I've Gone To Ground

I once took on an affair that involved me in subterfuge. The only way I could do it was to deliberately and deeply follow my heart. Then I quit all debating about the awkwardness of my position and the risk. We needed to protect her kids from the eruption of her affair in the middle of her path to divorce. We succeeded. Over the course of two years this affair never got back to her family even though we were less than secret in some circles. In the end she left me for another who was new enough that she could bring into the open after her husband had a girl friend and the divorce was well established as going forward. The kids did fine. I met them at one point. She has ultimately accomplished that separation, including separating from the necessary boy friend to match her husband’s girl friend. I actually knew I could not succeed in keeping this woman my lover and am grateful for the two years we had. What she gave me was my mature poetic voice.

What all that has to do with this poem, the quality of waiting in it is very much the quality of waiting for my lover to come to my house, especially on the days I took off from work to make it happen. I’m an old outlaw, not only this way. This is one of the prices.

I've Gone To Ground

There's no advantage
to this hideout, too many
splinters, not enough
light, and they shut off
the power decades ago.
I think you'll not find
me here, haven't had
a bath for days. This ain't fun,
this rash, these splinters,
nothing to do, not any
damn thing, just waiting for you,
you said you would come.

March 2, 2009 9:16 AM

This Ache In My Heart

I have been busier today not working than I would have been working. To the doctor’s three times today. Phone work, to the Auto Body shop because someone hit me on the road last night, a glancing head on with a towed car that swept wide because power steering wasn’t there. Very low speed accident. I always use sentence frags. Does anyone care? My mother did. She hated it when I deliberately did shoddy shit like this because she knew I know better, and I do. Filing the accident report. Getting the estimate, $3500… Their insurance saying, “no problem.”

The physiatrist said that my screwed up vertebra really should not cause pain and numbness, but my pain and numbness there anyway. I don’t care if that is so but what I do care about is finding out what is going on. I will return soon for an in depth test of the nerve pathways in my leg. Oh fine! Needles, effing Teflon coated needles. This will pinch a bit…I hate it when they say that.

This is not how it was, but on another world, how it could have been.

This Ache In My Heart

How you lie there still
after the wave has passed by,
after the heat fades,
and I wander off
to pray for the day's return,
kneeling in the grove
beside our campsite
out of your sight on purpose
because I fear love.

March 1, 2009 9:54 PM

The Sighting

I don't think I will add much to this one...

The Sighting

It was diamond
shaped and shivered, spitting light
from the three corners
as it hung weightless
small and close, far and larger,
I don't know, she said,
and I can't tell what
I know because I am sworn
and they keep watching.

March 1, 2009 9:32 PM

You Wouldn't Like Me If You Knew

I am still today a shame driven creature when the right conditions arise. If in shame, I will tend to extremes to get out. If not in shame but at risk for it, I will tend to similar extremes to avoid it. I don’t care, really where that comes from. It matters that I know it and that there are two streams of practice regarding shame that I can avail in order to live a better life. I can practice towards avoiding known causes of shame, but while this practice is useful and necessary, a better practice is aimed at moving beyond shame into forgiveness and compassion.

I am so filled with the tendency to treat myself better than I may deserve in any condition, that I have often felt doubtful toward such statements as “the first person I need to forgive is myself.” In fact a minor condition of my shame is knowing that I give myself too much of a break. But here again, I must concentrate on the known predicament I am in. My insight is often profound but it is also distorted in ways I cannot see.

I am 64 years old. I have seen much come and go. Nakedness of all kinds is not such a big deal anymore. I have learned the truths of clothing, of walls, of mirrors, of truth telling and of deception, of double lives and disguises, and how to spin the truth into a lie. I am still the victim of this poem if I relax my grip.

A very good friend of mine tells me her code as a runner on the track and in her life, relentless forward movement. You cannot finish the 5k course and more without a vow to relentless forward movement. I agree. In my place in order to transform beyond a shame driven reactive creature living a grief stricken life, I must recognize I swim against a current that changes all apparent straight lines into curves of a backward tendency, that forces me to tack like a sailboat to move forward, that any rest I take will cause me to work harder to catch up later, that if I just tread water for a time, I will be going backward. My life cannot have any straight lines for long because the backflow always curves them. This metaphor goes on and on with useful applications. Relentless forward movement.

It is not grim, it just is.

