The Tender Spots

"Of all the pitfalls in our paths and the tremendous delays and wanderings off the track I want to say that they are not what they seem to be. I want to say that all that seems like fantastic mistakes are not mistakes, all that seems like error is not error; and it all has to be done. That which seems like a false step is the next step."
- Agnes Martin

What a statement of faith. I agree. I am dark right now, on a treacherous path, in too much pain to do much and without a clue how to get out of it. I am still on track. I choose to believe so.

Love, compassion, forgiveness. Prayers for healing.

The Tender Spots

The tender spot's found
in between
the dark and day
or day's end and night,

or in between me
and
you dancing in twilight
lit by rosy flame.

You said eternal
life
is found in us. I said
Yes, within our hearts,

In the tender spots.

February 25, 2009 5:03 PM

Your Lifting Capacity

This has been said so many beautiful ways and this is one of them. I have called it seeing with God's eyes. It changes things to know the world from this other position, oddly the same, the identical position to this one, and yet never easy to attain until you do. At that point you know how easy it is to reach it, so easy that you will be embarassed, but in a harmless way. Mostly joy and laughter rules in the birth of things, compassion in their ceasing.

Currently, I am in the darkness. Yet I remember.

"Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Can't you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front."
- G.K. Chesterton

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

I am quite sure that not one of us can rise on his or her own. But this is paradoxical because in the end it is entirely up to us. Identity becomes something other than what we know. So does the emotional life. And like said above, we no longer come in through the back door, the servant's entrance, but through the front door, like the prodigal sons and daughters we are.

Your Lifting Capacity

You left mundane some
time ago, lifting your eyes,
your heart, your soul to
reach the rainbow prism
in the eye of God, well past
the rainy clots, spray
of worn out old words.

Look how you bring us along
with you as you go.

February 25, 2009 9:23 AM

And I Said, I Will

Here is a teaching moment. It is the connection of magic with the heart of the world. At the micro order of magnitude, down around the size of Plank's Constant it is actually difficult to tell which direction is past and which future. The arrow of time is revealed to be an artefact of magnitude. There is no question that the manipulations of magic have to reach into this realm.

Sometimes, as with the tale of Merlyn, mages can live the arrow of time backwards, from future to past.

And I Said, I Will

A mage remembers
both forward and back, standing
here, now, centered in
the land, poised, at rest
but not indolent, he said.

He spoke as we walked
the path I, yearning,
cannot walk without his wit.

Do not, he then said,
keep only yesterday
but keep tomorrow as well,
and I said, I will.

February 25, 2009 8:42 AM

On Hearing MacArthur Park

If ever a song production was over the top MacArthur Park is it.

******

I just finished reading Philip Norman's book, John Lennon. What struck me, the thing I liked most about Beatles music was actually mainly the work of George Martin. I absolutely loved the seamless arranging, every bit as profound as any symphony. George Martin was classically trained of course. Early on, I was struck as a singer myself at how really good the Beatles were at vocal harmony. Another thing that struck me, how their lyrics seemed so strange, but as Norman points out over and over, knowing where they lived clears up a great deal because they just wrote about places and people they knew.

******

I have really been knocked down by this low back injury. I can't work and it's been three weeks now. I don't know what I did, woke up with it one morning. I have no clue how I stressed my back. I went for an MRI today. I have been referred to Physiatry but haven't received the scheduling call. I find myself sleeping as much as possible. So far I have been able to cook and bathe and all that, but not without complaint. I can't even type for very long at a time because there is muscular intertie with my low back. I thought sciatica but mostly it stays on my left side in my hip area. We have proved that it is not hip though. This is the first time in my life that back pain has afflicted me like this. The only thing worse I have experienced is gout, but this is coming in a very close second.

*******

On Hearing MacArthur Park

If I had a cake
I would keep it away from
rain in any form.
I would not use green
in the icing either. Weird.
But underneath that
is a spirit song
that rises and fills the wild
places in my heart,
then spreads out from there
reaches the dreams in your life,
changes things for us.

February 24, 2009 8:27 PM

The Deer Trail

Sometimes I really tire of what I believe is the universal condition. I ache for our illusions to become real. We make our own roads, intending them to go somewhere, the passage easy, efficient, but we know all the while that we are travelling in wilderness, following trails we did not make. We call for true companions, simply decide that someone nearby has to be that companion, desperate from waiting for our true companions to be revealed. But we really know there is no true companion, not like that, not like the inner dream. We take on a sense of humor about all this in order to get along. We go to considerable lengths to deny that suffering is our lot, or else falter in the burden of it.

I struggle to remember how I wanted to be here, argued with my maker to get here. It seems to me so much easier to blame another for my fate.

Here am I, Lord. Walk with me.

The Deer Trail

The woods loom over
the path we take, this deer trail,
wide enough for us
right here, falling
gloom like rain, so little sun.
When I have touched you
like I did today,
walking near enough to, wanting
the feel of your skin
from my hand to heart,
I say I trust you, I trust
this trail, where it leads.

February 24, 2009 11:22 AM

Final Proof, The Sweetness Of The Rose

It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.
-- Peter De Vries, "The Mackerel Plaza," 1958

An AA speaker, Bob Earl, would say the same thing this way...Without God, I'm fucked.

Exactly.

In real life, unlike in Shakespeare, the sweetness of the rose depends upon the name it bears. Things are not only what they are. They are, in very important respects, what they seem to be.
-- Hubert H. Humphrey

It was my mother's lifelong distress that she built her public self so completely, with such excellence, such art, that those of us close to her could not break through. If we caught on to the differences between private and public self, we would eventually think of her as not genuine, and become accusatory. That would never work because her persona was too tightly woven. To my great good fortune, I realized possibly a decade before she died that what I took as false was not false and she was in very important respects exactly who she seemed to be. It was possible to map her public persona character back onto her mostly hidden private self. It is in this area, in the consequences of this structure that at least two of her five marriages failed and also where she almost lost her last two siblings. In the end as best they could her youngest sister and middle brother both decided that keeping the relastionship was too important and they tried to look past this appearance of falsehood in her persona.

I don't know if her siblings ever figured it out, because she really was difficult in her way. In many real respects she not only raised me well, but I also survived her and had to struggle to do it.

Meanwhile as is often the case in such matters, there are a very large number of people who remember her, who continue to be taught through her books, who loved her dearly, knowing and needing to know only her public self. She was celebrated and decorated, and was one of the leading lights in the ministerial program for training ministers in the field in Unity School of Christianity. She accomplished a great deal in her lifetime, including writing three books, training ministers, teaching high school English to a whole army of baby boomers, and winning various awards for acting and also directing plays. In her youth, she turned down the opportunity for a movie career to go to university, and there she graduated PhiBetaKappa and was valedictorian of her graduating class, sharing the stage at Berkeley that year with Harry Truman. She got a lifetime achievement award from Unity School near the end of her life, of which I understand only one is given a year.

She said she understood Liz Taylor very well. I think she did.

The Remedy

I was too deep in health issues to blog til now. Oddly enough this is the next poem in sequence.

Homeopaths call their decoctions remedies and they do so because they believe them to be restoratives, enabling our selves to bring our systems back into balance on their own. Allopaths offer their drugs to directly combat specific symptoms, assuming if you get the symptom out of the way the body can do the rest.

I will be getting an MRI on my back on Thursday.

The Remedy

It doesn't matter
what I believe, or you, or
how the sky reaches
into the farther
shape of space, nor that lemon
scent is present now.
What matters now, we
learn to forgive so truly
that nothing's left out.

February 21, 2009 8:54 PM

Sky Blessings

"When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power. Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world, and like spells, they only work if people believe in them."

-Wolf Hall (Mantel)

Damn. I wish I had wrote that. It's a really big clue. If you understand how that connects, how that works, how utterly essential both laws and spells are, if you understand all that, you are truly headed down the right Path.

Here's a spell...er, poem.

Sky Blessings

When hawk calls to you
I know you answer, soaring
higher than before,
becoming distant
to the rest of us, to me
while leaving your note
singing you'll be back
sooner than the next song plays
in my heart for you.

February 21, 2009 9:03 PM

Hard Pressed

I am breaking from my usual practice today. I feel my limits more than usual.

This morning I read a passage from The Path To Bliss written by the Dalai Lama in which he points out that the universal only appears in particulars in our experience, that this applies to teachers and students of awakening as much as anything else. Thus the presence of God Incarnate on the planet, even that, is ever and always deniable by those who cannot see. He points out that the message delivery, being particular even if the message is perfectly universal, can only succeed with those already prepared to receive it in just the way it is given. He calls this preparation the karmic bond between souls.

That is why there must be many teachers of enlightenment. It is not enough that I am ready to receive, in itself miraculous. As well there must be a teacher or a teaching intimate enough that the message would seem to rise up from within me, as if a memory.

Hard Pressed

He cast his salt on
the seasons of nearby souls,
knowing only some
would receive from him,
those who have traveled in his
company, dancing
with him through ages.

Though my heart's universal
my armor is stone,
my salt has true grit,
and I'm hard pressed against my
limited presence.

