impossibility if you ask any viticulturist.
I realize these kinds of stories make me sound like a cuckoo bird, but I dig being what the “real world” deems a little crazy. My daily intention, in fact, is to free myself from all habits and “beliefs” taught to me by my culture, to relinquish all limitations.
As far as I’m concerned, the bedrock of reality is love and everything else is just an unfortunate perceptual habit. In my Course reading this morning, I was struck by the line that everything we see out there in the world (the chaos, the separation, the arbitrary viewpoints) is made out of the things we don’t want within ourselves, the things we can’t accept.
When we separate ourselves from life, begin to identify with a body, we start casting all we find “intolerable” out there.
The reason this is GREAT news is that, in truth, everything occurs in our own minds where we do have complete and total sovereignty.
The Amazingly Awesome 222 Benefit Concert is happening this Sunday at Unity Village with Karen Drucker, Greg Tamblyn and me. I posted a photo on FB of the three of us and announced it as the start of our World Tour.
FYI: It’s also the end of our World Tour, at least for this year. If you happen to be coming to this ginormous T.A.Z. (Totally. Amazing. Zone. –shoutout to Pamela Joy for the inspiration), I expect to receive a big hug.
Whatever you’ve got planned for this weekend, I trust that you will make it the very best one of your life. #222 Forever!
“You can’t go wrong if you’re dancing, singing or laughing.”—Betty Shaffer
My 90-year-old friend Betty was taking a nice, hot bubble bath last week. She rarely locks her door, but for some reason she did that morning and for some reason, her boyfriend, who had left earlier, came back to retrieve something he’d left behind.
Betty, of course, wasn’t wearing her hearing aids, so when her beau knocked, she didn’t hear him. She was blissfully oblivious that he was outside her door, panicked and banging furiously
He rushed to the apartment office, explained his dilemma, his intense alarm that something horrible had transpired.
They hurried back to her door, clumsily inserted the key and threw open the door to find a completely nude Betty dancing with wild abandon.
I love this story for two reasons. It shows how unfounded most of our fears are. It demonstrates how quick we are to assume the worst and to forget that life is always working out for us.
The other tale relates to our bodies and how we perceive them, how we decide certain things about how they should work, how they age. We listen to medical doctors who sole job is to look for problems and pretend to have answers, some of which, of course, are really helpful.
I just wish more of them knew that our bodies are simply condensed energy providing a vessel in which our spirits can express and grow. Our culture tells these bodies what they should do, what their limits are, who they should love. Docs even provide statistics and predictions on how they should react to various calendar years.
Sadly, most of us are at war with our bodies, wanting them to look different, be a different size.
But as Betty demonstrates, a body is simply something to enjoy while you’re lucky enough to have it. From what I can tell, they’re here for us to notice and relish beauty. And, when we can, to use for dancing, singing and laughing.
Betty, by the way, is my friend who when she hears someone’s body is perhaps on the way out, is quick to think, “Oh, I’m so excited for them.”
I love you all and I love your bodies. Hope you use them to see something beautiful today.
“Pessimism doesn’t change the world. Seeing the bright possibility on the horizon, and declaring it real, is the act of faith that can get us there.”—Barbara Kingsolver
I have to restrain myself from starting every post with “OMG!” Blathering on about my lettuce patch and climbing purple clematis and the fox who makes his rounds in my neighborhood probably makes me sound uncool, unworldly.
But dang it! Why not find the wonder within the moment, revel in the life that’s exploding everywhere around me?
Cynicism has long been the prevailing fashion, but is it really true? Is half-full all there is to see? Or just a conditioned viewpoint we’ve spent years building up and believing in?
Today’s Course in Miracles lesson asks us to refrain from dismal thoughts and meaningless laments. It asks us to see a different world and to think a different thought from those we have thus far been practicing.
It says any thought that’s not life-affirming is a lie. Any thought that doesn’t take possibility into account is limited and untrue.
And while a lie believed might temporarily act as law, by shifting our gaze slightly to “the now,” we can neutralize and dismantle it.
Looking at life with wonder and thanksgiving is the doorway into a higher dimension, a place where another, more beautiful voice will always have the floor.
I also want to let you know that this merry, merry month marks the grand opening of Taz’s Hangout at the Douglas County Big Brothers/Big Sisters headquarters. It’s a new space where Bigs and Littles can hang. Taz’s friends and many of my friends are gathering today to officially “cut the ribbon.” BBBS is even changing the official address to 222.
So I continue to be amazed, to celebrate and to see possibilities and declare them real.
“Miracles happen all the time. People just fail to notice them.”— Lorna Byrne
Happy Hedgehog Day!