You Wouldn't Like Me If You Knew

I am sitting blank
trying to say what I know
but it holds me back
even as I am here
willing and I thought, no fear.
You said secrets keep
me sick and I know
how they erupt like boils do
yet shame blankets all.

March 1, 2009 3:04 PM

An Old Door

Sometimes I feel really nourished and cared for. Today, something really kind happened to me. I am astounded and grateful for the gift. In fact, several remarkable things have happened in the last several days. My life may have changed nearly beyond recognition. I have new responsibilities. There is a quest coming. We shall see.

I am not yet fit to return to work but I expect that my efforts will have me released for work by next week. However, then I will enter the queue, eligible for a return as soon as a suitable project appears and the current work force adjusts. There is a pressure on my boss to fund the medical insurance he continues to carry for me though I am idle. This pressure is on me as well to return as quickly as I can. However, my boss cannot just dump someone currently active to make room for me without risking that man’s return at some future time. It just isn’t done, nor would I want it to happen. These people are all my friends too. So an ending has to be reached in normal order.

As for this poem, if I did not practice diligently, this is who I would be. It is certainly who someone on the planet is.

An Old Door

This old door, not locked,
will fall off if you try to
open it. That's old.
I am not that old
though if you try to open
me, I'll fall off too.
That's why I keep closed,
because I'll fall off the edge
of things otherwise.
That's just how I think
even though you say I know
better than that now.

March 1, 2009 11:54 PM

Looking At The Hills

I actually wrote this about God.

This reminds me of the pop song going around lately with the lyric

What if God was one of us?

A while back Paul Simon pointed out that God is old. If He’s anything, old is what He is. She? If She, then I might be in trouble here.

Looking At The Hills

One time I saw you
step out completely naked.
You were really old.
This was like looking
at the rounded hills that once
(you told me) were tall
and jagged mountains
fresh from tectonic forces.

I saw you by chance
and did not tell you
I was there. I just backed out,
gently shut the door.

March 01, 2009 9:53 AM

I've Done It Again

It’s time for a little resizing. I might be just a tad too fat for my tights. I’m a terrible gardener. Mostly now I hire someone in to keep my yard civilized. Here is one man’s version of my plight:

I have a rock garden. Last week three of them died.
-- Richard Diran

That one had me howling. Dancing around on all fours, wishing I had thought of it first. Then I Googled Richard Diran. Try that. Talk about resizing.

Maybe I start to sound sometimes like I am not just another bozo on the bus…

I've Done It Again

I'm coming apart
and they say I am right where
I'm supposed to be
and I ache for you
now that you've sent me away.
Why did I do this?
Right where I'm supposed
to be, learning how
I make my own misery
by judging your heart.

What can I do now?
Pretend nothing's wrong?
I don't know how to stop this.

February 28, 2009 7:53 PM

Still Sleeping

You never know when something will change nor from where it rises. Even then, perhaps it’s an opportunity and perhaps something else. What to do? I claim that all the main turning points in my life come out of my life rather than me deciding to follow some plan. This is true, but it is also true that the responses I make must be immediate and generally with some kind of clarity. If anyone should ever wonder if my way of living is responsibility avoidant, it cannot be for the simple reason that I say yes or no to the opportunity. Recently that has happened again. Several years ago a man with a unique way of living in the world came into my life as I followed a lead. We interacted for a bit and I felt an old hunger rise up. I remember a time before this one:

Back in 1973 I began a partnership, active for six years and I thought it might lead to big things. It did, though not what I thought. What came of that partnership was many things but not the change of life and way of being in the world that I thought. Instead, in 1981 I was awarded a degree in completion of college level work based mainly on our partnership. I thought he was going to be a partner in building a new life. Instead I had my new Oregon life and in it he transformed into the mentor of my completed degree. We did not partner much after that, though he was a lifelong friend. When I married, he was my best man. When he married I was his. He was thirteen years my senior. At the end, he contracted a form of Parkinson’s and died of it. I have his dictionary and several other books, left to me.

I lived hungry with him, wanting developments which could lead me out of the life I lived. I didn’t have a clue how to do that but I thought he did. It turned out I misjudged him in this way. He was living his life not building a new one even though he talked about it. Talking about these possibilities was a fun thing for him. It was not only me that misjudged. I know his wife went through a transition of realizing that he talked plans he was never going to actually do. One famous one was the book he was going to write (he had already written one) and that book turned out to be about different subjects over the years. From time to time he would even get three chapters in or so. Then something else would turn up. He lived for research, not for the book.