October 31, 2009 7:33 AM

A Way Through

I am not a fan of A Course In Miracles. I have read both Gary Renard and Marianne Williamson. I very much like what Marianne has to say on many topics. It is clear that forgiving is the key to miracles. With that I agree. It is a radical calling. Love is transformed when forgiveness is free flowing. If you have a problem with loving, it is almost certainly an issue with forgiveness failing or lacking that is the problem. Sometimes it is as simple as waking up. Sometimes it is the whole life walk that is required.

It occurs to me as I write, afflicted with a life threatening pain, that it is probably a forgiveness issue too. I am overweight. This has contributed to my condition. Obesity too is a forgiveness issue. I know this because when I look at solutions bitterness rises. Forgiveness is the antidote to bitterness.

The worst blockage to forgiveness I ever encounter is my certainty. There is no forgiveness in this attitude, cannot be. I am certain I am right. You ask if I am prepared to die defending this hill. How much of me instantly says yes to that? I don't even have to start my defense. I have already lost.

A Way Through

I need an open
door at this point, a way through
the wall I have built
holding intentions
corraled, herded together
behind resentment,
wariness, distance,
uncertainty, deep dismay.
I need a passage,
a safe place to walk.
When I ask it you say I'll
get that when I learn
to forgive.
Damn.

February 21, 2009 4:01 PM
Modified October 30, 2009 7:38 PM

Exoskeletal

The grass is always greener. What if I was a bug?

I don't know, perhaps I was feeling more vulnerable than usual.

Exoskeletal

If I could expose
my bones, wear them outside me,
then I could be soft
through and through, secure
in this bumpy ride we have.
I could paint myself
in psychedelic
colors, graffiti to show
my true views, my love.

February 21, 2009 9:11 AM

I Tell You Three Times

This is one of the prescriptives, of which I have very few, but this is a key magic. The power of words, incantatory, must be based on principles and this is one of them. I tell you three times. Saying a thing once may have effect, but no matter how powerful the idea, the effect is unpredictable. Saying it twice reveals the passion. Saying it three times releases the inner power if it is there. This saying cannot be complex in essence and is better if it is not complex in the words themselves. Do not use the passive voice. Assert. Say it as clearly and succinctly as possible, and if it cannot come clear and succinct, then wait until it can. Be careful of your audience as well. It is better to not say a thing of power than to say it in front of those who cannot hear. This does, however, not mean that everyone must hear. Those who can hear, let them hear.

I Tell You Three Times

This is a truth of
open spirit, this threeness,
triune spell of love
given, trident to
the heart of the fallen world
that impregnates those
who are ripe for it
and even rings the wind chimes
of those still not ripe.

February 20, 2009 4:54 PM

In My Blood

Where I don't feel so much connection to Britain's present, I do feel it to the past. I am told I am related to Scottish royalty, to Robert De Bruce through my father's lineage. When I read John Michell's View Over Atlantis there was a stirring in my heart. I don't really know what to do with such things. I love the Ley lines, feel there is really something to them (but what??). I am too well trained in our scientific disciplines to easily entertain alternate sciences, but I am too much a poet to not give credence to the fantastic. I have one foot in both worlds. Last February there were serious archeological articles appearing that tied Woodhenge and Stonehenge together.

There is Woodhenge and Stonehenge within walking distance and the tracings of the path, which includes the nearby water. The path goes to the water from Woodhenge broadly, then along the water, then is discernable as a straight track to Stonehenge from the water. The living quarters were near Woodhenge and it is now surmised that there was a ritual interconnection of life(wood and village) and death (stone and solitude), that this was the first use and that this use continued in later iterations, though the astronomical placements seem clear as well. The astronomy may well be related to the spirit realms.

In My Blood

I, immersed in time
like drowning in deep water
walk the living path
from wood to stone, there
to worship the dead, and back
to wood to praise life,
both henges my own
by right of birth, by divine
right, by right of blood.

February 20, 2009 2:18 PM

Or Maybe My Eyes Are Dumb

I have suffered a disaster. I had hoped to return to work. Now I know I can't. I tried. I had to walk to get to places to do my work, couldn't just sit there. I left at 2, defeated, in too much pain to even concentrate. I am not very much better now. Too much walking has left a residue of pain and wiped out any gain I may have made over the last week of staying home. I have placed the table leaf under my couch cushion to stiffen the "bed" (I am using my couch because I can elevate my legs better). I had to call my boss and say all this, offer to get out of the way. I will stay home tomorrow and probably go in the next day to hand my work off to someone else. That means I may not get back to work for a while, just because there won't be any with someone else doing it. But I won't be returning for a while anyway because I can't physically do it. Terrible. I have no idea how long this back thing is going to take.

In the meantime, unrelated, they have me on a 24 hour blood pressure monitor (every 20 min. or so) to see if they can better time when I should take my heart meds. This all makes me sound like some kind of invalid. I don't feel like one in most ways.

This back thing is just too odd. I don't understand how it started (somehow in my sleep) and it is most like sciatica but then not really. I can twist and bend and do all the things I would think I shouldn't be able to do. I am not any more "stiff" than usual. I just can't walk very far without the pain starting and then building to the yelping level. It doesn't even really shoot down my leg much like it is supposed to, just sits in my hip quietly and manageably until I walk too far (which of course is not far at all).

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

I am not sure of my ground here. Don't ask me what this poem means. As noted, this is a poem from February, and not about my situation now. I have no idea what it could have been about then. I can say in general I am a rather good photo subject. My deceased wife on the other hand was one of those unfortunates. She was a plain woman verging on pretty in some ways, but almost never took a good photo. For every good photo of her there were at least ten that lied about her, made her look awful. For me, I think one in three or four make me look decidedly better than I am in person, and most of the rest match me. Sometimes I look like a dog. That would be true of everyone. The camera eye is strange that way. I am told television is worse for many but I wouldn't know. Whenever I have seen myself on tv, I think I look like me.

The voice recorder is another thing. I hate my recorded voice pretty much, don't think it sounds like me, hope, really hope it doesn't. Anyway, I can't give a context to this poem. I can say it is one I rather like though.

Or Maybe My Eyes Are Dumb

My thumb is too fat,
my fingers much too rigid
and anyway I
find this shot very
unbecoming to the fine
shape of my glad hand.

Maybe you've taken
an allegory, my hand
standing for some clod.

February 20, 2009 10:22 AM

Walking On Eggshells

Sometimes, life gets intense. I spent two years at one point feeling like I was on thin ice or as I call it here, walking on egg shells. I could have said going through the mine field. Actually it was only eighteen months. I woke up from my habits at two years and realized the power was out of my situation and had been for about six months. I was so used to living the way I was that I continued for half a year needlessly, not even really understanding what I was doing. At least when I woke up it was easy then to drop the attitude.

Walking On Eggshells

I spent so long on
eggshells that I got fairly
good at no more than
cracking them some
as I took this newer path
out of the mean woods
of my wasted life.
I did have to pick shards out
of my feet sometimes.

February 20, 2009 10:11 AM

First Things First

Here is something to ponder, I guess. In AA's Big Book there is a section which offers a model of good living in one day. That whole section begins, "upon retiring at night..." Ever since this was pointed out to me as prescriptive I have pondered and tried to think of my life that way. This means my day is about a third over when I am getting up in the morning. It means that my day is nearly over now as I write. It also means that sleep is not separate from my day but is the start of it. As such sleep is not in the way but an important first step. Sleep itself as a practice. I rather like this upside down way of looking at the day. I think Bill Wilson had something when he organized the day like that. I wonder if he was carrying a tradition forward, since there was a Christian group practice (the Oxford Group) where he spent some time before and in the early days of AA. AA began in association with the Oxford Group, though that association did not last long.

I have never heard of anyone offering this way of looking at a day anywhere else. It is not overtly offered that way in the Big Book either, not specifically said, do this. It is just written that way. That, my friends is how esoteric knowledge may sometimes be transmitted. It is offered in the open but not emphasized. As Jesus said, more than once, "those who have ears, let them hear."

First Things First

You say, First Things First.
They say sunrise, noon, sunset
midnight then sunrise,
But I say sunset,
that is first for me by far,
or moonrise, Venus
as the evening
star, that is first in my life,
descent into sleep,
then dreams of places
further than my breath, then all
the others follow.

February 20, 2009 8:35 AM

The Curvature Of Nature

Here's a real lesson, I believe. Manifest reality works in ragged lines, often curved, never perfect. Human brains like straight lines, instinctively know that they are the shortest distances, and without sophistication will expect the flatness they see to the horizon is the truth of things. Humans want things in the world to work just like brains do. And they do, sort of, once you get past the illusions. But humans like to hang out and fool around and not take so much responsibility too if they can. In these matters they don't have time between getting food, fighting and fucking. Raising kids just like them. And all the other things they get involved in. They don't have time to see clear, would rather see straight because it is so much easier. Besides, it's close enough for government. You get a C on the test, you pass, even though the price may be high, but you can't have an omelet without breaking eggs, now can you? Often humans hate other humans who see better and will persecute them. We all know the usual examples of that. Especially in America, we like technology but not the nerds and geeks who produce it, like science but deeply distrust scientists who might be able to tell us how to live safely on the planet, and now we are paying the price as China and India grow better scientists than we have.

