Mirrors

Gentle Forbearance

The first aspect of patience is gentle forbearance. We may be the exhausted parent of a child who is having a fit over some baffling homework; perhaps patience in this case means taking a few deep breaths instead of yelling in frustration. Or we may be on the verge of making a brilliant retort to a coworker, but we hold our tongue rather than say something hurtful. Even though our impatience is triggered, we can tap into the deeper reservoir of our motivation not to do harm. Gentle forbearance may feel difficult-even contrived-because it doesn't constitute true acceptance of how things are. But it is nonetheless a critical aspect of patience because it helps us restrain ourselves long enough to determine the most skillful action for the moment.
- Michele McDonald, Finding Patience

For me, the most intriguing part of Michele McDonald’s quote is that it is part of a three-fold offering that develops a path, a process. Saying “patience is a virtue” may not be enough for those of us who wish to develop patience. Here is a three step process that passes through achieving acceptance and then reaches true patience. The primary virtue of patience is that it is a principal step in healing anger.

The process has the following three steps:

• Gentle Forbearance, which leads toward acceptance
• Endurance of Hardship, which prepares for acceptance
• Acceptance of the Truth, which establishes the back story of the incident.

The implication is that reaching true patience involves each of these steps, though the actual process may be unitary if one is skilled in the practice of patience. I really love having access to a tool like the understanding of a three step process through acceptance to reach patience. Note that acceptance is actually about the back story, the understanding that every situation has a cause that extends into the past beyond the present moment and the present participants, and the achieved patience is about the present moment.

If you wish to explore further, click on the provided link to Michele’s article and her further suggestions for followers of Buddhism. It appears that Michele has based her teaching on the work of Shantideva, an eighth century Indian Buddhist scholar and a current major resource in the practice of Buddhism. The name “Shantideva” is a Sanskrit compound that loosely translates as “the Divine Soul of Peace”. He apparently went by the name, Shantivarman, which uses the Sanskrit surname honorific “Varma” and translates loosely as “Master of Peace”.
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Mirrors

It is the blessing of those who love to say all is well.

It is the blessing of those who are loved
to feel the weight of love and wish to rise
that they may carry it lightly and with joy.

So burdened with blessing
we are ever mirrors, in loving one to another.

July 5, 2009 1:01 PM

A Serious Question

There are serious religious arguments about the subject of this poem. Christians, Jews and Muslims would answer in some sense yes. Buddhists would answer in some sense no, but as a matter of service, then yes for a really long time. Hindus and Taoists would suggest it is just not the right question at all but in the end illusory, just wait and see, because you can wait, life after life and eventually, sooner or later, you will see.

I wrote this poem on Independence Day, last year.

A Serious Question

If I was of one
mind, would it be my one mind?
Questions like that hurt
my brain with sudden
uncertain strokes of soggy
gloves right smack across
my neurons naked
in the heat of mental things.
I have no idea.

July 4, 2009 4:55 PM

A Three Word Challenge

This critter appears to be meditating. I am pleased to think that a spiritual life appears among the four-footeds. If it is not true, then it ought to be. There is something to the relations of them to us. Aboriginal spirituality in general includes our spirit connections to animal spirits, mainly for good, and often for healing. First nation people often quest after an experience that reveals which animal spirit is primary in their spirit lives. Astrology associates beings with signs, like the Ram with Aries. As a Scorpio, I am associated with the Peregrine Falcon, not only the Scorpion. Witches have their familiars, spirit creatures through which certain visions and powers are enhanced.
***

"What good, what lasting good is there in me? Is there nothing else between birth and death but what I can get out of this perversity - only a favorable balance of disorderly emotions? No freedom? Only impulses? And what about all the good I have in my heart - does it mean anything? Is it simply a joke? A false hope that makes a man feel the illusion of worth? And so he goes on with his struggles. But this good is no phony. I know it isn't. I swear it."
- Saul Bellow

***
I am breaking my rule with this poem so I can add a reference to this post on the Three Word Wednesday site, one of the many places where creative writers gather to share the craft. This is one of the most amazing gifts of the Internet. Writing is a solitary activity. The ease with which writers gather dynamically with one another now that the Internet permits it is a brand new experience on the planet. It is highly likely to have an impact over time that we can associate like this. My rule has been to publish the oldest poems first, and I am still in July of last year. This poem I wrote today as noted at the bottom.

A Three Word Challenge
(use abstain, halo, prayer, in a poem)

Two syllable words,
a triune group, a challenge,
how do I get there?

How from here shall I
use the word "abstain" and not
place it next to me,
withold myself as
you asked, with all perfection,
earning a "halo"
and wings and the right
to kneel in "prayer" as if
I have found myself?

August 26, 2010 8:43 AM

Walking The Land

While this photo does not accurately picture an arctic forest, it is beautiful and is my current desktop.

This poem I wrote in honor of my friend Jozien who lives in Mendenhall, in Yukon territory who goes into the wild quite regularly. Jozien lives on the edge of wilderness, at a wide spot on the road from Whitehorse to somewhere else. There is not much there other than a few neighbors. At least that is how she describes it as she does on her blogs. You can touch her world on my blog sidebar, Keeper of Wild Places, she calls it. I wrote this poem about the many hikes she describes.

Walking The Land

The ancient lake bed,
the still more ancient island,
all the mosquitoes,
even the swallows
all say you are so lovely
as you walk tall, strong
in the summer land
of your adopted country,
thus blessing us all.

July 3, 2009 11:01 PM

Embarkation

How do you like these little guys? I stumbled upon them.

Love as a balloon aloft, love as a sloop, a fine sailing ship, good images, I think.





This is the ImiLoa a sloop that berthed at the time of this picture in one of San Francisco's marinas.

There are differences in the rigging that distinguish a sloop from a cutter. Perhaps there are differences in the rigging of love as well.

Embarkation

When your flames lift wild
and soar as balloons, as some
do, reaching great height,
I have no choice but
love.

That means that I must embark
and take my place here
on this sloop, a ship
not for fools but for lovers
nonetheless. True frames
are provided here, shaped
to fit the way lovers bind
each other closer.

July 3, 2009 11:33 AM

Chanting Under The Eagle

This is the picture that my friend Jozien posted of a young eagle she saw up close the other day. For her blog try this: Juvenile Eagle While you are at it, she does nice outdoor work and I can recommend her archive and other blogs. She lives, married with a nearly grown son in the Canadian Yukon, in a wide spot in the road named Mendenhall, near Whitehorse. She's a Dutch immigrant to Canada and a good friend of mine because of the blogs.

Here is a poem I wrote about a yearling Bald Eagle, one of a pair. We had gone on vacation to Orcas Island, where my lover’s family had property and a small trailer. On this day we took her canoe out on Mountain Lake at the east end of Orcas. We canoed clear around the lake, heading north and then turning east at the north end, then going south to the dam at the south end of the lake. While we were headed south on the far side of the lake a pair of yearling Bald Eagles appeared overhead. They split and one went to our east side, the other to the west side. As we continued, the east eagle was perched on a tree limb but flew off as we neared him. We saw the west side eagle still perched in a dead tree. We continued down to the dam at the south end and returned on the west side.

We saw that the eagle was still in the tree as we approached and I got the idea at that point. I told my lady that we might try something and I then led her in a chant, “Om namo bhagavate vasudevaya.” This is a famous 12 sacred syllable chant honoring the God within us. We chanted low key, soft sounds as we paddled, careful to avoid too much noise of any kind, moving slowly and steadily. It worked. That eagle did not move even though we were only fifteen feet below him. His brother or sister (her?) was long gone out of site. The eagle cocked his head and gave us the eye as we passed, completely interested in whatever about the situation was holding him. I think it was the rhythmic quality of what was going on.

In any case, I felt completely honored that the eagle trusted us, blessed in every sense of the word.