When I met this new man a few years ago, the same hunger rose up. Here is another established man in a world I feel better suited for. Last time with him I became the subject in a training video. There are people who have knowledge of me that I do not know through this video I have never seen. Then we parted company but we both knew not necessarily permanently. This time there is a project, and we have agreed to explore how I can serve the project. Who knows where it leads? I am much closer to the end of my life, not nearly so sure I need to go anywhere.

Still Sleeping

You woke up today.
I can tell because your rim
has gone all rainbow,
visible, growing
the bubble of clear vision
all around your eyes.

If you look into
my heart perhaps I too will
awaken today.

February 28, 2009 6:21 PM

A Small Fish

There is another world. I know there is. Once a guy in AA said, “This is not God’s World. This is the world God Permits.” So there is this world and at least one other. I am used to it.

We play music these days in Equal Tempered tuning. At least that’s the tuning we use most commonly, and only use the other tunings as specialties here in the West. I took a music course a while back and learned that in Bach’s time tuning was more various, but a common tuning was called Well Tempered. Bach wrote music entitled The Well Tempered Clavier. What happened in this tuning was that different scales had different temperaments due to the various ways that the tuning was handled note to note. In Equal Tempered tuning the notes are similarly flatted high and sharped low in order to make as far as possible all the note values the same, octave to octave, no matter what. In Well Tempered tuning there are different values based on other esthetics. When a composer in Well Tempered tuning wanted to evoke lighter and darker moods, he could compose in certain keys which actually did that, were more sharp (bright) or flat (dark). I don’t now remember which keys were which, but I know this is true.

What basically happened over time, musicians wanted to maximize the ability to change keys in the same piece of music without ending with cacophony doing it. That is not so easy in the other tunings. That is what the Equal Tempered tuning did. We have learned to hear past the slightly sharp bass and slightly flat treble. When I listen to my keyboard however, especially in certain voices, I can hear the flatness in the treble.

I think the different worlds are something like that. They are music in different well tempered keys. Perhaps there are worlds in even more difficult tunings, that can only be played in one key. Played together the worlds would be cacophony.

A Small Fish

I am the small fish
in between the stones below
the silver surface
all dappled nearer
the bank, the north bank of you.
You are the far world
in the open air
way beyond my darting life.
I hardly know of it
at all, just stories
the elders tell when they die.
I want to believe.

February 28, 2009 11:09 PM

Turning Around

The false strikes…I was wondering what to post with this poem. Tonight, a man, recently separated from his wife, confessed a large fear today in front of a mixed crowd of people. He said his ex had a new boyfriend and he didn’t know who this man was. His daughter is living with his ex and now the boyfriend has moved in. This means inevitably the boyfriend will be alone at times with his daughter. The man said that he couldn’t sleep nights for fear of that.

First it told me that this man truly loves his daughter. When he told us he realized how powerless he was in this situation, that told me he was struggling to stay real. He even told us his ex was asking him to trust her judgment. This told me not necessarily that it was wise for the man to trust her judgment, but at least that he knew he had little choice.

You would have to have been there to catch how poignant this was, at least to some of us, and how unlikely too. This man is not known for good judgment. However, grasping hold of lifebelts as only the drowning can do, this devastated hurting man listened to others and to his heart and chose a course of action.

He called the man up and told him he was too frightened to leave it alone, that he needed to know who this man who was with his daughter was. With that honesty offered the other man responded and was willing to meet. They are going to meet tomorrow.

Can you see how many other ways this could have gone? All of them probable disasters? This man showed more courage than I might have at my command today, confessing his fear to a stranger. And it is an object lesson in how courage arises out of necessity.

A false strike averted broke my heart with gratitude today. I am grateful when I get the privilege of seeing the pain of the world eased. As one of my good friends said, these two men have the opportunity to become friends over the common bond of the one man’s daughter. She is six, I think.

Turning Around

Now that you have turned
this way, you can see the spring
coming as it comes.
Your eyes have opened
as I hoped so long ago.
It helps as you swing
the axe to cut wood
for the stove and avoid false
strikes, wounds to the world
and to those you love.