I like poetry. I think poetry is very often reminiscent of the true short lines of nature, the ones that curve all over the place and take us home more certainly than those God damned straight jacket lines of the people who think they need to run things.

The Curvature Of Nature

The best lines nature
offers are curved and crooked
like the veins in leaves,
and in our bodies,
like the paths that rivers take.
Why then should we think
that good lives are straight,
that good men should be upright,
I be an arrow?

February 20, 2009 8:09 AM

Zero Sum

A zero sum game cannot happen in infinite surroundings. This I think is one primary difference between God's world and the world He permits. The failure of love is often zero sum on the planet, because partners don't agree that love should be over. Love turns out to be a finite resource. Someone is left holding the bag while conceivably the other gains. Love does not appear infinite here. A huge portion of popular music wouldn't work if the failures of love were not a zero sum game.

Zero sum thinking has led in the social sciences to social trap thinking. A social trap is where everybody wins for a while and then everybody loses because the activity self destructs, like using up all the available oil may turn out to have been a social trap if there is no way out of the crash as it runs out. That's another form of zero sum. The solution to zero sum is to go somewhere else, if you can. Or else simply suffer through it and come out the other end better or worse depending on alternatives and flexibilities and attitudes.

Zero Sum

Could it be my fate
to curl inward whenever
the wind blows like this?
I have holes where you
should be, where the world whistles
through me, where I feel
the edges freeze if
I do not tightly hold round
shape and roll away.

February 18, 2009 9:58 PM

Mirror Spells

I am stuck at home, on a temporary regime of Prednisone and rest for the sciatica that has afflicted me for a couple weeks as an aftermath of my hospital stay in May. I have grown pensive and tender, more than usual, find myself grieving at odd moments. That is not so unusual, I think. By this time in a life there are sufficient things to grieve built up from the first disappointments to now. What I have learned about grief (and many other weighty topics) is that you never really finish them and that each old grief tacks onto the new, that in this way grief stops being a harsh new song but an older symphony. That is why it seems to me very good if I make peace with all my losses. Then I can be transported by the beauty of the symphony rather than crushed under the heaviness of my surround.

At the same time, Prednisone makes me hungry and itch and not sleep. The pain is less, but I understand that really does not give me permission to stress my body with normal things. I am better sitting carefully, and even better lying down with my left thigh close to the sitting position.

I ran into something that I am trying to bend my heart around, that I may hold it close. I will share it here.

Just This Much

Full attention is both an activity of learning and the actualization of unconditional love. It is this selfless, choiceless love that heals the illusion of separateness, brokenness, and alienation, yielding a gratification, faith and confidence not dependent on external or internal conditions beyond our control. Practice-Life is the dynamic activity of bringing full attention to what is presenting itself most clearly in the awareness for as long as it is there, and with deepening simplicity and joy, knowing just this much!
-Douglas Phillips

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

Mirror Spells

Fairy tales are dark
like the heart of oldest woods,
like hatred and fear.
You look in mirrors
enchanted by wizened witches
expecting to see
your true shape within
but see only spells cast not
even on you but on
the mirrors so that
they twist the view cleverly.
Don't forget that fact.
It is not your fear
nor your hatred but beauty
seen through putrid spells.

February 18, 2009 9:46 PM

The Seashell

My poem here is two Fibs joined as one. I insist on magic. One of the magical mathematics of living structure is what we call the Fibonacci Sequence. This sequence is represented graphically in many of the spirals found in seashells and the placement of sunflower seeds in their heads, and in many flower petal arrangements.

Wiki says:

Fib is an experimental Western poetry form, bearing similarities to haiku, but based on the Fibonacci sequence. That is, the typical fib and one version of the contemporary Western haiku both follow a strict structure. The typical fib is a six line, 20 syllable poem with a syllable count by line of 1/1/2/3/5/8 - with as many syllables per line as the line's corresponding place in the Fibonacci sequence; the specific form of contemporary Western haiku uses three (or fewer) lines of no more than 17 syllables in total. The only restriction on a Fib is that the syllable count follow the Fibonacci sequence. An example of a typical fib:

One
Small,
Precise,
Poetic,
Spiraling mixture:
Math plus poetry yields the Fib.
— Pincus, Gregory K.

John Frederick Nims discussed the form as early as 1974, in his excellent introduction to poetry, Western Wind. The fib was brought to much wider public attention by Gregory K. Pincus on 1 April 2006. His blog has been the center of this new form of poetry. After Pincus published his blog on Fibs, they began appearing widely on the internet. Pincus wrote on his blog, "To my surprise (and joy), I continue to find new threads of Fibs popping up all around the Web. I've seen Fibs in over a dozen different languages, and I'd also note that today a cat left a post in the comments of The Fib, joining a priorly poetic dog, so I think it's safe to say that Fibs travel well."


The Seashell

So
I
shall match
the spiral
climbing down the slope
and reaching for you at the end.

Then I shall hold you close and rise
back up the golden
curve to stand
within
God's
love.

February 18, 2009 8:24 PM

On Reading Your Poem

I am surrounded in blogland with terrific poets. This is a poem about a poet, a poet in some trouble, it would seem. I don’t know what poetry means to all of you. One way I use poetry is to write myself out of a corner. Or into one, I suppose.

On Reading Your Poem

If you were deeper
than this, more compact, you'd be
impenetrable.
As it is, you are
breathtaking in your terse words
and approachable.
I fear for your plight
now, after the fact of it,
feel the squirt
of your juicy orange.

February 18, 2009 1:36 PM

I Have Promised You

Oddly, this next poem goes quite well with a comment that Wine & Words left on my last post. When I think about life in general, I have the idea that free will has to be involved. I have seen my cats, for example dither over a decision, and make mistakes, and learn so I know that you have to descend further down the food chain to find life so constrained that that there is no such thing as choice. Actually, watching birds, I get the same assurance. I am not completely sure about flies, but I am about cockroaches. So you have to go further than insects to wipe out all free choice. I am comfortable saying so.

When I look at my own life, however, I get another sense. I have often written here of it. I am a creature of destiny. However I tell the story, whatever is actually true, I feel certainly constrained such that I am more like the river of this poem, turbulent but not flooding, at least not usually. I have lived my whole life under a sense of destiny, but also fully admitting that I have no real clue what that can mean.

I have fashioned a personal myth. I accept it as myth and feel I would be mad to try to reify it further, but have found I cannot live without some explanation. When I found out that “God loves to be used” as Eric Butterworth said, I relaxed quite a bit about such things. It is now my opinion, not that anything goes but that instead the river is amazingly complex within its banks. I also feel secure in that I am protected, constrained within the banks (like my name Noordwal) and that I am certainly connected with the sea.

Thus as a creature of free will, even so, I have to exert major energy, somehow flood myself, in order to actually get lost. Confusion and willful disobedience however are other matters. If I relax and do not continue to resist, I wind up back within my banks. That seems to be my experience.

I am fearful sometimes that if I don’t get it together, I may never recognize my arrivals at all the blessings along the way. Recognizing blessings, the gift of maturity. However, it is obvious the ocean will be unmistakeable. In that sense, I know where I am going, it is not somewhere I chose, and while it is conceivable that I can rebel for a while, it wouldn't be easy to make my rebellion last for long, because it fights a kind of gravity. Only the tides of lunacy lift me :) That is Sun (Sol) warms me, gives me solace in his gravity and Moon (Luna) stirs me with her companion gravity.

I realize this may not be everyone's experience. It is mine. I wrote that I would be mad to try to get this vision further than poetry, to reify it. I would also be mad to deny my experience because I should conform to some dogma about first things.

I Have Promised You

I feel the path move
all on its own, like the flow
of a constrained stream,
turbulent, rushing,
or as if it has its own
will, changing its shape
according to dreams
I do not dream, cannot guess.
I act this way, act
with apparent heart
only as I can, as it seems
possible for me.
The choices are not
mine except as they arise
along the living way.

February 18, 2009 9:28 AM

Jumping Around

"To conquer illusion and hope, without being overcome by terror: this has been the whole endeavor of my life these past twenty years; to look straight into the abyss without bursting into tears, without begging or threatening, calmly, serenely preserving the dignity of man; to see the abyss and work as though I were immortal."
- Nikos Kazantzakis

While this would seem to be the statement of a Humanist and an Existentialist, I am neither or rather I am both and far more. I happen to believe that Kazantzatkis was a spiritual man however he framed it. What he lost patience with was the shallow, inauthentic people, and there are plenty of those who profess in some religion or other. People who take issue like Kazantzakis did (cf his novel The Last Temptation Of Christ) often leave religion behind but commonly with deep regret, for they wish that religion could pass muster. I would be one of those people except for the turning point in my experience when I turned twenty-one. I would have been one of those people if I could have survived without that turning point. It seems to be my experience that somehow God is really absent for many people, and the call to faith simply fails with them. It cannot be otherwise. Humanism arises among these people, though there are other sources for Humanism too. Nikos was certainly a Humanist.