Chanting Under The Eagle

In the green canoe,
paddling Mountain Lake, one end
around and then down
to the other end,
trees overhanging the lake's
rocky cluttered edge,
and in this one tree
giving us the cold sharp eye
a yearling eagle
holds court, permitting
us to pass under. We chant.
Shanti, shantihi.

July 3, 2009 10:05 AM

To My Child

I chose not to have children. I have written of it before and of the "reasons". The real business lies deeper, I think, and all the reasons belong at a shallower depth. I don't know why others take this tack in life and I don't really know why I did either. I don't know except to say it is all a part of some divine agreement, a complex list of what to do and what not to do that intertwines and interlocks.

I have never regretted this, at least not that I know, and neither have I gone out of my way to seek children out. The ones who show up in my life I almost always enjoy thoroughly, and I have often been told I would have made a good dad.

When I was in my early teens, I was one of the kids who could play with the younger kids, throw them around and all that and have great fun. It was high school and puberty that awakened me to my destiny in this regard. I have never stopped being able to fool around at the little kid level if I get the invitation.

To My Child

Sometimes I think on
how you have not come into
this world, not near me
at any rate, stopped
by my agreement with God
made so long ago.
I am far too old
to undo that deep a choice
for my solitude.

Jul 1, 2009 12:28 PM

That's When The Sun

Life is far more strange and even chaotic than we prefer unless we have developed the taste for the strange and chaotic. The ups and downs can be far too strong. I know that part of what drives the civilizing process that is the long history of our race is the demand to control this side of life and render it less. We wish to tame life in other areas as we do in the fields. We are fond of parks, of course and of tamed wilderness, and less fond in the main of the raw experience of wilderness when we are just another creature in it. It is not quite so friendly a place when we think we could end up someone’s dinner, even though through our efforts, that is the main experience they have of us, that we are dangerous and unkind and incessantly grasping and selfish.

Despite our efforts, life erupts as it did for me yesterday in the death of my small part Siamese companion, my familiar since 1991, killed accidentally at my own hand. I am thus rendering the verdict of the four-footeds, a consistent message, that association with the two-footeds is fucking dangerous. That is why so many stay away from us. We think we pay no price for this kind of treatment of the planet and the planet’s children, but we most certainly will.

I have been feeding birds for quite a while now, mainly House, Purple, and Goldfinches. It took most of a year before the winged ones found and trusted the source. My renter in the back yard has also put out food now and is receiving some winged ones. I am not surprised at the slow building of trust and I hope that the winged ones will not assume their welcome extends from our places to others nearby as a matter of course. We humans are often untrustworthy.

I have a friend who declares that his epitaph will be “But he meant well”. That’s about right for some of us. I fear even that lies beyond the aspirations of others on the planet. Perhaps we can rise above ourselves as we go on our ways. It is not enough to wish for better relations with things. We must practice, I think, have the courage to fail and resume immediately if we can our striving.

It may go better if we accept help from our familiars and from each other, not only from God but from God-With-Skin-On, whether the channels are two-footed ones or four-footed.

That's When The Sun

I thought my joy gone,
taken from me as summer
takes spring and fall takes
summer, as drought takes
rain, I thought my joy dried up.
That's when the sun broke
my bones open wide,
light roaring out of my eyes,
when you said to me,
yes.

June 29, 2009 12:45 PM

Laying Stories Down

Here is another shaman’s dream. I wish it was that easy. Lord, I really love cherries. Thank you for thinking of me.














Laying Stories Down

I shall tell stories,
give them vivid gilded shapes,
colors beyond ken.
I shall lay them down
among the cherries you picked
off the neighbor's tree
and spread here across
your kitchen's wooden table.
I shall fit them in
precisely with no effort,
bruise not one cherry.

We will change your life.

June 29, 2009 12:24 PM

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I prepared for posting the above before my day changed in a huge way.

I ran over my cat, Lynne Redgrave Cat. She was 19yrs, 3 mos. I killed her basically outright. She ran and hid behind a hedge next to the front door and died in minutes. She had taken to the bad habit of laying in the driveway, even on the sidewalk in front of the house. She was old, half blind, and significantly deaf, though she could hear better if she cared to. I was distracted and didn't think of her. She was not in an obvious place but I don't think I looked. I have been in the habit of moving her, but not this time. I am a hurtin' unit.

I couldn't keep her in the house because she quit having good bathroom habits in 2001.

I stopped everything, got my renter's attention (a long time friend who keeps two cats in the studio apt she rents from me) and we buried her in the back yard. We both cried openly. That's just how it is for me. Lynne came into my life in June of 1991 with her sister Vanessa, who died years ago. In the last year, she would partner with me when I sat here at the computer, taking over my mouse hand and accepting just about any body rub I could give her, hard around her ears, under her chin, up and down her neck (that one often got her hind leg going like a dog's). She would lay next to me in bed if I let her and next to me on the couch when I watched tv and ate my dinner. I would have loved her to have good habits so I could keep her in. She smelled bad and rarely cleaned but I could tolerate that. It is just that she shit on my rugs and peed there too as far as I know. I made a home for her in the garage, where she lived in the worst of the winter.

I think she no longer really cared, why she lay directly in the path of my car, and I am relieved that it was me instead of someone else who got her. Shit.

Winter's Ice

I find humor and pathos very close together sometimes. This picture of a shore bird (probably photoshopped?) is so evocative that I laughed outright for a long time the first time I saw it. It seems to depict an oil spill issue. The pathos in this humor is of course that this bird (if the photo is real) will probably die. The caption is perfect. "Fuck it. I'm going home." Perfect.

And as in the poem below, this bird is overloaded with weight. Next, here's Saul Bellow:

"And now here's the thing. It takes a time like this for you to find out how sore your heart has been, and, moreover, all the while you thought you were going around idle terribly hard work was taking place. Hard, hard work, excavation and digging, mining, moiling through tunnels, heaving, pushing, moving rock, working, working, working, working, panting, hauling, hoisting. And none of this work is seen from the outside. It's internally done. It happens because you are powerless and unable to get anywhere, to obtain justice or have requital, and therefore in yourself you labor, you wage and combat, settle scores, remember insults, fight, reply, deny, blab, denounce, triumph, outwit, overcome, vindicate, cry, persist, absolve, die and rise again. All by yourself? Where is everybody? Inside your breast and skin, the entire cast."
- Saul Bellow

In that passage, Saul Bellow illustrates how the shadow works, how perhaps even destiny sometimes works. He points out that weighty things go on beneath notice for a while before surfacing. Often then I will carry weight in confusion, not understanding, even misunderstanding where the weight comes from. It is likely that when I wake up at 3 AM to the buzzards who surround my bed eyeing me hungrily and whispering their dark messages, that these dark moments are authored in the shadowy work going on within me. It will be better for everyone when the work manifests in the light and I then can deal with it honestly if I have the courage. There is always that. I am bent and fear a broken back.

Winter's Ice

These days I notice
certain evergreens have changed
because winter's ice
weighed them down. No one
has figured out how to put
them back in their place.
They bow as if God
was near blessing them,
as if they needed such boon.
I feel the weight too.

June 29, 2009 10:47 AM

The Angel's Flight

I am sitting here in an idle summer’s afternoon. I sit in the cool of my house while outside the temperature has reached into the nineties. In the background, Deva Premal is singing

Gate, gate,
Paragate,
Parasamgate,
Bodhi Swaha

I ponder on this yearning to be "gone, gone, truly gone, beyond into the essence, gone beyond, salutations to the wise who have gone beyond".

This is a Buddhist chant, one of the most famous. I dream of the meaning of these things.

My heart settles into a rhythm that calms me and lets the cares of this day fade. In the quietude I feel the rustle of wings.

The Angel's Flight

The blue angel flew.
The air awoke at her touch
and began to spin,
glowing spiral clouds
running before and behind
her flight above worlds,
all the tangled worlds
she passed in wonder, amazed
at the small flightless
folk who groaned below

and her tears, bright lights, began
to fall like fine rain.