February 28, 2009 10:53 PM

You Keep Interfering

A taste for irony has kept more hearts from breaking than a sense of humor, for it takes irony to appreciate the joke which is on oneself.
-- Jessamyn West

This is such an obvious truth. And yet it would seem to contradict the thrust of my recent posts. I would suggest that she has used the term “heart” differently. She exercises the lead in making her statement and behind her lead Jessamyn’s “heart” is as surely broken as is mine or yours. There is no irony without that. In fact, that IS the irony.

Instead what is at stake is courtesy. What is at stake is what we used to call deportment, how one carries oneself in the world. To be broken is essential to the spirit, thus my heart must be broken, or else grace cannot enter. To the rest of the world, in which this brokenness within me may be an imposition, then I must act with courtesy, carry myself in such manner as to tread lightly. I cannot be too heavy a creature, spilling my weight over onto the lives and territory of others unless they invite me in.

What forms the irony is the apparent return of one’s former self, the appearance of a closed and shut off creature for the sake of courtesy.

This is one of the primary renditions of this Zen saying,

First there is a mountain (the heart is shut)
Then there is no mountain (the heart is open)
Then there is (the return of courtesy)

And here again is the appearance of Colton H. Bryant when he says, “Cowboy up, cupcake.” This is a fundamental statement of courtesy.

The question becomes then, how do we return to the world, broken in the flow of God, such that we do not impose, hold our boundaries as if in all humility we hold God back from unwanted display? How do we allow as He does, the continued full exercise of self will in others unknowing, unready, unwilling, and in rebellion? How do we even keep this from ourselves in those moments that we need to forget the mountain is gone?

Jessamyn replies. A sense of humor is not enough. A sense of irony is essential. Humor does not require humility and irony does.

Here is one facet of the irony. You cannot really behave otherwise than to keep to your right size in any case for long. To attempt to live too large, spilling over onto others cannot but at some point be your undoing, for you lack sufficient power without help and that power that is sufficient cannot be mastered at will unless some ultimate goal is yours as well God given. This attempt at power’s mastery will reveal your lack of courtesy for what it is, a form of gluttony. Those who become skilled at avoiding the price are catastrophes on the planet, never far from the scale that measures rudeness in the small and monstrosity in the large.

This is so common, such an everyday occurrence for us all in small ways, that we require of ourselves to offer forgiveness for such transgressions. Yet in larger ways we do not. Thus it is between us locally and between nations, the source for much displeasure and real suffering. Irony helps to keep the heart open nonetheless.

If you wish to be pain free, then you risk monstrosity.

You Keep Interfering

I tore up floorboards
and found a rainbow, hollered
What the hell is that?
This is just too much
the way you keep following
me around, catching
me up, sending me
skyward no matter how low
I still try to go.
Now I want to know
what you want from me. I don't
think I deserve this.

February 27, 2009 3:42 PM

Field Theory

I am really happy I did not fall for the idea that I should somehow be captain of my soul. My life is so far from anything I could have planned. Every time I bring some new venture into my path it seems that everything changes. I have often said in one or another context that I am on the cutting edge of my own life. I basically am not competent to run it because I have never been here before. There are some roadmaps and guidelines available. There are principles that I have chosen to follow, but these don’t really tell me what to do on this day to day basis I might be able to really use. So I have to go by rules of thumb, some dead reckoning, and take suggestions as they arise. It is in this context that yesterday’s post was offered.

I quite literally can’t do worse if I flip a coin. I have in fact run my life on coin flips before. Actually, there is a system that offers a formal treatment, a ritual that encloses coins and the random nature of things. It is very old in its oldest form and is widespread now. I Ching. I have worked with that ancient Chinese wisdom system since 1969. It started in a fascination and led to serious study.

At one point, I returned to school and took my BA degree using my work in I Ching to figure in about half of the 28 credits I needed to graduate. Astrology figured in the other half, but also systems theory and other aspects of philosophy and psychology, and more than a little interconnection with quantum mechanics and cosmology. Astrology and I Ching are legitimate subjects of college level learning when they are classed as metaphysical systems and treated formally in that way. Also, Astrology has been used in psychological settings as my colleague and I did. Both Astrology and I Ching reveal aspects of psychology, arising as they do out of the human psyche and can be used then as investigative tools to plumb that psyche.

See? This actually works, but I was up to that time, 1981, the only student to receive credit in metaphysics as a branch of philosophy in the prior learning experience program that I went through. Others tried unsuccessfully. The year after I was awarded my degree, they reconstructed the format of the program, and I believe what I did became impossible to do in the new format. I think it means I have been the only student in that program to do something like that. It took me two years, but the first year was burned up trying wrong directions before I settled on this practicum I produced.