I so admire him that one time our cat, Carl Sigmund Cat (yes, Jung and Freud, and most often known by his middle name, Sigmund) brought home a cat enough like him that he could have been a brother. We kept that cat and of course we named him Nikos Kazantzakis Cat. Nicky. When Nicky died, he was devastated by disease. The last thing I did was have the vet give him a biopsy of his kidneys. We found him full of tumors. I just hated that. What a waste, to cut that cat open and then to put him down. I have never felt good about that. I should have gone with my instinct rather than the "scientific logic" of the situation. I knew he was going to die. I fell short because I didn't want him to. Sin. I did not have to invade him like that. Shit.

I really relate to that quotation. I am deeply committed to God as I understand God. I see no conflict with that quotation and wish I had said it.

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

There are two astrological signs which this next poem might be about. Cardinal Air, and Mutable Air, Libra and Gemini. This feels more Libran to me because there seems to be too much free choice in it. Cardinal people are choosers. Mutable people are responders.

Jumping Around

I have sliced apart
the core of my life, cut it
in two halves. I jump
to one side, there see
the other, the oddities
found deep in that half,
or jump again, see
the other side of my life.
This way, back and forth,
I get to rocking
in greater pitches - soon I'll
upend and spill out.

February 17, 2009 4:02 PM

Not Too Happy Right Now

This poem is somewhat appropriate for the state of my union. I am currently waiting out a bout of sciatica on the left side of my body. I had this trouble on the right side fifteen years ago or so. I am convinced this current left side sciatica is a longer term effect of the circumstances of the heart event I had in May.

I spent way too long on the hard cot you find in the emergency room and ambulance settings. That made my left leg go numb in the same way that my right leg has been numb since the eighties. I made my complaint and relearned the familiar lesson, that doctors really have no solution short of the radical intervention of surgeries that often don't work, even make things worse. The doctor said the numbness would go away. Of course it didn't. Instead it has transformed into a vicious stabbing pain. I can get around so long as I am willing to take it on. I am also fortunate that when I sit the pain stays at an easily managed level mostly. That means I can work anyway. Because I am on a blood thinner and will be for another seven months, I am not allowed NSAIDs and that doesn't help. Tylenol is basically useless. Not too happy right now.

Not Too Happy Right Now

I get desperate
looking at my legless life,
hating to depend
on you to move me,
fearful you don't care enough
to come in some need,
some emergency,
some bug on my unscratched nose.
I ache for life flight.

February 17, 2009 9:28 AM

The Last Wolf, Coyote Grief

I am going to post two poems about the end of the world. One is mine, one by Mary Tallmountain. Ms. Tallmountain's poem is one I chose to read at an evening reading at the Carnegie Center in Oregon City a couple years ago. It sticks in my heart and pains me. I took my turn.

The Last Wolf
Mary Tallmountain

The last wolf hurried toward me through the ruined city.
I heard his baying echoes down the steep smashed warrens
of Montgomery Street and past the ruby-crowned highrises
left standing, their lighted elevators useless -

Passing the flicking red and green of traffic signals,
He bayed his way eastward in the mystery of his wild loping gait.
Closer were his sounds in the deadly night through the clutter
and rubble of quiet blocks.

I heard his voice ascending the hill
and at last his low whine as he came, floor by empty floor,
to the room where I sat in my narrow bed looking west,
waiting, I heard him snuffle at the door and I watched.

He trotted across the floor.
He laid his long gray muzzle
on the spare white spread
and his eyes burned yellow.
His small dotted eyebrows quivered.

Yes, I said.
I know what they have done.

from Light on a Tent Wall, 1990
University of California, Los Angeles, CA

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

Coyote Grief

That's when the night stilled,
hardened, and the tight stars choked
and fell to flat earth,
dead embers. The sky
was no longer black, dim gray.

Coyote's sadness
is deeper than hope.

She snuffs at dead stars amazed,
confused, wants to put
them back, cannot reach
that high, to the dim flat sky.
Her howl tears her throat.

February 17, 2009 9:11 AM

A Moment On The Path

I have nothing more to add to this one. Well, a little, I guess. Just that it is always and ever a collaboration.

A Moment On The Path

I feel it coming,
this upwelling rush of heat
from deeper inside
than I have ever
gone on my own, rising up
to meet the thunder,
the lightning descent,
the presence of you nearby
in the phosphor light.

February 16, 2009 9:35 PM

I Think You Are An Angel

This is a personal poem and I shall not myself reveal who I wrote this about.

I will take this opportunity to say that someone has recently said she thought I was an angel. I looked at that seriously in my twenties. How arrogant is that!? If I am an angel then I have been stripped and flensed and blocked. I have no sense of it. I do have a sense of otherworldliness that somehow has a very different relationship with God. Where we take it for granted that you can't argue with God, in my inner space there is a kind of memory of a place where you certainly can argue with God and I did so. I claim there is a sense at least temporarily that I won. What I won was the right to proove it, whatever it was I was arguing about. That's what this life seems to be for me.

I am here to proove a point. I do not understand the argument and think I actually can't without seeing with very different eyes, but I know I am rightly placed for it, this point of contention. I also think I am here out of turn because of it, would not have been in this life if this argument had not occurred. My life is both easier in some ways and also more difficult in others because of that. My inner resources are different, but my sense of belonging is woeful. First I had to learn to survive somehow the transition to adulthood. That took til about 26. Then I had to smash a kind of arrogance. That took til about 35. Finally, I had to leave the crutch of alcoholism behind. For me that was easy but only because the discipline that it takes is easy. That took til 54, but really is still in progress in the way that I still constantly bring it up. It is far more normal for a guy like me to be a gutter drunk or dead.

The long history of angels as they appear in our cultures, they are the manifestations of the adoration of God. It would seem that while it makes sense to speak of our self centered and self willed freedom to choose and to act, it does not make sense to speak of angels this way. They are God centered in a complete (perfect?) way. Thus I am left with an observation. If I am an angel, I am a fallen one. Whoa. Does this mean something? Perhaps. If it does, then perhaps Lucifer is not such a bad guy. I am no Lucifer, but then maybe our understanding of Lucifer is twisted too. I believe I have God's support. So I think does Lucifer. Think about that. How can it not be so? We are told Lucifer is in rebellion but how can that be true without God's permission? That, for example, is one facet of the story of Job, that there is a running relationship between God and Lucifer, and in the end we are instructed that it is beyond human understanding. Hmmm.

I don't know about you, but I really hate being told things are beyond me. Yet there it is. There are things square in the middle of my life that are beyond me. Lack of power of all kinds, including the power of understanding is my dilemma. I cannot avoid it, must admit it. Even all the way back to that moment when I was reminded of who I am, the sacred moment that made it possible for me to survive my path into adulthood, I have to admit I do not understand what the fuck happened. So I am radically dependent. I am dependent on you and the others in my life, I am dependent upon God. All else is pretense. If I am to accept the truth of free will it has to keep this dependency in place or else I will lose purchase on any sort of wisdom. Horns of the dilemma. Free will is self evident both from inclination within and experience in the world. I am a radically dependent man correctly intent on holding up my end of the bargain. That is the proper use of the will. I cannot drop either end of this deal without also losing any authenticity that can be mine.

This may all be complete crap. Probably. I don't care that this is not factually true, whatever that means. Frances, my last lover is certain that this is a cute story I tell myself and it really doesn't affect anything I do in my life. She smiles at me indulgently. It is self indulgence. Maybe. I know it doesn't matter to you that I keep this story, tend it, get better at telling it. Something happened to me that changed everything. That much is certain.

I Think You Are An Angel

I think you are an angel
not one so holy and distant
but here in my heart now
with words and words
that don't belong to me
these words you let out into the world.
Let out like the Northern Lights
across the sky
they reach me here
where I was feeling so silent.
I step into the glow.
And somehow now I
see differently.

February 16, 2009 9:14 PM

The Squirrel Died

This is sort of a true story. Mostly. This cat in my poem was the last old cat that I brought here from my old life, where I lost my wife to illness and alcoholism and divorce, and finally death. The cat was part of a pair of sisters we bought at a pet store because they were too cute together and my wife and I feared they would be separated. Annie and me, we tended to do things like that.

It turned out that they never did dote on each other, these sister cats, had no apparent special need for each other at all, not like our boys.

We had done this before with two red tabbie striped males. One was more adventurous than the other and the one more shy obviously needed his brother. His brother tolerated him, was clearly fond of him. But he also took risks, and one day he didn't return home. His shy brother went a little crazy in grief, changed, became as these needy cats do more difficult to live with. I am sure he didn't remember his brother after a while, but some of his grief behavior stuck with him, became frozen and in this way he never got over losing his brother.

When my last old cat, the one in this poem, lost her sister who died of illness quite young, I didn't notice any overt grief behavior. But what happened to her, when I moved here, she objected big time to losing her old house. That's what turned her. She was a place cat. She had established herself there and she didn't really like it here. She let me know. Over time she adjusted to the garage but insisted that the house was to be her toilet. I could never let her in for long and I had to keep track. This broke my heart. I wanted her to be an indoor cat but that just didn't work at all.

