David's Desk is my opportunity to share thoughts and tools for the spiritual journey. These letters are my personal insights and opinions and do not necessarily reflect the sentiments or thoughts of any other person in Lorian or of Lorian as a whole. If you wish to share this letter with others, please feel free to do so; however, the material is ©2023 by David Spangler
Sweet Seventeen
It’s amazing for me to think of it, but with this David’s Desk, I celebrate seventeen years of writing these essays every month. I had no idea when I started that it would last this long. The longevity of David’s Desk is largely due to you, my faithful reader, and the support you have given over the past sixteen years.
This experiment in writing a monthly essay began in 2006. That seems like forever ago. George Bush was President, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had been going for five years, destined, though no one knew it then, to last another fifteen years. This conflict in the Middle East became America’s longest war.
In the spring of 2006, Twitter was launched. At the time, a friend of mine who was familiar with social media told me that it would become the biggest thing on the Internet, changing in many ways how we communicated with each other. He was right. But in his positive visions of what this new medium could offer, he never envisioned the proliferation of Twitter trolls, the spread of tweet-fueled conspiracy theories, nor government by tweet during Trump’s Presidency.
Sandwiched between 2005, when hurricane Katrina devastated both the city of New Orleans and the Bush Presidency, and 2007, when the first manifestations appeared of the subprime mortgage financial crisis that a year later would explode into the worse economic downturn since the Great Depression, 2006 was a relatively calm year. But it seemed to me that the time was appropriate to launch an experiment in writing what I hoped and intended would be essays of empowerment.
As it says at the top, “David’s Desk is my opportunity to share thoughts and tools for the spiritual journey.” But behind these thoughts and tools has always been a conviction that each of us is a sacred individual. We are each an agent through which sacredness and blessing can emerge into our world. We need to remind each other of this because it’s easy to forget. So many voices in our world tell us just the opposite. I wanted David’s Desk to be such a reminder. I still do.
Our spiritual nature and the resources we have within ourselves are always there no matter what is happening in the world. For this reason, I have made a point of not trying to “follow the news” in these essays; I have had no desire to join the “commentariat.” There are many excellent people, more knowledgeable than I, offering such commentary on the happenings of the day (and of course, many other people who know little or nothing but don’t let that stop them from stating with certainty that “this is the way it is). I did not, and do not, feel that is my role. What I have wished to give witness to is our sacred nature and the spiritual power of our incarnations. This is where our power lies; this is where our ability to heal what is broken and to create what is empowering comes from. As I said in my very first David’s Desk, there are “no Muggles here.” We are all extraordinary, all magicians of the soul, capable of amazing feats of transformation through our innate power to love. We just need to be reminded of this fact.
As I began the eighteenth year of writing these “Desks,” I intend to keep on reminding you, and myself as well. We are, after all, partners in this enterprise of world transformation.
Thank you for letting me be your partner for the past seventeen years.
An Experiment
One of the advantages of David’s Desk being digital is that I can do things I couldn’t if it were printed. My Lorian colleague and friend, James Tousignant, and I do podcasts together. He thought it might be interesting to you, my Reader, if he and I were to have a discussion around the theme of that month’s essay and then add the audio at the end. That way, you could both read my thoughts for that month and also listen to me talk about them with James. So, without further ado, here is this month’s conversation. I hope you enjoy it and the added dimension it brings to David’s Desk