Before My Last Breath

I was speaking with one of my new (favorite) clients the other day. She was asking how my son Nick was doing. I was explaining how wonderful it was to have him home after spending two years in Italy. She could sense and feel my enthusiasm and love while talking about Nick. She then offered how some years back her grown children were living in close proximity to her and her husband and how happy she was about that. She then said, “Isn’t it wonderful when the stars align?” That got me to thinking about that feeling. The other night Megs and I were sitting at the dinner table having a meal with my mom, Nick, and Bodhi. I looked around and felt this deep satisfaction seeing the ones I love so dearly gathered together in one room sharing space and time and food together. I never had quite experienced that sensation. It was so special and warming. That’s what my client meant by the stars aligning (which she conveyed as much energetically as verbally). It is often a rare thing to h...

Aries March 2001 For some time I've had a vision for an initiation ritual called Self-Betrothal, or a wedding to oneself. It seems often that we seek out highly committed relationships in an effort to complete ourselves, when we really need to do this completion work on our own, though surely with the support of friends. Before such a joining to oneself, ideally there would be a time of preparation, perhaps a year akin to engagement, involving vision questing, counseling and learning life skills, culminating in a rite-of-passage in which a person essentially marries himself or herself in a ceremony attended by their community. The "ego" and "spirit" would be joined as one entity; the "self" and "higher self" would, through ritual and learning, be brought into one awareness. My idea may be some time from manifesting, but for you, this is a powerful time of joining to yourself, of allowing what is above, what is below and what is at the center ...

Oh I am feeling blah blah blah and have nothing to say but I'm SO tired of seeing the last blog stare me in the face every time I open my website. I decided it would be fun to open the folder on my computer called Writings & Ramblings and see what I discovered. It's a major copout but so what? It's my party and I can cry if I want to. Here's what I uncovered and it instantly took me back to that moment in time where Life leaned down and patted me on the head and said, "good boy". And the rest my friends is history... Well dear friends, it’s the year 2003 and frankly Miracles still do exist. A wedding is in the works and the two lucky contestants are J. Meghan McChesney and J. Jamie Gilroy. The Universe in all of its infinite wisdom and unending humor conspired to unite these two souls (for better or for worse) in a lovely display of Serendipity. As a testament to what is possible when one shrugs their shoulders and says simply “can a brother catch a...

I’ve been following the news like everyone. The King of Pop is dead. The Dream Angel for boys my age is gone too. The moonwalk is gone. The one piece bathing suit fantasy too. What is it when icons die? How do we cope? Where do we file that info? When a god dies, the demi-gods are filled with angst and fear. The common folk weep when their idol perishes; when great lights are blown out. It doesn’t matter if those lights were freaky, we still are drawn to them, mere moths to their brilliant celebrity… So I’ve been watching Bodhi, my two year old. He is magnificently filled with so much life. He not only is growing fast, but absorbing everything and learning at an accelerated rate too. He is getting to be himself – a little bundle of personality. He is beginning to believe his dream. I love it. But sometimes I look at him and realize he came from nothing. A sperm on its own is unable to create. An egg by itself cannot produce Life. Each depends on the other to merge an...

Editors note: please re-read Part One again. M: But some people would say that that doesn’t sound like real life. J: Of course it doesn’t. What happens in real life? Someone gets cancer and dies. Someone rejects you because your thighs are too big, your nose is too short. It’s all these expectations and judgments. We’ve been conditioned to see that it’s the goal, it’s the end game. It’s what does it look like after the romance. How many people say, “Oh yeah, romance is great but now we are married? Oh, I am married with children. Driver carries no cash, his wife has it all.” You know there are all these little things that support the belief that the romance at some point ends. Everyone wants a fairy tale ending but doesn’t believe it. Or people say, “Oh, that’s just a Hollywood ending. That’s Hollywood. It’s make believe.” Well, guess what? Your whole life is make believe. Why wouldn’t you make believe it in that way? I am with my beloved. Each second that I am wit...

I have been in a bit of a funk recently. Blame the weather. Blame the dog, the toddler, the wife, the job, the economy. Whatever. I found this inspiration for my next blog in a folder on my computer desktop called Writings. Not remembering what it was I opened it. The following conversation was transcribed from a workshop Meg & I gave a few years ago and we were discussing what romance really meant. In reading it over the funk I’ve been in lifted like the fog on the harbor this morning – just burned off from the relentless shine of the sun. Sometimes I need to remind myself of what the hell I’m really doing here. I share part of this transcript with you now. Enjoy. J: Do you see how romance is everywhere in life? Unless you are just are a hardened person, or a criminal, or someone who has been so abused by the dream of the planet that they are cynical. We aren’t looking for cynics. Ok, so they’re cynics. Go enjoy it, have fun with it. I am looking for the romantics of th...

My oldest brother emailed me an article this morning about finding a spiritual teacher. The author of the article studied with Kalu Rimpoche a Tibetan Buddhist lama who passed away in 1989 at the age of 84. He was a very famous guru with many followers. Reading this article that was sent to me kindled memories of my own journey on the Tibetan Buddhist path. The title of this blog was actually said to me by my guru at the time, Sonam T. Kazi. Or “Mr. Kazi” as the majority of his students or Sangha called him. (Sangha: group of followers of a particular teacher and belief system). The exception was a handful of “senior” students who had been with him since his arrival in the United States in the late seventies. They called him Sonam. Anyhow, I had been studying with Mr. Kazi for quite some time. Being a good carpenter and a faithful student I would spend almost every weekend of the year working on his property in upstate New York. After one particularly extensive project was co...