This poem is dedicated to and written for Ramya, and was delivered at her memorial on 19 Sept. '11. I've kept it within a small circle, but feel now is the time for it to go free. So too, one day, shall we...
Life
is vast,
shimmering,
as the early morning
ocean, and we toe the foamy
margin, being both here and there,
taking fleeting steps between the worlds.
Humans do not tend towards easy transitions-
In our scurry, we grasp at shreds of time to forestall change
or yearn mournfully for an anticipated moment of sudden renewallittle
else is savored, or becomes amazing, and life in a Universe of eternal flux
is missed, as miles of passing time in well-worn pavement pass beneath our weary feet,
in the struggle of deadlines and lifelines - what delivers us to transition is the sudden realization of it,
(the crashing wave).
It is at the peak moments of our rare and ephemeral dance on Earth that the wisdom of transformation rains down love.
It's the communion of wizened eyes glancing the edges of life, handing out peace as its fearsome edge is dared.
There is great teaching in teetering upon that edge, peering down the chasm of mystery which begat
our names and comes to claim them- we call this death- yet it is little more than a consequence
of the cosmos embodied as you, Ramya, a singular wave upon an infinite ocean, you, passing
through us as a radiant meteoric messenger of something beyond language, saying
"It's all transition- it's all transformation- it's all flux- that's all there is."
The wisdom of transience need not be reserved for the province
of deep, abstract human talk. The wisdom of transience
comes in peach yogurt, an amazing, singular taste
that your tongue may have touched a thousand
times before, but this time, it's truly amazing.
The wisdom of transience comes in sudden
bursts of laughter and the play of cats
when we are expected to mourn.
It is in the whoosh of bright
colors, when all around
we walk lightly
on sorrowful
ashes.
In these
few moments
so much has already
changed among and around us.
In scales impossible to conceive,
the personal and the planetary move
in metamorphic rhythms, a clockwork drama
that will manifest in joy, in pain, in speechless awe
and in the deep great unknowing that we carry in our bundle
of expectations. There is a voice now distant yet distinct imploring
that we be unburdened by this bundle, spilling the contents and to move
unhindered down the spiraling criss-crossing paths of we temporal sojourners.
This voice is now clear in the sparrow's song, the canticles of wind through pine forests,
the chorus of autumnal crickets intoning the mantras of emerging stars, she is altogether beyond.
A body moves into time and out of it, and humans gather at appointed places on the hour to bear witness
to yet another waving of the eternal- yet we all wade in the same sea, playing in the shallows, fearful of the depths.
We are of the deep while we make our stand on the shoreline, and from there, the ocean beckons us again.
All of these words, these elegies, and this person, this man, held the hands of two dying women,
these mothers, this daughter, son, these waves crashing twenty three days apart, stunned
and breathless on the shore this man was bent over in questioning the movement of
time, and waves unabated by human grief continued, his own wave out there too.
Sand passing through fingers, names passing through the pages, this is how
we mark the tides of our lives. One of these countless names offered
another way, "Come," Ramya said, "let me show you something else,
something different from what you carry in your bundle of
expectations, something amazing." Now, we see the
joy of mangoes, steaming tea, the table of friends,
and know, that even as time transforms,
these are the means by which we
measure awe, wonder, and
the call of life. Every seed
sheds its husk, one day
returning to the soil
which yielded to
roots. We love,
this is how we
return. We
dive in,
and is
this
is
how
we live.
Jules, so many times I've wanted to talk to you over the past two days, forgetting for that split second that we can't talk in the same way anymore. I'm missing you terribly, I'm trying to keep my face toward the sun for you and for Dustin, and I'm calling upon all your unconditional support over the past 7 years as guidance through this. It's funny, because we seem so different outwardly, from different worlds, people have a lot of questions about how we became family. Love, I tell them, unconditional love... that's the easiest and most pure answer. You'll find it funny that a few folks have asked if we had a, um, "special" friendship! I laugh, of course it was special, but if folks knew the either of us they'd laugh too. Just because we co-parent and are so close doesn't have to mean something else! I think you'd probably say something like "oh, my stars!," and chuckle 'til we both fell out laughing. People these days, right?
I told you over the past two weeks that you're my rock- and always will be- as we've clung to each other through many storms we're still here for each other, still here for D. That's my comfort right now, my trust, that above all else we are still and always will be family. It's in that steadfastness that I'll move forward, even when the clouds obscure the sun and the sleet stings my eyes, there's no stopping the love that created our family. As D's Dad, as your friend forever, as someone who's learned so much from your heart, I will carry on by the confidence and love you placed in me, transformed me with. Yes, on the outside, we're not your average family; but in our hearts and souls there is no truer family than this... and I have you to thank. Keep in touch, I know you will. I love you!
The 13th of a 12 Poem Cycle, "12 Glass Birds," to be published as a picture book in December 2011. The audio track will be posted soon, and includes audience participation sounds (hands rubbing, to mimic wings flapping)which occurs at the beginning, middle, and end of the piece. Thank you all for your wonderful support!
***
The first flight a bird ever takes
begins with a dare- the edge, these fledgling wings
the secret prayer that instinct was right, that we will know the air
and move with the world without the threat of the rushing ground dashing time to nothing.
The breath you are privileged to take just now once began
with a single chance, a risk taken, and oh lord we hope there was love.
With the procession of days, tiny steps led to arduous moves, points spiraling out of maps,
and without fanfare your young, great achievements shifted to the ordinary, the expected, the waning of surprise.
The last song a bird sings will echo forever, take heed to the ultimate chords;
may these songs be heard and held as true even if they cannot transcend the mundane din.
What’s happening now is already past, yet no bird traces a path across the sky in vain, no useless orbits,
each awkward step forward a kind of glory, every wing-beat a testament, each guiding star a chanting of the infinite.
***
So, what dare will you make this day?
We spend years lingering on the other side of the glass, watching
the passing day and its bodies in motion dancing by without hearing the music-
we keep waiting for a stirring within to lift weary bones into the thick of it, to find it’s midnight again.
Will you chance it all for the sake of the good?
Each second a decision, will you compel this hour to overflow with the holy?
Waiting no more, you plunge forward into as much beauty as you can find, as much justice as you are able, and
though you promise that no storm will thwart your of love of grace, we all must fall and fetter upon the bluntly real Earth.
Why not venture to the edge, and trust the wind to hold us up?
If life can promise little else, it does promise an answer to every challenge, each goading of fate;
we are given no assurances- no sanctuary from harm, no balm for all pains, only the hope of hand-me-down mercy,
with the glimmering expanse of you before me, I test these wings, I fall and glide into wide arcs, timeless upon the thrilling wind.
to emerge,
if only to fall back into the folds of you,
as if i were never cleaved and cast
into this night kept by cicada and thunderclap.
to cross the bridge,
even though we seek to span the very chasms we create
compelled by the eternal story of
returning, of knowing our distance is the same as our proximity.
to set foot on the far shore,
the facade of the foreign slips into the wind as a vagabond dream-
unmoored and loose in the wild currents
no words dare follow, just hold out your hand and catch the blessing rain.
to look back- tracing the original path,
the mist obscures the start-point, the clock chimes muted in the gathering winds,
our little place in the big world is one and the same
it's where we stand do the vista and shadows shift and merge in accord with expectations.
to continue along, i dissipate into the nameless abyss
not ever in fear- only trusting in the strident steps forward comes the truth of all journeys
we never start, and never cease, and there is relief in the knowing
that i never left the creator's firmament, just as you- an arc of light- shall transit forever, light upon light.
The sweet absence of perfection-
Working the Earth, hands are roughened,
The soil will not yield to what I want out of it,
We submit to the wills of the other, collapsed in green and days to come.
In the end, we overuse the word "perfect" as passable for now,
Not the zenith, not the diamond, not the lover.
The fecundity of dirt and its writhing ideas
Will surpass the order of my labor and
The standards I started out with.
This is good. Surprise me.
Overtake my expectation
Of the seed with the
Revelation of the
Hidden blossom.
While locking the office door behind me, feeling as hardened and crispy as a bacon concrete sandwich, I looked up and saw a lone blue heron silently crossing the sky over a half moon. Then, coming home, the clouds we strawberry red, and the lilac bushes were dancing in the street. It was then I remembered that the biggest things in life are often found in the smallest, the things which can be easiest to pass by when our minds are consumed with itself. Exaltation in the holy now through the messengers of creation...
* * *
There is something so affirming
Walking, whistling, in the rain
As the night lights spill over the street
Feeling the punctuation of each drop
A validation permeating the fabric
Of what little separates you
From the utterances of clouds.
* * *
As a boy it was my practice
To walk directionless in the rain
Songs in my head, unfettered to time,
Late getting home but deeper soaked
With the downstream of life, rivers of denim
Which carried me to some creekside, some heart valve,
Where the torrents taught in the language of the skies.
* * *
Now I amble from time to time, forsaking umbrellas
For the very purpose of getting wet, a reminder
That all I know is subject to both current and communion
That each passing minute is as meaningful as each cloud-birth’d drop-
Should I be troubled by the weather, or uplifted in the draft
That carries my little words to the edge of atmospheres
The province of improbable winds…?
* * *
We begin in a brine which churns outside of time
The oceanic experience of not-knowing this-or-that;
We are then as in concordance with the stars
As the seeds are to the falling apple, we are forever bound
To the perpetual happening.
Down through the gutter, down through the estuary we pick up so much.
I found you in the jetsam; we became in orbit of each other through the grace of rain.
* * *
I pulled nebulae over us as blankets
You heaved mountains upon the landscape in the sweat of love
Together we sang a song of improbable colors intertwining
We found ourselves mythic upon the Earth, yet cleaved apart
As the landmarks of memory gave way to landslides
And your touch became as legend as a thousand pages story-
I’ve re-read it, dog-eared, highlighted holy verses as rain pounds the roof.
* * *
Young eyes survey the horizon with surprise
While the skins dashed with boundary lines are ever cautious-
Where did innocence lose its way?
Whence did the woodland trails become roads mandated by obligation?
Somewhere, back there, there are steps to retrace
Which I’m sure will lead to a crossroads
Where the infinitude of love ripples without heed to the tremulous rules of days gone by.
* * *
Tonight, this body crossed the city
As the glow of greatest aspiration shimmered on the road.
Your name passed in rivulets as I dared a soft whistle hymn
And the rhythm of my feet is the same as that of the hopeful unjaded boy.
Some would call this folly; I call it revelation
To carelessly dare the cold, finding writ in symphony of puddle and concrete
A proclamation of goodness in the unsheltered, naked night.
I remember the day when the Berlin Wall fell. I was at home, probably "sick" from school, and had been watching with some vague interest the crumbling of the old East German regime. Then, of course, we had only the fuzzy images from the early days of cable news to herald the first hammer blows to a wall that stood as a symbol of repression and separation for thirty bloody years. The world was still somewhat new to me then, and the movements of people and their governing were seen through iconoclastic, naive eyes. Still, something stirred me deeply.
I remember crying, without the full understanding of why, as the wall fell and the people on either side greeted each other in a profound, ageless joy. There was something about the realization of a higher kind of unity, about the seemingly impossible bested with chisels and masses. Then we had Tienanmen, and the iconic single human stopping the tank on the street. Duvalier fell, and as President Clinton was sworn in on a January day in 1993, I stood amid a crowd of hopeful Haitians in DC chanting with power that the end of the Bush regime would bring the promise of a new era in their country, a place where I learned the pain and grace of deep compassion. Vaclav Havel, a poet-dissident, shook the Czech Republic with words- not weapons- and without a bullet retook Wenceslaus Square where twice in my time I later traversed.
These are some of the revolutions that have gone by, and the kind that relate to shifting the geo-political sands in the ever-turbulent winds of human ideologies. Science has undergone several quieter revolutions, and society as we know it is fundamentally different (for better or worse) than it was on that November day when I stayed home and watched the first of many walls to fall. Today, from a screen in my office, I watched the world change again, and faster than ever before.
This moment could be heralded in as many ways as there are Egyptians. My generation is informed by the uprisings of our day, which began with Perestroika and somehow softly faded into memory as an era of unprecedented comfort and false content wooed the potential of our generation to sleep. Here, through the fierce creativity that comes with the application of our best technologies, the world has been transformed in 18 days. Ingenuity is spreading with a pioneering determination across the planet, strengthening by the knowledge illuminated as thoughts and ideas circumnavigate a smaller globe.
This all comes from the power not at the "top," but right here, with us. As I cried today watching the overflowing euphoria from Tahrir Square, I realized that with the technology before me, and especially the will, I have as much power to change the world as do those brave revolutionaries. The power is already here, all that is needed to activate it is the desire of achieving something more than being bound to the comforts and trifles of our time.
If people power can topple what we once thought were strong dictators, people power can also restore ecologies, rebuild social systems, and renew hope- from small towns to whole empires. This proves that people have the power to change the impossible, if we only make the choice to do something. Today, the choice to transform was made by individual people united, not by a nation drawn with borders and fences and walls.
Today, what we're given is not a moment to remember, but a movement to remind that life on Earth begins and ends with we who are awake to realize it. We can realize that our current moments to be alive coincide with a uneasy balance between global life and death. We can respond to the crisis of our so-called modernity by making a conscious choice of what to uplift, what to reject, in order to reclaim the balance that our world was born from. Egypt, the Berlin Wall, all the uprising and revolts of history and present are symbols of doing something more than just celebrating human potential, it's about actualizing potential.
Where will you make your stand?
Sure, today we witnessed history. But the future demands our participation. Thank you, Egypt, for reminding the rest of the world that we made the world as it is, and we will change it as it will be.
Bird on the Moon . com: 8 years of cosmic something-or-other
So, time keeps on doing its thing and there does not appear to be much in the way of its linear (humbug!) progression. It's been a great eight years, albeit it's much quieter these days, but it's still home.
As with the first "real" post, I'll pause to thank the seven astronauts of Columbia for their service- my first post even unfortunately was to reflect on the disaster.
It's a continued honor to be witness to these times, and thanks to all my dear hangers-on for your support.
To the future (what's the future? When will it get here, anyway?,
jaybird
“We are an old people; we are a new people; we are the same people deeper than before.”
Imagine, for a moment, a bustling cityscape on the banks of a turquoise sea. This place is full of cross-cultural hubbub, travelers of every color and creed converge here, many gods of the regional pantheon compete for the citizens’ attention. The land upon which the city grows is envied by many factions, an object of economic and political desires. There is an expansive harbor, busy with the commerce of ships bearing far-off flags. To enter this city from the sea, there is a toll, yet rather unlike the turnpike shakedowns we’re accustomed to. Rather, the price is paid in whatever books you may have with you, scrolls actually, which are then taken to the city’s library, copied, and returned on your way out. This library became an epicenter of human knowledge, behind its walls all that was known and presumed was vigorously debated, among the shelves toiled the greatest minds of the era. The place is ancient Alexandria, Egypt, the time, 1600 years ago. Scholars and philosophers flocked to Alexandria to study and debate within a vast sandstone complex which housed about one million volumes- of which precious little survived its destruction by the rising voices of extremism and the banners of political conquest. In the last days of Alexandria’s golden age, among the last of the library’s great scholars, Hypatia found herself the target of many. Why? For being a female academic, for one, for being a scientist and rigorous defender of knowledge, for stubbornly standing by the virtues of inquiry over the increasing wailing of religious dogma. She was tortured to death by a man who was later canonized as a saint, and the library was completely obliterated out of fear. Today, the city of Alexandria is once more in upheaval as yet another generation cries out for justice.
“We are an old people; we are a new people; we are the same people deeper than before.”
We are comforted in knowing that the ancient world was at times smarter than current crowded sphere. The Dogon tribe in Mali has passed down in oral tradition for thousands of years that the bright star we call Sirius had a dim orbiting companion star, a fact that was only discovered after modern astronomers ran advanced mathematical calculations.
So here’s our modern world – we’ve advanced our understanding of the Universe far beyond the heretical telescopes of Galileo, beyond the first human footprint on the Moon, beyond the strange microverse of atoms. Yet we remain as stubbornly polarized as ever. While most of us agree on some basic facts - that the Earth is round (any flat Earthers out there?), gravity usually works (no offense to any skilled levitators among us), and the Sun emits light and heat (yes, this hasn’t been the best of winters to prove that one), it seems that we are very good at overlooking other facts, and to abuse our intellect to advance social agendas. That’s where wisdom comes in, to save us from ourselves.
“We are an old people; we are a new people; we are the same people deeper than before.”
I think it’s important to differentiate that wisdom is not knowledge- rather, wisdom is found in the experience of knowledge. Ok - knowing stuff is cool, but doing the stuff you know is even cooler. Of course, you have to want to know stuff, that helps. In wanting to know stuff, you have to know that you don’t know stuff. I know that I don’t know how to fix my hot water heater, and I call somebody who I know knows. It’s what I don’t know that I don’t know that’s interesting, it’s the savage curiosity of the unknown which propels me into the love of knowledge. Something altogether different converts the stuff you know into the wisdom you share. And often, you don’t know your own wisdom – you’re just doing what you know, after all.
“We are an old people; we are a new people; we are the same people deeper than before.”
Imagine consciousness as a creek, a timeless stream which transmits wisdom from person to person, culture to culture, epoch to epoch. We cannot definitively say where the headwaters of this creek begin; in fact, searching for the source of this river is the oldest known human preoccupation. It’s why we’re
gathered together today; to explore the maps of our lives, tracing the tributaries of the soul to the origin, and to the wider bodies of existence, to an ocean of all souls. Like the twigs I tossed into the river as a kid, pretending they were boats voyaging to an undiscovered country, what we learn passes through bends, eddies, and rapids in these metaphorical waters, becoming over time smoothed driftwood. We have scripture; smooth driftwood, which has traveled the thousand year river, coming to us, washing up on the shore, for us to find, ponder, and toss back in. “What is this? A new teaching with authority?” We can see each verse of ancient scripture individually, and marvel at the journey, or we can put them together, to build a temple from these well-traveled words, fitting each fragment of wisdom together until returning to the elements, with a gust of wind, a surging wave.
“If all the trees on earth become pens, and the sea replenished by seven more seas were to supply them with ink, the Words of Allah would not be exhausted in the writing.”
Breathe deeply. Doesn’t the very idea of wisdom thrill you, are you comforted to know that there’s always some wisdom to back you up? As much as I enjoy Chinese food, I can’t say that I’ve been too intellectually or spiritually surprised by most fortune cookies. However, it’s good to be reminded. “Better a hen today
than an egg tomorrow.” OK. “The first and last love is self love.” Alright. “Look, fortune is all around you!” Oh yeah! And that is the easy way. Wisdom can come in weird ways, in head turning moments: “Whoa! What was that?” Some examples: the Buddha’s shortest sermon; one day in his later years, a throng of disciples assembled and were awaiting another transmission of wisdom. Wordlessly, he held aloft a flower, laughed, and left the disciples with jaws agape. “Whoa! What was that?” How about the Greek philosopher Diogenes; his shtick? He’d carry a lamp in
the daytime, saying he was looking for an honest man. He lived in a tub in the middle of a marketplace, enjoyed a diet of onions, and took a lesson from a scurrying little mouse in adaption to change- which went to form the crux of Stoic philosophy. “Whoa! What was that?” Then we have Nasruddin, an 11th century
Groucho Marx of sorts. He was a Sufi teacher who taught by provoking thought in his students in most unconventional ways. One day Nasruddin sat fishing in a bucket of water. A visitor, wishing to be friendly, asked, "How many have you caught?" "You are the ninth" he said. “Whoa! What was that?” Today, we’d question the sanity of Buddha, Diogenes, Nasruddin, and Jesus. “What is this? A new teaching with authority! He gives orders to impure spirits and they obey him.” “Whoa! What was that?” These teachers turned expectation and custom on the ear, teaching that we can be so bold as “to see heaven in a wildflower,” to learn from the least of these, to question the answers, to accept the new and strange as something good. Thought needs provocation in order to bring people to insight, to sculpt wisdom out of the madness of the world. My personal effort at this is my bumper sticker which reads “Honk if you don’t exist.” Honking therefore is a dicey proposition. The mind explodes a little when confronted with the question: to toot, or not to toot.
But, let’s be gut-wrenchingly honest. While I revere wisdom and consider it a virtue, it’s not always a warm and fuzzy mystical thing to talk about, gaining wisdom is not always good times. Why? I think that for whatever reason, our society is more turned on by fear than wisdom. Sometimes, we’ll dress up fear as wisdom to manipulate minds into subservience to a fear-drenched false logic. How can a society endorse a moral wisdom that calls for the avoidance of understanding? Why do we fall for teachings that pompously decree that “there’s only one way?” Because fear is more readily available on the street than wisdom, fear sells, fear reactively rejects the willingness to challenge. Wisdom is the cure to fear; wisdom is stronger than xenophobia, homophobia, classism, gender phobia, racism, fascism, and the sum of society’s willful ignorance. If we choose to stand against fear, it’s not a protest – it’s a call to mindfulness, not arms. Each of us who chooses stand against fear is part of the cure.
Wisdom can be born from times when you’re toeing the
edge of an abyss, soaked in hopelessness. Yet suffering need not be in vain if it’s used transformationally, pivoting off to change course. Think of the prices you’ve paid for your wisdom… broken bones, broken promises, broken families. Work for me sometimes entails being present for a patient reviving from an overdose or suicide attempt. These are the most broken of a person’s days – my job is to get them to believe that it can also be the best day. How can that be? Because that day of reckoning can also be a day of reconciliation, a day of loss can be made a day of love by remembering the goodness that surrounds. Life is stronger and more resilient than we think, it won’t let us go that easily – so we let go, let God. I know this because it’s not just my job. Once, a long time ago, I had to wake up too.
