Close your eyes for a moment (except don't, because then you couldn't read) and imagine your very center. Imagine it's a tiny dot. Even an infinitely small dot. Smaller than an atom.

And then imagine yourself, that dot, that spark, is going to try out life on earth. You've chosen to live a human life to experience all that's divine in you. You want to experience truth, joy and love, forgiveness and gratitude, pleasure and generosity. You choose to become human.

What do you imagine that you, spark of the divine fire that you are, would like that life to be like? I'm guessing it's not this:

I'd like to spend my day like this: I'll rush out the door, leaving my home and family, and I'll drive for a half-hour or an hour in lots of traffic (that I know is creating toxins), and pass by people who are asking for money for food, people who haven't had a roof over their heads in a while. I'll ignore them, or most of them, and shut myself up in an office for several hours, where I'll breathe the smell of plastic and varnish and laser toner, and I'll talk to some people who make me smile, and some who give me a tummy ache. After hours of this, I'll eat a lunch made by unhappy, underpaid people, out of animals that are farmed cruelly, and that is likely to give me heartburn, a heart attack, or cancer. Then I'll go back to that building for several more hours, after which I'll repeat the half-hour or hour long drive in the other direction, and I'll cook dinner, clean up, speak gruffly to my family, watch some TV and sleep.

Listen to the spark. The tiny spark of divine fire, your soul. What does your soul want?

Collectively, we make even stranger choices. We work together to create a society where people go hungry, people feel desperate enough to steal, hopeless enough to spend their time stoned or drunk, and alone enough to be violent toward one another. We create a society where it's considered perfectly acceptable to send our children to schools where they have to ask to go to the bathroom, where they are exposed to violence, and where they are separated from their families and communities for hours every day. When people do bad things, we think it's reasonable to want to make them suffer. We round them up and lock them in cement buildings with other people who do bad things, and let them hurt each other. Sometimes we lock up people who haven't actually done bad things, but we think that's a small price to pay to make sure we get all the ones who do.

We drive cars and listen to the news tell us about global warming, about starving people, about war and corporate crime, but we ignore that just like we ignore the people we drive past who are asking for our help. We pour things down our drains that we know cause cancer, but we try not to think about it.

When we listen to our souls, we will find those things unthinkable. When we are still, and listen, we will give ourselves the life we came here for, and it will be beautiful.

Have I mentioned the connection between food and love?

I'm in love with the Oregon wild rice I found at the Saturday Market this week here in Eugene.

Here's a news story about how it grows here.

My brown rice has been coming from at least California. This stuff is yummy, and local, and it replaces turf farms! How awesome is that?
 

Now, Americans have a new option for a healthy snack. Diet Coke has introduced Diet Coke Plus, the first "enriched" carbonated beverage ever offered by the world's most famous brand.

Of course, you need calories to live, so consumers must be careful not to attempt to live on Diet Coke alone. "However," says Becky Phlemming, vice president of corporate strategy for con-agra, "there is an easy solution. Wonder Bread has now created a 100% whole grain bread made from our albino wheat, so it's still white as the driven snow."

Stay tuned for more breaking news, including ingredients lists.

P.S. Some folks have told me they're not sure if I'm serious. Well, I *am* serious, in that these products really exist. I'm not serious about them being good for you.  Yuck!

A woman on a list I hang out on asked how to teach her child about abundance while still teaching her to conserve water, for example. The bigger question is, I think, "How do I believe in abundance when there really isn't enough?!"

We're using up finite reserves of oil from the earth. Clean water is truly scarce in some places, and must be imported in others. (Look at Las Vegas, here in the U.S.)  And there isn't enough atmosphere to safely absorb and dilute all the CO2 we're putting in it.

Thinking about how to talk to my own kids about it, I've realized that I believe that there is an abundance, not just of material things, not even primarily of material things, but of things like learning, joy, and adaptation.

We can look at a situation where we have, say, only a little milk in the house, and we want to make pancakes. We may not have "enough" milk to make the batter, and still have some to drink. But we have our minds! We can choose to make something else, choose to trade some of what we have (usually money) for some more milk, make the pancakes without milk and have milk to drink in a glass, or go for a long walk to pick flowers and forget about the pancakes. In the moment, the abundance of energy we have for figuring this stuff out will create answers I can't imagine from where I'm sitting.