“You have to go past the imagined image of Jesus. Such an image of one’s god becomes a final obstruction, one’s ultimate barrier. You hold on to your own ideology, your own little manner of thinking, and when a larger experience of God approaches, an experience greater than you are prepared to receive, you take flight from it by clinging to the image in your mind. This is known as preserving the faith.” —Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

No taking flight or preserving the faith here. Throw it all out I say! Or at least move beyond… transcend.

No easy avenues to this Cafe. You won’t find it on the boulevard with happy nibbling and sipping crowds out front basking in the sun. That is, it ain’t on every street corner… and yet, paradoxically—poetically—it is! …If you succeed in opening your heart to it.

And the tea here is to die for.

All is one, and what is that one?

… Life, of course. That which is flowing through us.

We’ve had enough of looking beyond, casting our minds towards who-knows-where. We’ve had enough of ‘Sacred Books’ beguiling us from another age. We’ve had enough of ‘professors’ exhorting us to learn precisely what they laboriously crammed into their heads. Where has it gotten us? Where is it getting us?

It’s been right here all along. The ever living NOW.

Too simple. But true.

Call it Zen, call it anything you want, and then forget the words and focus on the unnameable Flow that courses through every living being and animates them to grow, to move on to the next generation, to absorb, to act, and in our case, to exult and despair and feel!

Damn, everything I seem to write these days morphs into a celebration. And yet, why not? What else is there?

Are we up to the task of Life or not? Should we whine and complain that things are not going our way?—this is our way! Right here and right now! I’m writing this right now and you whoever you are are reading it. This is my way and that is your way, and what beautiful ways they are!

Those are the only sacred ways there are, my way and your way.

The tea’s pretty good here, isn’t it?