It’s true – I couldn’t stand here in good faith and deny that I’ve ever been an idiot. Quite the contrary, I’ve been graced with an abundance of idiocy, but yet we’re all also graced with chances to transform the gloom of stupid mistakes into pillars of light which guide our souls to understanding. I’m grateful for having been an idiot, for not heeding the wisdom to know better, because the scattered debris of poor choices inspired me to
learn deeply and move forward. So, no regrets for blessings of learning. I believe that we all, ALL, are connected to wisdom, made of wisdom, and are as much a part of the wisdom of the Earth as the scrolls were a part of the Alexandria library. We must therefore take seriously our roles in protecting wisdom, ancient and modern, from abuse. We are at a crossroads where fear could overtake wisdom in this world; yet I have faith that the compelling power of deep knowledge is stronger than the desperate wail of ignorance. We can, and must, seize the day and choose to awaken into the miracle of simply being alive.
“These are the days…”
We can seize the day, but we can also allow the day to seize us, to shake us from complacency, to be reawakened as a student of the infinite in the ever-renewing school of life. We have much to learn, and fortunately for us, the Universe is always ready to teach. The song is “These are Days,” by 10,000 Maniacs. Band…
“These are days you’ll remember. Never before and never since, I promise, will the whole world be warm as this. And don’t you feel it? You’ll know it’s true that you are blessed and lucky. It’s true, that you, are touched by something that will grow and bloom in you.”
“You’ll know it’s true that you are blessed and lucky. You’ll know it’s true that you are touched by something that will grow and bloom in you.” We are all touched – all touching together – the wisdom of Earth, we are bound by the intelligence of atoms, and for a fleeting moment we are touched by a singular burst of time to become a conscious being in a Universe eager to know itself through our eyes. What if we lived each day knowing that just by living, now, we are an expression of a wisdom far deeper than any imaginable mind?
“These are days you’ll remember. When May is rushing over you with desire, to be a part of the miracles you’ll see in every hour. You’ll know it’s true that you are blessed and lucky. It’s true, that you, are touched by something that will grow and bloom in you.”
“God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you.” What if you accepted this not as some far-off awaited emissary of the holy, but what if this were you – being promised to yourself by God? What would happen if you accepted yourself so completely as to bless the wisdom that you’ve earned, even through darkness? Will you accept that you are wise not just because of the lessons you retain, but right down to every cell that pulses life through you, that you in fact serve a wise and holy function with a very specific role? What if…
“These are days! These are the days you might fill with laughter until you break. These days you might feel a shaft of light make its way across your face. And when you do - you’ll know how it was meant to be, see the signs, know their meanings – it’s true – you’ll know how it was meant to be - hear the signs and know they’re speaking to you, to you…”
Listen… there is a teacher, begging your ear to listen. That teacher might be a sunset, it might be a pine tree, it might be a diagnosis, it might be a terrible mistake. It might be what you already know. Be open to these strange teachers. Be not afraid, and protect the bastions of what you hold dear from anger and fear. Remember, you emerged from a world made of wisdom,
so don’t be shy about what you know deeply- it’s who you are.
“You’ll know it’s true that you are blessed and lucky. It’s true, that you, are touched by something that will grow and bloom in you.”
We are an old people; we are a new people; we are the same people, deeper than before. You are touched by something - grow and bloom – and remember that you are downstream on the river of life, opening to wider expanses every day – journey without end, deeper than before, in absolute communion with infinite wisdom. Oh yeah.
[Article written for the Vision Newsletter, Jan. 21 '11]
Despite the wintry abundance of pale and gray skies in the Blue Ridge Mountains, we know that above the clouds there’s an arcing expanse of sweet blue. We know this because we witness the phenomena of color and agree, collectively, to call the sky blue. We’re authoritatively told at an early age, that roses are most definitely red, violets are confidently blue (despite being called violets), and that’s that. Oranges apparently are so orange that they’re just called oranges, a feat of nomenclature that evades other qualities ascribed to our beloved juicy citrus. Maybe “Floridian Tangy Pulpy Fruit Water” doesn’t have the marketing pizzazz of “orange juice,” though personally I’ve never enjoyed a tall cool glass of purple (grape?)- maybe I’m missing out on something.
Over millennia language evolved from grunts and hoots advising of danger/pleasure into complex flowing garlands of adjectives and verbs to describe perceptions of the worlds within and around us. From the winds we coerce to move through our voiceboxes, to the never-ending inkwells of human communication, we’ve given language a tremendous power in shaping the world around us. One of my favorite rapscallion philosophers, Alan Watts, once used words for color to expand on the idea that while making grand cultural agreements over the meaning of words, we don’t associate with them in the same exact way. Here’s the experiment: consider for a moment “green.” Using a color wheel, you can easily point to green. Yet upon asking what the very first thing that comes to mind when hearing the word green, a rainbow of various visual interpretations can be listed; ferns, limes, Kermit the Frog (whom apparently found the vertiginous lifestyle challenging), tennis balls, eco-friendliness, money, and the fuzz that disgraces leftovers in the fridge could be among the spectrum of variants.
Now, kicking the mental experiment up a notch, consider the words “God” or “love” or some other suchlike abstract. Do you think of an old man in a cloud who hoards lightning bolts just waiting for someone to invoke a striking down on Earth? Do you think of the living organism which is the thin skin of our blue/green planet, circling the wilds of space? Do you think of an aspect of self that guides you from transition to transition, with grace and patience? We speak of these things, and yet each of us has a unique personal interpretation of these powerful, colorful words- and while we build society on the virtues of “freedom” and “fairness,” do we know what the heck we’re really talking about?
Certainly, things would get complicated quickly if we each stuck to our own inner definitions of everything, blinding ourselves to the value in others’ personal experiences with the Grand Ideals or miniscule details. In order to function personally and socially, we give consent to a mass-definition, and go our merry way. But wouldn’t it be useful to occasionally question what we really mean when we say, “I love you,” or “God bless you,” or “isn’t the sky so intensely blue today?” With each word spoken, we have an opportunity to explore how our self helps create the world we live in, and the very beliefs we hold dear. Would your value of (and connection to) God be transformed by examining the immediate associations with what God means, really means, to you?
William Blake went so far as to see “a world in a grain of sand, heaven in a wildflower” and his Infinity was pocket-sized. The reality of our personal experience of big and little things alike can be seen as more than putting language through a heavy yoga session of bending meanings into new- if awkward- shapes; it is an innate aspect of our curious consciousness. Believe it or not, we’re living the Via Creativa with every utterance, each paintbrush stroke, each synaptic spark. The wind does indeed have many colors, and while being green ain’t easy for Kermit, it sure beats the alternative of not existing- or creating- at all.
Just a quick note here, presented awkwardly as a sentence fragment. As you can see BoTM still exists, and will continue to do so for as long as it takes. While my postings are sparse and almost exclusively poetry now, this place still means a lot to me. Thanks for the continued support, folks.
Ephemera related for having made it through 38 Earth Years
The Julian calendar date of your birth is 2441658.5.
The golden number for 1972 is 16.
The epact number for 1972 is 14.
The year 1972 was a leap year.
Your birthday falls into the Chinese year beginning 2/15/1972 and ending 2/2/1973.
You were born in the Chinese year of the Rat.
Your Native American Zodiac sign is Owl; your plant is Mistletoe.
You were born in the Egyptian month of Menchir, the second month of the season of Poret (Emergence - Fertile soil).
Your date of birth on the Hebrew calendar is 3 Tevet 5733.
The Mayan Calendar long count date of your birthday is 12.17.19.6.14 which is 12 baktun 17 katun 19 tun 6 uinal 14 kin
The Hijra (Islamic Calendar) date of your birth is Thursday, 1 Dhi'l-Qa'dih 1392 (1392-11-1).
You are 38 years old.
You are 456 months old.
You are 1,983 weeks old.
You are 13,879 days old.
You are 333,110 hours old.
You are 19,986,641 minutes old.
You are 1,199,198,511 seconds old.
Entropy in numbers, extropy in spirit. I'm ready for another year!
Performed 5 Dec. at Asheville's Jubilee Community.
You are waiting on the riverbank, standing still in the night
Tossing stones into an abyss of time-
All is silent save for the splash at the end of each arc;
Nothing stops the depths from absorbing the stones, nor you.
Stars reflect on the river waves, and you brave the cold with purpose-
Each stone is thrust into its unseen destiny,
You stand with hope that your answers shall be as quick,
Shuffling your feet, gazing ever ahead through the familiar, encompassing dark.
The world has long receded from twilight to this moment,
And all the constellations peek through the thickening hour,
To find you, waiting, keeping vigil;
Though alone, your stance is once taken by each living soul.
In one way or another,
Your eyes have scanned the horizon for a certain glimmer since you first opened them-
Having faith that one day, something will crest in the distance
And will come to encompass you, to be suddenly united with all that you’ve known.
Your entirety has been formed in expectation for the awaited moment,
Sometime, you pray, one light will emerge and its radiance will pronounce your name,
With wide arms you will embrace this realized dream
And you could dare the night and call yourself completed.
We live our lives out on this sphere hoping one day to feel whole, as if we
Are an unfinished circle, looking ever skyward for a brushstroke
To finish our souls without finishing our flesh and bone-
To reach a zenith without having to scale a peak.
We are ever implored to move forward in the promise that an ultimate fulfillment
Is just ahead, we race the wind to find the meaning of our lifelong waiting-
Is it this stranger’s hand? This holy book? Some ceremony?
Are we to be re-created, given titles and tokens on that golden day of the attainment wholeness?
So here we are, an abrupt iteration of life spinning a billion year story
One perfect sunset after another
One great lover after another
And still we wait, questioning if we are yet fully alive; your life, a vigil in itself.
You’ve been forever standing there, tossing rock into water, on a midnight as long as the sky
Perhaps, just now, you were about to turn your back,
To resume the watch tomorrow, but now comes that certain glimmer
For which the sum of your days have been written, the moment arrives!
Curiously, that certain glimmer is not distant, no gradual approach, it’s here now,
To your surprise you are overtaken in a light that hails not from an exalted Otherness,
Your trembling is not from the touch of a God, or some other skin;
The promise of your fulfillment has been kept, but never as you imagined.
The long-sought answer was found in that minute when you forgot who you’re supposed to be
And remembered who you are, an unbroken strand of gossamer time,
A singular name alight with being, shimmering in kinship with all other stars-
You emerge from within yourself, at last accepting the wholeness you’ve always been.
Night gives way, and you leave the riverbanks, tossing one last stone-
The vigil ends…
The waiting is over…
Now comes the journey.
Sunday, we watched the kids, the parents, the grandparents
frolicking in the yellow ginkgo leaves
through a glass and she said "c'mon,
let's go play..." and I had to hesitate.
I have been standing still, standing firm, while all around
storms rage. Standing, as a tree in a gale
I may be moved by this wind but I
refuse to be uprooted even as branches
and the all of me is shaken loose, in a dark mournful cloud.
Am I waiting? Am I afraid? Am I not in
pain? I am these though I shall not
be broken by them- I am made to know the
security of deep Earth and to hold out for the light that
has yet to defy return. Shaken, in that
moment, contemplating play, I said
yes, as a man, and jumped into the yellow
frolic, and the joy of children melted any reason to hold
back, and leaves they did fly, gold tossed
to the sky, the dome of which has
overhung yesterday's gloom, and today's
exultant hope that all which is shod grows again, so go on...
I have always known you
I do not recall when we first met,
though I’m sure that somewhere in time
there is a marked page which will speak to the
intertwining of our spirits, writ by a bemused historian
who found the first awkward moments worthy of good laughs.
I can only speak my truth, and that is for as long as I can remember, I have always known you. I can still recall,
clear as it was yesterday, scooping you up from the
riverbed, frigid cold and so stubborn, and carting
you up the banks, through the November rain
heaving your rough and unwieldy form onto
the table, where for days I wrestled with
you, pulled the stones from you, the
sticks, the leaves, all that turns
muck into the finest clay,
you eventually became
pliant, I could form
you but only on
your terms,
and I am
a loyal friend
whose hands I
promised would only
work you as you told them to.
The day came, when I bathed you in
water and spun you on my wheel, and
you took the form of a bowl -at first, quite
coarse, but I persevered until you were ready to
get smooth. The day came when you were ready to
transform, and you gave forth a perfect bowl, a heavenly
chalice holding an emptiness so dear, a long unobtainable peace that can only be found in the open, unfilled spaces. I let you sit, and as days passed you took on a lighter hue, one that reminded me of those temple valleys from long ago,
where I scampered from teacher to teacher, a
hungry initiate, ready for wisdom. I learned
that wisdom comes not from people, but
from rivers, mountains, the smell of a
good tea, all sorts of unexpected
intersections- this is why the
villagers think of the
fellow and I monks
as mad. We put
ourselves in
the strangest
of places, and just
learn. That is our only
duty. Over several days, I
painted you, taking the greatest
of care to honor your contours, the
perfect void you encompass, uplifting your
grace with each stroke, before giving you, on another
day, to the fire, where you turned red hot as the sun, and you in the cooling became so strong, what was once supple was now rock. And I waited. I gave you time to adjust to the new
body you won in your contest with the kiln fire, and
one day, my abbot inspected you, listened to the
ringing you sang forth and declared you
perfect, harmonious, and ready for
the next step. The abbot never
told we younger monks
what the next step
was. We gathered,
and there were several
other monks with their begging
bowls, also looking perfect, as pitch as
new moon night, signing like doves. Then
came the hard part, where the abbot said that
for us to become true monks of the way, that we
must lift up our bowls above our heads, filling them
with the nectar of the cloud realm, then dash them to
the ground, in hundreds of jagged pieces. I knew I was not
supposed to succumb to attachment, but I felt the perfect form you gave, your smooth body as perfect as a cherry blossom, and I hesitated. My muscles locked, and the abbot impatiently approached, saying that all the other monks had
destroyed their bowls, as he instructed, but
in my thoughts of how much I came
to love you I couldn’t let you slip
into dissolution.
The abbot
reminded
me that
I must
do this
if I am ever
to become a full
fledged monk of the way.
He whispered, sternly, to trust
the way and it will be clear. Drawing
a breath, trying to understand the wisdom
in breaking you, perhaps the most perfect thing
I’d ever seen, my fingers at once withdraw from holding
you, fast as a mantis, and with a terrible final ring you were
scattering across the floor in a hundred shards. My thoughts were, “it would take a lifetime to put you back together,”
just as the abbot told we monks that “it will take you
a lifetime to put your bowl back together. But you
must- you must come to know each shard as if
it were a villager, learning where that person
fits, over time, and all of the other shards
have a place. It is now up to you, and
give your life to understanding
the way things are related,
and the way things are
whole, if there is
such a thing. With a
laugh, the abbot left us to
our piles. Now, I sit with you,
all your pieces in a cloth I carry around
with such care, I intend to learn wholeness
again. Each day, as I come across one shard that
fits with another, I see them as my village, my villagers, my family. I see the lover who left so painfully- I see my grandmother- I see my young relations, and how
hard it was when they grew from innocence
to become hardened by the realities of the
world beyond the village. I see myself-
I am the glue for each fragment,
even as they cut me and I
bleed a moment, I
continue to
gently
put back
together all
you have come to
mean to me- no longer
a perfect vessel that I had to
dash to the ground, but an intentional
collection of all that I lost in my fascination
with the wholeness, with the emptiness, that now
all of my wholeness, all of my emptiness, is being made up of you. That is why I can say that I have always known you,
as you are all I know, and we didn’t begin when
I dug the clay at the riverbank, we began
when the world began, and just as the
world grows we grow, having
complete knowledge of
each shard, and with
intention placing
together all
of you, all
of me,
and
you
are not
ever broken.
Interrupted occasionally by the thrall of the rain
I have given this night to the glory of silly love songs
Casting off-key verses deep into the drunken stars
Which dance in orbits incomprehensible 'round my head.
Some birds flock far-flung to fallow fields of impossible desires
Yet I am proud to make my nest right here,
Where the verses of exalted wings extol a magic sky
Where once our flight paths cross'd
And in our joyous collision,
We sang of dumbstruck bliss
That this Universe contained you
Thus containing us
Giving breath to this last-minute serenade
And all the reason under heaven
To throw our cautions and soar unimpeded upward
And inward, finding at last a branch sturdy enough
To hold us, and that eternal story
Which intones through all the constellations
The oldest story of generations
That we are here, it is now, and the wind with which we plot our course
Is incessant in its transit, we merely unfold wings
And give trust to the night.
the dim light from the other room
a twilight upon the house
and as we settle into ourselves
there are such landscapes wrought from your name.
i play in the hills- adventure alone the dunes
cooling in a desert night,
overhung by stars that became the light of our proclamations,
made in imperceptible whispers
as an innocent breeze would stir all but the stones in the forest.
through the silhouette that fades and lamps dim
i've mapped my route-
through the crags of your discontent
through the dry creekbeds once a channel for tears
through the earthquakes of your heart
through the rustling reeds rooted in the fecundity of thought,
i know now where i'm going.
you are my undiscovered country
the place yet uncharted
yet writ in code in each celebrated heartbeat.
you are a shelter, and I a wanderer.
we have common purpose, finding sanctuary in our touch
and only tomorrow's journey will reveal the next caress of soul's shoreline-
things we are not made to know, but as an actor in a never-written play, we find our place, context be damned.
we're here now, in this room,
hushed by crickets
brought closer by the encroaching cool,
ever more purpose to learn the contours of the self
light, shadows, silhouettes and all.
In
upturned
rapture I receive
eyes and skies ablaze
with the fusion of history and
future, this now sounds of purposeful winds.
With a quiet expectation I've waited for this,
the cool breath of a sky lover on my neck
as sun and moon play in clouds aflame
with the long light called autumn.
Equinox night is a'flood in a glow we all know yet
are humbled by, describing us as true aliens,
truly unexpected witnesses suddenly
basking in wonders made of stars.
As the galaxy insinuates itself into our routines,
the treeline becomes a margin between worlds,
sheltering birds and hushing our words as
tongues try to make shapes out of air.
Among these, rooted in the archeology of a thousand seasons,
the pine stands with branches balancing constellations,
surviving brutal frosts and fetid droughts without
opinion, unmoved by fear, just growing in accord
with the secret destiny writ in bark and sap,
the nameless knowledge of the cell and time.
Upon this upward exaltation we may safely
lay our hopes, and await instruction
from the soothsayer who knows
through the outstretched
arms of love the faith
which alights the
stars and the
goodness in
our gaze.
There is
little
sense in
much else
then this,
the hold
of roots
and the
faith of
trees in
this new
and holy
confluence
of paths
and time.
Looking down, I see our feet resting here, making home in the night, and holding fast.
As a river makes its way with the rock
negotiating contours according to the molecules
which have been waiting for a billion years to realize purpose,
so do I lay with you, in timeless reverie,
a requiem wrote in breath and pulse.
Of this I celebrate; the remembrance of warmth, the
touch uncommon between skins, the cellular heritage
of love destined yet dared, the dance of fate and chance,
your sleeping form is the realization of a thousand prophets.
Just as the stars declare light endlessly, I cannot uplift your name
any less.
O thou, whom I've held many nights now, these empty arms are as
joyous as they are expectant of your gravity upon them,
and it is in this emptiness that I commune with the heretics
who long declared the absence of presence is the actualization of
desire, a fire long conjured, but never lit 'til you said "yes."
This is my hymn to you, sung in the key of gratitude, played with
an orchestra harmonized with the sweetest of unexpected music.
Bonfire in the backyard.
Moonrise.
Few words, crickets filling the spaces
syllables won't bridge.
Realizations
fade in and out as embers,
glitter as the stars
sometimes behind clouds
yet still there.
I do not know the time,
just that it passes-
what was missed, right there,
never to return?
There'll be more.
Yet this-
still night on rusted lawnchairs
sometimes perplexed as language inadequately
imposes itself where the heart wordlessly dances,
so accustomed to the routines of the unspoken.
Late in the summer,
the heat recedes degree by degree,
and the nights give way to a coolness,
a hushed serenity before the green gives way to ice.
These nights, the soul rests
before bigger storms come to upheave the knowns-
these leaves will soon be blown by northern wind
skittering across the road as frantic refugees.
So, I cast my truths to the coals,
bless the stars, and ask the moon for forgiving light.
We leave the last heat of the fire untended
to devolve into mere ash, just like everything else.
We are kindling,
just waiting to be gathered
and transformed by the heat of coming together
in recompense, in stillness, and in the faith of love eternal.
Just past midnight
A squalid summer night
Nothing moves now, except
The moon's a'rising as lovers
Collapse in sweat, so wordless.
That celestial light runneth over,
Covers bodies in a radiant haze that
Knows the paths of a million miles, older
Than any word, fuller than any in-breath.
Under the buzzing streetlights, those crude
Fires we stole from Prometheus, rested a moth
With golden antennae fashioned from a heretic's
Invisible geometry- it held fast to the cracked road,
Claiming its place here amid careless feet and hurried
Transits, wings still yet ready, immune to regret, disgrace.
We met for maybe three minutes, I lost time and myself somewhere
In between the moon, a streetlight, and a moth, and what remained was
A shadow-play of merged beings, silently dancing, merging into one pale glow.
So much love.
So much light.
So much heat.
So much exertion.
This, our eclipse.
It began with a road bounded by still black water
Reflecting the tangle of trees in a symmetry far too perfect
Reeling past an acre of char where chimney was the last thing standing
In the hopeless space of blackened time.
This, my eastward dream.
Five days departed from the familiar is fifty days’ worth of inspired breathing.
Yet while here, amid the stands of pine and the slick symphony of frogs
It’s to the west my heart has looked
To the west that my beats are bounding not in the hope of love, but the throes of realization.
Here, rapt in the whoosh of wing and the crash of wave
I’ve found you, in the chill of sea and the glory of hot sand.