Here is another example of that sequence I wrote about yesterday...that I must make the gesture first, knowing I have little chance of actually getting it right, in order to get my world to reply or respond to me, guide me into the actual workable path.

Flipping coins to decide my fate…why not?

Field Theory

I took you from fields,
brought you into my home state,
expected your blooms
and the scent of you
to change my life forever.
That is what happened
but in a surprise
move, you pried my hands free
of their hold on you.
Sailing off on winds
that I could not understand,
you gave me myself.

February 27, 2009 2:24 PM

Who You Left Behind

I can’t do this thing alone. If there is anything I have learned in sixty four years on the planet it is that. I simply cannot subscribe to a philosophy that tells me to revere individualism, rugged or otherwise. If I wander in my own mind alone, I have entered a bad neighborhood, so I have relied through the years on trusted guides, whether in books or in classrooms, at homes or in gatherings.

I really resist advice. I doubt that people have enough wisdom to lead me directly. I also doubt, have learned to doubt my own direct vision…it is too full of my own prejudice. This is like scientists who know that what they call objective vision relies on a set of specific procedures, tools, and on peer review, which includes agreement through repeated results. I get a result. Then you repeat and get the same result. In this agreement we begin to trust the result. That is why when they say certain things scientists have credibility. They should be trusted. The procedures are reliable, time tested. I too can appeal to the procedures. But not when they say other things.

So I resist advice, but I do not resist certain procedures I have tested for myself and put in my life.

Here is one. I open. I ask of my world in openness. I become alert. I don the garb of the hunter in a certain sense of patience. I make certain gestures, knowing that while sincere, they are inadequate, ill framed, of themselves not useful. I also know that they change things and that in the changes there will appear situations or items that are useful. This is like the hunter flushing game. Then I trust this as true and turn into the skid at that moment, follow what rose up.

This procedure has held me in good stead. I got sober this way. It led to 12 steps and eventually a way to take all 12 steps. I got a career this way, a wife this way, Oregon this way. I started blogging like this. Now I have searched for healing like this, keeping the gestures in place (this must be, because I gestured in good faith and integrity demands follow through), but mainly following the path that has risen before me.

In this way, I am not alone but in dialogue with my world.

If I were alone on the path I could not run for long. If I were alone on the path, if I had to stop, I would wither. Sometimes on the path I do have to stop and watch the pacesetter disappear in the distance. Then the wolves nearby had better be my friends. Otherwise I am lost.

Who You Left Behind

Running the long path,
you outpace me, the others
who also race on.

I call for you, Wait,
I call, but you are steady
with a graceful lope.

Winded, the wolves halt,
turn yellow eyes to question
me as I stop too.

February 26, 2009 9:08 PM

Carried On The Wind

Yesterday, my cat who was dead came alive, resurrected by a neighbor across the street who found her wandering, apparently disoriented, down the block. My cat was so low profile that the neighbor had never seen her and so the cat seemed a stray to her. This was last summer when I thought she had wandered off to die.

So when another former neighbor who did know my cat was talking to this person who now has my cat, he saw a picture of the cat and said it was mine. She came over and offered her back but I pointed out that my cat was doing better with the neighbor than she had with me for years. That’s so because the cat apparently wants to live there and behaves like it.

She never wanted to live here and behaved like it here too so had to live in the garage rather than the house. That was so I could clean poop up off concrete instead of rugs. I am very happy the cat is alive and close. I am hoping for visitation and by no means will I be a deadbeat dad if they will let me pay for things. The neighbor apparently wanted to keep the cat. She seemed okay with it. She was impressed to know she had an eighteen year old cat. I was impressed with how healthy she looked. Of course that was relative to her age. She is senile quite often and we both know it.

Carried On The Wind

Today it was love
that came on the wind
and lifted the skirts of life
in order to make
more love, enough for
tomorrow's need, enough for
you on the mountain,
me at the river,
enough for all the small ones
and the high flyers.

February 26, 2009 8:45 PM

New Weather Coming

It has been too hard to sit here and use my left typing hand. Never mind. I have been through the worst of my storm and am in the rehabilitation mode now. I am hoping for a full release. There is still work to do.

New Weather Coming

I walk the long shore,
through the sand, the gravel, shells,
the strands of brown kelp,
with gulls calling me,
telling me to heed your name
whispered in the salt
breeze, and out to sea
the cloud banks rise up building
the new front.

