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The thing that gets me about the culture of gun rights activists is that they would even WANT unhinged people being able to access their precious inventory of guns.

Wouldn’t they, of all people, want to be extremely selective about the kinds of people who deserve the right to carry guns?

They love the idea of citizenship. Wouldn’t they be the ones gathering together to demand congress pass laws so that their culture isn’t stained by people who aren’t properly vetted and registered to use guns to protect instead of to incite violence?

I’m amazed that staunch gun rights activists would not only waste their time defending these unhinged people’s ‘rights’ but that they wouldn’t use their time getting them as far away from their gun culture as possible.

To me it makes the NRA itself appear unhinged.

Guns don’t shoot themselves? That’s right. They’re either shot by law-abiding people who find it necessary to own a gun, or they’re shot by people who are looking for a way out of their hell and have found it easier to access a gun than to access help.

That the NRA has decided against common sense has shown, at least to me, that the entire organization has sunk beneath common sense.

Gathering together after the murder of children to banter about evil, as if evil exists on its own, as if it hasn’t been created and mass-produced with the help of an entire society whispering, “You have no value unless you are aggressive at every turn.”

So much immaturity.

And all their advocates and staunch supporters letting their own triggers be pulled like little mini Pavlov’s dogs at the mere mention of words like ‘assault rifle’ ‘ban weapons’ ‘background checks’.

The NRA and those who’ve received much of their fortunes through the NRA have trained their members to be attack dogs instead of offering their members a paradigm through which to think deeply and responsibly.

Poor Eddie Eagle would be in tears.

The NRA could be helping people to juggle multiple contexts at once and be available to discuss solutions with flexibility and nuance so that solutions could work to make not only the gun culture more respectable, but solutions that could actually help keep citizens safer.

But instead, they’ve dumbed it down to dangerous. They’ve indoctrinated their people to viciously support labels at the expense of better ideas.

Well to me, a loud voice is only good for one thing—sounding an emergency. And I hear all those people yelling, but not thinking clearly enough to identify the real emergency and what to do about it.

It’s listening and responding that brings change and invites intelligent conversation to begin.

-JLK

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Prayer That Came To Me At 3am:

You can plant a seed of peace in your heart instead of waiting on another to plant one for you. Water it daily, and you will feel this peace within you grow, regardless of your circumstances.

-JLK

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Sometimes I think people would rather keep their sacred self to themselves than risk pushing it through all their protective gear only to have it dismissed or worse, skipped right over. But the thing I’m realizing is how important it is to share your favorite part of yourself. Not for others, but for this part of you. So that it gets to blossom out in the world, instead of being forced to stay buried as a seed longing to reach its full potential.

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Whenever I feel stuck, I long for a breakthrough. To crack my veneer and step outside of my safety and into something new.

But having a breakthrough isn’t a graceful process. We literally have to birth ourselves through something very small to enter the bigger space we long for.

I often wonder why we stop tallying milestones after walking and running. We still have to figure out where we want to go and who we want to be on our journey there.

And just the act of going anywhere can be a scary endeavor, because it’s so unpredictable. But yet, we also know that staying stuck winds up being equally deadly, maybe more.

I’m not saying we have to pack up and ship out.

Breaking through can be done not only in distances but in depths. So long as you travel somewhere, the destination doesn’t seem so important. Just that you’re breaking through what you already know to discover something new.

But when you do embark, please make sure you take with you some self-soothing for when you get hurt, and some values to anchor you so you don’t get lost.

And don’t forget to share what you discover, it just might help someone else feel less alone and stuck.

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I have an idea for a great replacement—to replace the violent and ignorant idea that anyone’s worth is inherently greater than another because of what they look like or believe in, with recognizing that everyone has an equal right to be alive and to thrive and with access to resources to make this possible.

From A Book of Hearts.

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From Feed It to the Worms, a collection of very short stories for small children.

I woke up to a couple mourning doves fighting in my garden. They were yelling at each other nonstop to the point where I had to go outside and say, “Guys, what is going on?”

They both folded their wings and looked at the sky instead of each other and tapped their feet. And I said, “Hey, don’t you guys mate for life?” And they both shrugged.

“Come on, don’t tell me you’re gonna be the first mourning doves to get divorced?!”

They shrugged again.

“You’re gonna ruin your family’s tradition? Over what? What could be the big deal?”

And they both blurted out together, “She doesn’t listen to me!” “He doesn’t listen to me!” And then they both said, “See?”

