The Violet Sky

Buddhist psychology refers to the aggregate of what we call personality as “the five clouds of entanglement.”

But if we are clouds, we are also luminous. Xenophanes, writing at the dawn of Western philosophy, tells us that the stars are actually clouds “ignited by motion,” kindled in their rising and extinguished in their setting, like coals. The sun too is a burning cloud, and as with the stars, each day it’s a different cloud that is set ablaze, for no two suns are the same, though they share in the same flaring grandeur—and this goes on forever because the world is imperishable, without beginning, without end. Herein hovers a magnificent hope: Entangled clouds that we are, sooner or later in our driftings we’re bound to catch fire, become a star or maybe even a sun, and not just for fifteen minutes but for a whole day or night. Every soul is combustible. - John P. O’Grady from Writing on Air, edited by David Rothenberg and Wandee J. Pryor, © 2003 by Massachusetts Institute of Technology.


The Violet Sky

When the sky colors
the world in violet hue
how can I stand still
beneath the changes?

I know I am far from home,
too far to get back,
cut off from old roots,
new ones not yet grown with you,
I am cold, breathless.

December 8, 2009 8:42 PM

I Know My Worth

I am a bursting bubble, yes I am!

"Perhaps the most important thing we bring to another person is the silence in us, not the sort of silence that is filled with unspoken criticism or hard withdrawal. The sort of silence that is a place of refuge, of rest, of acceptance of someone as they are. We are all hungry for this other silence. It is hard to find. In its presence we can remember something beyond the moment, a strength on which to build a life. Silence is a place of great power and healing." - Rachel Naomi Remen

Rachel Naomi Remen is one of the earliest pioneers in the mind/body holistic health movement and the first to recognize the role of the spirit in health and the recovery from illness. She is Co-Founder and Medical Director of the Commonweal Cancer Help Program featured in the Bill Moyers PBS series, Healing and the Mind and has cared for people with cancer and their families for almost 30 years.



I Know My Worth

I know you don't pick
me like I'm all important,
not to you I'm not,
not to anyone.
I know you give me more than
I'd ever deserve,
Not that I am less
But that there are so many:
you've so much to give.

Then I think again,
Know I am a sprouting seed
To you, yes I am.

Written February 8, 2009 11:27 AM
First Posted August 22, 2009

Please Soften Me - Reprise

All the ways I have been on this planet...this is one of them.

Please Soften Me

I am the hard earth
packed down by the passing time,
the tread of many
heavy feet, baked by
incessant sun through the days
of my exposure.

I hope your rain comes
to soften me, to seep in,
to loosen my joints,
to wet my dry veins,
to get my heart's blood to move
as it should once more.

First Posted as edited, February 8, 2009
Written sometime before that.

In The Arctic Scene

This seems lighthearted. I wrote it a long time back. I don't think that I was saying anything in some coded way, at least not deliberately. The picture of the hare rolling in the snow is perfect. If you want to read something into it, I don't mind. I have blog friends in Whitehorse and Mendenhall, in the Yukon Territory. That's high up. Either one of these women would be capable of slapping me around a little. I am quite sure of that. And. Winter starts in October in Whitehorse. Some fun, huh? I am down here in the Oregon Territory. We get one good snow a year most years.

In The Arctic Scene

You have pushed me down
asserting yourself with me
though I told you no,
not in this cold snow.
You cover me with blankets
then roll me over
in them and slap me
clean, finish bundling me up,
a rolled up rug boy
in the arctic scene
wondering what you have in
store for me this time.

December 8, 2009 7:37 PM

The Arrow

Blue Flower; Georgia O'Keeffe
Pastel on Paper mounted to cardboard, 20 x 16 in

I need a stand up relationship with God. I must be able to argue and snivel and in the next moment stare him square in the eye. A God who demands of me a perpetual posture of below to above is of no use to me and I shall surely turn away. This may be illness or rebellion in me but the die is cast. I have made my commitment and expect of Him the same. This is just what is.

Actually, if there is any rhyme or reason to the Christian claim of God as Man in the form of Jesus, whom we are to strive to emulate His Image and Likeness, then this is it, that God is willing to be man sized for the purposes of relationship with us, with me. In that then there is potential that I can look at Him under certain conditions as if He is my size or I His.

If I argue with God, it is said, I lose. So what? That I can argue is deeply essential no matter the outcome. I am not alone in this realization. I believe it was Jacob in the Bible who wrestled with the angel in full knowledge of his condition and was struck lame for it, but blessed nonetheless.





The Arrow

I had to kill a bird,
left for dead after
a cat bite that paralyzed it.
The killing broke my heart.

I wrote a poem,
and in my poem
was a rage within my grief,
a shout,
an arrow so compressed
that it flew all the way to God.

He still bleeds. I checked.

November 20, 2009 8:24 PM

The Truth

"All men, at one time or another, have fallen in love with the veiled Isis whom they call Truth. With most, this has been a passing passion: they have early seen its hopelessness and turned to more practical things. But others remain all their lives the devout lovers of reality: though the manner of their love, the vision which they make to themselves of the beloved object varies enormously. Some see Truth as Dante saw Beatrice: an adorable yet intangible figure, found in this world yet revealing the next. To others she seems rather an evil but an irresistible enchantress: enticing, demanding payment and betraying her lover at the last. Some have seen her in a test tube, and some in a poet's dream: some before the altar, others in the slime. The extreme pragmatists have even sought her in the kitchen; declaring that she may best be recognized by her utility. Last stage of all, the philosophic skeptic, has comforted an unsuccessful courtship by assuring himself that his mistress is not really there." - Evelyn Underhill in her book Mysticism

According to Wiki, Ms Underhill was a prolific author, a Catholic, but also a Mystic and very popular in her time, as popular as Aldous Huxley in his.