I’ve found you, deep within me and holding my unsteady hand.
In the touching of souls we feel the steady pulse of the brine from which we emerged.
This is nothing new, it is as old as the rocks upon we build our flimsy shelter
And it is in that age, that timelessness, that I revel with you.
Our story is just sand, and its blowing boundless across the shore of identity.
Who you are, and who I am, these are arbitrary questions as speechlessness overtakes us
From the arc of stars that spell our real names across the sky.
From black water to black night, we emerge, to shine momentarily
To the enjoyment of some stranger on the beach.
We are fascinated with the night
because it does so easily what we cannot,
silences the thrall of our storm-whipped landscapes,
soothes the jagged peaks of the soul,
blankets the day-worn heart with the softness of cloud,
and tosses the inspiration of stars through tattered souls.
As I am lulled to sleep by the comfort of obscurity,
the suddenness of rain makes mad music on the leaves,
and a slight chill hitches the wind,
fully awake now, I must go deeper into these hours
where all intentions lay hidden
and dreams are woven from the hush of the wilderness.
Hollywood makes billion dollar epic movies about saving our planet from all sorts of peril, and we consumers feed off the trough always gratified that the day is saved in the end, the golden American sun ever shining bright. These films seem to be dispossessed of the reality of how our society and our governments really operate, much like those who clamor about how things should be without burning a single calorie doing anything about it. Right now, amidst a great ecological disaster of gigantic proportions, there's no sudden explosion of genius going on, no heroism. Instead, we're giving up the creative reins to the same bamboozlers who got us into this mess. We're reduced to dropping thimbles on geysers and wondering what went wrong when the didn't work.
Where's Bruce Willis and his valiant crew to come barreling out of the blue with that make-do fix that saves civilization? Where's the ingenuity and resources that we entrust to our governments with our tax dollars to be at the ready when All Private Sector Hell Breaks Loose? Nowhere to be found, it seems we're scratching our national head trying to plug a leak that is destroying whole ecosystems. Just because the oil hasn't washed up on shore doesn't mean it's not wreaking havoc. The surface of the ocean is not the ocean. There's a whole lot more life below the surface than there is above. From birds, to whales, to plankton, these systems are being devastated.
Are largely untested dispersants that just cause the oil to break up below the surface and sink the best we can do? Surely, middle school kids would realize that this is just as long-run harmful as allowing the oil to invade the marshlands and estuaries. Short-term, the beaches are kept tidy and there will be less tear-jerking videos of (larger order) dead animals. White sandy beaches are good for tourism, but what about the rapidly expanding dead zones of ocean which impact local economies, let alone all that lives below the mystery of the waves. What isn't seen is the dramatic toll this is taking on microbial and smaller order life forms, which form the backbone of the oceanic ecosystem. Right now, there is a plume of toxins which is completely subsurface [ref.] exposing creatures to the poison of our disastrous energy policies. Why should whole ecosystems collapse because the American free market is sacrosanct and cannot be made be accountable to their various catastrophes?
I'm disheartened that this ecological cataclysm (there aren't words accurate enough to describe the lasting toll this will take) is already being displaced by the mundane triviality which feeds the zombie-like American media appetite. Right now, the main headline on a mainstream media site is about whether a para-celeb murder-sensationalist should get a lethal injection for snuffing out her prey. Sorry for the deceased, but whoopty-doo, an entire ecosystem upon which America has become crudely and carelessly dependent is about to blink out. Every inch of headline space should be used to galvanize our greatest minds and our highest ideals to get the fuck down there and cap the damn leak. Where's a Dutch boy in a pressure rated suit when you need one? Again, where's Bruce Goddamned Willis and a few hundred million clams?
Oh, that's right, I forgot: filming the next sequel.
Whatever you as an individual can do, please do it. If it means not buying BP gas, good plan. If it means faxing the living shit out of your congressperson, than work that bitch of a machine. If it means gathering up supplies for the scant workforce trying to contain the spill, call your boss and tell him where your priorities lie. If our government isn't producing the ingenuity needed to meet this challenge, it up to us, we who are of this Earth and dependent on it, to remind each other that we are but links in the chain of life.
Historically, this catastrophe is one of thousands. Contextually, our collective response may be a deciding measure in the exercise of our self-awareness, our humanity, and ultimately, our will to live in harmony with the Earth. She's taught us she will not be enslaved by our greed; it's either respect and revere her abundance, or be doomed by it.
It is, in fact, the law. Seriously though, homebrewing is a rough modern analog of our earliest experiments in chemistry. You take this plant matter, add water to it, wait, and K-POW, a magical elixir is created and has instant community value. I wonder why...? Anyhow, I just wanted to document for posterity the brews made so far and a glimpse at what's next:
Raspberry, Rose, Jasmine, Chamomile, Rosehips, Orange, Honey (and other things) Saison Bier: "Eros Red" (a whopping 6.5%!)
NEXT BREW: Green Tea and Honey IPA
AFTER THAT: Sasparilla and Vanilla Stout
The Asheville Zymurgy scene is awesome, and I'm glad that Theodore's Deaverbrews is a small but spritely part of it.
11-14 March, written at the Meher Spiritual Center in N. Myrtle Beach, SC... [raw and unedited!]
To say “it begins” presupposes that nothing was there to begin with, which is silly. Something, some One (or more) is always there to help set up, to unlock the door and turn the lights on. This applies in the Cosmos as equally as it does within your soul and in the lakefront solitude of this gentle hermitage.
The forthcoming non-beginning strings of words are recording events which begin on 11 March 2010, just north of the fluorescent decadence known colloquially as “Myrtle Beach.” I’ve not yet seen that place, but I tremble in fear of it, a bit. I have been told it’s a ghastly infection of the American condition on the shores of a great Mother Ocean who seems to tolerate lapping at the feet of distracted masses. At this moment, however, I’m in a very small yet completely harmonious cabin set within a vast “spiritual retreat center” which thrives in a very natural state. Rain keeps rhythm on the roof, and for the first time in some time, I’m left with nothing but time. This is a free and open space to think, heal, and contemplate the unwinding spool of string that is my body in transit through Everything. As I write this, a spider contemplates the window while I contemplate contemplation, and how it is I will go about reconciling the self this go ‘round. I slept some following this, I think.
I left the cabin, friendlily called the “Tree Room,” and went for the beach as the rain held back. I remembered in the very deep of my gut the heave of the Ocean, my truest home. As I wandered I considered a troubling battleground; how intellect requires doubt to sustain itself, while feeling requires trust that it may be healthy. It seems there is no clear path through these brambles which mediates these two ecosystems of consciousness. The narrow footbridge which crosses the lake is ample for now in both its steadfastness and gentle wobble. I will come back to this.
Regarding Myrtle Beach; I knew to expect overkill, but this was overkill on overkill. I passed a building which presumably was a theatre; it looked as if, amid the downpour, that the building had gone ahead and unabashedly smoked a motherlode of crack while it was waiting for its erstwhile audience. I sought out the safe haven of a restaurant among the brash, turgid hotels and condos, finally settling upon an Italian place, allowing Dean-O and Frankie to lull me into familiarity in this exciting, new alien landscape. Even the rain was unfamiliar, not a sweet mountain mist but the permeating breath of the Sea Goddess, who I one knew so very well. Walking back to the Tree Room from my first adventure, I found a toad who stood unfazed, a wide-eyed gatekeeper in this pregnant night. I could’ve passed him, unfazed myself, but rather I stood over him in awe, asking how I could be more like that still, aware and fully realized creature.
Sleep that night was a mixed bag of nutty dreams, of salad bars and swamp foxes (which I’m told skulk about the area). I had intended to sleep much more deeply, in that I’m constantly running a sleep deficit and had hoped to recover relaxation in my body and make up for lost dreams; it was fitful but at the very last I gained a somnolent finale. Now, I’m met with blue skies and sun, a celestial bargain following the drenching onslaught. In a few minutes, I will stretch, do some yoga, and prepare for a day’s worth of good, long quiet walking. I’ll be interested to know what I write next…
***
It seemed to take a while, this getting up of the oomph to go out, but once I did, the rewards were many. I think my hesitation comes from the prospect of having to interact with two-leggeds. They’re why I’m choosing the seclude here, wanting to be away from human interaction for a while. On the winding path to the beach, which crossed through matrices of vine and shadow, I came across a large turtle. She seemed to be on a wander from one pond to the other. I spent a few moments with her, amazed at the complexities of her shell as if somehow completely oblivious to the complexities of my own body. Yes, mine is a familiar skin, and perhaps the fascination has worn out. Obscuring our names, labels, and speciation, we are not different at all. We both occurred as such.
{So did sleep- occur that is. I felt that I had a lot to write but longed for a thorough sleep that my body has been needing, and I succumbed to nearly 12 hours of it. Some might say that is a waste of contemplative time; au contraire, it is an element I’ve been lacking, therefore making it more difficult to access the subtler regions of thought I need to enter. But back to where I was…}
The path to the beach was on either end bounded occasionally by dark waters, into which unseen things slipped as my footsteps sent ripples through the delicate environmental senses they possess yet we do not. Bubbles, swirls, these are all we are entitled to see of that world. How many other worlds co-exist that I don’t even notice, what effects do these have upon my sensory map that I overlook in my rambling? Countless. I cannot imagine the eyes fixed on me as I can barely fix my own eyes on any single spot, it’s all full of wonder. Up through the dunes to the beach- the Mother was not holding back, she was as dramatic as ever, more than just exercising a duty to make waves, but doing it with a little extra fortitude. Here’s paradox; a completely unspoiled, virgin terrain did I emerge from, yet standing distantly on either side of me are monstrous hotels, condos, edifices not so much as facing the ocean but challenging it. Tombstones, I thought. I sat, and listened to the in-breath and out-breath of the sea, absorbing the vibration into a body otherwise absorbed with time and things so far removed from natural. A body absorbed with the woe and misery of so many, a mind which is preoccupied with finding hope for these folks, yet is often too exhausted to find the honey for itself (or taste the honey it already has). The ocean wastes no times in healing, and lifting these things into the current, and dissipating them among the foam and arcs of waves.
I made for the pier. Since I was little, I always sought out some distant feature on the beach to walk to. While it’s cliché to say it, the feature in question was never the point, it was getting away from where I started. Then, it was the chatter of family. Now, it was simply to go deeper into unfamiliarity. For a buck, you can walk the pier, which was being battered and swayed by waves eager for sand. Blackbirds cackled, a few bored fishermen tried their luck, and I savored the silence, and the lack of necessity in making small talk. I can see why sailors of yore were a feisty bunch- the horizon yields nothing but mystery and ghosts of far off lands. It’s as inviting as it is potentially deadly, the perfect mix for sparkly and unreasonable eyes. There was a quiet restaurant at the base of the pier, where I likewise savored a mustard-laden bacon cheeseburger, fries, and two pints. I do believe that many would find this antithetical to contemplative practice. Again, I must say au contraire, it might just be a requirement.
I thought of dualism and monism, idealism and realism. I consider our foolhardiness in just opening our mouths, how a choice of word or belief cleaves away limitless tendrils of possibility just as a butcher cleaves away what once was a living body. I find that wrestling with the cosmological is of no less import than in wrestling with my inmost “demons.” In fact, the two are connected intimately. The indwelling opponent is the by-product of an inflexible and insatiable material world, the rewards of gravity and the reliability of things; from flesh to coins. The self that I strive ever more to be, ever more to radiate, knows that the world and life is little more than soup made of stars, and the things we covet and crave are as meaningless as thinly painting the image you see out the window on to the window itself. Instead, we are fed by the nameless; the undercurrent which gives sudden form to the formless, the whip of ‘gator tail, the laugh of gull, the skittering under a leaf, that dream of holding a lover, the act of reconciliation with the opponent and walking away wiser. The opponent is not the enemy of the soul, but rather the frictive force that gives the soul its moral shape by testing virtue’s resolve. I will always have an indwelling opponent, as we all do. In my time of healing, I gain strength from it, I tame it, I draw my boundaries firmer and ensure its territory is beyond the field of my actions and words.
By doing such, I also make cosmological reckonings; the material world is not the enemy of consciousness, but rather a symptom of it. Awareness gives shape and color; should I not be aware, what is a star? What is a desk? What is a self? It’s worth noting that our conception of the cosmological is not just human-centric (by the consciousness of our species), but it’s identity-centric, the ultimate trickle down theory. My concept of the Universe is not just tempered by how science or religion explains it, but by my own psycho-linguistic-perceptual filters. I don’t speak English, I speak Me-ish. You speak You-ish. The language of our tongue is just a rough enough translation that when you say “watch out!,” I know to jump. Yet simultaneous to your exclamation, my brain runs through every meaning of watch, and every meaning of out, and fits them into Me-ish by context of the snake about to bite, or whatever.
I can tell you about the brambles along the dunes, or the choir of young tree frogs singing in time with the ocean’s breath and the play of red-winged blackbirds, but what does this scene mean? Something completely different to each of us, but we conjure together to pull meaningfulness from it. The less aware we are, the more meaningless, vapid and stupid walking along a beach is, but we can describe it just fine. “I walked along a beach today.” The more aware; it becomes the most important thing we’ve ever done, though we can barely cough up an adjective to make sense of it. “The awareness that is I moved with the Universe at this particular geospatial juncture where elements perceived as separate clash and integrate with each other, during this knowingly illusory fragmentation people call linear time and material space.” It’s as if we live with one eye closed; we sublimate the vastness of our vision and experience in order to be understood. We limit input in order to navigate. How to open both eyes, really? I’m sure if we were to do this more than metaphorically, we’d disappear completely, in a flash… something both enviable and terrifying.
Humans are terrified, ultimately, of purposelessness. But the closer we get to understanding the physical states of matter, which appear as orchestrated slam-dances of energy, the less purpose it all seems to have than just to be. How do we get to fit within all that? We used to sing on our way to the beach “We’re here because we’re here, because we’re here, because we’re here!” which might just be as great an incantation to a cosmic “truth” as we’ll ever really get. Our desire for purpose or meaning gives social order and safety; it drives the machine of beginning and ending. The closer we get to fully accepting the great heaving mass that life and consciousness really is, the less and less useful social order and safety really is, as we fall out of that system and become its madmen, heretics, and heathens who just love being alive so radically that we’re not willing to cage it in institutions, words, or fields of study. We want very much to know it, yes, and know it deeply, we just know that our knowledge is very limited itself because it’s all written in Me-ish or You-ish and is therefore an infinitesimal fraction of how the Universe finds meaningful expression of Itself. The Universal language is the Universe itself. It is that it is, you are that you are, and everything in-between is some kind of flavorful filler we’ve added to make it that much more digestible. There’s no translation of this language; if you don’t speak it in one way or the other, you’re dead. The key is to become aware that you’re speaking it, and that the world around you has been articulately pronouncing itself for all time, and you’ve got just enough years to become barely conversational in the Universal language. Better to speak a smattering of it than none at all.
That being said, it’s time to go out again, and find something to eat.
***
Humans, let it be said, are weird, especially in our endless desire for entertainment and distraction. One such peculiarity is the pack mentality, that we need do damn near everything in terms of group versus individual will. For example, the culture of dining out is a major social phenomena. There are a few seconds of awkwardness when the index finger goes up and the lips pronounce “one.” At the Italian restaurant, the server hurriedly removed the opposite place setting, so I’d “have more room.” Room for what? If I’d needed that much room whilst dining with another we’d be in a pickle, eh? I am a somewhat in a world designed for pairs, or more. There are few cultural outlets for the free bird, the solo artist. Even here, in a place designed for solitude and contemplation, I’ve been asked many times whether I’ve done this group thing or that. No, I explain as tenderly as I can forfeit, I’m here for solitude, to not interact with people but to dissolve my own personhood into the moist soil and surrender ego to context just as fungus digests the fallen leaves. Being a short-term hermit is not an outcasting or an antisocial enterprise; rather, it is acting upon the hunger of the soul to know its source, to concentrate via whatever tools it has to work with upon the rudimentary questions that cannot be answered when in the scuttle of social hullaballoo.
I soloed my way through a 3D documentary about the International Space Station at the Imax theatre, then through a round of pollo molé and Dos Equis. Prior to this, I walked along the beach, just because. I was exalted by the play of gulls, the strong wind that made the sand dance as auroras, by the random flotsam that found its way to these shores; a twist of nautical rope, shells within shells, a brittle and bleached old bone. What graceful remnants; if only we could be some careful to leave such beauty in our wake, rather than the plastic that remarks to the discoverer “hey, I consumed something!” Everything else rots, and rightly so, except that which we make or plunder. We refuse to allow the spoils of our civilization to just go away, as if thumbing our noses at time, to succumb to the decay that is gnawing at our feet second-by-second. If anything is gleaned from our excesses by the fantastical future, let it be that we were an insecure culture. Even our gods were plastic.
Sleep beckons. See, there’s entropy again.
***
While asleep, I time traveled. In a sense, it’s “Spring Forward” day and rather suddenly an hour slipped away. Dreams are always weird things, never routine. But last night was weirder, complete with cats sneaking into my cabin that were incarnations of the Master, collectively (it’s been said he will appear to folks here from time to time. A friend of mine thought his wife was wearing a Frank Zappa mask but alas, it must’ve been someone else). There was something else about a sombrero, but that’s all I’ve got. In a bit, I’ll pack up and return the Tree Room to it’s me-less state, and make one last time for the beach, to pay my kind regards to such a dear and eternal friend. When I was half-asleep there the other day, post-cheeseburger, my mind playing with the dream-world as a kid toes the tide, I thought that I could peacefully and happily die in front of the sea, that if I had a choice (many decades away, mind you), that’s where I’d slip away. To think of the elderly pilgrims who make their way to the Ganges who, once upon her banks, seem to turn off like a switch with little fanfare. Not only are the enlightened not fearful of death, they tame it, know it, just as I have sought to know and tame the indwelling opponent. I admire that self-control… this time though, I was thrilled to be alive and present before such a great power, even as the sun lulled me into a reverie.
Have I achieved what I came here for? I could best answer that if I fully knew why I was here. I think my primary thrust was a strong dose of inner peace, and a quieting of the constant self-doubt which tends to make me either more hesitant or emotionally awkward. Yes, then, I think I’ve achieved these points. Am I healed? Insofar as I acknowledged the wounds and allowed them to be dressed by either my own will or the weed-like creeping in of the natural forces which slip in through the holes in our souls and take root, making a balm from the inside-out. Fairer to say, I’m healing versus healed; there are many places on and within that need a balm, and I’ve had to choose the most critical functions of the soul and heart first. But I’m coming away with a hefty bit of contemplation, something my life allows little time for. For this, and for the Tree Room, for the turtles and ‘gators and laughing gull, I’m so grateful. Today, I’ll go to a sculpture garden as the grand finale of stimuli, but certainly not the final overture of this way of thinking.
And so the journey ends, but certainly not the Work…
I don't believe I ever sat down and actually watched the Super Bowl in my entire life, because generally I could care less about sports. Tonight, I watched it with (and for) lil' one. He has never sat down with a man to watch the game, never had a Dad who made wings, red beans and rice, and shook the house with a mighty roar at that first touchdown. Tonight he does- thank you Saints, you made champions of us.
I feel this is an odd sort of milestone- that connection between the odd geeky new-ish Dad who has no sports IQ, and the Son who has overcome many hardships and seen the shattering of many dreams now enjoying something together this simple. He said it meant a lot to him, even me reading up on the rules of football so I could follow the game better.
These little things, these passing minutes of our passing time, accrue such value. The moments are forever sealed in some holy place, tied to our names and our fragmentary existence. I cannot estimate the value to him to validate his passions, something that passes in about 3 hours, something as small as passing a ball back and forth.
Tonight, we have watched a game, but I feel that we've won something far greater.
Just a few hours ago, Bird on the Moon . com celebrated its 7th birthday. This coincided with a night of merry making and home brewing with my best friend Joshua, and neighbors Sarah and Lynn. Long before the "social media revolution" of instant status updates and breathless texting, this blog served as my voice when I frequently was too unsure of it. Over time, thanks to the feedback and support of the over 3,000,000 visitors from damn near every nation on Earth, I became more confident of that voice, and ever more aware of the power of each larynx, each fingertip to change the world.
Since those early golden days, I've become a Dad twice over, a published author thrice over, and have been within an inch of my life a few more times than I care to count. The point is, as the lyrics go to "Indiscipline" by King Crimson: "No matter how closely I study it- no matter how I take it apart, no matter how I break it down, it remains consistent." My life has been spelled out for a few million strangers for seven years, and though each day I may acknowledge its fragility, this life persists. This name, just like yours, just won another minute. All the more reason to speak more clearly from the heart, and more powerfully from the mountain top. The words that we emit may not be constrained to a single place now, in this age of constant connection and the madly addictive buzzing of an entire planet learning to speak. They spread out, and when the lights go out, we are saturated by words from throngs of souls we'll never meet. Provided we do something with the strange knowledge that we are all connected in ways that cannot yet be comprehended, we are fulfilling the dream of ages- being humanity and simultaneously sharing the same stage.
The Internet is just a very rough and queer step on that path to true interpersonal, international interconnection. It is a primitive and crude simulation of that uncanny feeling we all know subconsciously, that feeling where we know that we are surrounded by the very knowledge we lack but just can't yet touch it. Each of us is tapping on some steampunk telegraph to the rhythm of our soul, at the least calling out in wonder from our common biology. It is still a young tool no matter our comfort with it. It is an opportunity awaiting your Next Important Search.
So, what does all this really mean? Heck if I know, but it has been and continues to be an immense pleasure to hold this place dear to me and share it with you, bot or Bolivian, with unconditional peace. For the next year, Bird on the Moon will persist in one way or the other, and the Internet will grow in untold ways, and hopefully you will be given the opportunity to use your voice in transformative ways... come what may and for whatever reason.
