Glory In The Highest
Thousands of things go right for you every day, beginning the moment you wake up. Through some magic you don’t fully understand, you’re still breathing and your heart is beating, even though you’ve been unconscious for many hours. The air is a mix of gases that’s just right for your body’s needs, as it was before you fell asleep.
You can see! Light of many colors floods into your eyes, registered by nerves that took God or evolution or some process millions of years to perfect.
The interesting gift of these vivid hues is furthermore made possible by an unimaginably immense globe of fire, the sun, which continually detonates nuclear explosions in order to convert its own body into light and heat and energy for your personal use.
Your hands work wonderfully well. Your heart circulates your blood all the way out to replenish the energy of the muscles and nerves in your fingers and palms and wrists. And after your blood has delivered its blessings, it finds its way back to your heart to be refreshed. This wondrous mystery recurs over and over again without stopping every minute of your life.
You can smell intoxicating aromas. You can hear provocative and soothing sounds. You can taste a thousand different tastes. How is any of this possible? You can think thoughts any time you want — big, wide, colorful thoughts or tiny dark burrowing thoughts. You can revel and wallow in great oceans of emotion. What colossal secret intelligence or improbable series of fabulous accidents conspired to bestow these superpowers upon you?
Language is another stupendous marvel. Millions of souls have cooperated intricately for untold centuries to cultivate a system of communication that you understand very well. Your ability to speak and read and write makes you feel strong and dynamic. It connects you with the world. It allows you to indulge in one of your greatest pleasures, which is to hear and tell stories.
Maybe this is the best gift of all: You have a staggeringly potent creative tool: your imagination. You use it to create mental pictures of things that don’t exist yet and that you want to bring into being. Your imagination is the engine of your destiny, the catalyst with which you design your future.
Or maybe this is the best gift of all: You know that you are you. You are exultantly and extravagantly aware that you are alive and conscious and awake and unique. You have a million different feelings and fantasies about what it means to be you.
Do you remember when you were born? It was a difficult miracle that involved many people who worked very hard on your behalf. No less amazing is the fact that you have continued to grow ever since then, with new cells being born within you all the time to replace the old cells that are dying.
At this very moment, there are 50 trillion cells in your body, and each of them is really a sentient being in its own right. They all act together as a community, blessing you with their astonishing collaboration. It’s just like magic.
Everywhere you look: glory
Every step you take: glory
Every breath you take: glory glory
Soaring roaring uproarious glory
is our story
This succulent burst of glory has been brought to you by the imaginary lightning bolts you can shoot out the ends of your fingers any time you want to.
“Glory in the Highest” uses material from a much longer piece called “Glory in the Highest” in the book PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia. The longer piece can be found online in three parts:
Read More by Rob Brezsny
World Kiss
The world is young, your soul is free,
and you are finally ready
to fall in love again and again
every day and every way.
So please feel free to fall in love
with this perfect moment
and this perfect place
with these perfect feelings
and all these perfect faces.
I love you
I love me
I love you and me together
I love us
I love them
I love us and them together
All of creation is alive and conscious, and all of creation deserves our burning, churning, yearning love. All of it. Not just the people and creatures and things that we personally find beautiful and helpful and interesting. But everything. All of creation.
If we want to become the gorgeous geniuses we were born to be, if we want to give back as many blessings as we are given, we’ve got to be in love with every single part of the Goddess’s extravagant masterpiece.
And so we can’t possibly be mere heterosexuals. We can’t possibly be mere homosexuals or bisexuals.
If we want to commune with the world the way the Goddess does, we’ve got to be Pantheosexuals — we’ve got to be experts in the art of Polymorphous Perverse Omnidirectional Goddess Diddling. Anything less is a lie, an obscene limitation.
With this in mind, I invite you to perform the ritual of the World Kiss. To do the World Kiss, conjure up your most expansive feeling of tenderness — like what you might experience when you’re infatuated with a new lover or when you gaze into the eyes of your new-born baby for the first time — and then blow kisses to all of creation.
Blow kisses to the oak trees and sparrows and elephants and weeds. Blow kisses to the wind and rain and rocks and machines. Blow kisses to the gardens and jails, the cars and the toys. the politicians and saints, to the girls and the boys and every gender in between.
