The various odometers, or blogometers, on Melting-Pot Dharma seem to be in sync. Several are hitting milestone numbers around the same time. Today, my 5,000th reader paid a visit, and I received my 1,000th like. Within the next week or so, I’ll reach 10,000 page views and 200 posts.

To recap the history of Melting-Pot Dharma, I started a blog called Mel’s Mouth in 2010 but largely ignored it after publishing a half dozen or so posts. Then, last September, less than six months ago, I revived it and began blogging daily. The more I wrote, the more I understood why I was writing — for my own spiritual wholeness, and to help others find theirs. So, thanks to a phrase I heard from Lama Surya Das, I gave the blog its current name.

As I approach my 70th birthday, I know this is my mission for the rest of my working life — writing, teaching, speaking to help people heal spiritually. Nudging me along with my mission has been the spirit of my son, Thomas Harkrader Pine, who died at the age of 29 three months before I revived the blog. To borrow from the language of Jackson Browne’s song below, I am throwing Thomas’s seeds as well as my own.

Thomas’s death launched me on a spiritual quest, which I thought would focus on my religious community, Unitarian Universalism. I knew that UUism was missing something and blogged about that here and here. But my spiritual home is Buddhism. I found myself writing about progressive ways to follow the dharma and progressive approaches to Christianity, Judaism and Islam as well as Eastern religions.

As a contrarian with eclectic tastes, it took me 40 or 50 years to find a Buddhist home and teacher I’m fully comfortable with, but I did a month and a half ago. They are Dzogchen and Lama Surya Das. They teach that we already have perfect Buddha-hood within us and need only wake up to that reality. But Dzogchen is non-sectarian, recognizing that other practices also lead to spiritual wholeness, or enlightenment.

So stay tuned for more on Dzogchen and Lama Surya as well as other Buddhist disciplines and progressive approaches to Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and spirituality in general. I’m working on a book, my first under my own name, and welcome the opportunity to give sermons and dharma talks, lead meditations, whatever I can do to spread spiritual healing. Just send an email from the Contact Mel page.

If you don’t already subscribe to my blog, click on the Follow button toward the bottom of this page. And anytime you’d like to share a reaction to one of my posts, leave a comment. Some discussions in the Comments section have led to ideas for new posts.

I clasp my hands and bow to the Buddha reading this now.

— Mel Pine (Fearless Lotus)

Copyright 2016 © Mel Harkrader Pine