In the spirit of our endeavour, as searchers and teachers, I can only leave you with this spellbinding gift:
Do you think we might be made of
Something more than what the scientists say?
I might be a smörgåsbord of old photos
Or the random bits of old game pieces
Found scattered on the shag carpet.
You might be some wind blown note, crumpled,
Only to land at my door, ink blurred and intent lost.
You might be the strange fog that settles over the city in January
The obscuring factor, the breath of a ghost.
Are we more than places, bits, together tumbled
In time's ruthless wind?
Are we more than a collision of consonants and vowels
Pulled off the highway, waving for the attention of passer-by?
In these later hours, the questions pass
As onlookers on the other side of the glass
Determined to get somewhere but too compelled by the shadows
Not to be curious.
As a stranger snuffs his smoke
I close my book- no closer to answers
But merged deeper with the question.
When the thin sheets of fog veil the city and hush her silver lights
And the snow, which fell as stars that entranced our tongues
Recedes back to the rivers, I too will melt, be absorbed,
Even in the stillness of this house, shadowed by a single dancing candle.
Snowmen collapse to Earth- I too lose my form
Somewhere between here and sleep, and drip back to oblivion.
The mind is softened by the loosening of shape and the returning of flow.
***
My slowing and darkening thoughts numb the impossible- I fly through the mists
And the shadows which blur the sharpest line… winging unbound,
Singing myself raw in the song of a newly freed slave.
Gravity unchains me, in dreams as real as a lone flame in the night.
To become a meteor in reverse, streaking in a flash of re-binding
Hurling my sulphurous way into the cold shimmer of heaven.
No-thing touches me here, even light relaxes because fantasy is faster than law.
You can take anything away, but none dares ransom this dream.
***
Before nightfall, I read that telescopes found yet another planet out there
Watery and massive, circling a sun seemingly unremarkable.
One could hail the discovery, save we have not yet discovered our own world.
Where is an observatory of the soul?
Where are the lenses that can focus upon the light of life
That we may name it, constellate it, give shape to a nameless radiance?
Just as there is no net fine enough to trap a soul and the photons it loves
There is no glass which bends life into a single, discernable image,
And no place high and dark enough to entice a freed thought to come back down
To take its place back among the alphabetized litany of “what makes sense.”
***
As the snow continues to merge with the swollen stream of yesterday
I will cling to the worlds in-between… the gentle minute between frozen and wet,
The unshackled thought which ran deep into the night and
Defied the roughened bounds of assumption like a fleet-footed vandal,
A dream on the wing parading through a mist-softened city at midnight.
A man in that city edges toward sleep
While evermore clutching in gratitude all that awakens him.
...has always been for me to ask for help. It's something I don't seem to have a problem coaching my clients on, but for me, it takes a lot. Here's the skinny: after knee surgery, loss of insurance, a failed return on investment from the new book, losing over a week's work (as a contractor, this blows the most), losing savings through failing mutual funds (I know that American poverty is still a luxury), not getting paid for services, vet bills, my cousin being sent to Asheville for me to "fix," and other recurring unexpected expenses, I'm at a total and complete standstill. Today, despite what the lender called very acceptable credit, I was turned down for a loan that was the last ditch effort. The lender has been leading me on continuously, saying that everything was clearing. Alas, he leaves it to a coworker to break the news. Now, whatever gas is in the tank is all that there is or will be, and despite my issues with Christmas, my son celebrates it and was looking forward to the just rewards of his incredible, blossoming character. Unless a miracle occurs, the last of the dominoes will fall in short order.
I know I'm not alone in asking for help, and as I said, my dire situation is an opulence most of the world cannot enjoy. We rats have been bred to accept this paradigm, and create dependencies that are beyond what is reasonable to sustain life and thrive. While in comparison this is small potatoes, for the moment, it's an emergency.
I am squeamishly and humbly asking for any donation possible. I need at least $250 to breathe, but about a paycheck's worth to relax. Anything you can provide is a wonderful gift, and accepted with gratitude. Even if you can't help, I'm grateful that you're reading this. Every thought does indeed count, and while I ask for help this way, I know I have it through the incredible generosity of my friend's spirits and hearts.
For that, I'm eternally grateful, and by that I am truly sustained.
Only a sliver away from empty,
She says, as the brokenness in her eyes mirrors the brokenness of her home.
Only a gust away from collapse,
He says, as shelter recedes into the gale and again, the familiarity of loss overtakes.
The worn chairs of an emergency room
Harbor memories of a million kinds of anguish
Hunger- madness- desperation- being utterly alone
Under the glaring white of anonymous lights.
How many children will only know this?
How many grandparents will die waddled in regret over what should’ve been?
If time would only stop long enough to allow love and reason
To dodge the seconds and dash into hearts long hardened by fearing
The gaze of a stranger who knows only pain, and doing something about it-
If time would only stop long enough to re-order our disassembly
Into new patterns where the least of these are pulled back from the margins
And return to the center of the spiritual city
To pull down the dividing fence between want and harvest
To welcome humanity back into itself
To be more than neighbors, but family-
To be more than family, but species-
To be more than species, but alive-
Not merely out of consequence
But of intention.
To live in hunger and lack may be an accident of our forgetfulness,
But to live in balance and community-
That is what we shall do on purpose,
Only a sliver away from happening right now,
Only a gust away from becoming strong again.
(Poem written for the 10th annual WNC Hunger Banquet)
Birdonthemoon.com, quiet though it may be, holds a very important place in my life. It's the studio that my house doesn't have (yet), dusty though it may be, the place where I come face-to-face with my creative effort. Through the archives of the past five years, I collected hundreds of poems and prose, culling here and there, and after well over two years of planning I organized that material into my third published work, One For The Nameless, which was officially accepted for publication just before midnight yesterday. It's through your feedback, interconnection, and support that this work was made possible. I'm humbled and awed to have nearly 900 pages of printed material from the past ten years, in addition to magazines and other print media.
I can't yet say I'm proud of this- that'll take time- but I am grateful for all of these opportunities to create, both in verbal and visual media. Thank you, again, for occasionally popping in the studio and saying hello, even if the desk is dusty, it means that this place holds value to you as well.
If eyes are the windows of the soul
You have pulled at those safe curtains, and the
Wind is blowing through, there’s a big storm coming
With each passing second that my eyes are pressed against yours
All manner of love is raging between us,
As all saints come passin’ through.
I made a bonfire out of yesterday’s fallen heroes,
Holy crackles be-glitter the night
And my words are burning- and my heart is burning-
And my eyes are burning with
The pure revelation of your love, heat and gusts of leveling breath
Rocking my foundation
Shaking me and transforming me into the very cinder I feign to master.
As we collapse into ourselves, I hear the distant anthems and
Proud hymns as all saints come passin’ through.
The last exhale, my Beloved, your hurricane of re-affirmed yes,
A symphony of innocence
That crescendoed through the valley and shook the dome of the night, Made the stars waltz, those very lights where you were and I am
So temporarily placed under.
Your name is now flung among the constellations,
The twinkling play of suns
Where you now run, full of love, as all saints come passin’ through.
I ask who will stop the time- who will stop time- who stops time
To honor the faces that fast become as thin as air, who we
Too easily forget when once we held them warm, alive?
We once stopped time for each dearly Beloved,
For those once-opened eyes where all saints came passin’ through.
This isn’t a metaphor or a convenient way to say to the
World how holy you are for having been incarnate- no-
When we touched I knew that same dizzy love that makes champions Of the dispossessed and raises up chiseled busts from
Rough hewn rock, and there ain’t none
That can question the virtues which arise from doing something more With love than just sighing.
Eye to eye, breath upon breath, this isn’t death because
There’s no stopping love.
Death stops no champion, no hero, no lover,
And at the moment the veil of life is loosened to the wind,
All saints come passin’ through us,
Among us… we bridge the mystery of light and shadow
By holding on to dear life as each determined heartbeat
Turns a gear in the clockworks of every soul you dared touch.
Today, I heard about a rush of leaves that came from heaven
Flocking through sunlight as a million fiery angels
A sudden blaze in your colors- the rustling was your name,
And that was enough for us to know
That you, my saint, my hero, my beloved,
Just came passin’ through.
FYI: There's a lot to be said about how discomfort pries loose mediocrity and exposes a raw and sometimes unnerving creativity. Perhaps, it's what's left of the animal in us- we grow stronger because of the wounds, not because we avoided them.
The Queen's many nicknames: Bear, She-bear, Betty-bear, Sweezle, Floor Biscuit, Lady Bucket, Lady Head, Princess from Outer Space, Sistah, Empress of the Known Universe, Lezbot/Lezboterian, Love-a-bear.
When I walk, do I remember enough the symphony of bone and muscle
That takes me through the streets, through the rain,
And into such a gentle night?
Do I remember enough the impossible synergy of tendon and energy
That propels me into your arms, that brushes me against your leaves?
It is so easy to forget
The strange convergence of some billions of forces
Which have built from nothingness this fluid body,
Forces constructing weathered words
Spoken out of breath, into your ear,
Into the Earth that is the you I name.
Just as all rests within all,
So does the abyss from which some artful surge
Pushes forth this world upon us.
This is as terrifying as it is ecstatic;
Nothingness is not immediately comforting-
It is the hoary ghost which hides behind silence,
It is that mystery which will one day completely encompass you.
You keep it away as desperately as you want it, want inside it,
Want to know the carnality of the ineffable.
Just as I mindlessly cross intersections,
I mindlessly choose to be enamored
By each crack in the street, each rustling and discarded thought,
Each bold weed which declares its belonging by root alone.
These things are the purest of privileges;
The experience of time passing,
Sentinels which declare “Today, you remain alive and in connection,
Do more than witness this- know this.”
To be in connection is to be a wayward and brazen anomaly of time-
You have emerged tenderly from the dark into this rush of everything
Grasping what you can, fashioning from elemental clay your work,
And going away...
And when you touch another, any other, the other-ness may dissolve,
Leaving you with it All
Clutching a bundle of nerves that holds you as much to the Earth
As it does some unnamed star, some cresting wave,
Some shimmer elsewhere.
We become each other’s connective tissue
When we, at last, become our selves.
***
When I walk, bone and muscle and tendon and energy
Are remembering, deeply, the symphony that is time.
I notice the woman who moves slowly up the hill
Under a large and twirling umbrella.
She is at once the center of the Universe, and its entirely,
And the nothing from which it came.
She does this so simply
Just by walking
Through a night where the cicadas keep time with the good rain
And the shadows merge silently.
I am
So rapt
With the sky
Which passionately
Paints the day in bold
Arcs, no matter the banal
Goings on in the grids and highways.
Funny how a sky's moon is oft linked to madness.
She has been so damn noticeable the past few days
Days in which there was great tumult scribbled into the calendar.
Sensible people lured into burning buildings of the mind, only to scream.
Sensible hearts drunken and flailing for words, longing for upheaval.
Making love after clocks dismantled explosively around us.
I cannot make sense of it all, this circus of emotions
Born from fecund neural landscapes I'll never see-
Can only hold so many souls without losing mine.
Somewhere afar, a star silently goes supernova
All its material surrendered to the artful
Play of the void, much as the imagination
Holds close our dreams, then bursts
In unison with the passionate
Delirium of the moonstruck.
Only containing so much
Until the pull of
Gravity takes
Our spirits
Beyond the
Horizon.
(inhale)
You are no different than the stars, really.
The same atoms that form you are dispersed all throughout
The night sky that brings you such awe.
You seek to unite all your disparate parts
Yet you are the cosmos, walking,
An aspect of an ever changing awareness;
You are a messenger, an observer, a nerve cell.
(exhale)
You took a dare tonight, and flung yourself
Haphazardly into the arms of strangers,
You cupped fire in your hand and danced on red-hot constellations.
To love is such a dare, to trust, to just feel is a risk.
That you chanced it is evidence enough you're alive
Every action is as dangerous as it is beautiful-
Your next breath is just as transformative as any ceremony.
(...)
To be invincibly curious (for Solstice/Father's Day)
In the vivid days of childhood you felt such a thrill
When you ran out the door for the forest, freeing yourself from time
Skipping into mystery and shadows without fear
Upturning stones in the creek to catch a salamander, to be invincibly curious.
You recall the wonder of the sun, some yellow star in a book,
That brought out your sweat and blazed your trails
Through a wilderness of thickets and souls.
By sunset, your name was called, tugging at you like a yo-yo string
And you brought yourself hesitantly home, perhaps a little late, out of breath,
Perhaps a little wiser.
In the mirror now, in these days,
The memories of youth are plotted in fading freckles
And we are punctual, and we enter the forest
With maps and caution as if we were once defeated by it.
However, there is a message inscribed
On the other side of that mirror where we mourn time;
There is adventure yet, for you are still a child of a Universe made of mysteries
There is exaltation in little things yet,
For you are still a child of senses which awaken further each passing day,
You are still a child even in your frailty,
For there is an eternity of graces yet to know and teach.
As a child, we do the walking for our ancestors,
Our mothers dwelling within our skins, our fathers anchoring to the bones,
And from these names in our blood emerge new children, new names,
New ripples in Creation’s pond.
The word made flesh.
From this newness comes an amazement in responsibility, and I am a father now.
From a child’s name comes a wonder in infinite outcomes,
And you are a mother now.
From the forest comes the child trotting,
And we uplift the goodness of their freedom, even when they’re late.
More than flesh made whole, the child before you and within you
Yearns that we never outgrow adventure.
I will affirm this in my muddiness,
As this father runs with the son into the forest again
Chasing dreams, catching holy glimpses of infinity
As easily as we might catch a salamander and laugh long
On the first day of summer, freed from time, the flesh made whole.
I'm on the bridge
The river is a muddy rage
And the sky, a battlefield of clouds.
There's thunder somewhere, could be in my head.
With a flutter, a white pigeon flies toward the mayhem above.
Lost, it seems, anxious circuits above the bridge, flapping with vigor,
As if its life indeed depends on this upward thrust to chaos,
There is reorientation and calmer winds yet.
Not along ago, a woman jumped from here-
For a moment lost on the air,
For a moment, free.
Life does indeed
Depend on being
Found, and at
Peace with
The sky.
Should she
have seen this
White bird swirling
Amid the impending weather
She might have chosen to be winged
And chase the very airs which troubled her
Finding herself in command of the wind, not merely blown
By it but meant to be upon it, intended to be made ever more alive.
I deeply revere these passing seconds, and the coming
Storm, and to behold this white pigeon flying for
Its freedom, flying for its life, flying perhaps
For these eyes only for they are lost too.
I uplift my vision to the passion of the
Sky, that I may too be reoriented
And clearer of my surroundings
More knowledgeable of my own
Feathers and their ability
To course through the
Very mystery which
Hold me back.
To the sky,
May I again
Be found
In you.
We talk about the corner of an eye
When we know it's round
Fooling ourselves into boxes and lines.
We're more fluid than that
Flowing from here to there, streaks of vision
Seldom aware of the limits
So swiftly made just by naming a thing, fixing to now.
The Big Dipper hangs as a
Question mark over the house, paradoxically casting light
Long since old but no less mythic.
I with those stars form the arcs of a riddle
Joined by our mere points in space
Orbiting in nameless absurdity as strangers then, now and yet to be.
Inhaling the sweat of suns, you can exclaim
There's something here or something there
When both and neither are true,
As real as an almost-kiss.
There's something behind the wall, within the grove,
And surely, there's something in your cornerless eyes.
As a tireless mockingbird I exclaim
Multitudes of somethings, perhaps senselessly.
There's no proof of even the stars
Of even the bird's song
Of even your eyes.
I could live without proof, and besides,
I would rather dare a dream of life
Than to deny that there's something there.
Today, at the hospital, a patient I was evaluating became increasingly hostile and unsafe. He was getting belligerent with staff, and the police were called in. I was wanting to get the guy some help, but I knew he'd forfeit that if he blew his top and broke the law there, which seemed increasingly likely as the minutes escalated and buzzed.
An African-American nurse walked by, who was just doing her rounds, and in his explosion he yelled out the dreaded N word. I turned to watch her sink, her head coming down to her chest as if her spirit just deflated. "Arrest him," I said, which they kindly obliged. I don't think I've ever seen a word so cleanly puncture a person's soul.
After he was carted off, I looked around for the nurse, whom I'd never seen before. She's from Africa, and said she'd never been called that word as long as she's been in America. I've seen people slapped, kicked, bludgeoned, and she was justly in shock over a wound just as real. She said that in her culture, if you offer a stranger a piece of bread, you acknowledge that you're their brother or sister, that the community takes care of each other. She said that's what she tries to bring to nursing- I said that she's giving an even bigger gift, that of sharing a great cultural value that "ours" needs so badly.
I was immensely touched by her spirit, even as it was wounded. For while she was reeling from such unkindness, she felt so badly for the patient. That he was arrested brought her no comfort, only sadness for him and such selfless compassion.
I've a lot to learn from that hour or so. And I'll never forget the haunting image of a proud, beautiful and strong person so suddenly broken by the careless arrogance of someone who is refusing what this nurse so freely gives... compassion.
The lilac tree uproots itself
And dances in the street at night.
Exuberant hues of purple thrill the air
With each sweep of a branch, each flourish of blossom.
Or, it could be you who's dancing,
Your spine arcing across the starfields
Fingers play with the wind, loosened from names and time.
Dancers, of dream and of now, you were once bodies
And are now words, blazing through the music
You are the poetry of some love-mad fool
Each footfall an answered longing
Each leap a wish unbound by reason.
Is a lilac any more reasonable than a poem, a dance?
If you have transcended bone to become a word
Do not be timid in your pronouncement,
Spin for the audacity of spinning,
Dance close to me that I may be moved by your orbit,
Swayed by the language in your steps.
I look out the window
And behold the lilac tree...
Still for now,
But waiting to be caught dancing,
As I look on and on, wordlessly,
Waiting for a poem.
It has come to our attention that this blog is being infrequently updated. Pleased be advised that the blogger is experiencing time-related deficiencies and this situation is being closely followed by Management. Remain out of your homes. Disregard the warnings and emergency broadcasts. Do not panic, as area authorities and the Great God Pan have the situation under control, as much as it can be controlled, which is actually quite little.
In the woods today a breeze
And a rain of petals on the path
Each a dancer in the moment,
Each spinning in homage
To the space between twig and ground
Falling is coming home
Lying there as crazy as a starfield
As purposeless as anything else,
Purposeful dancing only unto itself.
Being witness to such a game of chance
While so gracelessly be-forested
Casting out for such breath and sun
Is a daredevil's compact with gravity and happenstance-
I'll fly through time like those raptured blossoms
Singularly created for this very moment
To have my one dance seen by some stranger from afar
Admiring the winding path ahead
And might notice the petals fall.
This is one of those blog posts that is intended to be a mere blip on the radar, a brief surfacing for air, a sudden spike in the EEG. Things are, well, as the recent meme goes, just what it says on the tin. I'm still here, to quickly reiterate, but I've been frightfully immersed in such wondrously time obliterating pursuits, such as:
Learning my lines for the ghastly play, which I barely agreed to be in a few weeks ago, and now is one week from opening. I'm the lead, and this wretched script, dug from the very bowels of a publisher's hell, is brutal on the English language and even the most easily entertained.
Feverishly working to complete the final FINAL draft of the new book, as I need a stack for sale by this time next month. The miracle of modern printing will likely come through for me, but with the cancer upon time that the play is, I have a monumental task yet ahead.
Working. Stretching my brain around horribly warped dynamics and sadness. Also beginning to prep for my Substance Abuse boards in June, itself as fearful as taxes.
Co-parenting at a very critical time for the lil' one. I can't use this space to get into his stuff, of course, but it's fair to say that as he faces struggles, I face them with him with the added benefit of my experience in maneuvering similarly, yet with the added fear and unsettle-ment that time and memory bring.
As with the rest of America, experiencing severe financial discombobulation. Alas, poor Yorick...
I feel badly that my twittering (a somewhat gut-wrenching reworking of that lovely verb) has been far more frequent than my posting here. Perhaps, it's a side effect of our rapidly dwindling time/attention as a society, or my own, heavens, internetty laziness.
I will post more dispatches from the front as time and situations allow.
If anything, I am a stalker of words
The right words, their accompanying sounds
In dense trails through the brush, holding my breath to
Catch a glimpse of a semantic beast, a toothy emissary of the wild
At my own peril, to bare my chest to the creature, to drop my weapons and dare it.
I am not a killing man, yet there’s something terrifying- my bare hands are to confront it.
The very nature which draws me out, adrenaline shook and skin chilled
Are my own pronouncements gone feral, once gently past my lips
Only to get that crazed look in their eyes, and dash out into
Shadows, howl, and enter the thick symbolic bramble
And rage, and thirst for blood, and lead the chase.
Supple mouths are but gates that swing in the
Wind, and the entire menagerie creeps
Out, and that screeching is mine
The clawmarks are mine
Myself my own prey.
How is it that that which
Is tame so suddenly succumbs
To intoxicating instinct and becomes a
Wholly different animal simply by sniffing a
Breeze kissed with the freedom to run, even into chaos?
It is night, and it is still and I am waiting for you, for that which
Was once mine, was once me, now young and feral and uncompromising in appetite.
What will I do with my hands when finally, the words are caught, and time is nigh?
I may tense them in a hunter’s unforgiving grip, or open them, and embrace
Something once cherished, once escaped, now beyond recognition
In that moment of capture, but as I hold those words
Those savage nobles, those fearsome beasts,
We break down in sudden remembrance
I howl with you and you gently
Go with me, the fight is over
Leaving us to merge again
Into our homeland
Of air and
Flesh.