“Oh boy,” I said. “I know what the problem is. Neither of you are wearing thinking caps.”

“What??” they both yelled. “Birds don’t wear thinking caps!”

“Hold on,” I said. And I went to my craft bin and made a couple really tiny caps and placed them on their tiny heads. And after a minute, they both smiled.

“You look funny,” the one said to the other.

“Oh yeah?” she laughed. “You look pretty funny yourself.”

And then they both started laughing.

“Now,” I said. “Whenever you get mad at each other, just put on your thinking caps and look at each other till you find something meaningful to connect about. Ok??”

And every morning since, I get woken up by these guys laughing their beaks off.

The End.

-JLK

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When we fire zingers into people’s hearts to protect our own…

I once saw a car swerve, right itself, and continue on without knowing that the car behind his wound up losing control and crashing into a guardrail.

 

Makes me wonder how many people have been pushed out of their lane, out of opportunities, or pushed into heightened states of panic or depression by people who simply had no awareness that they were the ones causing the trouble.

 

I wonder how many lives are wrecked by these unaware proverbial vehicles, who would never for a split second imagine that they were responsible for any of it? For any atrocity whatsoever?

 

Some people would rather run over everyone with reactiveness at the mere mention that they might have a blind spot, than consider that maybe they actually have something to do with the unhappy faces around them.

 

It’s an uncomfortable feeling to admit that we could be part of what’s causing problems. That in the midst of fighting our own private revolutionary wars we could be causing collateral damage. Firing zingers into people’s hearts to protect our own without realizing that those other people meant no harm.

 

When my mother passed, everyone who knew her called to say how sorry they were and to lament about how sad her life had been. Some even told me her life helped them to see how blessed their own was. 

 

But I wonder, did they stop for a second to consider their own complicity in any of the many circumstances that caused her to fall through the cracks, and sink so deeply that she literally passed on to another world? Did they imagine she dug her own grave solely by her own two hands?

 

Even when I tried to communicate that I felt some responsiblity for my mother’s death, they said, “Oh, you’re too hard on yourself.” Maybe, but why would I not take some responsibility? And why would they avoid seeing theirs?

 

It’s not easy to face the role we all play in the consequences of cause and effect. To take off our good guy costumes and at least recognize that life is complicated, and that our choices, in one way or another, impact other living breathing beings.

 

Not to shame or punish ourselves, but just to reposition ourselves from imagining we are observers to realizing that we have dissociated ourselves from the scheme of things to protect ourselves, but are still in fact part of all these actions and consequences.

 

So many of us wear the hat of open-mindedness but how often do we refuse to allow the passing through of anything that doesn’t support our personal agenda, refusing to consider at all costs that our personal politics, they way we run our individual lives, are part of the dysfunction at large?

 

For me, I think it’s important to consider that the way I once treated another might have been part of the reason they needed to find god. Or as Caroline Myss put it, part of their motivation for enrolling in primal scream therapy. Because it softens my edges and reminds me just how connected we all are, whether we like it or not.

And maybe if we realized just how connected we really are, we’d invest in building more bridges of understanding between us, instead of imagining we live on separate islands.

 

-JLK

 

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Once upon a time, I gave a woodpecker a sandwich.

He couldn’t believe it. “All our lives,” he cried. “Pecking away at trees . . . giving ourselves headaches . . . and we could have been eating sandwiches!?”

I felt so terrible, I made him some to bring back to his family.

His family had a similar reaction. But once they calmed down, they were glad to have the sandwiches.

And ever since, the forest has been much more peaceful.

Though I wish they could figure out how to make the sandwiches themselves.

The End

-JLK

From Feed It to the Worms, a collection of very short stories for small children.

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I’m not a religious person, but sometimes, I like to think of the trinity as a metaphor to understand perspectives—the father/mother, son/daughter, and the Holy Spirit—all contexts, all ways of getting along with ourselves and other people—and a way to juggle these different contexts at the same time: to see ourselves as the children we’ve been; to see ourselves as parents, parenting our children as well as our younger selves; and to also see ourselves as a container of Being, that’s part of our person but also capable of being beyond our person, by rising up to that top floor of things where we can access that heavenly perspective, that place where we can see so clearly that life on the ground floor—being triggered and angry and judgmental, passionate and aspiring—are simply the ingredients of the surviving world, where everyone’s got a different mouth and trying at the same time to hunt for the sustenance to feed it.