The Squirrel Died

A squirrel came in
to die in a nest it made
in a bag at the back
under the shelf there
in my garage. I don't know
how long it lived there
before passing but
my cat also lives on pads
I lay down for her
in the garage. There
was no bad sign, not at all.
We are both glad though,
my old cat and me,
that I found it and the smell
is gone. That was bad.

February 16, 2009 2:07 PM

Hornswoggled

Hmmm. Yesterday I posted from the River Styx. In this poem I am up a tree, arguably trying to piss up a rope, a little green man to boot. This is of course the very next poem, written just a half hour later than the poem calling for someone to kill me now. So I guess I was in an odd mood in mid February.

I am reading the recent bio of John Lennon, that huge 800 page book. I ran into something wonderful that I never knew before. It changes my history. In Liverpool there is a street called Lime Street. There was a famous prostitute called Maggie May and she worked Lime Street. Uh oh. It turns out that Maggie figured in a popular English folk ballad.

I once fell for a lady named Katy. This was back in 1970. In 1970 I was fresh back from East Pakistan (Bangladesh). I was a student part time at San Jose State, later named Cal State U at San Jose, worked a little and sold dope to stay alive and keep myself in dope. I lived with my dealer, a smuggler and student, in a dope house south of the campus, on South 12th St. The Dooby Brothers lived up the street at the time. Oddly, there were two roommates with us who didn't do much dope, and a lady who lived upstairs in a separate apartment in the house who was clean too. It was just that way in those days, with people mingling and not worried about it.

Katy came into my life looking to buy some pot. She walked into my room, me never having met her before, I was in my underwear, boxers. I didn't care and apparently neither did she. She slayed me just like that. I was hers, if she wanted me. This is all a really complex story and of course it didn't work over the long haul. She was married and trying to leave her husband who was substantially younger than she was. They had intended to be a rock and roll band. That didn't work, and neither did their marriage, but he was really in love with her. I was a year younger than her too, but of course several years older than him. So when Rod Stewart came out with his hit Maggie May, I sang it to her along with the radio. "The sun in your face really shows your age, but that don't matter, to me you're everything." Amen. She got really angry. She did not take jokes like that very well.

Now Maggie May turns into a famous Liverpudlian prostitute. Wow. I had no idea. I guarantee you that Rod Stewart did though. Now I wonder how many people here in the states got that thing at the time. That was a really big song here. If it was as big in England, I am sure it was big in a different way because of the folk song.

This thing with Katy was a big thing for me, and in a curious way anchored the part where I was going to move to Oregon if I could. That's a whole other story. Maggie May is a big song for me because of Katy.

Hornswoggled

I'm trapped here again,
hornswoggled little green man,
hung by the hemp rope
treed and upended.
You claim I'm upright looking
at it with God's eyes
but blood rushing down
reddens my admitted bad eyes
and I still feel down.

February 15, 2009 11:36 AM

Using My Last Match

I have no idea what this was all about. I was under some pressure because my lay off had been going on for a while. But I have succeeded in placing myself in the position to handle lengthy time off. Since I had the heart event I have noticed my own mortality statements in a different way and wonder if I was noticing my approaching issue at some level, sensing what was to come in May.

If I am really at that place where I die, then hurry up and do it quickly.

I know my body instinctively struggles to stay alive. I have lived through enough stuff to know I don't have to pump up any false positive to convince myself to stay alive. However, I also know that staying alive is hardly the most important value in my box of values. I need to know I am of some use. I don't even want one day where I return to being a parasite. I have been there, done that. I need to know that some level of comfort is if not currently in my life, at least in my future. Quality of life rates high with me. I have seen too much. I know there really is a line there and that I have no right to judge another's decision about that, nor they me. Staying alive at any cost is for me simply insane and inhumane. The Hippocratic Oath cannot be applied in violation of humane values. The rub of course is figuring out the timing.

Using My Last Match

Hit me with a club,
why don't you, with a hammer.
Don't leave me standing,
not in this bad light.
Don't leave me to die alone
in the empty dark.
Take me down down down
throw me in the river Styx,
feed me to the fish.

I've used my last match.

February 16, 2009 9:58 AM

The Perfect Storm

I found this. It is so good that I am putting it here. This has certainly happened to me, more than once. However, I am still sure that the source is at least collaborative between me and some Other.

"Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step. There's no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That's the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.

And you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You'll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others.

And once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about."

- Haruki Murakami
Kafka On The Shore

Why You Should Write

I am currently reading Bright Shiny Morning, by James Frey. I am nearly done. What a gem. In the back of that book is an essay Jim entitled Music and Talking. He points out that he nearly always writes to loud music in the background. He points out that he always talks first what he writes and that if you talk you will see that language is only partially guided by grammar and mainly guided by context. Thus because he seriously writes as he speaks, he tends to write without many grammatical conventions, which do not show up in speech. He doesn't say, but he knows he should write. I know I should write.

Why You Should Write

The writing you do
reveals the design not yet
in God's world until
your hands and heart place
it precisely, a jewel.
That is what you do.

February 16, 2009 8:28 AM

Within Winter Lies The Truth

Today's words follow this time. I want this poem from last winter to sit with you a little while. I hope you won't move immediately into my prose.

Within Winter Lies The Truth

At the heart of it
like an old matchhead, glowing
under the crust, like
setting lava grows
dark with heat inside, within
winter lies the truth,
spring ready to rise,
life calling out to life, soon
it will feed again.

This is so right, true
that I can't argue, even
though it really hurts.

February 15, 2009 8:11 PM

Why would spring coming hurt? Because I have to let go of the old, make room for the new. Because I am attached. Because I have no choice and I don't like having no choice, go out of my way to keep the illusion alive that I do have a choice. Because I lack humility and humility is essential to my survival. Thus when I encounter something where humility is the answer I die a little inside and the loss hurts, always. Because life feeds on life and thus someone, some entity has to die that others live, a truth I deeply regret, as if it was my fault. Because I am so self centered that thinking something like that my fault makes sense and I know better. This shames me. Because I suspect that I object to life feeding on life because life might be feeding on me. That's just soooo wrong. That's why spring coming might hurt someone like me.

The Rising Orbs

People I know take orbs seriously, have gone to power points where they appear. They have night pictures of them, and of themselves and others among them. I have personally never seen them or been to those places. The places where orbs appear are not hard to get to if you know where to go. Not everyone can experience them.

I do know what it is like to call for someone to return. It doesn't matter what the reality is. The heart is another reality. I call for my deceased wife sometimes. I call for Mary and Frances. The others are so far back there before my wife. I don't call for them. I also call for the fantasy of some others whom I have never known as lovers. I called for Mary like that. One day she answered even though I never conceived she would. That is a lesson to me. Sometimes fantasies come true, and are even better in reality. That lasted two years and came to an inevitable end. That I knew it was going to be like that did not change a thing. That some others found a great deal in my loving Mary to criticize did not change a thing. It was a blessing and it changed my life way for the better.

Off topic...I am so completely pleased with this blogging experience. Sometimes the gifts are beyond measure. I look at the Feedjit widget and know there are many who never comment. I even know some friends around here where I live that go to my blog and never comment but tell me about it. Frances visits but will not comment. And you people who choose to interact are wonders of my heart. Today has been especially fine this way, with two poems in the comments. So this is just a heads up to those who may not go to the comment page, if you are coming here specifically for the poetry, you might want to check the comments. You never know when a poem might appear, sometimes a poetic dialogue. I have been known to write one in the comments of my own blog when the moment calls for it.

The Rising Orbs

The orbs always come
at this time of year
to nestle near the needles
at the base of trees
and rise at your name
called out in hope that calling
will bring you blessings
and blessings bring you
back to me, back to this place.

February 15, 2009 11:15 PM

Northern Lights

In replying to Joseph (Naming Constellations) today concerning Hafiz, I did a little research on the internet...what a tool. This time a little disappointing however. Indeed, now I don't know if I love Hafiz or Daniel Ladinsky. He is the latest and most accessible translator. I read a criticism of my source book on the internet that points out that the translation is so free that it is arguably not Hafiz' work. The critic is harsher than that. I have toned it down. That is the trouble with translation.

I have studied I Ching for nearly forty years. All my material is of course translated work. I have a dozen or more, including works by Thomas Cleary, which are later Chinese interpretations from the Buddhist school, the Confucian school, the later Taoist Alchemical school, and another spare hard hitting merchant's school. Cleary translated these commentaries. I consider myself a scholar, but I am hardly that if it is required that I understand the original Chinese text rather than understanding about it.

Now I must live with the idea that I have patterned myself after Daniel Ladinsky, thinking he was Hafiz. I am not sure I care. My voice is an honest voice. This is true with I Ching. It is also true in the poems I have written over the last year.

Northern Lights

I see you lying
on the snow to see the lights,
splashed across the sky
in the ice and stars
and later, at noon beside
you in the still air
are crystals, tiny,
bright as starshine in your hair,
in the bright white cold.

February 15, 2009 10:22 AM

Hafiz Speaks

I am going to let my buddy Hafiz speak tonight.