June 27, 2009 4:28 PM

Half A World

I confess to deep feeling. The Hindus make a yoga, a wisdom practice out of devotion. It is called Bhakti Yoga and is a true Path. It is among the deep needs of our destiny not only to find a true Path but as well to find the style of our journey. This is like choosing keyboards over guitar (a personal version) or like choosing poetry over deep painting. The Path in this way makes a difference. Devotion as a Path is much like the deepest commitments to a child, to a life partner, to finding a “soul mate”. Shanti, shanti, shantihi (peace, peace, most merciful peace). Bhakti yoga is not everyone’s Path. Thankfully, there are other yogas.

Half A World

All so far away,
might as well be galaxies,
at least half a world
to you from where I
sit trying to gather in
the essence of you,
of your passage through
days and days.

I look at what
you have left behind
for me and from it
claim I'd know you anywhere,
if you called my name.

June 27, 2009 8:43 AM

Weaving Light

"The word "compassion" generally inspires suspicion; it designates what is considered inferior, second-rate sentiment that has little to do with love. To love someone out of compassion means not really to love.

In languages that form the word "compassion" not from the root "suffering" but from the root word "feeling," the word is used in approximately the same way, but to contend that it designates a bad or inferior sentiment is difficult. The secret strength of its etymology floods the word with another light and gives it a broader meaning: to have compassion (co-feeling) means not only to be able to live with the other's misfortune but also to feel with him any emotion - joy, anxiety, happiness, pain.

This kind of compassion therefore signifies the maximal capacity of affective imagination, the art of emotional telepathy. In the hierarchy of sentiments, then, it is supreme."

- Milan Kundera,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being

I have entered a new stage of my life. Things have signaled that. I have been given this task of weaving that takes me far from my old self to the places where weaving light is possible, and I need you. I need you to come with me because I have been told I can’t do it alone. Have you the courage? Will you come? Will you even notice I have asked? You know who you are.

Weaving Light

It's impossible to
weave the strands of light without
your help or your song
to back the long work
of photon cloth, shades of color
the like of which are
never seen nearby.

That's why I've called you farther
than ever before.

June 27, 2009 3:05 PM

Snuffing The Air

I write of bears quite often it seems. I guess I relate to them somehow. I have been wondering lately how it all will turn out. Poor Mr. Bear. He will have to eat salmon alone it looks like. Lately I have found that not such a bad deal, myself.

I found myself unwilling to spend much time on the computer in the last couple days. But then wonder of wonders, an unsecured network close enough by. Now I am for an unknown time a member of the internet community. My renter in the back has been using this network for a while and thinks it is going to be stable for a while. With the absences growing in my circle, I suppose I will cast further out now as time allows.

I have written five more poems today. This little spurt of creativity continues, thanks to the websites that I visit, you friends who inspire me. I pray all my friends find their heart’s delight.

Snuffing The Air

Bear waddles along
snuffing the air for berries,
wishing she would give
him a chance. He knows
where salmon jump upriver,
would tell her, whisper
in her ear just so
but her ruffled fur proves it.
He's in a losing
game.

June 26, 2009 11:43 AM

Shape Shifting

"The truths we have come to understand need to find their visible expression in our lives. It is not enough to be a possessor of wisdom. To believe ourselves to be custodians of truth is to become its opposite, is a direct path to becoming stale, self-righteous, or rigid. Ideas and memories do not hold liberating or healing power. There is no such state as enlightened retirement, where we can live on the bounty of past attainments. Wisdom is alive only as long as it is lived, understanding is liberating only as long as it is applied. A bulging portfolio of spiritual experiences matters little if it does not have the power to sustain us through the inevitable moments of grief, loss, and change. Knowledge and achievements matter little if we do not yet know how to touch the heart of another and be touched."
- Jack Kornfield

Jack writes a strong truth when he writes: "Knowledge and achievements matter little if we do not yet know how to touch the heart of another and be touched." More commonly, in my opinion, we may know how to touch and be touched (at least something of it) but lack the courage. There are people in my life who openly tell me this business of love is too much for them. Touching the heart of another and being touched is after all a matter of fully opening, of willing to be naked in the face of what comes next when we are close whether it is touching or being touched. There is no avoiding that and it means ignoring the lessons of the suffering of the past in favor of faith in the future. This faith is not so much faith that suffering will not happen again, but that opening one's heart and the nakedness required is worth it.

It can be confusing too. Consider this:

"Everything in life is a question of drawing a line, and you have to decide for yourself where to draw it. You can't draw it for others. You can try, of course, but it doesn't work. People obeying rules laid down by somebody else is not the same thing as respecting life. And if you want to respect life, you have to draw a line."
- John Berger

That is equally true, is it not? It turns out that drawing lines does not contradict the openness required by love, but how shall we achieve that? The first step is to understand the futility of drawing lines in order to protect against suffering. That is not why we draw lines. We draw lines because it is in our nature to do so, not because there is any necessary utility in it.

Here is a light hearted example of what can happen.

Shape Shifting

You asked me to shift
shape with you. You took your flight
and left me with ears
and stronger haunches
than I've ever had before.
I hunkered, hiding
in the grass like hares
often do, seething about
how I would rather
be a bear, dammit!

June 25, 2009 12:52 PM

Trying To Make Sense Of It

When I am in love, I am automatically more confused even though I am filled with hope and faith in the goodness of things because of it. I am lightened considerably when I am in love, and yet there is a current of loss from the very beginning. Because I feel more alive, I have so much more to lose. This is difficult because I know beyond question that if I try to hold my love close, to cage it, to call out in warning, all that sort of thing, if I should try that I will lose love sooner rather than later. I am not sure if it is true of us all that we lose love by trying to save it. I know it is true of my experience. Love has me, not the other way around, and love initiates while I receive. In this sense I am as feminine as my partner. We are both under love. Love is my liege lord. Saying “in love” exactly means within the bounds of love, that love is bigger in every way.

Here is a master:

Love's Loneliness

Old fathers, great-grandfathers,
Rise as kindred should.
If ever lover's loneliness
Came where you stood,
Pray that Heaven protect us
That protect your blood.

The mountain throws a shadow,
Thin is the moon's horn;
What did we remember
Under the ragged thorn?
Dread has followed longing,
And our hearts are torn.

William Butler Yeats

And here’s me:

Trying To Make Sense Of It

As if you would give
me a flower one fall day,
me the teacher, you
the student, and I
would snuff the full aroma
of it all the way,
as if an apple,
as if we would ever meet,
as if you loved me.

June 25, 2009 12:21 PM

A Clutter Of Kittens

This is a poem about keeping Siamese cats. We had Char-Li, Lu-Si, and Beh-Si. The dams had kittens about two weeks apart. I was in Mrs. Winston’s class, in the fifth grade. Mrs. Winston had badly shaped front teeth, stained by tobacco. We were living in the central valley south and east of the Bay Area, a reasonable commute from the town of Stocton where my parents commuted for their teacher education certifications. They both taught high school on provisional licenses, that they got on the basis of both being Bachelor’s Degreed from Cal Berkeley and actively in teacher training. This was a California ploy to get teachers for the Baby Boomers as they were fast coming onto the scene and swelling the school rolls. World War II and the Korean conflict were over but there were still vacancies in many areas caused by war casualties. We lived first in town, renting a house not far from downtown in Oakdale. That’s where I lived in the fourth grade, Mrs. Looper’s class. As it became available, we moved into a tract home we purchased on contract on the edge of town in a housing development. I was then two houses away from the end of Pleasanton Place and the start of farm country and irrigation canals, where I went quite often. Oakdale is near to Modesto. Our phone numbers should you have a way to phone into the past, were 7774 and then 7777. There were no prefixes or area codes. I was 9 through 11, so this was 1954 through 1956. Something like that.