From up on that top floor we can see that really, everyone is doing the very best we can do with our particular relationship with the sustenance we have access to, and with the sustenance we so badly need and long for but don't have access to—and this perspective can give us a bit of compassion for what we're all going through, and a bit of the realization that maybe, we can make things a little more beautiful and a little more meaningful for ourselves and others, if we are only willing to bring down some of that heavenly perspective to the ground floor of life.

Maybe when Jesus was nailed to that cross, to that infamous trinity, he looked down and realized the enormity of Thy Will Be Done, because he was seeing things, literally had no choice but to see things, from that heavenly perspective. And being that he had no choice, his clarity was ignited—knowing finally, and with utmost certainty, that the striving for fulfillments that feed us down there on the ground floor are one thing, but the fulfillment of aligning one’s purpose with that heavenly perspective feeds the soul immortal.

Maybe he realized that this top floor perspective, and his journey that led to being literally crucified there by people who really didn’t know what they were doing, ignited that awesome realization that this journey was his path, his scripture. That from this heavenly perspective, there was no reason to feel crucified in the murderous sense, but to almost thank all those folks for giving him that inadvertent opportunity to learn what he ultimately needed to learn. Which was then followed by that divine urgency to return to the ground floor and share with these others what he so desperately needed them to know—that the world is not crucifying you—it’s just doing what it’s doing. And if you come up here, where I was, and see things from my perspective, you can find some relief and some compassion and some clarity, and then bring a bit back down with you so you too, can share it with those who don't yet understand.

In my own life when I’m on the ground floor and when I don’t remember that the top floor perspective even exists, it feels like I’m being crucified by my circumstances, and it feels like I have no ability to be flexible to see circumstances from any higher place. In fact, I only want to escape.

But if I can just stay put in my difficult circumstances; keep myself attached to them by my own will, I will remember that there is another way to see things. That the higher perspective, when I’m aligned with it, will always remind me that I’m on my path. And even though there's tremendous suffering in the world, caused both by my own hand and by the hand of others, that all of our paths are our personal scripture. And that the story of our scripture is not merely to be comfortable, but to expand our perspectives, even as it hurts to do so, and then, to return back to the ground floor to share what we’ve learned up there with the people in our lives, and share it through our hearts, before we ultimately return to that most holy of contexts.

-JLK

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If we ever get mad at each other,

I’ll give you my eye and you give me yours.

Just till we see where we’re coming from.

-JLK

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If you ever get scared, or mean, and you wonder if maybe you’re not such a good or brave kid after all . . . I’ll tell you what you do:

Take those feelings and feed ’em to the worms.

“Did you say worms?”

Yes, I did.

Did you know, no matter where you are,

underneath you, there’s a world of worms?

Even if you’re on the top of a skyscraper or on an airplane-

way down under the ground, the worms are there. And they’re hungry.

And you know what they like to eat best? All your bad feelings.

Tastes just like pizza to them. Yup. Even the ones that make you want to bite your mom, or make you wanna throw your toys,

or make you wake up crying in the middle of the night.

Just gather them all up and toss ’em all down.

The wormies’ll thank you.

They thank me all the time!

-JLK

From Feed It to the Worms, a collection of very short stories for small children.

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After my mother passed, I sometimes felt baffled and even more alone by the words people would say to express their condolences. But at some point, I realized that when someone dies, the language of condolences just needs to be translated. It’s a very simple translation. Basically, every offering of condolence can be translated into, “Death is painful and strange. And I don’t really have the right words to say. But I wanted to say something. Because I care.”

-JLK

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An illustration of me, when I’m on the verge of pushing through my pain and discomfort to have an insight, but have had enough and reach over and pick up my phone instead, lol.

No shame though.

Insights come when insights come.

If I’m available to have an insight, it can come from pushing through pain, from meditating, being stuck in traffic, making the same and just about the only dinner my son will eat, talking with a customer service rep, being there to read or comment on a friend’s post… anything.

In my opinion, whatever you’re connecting with is precious, as long as you’re present to what you’re connecting with, so you can recognize its preciousness.

-JLK

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Not everyone starts the day with the same number of spoons.

Some of us are still depleted from the day before, or the year before, or generations before.

Some people are doing the work of three people all by themselves, which means they’ve likely got a spoon deficit and are running on fumes.

It's difficult to find the spoons to deal with all the stuff we have going on.

But we can help each other conserve what spoons we have left by asking ourselves before we speak or act, “Am I about to deplete this person’s spoons or ease their burden?”