Tami Simon interviewed Lorna Byrne yesterday on her podcast, Insights at the Edge. I met Lorna in London a few years ago when we were both speaking at a Hay House conference. It was fun to hear from Lorna again, so I went back to read what I’d written about her in my book, Thank & Grow Rich.
Written before 2018, the year Taz graduated to the bigger, freer perspective, this excerpt about Lorna was the perfect way to re-boggle my mind, a trick I use whenever it tries to, as minds are wont to do, override reality. Hope you enjoy:
Lorna Byrne’s family was told she was retarded. She stared at walls, played with imaginary friends, acted “different” than the other kids. By the time she was 14, she was diagnosed dyslexic, so her dirt-poor Irish family saw no reason to continue buying schoolbooks and clothes and they pulled her out of school.
As it turns out, Lorna Byrne was actually a lot “smarter” than the rest of us. She sees things the rest of us miss. Miraculous things, beautiful things.
It wasn’t walls she was staring it. She was listening to angels, who forbade her from revealing their presence. Not yet, they said.
Her parents, the angels clearly instructed, would commit her to an institution if she told them. The angels had other plans for her life.
To this day, she sees these beings as clearly as we see our children texting their classmates on cell phones. “They are my teachers and friends,” she says.
One of her many “imaginary friends” was her brother Christopher, who had died before Lorna was even born. It wasn’t until she was 15 that she found out that the rest of her family, caught up in the limited physical plane, believed Christopher had left the planet when he was 10 weeks old. Their strict adherence to conventional reality precluded their seeing Christopher, the angels, and many things that, to Lorna, are an everyday occurrence.
Lorna sees spirals of light, sparkly colors, and waves of energy that the rest of us miss because we’ve been trained to block out all “atypical” information. She often sees dark energy, for example, in people experiencing illness in their bodies.
Her angels led her to interact with nature, taught her how to see. She grew to love and trust these angelic beings, who often asked her to open her hands to find holograms of stars or flowers made of light. They’d shine and expand from her hand as far as she could see.
Lorna, who grew up Catholic, uses the terminology angels to describe the magical entities she interacts with on a daily basis. It jibes with her religious beliefs, and it’s a useful word that most people can identify with. Angels— we’ve all heard of those.
Everything these magical beings ever told her came true.
Once when she was playing with a childhood friend, she could hear her friend’s father, who was far away at the auto body shop where he worked, calling for help. They ran to the shop and found him unconscious and bloody, under a car that had toppled on top of him.
Another time, she saw two young bike riders get hit by a bus. She saw them continue to ride, peacefully and without a care, on up to heaven even though ambulances and paramedics were scrambling around the leftover bodies.
When she was 10, one of her angels pulled down a big screen in the middle of the river. A vision appeared on the screen of a tall, handsome red-headed boy.
“Remember him,” they said. “You will meet him in a few years, and you are going to marry him, have children. You will be very happy.”
The angel also told her God would take him back to heaven when he was still young. Not the kind of thing you want to hear about your future spouse, but Lorna had long ago learned to believe everything they told her.
When she was 16, Joe, the guy in the vision, walked into her father’s shop and applied for a job. And sure enough, the two began dating, eventually fell in love, and got married, just as the angels predicted.
They were also right about Joe’s health. After marrying in 1975 and having four children, Joe began suffering poor health and died in 2000. Their youngest child was only five.
After Joe’s death, at the angels’ prompting, Lorna went public. Her angels had always told her she would eventually write books. She just laughed. But she’d also learned to heed their instructions.
At last count, this diminutive, soft-spoken, uneducated Irishwoman has written four books. She has gone on to appear on BBC, in The Economist, and at gatherings all over the world.
Lorna says all babies see angels and spirit, but about the time they speak their first words, they “learn” what’s “real” and what’s not.
It is only when we begin conforming to the strict paradigms of our culture that we lose touch with this magical world that surrounds us.
Methinks, it’s time to unravel our own strict beliefs about what is and isn’t possible and to reconnect with this magical world.
“Chasing wealth is not the answer. I’ve crunched the numbers. And sitting in a cheap fishing boat with my family is so much better than sitting on an expensive yacht.”—Nick Offerman
While I joyously soaked in Gandhi’s wisdom during the January retreat in Ahmedabad, India, I also learned about his protégé, Vinoba Bhave, whose book Moved by Love is one of many seeds I brought back with me.
I finished his book yesterday and can genuinely gush that I am now officially a Vinoba Bhave fangirl. He’s most famous for walking the length and breadth of India and inspiring wealthy landowners to give away 4 million acres of land to the less financially fortunate.
But the thing that most moved me was his approach to creating change, starting with a goal of freeing society from the bondage of money. I’m pretty sure Taz had a hand in this book coming my way.