I fell one day, face first on a neighbor’s driveway and broke a front tooth in . I never had it fixed because it never hurt, until my last girlfriend wanted me to fix it. This was a mistake because the filling has never worked well, just as the caps did not then. I argued about it then, convincing my parents to do nothing because nothing was staying on the tooth. They were poor and mainly happy it didn’t hurt me.

Char-Li was the tom. He had a total kink at the tip of his tail and an attitude quite suitable to a tom that was close to feral. He was a fairly large and beefy cat. He would go wandering for several days at a time as the fields were full of live food on the hoof, so to speak. Lu-Si was long and slender, had come from a tough life and had touchy insides but she still succeeded in breeding. Beh-Si was an ordinary shape and more filled out, as if she was tabby rather than Siamese. At this time, Lu-Si had three kittens first. Then Beh-Si had five. The kittens got tangled after a while and did not care whose mother was whose. Neither did the dams care.

A Clutter Of Kittens

Once we had two dams,
a tom, and eight kittens too,
all skittering on
the well waxed lino
floors at tip top speed
trying to turn a hard left
into the kitchen
and making a pile,
a squirming kitten tangle
against the white fridge.

June 24, 2009 9:05:29 AM

Weekend off

I've been too busy visiting and other stuff. The poems will resume shortly. Thank you all for your patience.

Denial

Yay, I wrote three more poems today. They are sort of dark though. There is a root cause. For me darkness arises always from some form of selfish and self centered entanglement. Often this leads to a kind of arrogance because I feel in my smaller shaped self that I must know what is going on, or I will risk a fatal misstep. I may engage in my arrogance in one kind of intolerance or another, some form of rudeness. In the poems, the burden of my shortcoming leads to darkness. I was taught that the solution is transparency. So I have said so here.

****

Perhaps as artists we poets and musicians and all the others who yearn and commit and express, perhaps we see the hidden things that peek out from the crannies of life. Occasionally, the things we see are Holy. More often they are some form of lesser truth. On the other hand, here is another take on things:

"We live in all we seek. The hidden shows up in too-plain sight. It lives captive on the face of the obvious - the people, events, and things of the day - to which we as sophisticated children have long since become oblivious. What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color."
- Annie Dillard

I don’t mind that she sees it so differently, though I favor the crannies because of the ubiquitous nature of untamed self centered will. In any case because as Annie says in our sophistication we have forgotten an essential piece because we are too familiar, because of that we shall have to learn other ways to see things. I say it is “peripheral vision”. I see the holy out of the corner of my eye.

But what do I know? If you depend on something I say, I will deny it! :D

Denial

This is the time for
clamping shut, saying nothing,
standing on the fifth.
Whatever it is,
I’m as innocent as Hell!
Cicadas or no,
Imps notwithstanding,
Sure, you were changed, but not me!
I didn’t do it!

June 24, 2009 2:01 PM

I Am Not A Flat Man

Writing poems has picked up a little, several in the last two days. I’ve been here before… So much of life repeats. Some say a lesson comes around again and again until one learns its heart. Then it never returns. Perhaps that’s so.

I am a believer in hidden meanings and far more than those meanings that lurk in some of the chance encounters on the planet. I say Jung’s concept of synchronicity applies sometimes. I say there are cracks where the Divine shows through in the otherwise seamless landscape painted by all the selves on the planet. We, all the sentient beings, cannot govern everything with our demands for autonomy, not even with the sparks of selves in all sentience, all the way down to the inanimate. Where the autonomy of creatures reigns, there the Divine usually withdraws unless some kind of Divine necessity overrides things. The historical evidence shows Divine necessity rarely comes up in any recognizable way, probably because that kind of intervention seldom works for long.

There are cracks where the Divine shows through, but the cracks dance. They are dynamic and wink in and out in any particular location. Perhaps as well you will find the Divine in the patterns woven, like the light paintings of deep see creatures as they swim, or the glow worms of the night. We weave too, in our crowded shapes, too busy with our notions of our own business to see God emerge for a moment to tweak something because we have all overlooked that place at that moment. My friend Erin has asked about the gaps, so I offer this. There are many more ways the world gaps, like the moment of poise between breathing in and out, but the gaps in and between self will and self will are the main ones that pertain to our reasons to live, our destinies, where Divine aid comes from or magic works.

I Am Not A Flat Man

I've been here before,
you are not the only one.
Others, same struggle.
I cannot break through,
Know I am not the flat man
who would walk away
midway through the vows
that arise between the lines
and instead would ask.

You send me away
though my soul shows through my bones,
through my naked bones.

June 23, 2009 8:11 PM

Lightweight

Perhaps riding stars is riding the light. In that way the word lightweight takes on another meaning.

Slim Pickens rides the bomb at the end of Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love The Bomb. This is one of the better movies made in 1964. It was political satire and black comedy. I was nineteen or late eighteen when I saw it. I loved the humor in this movie. Peter Sellers, as Dr. Strangelove, had an arm he could not always control. That became a comedy routine for many young men of the day. I still do that every once in a while, usually my right arm tries to attack me. Peter Sellers did it first. I wonder what it is like to know that you have given a routine to millions of boys.

These days I am confronted with unwanted time off work. I have been off work too much in the last year. I had to fund myself. That means I am spending my retirement funds early. Now I need to work but my health is not that good and I worry because it is a real tiring thing to work. When I have a normal week I come home on Friday evening so tired that I am near to weeping on those days. Then I take all weekend doing very little just to recover. I may have to retire soon even though I don’t want to because the money is not there. All this reality pressure has me thinking in both realms. I really don’t want the mundane to triumph over fantasy, but it did when I was a small child with asthma and it is doing that more and more these days too. The asthma appears to be coming back. My breathing has basically sucked for three months now. As I cast back to the time when I finally had to give up singing, I realize that this is not new, that what I was calling allergies was riding on top of this condition. I could feel it at the best of times for at least three years now. It was just not that bad.

When I can, here is where I live:

The Key to Our Well-Being

Our society provides no curriculum or schooling on how to notice love or to recognize the many people who have transmitted its life-giving power. Most of us haven't been taught that to receive love deeply and transmit it wholeheartedly is a real human possibility, that it can be learned, and that to do so is the key to our deepest well-being, our spiritual life, and our capacity to bring more goodness into this world.

So as adults, we need to become newly aware of the love that has infused our lives all along, to turn our attention to it afresh with the eyes of a child. To do so is to become conscious of the tremendous capacity for love that even now permeates our being-to open to it, to be healed by its life-giving energy, and to participate in its power to renew our world. We can awaken to the deepest goodness in ourselves and others. We can learn to recognize and commune with the blessings that have always been pouring forth.

- John Makransky, "Love is All Around", tricycle (Fall 2007)

Lightweight

Like Slim Pickens rode
the bomb, I shall ride God’s stars
though I heard you call
such stuff time wasters.

My folks would agree with you
that I am easy,
too easy, a fool
in fact, and prone to fritter
my life on shallow
things. But I wonder
if riding stars counts really
as a light-weight trade.

June 23, 2009 3:21 PM

What I Am Today

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

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

What I Am Today

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

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

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

June 23, 2009 12:51 PM

The Dangers Of Living With Dragons

The end of things is often so complicated that there is no graceful way out. I have been dumped by my last three loves, though my marriage was so obvious and necessary that I had no real hard time losing the relationship but instead relief that she was going into the distance. Not so with the last two. I fought hard to keep and make permanent the first relationship after my wife. The second, I thought was going to work, but then things happened and they led to introspection and that led to decisions that led to a severance after four years and nine months or so. I am not sure how long she really intended to end us, but she had given me a task, saying that it would lead to a continuation and then as I was doing it successfully, she ended us as lovers anyway. That was tough. One of the partners is usually far more invested than the other. She had plans she knew I could not join. During our time, I had mixed feelings but so much respect and warmth for the woman that I knew I would be fine and I mostly assumed that conditions would break in our favor and lead to permanence. She questioned our relationship and waxed and waned throughout all the years.