I've just finished the rough first edit of the new book. Yes, the new one, and incidentally, the third one which I've been sitting on for some time. The beast is at least weighing in at 350 pages of my gibberish presently, and with some cuts and additions, that's about where it will likely settle. Not that the page length has anything to do with it, really, but being a man there's something quite comforting in such a long, ahem, piece of work.
I'm still aiming for an April Fool's 2009 launch, and the free time between now and then is so, so thin. A poem ("Kick up the dust") originally seen on this site and performed at Jubilee will get an interpretive dance work-over in mid-April at the Diana Wortham Theatre, and I'd love to have a stack ready to go by then. It's quite an humor, obviously, and thanks everyone for your hand in the inspiration and the drive to keep this thing going.
If anything, this blog is a personal archeology rather than a public compendium of interests and whimsies for the masses. I've never been much of a consistent journal-er, yet I find another Groundhog's Day/Imbolc is here and Bird on the Moon adds another year to its dusty stacks.
Happy Birthday blog, you are 6 years old today!
What is especially interesting in this is that I'm pouring through all of these entries for material. I am closing in on having the first rough draft and edit of the and so much of it has its roots here. Yes, my frequency of posting is wanting, and perhaps the public substance has been less than immediately mind-blowingly transcendental, but what you do with these words is your business dear reader, I just arrange them. Transcend as you will.
So, no gloaty and self congratulatory posting here, just placing a marker here along the path. I am certainly keeping this going, because while it may benefit the passing reader (okay, over 2 million visits since the start) it is ultimately a time capsule for myself and perhaps for others... maybe my lil' one will be interested in going through all this some day. If at least to help him sleep.
Well, thanks everybody. It is an honor to be among the most senior of Asheville bloggerati, and it is an honor that some folks I'll never know hitch along on my journey. As the glam metal 80s song goes, "I don't know where I'm going, but I sure know where I've been."
Here's to not knowing tomorrow, and being thankful for so many great years!
The house at its quietest...
The little one fell asleep listening to
Old stories, oral histories, fantastic fictions.
I laugh, kiss his hair, and tuck him in.
Now alone with myself after a day of
Cold and muck; we sought out stones
At a disused mine, deep reds
Which emerge through the
Sleeping dirt in perfect geometry.
A brief moment of eureka, holding aloft the find,
When the stone is not the found thing at all,
But that moment itself now merged with
The crystalline, no longer the stone,
Just time in the sun, even as cold
As we were, even as entranced
And exhausted, and free.
Now, though, a flickering candle,
These fingers, these words, and this
Fruitful silence where the gravity of my
Changing life is not less heavy, but more comfortable...
The gravity of transgressions, regrets, awkwardnesses, shadows
Is reclining, may as have its feet on the table, whistling
"Round Midnight" or some other hymn to these times.
Tonight, I am just as able to converse with the
Heavy burden of my worn and addled secrets
As I am to hold those rocks we found,
Thinking of the holy effort not in the digging
But in seeing, savoring, exalting.
Perhaps, stories exist to lull
The child in us to dream
Just as much as they do for the teller
To find new passages through the mystery,
Unexpected paths through the bramble of our days,
And laughing in the quiet of a small house, at ourselves.
As the Universe created itself, and as we are the Universe embodied, so it is our course to create ourselves. We must further look to the stars to see that all creation, all forms, must one day un-create, disembody, and dissolve back into darkness and light and all that lies between and beyond.
To fight this is the ultimate denial; to take charge of it is the ultimate strength.
There is a great fascination in conceptualizing the Other,
That alien, that shadow, that ghost who makes a home
Just between the atoms of our Everyday, and lurches,
Suddenly, into our own, taking our breath
Without ever having to ask for it.
I was listening to this wind we've been warned about
Rattle the edge of my world, surely freezing
Any still thing, when a spider larger than the eyes watching it
Crept down, carefully down, the lampshade.
The Other moved with such precision
In strides that surely inspired daVinci
Mechanical is a crude word for it
A perfection of organic orchestration.
I do not move with such gentility,
I bumble dance and zig-zag through the symmetrical corridors of days
Not altogether graceless, yet not as aware
As the arachnid whose mission has now advanced to the bookshelf
Moving through pages which attempt to strenuously capture
The awe of the creation in which we find ourselves
Waiting for the Other,
Surrendering to the intruder
Without ever a breath of understanding between us.
It pretty much weakens a blog post from the start to say something like "I wish I could say more, but...", and this is one of these cases. I've got to be up frightfully early in the morning for the annual pilgrimage to Delaware, get the house ready, and somewhere in the middle of that, acknowledge a calendar flip to the much anticipated and feared '09. I type this while still annoyingly encumbered with a lingering laryngitis, which tries my patience even when the words are spoken by my fingers. So, a proper year end review would take more times than I am allowing myself, so I will process Zero Eight with a run-on sentence, thusly:
"It started with tossing some fireworks out the back and attracting the new neighbors attention, and continued on with a dire amount of unblogged work panic related to my own damn procrasination which actually lead to a vacation in Charleston where I met a fabulous gentleman with whom I still try to correspond amid the new duties ascribed by me as a Godfather-plus which stretched joyously into the springtime wherein I found a short poetic resurgence which couldn't have prepared me for the sudden death of my cousin Brooke whom I still miss and feel strangely about not being physically incarnate, then again even the most base matter is incarnated somethingness though by July I'd had it with a certain religion which would've argued even the above loosely worded observation, of which I increasingly shared at Jubilee to good reception, mysteriously, and it was to mystery I flew in September after resigning from a company that took over my older company, to which I retreated to a different division, but more excitingly I traveled from Istanbul to Bruges (Belgium) for about a month where at the midpoint I rendezvoused with Joshua and Robin for Oktoberfest and zaniness in Bavaria, and when it was all said and done after returning home I felt out of place by remaining in place and back home I tried to undertake a sabbatical but the new division of old company snatched me up and suddenly I was a "crisis counselor" full time which flew by as the autumn colors splashed across the mountains like a spray can shot off a fence post which isn't "Green" but whatever it's a metaphor, and fall grew into wintry-ness faster than I anticipated and the responsibilities and rigors of an emerging parenting role consumed me and lead to a few dark nights of anti-confidence which quickly dissipated each time I saw my lil' guy's happy eyes, which makes everything worth it, and despite losing a shitload in the markets and living a much less financially secure life (who isn't?) I find that I am happy and can leave Zero Eight wiser and, quite possibly, happier than I entered it, so in forty minutes I'm going to throw some fireworks out the back, and..."
Jeez that was exhausing for me too. Happy Arbitrary Passing of Time Day, y'all, and with joy and care may we welcome yet another symbolic chance to get things even more right.
David Corn: [Obama] stepped over a line by picking Warren to deliver the invocation at his inauguration--even if this is only a symbolic gesture.
By all means, Obama should work with Rick Warren when there is common cause. For political reasons, he should not eschew Warren because of his anti-gay views. Warren can be a powerful ally when it comes time to persuade the public to support climate change legislation. Success in governing often depends on forging coalitions with those with whom you disagree.
But Warren's opposition to gay rights is more than a mere policy dispute. It is an act of bigotry. Sure, Warren does not believe he is being discriminatory. But that's what it is. He is denying rights to certain Americans because he disapproves of how they love. By handing Warren this prime slot at the inauguration, Obama is saying that he recognizes Warren as a spiritual leader and is reaffirming Warren's position as such. This is an insult to gay Americans and those who support equal rights in this nation.
Up north, they say the trees bent and cracked with ice,
Billions of temporal crystals bringing the day down,
Cities on pause as in amber,
Time for the observers to rush in.
No such thickness here, that you can touch anyway.
Though I cannot tell if I am inside the shaken snowglobe, perpetual in mid-wonder,
Or outside it, shaking vigorously, questioning what has really ever changed.
Time for the observers to rush in.
I do know that the cold has twisted and crackled the branches of my tree
Gnarled them unrecognizable from spring’s gay pageant,
And we are in greatest upheaval when we are unseen to ourselves.
Time for the observers to rush in.
The winter is fearsome only in that it renders the obscure naked
Reduces flamboyance to only the most essential of movement,
Making the hide-n-seek of summer’s festive play a pointless act; nothing disguises you.
Time for the observers to rush in.
I was born on the cusp of the season, a rainy Thursday which surely washed leaves into the gutter.
Suddenly, skeletons around which we build the meat of our names, our craven necessities, are revealed.
I am spending the rest of my life peeling away to the origin, the naïve twig, the fragile bone.
Time for the observers to rush in.
From these heaps emits a gasp of timelessness, even as they whither under seemingly permanent stars.
Do you remember the games you played with yourself, dancing between two opposing mirrors?
It seemed that distance blurred you, but in fact you merged with that light, dissipated within the glass.
Time for the observers to rush in, one of them is you,
Finally seeing yourself.
When my mind wanders, just before sleep,
I enter the world of make-believe, the province of my younger and unstained hands,
Where I would simply play the day away,
To be some brave an noble figure commanding the world from my bottom bunk.
It is so often said so as to be second nature
That not-knowing, a celestial sort of innocence, is the closest we have to the child inside.
The first star I see tonight, I wish I may,
I wish I might, un-know all that has made my steps more pragmatic and careful,
All that has informed my restraint,
So that for even a mere hour I could reclaim the naive woodland paths of my forsaken years,
Where the rigidity of knowledge couldn't obscure the boldest of dreams.
Even though as my fingers are wrinkling with the millions of minutes spent wrestling Truths,
I see too enticements to play and pretend, to make believe
That the world's radiance cannot be overshadowed by the limits imposed by fear and pain.
Perhaps I can still pretend, even as the map of my body and soul
Succumbs to separatist movements of the competing flags of truth, honor, and virtue.
There are tree houses yet unbuilt, worlds yet untouched.
Though adventure may be tamed by the clock, I must jam the gears for child that follows,
And dare to never come home on time.
Only rust red and thin veins of gold cap the mountains-
This morning, I heard the syncopation of a tree letting go of it's final tiny hands-
The weight of heavy down is shield enough against gloom-
The very breath of the Earth is ferment now, roots into roots-
I crave spice, artificial heat, edible furnaces.
All life is clockwork, yet there is no universal agreement
What time it really is.
All I know is that autumn has arched the pinnacle,
An almanac page loosed from its binding,
And we flutter now into the nurturing dark and chill
Again, one with the province of stars, again,
Left to calculate our place and pace in the passing night.
What senses record your history?
What undiscovered dimensions of feeling are the dutiful scribes of your name?
I tremble before the venerable and exact chronology of mountains,
Of the iron in my blood and the exultant push skyward
Of mere ruddy leaves, southward flocks,
And the coming still nights.
Life has changed, and always will. It's the thankful litany of the ages that ours is an incarnation as variable as the autumn leaves, as random and resplendent as the stones along the shoreline. For this, I of course offer gratitude, but for that changing life, I must also offer concern.
Ours is a world that has been overwhelmed by the weight of its own divisions, a world that is collapsing under the strain of wars, disparity, and entrenched idealism. While beauty abounds and potential runs as freely as starlings, there is a very tenuous grip on the future here, and it's straining, and the gravity of millenia of carelessness is pulling us down. Each of us, from ivory towers to the shanties of the poorest slums suffers.
This year, I was asked to take on a responsibility that has transformed my idle minutes into measures of necessity. I was asked to be a Godfather, and beyond. For years I've been against the grindstone for children who've been cast off by a society too drenched in judgment and obligations of artifice to give the powerful mercies needed to help them recover from the suffering inflicted by the grand scale selfishness of society, abuse, and poverty. Suddenly, all of my efforts were contextualized into the needs of a child frequently disdained, labeled, written-off. Suddenly, I was asked eclipse the work-a-day world and be a champion for a soul whose merits were overlooked because of his challenges. I cannot imagine a better thing to say yes to, and a greater cause. I cannot imagine a greater challenge, and a better reason to fight for a future which is ambiguous at best, fearsome at least, prosperous at most.
I now have, finally, something greater than myself to fight for, to die for if need be. I never took the future of America as seriously as I do now, and never have with as much fire in my belly screamed aloud for change as I have in the past weeks. For this reason, for the sake of my responsibility which I view as sacred and as necessary as my next breath, I implore that all Americans take the time to look around them and undertake action which honors and magnifies their own responsibility. I implore you, my homeland, to seek out the greatness of your own callings and do what is required to grant a just and peaceful legacy to those who will follow us into histories yet unwritten. We have been too long negated, exploited, and like my Godson, written off. We have been mere pawns in a sickening political game, which does not honor the soul and the justification of a nation. The birthright bestowed upon us by our ancestors has been sold to high bidders and profiteers, and I don't believe freedom was a virtue intended to be commoditized and traded like cattle.
I believe that freedom was a virtue intended to be improved upon by successive generations, perfected, and practiced. This child who calls me Dad reflects a deep abiding wisdom when he says "it doesn't make sense that we make a big deal about hate speech but our institutions are themselves hateful." Can we not aspire to the words of children, and cease our nationally ignorant contrariness?
I believe that, in some form, we can at least begin that great work by using the best of our remaining democratic opportunities and elect Barack Obama the next President of the United States. Since I was young, I've always watched politics as a sport, at times a blood sport, but always without great inspiration. It was with a certain schadenfreude that I watched the powerful tear themselves down and see what mere virtues remained. Yet this campaign has proved me wrong. I see in Barack and Joe the best of America remaining unscathed, because they refuse to bow to the blood sport and spoil the justification of their message. They stand uniquely equipped at this time in history to create dramatic shifts of hope and opportunity, nit for myself as much, but for the one who depends on me most.
For the sake of the most innocent, and thus the must vulnerable and the most often victimized, do what is right, America. Do what is the essence of our birthright, do what composes the blessings of truest liberty, and vote.
Vote with love, vote with compassion, vote with confidence, and vote with hope.
I was once a boy,
Now, by default a man who through chance
Ran the gauntlet of time to hold these small words in my hand.
I was once a boy in my mother’s house,
With a forest at my back and silent meadows full of magic
Left to make worlds out of silent hours, to make sense out of paint,
To learn the world through yellowed paperbacks, rope swings, and the kids down the block,
Our secrets bigger than any treehouse, darker than the stagnant creek
By which we made our pacts.
I was once a boy in my father’s house,
On the brink of a river whose tides once ripped the basement, and would carry you away,
Where the clink of glass and the echoes of lonely proclamation
Were the make-do comforts of a misfitted bumbling frame,
Told with such fervor that there was something I stood for just by the heaving of my blood
Told that there was no trying greater than signing a once privileged name
But the driftwood boats could ferry away my soul, a hobo, a prince, to some greater ocean.
I was once a boy,
Now in my own house, quiet save for the cats and the chestnuts that hit the roof with each breeze.
I am wrinkling, I have numbers sewn into the spine of my worthiness, a chest of old stories.
The boy, once ruffled and curious, inexperienced and blessedly naïve,
Now has seen too much, inventively forgetting the scars, a luxury where once he was entertained by mud.
I wish I knew, even remembered, the goodly comforts of innocence, life before obligation.
I was once a boy, now a man, now a father,
With only years between this house, and the houses of my earliest days,
Years that pass radiantly, from my storied hands,
To those of the boy.
2045: First off, I soon hope to return to higher-minded posting, but politics has always been a sport I follow with a Neanderthal's zeal for the good-guy-clubbing-bad-guy-on-the-head-with-a-mammoth-bone kinda stuff. American politics is certainly the world's lowest common denominator, so to speak, but Obama seeks to bring the dignity and respect back to the gladiator's ring. We'll see how joyously he wails on the tired old awful Walnuts. Poor Walnuts.
2057: Mmmm, reheated garlic lemon rosemary elitist chicken! With capers!
2104: Walnuts is hurting right now, and he's angry.
2106: As always, I'm mentally yelling at my router. Barry comes on strong an energetic, Walnuts is puddling-like.
2109: If this is what "going on the attack" is, it's like playing war with balled up socks. Barry continues to sound presidential.
2113: What's wrong with spreading the wealth around? It might be "socialist" sounding, but so is nationalizing banking. Which Walnuts voted for.
2117: I'm sure Walnuts remembers the Great Depression. He voted for the 10 trillion dollar debts that will hobble our kids.
2125: Frankenstein has the scars to prove it, too. Why can't McCain return the respect he's being generously given by Barack?
2131: "Politics as usual is not working for this country."
2134: How dare Walnuts not acknowledge the bafoonery and evil statements that have gone on at his so-called rallies?
2141: Walnuts scrambles like a drowning rat at the end of the Ayers question. I will grant that he's a master at changing the topic.
2144: What's weird about the instant reaction feeds is that it relies on reflexive, not thoughtful, responses. Oh, and Walnuts is ridiculous in pulling out the "special needs" card. She's not even taking care of her baby.
2156: Still here, just dumbfounded by the fact that Walnuts gets to have the last word on every pivotal question.
2159: What's with Walnuts' cocky and unpresidential smirk?
2205: Yippee, you can drink now because Walnuts mentioned the gold plated Caddy! I swear, I've never seen more reprehensible rhetoric from a major candidate than tonight from McCain.
2209:I could consider eating a lobster, Sen. McCain, and perhaps I should get credit for considering it. Fact is, no way will I actually eat a lobster. But I can get some points for at least thinking about it. Right? That's what you're saying.
2215: the issues are not really being represented here. it's a gotchya tit for tat, a sifting for soundbites. the questions are weak.
2218: We trail the rest of the world in education because of our approach to education. We can't factory farm the power of the human mind. Intellect is a commodity that can't be created though a model that is so geared toward profit, but through instilling a classical desire to learn. I don't expect either candidate to address educational philosophy, but the way we educate has a lot to do with the failure of our system... we don't allow for the great variety of capacities, curiosities, and inclinations that make a big difference in a child's success.
2226: Okay, you fucker, bring it on about autism. Show me, Sen. McCain, how the administration you palled around with increased the funding and likelihood of effective treatment and education for autistic children. Show me.
2230: An eloquent (new elitist buzz word) finish from President Obama, while Walnuts was again scrambling with his fake hubris. It's over now, thank the heavens.
I was expecting to be posting journal entries from the Odyssey by now, having completed processing the pictures, video, and audio as well. Maybe I would've finally gotten some time in to work on the book, itself long overdue. Yet, what have I done, other than accept some contract work, dig a firepit, and play house?
I've been absorbed in the "correction" we've been seeing, the collapse of our entire financial sector (my investments included), along with real spasms of inadequacy in our energy sectors affecting real people, not just speculators in a pit. I've watched with great dismay the desperate thrashings of an old, power hungry man and his Manchurian compadre as the last democratic exercise we possess, the election of leadership, turns suddenly against him and the paradigm he represents. The venom, the whipping up of frenzies and lynch mobs, and the incitement (or, at least, tacit approval) of violence is sickening, appalling, pushes the bounds of realism. Is Barack Obama being called a terrorist? Is George Bush nationalizing our banks, the very socialism his ilk have blamed Obama for suggesting with regards to health care?
Is America so intellectually vacuous that these arguments have merit with even the "lowest" of low information voters? Apparently somewhat, as the mobs seethe and roil, yet it appears that gains continue to be made by Obama and the forces that hold dear to what remains of our democratic institutions. It feels as if there is almost a cleaving, a separation, occurring whereby partisanship will be generationally and regionally entrenched. With Obama's certain victory, a sacrifice is made, that of growing disparate populations who have accepted spoonfed hate and isolationism, in a time of great turmoil. Many will overcome their racial biases, and fears of "otherness," yet many will also hold fast to cultural and intellectual xenophobia.
I need satire to vent, base and thoughtless as it may be, we all do. But after we salve each shocking sting as the world we know melts away, there's got to be some action behind it, some energy that is prepared to fill the gap. Energy higher than the merely partisan, action more powerful than the pronouncement of words and opinions. My goal for today is to find my action, for words and opinions I've aplenty. What am I willing to do? Whatever it is, it must be far more than mere voyeuristic witnessing of a collapsing paradigm, as has been the American luxury.
I am back, and have been for a week. Updating the site has been a lower-echelon need, but I'm getting at it. I'll add a link to all of the goodies you were enjoying on the splash page last month, and now that there is time (albeit presently from concentrate), I will get back to blogging more often, and more meaningfully.
This weekend, the big O is coming to Asheville, and I and a jazillion others will be packing it in to watch him speak on Sunday. I was proud of my little home state last night, at least of being of the same geographic stock as the good Senator Biden. He sure ate some mooseburger, ya betcha.
Tonight is a wedding rehearsal for two great friends, and I have the pleasure of doing the duty. So, back to work on the ceremony, and the peacefulness of this terrifyingly gorgeous autumn day (so damn gorgeous that I'm worried that a glitch in the simulation software will occur, and the Universe as I know it will have to reboot for having exceeded the memory capabilities of the System).
I guess I could've taken the train to Prague tonight, and in hindsight maybe it wouldn't have been so bad. But I think my mind and body just needed a break. My stomach and innerregions are troubled somewhat, and there are other indicators which lead to tonight's brief hermitude: the abortive attempt to cool my heels (and ferklempt ankles, which have never seen this much activity) at the thermal pool, the constant running to hither and thither, the energy required to communicate ideas, and perhaps just a need for a static and peaceful few hours prompted this respite. I'm abiding the break comfortably in this oddly shaped hotel room directly overlooking the minaret where I once stood nine years ago, seeking some sort of connection. Now, almost a decade later, I'm feeling overconnected, and glance through the rain at the minaret as a symbol for not only a call to larger contexts, but also to the self that seeks it. We embiggen ourselves to find ourselves in the Eternal, almost stepping on the snail that crisscrosses the footpath.
There is some guilt in not adventuring tonight, gastronomically or otherwise, as I am obviously not in Central Hungary everyday. Yet I've feverishly chased town every rainsoaked street of the main centrum, lost or otherwise, I've put my sweat and drive into the day's unwritten adventures, and perhaps the kindest one can be to oneself is to stop and just be in the body for a while. At least, that's how I will justify my downtime tonight. Anyhow, a bucket can only hold so much usefully before it becomes an awkward comedy of excess, so tonight, I'm emptying.