Truth is not what it's cracked up to be, it seems. That's something to remember when someone waxes dogmatic as a Democrat, a Republican, a Buddhist or a Baptist. It appears the truth is really there but is largely a mystery and not easily approachable in any ordinary way. Any. Do I really mean ANY?? ordinary way.

To The Sun God

The ducklings of spring (like the boys of summer :D )

You can only be young once. But you can always be immature. ~ Dave Barry

David "Dave" Barry (born July 3, 1947) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American author and columnist, who wrote a nationally syndicated humor column for The Miami Herald from 1983 to 2005. He has also written numerous books of humor and parody, as well as comedic novels.

It's been wet and cool pretty much all summer this year and friends have been trying to paint but can't because the weather won't let them and they had this volunteer force all set up but too bad! Now I am not a sun worshipper, not like the woman at work who pines for the Arizona desert. But it is kind of time for the sun to bake the land around here. Soon, I think. August is nearly always hot and dry, and into September before the rains begin again. I came to Oregon from California in part for the green, knowing that the green requires soggy ground. My understanding, in the Willamette valley where most Oregonians live, if there were no people this would be rain forest pretty much.

I got a little desperate for sun in the winter of 2009.

To The Sun God

Look, I know you’re not
really going away, not
diving into earth
to decide what’s next.
I know even the longest
night has day after,
but damn! there’s something
to it, how my bones shatter
in the dread of it,
so here am I, Lord
I bow, I ask of You now
Please, my Lord, come back!

December 5, 2009 7:30 PM

The Quilt

No great artist ever sees things as they are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist. - Oscar Wilde

When I have a terrible need of -- shall I say the word -- religion. Then I go out and paint the stars. - Vincent van Gogh

For I must tell you that we artists cannot tread the path of Beauty without Eros keeping company with us and appointing himself as our guide. - Thomas Mann











The Quilt

Sew your patient quilt
one stitch, then another stitch
all in muted hue
and I will love you
through it all, as I promised
on that day last spring,
when our world's warm song
held us in the gift of peace,
momentary, true.

December 5, 2009 7:43 AM

An Old Story

Moses Siregar, a man attempting a career.

I have no comment on the writing of Moses Siregar. I do not know it. He put a "Black God" in the title of his upcoming (first?) novel, which he claims has been and perhaps still is a free novella on Amazon.

An Old Story

You teller of myth,
inconsolable goddess,
bringer of winter -
the ice enters me
that I too would steal your love
to keep here below
I am no better
than the old black god, older
than all my sand.

December 5, 2009 7:29 AM

Effective Prayer - Reprise

There is a concept, a hope, a belief out there that began in the late sixties. In the late seventies it began to have a name. Called the Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon by some, it basically states that when enough of us really make a shift in paradigms, then we all go, assuming it is a true thing we are talking about and not a false hope. I know we discussed this idea hanging out in living rooms in 1966. I know I wrote my first poems about it in 1967. How many would be enough? Apparently more than appear in the photo.

Wiki says: The hundredth monkey effect is a supposed phenomenon in which a learned behavior spreads instantaneously from one group of monkeys to all related monkeys once a critical number is reached. By generalization it means the instantaneous, paranormal spreading of an idea or ability to the remainder of a population once a certain portion of that population has heard of the new idea or learned the new ability. The story behind this supposed phenomenon originated with Lawrence Blair and Lyall Watson in the mid-to-late 1970s, who claimed that it was the observation of Japanese scientists. One of the primary factors in the promulgation of the story is that many authors quote secondary, tertiary or post-tertiary sources who have themselves misrepresented the original observations.

Over the years the original claims are largely discredited as real science but the idea remains alive still today. There is a New Age Movement called the Shift Network. Google it and you will find what people are trying for these days, hoping to spread the consciousness of a new way of being and reaching that turning point. There are many phenomena that demonstrate a turning point and these include the awakening sometimes experienced along the sacred paths.

I have the same relationship to this idea as I do to Aliens Out There. I do so want these ideas to be true ones. I am fairly convinced we are too far down the drain to survive without some kind of intervention by God, Aliens, or Shifts in Consciousness.

I hope prayer can be effective in this matter.

Effective Prayer

The music draws me
Into the dance where you are
And gifts me with form.

So we twine, complicated
Shapes. We draw others to us.

Dozens, hundreds, more
Until we reach that moment.
Then God moves the world.

Written October 13, 2008
First Posted 12/26/2008

I Can't Hide It

Wiki says: A bleeding heart is an informal label applied to someone regarded as excessively sympathetic, liberal in a political sense, or both. It is typically considered a derogatory remark.

Etymologically, the term originated as a Christ reference, originally the bleeding heart under a cross, representing the sufferings of Jesus crucified.

Christopher says: Isn't it interesting that the sufferings of Jesus should devolve into a criticism of the left. I understand I am now speaking of US politics. This gets me to think there is something to the idea that conservatives of the right really don't like the New Testament very much. They wish for an ascendancy of the the Old - where "an eye for an eye" typifies justice and love and forgiveness is not yet ascendant as the New Law brought by Christ to supplant the whole of the old Law. Love and Forgiveness is Bleeding Heart. Please notice that love and forgiveness are not absent in the Old Testament (Torah and other books), just that they do not yet govern as they do in the Kingdom of God as described by Jesus.