That permanence did not happen, not even close. In its place I was given a prayer discipline out of necessity and I succeeded in making the transition without rancor. It was a reasonably close thing. The work was easy enough but the patience called for was considerable for about a year. I was poised to fall into hostility, and could easily have done so. The prayer discipline has held me in good stead for a number of years now, used in many other issues and I am still very good friends with that woman. This pleases me any number of ways.

The Dangers Of Living With Dragons

I realize I've
burned your trust as if I breathed
dragon's fire through holes
in my wizened soul.
I would slink off like weasels
do if I weren't caught
here in the web we
wove long ago together
out of dragon's hair.

June 23, 2009 12:34 PM

I'll Go Riding

I am learning the ways that we fool ourselves as much as anything these days. As I wrote Thursday in Here Be Dragons, I am reading a book that is describing in depth the various ways that we avoid the truth of our unpredictable condition on the planet, and as well this book is describing all the falsehoods that we put in place so that the world does appear predictable. We demand predictable lives. We want to have control. We think that an uncontrolled life isn’t fair and we buy insurance so that we come out of an unpredictable “accident” all right. Insurance companies bet that these odd occurrences are so rare that they will make money hedging our bets.

So we know that the other stuff, the unpredictable stuff, does happen, but we minimize it, or some other ploy. Many people will risk it if they can, as I did in the nineties. I was working on contract and getting all my pay as a gross income. I had to do quarterlies to pay my taxes and health insurance was up to me. I couldn’t afford it. For most of ten years I did without. Then I was nearing sixty. I said to myself I will have to get some coverage. Then my boss hired me direct again as an indirect raise, giving me the employer health coverage. That’s how I came to have Kaiser Permanente insurance when I had my heart event. It was a $200 heart event, angioplasty, and stent placement. Even had they had to send me to another hospital for more advanced heart work, it still would have been in that range. This is where Kaiser Insurance shines. I am on several heart drugs, blood pressure and cholesterol meds. Kaiser shines there too.

There are professions engaged in predicting the unpredictable. They believe their own bullshit and we believe them. It is actually demonstrable that too much “knowledge” in a fundamentally unpredictable field actually makes it less likely you can predict well. This would be all about business, except it is not. When we marry, we are mostly all sure it is for life. Wrong. That happened to me after twenty years. Who would have thought? That woman sobered me up, then lived with me sober for another decade before she began to fail herself. Then in a few short years alcoholism forced our divorce and killed her. That is the situation that ruined our retirement, and has me in the pickle I am in now. I am quite close to not being able to work for reasons of health. I need five more working years, but I suspect I won’t get much retirement out of it anyway. It is just that this maxes out Social Security, and pays me nearly a thousand bucks more a month by working longer.

So you see, I know intimately how predictions fail.

I'll Go Riding

I feel cut off now,
at the knees at least, or topped
like a tree might be
thinking like you did,
approaching life so.

Instead, today I'll ride you
like a wild dragon,
like a dappled mare,
ride you into the heart's core
and beyond tall tales

into the truth of things.

June 22, 2009 12:24 PM

Meningitis

I don’t know if this is good poetry or not. I think it is part of this thing I have taken to calling a life’s work. I am blogging it seems pretty much all of me from fantasy to history. This is certainly part of it. I went to West Point directly after high school graduation in 1963. I spent Plebe summer and into October there, resigned my appointment and entered Santa Clara University to salvage the year. That was really a mistake and I nearly failed out, but I had compulsory ROTC and made Cadet of the Year because my training was so far beyond anything anyone else had. I was assigned to a Signal Company in the US Army Reserve, a company doing telephone line work. I attended weekly meetings and began my six year commitment.

The summer of 1964 I was required to go to Fort Ord, not that far from San Jose. I entered Basic Training on a track to go to Advanced Training in a Signal Company MOS. Very near the end of my Basic, I succumbed to the Meningitis epidemic that was passing through the camp. It happened as I write here, with my morning feeling unusually strong. I assume now that my immune system was in top gear, not yet losing the battle. It didn’t take long to feel awful. By the time I got to the hospital I was barely able to stand or walk I felt so bad. They wanted a chest xray and I went to the area. No one was there so I lay down across the chairs. That was maybe 11 AM. When they finally noticed me I was nearly comatose and my fever had climbed to 106 degrees, maybe by noon. I went from fine to that sick in the matter of about three hours.

They rushed me to the ward and put me on an ice blanket in an isolation room. Now there’s a trip. That was really painful. They also were concerned that I might convulse and puke and aspirate it. So I got the gastric tube. That was also really unpleasant. I was not in any condition to be frightened. I was really uncomfortable though and kind of angry about that in a weak whiny kind of way. It especially seemed to me they overreacted with using the gastric tube.

Afterwards they were treating me with massive doses of Penicillin and I finally started to react badly. I assume I am allergic to it now. When the fever broke they transferred me to the ward. I was unable to move much. Capillaries had burst all over my body in the heat of the fever and my body was bruised from the tips of my toes to the top of my head. This included all my internal organs. It took a month in the hospital, and then another month at home. After that I returned to Fort Ord to finish my basic and was put in the Holding Company supply room for something to do. That made me a supply clerk.

I continued to attend meetings for two more years before I got fed up and quit in the fall of 1966. I have told that story here on my blog somewhere. You don’t usually quit the Army without unpleasant consequences, since they consider that desertion. But I got away with it with a great deal of help from my Mom who was really invested in seeing her baby boy not go to prison or worse. We sort of won the battle explaining that my actions were caused by the brain damage of the meningitis. For my part this included a four month stay in a mental hospital in 1967 prior to disappearing off the Army Reserve map for the rest of my time by going to East Pakistan for two years, more than fifty miles from any army facility.

I have, of course absolutely no concern about any of this, never have. I was not a deserter in the normal sense, toed the line for four years, and nearly gave my life in Basic Training. I was certainly wounded and was damaged as badly as other people who got to go home. But mainly I was not concerned because Viet Nam was, in my opinion an illegal war and deserved an action against it. When I quit, I was conscious of all that too. I did not act very cleverly, but my Mother was more than capable in working the system. I know she did not think much of the war either and certainly was against me going to it.

Meningitis

I woke to brightness
and felt like a million bucks
that morning, almost
done with the basic
and ready to graduate
but then started to
crash down fast, so weak
of a sudden, weird, alone
stumble to sick call,
to hospital, there
to lay across chairs so ill
alone waiting for
something to happen
and then after hours they took
me fast to the ward,
to the ice blanket
and the fucking gastric tube
and the pain of it
all and the month long
slowly now got my life back,
knew my brain had burned.

June 21, 2009 1:29 PM

Here Be Dragons

It is important to live as if things are as permanent as stone. It is built into us genetically or in some other basic way that we rely on things not to change or to change in manageable ways, ways that flow slowly and rather predictably along. We desperately want assurance that our families will thrive among other things and big, abrupt changes are definitely not the ticket even though we all know they happen and are not predictable.

However, we have to admit impermanence into our lives. Impermanence, the fact that absolutely everything changes eventually, is the bedrock that actually does not change. It's important to live with impermanence as a frame of reference so that we can approach each moment or each day with a sense of humility about what we are able to do and what we are not able to do and relinquish control over things we cannot have control over.

In order to admit impermanence into your life you have to also admit interdependence as well. You have to invest yourself in love and concern for people, accept people's love as if that's the only thing that exists. It is only in this way that you can form the courage that can meet impermanence honestly. There are many methods you can use to achieve this spiritual stand.

Thus, the seeker's commitment to living is to live as if everything is always there forever within the acceptance that nothing is going to survive. If you can live so that you embrace this dilemma then you have a chance at living honestly on the planet.