...is what is now playing here in this quite net cafe in Ljubljana. I take a 0625 bus tomorrow morning for Trieste, and through the help of certain stateside goddesses, I have been able to print out what was lost in Mostar, just down a few momentos from the binder, but no great loss (provided of course I can work out the issues with Deutche Bahn regarding my lost ticket).
Ljubljana is stunning, and as I twittered, it should be a haven for expats. I am now 12 days into the trip, two weeks left, and I am getting better in adapting to the wear, team, and grime of cross continental travel. Albeit, I am less daring than backpackers who throw themselves across borders with little more than tattered guidebooks. But this is who I am, no more, no less. I have been asking myself what standard I hold myself to, regarding what I should get out of the journey and what I put into it. I feel that my expectations of myself are almost completely beyond what is immediately achievable, in the realm of the mythical attainment. While I must keep one foot across the threshold of higher purpose, my forward foot needs to be more grounded in the now, the journey, the topography of this minute´s adventure. I think I have grown up in such a self analytical and critical climate that it makes it impossible to ever achieve enough, the same struggle I see in school kids. The same I see in seniors, struggling to put an exclamation point at the end of life. Overreaching creates an underreaching within, discarding an aspect of the soul/self for what it is... there, present, singular, and briefly anchored to a material incarnation.
Today, I will dive deep into Ljubljana, for the joy of it. What I come up with is what I come up with, and I will be happy with it. As the cafe radio now blares from the depth of the ´80s, "It´s my perogative."
It is a hot day here in Nis and I cannot find the apostrophe key on this haggard cafe computer anywhere. My phone is about toast, and I do not know if I will be able to twitter much without it. No problem, really. I have a bus ticket for Herceg Novi, Montenegro for 1715 tonight, about 24 hours behind schedule. No worries, though,I extended my stay in Dubrovnik to cover the lost day and am making Mostar a day trip, from which I will leave for Ljubljana of the 10th. My hotel here, though, is a thing of beauty and cannot be forgotten. As the elevator heaved its way to the 13th floor at 2 this morning, I felt so grateful for a temporary shelter against the elements of grime and sleeplessness. Alas, the room was stacked full of old mattresses, there was a pile of old rags in the bathroom, and a full tilt Serbo-rave going on til 5 in the blessed a.m.. It is the best of post Soviet hospitality. I wish the shower had an option for sanitizing gel.
Despite the hiccups, though, I am enjoying myself ragged. The language barrier has been fun, and in Sofia last night I was reduced to making a choo-choo noise to the cab driver to indicate the train station. We both laughed, and he sold me a CD of Bulgarian hits, actually quite good. Today I wandered in the heavily accented heat around the fortress of Nis, which has since fallen into use by drunkards, and its historical value is only discernible through intuition. I know it was built in the 1700s, and surrounds much older structures. But for the ubiquitous cafe umbrellas and the retired carnival rides littering the outskirts, you just soak up the history by osmosis.
The sun is now full tilt on the monitor and I can't see a damn thing. UPDATE: the gentle cafe host jury rigged a cushion resting on top of my journal as a shield. I was about to say, and thus am saying, that the sun here is more brutal than the sun at home. Hotter than Balkan political rhetoric. Even more than that. I think metal is melting around me. AC does not exist here, at least in any perceptible way, but again I'm not here for my comfort, but to learn and be open to the lessons of the road.
I still have an hour before I have to get to the bus station, and I'm computered out. I suppose I'll look around for a burek, the local cheese filled pastry wonder.
Istanbul is a city of remarkable and thrilling contrasts. Perched on the arbitrary edge between Europe and Asia (which I briefly entered yesterday), the city must reconcile its ancient history with the adrenaline of westernization. I am impressed with Turkish pride, and the resistance to anglicization, though it does make basic communication a tad tricky. It almost feels like a frontier settlement, though not because its roughshod. This type of frontier is entirely mental, a philosophical border upon which I am now perched upon in more than one metaphorical way, naturally. I'll write more, much more, tonight. The bustle outside is tempting me out.
Last poem written in America, at least for a little while!
“Kick up the dust” by jay joslin
This body is held to the Earth by the long golden light of another passing day
Is made a lengthening shadow by the rush of protons from a heaving star
These footsteps fade into the gentle late summer night,
Falling in rhythm to the whimsical dance of stars
Under the opulent fantasies of constellations,
And the whirring chorus of cricket song.
Your body is held to the road and its curiosities by the ever quickening drama of time,
Is implored to move across the map by whispered promises of legends to behold
Your footsteps kiss the paths through a wilderness made to be known-
The Universe desires passionately to know itself through your bones,
Seeks to feel, dance, laugh, and run uphill through your skin
Longs for brambles parted by your hands in discovery.
Our bodies are held to their destination by the urgency of mortality and the blessing of names,
Are composed of atoms that are but dust, kicked up in the exertion of self-awareness
Our footsteps are made in the agreement that for this life, we must know it,
Must know the surging waters of love and the drought of disillusion,
Must wander in the moonless night for shelter, warmth and song,
Savoring holy moments of meteors and sudden friendships.
This body is held to the Universe, as much as it is an extension of it, soul within soul, star within star,
Is choosing to make camp in the rugged wilds of the unknown, for where else is there sanctuary?
My footsteps kick up the dust along a well-worn path trod by every living hungry creature,
An irresistible highway worn by the endless gypsy caravans of our young intellect,
I cannot help, like you, but to cross this perilous terrain of Earthly existence,
Thus, let us make camp together, light the fire, and tell stories
Over the embers of yesterday, marking our progress
On this tattered map, agreeing we have no choice
But to kick up the dust, kick it up within the soul
In torrential recognition of our rambling nature,
Kick it up along the road into swirling eddies
Of improbable molecules, and ride the trail
Into ourselves, in this long golden light,
Through this shimmering landscape.
Yes, it really is. I've transitioned yet again jobwise, and it is a bittersweet thing. Many of you know how incredibly proud I've been of some of the accomplishments the kids and families have made, and that pride can only swell as I gently and gracefully take my leave from this particular position. It's with a sense of gratitude for serving that I step out on journeys unknown, and a sense of profound relief that I've at least for now decided to shelter myself from the gale forces of mental health "reform" in North Carolina. Many of you know how much I love the community I've served with a passion, and that love does not subside as I move into a period of transformation... I will be back, in a variety of contexts. Roots is roots.
It's also true that in 13 days you can watch this site for daily updates on my Oriental to Occidental Odyssey from Istanbul to London. I'll have pics, real time GPS data on where the hell I am, and observations from the road as communications allow. It's 27 days of 17 countries, mostly as a solo traveler until I reach Munich for Oktoberfest, where I join Joshua and Robin for merry making, sausage saluting, and beer bellying. I will be in the Balkans for most of those days, and with so little time left to get my logistics in place, time is being funneled into very tiny points of must dos and check lists. Minutiae never loomed so large.
So, despite the lack of activity in the past, I dunno, era, the blog will be cooking daily. Please join me in the coming weeks as I slide into purposefully perplexing portals hither and yon in the Old, and Older, Country...
Under the summer drunk stars
Around four in the morning
I left the house almost naked
Pushed out by a dream
To pet the cat.
She was about as surprised as I was at this behavior
Purring warmly on the lawn chair
A rather holy place to be.
Did you hear that researchers in Italy have recently unearthed some interesting documents in the life of the astronomer Galileo? The little town of Pisa was famous not only for its leaning architecture, but also a heretic in the making. One of these scrolls has just been translated, a 450 year old letter to the editor of the Pisa Citizen-Times:
“I am writing to complain about the scandalous activities of my neighbor Galileo. He believes God’s Earthly real estate revolves around the sun, and stars are not holes poked in the canopy of heaven, but other suns! Blasphemy! He also thinks the moon is too far away to reach, yet my meemaw, bless her heart, would climb up there every Sunday for our gorgonzola. I have some friends who work for the inquisition part time and I am sure they would love to talk with him about the heresy of rejecting common sense. It’s like saying that our beloved tower has an issue with staying erect. There’s a peeping tom problem in Pisa, so I wonder if his telescope is being used for other purposes, you know what I mean? Well, let me warn you, Mr. Astronomer, when moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s divine justice.”
We’ve got to wonder just how much in the world has really changed from Galileo’s time to our own. He was forced by the church to recant his theories and lived the rest of his life under house arrest. Though facing blindness and chastisement for second guessing the pope’s celestial dogma, he privately held firm to his heliocentric far-sightedness. Galileo joins a litany of countless martyrs snubbed not for being right, but for being objective.
In the blink of civilization’s dusty eye, we’ve gone from living on a flat Earth at the center of the solar system to billions of other suns, the Hubble telescope, and constant revelations of the mind-bendingly awesome and terrifying expanse of space. We’re mites on a windblown seed compared to the infinite map of the Universe ever unfurling deeper into starfields of knowledge and reckoning.
It was only a matter of evolutionary time before we looked out from our caves and wondered about the stars. By shifting our focus from digging through the mud for tuber treats and tasty grubs, the movements of the constellations suddenly became labors of the gods, and the crashing of the waves were the magnificent heavings of a breathing ocean. The shift of perspective from immediate survival to the eternal mystery, small picture to big picture gave us our myths, legends, and greatest struggles. Breathe deeply.
You’ve heard before that I was a weird kid, and rug-rat Jay thought that lives were lived in a black and white world until the advent of color television. Some of us still think the world is in black and white because of color television. Still, I wasn’t terribly far off, at least in cosmic time. According to evolutionary biologists, our ancestors didn’t gain full color and focal range until they stopped their nocturnal hunting, began to eat flowers and fruit, necessitating avoidance of deadly predators. We may have hunger and slithering beasties to thank for our ability to look deeper and clearer. Again, check it out: we can’t see the big picture until our survival as a species is threatened and we’re forced to evolve. That’s happening right now.
Just as the wilderness bound Israelites tested their willingness to see God’s big picture in that surprise delivery of the certified organic manna, our vision is grown when the unexpected suddenly appears. Not just eyeball vision; the vision of heart and soul is profoundly clarified by the light of sudden wonder. “When the people of Israel saw it, they said to one another, ‘What is it?’” Breathe deeply.
Way back when, at a Mt. Shasta campsite, I was bitterly lamenting in my journal that I had traveled two thousand miles for some good meditation, and couldn’t do it. I tried in vain, studied the ins-and-outs of dozens of meditative practices, and yet there I was… spilling my ink in the shadow of one of the most majestic mountains on Earth… not getting connected. During my unfocused kvetching, however, a bee landed menacingly on my hand, ceased the writing and grabbed my prickled attention. For over half an hour, the curious critter shook his honeymaker all up and down my fingers, and that’s all there was, the waiting, the care to avoid being stung, and the fascination of contact. Just as suddenly as it came, it went, leaving behind the gift of a powerful and unexpected meditation. That bee didn’t read the mindfulness books that were dog-eared in my tent; the bee helped me just be, and I just was. The song is by Asheville’s favorite son and original Jubilant David Wilcox…
“It's the choice of a lifetime & I'm almost sure
I will not live my life in between anymore
If I can't be certain of all that's in store
This far it feels so right
CHORUS: I will hold it up, hold it up to the light,
Hold it up to the light, hold it up to the light”
The internal struggle between big and small picture was mediated by a tiny insect who was only curious, resulting in an exercise of focus that forever changed the way I see. We’ve all been there, we’ve all puzzled with getting the big picture back. Mostly, the answer is right under our nose, jumping up and down for attention.
“The search for my future has brought me here
This is more than I'd hoped for, but sometimes I fear
That the choice I was made for will someday appear
And I'll be too late for that flight
So hold it up, hold it up to the light,
Hold it up to the light, hold it up to the light”
Shortsightedness does have its advantages, just as farsightedness. Choosing to see only the smallest picture unlocks the subatomic, the foundation of physical realities; looking for the big picture gives us astronomy, exposing the context of our cosmic interplay. Working the graceful ability of balancing perspective grants us the wisdom to know the difference, charting a literal and metaphorical route from our point As and point Bs. Forgetting the context by which we walk those lines trips us over the first little bump. Just watch any random streetcorner and observe how clumsy we’ve all become through the distraction and misplaced immediacy of our digital lives. We’re immersed in an ethereal world of virtual contact when we’re shoulder-to-shoulder with our friends and family. We watch videos about what’s happening outside and when we’re out there we’re so gadget-enthralled we may as well be inside. Distracted by the short-term, we forgivably forget we are a part of a swirling galaxy, and have come through the Universe just to be here now.
“It's too late to be stopped at the crossroads
Each life here, each a possible way
But wait, and they all will be lost roads
Each road's getting shorter the longer I stay…”
Think about it; for those of you in long term relationships, when you bicker, do you usually tussle over whether mutual love is free will versus destiny, or to blanche or boil the broccoli? Typically, we’re drawn to stumble over the seemingly smallest of obstacles, and the molehills become perilous divides. That’s until we have our “eureka!” moments, recalling that a disease of conflict begins with a paralyzed point of view. Relax the eyes, and bring the light in to help, and the conflict becomes conversation, and the conversation becomes music.
“Now as soon as I'm moving, my choice is good
This way comes through right where I prayed that it would
If I keep my eyes open and look where I should
Somehow all of the signs are in sight
If I hold it up to the light”
It doesn’t take much imagination to see why being stuck on just one way of seeing things is dangerous to our survival. Regressive politics, cultural narrow-mindedness, and religions which abuse their origins provide plentiful bad examples of what happens when we disregard the wonder of our visioning potential to hyperventilate over some otherwise forgettable point. Political and religious tunnel vision reveals the devil in the details. It’s those molehills that always, always divide us, not the mountains which beg to inspire.
“I said God, will you bless this decision?
I'm scared. Is my life at stake?
But I see if you gave me a vision
Would I never have reason to use my faith?”
What would happen if we reconciled these differences in perspective by holding up to the light that which we don’t yet understand but care to transform? Could a room full of antagonized politicians stand together against hate crimes? Yes. Could the leaders of the world’s religions stop proselytizing for a minute to gather and unequivocally condemn all forms of faith based violence? Yes. While it may not have happened yet, we can’t deny there’s a powerful movement afoot to create healing in the littlest of ways, by choosing to be a curative to despair by seeing the big picture emblazoned in every heart, by smiling at a stranger, and surrendering what we don’t know to the light.
“I was dead with deciding - afraid to choose
I was mourning the loss of the choices I'd lose
But there's no choice at all if I don't make my move
And trust that the timing is right
Yes and hold it up hold it up to the light
Hold it up to the light, hold it up to the light”
We do this every Sunday at Jubilee and hopefully every day as Jubilants, by pecking at the thin eggshell of our collective comfort zone and taking a chance on ways of thinking and doing that just might transform and heal profoundly and imaginatively. When we gather with intention and focus, we as individuals, not nations and religions, seize the day to be corrective lenses for a critical planetary shortsightedness.
“I will hold it up hold it up to the light
Hold it up to the light, hold it up to the light.”
Children are born into the world wide open in wonder, and for a few years there’s a great magic between each eye blink. Things exist without labels, the sky can be blue for whatever fancy that day. As we age, the eyelids gain weight, the labels stiffen, and world becomes fixed, routine. That’s where my godson comes in to do the teaching. We’ll go to a garnet mine deep in Madison County, looking for hours amongst the muddy creeks and rock heaps for these mere gems, tiny fragments of a massive geological artistry. In the silence and bramble of those hours, the eyes relax, and details I would otherwise stumble over become patterns and clues for yet more treasure. He’ll find a garnet, tell me to come and see. “What is it?,” I’ll say, and he will hold up to the sun an ancient stone of beautiful deep reds and purples, shining through a union of distant star and upheld hand, mouths open in wonder. Just for that moment, all the fighting in the world ceases, a holy symmetry emerges, and a creation story is radiant in the palms of our hands. For that moment, we just see, and through the miracle of vision, the vision of soul and heart, we all can just, and justly, be.
“I will hold it up hold it up to the light
Hold it up to the light, hold it up to the light.”
I've had it with Christianity... it's a ghoulish, enslaving practice that thieves free will from the young and the helpless. Yeshua would have long since disowned his so-called believers. Little more than the same money changers in the temple which he scorned, the Christians prey on the desperate and keep them plugged into a dogma which maintains weakness by obliterating the virtue of doubt, replacing it with the morphine of blind faith. There are millions of "good" Christians out there, but the Evangelicals and proselytizers wear the pants now. The bathwater and the baby are too tainted to be useful.
If you really want to be close to god, it's time to fucking evolve the fear out of you.
Yes, midsummer.
Locusts and fireflies are your doormen
Love and pain are your guests
"Madness and mendacity" your dichotomous motto.
So far, sand dunes have overrun the interstates
Moss and toads have taken the circuitry
And this place I've known, the subtle chamber of bone
Which hosts the electrochemical dance that I call me
Is dampened by creekwater and green tides.
You are called a host of extremes
And you enchant me with your humid streets and porch stories
Such leisurely things
While forests burn and islands drown in anonymous tears.
You've spiked the punch with authenticity, and danger.
You've shined the mirror to a terrifying reflectivity,
I can't bear to look more, but as a raven is drawn to glitter
I am forced to confront the light which bounced off me, into the glass
And all the illusion held captive in a second's peek.
Even the night birds hush in your breath,
Inhalations of fecundity, exhalations of reaping.
Midsummer, you throw symbols at me
And the least I can do is throw some back
And we're left in an exchange of colors across the fence
And even in the greatest pain, your verdant mantle soothes,
Leaves me not with faith, not with doubt,
But just this moment, clamor of dreams, just this now.
Imagine an early Easter morning, one in which an eager curly haired little girl could not wait to open her Easter basket. This precocious and determined child had woken dad up early so as to get a good head start on finding her goodies, and her Daddy obliged, as only dads do. The bounty was discovered, and amidst a likely pile of wrappers and egg shells, Dad (who was probably a tad sleep deprived) nodded off and dozed. Now, to some children, dad’s nap would either be disappointing or opportunity-making. Brooke was different. Her big heart, caring nature and kind soul was evident even as a young child. She doted so much on the needs of her friends and family, gave so much thought to how to reach out to those in need. That was Brooke’s way. Dickie realized this for himself when he woke up, and found that Brooke had been diligently trying to feed him a whole chocolate candy rabbit in between snores. Imagine, between the crumbled and melting bunny and the chaos of an early Easter morning the great laughter and surprise that rang through the house. That was, and is, Brooke’s way.
Breathe deeply.
Early on, Brooke liked to team up with me when we were at the beach. I remember exploring the bug house with her, looking for salamanders and toads out back, and generally adapting to my weirder and older interests for the sake of company. We ate mustard sandwiches together. Yes, just bread and mustard, and it was good. She believed in the power of friendship, and as we grew older, the message was clear: “we’ve got to stick together cousin, we’ve got a heck of a family to hold together.” I remembered that conversation we had when performing her wedding to Eric, and seeing the whole family together, joined that day in the infectious joy of watching two people scatter their love like some radiant confetti. Nothing is perfect, and love is not an exact science; but for Brooke, giving and receiving love was a devotion constantly practiced, and practice makes perfect. Today, we welcome her into perfect love. Lyrics from a favorite song of hers by Michael W. Smith represents her passion for cultivating love and friendship:
“And friends are friends forever,
If the Lord's the Lord of them
And a friend will not say "Never"
'Cause the welcome will not end
Though it's hard to let you go
In the Father's hands we know
That a lifetime's not too long
To live as friends.”
Breathe even more deeply.
Brooke’s favorite quote, and perhaps her motto, was from Alexander Pope; “Act well your part- there all the honor lies.” Brooke sought, through her relationships and her beliefs, to have a clear role in the world. This is clear through her constant availability to her friends, and Eric says that no one could talk her out of this readiness and steadfastness. So strong in her convictions, Eric also says that there weren’t a lot of things you could talk Brooke out of. That was and is her way, a sincere and steady devotion to the pursuit of a personal truth. For all the quirks and challenges of that pursuit, it is indeed the only path we truly have, and some discover that too late. Brooke got started on this early, and leaves this world with cherished convictions for us to drink deeply from.
We mark the passing of a life with memories and stories, yet sometimes in these rituals of celebration and letting go we become so enwrapped in our shared grief that we neglect to illuminate the departed’s virtues, and make commitments to take these on for ourselves as a way of honoring them. Her love for her cats, and all animals, speaks deeply to an infectious compassion for the helpless and the small. May we carry this on, for Brooke. Her attention to and love for national politics speaks to a profound caring for a troubled country, and a desire to make right the injustices of this world. May we carry this on, for Brooke.
Her love for her ancestors and for the land from which they came, Ireland, is a reminder that we are all connected not only through the bloodlines of family but from the cradle of history, and as descendants we are charged with the duty to know our individual heritage and defend our cultural treasures. May we carry this on, for Brooke. From her favorite musical “Rent,” comes a lyric to remember this commitment to carry on Brooke’s passions:
“Find Glory
in a song that rings true
truth like a blazing fire
an eternal flame,
from the soul…”
As we gather in this sacred place to recall the warmth and breadth of Brooke’s life, and the lives of those who proceed her, may we be so bold so as to hang on to our laughter, and our chocolate bunnies. May we be so bold so as to hang on to our faith, and its transformational power. May we be so bold so as to be a family united, just like on Brooke’s wedding day. We speak of a person’s legacy upon their passing; seek Brooke’s legacy and lesson for yourself, just as you’d seek out Easter eggs on a hunt. It’s there, and it’s your job now to find it.