Bleeding heart may also refer to:

Organisms:

Doves in the genus Gallicolumba
An Australian rainforest plant Omalanthus populifolius, also known as Queensland poplar
Flowering plants in the genus Dicentra of the fumitory family
Flowering plants in the genus Clerodendrum (glorybowers or bagflowers) of the vervain family


Other:

*"Bleeding Heart" - Elmore James song
*A song by the Brazilian metal band Angra, presents in the 2002's EP Hunters and Prey
*Bleeding Heart Yard, a courtyard in London, England
*A song by Olivia Lufkin on the album Flower Festival
*Bleeding Heart (album)

I Can't Hide It

Every time I
hear that snap I know my heart
lies looser here. One
more string is broken,
hanging adangle, allowed
to drip its salt flow
down my sticky heart,
crimson hot glowing spillage
setting me apart
as if I have messed
my bed, sheets hung out again
on display to all.

December 4, 2009 5:04 PM

The Lava Field - Reprise

Wiki says: The Boring Lava Field is an extinct Plio-Pleistocene volcanic field zone with at least 32 cinder cones and small shield volcanoes lying within a radius of 13 miles (21 km) of Kelly Butte, which is approximately 4 miles (6 km) east of downtown Portland, Oregon, in the United States. The name is derived from the town of Boring, Oregon, which lies just to the southeast of the most dense cluster of lava vents. The zone became active at least 2.7 million years ago, and has been extinct for about 300,000 years.

The Portland metropolitan area, including suburbs, is one of the few places in the continental United States to have extinct volcanoes within a city's limits; Bend, Oregon is another.

Panorama showing Portland and part of the Boring Lava Field. The buttes of the Boring Lava Field are visible toward the center of this panorama of Portland, Oregon. The panorama is taken from the west hills to the south of town and sweeps north, east and southeast.

The Lava Field

I was angry once,
So hot that my hope melted
And flowed down my sides.

I am deformed, bent like that.

I have held still for so long
That dreams have begun
To form on my ruined hope,
On you in my life.

Written October 22, 2008
First Posted, January 8, 2009

In Living Color - Reprise

"You have too good a mind to throw away. I don't quite know what we're doing on this insignificant cinder spinning away in a dark corner of the universe. That is a secret which the high gods have not confided in me. Yet one thing I believe and I believe it with every fiber of my being. A man must live by his light and do what little he can and do it as best as he can." - Walker Percy

Wiki says: Walker Percy (May 28, 1916 – May 10, 1990) was an American Southern author whose interests included philosophy and semiotics. Percy is best known for his philosophical novels set in and around New Orleans, Louisiana, the first of which, The Moviegoer, won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1962. He devoted his literary life to the exploration of "the dislocation of man in the modern age." His work displays a unique combination of existential questioning, Southern sensibility, and deep Catholic faith.

By the way: Semiotics, also called semiotic studies or (in the Saussurean tradition) semiology, is the study of signs and sign processes (semiosis), indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication. Semiotics is closely related to the field of linguistics, which, for its part, studies the structure and meaning of language more specifically. Semiotics is often divided into three branches:

Semantics: Relation between signs and the things to which they refer; their denotata, or meaning
Syntactics: Relations among signs in formal structures
Pragmatics: Relation between signs and the effects they have on the people who use them

In Living Color

To think I was there
At the unmasking moment
And saw your true face.
This is like early
Crocuses coming up, out
With their purple blooms
Just after the snows.
They too guess right times
As you did just now, showing
Courage in the gray.

Written January 9, 2009 9:23 AM
First Posted May 30,2009

Pig Iron - Reprise

Wiki says:

Pig iron is the intermediate product of smelting iron ore with a high-carbon fuel such as coke, usually with limestone as a flux. Charcoal and anthracite have also been used as fuel. Pig iron has a very high carbon content, typically 3.5–4.5%, which makes it very brittle and not useful directly as a material except for limited applications.

The traditional shape of the molds used for these ingots was a branching structure formed in sand, with many individual ingots at right angles to a central channel or runner. Such a configuration is similar in appearance to a litter of piglets suckling on a sow. When the metal had cooled and hardened, the smaller ingots (the pigs) were simply broken from the much thinner runner (the sow), hence the name pig iron. As pig iron is intended for remelting, the uneven size of the ingots and inclusion of small amounts of sand was insignificant compared to the ease of casting and of handling.



The Chinese were making pig iron by the later Zhou Dynasty (1122–256 BC). In Europe, the process was not invented until the Late Middle Ages (1350-1500). Actually the phase transition of the iron into liquid phase in the furnace was an avoided phenomenon, as decarburizing the pig iron into steel was an extremely tedious process with medieval technology.

Traditionally pig iron would be worked into wrought iron in finery forges, and later puddling furnaces, more recently into steel. In these processes, pig iron is melted and a strong current of air is directed over it while it is being stirred or agitated. This causes the dissolved impurities (such as silicon) to be thoroughly oxidized. An intermediate product of puddling is known as refined pig iron, finers metal, or refined iron.

Pig Iron

Staring between bars,
My knothead keeps getting stuck.
Wanting to be free,
Over and over I try.

Then he comes, tells me, "Become
The cage, little friend."
Turning into pig iron,
I begin rusting.

Written December 4, 2008
First Posted December 4, 2008

Graceful Release

Ever-So-Graceful Release

"The awe of autumn is in the ever-so-graceful release of what once was, coupled with the promise of what will be." - Diane Varner

Check out Diane's site. There are a great many beautiful photos.

Graceful Release

How your hand left mine
so casually, graceful
release, floating on
the currents. Events
as they come flowing, pass me
by, and I see you
shrinking in the light,
now only a photograph
I see now and then.