Bhave was very clear that money is incapable of solving problems. Believing it is (and aren’t we sold that story from birth?) blinds us to real possibility. A revolution, he says, needs Spirit, not organization and structure.
One man, rooted in Truth (what Gandhi called ‘soul force’), is all that’s needed for Spirit to move, all that’s needed to create societal change. Bhave’s mission was to root out discrimination of every kind and for wealth and property to be shared by all.
I mean, who doesn’t want that really? It is only fear and our belief that we are separate that keeps that beautiful vision from being a reality.
Bhave was fearless. Because he knew he was more than a body, he had no need to protect it. Again, it’s the polar opposite of how we‘re trained from birth. He was able to give everything he had—his labor, his intelligence, his time and his thoughts–to this magnificent vision because he knew who he represented: the highest spirit in all of us.
Never did he coerce anyone to give up their land. In fact, he made it clear that if privileged landholders didn’t feel inspired to donate a piece of their property, he didn’t want it. He was giving them an opportunity. Because that’s what all of us really want—to give, to love, to make our hearts large enough to include everyone.
I could never repay even a fraction of the blessings I’ve been given in this lifetime, but at least I can share stories like this one. Hope you feel as inspired as I am right now. #222 Forever!
“Let your broadcast of love bless the world.”—A Course in Miracles
Reading through E-Squared to update for the upcoming 10-year-anniverary edition, I was struck by the opening dedication: For Roosky. May your light forever shine.
Roosky, of course, is one of Taz’s gazillion nicknames: Taz-a-roo which led to Roosky which led to the dedication and my hope that the light and love she so clearly conveyed would bless the world. At the time, I was assuming its broadcast would continue here in the flesh.
But as Virginia Francess Sterrett said, “As long as space and time divide you from anyone you love, you simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time and, furthermore, to win.”
That’s the goal of the Taz Grout 222 Foundation. Not so much to battle, because well, battling just keeps the crazy going, but to defy space and time by keeping alive Taz’s incredible light. Every year on February 22 (that’s today friends!), we give a gift to an innovative project or person with a big idea to change consciousness and therefore the world.
In times such as this, it’s vital to recognize that behind-the-scenes, beneath-the-news there’s a completely different story going on. There are so many of us who only want to love and serve and who really believe with our entire hearts and souls that a more beautiful world is not only possible, but is right now, as we speak, gathering breath.
As usual, the foundation got lots of great pitches for lots of worthy projects. And as always, I consulted Taz (I’m just her ground crew, after all) to finally settle on the following projects for this year’s 222 Foundation gift:
I. I have fallen in love with Bill and Pat Taylor who started the Southeast Asia Foundation to, as they say, give back to the Universe for the countless blessings they’ve enjoyed in their lives. Not only does every single penny go to their mission (all operating expenses come from their own pocket), but they show up themselves, boots on the ground, to make sure every one of their projects begins with and is guided by locals. They take their inspiration from Lao Tzu, insist on both sustainability and religious inclusion and act on the words from an oval river rock Pat once gave to Bill for his birthday: “You cannot do all the good the world needs, but the world needs all the good you can do.”
Thanks to Bill and Pat’s beautiful work (their tagline is “It takes a girl to raise a village”), the 222 Foundation has chosen to fund seven libraries in rural Siem Reap, Cambodia: four for kids, two for high schoolers, one for university students and one for the community. Taz LOVED books and worked at the Grinnell library when she was at university so having access to books, rare in rural Cambodia, is a must for promoting literacy and providing access to new possibilities.
We’re also funding a chess club and providing filters and fuel for water purification towers in Siem Reap. Mostly, we want Bill (he even shared a wonderful 222 story from when he was a 9-year-old Boy Scout) and Pat to know how much we appreciate their open hearts, generosity and unflinching belief that “it’s not merely about the money. It’s about each girl knowing that somebody some place in the world loves her and cares about her and encourages her to make something of her life.”
2. The other project Taz led me to support (isn’t she just brilliant?) is Craftroots, an artistan collective I was able to visit twice when I was in India last month. Once again, I fell in love with their mission. Yes, I fall in love A LOT!
Craftroots works with more than 17,000 artists in rural villages, keeping alive 72 ancient Indian arts and crafts. They aren’t out to scale their model or grow profits or production. Their aim is to bring a conscious shift in society by putting beauty into everything.
The artisans, mostly underprivileged women, aren’t viewed as laborers. Rather, they make up a sisterhood where each artist is genuinely respected, celebrated and encouraged to see their work as an offering to the divine—the divine in themselves and the divine in all life. Artisans pray together, read inspiring quotes each morning and focus on Truth: oneness, belonging and kinship.
Founder Anar Patel (to the right) also participated in ServiceSpace’s life-changing Gandhi 3.0 and says working with rural artisans is the greatest privilege of her life. She described it as her form of worship.