And with each World Kiss you bestow, keep uppermost in your emotions a mood of irreverent adoration and horny compassion. And remember that it’s not enough simply to perform the outer gesture; you’ve got to have a heart-on in each of your seven chakras.
I love you
I love me
I love you and me together
I love us
I love them
I love us and them together
Rilke said that
“for one human being to love another
is the most difficult task.
It’s the work for which all other work is mere preparation.”
Teillard de Chardin said:
“Some day after we have mastered the winds, the waves and gravity, we will harness for God the energies of love; and then for a second time in the history of the world, humans will have discovered fire.”
Leo Tolstoy said:
“Everything I understand, I understand only because I love.”
Pascal said:
“If you do not love too much, you do not love enough.”
Emily Dickinson said:
“Until you have loved, you cannot become yourself.”
You and I say:
Because we love
Ruby-throated hummingbirds sip from plum flowers
and the moon sings its silver fragrance
to the swans and volcanoes and fields of wheat
Because we love
Wild grapevines coil around the roots of the mountain
and mangoes ripen in the smoke of forest fires
Because we love
Everything alive swims in an eternal river
that flows through our dreams all night long
I love you
I love me
I love you and me together
I love us
I love them
I love us and them together
I’m blowing World Kisses to you right now, and to everyone you love and to everyone you hate. I’m blowing World Kisses to all the convenience store clerks in the world. I’m blowing world kisses to the Norwegian widower working on an oil rig off the coast of Nigeria and to the weaver playing cards with her nine-year-old granddaughter in a bus station in San Salvador.
I’m blowing World Kisses to all the ravens in Ontario, and to the tornado rolling along the eastern coast of the Black Sea, and to the 15-year-old tractor rusting in a junkyard in Montevideo, Uruguay.
I’m blowing World Kisses to the woman who broke my heart, and to the friend who betrayed my trust, and to the rich old white male politicians in Washington who hate everything I stand for.
I’m not afraid of running out of love. The more love I give, the more love I have to give.
On you and me and all of everything, I bestow my ripest blessings, and hereby declare that since my atoms and your atoms were ripped asunder at the Big Bang, I have fantasized of our rapturous reunion.
World Kiss is brought to you by the ecstatic state of mind that the poet Daniel Ladinsky enjoyed when he said,
“One regret, dear world,
that I am determined not to have
when I am lying on my death bed
is that I did not kiss you enough!”
I love you
I love me
I love you and me together
I love us
I love them
I love us and them together
Click Here To Read Writing #2
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BIO
Rob Brezsny is an aspiring master of curiosity, perpetrator of sacred uproar, and founder of the Beauty and Truth Lab. He writes “Free Will Astrology,” a syndicated weekly column that appears in over a hundred other publications and on the Web.
His next book will be published late this summer. It’s called Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How All of Creation Is Conspiring To Shower You with Blessings.
As much a storyteller and prophet as astrologer, Brezsny brings a literate, myth-savvy perspective to his work. When Utne Reader named him a “Culture Hero”, it observed: “With a blend of spontaneous poetry, feisty politics, and fanciful put-on, Brezsny breathes new life into the tabloid mummy of zodiac advice columns.”
In its profile of Brezsny, the New York Times quoted a reader who compared his writing to that of the novelist Tom Robbins. The horoscopes “are like little valentines, buoyant and spilling over with mischievousness. They’re a soul prognosis.”
The world is young, your soul is free,
and you are finally ready
to fall in love again and again
every day and every way.
So please feel free to fall in love
with this perfect moment
and this perfect place
with these perfect feelings
and all these perfect faces.
I love you
I love me
I love you and me together
I love us
I love them
I love us and them together
All of creation is alive and conscious, and all of creation deserves our burning, churning, yearning love. All of it. Not just the people and creatures and things that we personally find beautiful and helpful and interesting. But everything. All of creation.
If we want to become the gorgeous geniuses we were born to be, if we want to give back as many blessings as we are given, we’ve got to be in love with every single part of the Goddess’s extravagant masterpiece.