December 4, 2009 1:58 PM

I Wanted Rubies

I shall not flinch from any of it, I hope, this human life. I aspire to apotheosis, nothing less, really, though I cloak it in Buddhist terms, claiming I follow the Buddhist ideal of Bodhisattva. My stories are built around this yearning, this lifelong desire to ascend, to rise up into beneficence, into munificence just because love and mercy abound. I have done my part, too. I have done the work, the little bit that has come my way to do.

There is of course the rest of it and I have had my share, I suppose. I was born and raised in bewilderment. Along the way I discovered hatred and grief. I have been afraid to the cold door of death and even more afraid I would be found a coward. I know the tedium of bearable pain and the agony of mortality too. All this it would seem should be surmounted, but perhaps not. I know the arguments.

I Wanted Rubies

If I was just this
or if I was that, I say,
I say so insistently,
as if this one spell
would dispel the pain,
the dissipation

of my rootless life,
the roots ripped from me, snagged in
tangled balls of clinging
earth to drop and splash
upon the stony dry ground
of my ruthlessness.

July 7, 2011 9:50 AM

Call The Grieving God - Reprise

I don't know how to make theology out of it. I don't care because for me this is where heart comes in. I know in my bones that Infinite God grieves. The sadness known to the house finch chick who fell from the nest, the fear and loss of its mother, the regret of the universe at that moment leads to the infinite grief of God. Anything God does in genuine response of His own is and must be infinite. As in the Holy Word, down to the smallest and least of them. When life is unfair, as it so frequently is, God grieves the necessity of that. Because it is necessary. It always has been. Life must prey on life. There is nothing else it can prey on, nothing but life and its gifts and remains. The oxygen we breathe in is the exhale of plant life. The prey will always know its own protest. The prey will always Witness. And God perhaps eternally grieves as she sees as a mother does through the prey's own eyes.

Call The Grieving God

The walls are too high.
They go too far left and right.

Storms will come near soon
And wild eyed, we still cast blame.

Call the grieving god to help
The host cross over.

We think we know what happens
And still the walls fall.

This poem was written on October 27, 2008
First posted, January 16, 2009

A Collaboration

Wiki says: "Daniel Ladinsky is an American poet. He was born and raised in the Midwest United States. Off and on over six years he spent extensive time in a spiritual community in western India, where he worked in a rural clinic free to the poor, and lived with the intimate disciples and family of Meher Baba. In introductions to his Hafiz poetry, Ladinsky notes that he offers interpretations of the poet Hafiz, rather than translations. He believes that it is more important to convey the emotions in Hafiz’s poetry than to keep the same rhythm in the English language, and he uses the most simple words possible.

"Since the release of Ladinsky's first book, I Heard God Laughing, his ostensible renderings of Hafiz have become widely quoted, though many point out that his poems are originals, and not translations or interpretations of Hafiz. Christopher Shackle describes The Gift as 'not so much a paraphrase as a parody of the wondrously wrought style of the greatest master of Persian art-poetry.' The fact that Ladinsky's poems do not actually represent Hafiz' work was a source of embarrassment for Dalton McGuinty, the Premier of Ontario, when it was discovered that the poem McGuinty had recited from Ladinsky's book at a Nowruz celebration in Toronto had no corresponding Persian original.

"Ladinsky's work has garnered positive commentary from Akbar S. Ahmed, has been favorably endorsed by The Christian Science Monitor writer, Alexandra Marks, and has been quoted in contemporary Muslim American non-fiction. Some hail Ladinsky's contemporary work for creating an immediate access to the spirit and intention of Hafiz' verse. Ladinsky authored a short essay in the form of an Amazon.com review, entitled My Portrait of Hafiz, that offers a description of the process and background of his work. The Islamic Foundation of North America has used Ladinsky's The Gift in a children's Islamic Literature curriculum. Ladinsky has also reviewed contemporary poetry, such as Full on Arrival."

I have written before of how I fell for Hafiz as Ladinsky edited and translated him. I don't really care if it is Hafiz or Ladinsky (as some argue) who really wrote the poems. I guess what a criticism like that means is if I read someone else's translation I would not easily recognize the poems. I am no purist and also I have a way of spinning off of the work other people do. Many of my poems arise in that way, not that I reframe someone else's work. Sometimes it is only a word or a phrase.

Here is an example, an excellent example of Ladinsky/Hafiz posted on PJA64X by Philip Arnold back in 2009:

We should make all spiritual talk
simple today:

God is trying to sell you something
but you don’t want to buy.

That is what your suffering is:

your fantastic haggling
your manic screaming

over the price.

Hafiz-e-Shirazi (1315 – 1390)

Translated by Daniel Ladinsky

Irani painting of Hafiz by Mahmoud Farshchian

Back in the early days of blogging I was visiting many sites regularly and writing frequently. I dared to make the assertion that I was going to be writing two poems a day. I did that for over a year. Recently, knowing that no one goes back there I have started reprising poems from the early days, though I blog new intros for them. Between the reprises and all the writing I have done, I still have 390 poems I have not yet posted. I am still calling these poems up from December of 2009 and posting them as fresh not yet posted poems. I am moving forward from there.

To say these poems are "mine" is just odd. All of them are collaborations.

A Collaboration
(Patterned after Hafiz/Ladinsky)

My poem always sits stunned,
chained, unable to move beneath
your magnificent beauty.

It is essential
for my heart's coronation
for my poem to realize
there is nothing but divine
movement behind you
in this world.

December 4, 2009 11:30 AM

You've Caught Me Staring

Lacey Gallery
You've Caught Me Staring

The way you watch me,
posed behind a slender reed
as if you quickly
would disappear if
I looked away for a moment,
like a cheshire cat,
the way you watch me
changes me deep in the pith.
I thank you for that.

December 4, 2009 8:30 AM

The Next Belch

The Family Belch Page

I have no idea what this is "really" about. Sometimes it just gets too odd...