Beyond
all, you sail my life.

February 26, 2009 8:21 PM

The Legend of Colton H. Bryant

I wrote this toward the end of yesterday evening, but I was involved and couldn’t post.

This book by Alexandra Fuller, The Legend of Colton H. Bryant, is, a prose poem from start to finish. I cannot recommend it more. But I warn you, it is likely to break your heart. It has broken mine. It is rare to read the raves of reviewers, read the book, reread the raves and decide they didn't do the book justice.

The story reads like a novel but is a true story of Colton, how he grew, what he did, and how he died. It is also the story of those closest to him, how they loved him, and he them. It takes place in Wyoming, on the high plains, and because Colton made his living at the last on the gas and oil rigs, it is about that as well. It is about the wild horse he tamed, and in the end it is about life and death, beauty and loss. It is about cornflower blue eyes and mind over matter.

Most of all, it is about how we go on, no matter what, no matter freaking what. "Cowboy up, cupcake," Colton would say.

I apologize for not posting sooner. I was busy reading. I was also distracted by other things. And I cannot post right now either, because I am downloading the 89 meg Itunes player at 4.5 kbps, a 5 hour download. I rarely do that but it's in a good cause. I will then have a way to play for free the whole remastered Beatles set, 16 cds of Beatles which was saved off for me in .m4a format or whatever it is that Ipod and Itunes defaults to. I sniveled about it, but Windows does not play that format.

Cowboy up, cupcake. Or as we say in bar talk in Oregon, "Oh well." You have to say that with the right inflection. Heh.

The Enigma, Old Business

"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth."
-- Umberto Eco

I am very happy Eco said it. However, I can't stop there because it is not only madness that attempts to interpret the enigma from our side. Sometimes it is a yearning of the deepest heart, and that creates when there is talent and skill, much of the greatest art. And in my experience, the penetration is not only one way. What I mean is, the enigma sometimes interprets me. When that happens it is not always terrible. Sometimes it is a new birth. When the music broke loose in me in the nineties so I could return to it, I feel this is what happened. After the turning point, the world is no less a harmless enigma, yet it is now married to the yearning I have had lifelong where once it was somewhere beyond me, and maddening for that, just as Eco says, terrible, demanding an interpretation which is impossible.

Is this also the force behind the experience of mothers and fathers who fall in love with their infant, that the enigma is delivered directly into their care, just as they once were delivered? Is this not as well the position of the mystic? Is this what happens in the best love making? This is as well, I believe, the best way to die, embracing the enigma.

That quaternity is the true cross found at the heart of the harmless enigma that is the world we live in.

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

I am an arrogant man, but I am a recovering arrogant man. I try for gracious gratitude, even though I think gratitude is beneath me. Practice. I am glad to have learned the musician's lesson about practice, even though I really think practice should be beneath me too. Can you imagine how embarassed I have been at times, getting caught in my arrogance? I am unfortunately not arrogant enough to avoid shame successfully. I am shame driven when I am smaller than fits my true heart. I have to keep my arrogance a secret from myself in order to function that way. Or else I must practice, practice, practice until I learn to live right sized.

Old Business

I didn't ask you
to help me, did not accept
graciously at all,
in fact I rushed off
as if I found something new
laying on holy ground.
A unique moment,
a unique new man was born,
that's how I thought then.
Now I know how this
is old business, common,
belongs to us all.

February 26, 2009 7:50 PM

The Dancing Girl

This is a memory. I once had a woman dance for me in my living room in a full costume including a long flowing black-haired wig. What a gift. This moment was one of many that changed my life.

The Dancing Girl

You told me secrets
about dancing, it's costume
that makes it real,
that's what you said, then
you twirled your full skirts so high
I saw your full shape,
the shine of your shoes,
and the grace notes in my heart
all from the rhythmic
swirl of your sweet world.

February 25, 2009 7:40 PM

A Sudden Appearance In Cold Waters

I really need a little shapeshifting just now. Last February it was winter I was escaping...

A Sudden Appearance In Cold Waters

I take my dolphin
shape to cut through life's cold wash.

I am sleek and slick
with tropic waters,
with the sunlit spells you cast
beside the noonday
shoals of tropic fish
near the coast I promised you,
where I keep your hope.

February 25, 2009 8:11 AM

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