Tuesday, August 3, 2010

What I Am Today

Interesting. I dream. Not what I really am, what I dream I am. Even in dreams I will dim down. Sooner or later, I will wane. This is natural. We even speak of the death of suns. Suns die. Living in hydrocarbon bodies is not a fate similar to suns. The world places demands on us even when we live as loose as we possibly can. We step to the edge, yearning to fly. It remains possible only where there is magic. That we fly now – if viewed by a lord or commoner of the middle ages, it would be magic they would see.

It is very important to know where magic ends and the mundane begins. No matter how we yearn, the stories are stories. I choose to live intensely in stories. I live intensely in dreams. When I have a lover, stories and dreams cross over in intriguing ways and lead me into realms of hope for the future of the planet. Even there I remember the realities of doing dishes and going to work, and if I drive too many miles, then some form of accident happens along the way, or some break down. If I live too long, then my health fails no matter how many dragons I have ridden. This is just true.

What I Am Today

You asked, what notion
of self have I dreamed I am
and I replied, "Verb!"

That's today's answer, action.
I burn, cast shadows like light.

Tomorrow will dim
my glow as is usual
after all this shine.

June 23, 2009 12:51 PM

6 comments:

  1. Love the whole thing, but those last lines I can feel in my bones.

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  2. Oh, I smile so big in this. I smile so friggen big.

    I hope I go out as a verb! Even if it is at 80. 60. Tomorrow. Let it be a spirited verb!

    (As I laid in bed last night, after reading poetry and all that, I thought about waning and how my mind has not developed the electrical routes to consider this in reality. I hope to never develop those routes. I hope to be spunk until the end, and I won't even mind if I am perhaps wrong in it.)

    xo
    erin

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  3. Karen, hi. Exactly.

    Erin, my love, my very good friend. Refer to Karen, for that is my point. She says, at an age similar to mine, that she feels it in her bones, whatever else she does. It takes care of itself. You don't have to artificially cultivate anything. All you have to do is live honestly. Sixty five birthdays is just different from forty five birthdays, unless you get stuck. You say you hope to never develop the dimness as if it were thinking that makes it so, but it is living that makes it so. My hope for you is that you never get stuck in artificial denials of the truth of what happens next.

    The zest for the journey includes a zest for its end or it is not complete. The Hindus believe in poverty at the end as well, a begging bowl and a life in the forest as a spiritual itinerant, giving room in the life to pay attention to the graces and beauty of departure. That takes place in the last third of life, beginning in the ideal sense at age fifty-six. When I say these things completely, it is within such a larger spiritual context of duty to the shape of human life on the planet.

    I am not poor by world standards, even now while I am jobless and not tied into a system I don't believe in, not at the moment tied in in any way. I am sitting in my own house on my own nickel, wondering how I will pay my auto insurance in two weeks and my property tax in three months. I am however, desperately poor by American retirement standards.

    We do not have a system that covers these things well.

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  4. This is just true. Somethings are non-negotiable. Death cannot be bargained with. But I ask myself if I would prefer to meet him in a moment of young shine (although I fear I am past that option), or in the dim of old. I have no answer.

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  5. So my blog is growing old before my eyes because I am doing that in my life. This is the whole of things, that I am in my mortality. That is my work now, to die well if I can.

    What does dying well look like? I should not burden others too much, but neither should I pretend that I do not live with death on my shoulder. Actually I have been doing that in some form since Carlos Casteneda was instructed by his brujo Don Juan Matus to live like that. It is what shamans do. I am happy that I did not die early. On the other hand, I have been living as if this day was my last for a very long time. I am okay with that. It is what shamans do. It is a source of power.

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  6. each verb has a different course...


    beautiful thoughts...

    ReplyDelete

The chicken crossed the road. That's poultry in motion.


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