The Next Belch

I shall atone once you
get me to grasp the main point
of entry into
dreams of who I was
when this all started for us.
Or maybe never
as I rumble on
wondering what the next belch
will taste like for me.

December 3, 2009 9:22 PM

Bathing As Incantation

On left: Bohr as a young man.

On right and below: A fully mature Bohr.

Wiki says: Niels Henrik David Bohr; 7 October 1885 – 18 November 1962 was a Danish physicist who made fundamental contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum mechanics, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922. Bohr mentored and collaborated with many of the top physicists of the century at his institute in Copenhagen. He was part of a team of physicists working on the Manhattan Project. Bohr married Margrethe Nørlund in 1912, and one of their sons, Aage Bohr, grew up to be an important physicist who in 1975 also received the Nobel prize. Bohr has been described as one of the most influential scientists of the 20th century.

"We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough." -Niels Bohr

It is in that spirit I often write my poetry. I guess it is up to you guys whether or not I succeed.

Bathing As Incantation

In my bath you show
as the bubbles from the soap
clinging to my form
as bubbles will do,
a cleansing film on my life,
washing confusion
out of my lank hair,
giving it waves, a fine sheen.

When I want trouble
that came here to me
unbidden and unwanted,
when I want trouble
to just go away,
that's the time I take you up
on your claims of joy.

That's the time I love you best.

July 1, 2011 12:40 PM
last line added 8:31 PM

last line courtesy of Donovan, though he wrote "that's the time I love the best."

When Einstein and Bohr got together in the heyday of the Copenhagen Interpretation, they sat and discussed the state of things. Einstein is reported to have exclaimed, "God does not play dice!"

It is perhaps apocryphal but possible that Bohr replied, "Don't tell God what to do with His dice!"

Deja Vu All Over Again

Wiki says:Lawrence Peter "Yogi" Berra (born May 12, 1925) is a former American Major League Baseball catcher, outfielder, and manager. He played almost his entire 19-year baseball career (1946–1965) for the New York Yankees. Berra was one of only four players to be named the Most Valuable Player of the American League three times and one of only six managers to lead both American and National League teams to the World Series. He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1972.

Berra is widely regarded as one of the greatest catchers in baseball history. According to the win shares formula developed by sabermetrician Bill James, Berra is the greatest catcher of all time and the 52nd greatest non-pitching player in major-league history.

Berra, who quit school after the eighth grade, has a tendency toward malapropism and fracturing the English language. "It ain't over till it's over" is arguably his most famous example, often quoted.

Deja Vu All Over Again. Berra explained that this quote originated when he witnessed Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris repeatedly hit back-to-back home runs in the Yankees' seasons in the early 1960s.

Too many things going on, but here's a poem I wrote today:

Deja Vu All Over Again

You tell me to stop.
My head tries sooner than my
body to follow
orders. We measure
this...it is just so, two minds
as if my spirit
and my soul converse
and do not always agree.
This raises questions
all over again,
deja vu for us, tricky
like and silver furred.

Written June 30, 2011 12:48 PM

Walking On Clouds - Reprise

"Leaving on a Jet Plane" is a song written by John Denver in 1966 and most famously recorded by Peter, Paul and Mary. The original title of the song was "Oh Babe I Hate to Go" but Denver's then producer, Milt Okun, convinced him to change the title.

The song was initially recorded in 1967 by the Chad Mitchell Trio, and later that same year by Spanky and Our Gang. Peter, Paul and Mary's version first appeared on their 1967 Album 1700; however, it did not become a hit until they released it as a single in 1969. It turned out to be their biggest (and final) hit, becoming their only #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the United States. It was the second to last #1 single of the 1960s. The song also spent three weeks atop the easy listening chart. The song was also sung by the crew of the space shuttle in the movie Armageddon.

I thought of two old songs, this one and Gordon Lightfoot singing "Early Morning Rain", but I think this song is closer to the sense of my poem.

I must apologize but I have no sound at all at the moment on either of my computers. My older laptop has decided to freeze in the start up after it decided all on its own to shut down last night. That was the computer that had the sound. This computer has decided to force me to massage it and manually open the wi-fi driver in order to have internet. At the same time the windows sound driver has disappeared beyond my skill to find it. In an unrelated issue my Blue Parrot blue tooth device has refused to start up too. That device is a hundred bucks to be a head set instead of an ear piece only, and the input is voice activated. It's made for trucker's cabins. I might be pissing off the technical gods somehow.

Not having any way to verify the quality of any sound media, I would never just post anything.

"Walking On Clouds" was the second poem posted with "The Ring Of Light" reprised yesterday.

Walking On Clouds

I look from above
To the clouds that cover you,
Keep you from my sight.

The clouds seem to say
I could float, even walk there
In mid-sky out past
The place you still live,
Home that I left, leaving you.

The sun's rays reach me
In horizontal
Lines that slice me right to left
Like you asking me.

January 17, 2009 2:06 PM
First Posted June 18, 2009

Ring Of Light - Reprise

Ring of light over Moscow

A Ring of Endless Light is a 1980 novel by Madeleine L'Engle. The book tells of a girl named Vicky and her struggle to understand life and significance in the universe as she deals with her dying grandfather, while at the same time finding love.















Madeline in 1946

Madeline in her later years

Wiki says: Madeleine L'Engle (November 29, 1918 – September 6, 2007) was an American writer best known for her Young Adult fiction, particularly the Newbery Medal-winning A Wrinkle in Time and its sequels A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Many Waters, and An Acceptable Time. Her works reflect both her Christian faith and her strong interest in modern science.


The Ring Of Light

There's a ring of light
I found, placed on my finger
As a charm that calls
You from your labor
In the fields of confusion.

