A Simple Beauty...

                                                   A Welcoming Home...

There is a simple beauty to a welcoming home... "Home" is a sort of "workshop" for learning what it means to "live" -- and to do that living in relationship with a community. While lifestyle fashions change -- not often enough for advertisers and big business! -- a welcoming home should aim for an environment that concerns itself with essentials: bareness perhaps reflects a certain monastic discipline: but "home" normally means the occasion of children: as such, an "ordered chaos" is part of the essential. Color, games, plants, pets, and books cultivate the essential... Here, in this home, the Divine Presence is not separate from gathered dust balls of dog hair, soup cooking on the stove, music on the radio, and the humble bliss of good conversation... 

Simple living is a closer opposite to poverty than is gaudy wealth. Simple living is the epitome of good taste: if it ain't tasty, then who the hell is doing the cooking? Good taste recognizes the beauty in "things": things such as photographs of contemporary heroes and saints, like Dorothy Day, Nelson Mandela, Amma, and Ram Dass serve as inspirational models for children and adults both. An altar looking out a west-facing window, if such window exists, is another essential: perhaps adorned with a figurine of an ancient Goddess, perhaps with icons of Yeshua the Poet of Nazareth, the Little Brown Lady of Guadalupe, St. Francis and St. Hildegard, or other personal / family favorites, along with a smattering of special found rocks, wood, and potted plants... A welcoming simple beauty inevitably leads to contemplative moments: for simple living is a sacrament of the Divine Beloved: always present... 

Our vision is steadily focused in an environment of a welcoming home. The members and guests of this household might steadily awaken to their living radiance: "what if?" is the first step in transformation... inevitably followed by "why not?"... A welcoming home has within its very walls the seeds of artful possibilities: beauty and kindness are the growing plants -- the vigorous vines -- in the souls that are in the care of this home... The inexpressible speaks volumes in the welcoming home...

The location of the walls of a welcoming home are not as important as the removal of the walls bordering the hearts of those who live there. Is this welcoming home out in the country? Is it in a little town, or in a big city? The location is incidental if those who live there are living in remembrance of the Divine Beloved who is as near as their in-and-out-flowing-breath... A living spirituality sees no separation in the secular and the sacred: this "no separation" makes the family table an altar: this "no separation" makes the sexual a mirror of the cosmic bliss: this "no separation" becomes the simple living declaration of a world and universe pregnant with the Divine... Finally, a welcoming home, becomes for each member a little school of love, where the daily curriculum is love, where the homework is love, and where there is neither a "pass" nor a "fail", but a simple celebration of "Ah..." All of this, and more, is in the simple beauty of a welcoming home...