It happened again last night:

Love popped the cork on itself-
Splattered my brains across the sky.

I imagine now for ages
Something of Hafiz will appear

To fall like stars.

Isn't that cool??

And this one:

Last night God posted
On the tavern wall

A hard decree for all of love's inmates which read:

If your heart cannot find a joyful work
The jaws of this world will probably

Grab hold of your sweet ass.

I have more than one work. I recommend more than one.

An Ancient Spring

Here is a vision of the way it once was. I am drawn to pieces of this vision like I belong there, would belong here if it was more like this. I have a serious belonging problem. It is no accident that I am alcoholic.

Yet I am also aware of the advantages that civilization has brought to us. I am what I call a "hot house flower". What I mean by that is modern civilization has saved my life often enough for me to know that had I been born with this body in an earlier time I would never have made it out of infancy or early childhood. That has been carried forward as well. My skills are all civilized skills. In other words, not only am I still alive because of civilization, if it were taken away I would not survive either the transition, and if I somehow did, I could not make the transition myself to some form of more basic tribal society role, unless somehow I could be the shaman.

An Ancient Spring

The tribal drumbeat
matches, leads the dancing girls
while the shaman chants
at the edge of light
further from the fire than crones
go this night, well placed
to bridge the dark gaps
between the warming of spring
and the cold white shards
of winter to north
of this hopeful dancing clan
seeking a new life.

February 15, 2009 10:02 AM

Itchy Condition

I am just buried under work for the next little while, not sure how long. So I am sitting here earlier than usual, fairly dog bone tired. Apparently I was more energetic back in mid February. At that time I was still laid off, had a couple weeks to go.

Speaking of itching. I bought some stuff on line. One of the things I bought is a telescoping stainless steel back scratcher. Sometimes a well scratched back is better than sex.

Itchy Condition

I've kept this long search
going because I've felt so
strange standing still here.
I've made a good nest
and the wind breaks well around
the walls but I itch,
hanker after ways
I heard you went, others go.
I want a good scratch.

February 15, 2009 9:48 AM

The Garden

There is a place for shrines, for ritual, for practice, practice, practice in the spiritual life. This remains true even without God at the heart of things, thus Humanists tend to form these relationships with the heart too. Even Communists hold their parades in support of their yearnings.


Certainly I cannot live without my practice. At one point I held a particular location on the Willamette River to be my power point. It did not matter that I could no longer get there. Later, the Willamette National Cemetary became a power point. Sometimes I go there. Even if I don't, it is still there in precisely the same way for me.


The Garden

At the far, far end
of the gravelled path I placed
a shrine on the rim
of the gulf between
you and me, in the garden
I planted for you.
You remember it
I know, the gated roses
overhead as you
enter and the paths
that wind among the plantings.
I find myself there.

February 15, 2009 9:24 AM

In Thin Air

I sometimes feel just like this. For example, some years ago I was sent on assignment to a silicon wafer facility south of Salem. I was completely over my head. That's how that turned out. It still would have been okay had I been given a supervisor who actually knew his job. We were doing the process piping hook up design. They gave us a plumber as a supervisor rather than a design engineer. That meant I needed about ten years of experience as a designer in high tech in order to do the job. I had no support from above and that meant I had to operate at the higher level. I failed. The whole time I struggled and kept surviving, I felt exactly like this. I could feel the gravity but I didn't fall. The wedgie was uncomfortable.

Then something happened. I had a small part to play in it but the main thing was the business maneuvers that were going on. I was fired summarily and basically escorted off the job. They packed me up after I was gone. I was fired to protect a future contract that was in process. This had never happened to me before, hasn't happened since. The fingers holding me in thin air opened and I fell hard. I was ten years into working for the company that assigned me to the work, had been laid off and was back working on contract. I have never worked for them again, knew then I would not ever work for them again. This was my sobriety job, working for this company. It was the first job I got after I got sober and gave me stability in the first ten years of my sobriety.

The rest of that story is that I have been blessed by being released from that company, but it was a painful and embarassing separation. There is are many reasons to commend the separation. It might even be this could be called a divine intervention to get me out of there. If so, God sometimes plays pretty rough.

In Thin Air

It's me in thin air
without the necessary
wings, relying solely on
you to hold me here.
Amazing. I don't
float, nor do I fly.
Hanging in your pinched fingers,
I will not look down.

Don't look down, that's what you said.

February 14, 2009 4:14 PM

I Will Not Leave

Here is a poem of promise and commitment.

I Will Not Leave

Then remember this
on the day you walk upstairs,
that once you did swim,
turned cartwheels, let me
catch you, you who smiled for me,
who let me clasp hands
with you as your soul
rose to the lighted dew dropped
sky, who told me dreams.

February 13, 2009 9:53 PM

Hidden Under Snow

This is a poem I wrote as winter began to let up its grip in Oregon. Portland is far enough north that we have real seasons, but far enough south that they don't keep hold that long. Because one of my friends is Australian, I keep thinking about that. It's night there when it's day here. It's summer there when it is winter here. I believe it is very good to keep that difference in mind. It can be one of the true salutary effects of our internet connections if these connections can give to us the true measure of the planet. I can exchange with my Australian friend, but not easily converse. She lives upside down and backwards, or I do.

I have another friend who has gone rather quiet. She lives in Tehran. Ouch.

Hidden Under Snow

Thank You for water
fresh from the spring at the head
of the running creek
hidden under snow
sparkling in the sun of love.
I've seen with Your eyes,
know I've seen through love,
through the angelic limpid
true soul of fierce joy.

February 13, 2009 8:59 PM

Someone's Got To

I couldn't make this up. I'll bet you couldn't either. It is just beyond me to ever conceive of this. I found it on Post Secret, so somebody did make it up, perhaps even commited this act. I loved the postcard so much I wrote it as a poem. This act against the Gideon Bible is surely one of the ultimates in underground resistance, the sort of thing hippies loved to do. It is nearly perfect in its peacefulness. I don't care that I stole the idea. Stealing the idea (but not the form) is technically legal. Stealing the idea also is an underground act. Everything I am builds on the fact that for six years I was a hippie in one or another form. In 1966 this die was cast. In 1973 I was forced by circumstance to go underground. I began training up in things like careers and marriages. Even so it took eight more years until I bought a house. My heart still delights in things hip.

Someone's Got To

I go on long trips,
stay in hotels with nothing
to do, but pull out
Gideon's Bible
and draw naked people where
I can find the space
for them. Then I list
the pages on the cover
page to help others.

February 13, 2009 4:16 PM

Shirking Work Again

Oh man. A friend of mine has asked me to stand as a witness as he marries the woman he has been with for several years. I have of course said yes. This Saturday at 2pm. I have taken on the other job as a bachelor friend of a soon to be married man. I am asking him every day if he really wants to do this. We both agree that is my job until Saturday. Heh.

So he told his partner (they live together now). She doesn't like it. Heh. We are both laughing about that. He says she'll be okay again in a week. I have decided to avoid her til Saturday if I can. I value my privates.

Shirking Work Again

Climbing brambles reach
the top of the white trellis
meant for my jasmine
because I have shirked my work
again for dallying with
the likes of your tunes,
the hunting hounds of Harrow,
or your wide green eyes.

February 13, 2009 3:50 PM

Needing Advice

You can't push the river. Some questions are answered by realizing we have to stop asking them. It is possible to ask a question that must be answered both ways or even cannot be answered at all. Language is a very large indeterminate but finite system. On any given day there is a finite number of words and a finite algorithm for uttering them in any coherent way. On any given day I am a finite expression of humanity (of the human system) utililizing a finite system to express whatever I choose. There are two directions which cause serious trouble. If I try to express the infinite I enter paradox. If I try to express myself too close to the subjective heart of my life, I again enter paradox. This trouble was demonstrated in that latter way by Kurt Godel who proved that any system with sufficient power would be subject to the paradox of self reference, that you could formulate expressions within the system that cannot be responded to in the system. In other words, it is possible to ask questions concerning existence that cannot be answered. Of course the trouble with the infinite is self evident mathematically.

Thus trying to capture God in language cannot be a human activity. If God is ever captured in language it must be the other way, that God hands the language down. Even so, there can never be a satisfactory proof of any of these statements at the level of mathematical rigor. This is only as concerns God's identity, or ours, that is, the self referent or the infinite.

Oh by the way, that you and I might have an infinite soul probably doesn't change this a whit. We are in general forced to press through the finite systems of body and language in order to utter anything.


Needing Advice

I've come here today,
climbed your mountain to reach
the outlook where you
perch like the eagle
you are, glad to find you home
rather than flying,
soaring too far out
to bother with my questions.
I hope you won't shift
your shape so soon like
last time, leave me to trudge back
down the mountain slope
so unsatisfied.
I ask about life, is it
Meaningful story
or not? Yes, you say.
Then you shift again, sprout wings,
fly away from me.