When Brooke was born, she was a mere five pounds and change, and mother and father could cradle her with a single arm, just as now she is raised up on eagle’s wings. Angels, together we implore you to make your wings big, for Brooke has grown a lot. Brooke, may God rest your soul, and the souls of those who cherish you. Thank you.
With a heaving breath and a bold foot forward
We say “at last!,” to this long day of longest light
Of our own star and the billions unseen in even the clearest night
From the twinkling of atomic dances deep inside our bones
To the lightning bolts of dreams, flashing us awake…
We say at last to the rooting of our own feet
To this soil, the touching of our soul to the compost of generations
And we turn the soil as if turning a page,
And our fingers are trailing historians through the dark skin of the mother
The mother who moves us to slough our own seed-shells and grow upward,
Perilously, hopefully, brazenly upward to the height of the summer sun.
We say at last to the golden days of reverie and discovery
Amid the brambles of our thoughts and the thickets of desires,
Pulling from the undergrowth some magical thing we rush home to tell everyone about,
“Lookit,” we say, “I found something amazing. Wanna see?”
We say at last to our streaming of curiosities, which we nurture in the hours of heat and ardor
Along the creekbeds of the soul, where we are bent over in wonder
At this thing we call our reflections, in the clear blue,
Some future self calling us to dive in, no matter what you’re wearing.
We say at last to passions finally spoken and tears and sweat spilt
To the wrestling of shadows along the sweltering sidewalks
To the thick and humid afternoons where even the molecules siesta
And even our firmest intentions waver and stand still.
We say at last to a season of paradox, of exultant joy and trembling sorrow
To the fruitful green which tendrils from the cemetery
To the abundant table and a hunger which cannot abide.
At last, we stand in celebration for the longest day,
And bow gently to the slowly creeping night
Which brings yet more starlight
Welcomed by the cadence of crickets
And the sweet, soft murmur of breezes
Through the leaves and branches of the summer soul.
At last!
As holy fireflies take flight
And the cicadas intone golden orchestras,
Cry for innocence, for as we are steeped in the worldly stew of summer
A child loses his childhood, syllable by syllable, second by second, robbed blind
Of reveries and curiosities, replaced by the putrid promise of false properties and cleverly disguised viscera...
Who steals this but the society which prizes innocence, or so it righteously claims,
Burns books to keep the tawdry words in ash but sells them back with
Some god's careless permission and redemption in blood money?
This world is fetid enough, from the humid wretch of birth
To the broken mirror of death, and the children know
There is cruelty even in the benign past the
Window's vale, and so tonight I damn
Those who selfishly thrust the murk
Against the pale years where the entitlement
To mystery and secrets of time are now the endangered sacred,
What for the morphine of palliative entertainment, and the subjugation of the prophetic
To a mere profit margin.
In the strongest words I know,
Curse the damed robbers of youth,
And cry, wail, and thrash for innocence,
For if I were to die in battle, let it be for those few years
Where the auric song of the cicada and the vigilant light of firefly
Overwhelm the petty and neurotic saccharin which contaminates the sugar of youth.
Suddenly, I feel a great resurgence of hope and pride... I know, "Hope" and "change" are quite ambiguous. We will ensure that Barack is clearly guiding us to these, but certainly getting there will be far easier with genuine and inspired leadership than crotchety old men who feel entitled.
In this blog's 2nd year, I endorsed Dean. It it with even greater pride in the redemptive power of inviting every citizen on board that I gladly endorse Barack Obama for President.
Coming down here, I thought much about the cliché of the freedom of the road. Writers tend to be observant, if downright hypervigilant, of such overused phraseology, much like a neurotic nature-phobe smack dab in a snake infested woods. Yet, there is a deep and unavoidable truth to the road, and the freedom-process it generates as you get further and further behind the place you once were. Or, the person you once were.
I had several stops along the way, and worked hard to remember that it was I, not the people around me, that were suddenly decontextualized. The silver haired waitress at the bagel shop, at the center of the first state to secede from the Union, who reminded me that they don’t sell pork products. Or the gentleman who shared the lobby with me as I waited for new tires on the car, whose voice was long and golden, whose countenance was remarkably gentle and accommodating as we awkwardly noted the physiological inconveniences the free coffee generates when the bathroom doors are locked. These people become consonants and vowels in the sutra of peeling the self away from home and comfort and lackadaisical routines. They serve as sudden reminders that our self-important journeys are not so pivotal to the flux of the Universe, that every breathing conscious entity is also trippin’, and that Chaos must always visit and transform the ordinary as soon as it begins to crystallize. We are variables, random factors, and yet the greatest Universe our presence distorts is our very own, the one we peer down long and hard when we suddenly realize, at last, that we are not where we once were, and are utterly vulnerable. You can learn these things from trivial banter with store clerks and passer-by on their way to their own jolting somewheres.
Out my window in this temporary place is the ocean. The ocean, well, it oceans. It does what it does, and my heart exhilarates to find it in the process of oceaning. I delighted in the tidal pools, the evidence of an always working Mother, and the neat piles of spent lives in shells and fossils. There was an old boat which had tried to wash ashore, but didn’t make it, now covered in the green hair of a graceful decay. There was a hint of phosphorescence after the sun was through sunning, and the pier which juts a thousand feet into the Atlantic was excitedly alive underneath as the waves bullied the pylons and lovers and fishermen found their respective romances above. The beach is an intoxicant, an immediate Earth-based psychedelic, it makes us do things we wants so badly to do but are otherwise conditioned against. Like being in awe without being casual. I can stop and stare and be jaw-dropped by a flight of pelicans in a way which could render stares and quick judgments on city streets. I can stop and pick up things and marvel at them like a three year old, and no one gives the slightest shit, nor I them in their own exaltations. My own biological imperative becomes enlivened if exaggerated, and last night I drank and ate and slept and dreamt of sex. How unlike a sea turtle or a dolphin or a mere gull am I now?
I went to the islands further south, and found the most quiet forests you could dare not hear. The occasional red-wing blackbird, the rustle of a sudden snake black as midnight and as slick as a pickpocket. Skittering crabs. Breezes here and there flirting capriciously with the palms. That was it, no other buzzing or grumbling or beeping or barking. It was such an eerily pristine place that it’s little wonder that the locals feared those groves, as it’s from such awesome silence that howling gnashing-teethed beasties emerge from to scare your soul back from whence it came. Love it.
And the stormy weather came, and if you listened close enough in the howling winds a crooner questioned why there was no sun up in the sky, et cetera. The waves became decreasingly serene, and their thrashing reminded me of how precious little we know. We can say that the moon’s gravity, and wind, and the shape and grade of shorelines makes a wave, which is all well and good scientifically, but there’s more to their story. There is a mystery in each foamy curve, a question as to what the wave is carrying to shore, what it takes away. There is also a powerful realization which takes our concertmaster’s mind and turns it inside out; they stop for no one. I dreamt again, and this time I saw the waves stop when no one was looking, and the ocean became placid, and a single ripple would’ve been news. It was black and eternal and terrifyingly still, which is the stuff of greatest fantasy. The whole Universe is a storm, and there is no power or organ within our mind that can cease the thrashing. It will always be a violent maelstrom that we, as desperate barnacles, cling to. The placid dark of utmost impossibility might just be death, but even as one barnacle is loosed by one particularly brazen wave, another will follow and another. World without end.
Then, from the ocean to the marshes, the swamp. The word swamp is wonderfully onomonotopeic, as it is rather the sound of that humid and biologically tawdry place. The murk presents a whole other kind of mystery versus the ocean, and conceals a primordial violence which will certainly ensnare the wayward and careless, be that a tumbled nestling or a cocky upstart human. Alligators. I was mere feet from one who certainly could’ve entertained a me-sized appetizer. I stood, silent, as we contemplated each other’s fate. In the end, it happens as it always happens; we each went our respective ways without so much changing the course of our mutual, if completely alien, lives. There was an agile snake too, ebony and stealth, who I observed from a safe distance. She stalked a cardinal, and a frog, and neither were so inclined so as to experience the opposite of life on such a lovely Friday. Pity for the snake, but such wondrous suspense for the human, for whom time was completely obliterated and was taught, again, that rapt attention to the world (a very deliberate choice inspired by holy, profound curiosities) is the simplest pathway to being-here-now. How sweet it works. Rapture is a muddy and fecund and raw agreement to recognize how much in this Universal body this name inhabits so quickly is unknown, unexpected, and yet so deeply entwined in our Natures. I know that snake, that alligator, and the cardinal, and the small squeaking frog; they are me. Though they “happen” a few feet away, they register in the meat and sinew, they belong to the labyrinth of the mind, their fates are magically threaded with my own lifeline. I cannot explain this feeling any more than that; I think it comes from Mystery.
I slept that night deeper in the city, deeper in the arms of another, deeper in the tangle of a self purposefully unraveling. The ardor of the world which burns and scrapes the skin, which entraps small prey in a sudden moment of resigned horror, which inspires the violent dance of waves, also excites the smallest of things, mere atoms that become enlivened and blossom at the touch of another in passion. The joy of a lotus blossom exploding into the light, the thrill of night jasmine; this is the sacred adventure also writ into the body, and at last, I adventured and guided such through the hoary unknown of our dual natures. And I laughed like I haven’t in ages, innocently, convulsively, just for the hell of it. Why not, and why not more often? Why are we all not guffawing in the streets? I only ask, but with no expectation of an answer. Damned if I know, and frankly, it’s early and I’d like some coffee.
…
I had to go home. I ran out of time. The danged road is always circuitous.
“I ain’t got time” may as well be the abbreviated national anthem… as tiny windblown seeds at the mercy of the infinite, it is in fact all we have. But we are so beholden to this trip of mortality that this does not compute, in the least. Divide by zero. We live within the heavy parenthesis ( ~ ) of birth and death. But the old city, the ocean, the swamp, these all dance within this queer cycle and are crushed and remade from time. I’d just heard that a fish in a Washington lake has experienced an accelerated evolution, and they are now armored, the first such mutation in a million years. Add some chemicals to the water, et voila, the cycle is broken and the sacred inventiveness of our genetic fabric throws on a new fashion. It took little effort for them, and so what are we waiting for? More time? We both fear it and crave it. The horseshoe crab knows only its life but the shoreline knows well its shape, from fossil to crawling right up to your toes. We all must come home.
I can’t count the waves and I certainly lose track of time. I cannot conceive of an Origin, nor can anyone, so we make up stories. In the beginning, God created the paradox, which was perplexing as he didn’t mean for that to happen. God looked upon the face of the paradox, and like Groucho Marx it was an old slapstick routine of the mirror that won’t quite conform to your reflection. God, with nothing but time on/in her hands, tried but could not quite synchronize herself with the seemingly autonomous reflection now before her, and moved on to other creative pursuits. The sky. The critters. And such. They also were first produced from God’s imagination, yet were peskily acting beyond God’s control. The mind of God became much less a canvas on which to paint creation, it became a crowded stage of impatient actors, clamoring for scripts and asking for rewrites. God had a decision to make; cleave from the chaos of their creation, or dive into it, a great swan dive into the pool of God’s own excited tinkering, which was done so hastily that each created thing had its irony, of not its opposite. Why I did this, I do not know. Perhaps I should ask you.
All we have and don’t have is time, and the time could well be used to find out whether God dove in or hitchhiked out of town for a second chance somewhere to get it right, free of paradoxes (which, itself, it, you know, a paradox. Right?). It is in these times of heightened curiosity that I’m thankful that I don’t have a clue and for the most part know nothing of this. I think I knew once, but forgot, which is fine. There is a great relief in spending time with the tides and the pines and the sudden creatures… I don’t have to know these things to be dazzled by them, and thus to learn from them. I don’t have to be a cartographer to understand my sense of place, nor a scientist to grasp the reactions around me. I think I just have to know, as much as one can, myself. I see traces of me in the washed up shells, and hints of you in the laughing gull. Comfort enough. Evidence enough that we are entitled to witness and exist. World without end.
Yes, it was a beautiful day,
That cliché, past tense exaltation
Cannot be denied. Not today.
A friend and his family found beauty today,
As his mother's ashes were poured into the ground
And the petals of cherry blossoms snowed in the comforting heat
And it was so quiet there, so simple a punctuation for a whole life lived
A name reduced to dust, as the trees trembled, and memory breezed.
What troubles me is not death, that pouring back
Of body into originating body, nor its random
Calling- no, it is that this finite body
Has so little time to know all these
Other finite bodies, and to
Bless them, and to
Say goodbye, properly,
Though a little less than hello.
Like cherry blossoms, I desire interconnection
So brazenly that I beg it to rain on me in torrents
To soak me to the bones and soften them in the realization
That ultimately and finally, all that stands between me and thee
Is the quality of our animating principles, that which
Drives us to be, and do, and revel in it as madmen.
I've lost some big connections recently, though
Not as overtly as my friend, whose calm,
Noble stance was a testament to his
Mother's tutelage. Yet these losses
Are for me deaths, though not in the sense
That I need contact a mortician; these are the
Deepest cuts of life, the severing of bloodlines and lifelines
Between generations of jadedness and misbegotten fortunes,
Those deaths that need not be, but are cold stares
Across the chambers of the heart, and you know
That, regardless of history, it is finished.
There is no idyllic churchyard for these
Broken realizations, nothing but a
Heap of unspoken regrets and
Pleadings, but alas.
There are more to these generations,
Because just as the priest fumbled with the
Ashes of that fine woman, some human somewhere
Was writing with holy ink a reflection of a promise
I'd made, never to abandon, never to judge, never to cast off.
I held that paper about an hour after that mother, a Cherokee legend,
Met the improbable womb of her mother, the goddess Earth,
And realized that even after the deepest cut,
The body to which we belong heals fast,
And makes dazzling connections
Not out of obligation, but
Choice, love, and hope.
As those petals
Fell in the music of mourning,
I felt a stranger near me; not some
Apparition, not some metaphor newly released,
But a stranger of time, from time, that exotic country
Where we expel our castaways of memory, and to which we
Are yet bound. The stranger, amid forsythia, magnolia, and freshly dug earth,
Was myself, shimmering in Creation, with you, and you, and her, and him, interwoven
Though not yet realized, a generation within eternity though not yet
Grown, a fiber of continuity just beginning to be woven
Into legacies, and that even as words do not
Pass in death or brokenness, there is
Assurance that we remain
Touching, regardless,
And it is love
Which tightens
Our mere strands,
Makes them shine in the
April light
Just
So.
I just needed to say that to someone. That someone happens to be you, I suppose. So hello, I say, with perhaps a tinge of feigned joviality. I have been a slave to this computer screen for the past several days, completing a task Sisyphus himself would not envy. I think at this point, I have thoroughly and completely lost my blessed mind. And because I'm dyslexic and a horrible typist, I've taken to using voice recognition software, which is accurate about 75% of the time. In this moment of reaching out, I thought I'd share with you perhaps the most bizarre piece of failed recognition. I present it to you entirely out of context, fresh from the stinky sulfurous pit of hell where instead of flames and molten bitty bits dripping from the Ashcroftian hopeless expanse above, there is nothing but endless painful bleeding paperwork for you to struggle through, this comedic mistranslated gem:
"Think he may be how how how I can't in Kenya. I loses wind and wave, my name is Jay, I'm going to wrap lodging counseling on flying alcohol."
The soil knows exactly what to do;
No clocks, no procedures, no sanctimonious dictate,
The soil is wild and free, and is the place of beginning.
It's spring now, and we emerge from our dens
As the sun emerges as warmth on the skin, days on the wing.
You can smell the Earth's thinking
As the soil, common dirt, is awakened and electrifies the slumbering underworld,
And within days the mountains here are buzzing
With anxious tendrils of birthing and returning life,
Their holy codes activated with a mother's whisper
And we are reminded of the resolute autonomy of the thin skin of our host.
See us from a distance; we are mere seeds.
We ourselves shall shed our casing, sprout, fruit and whither,
And do so with desperation, like weeds, shadowing all else for more light,
All else be damned.
Weeds do have their place,
Yet in zealously controlled gardens their clinging is loosened by the scythe,
Brought down by their own nature,
Brought down by the gardener's desire for a productive season-
This I must ask myself; when am I gardener, when am I weed?
Through the holy soil, the sacred dirt, intermingle roots;
I am entwined in you, and you me,
Our growth is in correlation.
My roots are my gardener's hands,
Just as my roots are the shimmering strands of fellowship of my weed nature.
Our world is as much below the soil as upon it,
As much in darkness as in light,
Yet, like the soil, we cannot resist the sun's impassioned blessing.
I cannot but grow along with you.
I cannot but be pruned by strange hands.
I cannot but live as the coiling secrets invisible in my body command.
Standing, rooted in seeming contradiction, I rise yet.
You will rise through the dark with me,
Silently, in exaltation for the random tossing of mere seeds.
Delivered Sunday, 9 March '08 at Jubilee Community, Asheville, NC
Diary of a firefly, Summer, 1986.
It was the big night tonight, and all the boys were glowin’ mighty fine before liftoff. I myself had supercharged my bioluminescent enzymes for the purposes of tonight’s courting, and gave a little zing to my antennae, which I’ve been told are my best feature. As fate would have it, however, my lightshow was cancelled by some human brat with a glass jar. Haven’t those pesky bipeds gotten the memo that we have an important job to do? At least the clumsy mouthbreather poked holes in the lid, but next time I do hope for a cleaner jar. Reeked of peanut butter. Happens every time. Using the usual strategy, I withheld my flashing so as to underwhelm him and win my release as a presumably boring specimen. It worked, I was dumped in favor of brighter fellows. By then it was too late; everyone else had found love and turned the lamps down low. Everyone except Charlie, whose last-minute flashing caught the kid’s attention which landed him in captivity. That bug has one bright tweeter but is still quite the dim bulb. Oh well, I’ve still got some flash in me yet. And the stars, which the bumbling human failed to notice, were putting on a heck of a show. Now, I’d love to know how to catch one of those beauties!
Or so one might imagine the journaling of one of thousands of fireflies from those innocent days when light and fire drew our combustible childhood curiosities into nights of adventure. When I was really little, I knew for a fact that the fireflies which lit up the fields like roving carnivals / were star-seeds, looking for a place to land. With a promise that all was not fearsome about the dark, they softened a night then also filled with boyhood monsters.
Darkness by itself is imperceptible; we perceive it only because light will never completely surrender. We know this just by marveling at the night sky; we know this because even within ourselves, even when drenched by darkest nights of the soul, there is an ember that will stubbornly never cease radiating. It’s this indwelling soul flame that is the most captivating kind for this fire bug.
So, can you imagine the scene when fire first took off as a commodity among our prehistoric ancestors? The cave parties must have been a real hoot; “hey blokes, come look at this, this stuff lights up the place and makes things disappear at the same time! UGAAH!” It’s that magical quality that also compels the pyromaniacs and the mystics both to drop what they are doing and burn stuff. Come on, I know that there’s some other pyros out there beside me, right?
The pyros, scientists, artists and mystics all love fire because it reduces matter to its most skeletal and primal nature, the fundamental chemical element from which all life on Earth is fashioned. The charcoal which was used to graffiti those primeval fire-intoxicated caves is mostly carbon, our organic godfather.
When I was that scrappy ragamuffin carrying my jar of fireflies, their twinkling brought me happiness just as the stars gave me awe. I felt that somehow, even despite my troubled childhood, I was a part of all of this crazy light around me. There are dark times in being a child, and those fireflies gave me holy nights. I can’t thank them enough.
As I tore into grade school science, I was bugging out over the concept that fire was energy; pure, raw, transformative energy, the breath of the Universe. Somehow, through our own biological spark comes a realization that we share a strange commonality with the fireflies and the leaves and twigs I’d burn out back for kicks. We are all star-stuff, all made by and dependent upon the same solar heat.
In those smoldering days of youth that I learned to pray. Isn’t it interesting that all around the world, the act of prayer commonly is accompanied by lighting a candle? Isn’t it interesting that, when we pray, we are usually provoked to it because some darkness, some thick and dim mystery has encroached? It’s as if the flame acts as a stand-in for God, being with us as we endure the gut-wrenching unknown. In its small and tenuous flicker, the candle stands as a beacon, like a firefly who whispers “don’t be afraid of the dark, you are never truly unseen!” While that might be hard to remember when we’re in the dark and off the map, it’s by these little lights that we find each other.
The Hopi have a ritual that is never missed; each day, dancers must gather on the mesa before dawn and dance the sun awake, to call it to blaze through the dream-soaked canyons and give meaning to the day ahead. The choice to dance reconciles the long night with the emerging day, interweaves them. The choice to search out that light gives lift to the dense unknown, and allows understanding and reckoning to ascend through the long, lonely nights we all must navigate. The song we are singing today is written by Bruce Springsteen (c). Band, take it away:
Can't see nothin' in front of me
Can't see nothin' coming up behind
I make my way through this darkness
I can't feel nothing but this chain that binds me
Lost track of how far I've gone
How far I've gone, how high I've climbed
On my back's a sixty pound stone
On my shoulder a half mile line
Come on up for the rising
Come on up, lay your hands in mine
Come on up for the rising
Come on up for the rising tonight
This portrait of fire and light we’re painting is intimate, and personal. Yet fire in the forms of disaster, bombs, and war makes for the biggest headlines and the most breathless reporting. Like most everything natural and beautiful upon the Earth, human ingenuity in the adrenaline-filled quest for power has wrestled fire into napalm and split atoms. If you look at the timeline of human history, I guess it’s easy to sigh and say that it was bound to happen. While this song we’re singing was written in response to September 11th, it’s not about retribution, nationalism, and waving our torches angrily, it’s about what flames teach do in those times; to rise above, to arduously carry what we’ve surrendered to the stars.
