My long and winding road took me to San Cristobal de Las Casas, in Chiapas, Mexico. My brother Virgil was born and lives there on “Rancho El Ar” with his mother and world-class artist, Flora Layla Edwards. This amazing city is located in a volcanic crater, 7,000 feet in the sky, and is a refuge for seekers from around the planet. Nearly finished with this book, I had struggled with how to illustrate it. Find another artist? Use my sculpture? Then I happened upon Fernando Gallo and Enzué Durán, of Enzue Galería & Estudio de arte in San Cristobal de Las Casas. This talented couple runs a small but potent gallery and printing workshop. I took two linocut printing classes with them and fell in love with the technique. The rest is history as they say, and this led me to create a whole series of linocut prints for this book. I am eternally grateful to Fernando and Enzué for opening up my heart and repertoire of artistic expression to this medium.
Love can be silent and covert. Love doesn’t always come with road signs or flashing lights. It is always flowing deep in the matrix of your being.
To be present with love doesn’t require you to hunt it down and then be present with it. It is already present within you – the task is to simply remove all the walls and noise and ego that stands between you and your own heart. Once you do that, notice how a sense of peace, calm, and tranquility flows into the moment.
To imagine that the mind and the heart are separate is a form of spiritual bondage with implications in both the physical and metaphysical worlds.
Liberating love in your life relies upon you liberating your notions of the heart and the brain simply being parts of a machine that has no soul center or love center.
Be still my heart” is an expression used when something is too much for one to bear, causing one’s heartbeat to accelerate out of control. In recent times, the term has devolved as a form of sarcasm to imply something is mundane or banal. We can’t allow the pessimism and hubris of our time to jaundice the beautiful truth behind this saying. The human heart is so much more than a glorious pump; it is also a remarkable “still” that refines both the good and bad times of our lives, converting the magic of these fleeting moments into timeless incandescence and illumination.
There is no toxin powerful enough to defeat love. Love is the ultimate detox.
Entertain the idea of ‘optimalness’ in your heart as well as in your pursuit of health. Truly sustainable health begins with a loving relationship to the self. An optimal state of loving and health isn’t about achieving or being in a ‘perfect’ state. It is more like a state of perfecting or polishing the imperfections (which make you perfect!). It is casting out ideas of the polarizing concepts of perfection or imperfection entirely and embracing all of your uniqueness without judgment. It is embracing your intentions and taking positive actions. It is a verb not a noun. It is the journey versus the destination point…because you are already ‘there’ – always here – in this present moment, in this body, and doing the best you can.
