"If, by God's grace, you have learned to love God, all things, including hardships, testings, pressure, difficulty, disaster, danger and death will work for your good."
-- Romans 8:28, quoted in Coal or Diamonds?

Joie Plaisir Eibr is a place composed of everything immaterial but real, like emotion and imagination, creativity and caring, intelligence and thought, beauty and splendor, humor and mystery, character and devotion, prayer and panoply, originality and invention, history and principle, symbolism and vision, awe and wonder, erudtion and enchantment, brilliance and abstract structural form, meaning and analogy, gentleness and gentility, premonition and prophecy, the concepts of zero and infinity, alphabets and hieroglyphics, freedom and God; the saints and our famous forebearers, all the great past heroes and heroines and religious leaders, the apostles and Biblical prophets, emperors and queens, kings and empresses; lands perhaps mythical like Atlantis and Camelot, places that used to exist like "The Garden of Eden" in the Shenandoah Valley's Burner's Bottom now "paved and turned into a parking lot" and Minoan reign on the isle of Crete; Magi and clowns, mythical figures like the Amazons and Sirens; all the water and air craft, like chariots and tall ships, that have ever been invented, with waters and waterfalls of translucent aquamarine meshed into royal purples cascading and foaming, floating and diving with variously sized, shaped and designed specks of gold, like snowflakes shimmering; possible artifacts like The Shroud of Turin, Excalibur and The Holy Grail; the gods and goddesses of Hinduism, the Mayans and Incas and many others now generally unknown or ignored; gourmet delicacies from ethnicities everywhere throughout the eons and liquours of exotic fruits, nuts, spices and herbs, many now extinct and only heard of by rumor or literature; caves of cut crystal and icicle caverns with shale angling down toward the center of Joie Plaisir Eibr; the poems of Sappho and other art and science known but lost on earth, like word-of-mouth-and-hand folk tales and tunes, and storytelling epics; flying dragons, Eros, and the mermaids, and textures and textiles since they were first discovered and made; monks and ninjas, belly dancers and whirling dervishes, and all the species that have ever existed anywhere; soaring angels and crawling, digging demons embodied, our ancestors and all the dead children and babies; the beginning and ending of time and creation stories from various nations and tribes; memories of our families and friends, ghosts and apparitions, spirit guides and familiars, all the usually unnamed and unknown peoples that ever lived, and do now, reknowned philosophers and artists; the colors of the spectrum our eyes aren't configured to see and wavelengths beyond our hearing capabilities, the visible fracture and fusion of electrons in birthing and dying suns; thunder, lightning, hail and rain personified; all the chemical elements arrayed, dancing and recombining differently to the music of the universe and its motion through The Void; deathless and lifeless, extant and non-existent, embodied and evanescent in its resolution of earthly dualities, a place of the heart and mind enspirited and inspired, where there's darkness and light but you can't tell day from night; beyond easy knowing or telling or settling in to, but there where the earth meets the sky and the stars the moon; a destination of laughter and smiles so shiningly sublime you have to close your eyes sometimes, but it's still there, blinking in the distance and beckoning, "Come here. Come here. Don't be afraid of abandoning what you've known before. Come here, where you'll be safe in a love all-encompassing, uncritical and accepting of everything you are and ever have been." It's over the rainbow -- on the other side of now and today --a place of the spirit and the mind that you can visit anytime. There's no such thing as sin or illness in Joie Plaisir Eibr. And it doesn't matter how you look either. It's made up of all the precious and semi-precious gems, minerals and agates with an atmosphere of flourescing and waving gases, fiery plumes ignited by their passings and collisions, clouds of stardust sparkling, and the Sun of God -- a halo, a sacred hologram --beaming. If I can find it, and others too, so can you.

Selah.

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"Home -- that blessed word, which opens to the human heart the most perfect glimpse of Heaven."
-- Lydia M. Child (1802-1880), abolishionist, activitist, novelist, journalist, and poet who wrote extensively on justice issues for Native Americans, African Americans, and women

"Our life is frittered away by detail.... Simplify, simplify."
-- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), writer, dissenter, transcendentalist jailed for tax-resistance to the Mexican-American War and author of Civil Disobedience, arguing that conscience should be one's ultimate guiding light and influencing Gandhi and King

Meditations/prayers from Silent Unity's 2008 On Sacred Ground calendar:
"I am always in the presence of God, the presence of peace."
"The abundance of God is everywhere present and flows to me in fulfilling ways."
"I have instant access to the mind of God, and I am divinely directed in all I do."
"I am safe and secure in the presence of God."
"Through the life of God within, I am strengthened and renewed."
"With the love of God in my heart, I radiate peace to the world."

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