So many times we judge our words and actions based on what WE find useful or amusing, and have little or no awareness of how it might land for another—as toxic, or nourishing.

I realize more and more that world peace truly does begin with immediate vicinity peace.

So just as I have a keenly calibrated radar for whether or not I’m being treated fairly, I try to remember to check in with myself to make sure I'm not covertly or unknowingly generating toxicity that another person is going to have to work hard to heal from.

And if I do happen to have any extra spoons, I can give them away through my support. Chances are, I know someone who could use them.

-JLK

"Spoon theory is a metaphor that is used to describe the amount of mental or physical energy a person has available for daily activities and tasks. It was developed by Christine Miserandino in 2003 as a way to express how it felt to have lupus. She used spoons to provide a visual representation of units of energy that a person might have and how chronic illness forces her to plan out her days and actions in advance, so as not to run out of energy, or spoons, before the end of the day. It has since been applied to other phenomena, such as other disabilities, mental health issues, marginalization, and other factors that might place an extra – often unseen – burden on some individuals."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_theory

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I think one reason people don’t tell the truth about what’s so for them, is because of the things they’ve heard people say behind the backs of other people going through similar stuff:

They should get help.
She used to have it so together.
I feel so sad for him.
It’s such a shame.
She’s had such a hard life.

But the only people who judge another for a trip to the abyss are those who haven’t visited there themselves.

So if you’re having a hard time, please don’t feel stigmatized. And please don’t hesitate to ask for help. But—please make sure to ask the right people for help.

Find someone who’s returned from their own abyss, someone who knows how easy it is to wind up there.

Sometimes the journey to the abyss is just a few thoughts or circumstances away.

Those people know how to navigate down there. They can lend you a light so you can look around down there and find friends. Not shame.

-JLK

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Who says there has to be a right way to meditate?

Who says you have to just watch your thoughts pass by as if in some brook?

Why not welcome our thoughts?

What if they’re the first sentence in a story we haven’t heard yet?

Who says we can’t stroll our bodies like libraries, browsing for the information that might give us clues for how we arrived at being the person we call ourselves?

We’re not alone in our bodies after all.

There’s younger selves in here and ancestors and livers and spleens…

And they’ve all got stuff to say.

Important stuff.

We all go sit in a chair to watch someone else’s adventure to find the holy grail, while our own is sitting inside us waiting to be discovered.

Why not explore our depths? Discover where the gold is?

Have you ever tried to communicate with someone and they say, “Wow, I’m not at all absorbing what you’re saying! I’m watching your words and thoughts pass by in the river of my mind!”

You might want to slug them.

In fact, that might very well be your last conversation with them.

Why not listen carefully and respond to the voices inside ourselves?

We don’t need to let them take us where we don’t want to go, but why not ask them the reason for wanting to take us there?

Some of those voices might be the confused voices of upset younger versions of ourselves who internalized a lot of negative stuff.

Why not take the time to listen to their concerns, and show them a new direction?

Or if we’re feeling damaged, instead of watching our damaged parts float down the river, why not appoint ourselves our own doctor or triage nurse and tend to our own damaged parts?

We store our pain in our bodies. So if we pay attention and scan our bodies for which parts of us are having an emergency, we can hurry to their proverbial bedside and soothe their wounds.

‘Oh boy. Someone rang the nurse’s bell from the lower left leg of the hospital! Stat!’

‘Uh oh. There’s someone who needs immediate assistance in the heart of the hospital! I’m on my way!”

The point is, meditation can be a time to heal ourselves, and healing can actually be really interesting and even fun.

And as long as you’re not attached to any particular way to meditate, it can be made up, like any recipe, to suit your particular appetite, your particular set of ingredients, and your nutritional needs.

Sure, I still carve out the time to focus on my breath. And I’m grateful that my breath is always here, as the most reliable anchor to ground me.

But when there’s a feisty negative thought, I don’t let it go… I go toward it, and I ask where it came from and why the big upset. And each time I really listen, the same thing happens. I wind up understanding where that upset came from, and that upset thought turns into an insight, and all I'm left with is empathy and love.

To me, the purpose of meditation is to discover what I'm made of, and to give each part of myself my attention, understanding and love. And as far as I know, there’s no right way to do this.

But because this relationship with myself is the longest term relationship of my life—I figure I better make the process of getting to know myself as fulfilling as possible.

-JLK