Work is love made manifest.

I read that years ago, and I loved it. It sounded wonderful. It sounded, well, it sounded me, the way I wished my me could sound. I hadn't a clue about how to experience what it could mean.

We manifest in our lives what's going on in our heads. When our thoughts are jumbled and chaotic the way mine were for years, our lives are jumbled and chaotic. Nothing works satisfactorily.

When our thoughts are filled with confusion and unasked, unanswerable questions, it's all too easy to reach out and blame someone.

Society or some segment of it will do as a target of our blame. People closest to us are particularly satisfactory blamees, because we can get a rise out of them. If our loved ones refuse to accept the blame, we can usually still manage to justify our sense of frustration and futility by using their refusal in our blaming game.

When we're caught up in this game, what we can't understand is that if there is any fault, it can only be ours in finding fault.

When we persist in the blaming pattern, we lose our ability to focus clearly and deal effectively with our own selves and our own lives. We can't see ourselves with any kind of objectivity when we persist in looking through the smoke and shrapnel of others' faults, or the intoxication and self-indulgence of blaming and pitying ourselves.

No matter how we arrived at our thinking patterns (and laying blame is a particularly virulent pattern of thought that can devastate most of us) our lives manifest our own thinking, not anybody else's. We can only start to create patterns of thinking that work to create harmony and fulfilment when we accept our own responsibility for choosing to continue entertaining the thoughts we do.

When we accept our own responsibility for the thoughts we habitually entertain, we can start to clear out the chaos of resentments and unworkable concepts of how the world should be.

Work isn't only what we do to produce a pay check. Any time directed at producing money is merely a part of our work: our real work can be to appreciate our whole life, should we choose to seek wholeness.

Creating our lives can be our true work. Shaping our thoughts and our mental climate to produce harmony and fulfilment, to be responsive and flexible, to be appropriate and effective: this can be our work.

This work is our real wealth, our love made manifest.