The 222 Foundation’s form of worship is looking for creative ways to burn through our culture’s prevailing trance of scarcity and lack and to provide a pinhole through which new possibilities and ways of being can shine. We are honored to support the above two projects and to remind everyone that there is light waiting for all of us to find. Happy #222!
“We’re all quietly aching for something to celebrate.”—Mark Nepo
I just ordered Gabor Mate’s new book, The Myth of Being Normal, and can’t wait to read it. The nearly 80-something physician argues that society trains us to suppress our own needs and authentic selves in order to fit in.
I always called it following rules and cultural paradigms and I’m proud to say I spent most of my life avoiding the biggies.
I refused to take on a job that had no meaning or purpose just for the sake of money. I refused to believe that having a ginormous house or a fancy car would make me happier or that the celebrities on Instagram were worth emulating. Even on my recent travel assignment to Lake Geneva, I couldn’t help but look at all the Gilded Age mansions and wonder, “Don’t all those big yards and 28 thousand rooms just separate you from other people?”
Disconnection, after all, is the exact opposite of freedom when you no longer trust others or the universe or the life force that thrums through us all.
As Mate points out, we evolved as communal creatures in close contact with each other. But now, because we live in an economic system that depends on growth and bigger, better, faster, we’re running roughshod over our basic human needs. Loneliness is at epidemic proportions.
But the biggest diversion from “normal” are my views on death. Tomorrow would be my daughter Tasman’s 29th birthday. Yes, I’m sad that she’s not here in physical form (we reveled in a lot of pretty amazing Tasmanfests over the years), but all the real things—the love, the closeness, even the conversations continue. And, as my friend Martha Creek pointed out, sadness is just a disguise for love.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that, as a culture, we celebrate a lot of things that aren’t good for us. In fact, a lot of what we think is desirable is flat out dangerous. And when celebrations of wealth, manufactured, one-size-fits all beauty and what’s billed as safety is considered “normal,” it resists scrutiny.
What I’d rather celebrate today is creativity, connection, having conversations that matter and that all the love we so long to enjoy already inescapably exists.
Have the very best weekend of your life, my friends. #222 Forever!
“The only true privilege in life is to love.”– -Justin Faerman
I’m totally jazzed about meeting some of you at this Sunday’s Amazingly Awesome Benefit Concert for the Taz Grout 222 Foundation. It’s such an honor to be surrounded by so much support, so much love, so much possibility. Even if you are on the other side of the globe.
Because remember – it’s impossible to step out of the ocean of wholeness. There’s literally nowhere else you can go.
So thank you one and all for so richly blessing me on this wild and crazy ride. From wherever you might hail.
I’ve already gushed here on the blog about my joy at writing a song with THE KAREN DRUCKER! She of Tarzan calling fame.
And I’d be remiss in not mentioning one of the other musicians who will be joining us on Sunday. Greg Tamblyn and I have been friends for eons. When I taught a journalism class at Avila College, he kindly showed up for my student reporters to interview. I wrote about his hilarious song, “The Shootout at the I’m Okay, You’re Okay Coral” in my book, Art & Soul, Reloaded. And it was Greg who first introduced me to Evy McDonald who I’ve written about on the blog and, if memory serves, in one of my books. It’s a story about stepping away from the ego’s limited narrative and returning to the present and the wholeness of who we really are.
Here’s the scoop:
In 1980, Evy was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease. By the time doctors finally determined her illness, she was, to use her own words, “a bowl of jello in a wheelchair.” The doctor told her, at best, she had six months to live.
After raging about the unfairness of it all for a day or two, she had this thought: “Since I’m dying anyway, why not use the short time I have left to finally learn to love myself unconditionally?”
For years, she despised her body. She was overweight, for one thing. The polio she’d had as a child left her with two withered limbs and well, she was hard-pressed to find anything she really liked about her physical body.
But she was determined. Three times a day, she’d roll her wheelchair to the mirror and sit naked. She wouldn’t leave until she’d find new positives to add to a list. Her hair was pretty, for starters. She decided that whatever it took, she was going to learn to accept herself. She also resolved to give all negative feelings and thoughts over to the bigger thing.
At some point, she crossed some kind of miraculous threshold. She actually began to feel love and compassion for herself. She began to see her body as a miracle of creation, to see herself as a blessed being who could experience joy.
Strength began to return to her limbs. She eventually began to walk, to feed and to clothe herself. She became the first person to completely recover from ALS and 40 some years later, she’s still ALS-free.
So whatever fabrication you believe is ultimate reality, be open enough to consider it might just have a few glaring holes.
Here’s the song and one more invitation to join us this Sunday in our extraordinarily epic quest to change the consciousness of the world. #222 Forever!
