Jack Kornfield is a storyteller with a mystic’s heart.  When I picked up After the Ecstasy, the Laundry, I knew I’d found someone who could speak to me. I bought the book after having been invited to the White House to have lunch with Hilary Clinton (OK, I was one of many, but she was at my table). I came home to find the house in total disarray, the kids a physical and emotional mess and Bob laying on the floor, holding a tall glass with a straw like you see hospital patients using.  He had hurt his back watching the kids during the two day trip I took to Washington.  And I am sorry to say that the first thing I thought about was not that poor Bob had hurt his back, but that I had one hell of a lot of work to do to clean up after my honorary experience in Washington. Clearly, I was not enlightened.
During our Chase, I often wondered if some of the saints and these wonderful spiritual teachers we were reading about ever had a really bad day.  Did Mother Teresa ever get tired, not just of serving the poor, but of grocery shopping? Do Zen Masters pay taxes and wash their cars? Do they even have cars? I found that I could get to a place of inner harmony alone and by a beautiful ocean, but despaired that I would ever find peace throwing a party for a ten year old or reading an assigned text to my blind daughter because it was not in Braille again.  I wondered if there was any hope of living in a truly connected way in this culture, in my own community, and in my own skin.  People assume that mystics and saints live in perfect relationship to God and that those who are “enlightened” can stay that way---well I did anyway.  Jack Kornfield shares his own experience and those of many others to say that the path of the heart and one’s spiritual journey is imperfect but that peace and wholeness and inner happiness can be found in the Western world, and that the laundry might just be a way to find them.
He quotes the founder of Japanese Zen, Dogen: "The human mind has absolute freedom as its true nature."  There are thousands upon thousands of students who have practiced meditation and obtained this realization.  Do not doubt the possibilities because of the simplicity of the method.  If you can’t find the truth where you are, where else do you expect to find it?
Jack Kornfield says, “What we have no words for, we cannot understand.”   After the Ecstasy gives words to experiences and feelings we all know but don’t talk about. It’s funny, compassionate, and very, very honest.  I am reading it again for the third time. It continues to give me hope that I will figure something out about this mysterious and complicated life I am living. Meb

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As you probably know by now, mine is a "everything but the kitchen sink" approach to life...you never know what might be the important piece or the thing you missed.  My reading preferences follow in the same direction (I am nothing if not compulsive, oops, I meant consistent...oh no, I can see Meb and Katie's eyes rolling already!)  When thinking about book recommendations, I found it just too difficult to select only one book.  I realized that many of the books I was focusing in on were of a particular type.  Novels mostly, books written from the perspective of someone who has lived their life and revisits their experiences in a new light  Sometimes it's telling the story to someone else.  Sometimes it's just moving back and forth between the past and the present.  Water for Elephants is an example of the latter. We enter Jacob's story from the nursing home where he lives, but he comes across larger than life in the exploits he describes from his years with the circus.  Kate Morton's books, The House at Riverton and The Forgotten Garden are examples of the former.  In Riverton the narrator speaks into a tape recorder to provide a connection for the next generation.  The characters come alive for me, perhaps because we meet them as fully formed human beings...foibles and all.  They don't take themselves too seriously as the weight of the world is no longer on their shoulders with the realization that their exit is around the corner and yet, they are wise enough to reflect on the lessons they learned from others: the power of respect, the value of kindness, the importance of love. Upon reflection, maybe I'm like that:  living my life...loving it really, and yet packaging the vignettes in my story to savor and one day pass along...I don't know how the story ends...none of us do...but the ability to celebrate the fabric of it regardless, is what these books teach me as I accompany the characters on their journey in railroad cars, across the sea or in a changed world...I'd love to know what you like to read.  Joan

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We talk so often about miracles (after all it is an occupational hazard for us) that we don't always highlight the other side of the coin - that while miracles happen, so do calamities of such epic proportion that it is difficult to understand how the human spirit could survive them.  When we are the observers, as most of us are in witnessing the tragedy in Japan, it is difficult to simply imagine putting ourselves in one of the photos. The anguish is palpable and raw and from faraway it all seems somehow unbelieveable; and yet it moves us.  Faith and miracles are hard to talk about in the midst of human suffering, but the faithful voices in this CNN article offer intrigue as well as comfort. http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/03/20/finding-faith-amid-disaster/

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Most of us couldn't get through life without signs. Stop signs, Street signs and Exit signs all keep us safe and get  us where we want to go. I wonder what would have happened if Paul Revere didn't get the sign from the church tower: "One if by land, two if by sea." There are more subtle signs than tearing apart a daisy to determine if your crush of the month returns the sentiment. Facial expressions, body language and the little voice inside your head are all signs and we are wise to pay attention to them.

Miracles are signs.

At a book party in Denver a few weeks ago, I met a woman who relayed a wonderful story about her first cousin and how she and her mom wrote a chapter story to keep this cousin entertained after she was bed ridden from an injury. The story flowed from them and it wasn't until all ten chapters were completed that they realized that in writing the story, they had been inspired by the cousin's daughter who had died tragically a few years earlier in a traffic accident. The woman worried no one else would consider it a miracle, though they did. I told her what I had learned from Soren Kierkegaard about miracles as a sign: "...only for one who knows that is a sign, and in the strictest sense only for one who knows what it signifies."  So the woman and I continued our conversation about miracles and signs and I shared with her a story from the previous evening at The Tattered Cover bookstore:  a hospice nurse frequently asked her patients to send her a sign once they had "crossed over."  One gentleman who she had grown especially fond of promised her he would send a sign if he could.  As she walked along a sunny sidewalk the day after he died, she looked down just as she was about to step on a dragonfly.  She moved back, the dragonfly flew away, and she saw something etched into the concrete.  A closer look revealed the gentleman's name!  He was a cement contractor and countless years before had signed the last block as he laid the sidewalk.

One of our readers concluded that "...there is the likelihood that signposts of the divine do indeed work in all of our lives, lighting the way for our highest possible good."  Thank you to all of our friends and readers who have shared signposts of the divine with us.    Katie

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