February 13, 2009 2:57 PM

I'm Not Doing This Right

Here's the thing. I have this reputation as a "safe" man. In AA there are a significant number of women who don't start out trusting women, or even if they do, they are like me and do the best honesty and truth telling across the sexes, telling mom or dad. Me, I am grateful that I can have the kind of honesty I do where I would never tell my mother these things. Her instincts were wrong for me already when I was seven. But as a child of a single mother in the late forties and early fifties, I was trained to speak straight across with women and it works for me today. The women spread through the grapevine that I am one who will not mess with them. However.

Who is going to gift me with the kind of physical intimacy that I have done without for so much of my life? When Ann got so sick. Before that when I was a drunk. For the first few years going through our divorce and after.

In 1999 there was an intervention. The next seven years gave me an active sex life, even at times a colorful one. I have been solo since.

I am not lonely. I have many friends because of how I live. I don't lie awake nights aching for companionship. I would sleep fine if I didn't have other reasons for waking up frequently in the night. I always go back to sleep. This is not about desperation even a little. In fact I often observe relationships around me and go home grateful for my solitude.

However, I straight up miss physical intimacy. In the middle of the day back last February I spoke up.

I'm Not Doing This Right

Man, she called me safe,
said I was a godsend to
women wounded as
she, so open, kind,
so clear sighted and so wise
and five others gave
agreement. Oh shit.
Fat, aging, kind, wise old eyes,
Who, I want to know
is going to lay me?

February 13, 2009 2:27 PM

Seeing Deep

I was in the middle of something back in the middle of February. Here's the next.

Seeing Deep

It is important,
you said, that I get balance,
this word with that word,
line with lines and now
I am afraid of
the process, would rather have
been unconscious still.

So why do I write
more lines anyway?
Now you just smile at my frown.

February 13, 2009 10:49 AM

You didn't like how I said it last time? How about this one? You did like how I said it last time? How about this one?

Indra's Net. Maya's Play. Om namah Shivaya. Sat chit ananda. Truth, love, bliss.

I Sadly Swim Away

Put the hammer down
and come teach me how to live,
I call out to you
and you tell me, watch.

I will find, you say, the way
in my chapped sore hands
and it will do no
good to attempt escape from
the sea we swim in.
You say work ripples
the surface, cannot be
pulled away from it,
that trying creates more.

Your answer is not what I
Seek. I sadly swim away,
Create more ripples.

February 13, 2009 9:20 AM

You Keep Trying To Teach Me

To see with God's eyes. I feel like I did that once, by pure grace. It was an intervention, even a triage on God's part. He had nothing left to do and since I was unprepared, it was necessarily crude, so not only a triage, a battlefield triage. I might have died. I came close. I had a scrambled mind and was living on the street after. Literally starving to death. He made no promise that I would survive.

Of course the essence of the vision was how completely thoroughly all right everything was, and also how completely thoroughly this whole thing is dynamically supported by the divine energy at all moments. One gap in that once and the whole thing becomes smoke and mirrors, just exactly right now stops. His energy is the spanning momentum of the indeterminate (very large but finite number) set of quantum gaps in the universe. Drop one. The whole thing dissappears. To see with God's eyes is to see original beauty and to know that without His eyes neither will that beauty be visible. So much more.

To know too, that this cannot be taken back to ordinary mind, ordinary eyes. Seeing with God's eyes won't fit the ordinary human shape, is much too large for that. To grieve that. To argue against it. To try to return at will (utter failure already known). To realize that what is next is a disciplined life, full of practice, not really to return to the lap of God so much as to pay for the incredible gift already given. Now that I know, I am compelled to pay. Such is my life.

Now, 43 years later, He is still calling me to practice, and I am still far from the top of the mountain. It's a helluva life.

You Keep Trying To Teach Me

Now you go one more
and tell me it's not finite,
nor infinite. What?
You say they are both,
the fin and the infin, both
are parts of the ite.
This just gets to me.
Then you say the ite is bliss
and the fin, infin
are just the two fronts
that merge and all is then bliss
and now my teeth hurt.

February 12, 2009 4:25 PM

The Triangle

This is a true story, but as a true story it is not about another woman. Or it was about many women but not about amorous liasons, instead about friendship and trust, intimacies of the heart. In AA I have had and take that opportunity to befriend women. I went home to my wife. In the early days, people figured it out. I was going home to my wife. Women found me trustworthy and as a result I wound up with as much female intimacy as I wanted, and this included a chaste form of intimate hugging and touching, an occasional familial kiss. I went home to my wife. That was a whole other story. Our marriage had become distant due to my drinking and it wasn't coming back so well.

(I should say as an aside, three times over eight years there were women who just stepped in closer and once I was very close to accepting the offer. I stopped, but not without creating hard feelings in the lady. She thought she had me. She got me to come home with her but couldn't get me in the bedroom. That ended it. Ouch. This was a couple years after the moment this poem is about.)

On my sixth AA sobriety anniversary, hoping to get my wife to join in on this joy in my life that was AA, I convinced her to come to my celebration meeting. Other people would do that, have their spouses come to the meeting. It usually was a fine thing. It would work out wonderfully I thought, a family thing, a solidarity thing, a healing thing. That's what I thought would happen. My wife was a Social Worker, and a good one. She had pushed me into sobriety. I was making it work, had become a successful sober story. It all pointed to a wonderful time of celebration. She came with me. We sat together. I acknowledged her. It all seemed to be going well. The usual things were said. People, several of them of course my women friends, said good things about me and how I was valuable in the group and to them personally. All of this.

After the meeting, on the way home, I asked her what she thought. This poem is basically what she said. I was crushed. There was nothing to do, no way for me to fix it.

The Triangle

I saw her but damn
I just hate meeting her now,
your mistress, that's what
you told me coldly
upon returning from town.
I could say nothing.

February 12, 2009 10:43 AM

More Practice

Music is one of the lodestones of my life. Had it been the only one I certainly would have ended in a very different life. I tried to leave music behind at one point. I quite genuinely believed music had nothing more for me. I wandered off into other efforts to lift myself out of here, into some other life. I had a partner. I had work. I also had a marriage and a career. Eventually, my wife believed enough in what I did that she suggested there was a way to turn my work into the completion of my degree. She was right. I sat at home night after night writing and planning and researching, following the directions that the university gave me to turn my life work into college credit. I created a document of nearly 300 pages and asked for 28 credits. I needed 24 to graduate. I did graduate. It took me 2 years, the first year to settle into what I was really trying to do and the last year to do it.

It turned out that the whole thrust of my work was over at the point that I turned it into upper division college credit by producing a post graduate level practicum. I didn’t know it was over then, but I know it now. Then I thought my work might resume around some corner I couldn’t see. Now I am pretty sure I am happy that it didn’t flower into a new life. My work to that point, in 1981 when I graduated has ebbed away. In the mid nineties music came back into my life, poised for a major intensification in 2001 when I entered my five year relationship with Frances.

In the last decade poetry has emerged as another lodestone. I didn’t have a clue that was going to happen. I have no idea if it will last. Poetry is a practice. Music is a practice. These practices are actually my work. I make my living in Engineering and I do this so I can work. I ask daily to be well placed in all of these areas. I feel blessed.

A third lodestone is my participation in AA. It too is a practice. If I don’t have sobriety I have nothing. I need to remain connected, need to serve, need to keep reverence before the Power that keeps me sober. I need to remember where I come from.

The quaternity is completed by my prayer practice. This consists of chanting and mostly solitary prayer.

More Practice

You said it is how
the world is made, that the slow
sad songs are easy
to play, while the bright
glad songs just take more practice
and are more mature.
You said I like sad
because I am afraid joy
will break me open.

What do you know of me
to say such things?

February 12, 2009 9:37 AM

Doing The Mending

This one in gratitude for Liz, who loves the image of the stones. I fly with the angels some of the time, command the power. Walk upright in the land, a prince among men. Other days I'm the toad.

Doing The Mending

This is what life is,
this collection of small stones,
this river running,
this heart speaking truth
in stories and then in need
resuming the wash,
the dishes, cleaning
after dogs, cats, kids and more,
mending, always that,
the mending.

February 12, 2009 9:19 AM

Past The Moon

I want to write you healed and found as if I could write thus and by writing make it so. I also want to write you healed and found because you are not and are lost and perhaps in need of a poem from one who loves you. I want you lifted on angelic wings. This I want if you wish to rise. I see this incantation as a statement of power, as if I had this power. I insist.

I am an arrogant man.

Past The Moon

I want to write you
healed and found, lifted higher
than you thought you would
go this very night.

I want your vision to clear
so you remember
who you really are,
no, not then but beyond that
history you told
to the history
you don't speak of now because
it goes past the moon.

February 12, 2009 9:20 AM

A Typical Lesson

No matter where you go, if you run into a spiritual master you will receive the instruction in some way to let go. This is interesting. It is surprisingly difficult. Most everything that is really good to let go of feels a little like letting go of the branch not knowing how far you will fall. Letting go feels like falling backwards, trusting that someone will catch you.