And so we can’t possibly be mere heterosexuals. We can’t possibly be mere homosexuals or bisexuals.
If we want to commune with the world the way the Goddess does, we’ve got to be Pantheosexuals — we’ve got to be experts in the art of Polymorphous Perverse Omnidirectional Goddess Diddling. Anything less is a lie, an obscene limitation.
With this in mind, I invite you to perform the ritual of the World Kiss. To do the World Kiss, conjure up your most expansive feeling of tenderness — like what you might experience when you’re infatuated with a new lover or when you gaze into the eyes of your new-born baby for the first time — and then blow kisses to all of creation.
Blow kisses to the oak trees and sparrows and elephants and weeds. Blow kisses to the wind and rain and rocks and machines. Blow kisses to the gardens and jails, the cars and the toys. the politicians and saints, to the girls and the boys and every gender in between.
And with each World Kiss you bestow, keep uppermost in your emotions a mood of irreverent adoration and horny compassion. And remember that it’s not enough simply to perform the outer gesture; you’ve got to have a heart-on in each of your seven chakras.
I love you
I love me
I love you and me together
I love us
I love them
I love us and them together
Rilke said that
“for one human being to love another
is the most difficult task.
It’s the work for which all other work is mere preparation.”
Teillard de Chardin said:
“Some day after we have mastered the winds, the waves and gravity, we will harness for God the energies of love; and then for a second time in the history of the world, humans will have discovered fire.”
Leo Tolstoy said:
“Everything I understand, I understand only because I love.”
Pascal said:
“If you do not love too much, you do not love enough.”
Emily Dickinson said:
“Until you have loved, you cannot become yourself.”
You and I say:
Because we love
Ruby-throated hummingbirds sip from plum flowers
and the moon sings its silver fragrance
to the swans and volcanoes and fields of wheat
Because we love
Wild grapevines coil around the roots of the mountain
and mangoes ripen in the smoke of forest fires
Because we love
Everything alive swims in an eternal river
that flows through our dreams all night long
I love you
I love me
I love you and me together
I love us
I love them
I love us and them together
I’m blowing World Kisses to you right now, and to everyone you love and to everyone you hate. I’m blowing World Kisses to all the convenience store clerks in the world. I’m blowing world kisses to the Norwegian widower working on an oil rig off the coast of Nigeria and to the weaver playing cards with her nine-year-old granddaughter in a bus station in San Salvador.
I’m blowing World Kisses to all the ravens in Ontario, and to the tornado rolling along the eastern coast of the Black Sea, and to the 15-year-old tractor rusting in a junkyard in Montevideo, Uruguay.
I’m blowing World Kisses to the woman who broke my heart, and to the friend who betrayed my trust, and to the rich old white male politicians in Washington who hate everything I stand for.
I’m not afraid of running out of love. The more love I give, the more love I have to give.
On you and me and all of everything, I bestow my ripest blessings, and hereby declare that since my atoms and your atoms were ripped asunder at the Big Bang, I have fantasized of our rapturous reunion.
World Kiss is brought to you by the ecstatic state of mind that the poet Daniel Ladinsky enjoyed when he said,
“One regret, dear world,
that I am determined not to have
when I am lying on my death bed
is that I did not kiss you enough!”
I love you
I love me
I love you and me together
I love us
I love them
I love us and them together
BIO
Rob Brezsny is an aspiring master of curiosity, perpetrator of sacred uproar, and founder of the Beauty and Truth Lab. He writes “Free Will Astrology,” a syndicated weekly column that appears in over a hundred other publications and on the Web.
His next book will be published late this summer. It’s called Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How All of Creation Is Conspiring To Shower You with Blessings.
As much a storyteller and prophet as astrologer, Brezsny brings a literate, myth-savvy perspective to his work. When Utne Reader named him a “Culture Hero”, it observed: “With a blend of spontaneous poetry, feisty politics, and fanciful put-on, Brezsny breathes new life into the tabloid mummy of zodiac advice columns.”
In its profile of Brezsny, the New York Times quoted a reader who compared his writing to that of the novelist Tom Robbins. The horoscopes “are like little valentines, buoyant and spilling over with mischievousness. They’re a soul prognosis.”