You seek a house free
Of darkness, descent,
Burial beneath the sand.

But more sand arrives
As you look, begins
To bury you as you age
And your burden too.

There's a ring of light.
I will place it in your hand.
Light will circle you.

Written January 17, 2009 9:57 AM
First Posted June 18, 2009

Inversion - Reprise

I say I am here as a Witness. I don't mean this as if I am some special creature given a unique task. I am sure Witnesses are a dime a dozen and in some real sense there is no one who is not a Witness. And yet in the story I tell myself, I am in a lifelong argument with God about some aspect of this life, a focus, as if I have come here sure I will win this argument if I give it due diligence. What amuses me, I am more sure of the plot than I am of the substance.

I am not that sure what exactly I am looking for. When I am at my least mature then I claim I want to declare a world without suffering, that it is suffering that is the sticking point and that it is suffering that should be removed from this life. But that is purely adolescent and ever since I have learned the heavy forgiveness lessons I know that is not really it. But I remain toe to toe and eye to eye with the Creator. Yes, indeed.

Here is a Witness story.

Inversion

Dropping down from here,
From this single star,
I have come to see your life
The way it really
Is, not the way they
Say you are in the stories.
It's a steep descent,
A quantum shifting
Down for up, charmed for strange, you
For me in this ploy.

I am upside down,
Not ready - such timeless light.

Written January 18, 2009 9:51 AM
First Posted June 22, 2009

Merlin's Lament

Here's a song by Dave Carter...I hoped to find a version on YouTube but there seems to be only one, not by Dave and Tracy but by someone else. It is poorly recorded and poorly done in my estimation but Guy-Michael Grande's heart was in the right place. Dave is gone now and those who know all weep for that. In 2009 there was a memorial concert and that's where the YouTube I found was taken. Ick. I hate it when they die early.

MERLIN'S LAMENT

In a castle keep, in a vault of stone
In a house at the end of the lane
An old man weeps in his door alone
And he sings out this mournful refrain.

She will not come back
She will not come back
Though the mountains fall down to the sea
And the sky burns to cinders and the river runs black
She will not come back to me.

No lightnin reed from his books of lore
And the staff in the corner, no fire
And the crystal ball always bright before
Is grey as the dust of desire.

She will not come back
She will not come back
Though we call on the powers that be
They will cipher this message in his cold zodiac
She will not come back
She will not come back
She will not come back to me.

And joy my love was a dancin spring
And life was the touch of her lips
And a brook ran mad to my cave down stream
From the miracle hills of her hips.

She will not come back
She will not come back
Though the stars hang their tears in the trees
And tireless Orion lies spent in his tracks
She will not come back
She will not come back
She will not come back to me
She will not come back to me.

Wiki says: Dave Carter (August 13, 1952 – July 19, 2002) was an American folk singer-songwriter who described his style as "post-modern mythic American folk music." He was one half of the duo Dave Carter and Tracy Grammer, who were heralded as the new "voice of modern folk music" in the months before Carter's unexpected death in July 2002. They were ranked as number one on the year-end list for "Top Artists" on the Folk Music Radio Airplay Chart for 2001 and 2002, and their popularity has endured in the years following Carter's death. Joan Baez who went on tour with the duo in 2002 spoke of Carter's songs in the same terms that she once used to promote a young Bob Dylan:

"There is a special gift for writing songs that are available to other people, and Dave's songs are very available to me. It's a kind of genius, you know, and Dylan has the biggest case of it. But I hear it in Dave's songs, too."

Carter's songs were often noted for their poetic imagery, spirituality and storytelling while retaining connection to the country music of his southern American upbringing. Carter's memory has been kept alive by his many admirers, most notably his former partner. Tracy Grammer has continued to introduce previously unrecorded songs and recordings that the duo were working on prior to Carter's death.

Carter died of a massive heart attack Friday July 19, 2002 in a hotel room in Hadley, Massachusetts after returning from an early morning run. He and Grammer were slated to play that weekend at the Green River Festival in Greenfield and were booked that summer to play many of the nation's top folk festivals and folk clubs. He was 49. Carter's death came as a great shock to the folk music community. Tracy Grammer gave her account of Carter's final moments in a letter to fans:

"Yesterday, shortly after he went unconscious, he came back for a lucid minute or two to tell me, 'I just died... Baby, I just died...' There was a look of wonder in his eyes, and though I cried and tried to deny it to him, I knew he was right and he was on his way. He stayed with me a minute more but despite my attempts to keep him with me, I could see he was already riding that thin chiffon wave between here and gone. He loved beauty, he was hopelessly drawn to the magic and the light in all things. I figure he saw something he could not resist out of the corner of his eye and flew into it. Despite the fact that every rescue attempt was made by paramedics and hospital staff and the death pronouncement officially came at 12:08 pm Eastern Time, I believe he died in my arms in our favorite hotel, leaving me with those final words. That's the true story I am going to tell."

***********************

I said it this way


How You Are Leaving Me

I stumble along
trying to get it, get it.
Man, what can I do
to convince you that
you've risen higher than this
yard we've known so long?
You've returned to nest
in the old haystack we called
good enough once more.
But I know you'll go,
again you will step away
and one time soon, soon
you will not come back.

December 3, 2009 8:05 PM

Design by anxiety and sweat

No post tonight on accounta my brain is fried. Too much design by anxiety and sweat this week...

Kerplop.