Left the house this morning
Bells ringing filled the air
Wearin' the cross of my calling
On wheels of fire I come rollin' down here
Come on up for the rising
Come on up, lay your hands in mine
Come on up for the rising
Come on up for the rising tonight
Consider the phoenix, that flaming bird which rises from the ashes. Its flight represents the freedom and new birth that personal transformation brings by reducing to cinders what holds us back. Consider Prometheus, the Titan in Greek mythology with a craving for fairness who stole fire from Zeus and gave it freely it to the mortals on Earth. Zeus wasn’t keen on empowering the little people and punished this brave light-bearer for the sin of riling up the population. It’s all too familiar that we see the same cycle of the light-bearers being scorned and ridiculed for blessing the masses with luminous gifts. Jesus encountered that. So did Gandhi. So did Socrates. So did Mandela. Why must illumination be so dangerous? Why must history make martyrs of those whose love for life burns brighter than the risk of death? Perhaps the answer is simply that while names can be blown out, there are lights that never extinguish, and with each passing generation the human flame of goodness and passion will rise as high as each soul dares it.
Spirits above and behind me
Faces gone, wise eyes burnin' bright
May their precious blood bind me
Lord as I stand before your fiery light
Come on up for the rising
Come on up, lay your hands in mine
Come on up for the rising
Come on up for the rising tonight
I believe each of us has the power of the Prometheuses and Brighids and Christs and Gandhis of this world. I’ve seen it in the fiery selfless love in the parents of the kids I work with who have been held hostage to poverty and abuse. I’ve seen it in their kids’ strength not to succumb to the doubts of others who write off their potential for a full and beautiful life. I’ve seen it in the hospitals of Haiti, where we put joy of living ahead of sorrow and held dying children who would never grow to play in the sunshine. I’ve seen it in this community, right here at Jubilee, where without question we have dispatched ourselves to New Orleans to bring light to besieged St. Bernard Parish, where we have stood up for the homeless and the hungry, and where we accept, without question, every imaginable path to God as the birthright of all beings. Bearing light is not just for mythology and antiquity; it’s happening right here, in this room, with something as simple as holding hands and being together through all the tears and laughter that life so miraculously shines forth.
Come on up for the rising
Come on up, lay your hands in mine
Come on up for the rising
Come on up for the rising tonight
La la la la la la la la la lah, etc.
From the cartoons, I learned the phrase “fight fire with fire.” As we further kindle and feed the growing light of generations, we are facing the cost of fruitless fighting for something so wonderfully common and ubiquitous. The light we’ve fought for, created religions and dogmas for, and drawn sharp borders across the Earth for, has been, is now, and will always be within us, just like our firefly in the jar. We speak of fiery passion to renew the world; you may confront the artificial fires which are charring the planet by rising and shining with a transforming radiance born from making a holy commitment to yourself and your singular life. Rise and shine, to energize and inspire this world, right down to the molecules dancing in excitement from this sacred heat.
Come on up for the rising
Come on up, lay your hands in mine
Come on up for the rising
Come on up for the rising tonight
La la la la la la la la la lah, etc.
May you be moved to pass on this ancient progression of increasingly magnifying light by kindling it, to watch it rise in the most needful of places. May you find a cosmic hint of yourself in the shimmering sunrise, and may you be visited by dreams of fireflies encircling you, themselves enthralled by your own mystifying and compelling glow.
There is an imperceptible light; thin, quivering, just below the surface of your vision that connects and holds all that you know, all that you are, and all that you shall be.
Scientists, artists, musicians, madmen; they all see some shimmering of this light, but can ever completely discern its blinding luminance. For to know that all light- to know it with your eyes with your heart with your mind with your spirit- will tear apart all that we know that is our fragile human consciousness. Perhaps that is a good thing that we don’t all stare at the sun. Some to truly dare the fiery brilliance of that light at risk of their own soul. Revere these beings, for while they are overcome by brilliance, theirs is a holy reeling in the flames, theirs is a sacred compact with the ash of our charred assumptions and limitations.
...that the typically creepy and largest theo-fascistic B*ps*st Ch*rch in West Asheville had quite the point illuminated on their cliché sign tonight:
Love is a risk, but never a loss.
It got me, and got me in the gut. I've said in so many ways so many times before that I'd rather risk everything I am and could be for the sake of delivering yet more love than accept blindly a path of greater comfortability. This strangely is ever so true tonight, as this evening is a confluence of forces reckoning with each other. Too complicated to explain here, but it truly is better to dance the jig of love cliffside than to safely entrenched and numb to it all.
A profile on this here web thingy for the upcoming edition of Q-Notes, the newspaper for the queer community of the Carolinas...
Approximate average number of page-views each week? Month?
I rate about 6000 page views a week, and hover steadily around 30000 per month. While I've not posted as gregariously as I did at the blog's inception, I think the high number is due in part to the fact that most blog's lifespan is about 2 or 3 years [BOTM is 5 y.o.]; being around for a while in a variety of incarnations pays off with reader loyalty.
Tell us a bit about you. Where are you from? Where are you living now? What do you do?
I live in Asheville NC and have been here in the mountains since escaping from Delaware in 1997. As much as I feel a link to the soggy landscape up there, I have always felt more at home here nestled in this slightly more rugged patch of Earth and anywhere else. The 'what do I do?' question is deliciously open ended, so I'll start by being as such... I dream, I question, I sift information like a mad Gold Rush prospector, and I enjoy overturning presumptions whenever possible, especially my own. Being more specific, I work in a therapeutic capacity with emotionally/behaviorally challenged children and families, do after hours mental health crisis work for a rural hospital, and am a majordomo of sorts to a famously funky spiritual community in downtown Asheville.
How would you describe your blogging style?
It certainly fluctuates with my mood and what's happening in the moment. I like to highlight stories and information that contain some sort of obvious transformational value, so I'll post links to breaking news on consciousness, health, ecology, and urgent political opinion. I will provide commentary when needed, but will also let the links speak for themselves [old school blogging style]. Inversely, the blog is a sketch pad of sorts for my poetry and wordplay, and even though those works are somewhat veiled by personal symbolism, it's the closest I get to publicly emptying my bucket of psychic beans.
What issues or topics do you like to speak and write about?
Expanding consciousness sounds "retro," but it's our future, the only one we have as a species if we choose to thrive in this world. It can be spoken of in a number of ways, because our consciousness is not limited to the domains of gurus and neurologists. Anything, in fact, could be used as a transformative tool to wedge open the skull and allow for previously unseen and unthunk ideas to percolate within and through our world. I suppose that's my main thing, vague though it may be. To narrow it down to issues that are affecting us now, we cannot afford not to talk about the Earth, our poorly evolved political and religious institutions, and basic human rights. You'd think that the future we were promised would preclude us from having to march in the streets for those basic rights, against torture and bigotry, but alas the work is not yet done. It takes passion for us to live, and boredom for us to succumb.
How does your online personality match up to your "real world" personality?
I can be sharper tongued with my fingers typing than my tongue wagging, but there's not much contrast between my written self and my real world self. If anything, I bumble more through the real world. If I were to critique my online/written self, I'd say that I am more far more humble, pliable and goofy than the words portray.
How do you use your blog to address political or ideological principles? Do you use your blog to write on progressive or LGBT issues, and how so?
My blog is there specifically to play with beliefs and allow space for examining them within your own context. I like to place the rigid entities of politics, religion and culture in a philosophical crockpot and reduce them to the soft states they fight against becoming. I will blog on LGBT issues when they are relevant to me... While being gay is an aspect of my identity, I don't wear it as a chip on my shoulder. I acknowledge and praise those warriors that have fought for the recognition of our right to live and love freely, and am passionate about unlocking society's taboos about sexuality and personal freedom. Our diverse sexualities no doubt influence our whole beings, yet I don't personally feel inclined to "metaphyisically graffiti" my gayness everywhere [excepting when I feel especially pathetic about being hopelessly single, wink]. I think sometimes we as a community frequently overcompensate for the millennia of oppression by becoming caricatures of ourselves and our movement... we all do that from time to time, but there's a time to wave our flag and a time to be in the big fat human picture, too.
The only way to begin
Is to start at the place
Where you first forgot why
There was anything at all to do.
This house is so quiet
There is nothing, nothing,
Nothing to indicate I am anchored
To any one fixed place in this midnight void.
Is there any reason to doubt
That there are no reasons to believe
The ensconced gilded myths we go glibly accept
Are little more than some kid's rock skipping across the water?
Perhaps the most terrifying thing
One of us can do is to heave away the trust
We hold so fervently to our love-starved breasts
Into the darkness, eaten by the moon, dissolved by some unknown breath.
I want only that.
Though I am shy to admit it,
I want the terror and vastness of not-knowing,
Not-thinking, not-filling-in-the-blanks, not tripping over my own shadow.
There's no time for sanctimonious pangs,
Only a moment or two for remembering when life was the color
Outside of the lines, the untamed scrawl that dared shallow conventions,
The sweet realization that we are creator first, created second, and responsible always.
It's time for music;
Time for some Slavic circle dance
For the starry night which overhangs this house
Which I come to inhabit beginningless, endless, as slowly I bring the lights up.
It's true, and I thought that, gasp, I might have shuttered things by now. Not true, but it is hard work to keep a metapersonal meme fresh (so long as one frets and worries about it). I've obviously been a lot more relaxed about it all, and that's been a relief as I've been mired in logging vast and creatively fecund realities, let alone blogging them. I could be less cryptic, but I can't be (?) at present, because there are things going on that are somewhat painful in the familial sense, and work is an ever-present umbrella that follows me everywhere I go, and work just isn't something I can talk about online. So, WYSIWYG, and hopefully that's enough. It is for me, though I'd certainly like to rekindle the blogging fire.
Here are those 2 February (or Imbolc) milestones of the past 5 years, just fer kicks:
If I didn't have to go right now, I'd wax poetic and whimsical, but, as aforementioned, I have to go. As do we all, in our own quirky and seemingly pointless ways... where are you headed, my friends?
It has been windy
Here in this valley of winter
Here in this fantasia of familiar turned skeletal
Here in this body, even, this weathervane of memories.
With the wind, much is scattered about
Reckless debris being driven to who-knows-where
And who-knows-why.
Among the leaves, the bottles, the crumpled rejects of some scribe,
I know that scraps of love, pure love, are on wanton trajectory.
Ownerless love, spent and used love, outgrown love, love beyond repair...
Blowing around as plentifully as any other careless thing
You wouldn't know that there's so much orphaned and stained love
Rambling about each time the wind picks up.
There may be a worried and passion-worn photograph
In a flurry with all our other forgotten nameless jetsam
Skittering across the road, and you're lost in your own whirlwind,
You might not see that one scrap winging by,
You might not see your own face
Caught in an amber of momentary bliss
Now darkened, now sloughed off, now as common as twigs and paper bags.
With all this bluster,
Let there then be a madman...
One who chases fruitlessly after all the trailing bygones
Who stitches together the improbable random stories of love lost
Who collects the discarded tears of broken dreams
Who exalts the song of love from atop a heap of time's rubble
Who, though sullied and calloused by dashing here and there,
Vindicates love even in its waste
And from his daft collecting,
Holds up one for the nameless, the forsaken, the broke,
Summoning light to again enter the trashed years
I've left thoughtlessly behind in the wake of desires untouched.
Let the madman's work remind, no, exclaim,
How great is the right to love
And cruel we are to toss it out the window
Wheeling down the road
Done with it
Without passing it on.
Songs, not necessarily new releases, but the ones that made the biggest impact for me:
13. Tool "Lateralus"
12. Justin Bond and the Hungry March Band "In the End" (Shortbus)
11. Wolf Parade "Dear Sons and Daughters of Hungry Ghosts"
10. Bat for Lashes "What's a Girl to Do?"
9. Covenant "Humility"
8. Masala Sound System "Od Tarnobrzegu po Bangladesz"
7. MIA "Birdflu"
6. Seabound "Watching Over You"
5. David Wilcox "Hold it up to the light"
4. Iggy Pop & Teddy Bears "Punk Rocker"
3. Syke 'n' Sugarstarr "Like This, Like That"
2. Peter Mayer "My Soul"
1. VNV Nation "Arena"
Photos:
Poem of the Year, "Holy Elemental"
I
Standing there,
Half in, half out the door
Between the darkened house
And the autumn morning alit with glories
The invigorating chill that greets the face: a kiss from summer
Passing down the road, heading south, waving goodbye with long golden light
Trailing across the dew-blessed grass, tiny prisms, a thousand stars at my awakening feet.
II
Do you recall
When you dove headlong into a pile of leaves
Your smile-creased cheeks tenderly touched by the fallen green of yesterday
And your childhood laughter echoed across the idyllic fields of the passing years
As crows kept time, and the night crept in, and when the fires were lit to keep you warm,
Your eager mind wandered into the shapes in the flames,
And you wove fantasy from the heat, lulling you into sweeter dreams, as frost wrote
Sonnets upon your window?
Do you recall
The last plunge into the lake before the ice took the water away?
That moment in flight, forever a child of the winds,
To be swallowed in a splash, the last of the year,
And the chattering of your teeth were mantras of the ruggedness of simply being alive?
Do you recall
That you are holy elemental?
That you are a spinning wheel of all that which combines to vivify today?
That you wade through the cosmic brazenly, in the face of entropy,
With a face of a singular being quizzically raised from ice, fire, void,
You are as much the rough embrace of sycamore bark
As you are white water, a sky as blue as faded jeans, a fire from darkest cracks of Earth,
A star…
III.
With mystery, you move forward slightly,
Past the door where you stood astride the equilibrium of the Equinox,
With the galaxy of memory that is your darkened home behind you
Toward the brilliance of the shortening day
Toward the bliss of rediscovering the steam of your breath
Toward the music of bending milkweed, the red leaves on the crisp wind;
Kissed by another summer now receding,
This is the first morning of Autumn,
And as mockingbirds intone sutras toward the lowering arc of our sun
You do recall
Bravely
That you are all of these things, these images, these songs,
These hopes and dreams of matter against the vastness of space.
You are still a child
Who, as a sudden act of creation, is made of all of this,
Who can play even as the flowers fade
Who can jump sprightly even as the chimney swifts spiral south
Who can learn, ever more,
That it is you who are the season, changing:
Holy elemental, how do you dare, right here, right now,
With these gallant and young steps ahead,
How do you dare to transform
The Earth
That is
And can only be
You, yourself, your own celestial body?
In order to create a powerful new year, I hereby unleash a pent up torrent of bitterness, so that opportunity, creativity, and clarity may flow in:
Proselytizing, pandering, arrogant, and manipulative people of any faith that wave around their Glorified & Righteous™ symbols and expect others to just plain submit to their intellectually numbing and spiritually vacant religiosity and clap loudly for their magic tricks and circus acts. I'm so utterly and completely done with the vampires among us that prey on the young, ill, poor and uninformed to bend to kiss the feet whatever poobah is the ever-lovin' source of all your comfort. I've seen far too many abuses lately of what *were* great spiritual traditions for the sake of stroking the collective ego of insecure and unethical people. I'm not disclaiming religion, spirituality, or faith... quite the contrary. What I am condemning in no uncertain terms is the practice of vomiting religious screeds all over those who are down and out, lost, and thus easy to manipulate, and guilt tripping them into following along like good little sheep. It's sick, and only served to keep the dumb on in a society who has the complete ability to turn dumb off.
Anyone whose greed overtakes their love, reason, and moral obligations, and runs away with it. You know who I'm talking about. And as much as it personally hurts, I'm over it and goodness will prevail.
Politicians. In this election year, unless you're willing to stand up and insist that you will make massive changes in this utterly broken system of government, you are every bit as responsible for the brokenness, and good luck piecing the system back together. So far, only Mike Gravel, Dennis Kucinich, and to some extent Ron Paul are showing their cojones. Because the system is rigged against political will that falls outside of the neat little boxes we've designated as safe, these folks are devoid of any chance of winning, and that sucks. So, revolt or sleep. Take your pick.
Gay men that are pussywhipped by the narrow limits of social acceptability into playing weak-willed characters instead of actually doing the hard, sometimes painful work of self discovery. It's not all Andrew Lloyd Webber and tight jeans... it's a distinctively difficult life path we've been given to live in a heavily dualistic society where our love breaks the mold and causes uncomfortability. Do we play along and accept our apparent role as snazzy, witty, and materially addicted, or do we create social change by being rugged individualists being who we are most deeply compelled to be? I've talked to so many of you that scoff at your deepest desires... why? Why gracefully submit? It's just another form of victimization, so stop playing along, stand up, and be someone other than who you're expected to be.
Pity. Yeah, I've played that game, used it like a dishrag time and time again. I've been over using it personally for a while now, years in fact, but I see so many people who are taught by their environment to use pity for gain, it's terribly sad [but not pitiful]. Why? Why lower yourself to get something you could easily gain by lifting yourself up? That includes the "pity fuck," welfare, time on Dr. Phil's couch, emotional hostage taking, and a spirit numbing false sense of entitlement. Stop it. Pick yourself up. You're better than that, right?
There. Now that I've grumpily released my curmudgeonly misgivings, I've got the space to intentionally create and further become the opposite of my vexations. It's a choice. Wanna join me?
I want to invoke the names of the old gods
Those beings who inhabit the gnarled wood
The stone faces of sacred mountains
The curling waves which tell stories to the shores.
I want to raise, in the dark and hushed hour
A tribute from the harvest
To meet it with my lips
And pronounce, with good company,
The continuity of life.
I want to declare the right of all beings to be revered.
I want to stand in defense of the weak and broken.
I want to rise with you into the ineffable light, dark, and unknown.
I want to break the mirror of our shared delusions.
I want to grow, that one day I may bend and whither and be glad for having lived.
It is one thing to express a want
Another to justify it
Another to fight for it
Another to give yourself to it
Another to give it away completely.
All these things, I want,
So I may give them to you,
And walk away relieved for having
Finally, with a simple act, set myself free.
There was rain on the roof
Rivers ran down the thin glass
That keeps here from there.
Touching the window,
Tracing the storied waters
Something like catching stars in a net.
I want words here
Words to trickle in stellar trails of truth
Words to rain down on my mute wishes
Of these stormclouds to speak for me
For the rain to cry for me
For my door to be opened
[some muse off the street comes in
folds an umbrella
and says hello]
I want the linguists of the soul
To name my unspoken troubles
Which thoughtlessly tremble my hands
Which know every cell I am.
I wish to succumb to the flooding
Of some holy lexicography
I wish for the roads of my body to slicken, ice,
For my creeks to rise, and overtake the bounds
Of my understanding
And to go downstream,
Toward some hypernymous sea, some inexplicable sky.
I wish I were named something like this rain
Which makes December music tonight.
I could patter on your roof
Roll down your window
Even your finger
And at last
Be given
Wholly
To the
Earth.
First, before I unzip the squishy tumblething that is my brain, you should know by now that this blog is quite periodic as its author has more-or-less been significantly distracted away from the medium and will post periodically as time allows. Management sends its regards, nonetheless. Some day, a new manifestation may appear, or some bloggy zeal may reinhabit these pages... until then, be content with the constantly updated fresh postings that can been seen through the feed called your window. The whiplash inducing comments in Reality threads are quite addictive.
Cryptic asides aside, things have been well-ish, if scattered and somewhat overrun with the onslaught of responsibilities and minor personal fuckups that I've been privy to. The good thing is that there are good things afoot, such as a new drive to solidify my philosophies into something more tangible and workable than the common late night rants with good friends; I'm writing things down and trying to craft a cogent and useful system for myself. It's like playing hide-n-seek with yourself in a mirror, though; the best I can do is to catch myself and all the inconsistencies that lie therewith. I need more bounce, more avenues to sound off and thus receive critiques from the thoughtful minds that live beyond my brain. Yet, save one soul, I'm too shy to air my quizzical laundry for the whole world. Very few see the delicate underthings of my inmost thought, so suffice it to say that I'm getting things done and am doing the Work.
Today just so happens to be the 35th anniversary of my signing on to be on this planet with y'all. I plan to do a lot of self care and some minor indulgence today, to create a little personal levity in what has been an otherwise stressful season. Again, those things (the stressful bits) tend to stay under wraps here on the blog, so that when I do post, I can hand you something more useful than Eeyorish wankery. I save that for the mental health profession.
Thanks for sticking by these sporadic broadcasts, and know that like a elf in the night, the blog will occasionally drop you a treat when least expected.
Love is the force most mysterious
For it abides through dark and light
Above and below
Through the royal sky of day and the bejeweled canopy of night.
Love has infinite names and no definite place
Yet it is written in your own bones
It wakes you and dreams you
Crystallized in a clear moment which none can own.
Love compels us to know ourselves
When distraction and hullabaloo competes to win
Self knowledge is galactic
Through it, we propel forward, and give from within.
Love propagates from itself
And creates potential in its wake, a gypsy dancer
You cannot help but to jump and exalt
For the question of love is its own answer.
Love is the force most mysterious
Yet somehow, you can touch it now, here;
You chose it, love chooses you,
Just this once, trust its embrace, for as with all Creation
It is ever present, and yet you are the one who chooses to hold it near.
Birdonthemoon.com, quiet though it may be, holds a very important place in my life. It's the studio that my house doesn't have (yet), dusty though it may be, the place where I come face-to-face with my creative effort. Through the archives of the past five years, I collected hundreds of poems and prose, culling here and there, and after well over two years of planning I organized that material into my third published work, One For The Nameless, which was officially accepted for publication just before midnight yesterday. It's through your feedback, interconnection, and support that this work was made possible. I'm humbled and awed to have nearly 900 pages of printed material from the past ten years, in addition to magazines and other print media. 
I've just finished the rough first edit of the new book. Yes, the new one, and incidentally, the third one which I've been sitting on for some time. The beast is at least weighing in at 350 pages of my gibberish presently, and with some cuts and additions, that's about where it will likely settle. Not that the page length has anything to do with it, really, but being a man there's something quite comforting in such a long, ahem, piece of work.
