Nine To Five

One of the great blessings of self-employment is that the term “9 to 5” ceases to have meaning. There is just the day and the night and the work to be done.

Our society sanctions selling your soul to the Machine for at least eight hours a day, at least five days a week. Lives are literally spent, the juices all used up, as people slog through uninspired day after uninspired day just to collect a pay check. And we think that is normal! And we think that is how it should be.

Glory to the God of Creativity!
Blessed be the inspired life that energizes body and mind!

Finding within yourself a way to survive by your own happiness is very freeing. Humans are not machines and should not run on factory time. These crazy ideas are throwbacks to the Industrial Revolution when women and children were shackled to looms to increase their productivity.

The factories are mostly gone now. The jobs are gone too and they won’t be back soon.

What would a creative society look like? What if each child and teenager was encouraged to follow their bliss in order to find their life’s work? What would you have done?

I loved making things with paper, glue and scissors. I loved pictures, collages and writing stories, one hunt and peck at a time on my Mom’s typewriter. I loved fashion and fabrics, putting on fashion shows and plays. I loved singing and dancing and playing Indians in the woods.

I am a grownup now. My life supports me playing on the computer all day and all night long if I choose. It gives me time to think and breath and take care of the details. I wonder if I will ever retire, or if perhaps I already have.

All That Is

For years I had elaborate altars in my bedroom. I’ve been a spiritual materialist for a long time (a phrase coined by Chögyam Trungpa to describe Westerners and other folks who like to amass spiritual artifacts. I own four different sets of prayer flags from Tibet, Buddha statues from Bali, India and Cambodia, statues of Tara, Ganesh, Hanuman and Sang Hyang Widhi Wasa (the one true God). I have boxes of photos of tankas, Hindu paintings, incense, incense burners, candles, votives, small household altars from India and Bali, batiks of gods and goddesses, God’s Eyes, crystals, precious stones, Native American fetishes, abalone shells, smudging wands of sage and cedar, books on Hinduism, Buddhism, meditation, yoga, tapes, CDs and DVDs. Stuff, stuff, stuff!


Maintaining a beautiful altar requires a focus and care that I no longer have. Many things have been put away and forgotten. There was a time when each of these items spoke to me in some way, evoked some feeling of connection to spirit.

My guru, Neem Karoli Baba died before I could get it together to go to India. Still his photos seemed alive to me, and I kept them all over the house, talking to him constantly throughout the day, and always receiving his messages, jokes, tricks and wisdom with joy.

Over the years I have grown spiritually. My gods and my gurus are no longer external . Somehow they have become enmeshed in my being to a degree that I no longer feel any separation from the divine.

Even as outward displays diminished, the inner core intensified. I relaxed into knowing that I am living in, experiencing always a unified field of love that is constant.

It has been easier to experience the presence of Divine Grace when I let go of the visual representations of gods and goddesses with human likenesses. To me, now, the Divine Presence is more like air or water, a living plasma, a matrix or web that I am completely a part of. I am consciousness experiencing being human and learning to function in this holographic universe.

I have tried to build an altar out of light and crystal, a shimmering white light of pure silk, an emptiness like a huge glass bowl, sparkling water bubbling over crystals and sunlight casting rainbows all around.

My god is not static but very much alive and dancing like sunlight on water and the intense radiance of color as painted by flowers. The beauty of the earth is vibrant and powerful as it streams through the animals and plants, and all of nature is alive.

I am part of all that is, and it is part of me.