Love is life

Love is knowing we are connected to everything.

Imagine what a wonderful world it would be if we could walk into every interaction with loving intention.  Love often brings forth a similar response.  Both the giver of love and the receiver of love benefit.  Research into loving kindness tells us that the witness of loving interaction also benefits.  

Love is also healing.  I have witnessed and felt it whenever our daughter Ashley is in the hospital.  The love of her family, friends, nurses, and Doctors is part of her healing process.

Our world needs your love.

Love brings value and worth into our relationships.  Love brings appreciation, joy, compassion, empathy, connection, celebration and life.  Love connects us to meaning and purpose in our life.  Love helps us see the good in others.  Love also helps us appreciate our unique selves.  Love helps us appreciate rather than judge.

Love is life.

Hate will have to dissipate and be broken by love

If we stand up to hate, the world will be blessed with a freedom never known before.  

If we fail to speak our truth, 

if we fail to stand up to hate with love, 

the whole world, 

including everyone we know and love and all those we care for,

 will sink into a depth known in history as the holocaust.  

Let us pray together in love and respect and care,

and believe and accept one another,

no matter how different.

More similar than different

We all reach for different dreams

but deeper within each of us resides

the same Divine spark that reaches

for our unique dreams

Each of us has a unique role to play in life.  Each of our unique roles is essential in building a beautiful community, family, or relationship.  At the core of our uniqueness, there is a Divine seed, a spark of universal love that is in and surrounds all of us.  At our core, we are the same.  We are all seeds of Divinity.  

Empathy teaches us that when we look past our outer shells and when we see deeply into the soul of another, we find ourselves.  At the center of humanity, we all share the same fears and the same joys.  

In my youth, I worked hard to be an individual.  I worked to be creative and unique.  I confess to being proud of my differences.  Now in my 67th year, my primary goals are to build community.  I strive to help all I come in contact with, see their similarities.  I continue to be humbled to be a part of building an understanding and empathetic community. 

Through years of unrelenting back pain and the fear for our special needs daughter's health challenges, I have experienced the vulnerability of my full humanity.  When I was leaving IC, after being with my daughter who was in recovery from pneumonia, I caught the eye of another worried visitor in the elevator.  We looked at each other, tired, worried, and unified in our grief.  In that moment, I realized, we are more similar than we are different.

To love another person is to see the face of God.  

We are more alike than different by Hulya Kara

Purpose

One of the great joys in my life is helping others find and practice their sense of purpose.  I believe that one of the primary reasons for our lives is to find and practice our sense of purpose.  Our sense of purpose is unique to each of us.  We are blessed when we share our purpose with others.  There is no greater joy then to be on purpose.

If you have a sense of purpose, be grateful and practice.  If you are not sure of your purpose, reflect on the moments in your life when you feel joy.  I find that our sense of purpose is difficult to find when we are self absorbed.  When we are being of service to someone else or something greater than us, our purpose is often revealed.

Over the course of my life, I have often reflected and worked on my sense of purpose.  My purpose statement found me in my early days while reading "A Course of Miracles", 1976.