I Once Saw - Reprise

Freya Coming To Handle Me

I think this poem is one of my favorites. When I remember old loves it is most often with kindness and gratitude for the privilege of loving like that. I am a fortunate man. The women who chose to love me were all decent and careful with the hearts of others. One was too ill to really be with me. That was long long ago now. The woman who married me was in the end too ill to stay with me and we divorced hoping to save both our lives. I was saved. She unfortunately was not, and she passed in 2001. Her sister told me earlier that same year that she believed my ex-wife still loved me. I still love her today. Illness, death and divorce did not stop my heart from beating with her rhythm. Neither did that keep me from loving others since. I believe that having the chance to give and receive love in all its richness and diverse forms is the highest privilege of this problematic planet. I know it is not actually a right. Perhaps in God's World you could say such a thing: "I have a right to love and be loved!" This is the World That God Permits. In this world lives without much love are not only possible, they are common when you cast your net worldwide in the industrialized countries. Elsewhere, despite privation and injustice, there may be more love than you think. We do pay a price for our greed.

I don't think you earn love, but I know you can earn the loss of love. Genuine love is a privilege and contains a note of Grace in the largest sense.

Oh my, I do go on...pay me no mind...

I Once Saw

God sees the long shape of me
All at once, and me,
I once saw this too.

But that was between my lives.

All I have is small
Plodding steps, flat feet.

I recall your eyes
Lighting my heart, God close by.
I recall your touch.

Written November 1, 2008 10:27 AM
First posted, January 23, 2009

I Am Not Sad - Reprise

My Summer Cottage

Many people have come to believe very much as I have in this time. I see this is true by checking in with a variety of sources. Lately I am finding some valuable training that is freely available on the internet. One place, the University of California at Berkeley has hundreds of past lectures, entire college courses, freely offered if only you find the site. This is incredible value. An entire college education for free if you want it. The Shift Network is offering contemporary discussions, interviews with fairly well known people concerning awakening. What these people and I have seen is some kind of agreement with life or with God that is personal and dynamic. This agreement is a power source and leads toward a destiny. I see this very much like the idea of a "calling" or the expression of a unique "talent" as Christians use these words.

That I dare to call myself "God's chosen fool" is an expression of this faith. That I post here is also an expression of this faith. I have been patient with myself in the matter of my destiny. I have thought I was on the way several times, through music, once through a movement, a couple times through love, once in partnership with a mentor I thought would lead us both, and now through the medium of blogging. Blogging may come to nothing. Everything else has. It does not matter. If I am certain of anything, I am certain of that. It does not matter. Within that, paradoxically, something matters very much. What matters is the feeling of being rightly placed my efforts give me. What matters are the friends I have made world wide, Spain, France, England, Persia, India, Australia, Canada.

You see, it is not really the poetry. The poetry is the coin of the realm, neither the source nor the goal. You have to pay to play. That is why I don't overtly display copyright stuff, and freely write on other's sites. These are my offerings. I don't own my money. Neither do I own my poetry. In this way, I am rich and I am an open hearted man.

I Am Not Sad

I shed like a snake
But have no fangs, no poison.
Many lives, long gone.

I slither to the table
And dine in costume as if
I too were real.

I am fantasy, shadow,
God's chosen old fool.

First Posted November 24, 2008
written sometime between Aug and Nov, 2008

The Good Fight

This is the view from the patio outside the bedroom where the poem below is set.

Meditation:
Where do I feel it? High in the chest. Up and down my breathing. Allergies. Sore throat and uncontrolled coughing, sometimes all the way to unconsciousness. That's how I had a bad accident with a telephone pole eighteen months back. When I am stressed, sometimes I find that I breathe so shallow that I am starved for air. This all is the state I was in before my heart trouble. This heart trouble affects my breathing. Oddly, since my heart trouble surfaced in breathing difficulties, the allergies have receded. That intrigues me.

I have seen that before in others, that a chronic issue goes away when some new thing starts. (It is very difficult to notice this when it is happening to me. I suspect it might be difficult for you to notice this too.) I take that to mean there are emotional components in disease and that these can withdraw from one system of disease when they are invested in another. This is actually good news because under rigorous emotional honesty there is a chance for me to untangle an old knot.

"Grace means more than gifts. In grace something is transcended, once and for all overcome. Grace happens in spite of something; it happens in spite of separateness and alienation. Grace means that life is once again united with life, self is reconciled with self. Grace means accepting the abandoned one. Grace transforms fate into a meaningful vocation. It transforms guilt to trust and courage. The word grace has something triumphant in it." - Yrjo Kallinen

George Henry Kallinen (Yrjo Henrik Kallinen, June 15, 1886 Oulu - 1 january 1976 in Helsinki ) was a Finnish Social Democratic politician and a Counsellor of Education. He was known first and foremost as an advocate of the idea of a neutral and peaceful Finland. He built his career mainly by maintaining close alliances with other compatible politicians.

The Good Fight

I used to fight it
as if I could win the fight
but I knew better.

So she tickled me
and whispered in my ear, make friends,
she said. What?? You mean
take that old foe in?
Fuck that! No, really, she said
touching me like that.
So I tried. Bravest
thing I ever did.

December 3, 2009 8:21 PM

Disgruntled

I am disgruntled. I wrote two poems today. Both were eaten by the computer and my poor habits of protection. No post tonight.

The Core Of Things

Philip Straub

I wrote this yesterday in honor of a sweet and very short post offered by my long time blogging friend Erin in her blog called In Search Of White Space. Yesterday there was something wrong with the connection and I struggled to save the poem, let alone fail to post it on her blog as is my pattern. "A clean getaway" was in a song I was listening to, as was the idea of being strong enough now implied by another when I got to there. Those are the sorts of leads I follow when I write.

It felt like I should post it now, so I did.