--This is an exerpt edited, modified and expanded by me, taken from Impermanence: Embracing Change by David Hodge and Hi-Jin Kang Hodge, published by Snow Lion Publications

That is really something to ponder. Unfortunately the original quote that I had access to was somehow garbled and basically made no sense the way it was presented. I am quite sure that what I have done has done no violence to the original intent at all.

I am currently reading a book, The Black Swan, The Impact Of The Highly Improbable, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It is a presentation of the nature of impermanence from the perspective of Western business and science with attention paid mainly to those big changes we would rather do without. A Black Swan is an event deemed highly improbable yet causes massive consequences. Using this term comes from the disturbance that happened in taxonomy when Australia was discovered because at that time Europeans were quite sure there was no such thing as a black swan. All swans were white. There are members of the swan family in Australia that are black but no one from Europe had yet been there. September 11, 2001 was a Black Swan.

I guess I think that my poem is kind of a black swan poem.

Here Be Dragons

The relief I feel,
the flung knives going this time
into the torso
of some other poor
sap of a man who dared cross
you, telling you there
are no dragons now
if ever, when right before
your bright blue vision
one plainly sits at
the end of your gold laced rope,
patient with your hold.

June 21, 2009 11:30 AM

Without Wine Or Good Bread

Between the Mundane and the Magical
There is a term in the Celtic tradition that I find resonates with something fundamental about Zen practice. The Celts spoke of "thin places," places like caves or wells or other special sites where the boundary between the mundane and magical was permeable. To me, Zen practice offers a kind of thin place, a "place" where we can discover that there is fundamentally no separation between ourselves and others, that what we seek is always so close, always right here.
--Roshi Pat Enkyo O'Hara, tricycle, An Introduction to Zen (Spring 2009)

When I came across the O'Hara quote, I found myself rising to it as if it floated in mid air calling to me. The meeting of the magical and the spiritual and the mundane in special locations is an important part of my practice. Without having a clue how you should go about it, I nevertheless recommend getting one or more power points on the planet, places that are thin in this sense. It is helpful to know you can access the power in some sense, that you know where the thin places are. In my experience it seems unnecessary to make a big thing of the thin places. They are conduits and the flow takes care of itself because there are two features to the flow: the stream of power and the stream of destiny (intelligence and communication).

Without knowing I was doing so, I constructed access to one on the Willamette River in 1991. I had a work assignment as a construction coordinator on a project I had designed and drafted. As they built the testing facility, I was constructing a spiritual connection to Willamette Falls. As I finished my assignment there, I realized what had happened for me. It is gone now but it served through the nineties. I could stand on the Oregon City side of the Willamette at the Falls and look at what I had done. I had constructed a personal shrine in a thin place on the planet, a holy place as all the locals of the First Nations can tell you. Willamette Falls is a thin place. I could drive past it as I did daily and feel the surge. The Nineties were dark days for me as my marriage came undone, as I watched my wife fail and finally die in 2001, as my future disappeared in all recognizable forms. One aspect of my survival in this terrible passage was that I did not have to buttress things using only my own power. I could rely on Higher Power. I knew where one gateway in the flow of power and destiny was.

These days the power flows in part from the buried treasure beneath the dogwood in my front yard. A squirrel consecrated this spot as I watched one day, and I have thanked him since for showing me a thin place. You would know Sir Squirrel (perhaps Lady Squirrel as I don’t tell them apart) to be a remarkably bold creature. His presence on the ground for as long as that ceremonial burial took was a feat if you knew how many cats call my neighborhood home. Cats love playing with squirrels.

Without Wine Or Good Bread

How is it with me
today of all days after
all that has happened?

What on earth could I
say now that I haven't said
before a dozen
ways, more than that, so
intent am I on speaking
my tattered truth out
to you all?

I am
vacant.

The sublime
comes direct to my spirit
with me just passed by.
I am in empty
space, without wine or good bread
but I'm used to it.

June 21, 2009 8:15 AM

Bested By Words

There is a downside to my claim that the poesy words just come. Often by the time I am done with a poem it is completely different from anything I thought I started to do. I have to give up all thought that I actually do this stuff. It is my unconscious weirder brother that does it. I guess I sort of get away from responsibility like that, up side. I am darker, more frivolous, weirder, cruder, and several other not necessarily savory things, down side. Sometimes I actually start out with an aim, say a seductive poem to a female friend because it is all harmless here but by the end of the poem I am nearly embarrassed because the poem is hardly seductive and borders on mean or something. The last example of this is quite recent but you will have to wait most of a year before you get to see the poem and by then I will not really remember where I originally placed it, in whose comments it appeared. That’s the good part of having over three hundred in the queue. Heh. That’s another responsibility distance…that I am posting the oldest poems first.

Suffice it to say, the poems speak for themselves. That is why I write these intros. At least then I get to say something…

Bested By Words

I often wonder
at my yearning to enter
this room filled with song
yet again after
the beating I took last time
when the words and lines
turned me from my hope
one more time, turned me into
knots they chose for me.

June 20, 2009 9:05 AM

The Rumble To Grind Me

Here is the original form I developed at the start of my blogging. I had found haiku sites. It is a Japanese haiku form, but it has more room in it. I don’t remember what it is called, but it was developed for sitting in teahouses and singing back and forth between competing poets. One of my favorite things is when I go to your site or you come here and we trade poems back and forth. This is a summer in upstate New York poem. The weather does get oppressive there, then the thunderhead builds and a rainy tantrum ensues. After that you get a day or two before it all builds again. I loved those storms. I was at West Point doing plebe summer in my seventeenth year on the planet, amazed at where I was, already knowing that I would not stay. I was simply too young.

That I left was good for me, I think. It was 1963. I would have graduated in 1967. Guess where I would have gone. I do not think I would have done well as a Lieutenant in Viet Nam at the age of twenty-one or two. Instead, in 1967 thru 1969 I was in East Pakistan, living with Mom and Dad, working at the Holy Family Hospital in Dacca as a Financial Secretary and paymaster. I was doing home study in philosophy and psychology, working hard on my guitar technique, teaching guitar, getting stoned on ganja and charras, making love with American girls, two of them but one at a time, and singing in a madrigal group that a Swede named Bengt Sjerblom started for the international community. As I returned home to California, I was carrying the Honorable Discharge that acquitted me of all further obligations to the US military. There is of course a bit more to that story. I have told it here before.

The Rumble To Grind Me

Hot light stabs my eye.
The first fat drop falls right here
on the front of me.

I ache for the downpour start,
for the rumble to grind me,

for the change of air
after all this oppression,
for you by my side.

June 19, 2009 12:48 PM

River Run

Sometimes life is constrained in walls. Sometimes life opens up in wide meanders. Sometimes life takes place in a forest, a savannah, a swamp. I have been in the swamp. It is very hard to remember the original objectives when alligators are persistent distractions. Right now I am having a health problem that will not recede all the way to gone. It is not serious right now but it is not gone either. Last year near this time, I felt I was in a riverine canyon. It was good for poetry.

River Run

The walls have come in
tight to us and we are like
rapids running fast
over a rocky
bed, so many of us but
not all, no not all.

There is erosion
and we don't know how weakened
walls still contain us
or if, as they fall
will they dam us up, stop us
or not. Will we spill,
continue down stream?

June 19, 2009 9:42 AM

I Can Almost

I am not only capable with my hands in massage. I can also use my hands beyond the body in energy work. I have that kind of confidence. I also have received this kind of work and find it at least as effective as straight massage in certain situations. I am grateful to live in a body that allows for effective poetry, music, dance and touching. Actually dance is now beyond me in most ways. In my younger years I could play my body in dance very much like another musical instrument. That is a highly aerobic activity.

In high school I did musicals. I loved the chance to dance on stage. I loved the kind of partnership that stage dancing offered. I have never had a lithe dancer’s body.

