PUT SPIRITUAL PROBLEM SOLVING INTO ACTION

Be an instrument of peace: Recognize that the people who can push your buttons - your wife, children, boss - are your greatest teachers. Give yourself a specific period of time each day to be alone and undisturbed. Stop yourself when you are making your peace dependent on outer circumstances. Get back to nature. Sow love instead of hate: Never take hatred personally. Don't allow the hateful incident to linger in your mind. Make time to join in the life of a child rebelling in anger. Whenever you encounter hate, remind yourself that the person directing that hate outward is feeling hated. Sow pardon where there is injury: Approach any experience of injury with a mind-set of high hopes and possibilities for release from that injury. Immerse yourself in the literature of healing rather than that of evil. Take care of the sick but be indifferent to the illness. Let go - refuse to harbor thoughts of illness. Replace doubt with faith: Practice developing a trust in the unknown. Develop a private prayer. Affirm your faith, not your doubt. Give God the credit. Turn despair to hope: Turn the despair over to God. Don't despair over a particular trend with your children. Visualize whatever situation may be working for them and treat them as if they have already achieved what you thought was in their best interest. Don't let yourself be the sounding board for the sorrowful tales of others. Be persistent in acting as if it is impossible to fail. Bring light to darkness: Practice becoming an appreciator of beauty. Become familiar with the literature of inspiration about those who have overcome darkness in their lives. Keep your thoughts centered on what you want, rather than on what you don't want. Send joy in the face of sadness: Acknowledge your sadness and then let it go. Remind yourself that joy is found in stillness. Know that all problems are a result of feeling separate from God.

HIGH ENERGY THINKING FOR SPIRITUAL PROBLEM SOLVING:

Recognize the availability of a spiritual force. Unplug from the material world and immediately let go of fear, judgment and negativity. Know that you are not alone with your ego, but connected to other people who are available to help you. Be cheerful. See yourself as an observer of your problems rather than a victim. See that answers come from the heart, beyond words and explanations. Stop giving energy to the things you don't believe in. Stay away from negative people. Employ the advice of Mother Teresa of Calcutta: "Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough. But give the world the best you have anyway." See yourself as a spiritual being having a human experience. Realize that true nobility is not about being better than anyone else, but being better than you used to be. Don't feel spiritual, be it!

If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that?

Matthew 5:46

It was a year of brilliant water in Pennsylvania that final summer seven years ago, the sun's quick reprints in my attache case: those students of mist have drenched me with dew, I'm driving away from that widow's house, my eyes open to a dream of drowning. But even when I pass --in Ohio-- the one exit to Calcutta, I don't know I've begun mapping America, the city limits of Evanescence now everywhere. It was a year of brilliant water, Phil, such a cadence of dead seas at each turn: so much refused to breathe in those painted reflections, trapped there in ripples of hills: a woman climbed the steps to Acoma, vanished into the sky. In the ghost towns of Arizona, there were charcoal tribes with desert voices, among their faces always the last speaker of a language. And there was always thirst: a train taking me from Bisbee, that copper landscape with bones, into a twilight with no water. Phil, I never told you where I'd been these years, swearing fidelity to anyone. Now there's only regret: I didn't send you my routes of Evanescence. You never wrote.