Or another picture, I was a diver in my young days. I learned the half and full gainer. These dives are especially difficult for two reasons. The first is this fall backwards thing. In this dive you give up your vision at a critical moment as you thrust yourself backwards. When you are flat on your back out over the water, the trust is in momentum and energy to do what they do and keep you going in your flip. The second is trusting in another part of the momentum, that of your approach. As you leave the board you are flipping back toward the board. If you don't have forward momentum, you will hit the board. Hmmm. I learned a whole bunch about doing my job and letting go as I learned these dives.

I wish it was that easy emotionally and spiritually. Heh.

A Typical Lesson

This is really tough.
You say I'm in a foolish
Argument. I say
I exist. That's wrong.
I say then I don't. You say
I'm still wrong headed.
Why should I trust this?
You say I don't have to do
Anything. That's when
I go ballistic
But I won't let go my hold.

Then you say let go.

February 11, 2009 3:40 PM

The King's Mistake

The heart of the royalty system has always been the idea of rule backed by God. Because of the divine right to rule, it is a really large thing to depose a king. Of course how that works out in practice is that a small group of lords with lineages and claims of lineage also feel that divinity favors them, and an even smaller group of lords usually exists that has very little to do with God anyway. So the clarity of divine right becomes muddled in most reigns. Yet that is not different in terms of ideal and outcome than any other political system. None of our political systems actually approach the ideals that the politicians utter and insist the citizens live by. We so routinely encounter corruption in our politics that many of us assume it to be the rule rather than the exception. It sometimes seems so.

There is something to be said for the divine right idea. It is clear that some men favor this idea. The question for these men is not whether or not there is a divinely backed ruler but how to identify him or her. If it is clear that the king has lost his way, then it becomes possible that God has withdrawn and the king's growing error is the signal of that withdrawal.

And what of me, of small men like me who nonetheless actually own property or space like kings own kingdoms? Make no mistake. Holdings of things of value and especially real estate can only happen when these things are directly removed from the king's possessions. We call certificates of ownership titles. We call royal holdings titles too. There were papers describing royal holdings, making them clear. What of the citizenry in republican democracies, who have "divine" rights? That is what we claim, that the Constitution delineates rights that are sacred in this way, and thus we have all been promoted to royal status in this sense. We are all titled. What of us? Can we make errors that sever our divine rights? Of course.

The King's Mistake

I am king, enthroned
enrobed, enacted, royal
in my ways but lost,
in error, dismay.
There is tension in the chords
of the band playing
on my stage, yearning
in the echoes of my heart
for the healing of
the severed silver
thread that was mine, whole before
I cut it in two.

February 11, 2009 10:38 AM

The Wild Geese On The Lake

I was in a marriage relationship for over twenty years. That was not necessarily good news but it was a life commitment. I took that vow seriously. I saw a photo of a mating pair of swans. That's what led to this poem.

The Wild Geese On The Lake
(the drake overheard to speak frankly with his mate)

Today I am not sure
I would choose you but I'm still
here crossing with you.
That choice is old news.
It's what we do, girl, live out
old choices, loyal
to them and to each
other, call it love, sure it's
God's will to be here.

February 11, 2009 10:14 AM

You Said, I Said

I am not the peaceful man that I should be. There is an inner disturbance that prevents certain things in my life even though I know I should be able to do them. I can see and understand. I can even give examples. Here is one.

I make my living as a machine designer. This is a deeply complex suite of tasks that involve relationships with other specialists, knowledge of specific tools and items, at least a smattering of engineering, knowledge of ergonomics, past practices, certain complicated codes, and after all that then specific knowledge of what the machine in question does and how it fits in the process in which it is placed. I have to apply logic, algebra (did you know this word is arabic??) and geometry all the time. You would think then that I would know lots about how to support my house and car, how to build things in my life. You would be completely wrong. I am a little better now, but not much. I hire nearly everything. If I didn't know righty tighty, lefty loosey, then I would very quickly have trouble trusting a frozen bolt or nut. I would not know which is right. I am severely mechanically challenged. I have a poor relationship with objects.

And what my inside experience of that is, it is disturbance. I am hung between horns of several dilemmas. Here is one.

You Said, I Said

You said I should be
objective, withdraw myself
from the things I see.
You said to follow
and become the things I see,
then go far beyond.

No wonder struggle
continues with such counter
driven strategies.
There will always be
tension present in my love
in a world like this.

February 11, 2009 9:53 AM

Neck And Neck

This is a memory.

Neck And Neck

When I got sober,
just a couple months of dry,
getting on the ground,
I was still looking for work.
Our ginger cat,
we called him Godot
or we called him The Best Cat
In The World, he died
over a few days
of kidney failure. One day
I held him. Springtime
in the sun. He smiled.
Grief and joy raced neck and neck.
Then I put him down.

February 10, 2009 4:54 PM
********

How this worked, I was laid off in November, received the ultimatum in the last days of December, struggled against the idea but capitulated by the end of January and went to treatment. February, 1983, I was in treatment. I got out in March. I looked for work in March and April, went on an interview in early May and went to work for the company the next ten years.

At the same time, Godot began to fail with all the typical signs of kidney failure in cats. By the beginning of May he was sinking into coma, hardly rousing at all but for a few moments a day. Finally he stopped everything. On that last day, I sat with him in the sun, knowing it was time, but also knowing he liked it just fine in my lap in the sun. Phew, tough to write still after all these years. I looked around at the spring, at the life, the beauty and a joy rose in my heart right along with the grief that was breaking my heart. I was so proud to be there, to be present, to be able to do what had to be done.

The next morning I took him to my vet, who by this time and so many cats was a friend, and I stood beside the best cat in the world as we put him down. That tore my heart wide open of course. I drove home after and straight to an AA meeting where I found I could not speak, though I tried, the grief was so large.

That was a Thursday. It was the next day, a Friday that I was invited to join that company where I started working in my new sobriety and then kept that job for ten years. I felt really grateful that I had finished with Godot first.

It was the first time in my life that I learned I could have such disparate emotions as big grief and fierce joy in my heart simultaneously, simply amazing.

Telling Mom About Going Into Publishing

Some people I know decided to go into publishing and said they were leaving the blogs behind. I wrote this thinking about the changes that life makes when you make big decisions.

Telling Mom About Going Into Publishing

and then I said let’s
do this thing and she said yes
and then we got Jan
and this is just so
good I can’t hardly stand it.
I’m grinnin from ear to earth.
Mom says, honey, I
hope you know whatcher doin.

February 10, 2009 4:14 PM

Holding You

I had a harsh morning and a relentless afternoon, then I went to a meeting and found out that there were many people struggling harder than I am with these issues of mine. I came home and realized that the next poem simply wasn't one I would post, so I skipped it and came to this one.

Tonight I miss my cat, and with that the tiny little hooks that lead to all the other lost cats, the wife, the mom, the dad, the many friends, all gone now. Thank God I know what to do. I have done it, am doing it. As my friend Vivian says, Relentless Forward Movement. That came from her extreme marathon running husband. He's gone now too, a heart event that occurred at the end of a mountain marathon. He finished, and finished well, but then he died, too far from the medics who could have saved him had they been able to get there. Relentless Forward Movement.

I am in between a rock and a hard place. Nothing new. Same old. Yet this time is new if the stuff in it isn't and I will go on. Of course I will. I am not alone. Nor are you.

Holding You

Spidersilk, silver
and stronger than beautiful
holds you as I spun
for you before this
life in another, knew you
then, knew you would need
it now, my princess.

February 10, 2009 2:48 PM

Appearances

When I first heard someone use this image I lost it. I think it is just about perfect. I have spent twenty years getting beat with the lash of my choice between saving my ass and saving my face. It is so often true that I can't save both at the same time that I know I can cut a corner by making it a universal principle. If I say you can't EVER save your ass and your face at the same time, I will not be always right but I will score at least in the high B range. Of course if I was an effing saint, I would always pay exquisite attention and note the exceptions. Then I would only make errors when they were called for.

(Bridge)
Errors are after all and in fact sometimes called for. I was taught years ago that Navaho rug weavers will weave quite complex patterns but there will be at least one deliberate subtle error in the pattern.
(EndBridge)

Pythagoras knew long ago that the real world will always fall short of perfection. This shows up in the perfect tuning cycle of fifths which goes sharp as you go. This fact has forced us to tune musical instruments to a special tuning called tempered tuning. If you want to play in all keys you have to tune slightly flat. We get used to this but sometimes it will stand out in one or another instrument. You can tune perfectly if all you want to do is play in a single one of the twelve keys. That will force certain other keys on your instrument to sound awful. Back before our modern tuning there was another kind of tempered tuning in use and it caused certain keys to sound different from others, brighter or darker. That meant that people composing music would choose their keys for the piece based on the timbre of the key. Sometimes orchestras will tune to the old style in order to play these pieces. Tuning slightly flat is an excellent example of a required deliberate error.

Appearances

I look so cool, so
unruffled, drifting along
with the gentle flow.
I am one with things
oh yeah, unless you see red
in my eye and look
under the surface
at the furious movement
of little duck feet.

February 10, 2009 10:01 AM

What is really cool, I wrote this as is my practice in Word Pad before I went online tonight. That's when I ran into Woman In a Window's comment on yesterday's post. That was too spooky. Go there. Read it. Remember I wrote this without knowing she had visited.