The thing about energy work, it is effective but there is no good theory to back it up, at least nothing that works scientifically, not that I know of, not that passes my test as science. I don’t really care. I have engaged in more than a few practices that are like that. I don’t expect that science will ever actually take things like magic and find a place for them. I believe the whole basis for science precludes certain parts of our human world. Only idiots decide at that point that science then denies them. That is not science but instead a kind of religious dogmatism you might call scientism. I believe that sort of thing is a mistake wherever it is found.

I Can Almost

I can almost taste
the salt past, the lemon day,
the strawberry dream
of days yet to come.
I can almost see flowers
move seductively
as they tease the bees
into doing their deep bidding.
I can almost feel
your arms as they move
gently above my prone form,
stirring the near air.

June 18, 2009 12:20 PM

A Dangerous Fragility

Pablo is another poet. He wrote a poem with “dangerous fragility” as the translation of his phrase. I liked it. I will always favor this one too: “You hold the key to love and fear both in your trembling hand.”

I knew a girl who had a trailer at a nudist camp. I was nearly her boyfriend. I never went with her, but I was intrigued. She called herself a nudist Buddhist. I am no longer in the same spaces and this stuff doesn’t really call to me that much any more. However, I believe deeply in a profound transparency.

I want to live such that there are no more secrets. Remaining discreet is a part of civility. You don’t puke your stuff out on the shoes of others whether they want to know of it or not. On the other hand, how freeing is the thought there is no longer anything I must keep quiet. It is all too long ago, or they are dead, or so long gone that none of it matters anymore. Then all that stuff becomes grist for the sharing, to teach, or to establish rapport, or to comfort – to just touch base and share connection.

Me too, brother. I too used to stress out farm animals. Heh. Well that may be a bit of an exaggeration, but I do have my stories.

A Dangerous Fragility

I am low, broken,
ground down like the sand that's left
when you grind down glass.
I feel surrounded,
dangerous fragility.
(Pablo wrote that phrase)

Now you point it out.

The capacity for fear
and for love is one,
from the same deep place.

You say abandon my last
towel to the wind.
Vanquish the howling
complaints and open the shades.
No more ghosts today.

June 16, 2009 12:51 PM

Songs Arrive In The Air

Sometimes it seems like the stories, the poems, the songs are all around, in the air, waiting for us to manifest them for and with each other. They are not created. They are born, but like one of the children of the gods, full grown and graceful.

I am a caretaker only.

Songs Arrive In The Air

When I listen your
stories take me up and I
fly south to season's
end, to the green sea
found there, to the low sandy
hills of the old shore.
When I listen songs
arrive in the air above
and I remember.

June 16, 2009 12:29 PM

Fellow Traveller On The Path

There is a primate social activity, probably the best that we could do for each other if we still did it ourselves. They call it grooming and I guess it is essential if you are furred all over as most primates are. They just decide and start to do it, looking in all the crevices and between all the hairs, picking out that which does not belong. They pay exquisite attention. The one being groomed sits quite still.

Sometimes in AA meetings I will touch someone’s back and do some “grooming”. I love doing that. In choir at the local community college, they would chain up sometimes, though the age difference never allowed me to join in on that one. I even have a massage table at home. At one point I was going to get a license. I realized that I was not really in love with touching enough though. It still matters who I touch and I don’t think that is quite the case with true massage therapists. On the other hand, I work with energy too.

Recently a friend blogged on this, saying we do not touch each other enough. Can I have an “Amen”?

Fellow Traveller On The Path

The last time you rolled
I clung to your fur, looking
out for the things you
pick up doing that,
like the weeds, seeds, dung, dirt
and the detritus
of your longer romps
with the one who gave us this
strange, wonderful life.

June 14, 2009 10:05 AM

Coming Apart

"It is this admirable, this immortal, instinctive sense of beauty that leads us to look upon the spectacle of this world as a glimpse, a correspondence with heaven. Our unquenchable thirst for all that lies beyond, and that life reveals, is the liveliest proof of our immortality. It is both by poetry and through poetry, by music and through music, that the soul dimly descries the splendors beyond the tomb; and when an exquisite poem brings tears to our eyes, those tears are not a proof of overabundant joy: they bear witness rather to an impatient melancholy, a clamant demand by our nerves, our nature, exiled in imperfection, which would fain enter into immediate possession, while still on this earth, of a revealed paradise."
- Charles Baudelaire

I hunger for a change. The first time a revealed paradise actually seemed possible to me, I committed to a new way of life. I know I am not the only one. American history is peppered with utopian movements. When my Hippie brethren went to the countryside they were in that time worn American tradition. A certain kind of revolutionary found world wide will ache and then work hard to impose a utopia on us all if he can, certain we will thank him for it once it is up and running. Communists and socialists, but also the more extreme forms of capitalists all do this. I am not different in my yearning, though I may be different in what I yearn for. These revolutionaries are not only the politically motivated; they are not even primarily political. Most utopias are of a religious or spiritual nature.

As I wrote in this next poem, such sentiment, such motivation is not only at the social level. However, I am fragile, and I know it.

Coming Apart

That single rusty
nail you placed on the table
beside my rocking
chair gives me concern
that something's about to come
down, some essential
piece of me is loose,
will fall off if I get up,
try to follow you.

June 14, 2009 8:29 AM

Where You Planted Me

I was speaking to a woman struggling with a breakup and found myself saying to her, “What do you think we (meaning men) actually have that you need so badly?” Short of a good job and lots of money where maybe she doesn’t have any, I can’t really think of much, but the man she is troubled by is not one like that. He doesn’t have those things and further, she has two children and the usual baggage. What man with all that is going to fall at her feet and give her the release from the burdens she carries and thinks she needs? Wow. I think this woman is hugely attractive just all by herself. Talk about cutting my own predatory throat (I have nothing you need). Time to grow up, I guess. Growing up in public is a bitch. Ick.

Where You Planted Me

You have taken me,
taken the true heart of me,
you say, giving me
an old space in your
new garden, just there beside
the Goodnight Roses,
where you last planted
iridescent dragon bones
and grew last year's dreams,
annuals. I hope
as you water me that I'll
be perennial.

June 14, 2009 7:18 AM

The Journey To Your Heart

Strangely like the hologram of today, there is an ancient image from India, Indra’s Net. Indra is, with Varuna and Mitra, the Adityas - the trinity of the principal Devas. Indra is also Devendra, Lord of the Devas (Dev-endra). He is a smiter of obstacles and He gave being to the Sun and Morning. He is King of the gods (that is if gods are ruled, then Indra rules) and He is then likened to Thor in Norse and Zeus in Greek mythologies. He is God of War, Storms, and Rainfall. There is much more. We carry the meaning of the word Deva in English when we say Divine.

Later the Mahayana Buddhists developed a vision of the emptiness, dependent origination, and interpenetration of things, taking Indra’s Net as the metaphor. This developed vision appeared in the third century. In the Hindu world view of the ancients, Indra’s Net hangs over his palace on Mount Meru. Mount Meru is like Mount Olympus for the Greeks, the axis of the world. There are jewels of a magical cut at each vertex of the net and so each jewel contains within it the reflections of every other jewel (and this is where scientists are amused that the concept of the hologram is really really old in theology). That is how the world holds together, held in Indra’s Net.

This means that if you remove the net, the world dissolves into the original emptiness, the chaos of pure potential. What we call real is actually emptiness, dependent origination, and interpenetration projected holographically. What we call real is the projection Indra's Net, the covering of His palace on Mount Meru so long as He allows the sun and the morning, war and the storms continuance, so long as He choses to smite the obstacles and does not take down and fold His net.

Thank God for Wiki. Wiki lets me say all this with some degree of accuracy.

The Journey To Your Heart

When I think I am
like everybody else
then someone says not,
and when I think I'm
different, that's when someone
says, Fool, there's no way!
This is like jewels
in the sky flashing colors
in the changing light.