The Core Of Things

A clean getaway
lies ahead, I hope, after
all the tangled stuff
of my foolishness,
the mire of our strange choices,
the sand of your loves.
I still remember
how bright we were together.
Oh, that stands out, shines
in my memory
as I go my way.
I hope you're strong enough now
to keep a firm hold.

June 17, 2011 12:42 PM

Why Do I Do This - Reprise

Martin Heidegger

"Why are there beings at all instead of nothing? That is the question. Presumably it is not an arbitrary question, "Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?" - this is obviously the first of all questions. Of course it is not the first question in the chronological sense. And yet, we are each touched once, maybe even every now and then, by the concealed power of this question, without properly grasping what is happening to us. In great despair, for example, when all weight tends to dwindle away from things and the sense of things grows dark, the question looms." - Martin Heidegger, from Being and Time

Wiki says:

Martin Heidegger (September 26, 1889 – May 26, 1976) was an influential German philosopher known for his existential and phenomenological explorations of the "question of Being." His best-known book, Being and Time, is considered to be one of the most important philosophical works of the 20th century and he has been influential beyond philosophy, in literature, psychology, and artificial intelligence. Heidegger remains controversial due to his involvement with Nazism and statements in support of Adolf Hitler.

Heidegger claimed that Western philosophy since Plato has misunderstood what it means for something "to be", tending to approach this question in terms of a being, rather than asking about Being itself. In other words, Heidegger believed all investigations of being have historically focused on particular entities and their properties, or have treated Being itself as an entity, or substance, with properties. A more authentic analysis of being would, for Heidegger, investigate "that on the basis of which beings are already understood", or that which underlies all particular entities and allows them to show up as entities in the first place (see world disclosure). But since philosophers and scientists have overlooked the more basic, pre-theoretical ways of being from which their theories derive, and since they have incorrectly applied those theories universally, they have confused our understanding of being and human existence. To avoid these deep-rooted misconceptions, Heidegger believed philosophical inquiry must be conducted in a new way, through a process of retracing the steps of the history of philosophy.

Heidegger argued that this misunderstanding, beginning with Plato, has left its traces in every stage of Western thought. All that we understand, from the way we speak to our notions of "common sense", is susceptible to error, to fundamental mistakes about the nature of being. These mistakes filter into the terms through which being is articulated in the history of philosophy—such as reality, logic, God, consciousness, and presence. In his later philosophy, Heidegger argues that this profoundly affects the way in which human beings relate to modern technology.

Heidegger's work has strongly influenced philosophy, theology and the humanities. Within philosophy it played a crucial role in the development of existentialism, hermeneutics, deconstructionism, postmodernism, and continental philosophy in general. Well-known philosophers such as Karl Jaspers, Leo Strauss, Ahmad Fardid, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Lévinas, Hannah Arendt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Richard Rorty, William E. Connolly, and Jacques Derrida have all analyzed Heidegger's work.

Heidegger supported National Socialism and was a member of the Nazi Party from May 1933 until May 1945. His defenders, notably Hannah Arendt, see this support as arguably a personal " 'error' " (a word which Arendt placed in quotation marks when referring to Heidegger's Nazi-era politics). Defenders think this error was largely irrelevant to Heidegger's philosophy. Critics, such as his former students Emmanuel Levinas and Karl Löwith, claim that Heidegger's support for National Socialism revealed flaws inherent in his thought.

**********

There are the big things in my life. Even at this point, I really don't know what to make of them. I know the illusions I followed. I know what I wanted but that was never possible. Three times I tried. Instead I have the life of the possible. That is all right with me. I am all right.

Why Do I Do This

You tell me to check
so I look in all the back
rooms, in the boxes
I stashed there, looking
for motives, hidden behind
the obvious ones.

Out of the corner
of my eye something scurries
along the wall, dives
into that small hole
and refuses to come out,
not even for you.

That is, you say, the main motive.

February 2, 2009 2:42 PM
First Posted August 2, 2009

On Being The Right Size - Reprise

"That ideas should spread freely from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property." - Thomas Paine

Thomas "Tom" Paine (February 9, 1737 [O.S. January 29, 1736] – June 8, 1809) was an author, pamphleteer, radical, inventor, intellectual, revolutionary, and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. He has been called "a corsetmaker by trade, a journalist by profession, and a propagandist by inclination."

Tom's smile is distinctive. On Google's Images, there are several portraits of Tom and two things stand out, drawn similar in most of his portraits. One is his smile, shown in different poses, always recognizable. The other is his rather prominent nose. I am convinced that we rather do know what Tom Paine looked like.

I feel very much as Tom does, that in nature "inventions" (that is, creative acts) are by nature interdependent on a whole constellation of beings, moments, and events. Creative acts are so entangled with sources of inspiration that it really means very little that, for example, some poem comes into the world through me. Intellectual property only makes sense in society as a move to generate income. There is no other sense in which I can or you can be said to "own" a creative act. That we were first with it means so little, especially when most "original" notions have already been expressed many times before in some other form.



Under certain conditions I feel closest to God when I create. I feel then like I am the most deserving of His attention, and I feel I am the most likely to be doing His will for me. It is said in some circles that Man is made in the Image/Likeness of God. Though this phrase is Christian the vision extends far beyond Christian sentiment. What else can be the heart of the Image and Likeness of God but those moments when we come closest to making something from nothing? And by bitter experience I know intimately that I cannot create, not really unless I also love, forgive, hold mercy and compassion close. This is just true.

On Being The Right Size

I took out my tools,
started building the world new,
just as you said to.
You said I make worlds
by fabricating something
and changing the old
and if I did not
then that one chance would be lost
forever. Oh my.
What a large burden.
When seen the way you say it
I feel really small.

January 30, 2009 2:56 PM
First Posted, July 22, 2009