It's still cool and rainy in prealpine Italy. The mountaintops are often shrouded in clouds, it rains daily, and there is that wet melancholy feeling. I am ready for a warm sunny day!

These periods between jobs when I am usually in a quiet place are necessary for me, and yet I always feel like I am shirking. Funny thing.

I'm reading a book called “Mountains Beyond Mountains” by Tracy Kidder. I highly recommend it! It's about a man named Paul Farmer, a doctor, medical anthropologist and what I would call a medical activist. The book, and Farmer, are fascinating, inspiring, wrenching, and well worth reading.

The first run of my 8 week class Healing Magic has concluded. Now I am preparing for the second run by doing some rewriting of the materials, making some additions to the reading list, adding a film list, stuff like that. It is scheduled to start June 2 but I think I am going to move that back to August or September. I haven't done much in terms of promotion yet.

I appreciate so much the comments that people have made on this blog. No matter what happens to humanity, all the journeys that we make in becoming more loving, more generous, concerned with more than just ourselves; this learning is a pure goodness in the universe, and it is a privilege to be part of that.

I was just out for a walk and ran into a couple who live in this village. They speak only Italian and I speak little Italian, so communicating has it's challenges, but they were picking roses and the woman gestured and with words telling me they were for a benediction for St. Rita as this is her feast day. I told her that my mother was named Rita and that it is her birthday tomorrow, she would be 80. Then the woman showed me some other roses, St. Rita's roses, some of the only pungent roses I have seen here. It was a very sweet moment, and particularly meaningful for me given some of the memories and grief I've been working with this week. Grazie St. Rita!

Here's some hot news. "Stories from the road" told by yours truly will debut on wbkm.org June 1, 2008 at 8 PM Eastern Time (US). To listen go to http://wbkm.org and click on the flower. If you want to be sure you can listen I suggest going to http://wbkm.org ahead of time to make sure your settings all work. See you on the air on June 1!

Last night I dreamt over and over (waking up, going back to sleep, to the dream) about my mother's murder. I wasn't dreaming of the actual event but of her being missing, finding out she'd been killed, and feeling powerless and enraged. Over and over. I woke up feeling sad and heavy.

I read, a couple of days ago, about a bomb, which came out of Gaza and killed a woman. I thought about how tragic that was, and all the other tragedies, the daily deaths in Gaza, all equally tragic. I wrote to a friend who lives in Israel, what will it take for people to learn? Her response, that we are learning and that love is the answer, rings true. I believe it.

What is belief? A mental construct of reality, a lens through which to perceive, a set of guidelines that we use to determine trajectory and behavior. Belief, as a human activity, is and has been the basis of our species' path for thousands of years, whether we call it religion or ideology. Now we are on the brink of self-destruction. Through our heedless actions we bring about the daily extinction of life forms on earth, climate change continues to accelerate, cultures clash and a minority ruling elite continue to amass resources at the expense of the non-elite majority.

I travel and teach love, joy, personal empowerment, connection with spirit and self, belongingness. I believe in all of it. I feel good when I teach it. I see others feel good when they work with these ways.

Here in this quiet valley, in this stone village which has stood for hundreds of years where people have been growing food, making olive oil and wine and cheese, where the church bells ring hourly and birds sing, flowers bloom, people are born, live, die; here in this place I find myself. Through the amazing technology of internet and wireless microwave transmission I read articles, peruse newspapers, dialogue with friends.

Somehow there is a space in the world that I fill. I touch some lives, and hopefully they are enriched by this touching, and they touch my life too. Sometimes the love and kindness blow my mind. Sometimes I encounter tightness and scarcity in others, and in myself. I do my best to work it through when I encounter it in myself, to get back to kindness and generosity. When I meet those walls in others I do my best to be compassionate, and to find ways to get/do what I need to when others are not sharing. Sometimes I do this better than other times.

I feel fear about the collective situation, and I feel fear about my personal situation sometimes. Rarely do I find myself immobilized. In my dream last night I felt immobilized, in a bed on the street in Burlington outside if the old Grand Union, people walking by, and I was invisible to them. I knew she'd been killed and I couldn't find her.

The government of Nevis covered up my mother's murder because they didn't want to damage the tourist trade. The government of Nevis, along with the US Consulate, the FBI and the Dade County Coroner, lied about what happened in order to protect their financial interests and political affiliations. How disgusting is that? And yet it is certainly no more heinous than the daily killing, through direct and structural violence, that occur in so many places on this beautiful planet; violence perpetrated by governments and their agencies, by corporate policies and practices, and ultimately by the complacency of regular people who, for whatever reasons, collude in order to maintain the familiar comfortable status quo.

Words like hope, despair, futility, possibility, all crowd my mind and make me wonder, as I face the sun and the infinite sky, about the great mysteries we humans have contemplated for millennia. What are we? Are we spirits in bodies? Are we just biomachines with nervous systems and built-in self-preservation mechanisms? How is it that we can feel and share so deeply and at the same time turn our backs on life itself in order to be comfortable? Are we evolving towards a more fully realized existence or is this a wheel spinning conundrum which we must pass through on our journey to whatever lies beyond the veil of this life?

This post is in response to Shahar's comment from a few days ago.

I think probably everyone has different reasons for getting married. The couples I have married all seem to do it because they want to be married to each other. What that means to them, I cannot say.

I have never been married so it's ironic that I act as priest in wedding ceremonies. The weddings I have done have all been fun and sweet and my intention in doing them is to offer a kind of supportive energetic as the couple takes what is for them an important life step. My job is to priest the ritual as I would any ritual, bringing my best and making a space for the mystery to be experienced. I've been to weddings where people spent tons of money and ones where people spent very little. It is an interesting practice, marrying. I really am not sure why people do it. I do think, though, that if it is something two people want, to marry each other, analyzing it can be useful and can also be useless. If one wants something, does one have to understand it rationally 100%?