I have seen your heart
and bathed in the warm waters
I crossed to find you.

June 13, 2009 2:44 PM

Small And Simple Grief

Steven Levine, friend of Ram Dass, informed both by Bhakti (Devotional) Yoga and Theravada Buddhism (live as we believe he lived style Buddhism rather than go where we believe he pointed style Buddhism), a practitioner in Western grief work (with Elizabeth Kubler Ross and elsewhere) and married to Ondrea. Steven, true to his Hindu experiences, brings "God" into his Buddhism, or perhaps brings Buddhism into his worship and devotion as do I, though I am Mahayana and also more eclectic than even Hindus care for. They are older, live now in seclusion dealing with their own failing health it is said on Wiki.

"We use the word "love" but we have no more understanding of love than we do of anger or fear or jealousy or even joy, because we have seldom investigated what that state of mind is. What are the feelings we so quickly label as love? For many what is called love is not lovely at all but is a tangle of needs and desires, of momentary ecstasies and bewilderment - moments of unity, of intense feelings of closeness, occur in a mind so fragile that the least squint or sideways glance shatters its oneness into a dozen ghostly paranoias. When we say love we usually mean some emotion, some deep feeling for an object or a person, that momentarily allows us to open to another. But in such emotional love, self-protection is never far away. Still there is "business" to the relationship: clouds of jealousy, possessiveness, guilt, intentional and unintentional manipulation, separateness and the shadow of all previous "loves" darken the light of oneness. But what I mean by love is not an emotion, it is a state of being. True love has no object."
- Stephen and Ondrea Levine

Small And Simple Grief

The small, simple griefs
are as bottomless as those
catastrophic sized,
and worse in their way,
personally placed down in
the deeper caverns
where you can only
hold them, and hold each other
knowing most won't care.

June 13, 2009 11:33 AM

A Just Love

There is room for at least one other in each true relationship. In fact it is essential. It was said a little while ago that it takes a village to raise a child. It is quite possible that it takes a village to build a true love. Lacking such a village, we are called to rely more radically on the one who left us here, who will return for us at last.

That last phrasing is lifted from a song written and sung by many in the folk and folk/rock scene in my younger years. I sang it too. It is one of the names of God.

A Just Love

Love like this is just.
Love like this fits us, a rose
on the pillow left
by The One who will
take confusion and weave it
into a halo
that hovers above
like a crown of thorns lifted
off us in blessing.

June 13, 2009 9:14 PM
Retitled and Amended, July 14, 2010 7:15 PM

Neutron Lives

The proton is also “three minute jewels so glued tight” that in fact they call the particles doing the gluing (when they are particles rather than a wave function force) gluons. This is a feature of what is called the “strong nuclear force.” It is so strong in fact that it takes temperatures and pressures almost beyond imagining to pry the jewels apart. It is expected that such a state, a terribly hot and pressurized quark soup can exist (the jewels are called quarks). They call such a state of matter a plasma. Minutely shortly after the Big Bang, all that existed was quark soup.

Elements like Carbon and Oxygen are stable atoms composed of protons, neutrons and electrons. I am not sure if the ten minute life of a neutron is a free neutron only, not part of a nucleus but I kind of think there is a kind of magic here and that even while carbon lasts like in diamonds indefinitely, the neutrons involved do change out every ten minutes or so somehow. In any case, there are bajillions of them, astonishingly large numbers involved in any measurable amount of matter. That they constantly wink out and others(?) reappear (how would you tell them apart(??)) is just the coolest thing, only bettered by the virtual particles which spontaneously appear and disappear instantly because they always manifest in pairs and appear as matched particles and anti-particles.

Protons, by the way, last a really long time, aeons, no matter that the uncertainty principle demands their demise. Eventually though, protons disappear and are replaced too.

Neutron Lives

The neutron is three
minute jewels so glued tight
that they will not blow
apart for at least
ten whole minutes.
This seems short to us bigger
people but not so.
Neutrons pass aeons in
seconds, and grow entire worlds
which pass in minutes.

June 12, 2009 12:45 PM

Give Me New Wind

We mostly do not change even if we want to. This is so well known in the healing trades that policy is made on that opinion. Most of us most of the time end up doing the same old no matter what. We recognize each other after years not only because we so often look like ourselves but we act that way too.

There are other outcomes, other people, however, people who can and do change. First obvious clue - actors can successfully play their body and character as a tool for a role. They not only gain and lose weight at will but they change the way they emote, they way they speak, the way they use their bodies to communicate, knowing what they do as they change and what they do when they have changed. It can be disconcerting if you ever have the chance to know one of these people because they can after a time slip in and out of roles really easily. Con men do this too, so it comes as no surprise that this might be spooky to some folk.

Under the right circumstance many of us may be able to make basic changes if we are given the right push, the right pressure. AA has a slightly better than 20% rate of changing drunks into sober alcoholics. Nobody has a better record. The road is rocky too. Most get drunk after starting in AA at least once, some many times. This is a remark to the seriousness of compulsion and addiction, but it is also a remark to the simple truth that most of us just don't change even when we recognize a dire need.

The AA solution involves a Higher Power. This is a recognition that we need power we don't have in order to change and as well a place to stand outside ourselves to wield that power. That is what makes the difference, a power we don't have within us until we open to it, and as well a new place to stand in order to use it.

Give Me New Wind

The divide between
us, the gap that shows sometimes
when you dive into
the joys that raise you -
you swing them like your children
before my gray shadow,
this gap is my call
to God to change my old shape
and give me new wind.

June 12, 2009 12:29 PM

The Poem As A Spell

I have returned to this side of things. I had a good visit but my health is still an issue so I am not so happy. I use drugs to hammer at the problem but wind up with other side effects that I don't like. I am grateful for one more day off before I return to work. I have so far this time only lost one day of work with this trouble.

I don't think the doctors have anything for this. They never have yet, not in my childhood, not in my adult years. The allergies are lifelong, just worse now that I am older. To say it like that seems so minor but choking is no joke, nor is the bloodpressure rise in my chest and head in a long paroxysm of uncontrolled coughing. I can sometimes shout it out, use anger to match and control it. Then after a day of this shit I am exhausted, and I have to pace through the day. Heat makes it worse. Air conditioning makes it worse. Winter makes it worse. WTF. In other words I can't do anything that really makes it better but end up in the right part of the world (where the fuck is that?? and why won't it hold still so I can find some place??) or live like the boy in the bubble. Kill me now. That's a better alternative than the boy in the bubble. I had enough of that shit already. I vowed I was not going to live like that when I moved away from home and it worked my whole adult life, but now this shit has returned. I refuse to live like that. It is stupid and shameful (I don't care how insane that sounds; it's really how it feels) and much too hard to do. It shows completely what the real state of things are. If I can't live here in simple ways, just getting along, then I shouldn't be here. I surely don't think it is worth struggling to stay. Often at the end of a paroxysm of uncontrolled coughing, I am so overfilled with Oxygen that the breathing reflex stops and I don't breathe for a time while I am getting my shit back together. That's because I almost go unconscious every time and do go unconscious sometimes. That was the state I was in back in January on the road to the chiropractor when I had my accident and hit a telephone pole. It feels really good to not breathe in those aftermath times. I start again and notice I did not miss it. This is just how it is.

We all have troubles.

The Poem As A Spell

An incantation
to implant your old home world
into us from street
to summer hot street
worked by spinning and turning
and the thrumming beat,
a younger magic
than is your own land
itself, once land of shamans
older than we will
ever be,
ever
be.

Interlude Continues

"We live in this mysterious world as if we understand it and so wonder becomes lost. We live as if we know more than we don't know and that isn't true. Each moment of our lives we stand at a crossroads: we can reduce the profound to the mundane or we can intuit the continuous and vital mystery through which we move."
- G. Bluestone

There you go.

I notice, have noticed my whole adult life that whenever you really know something special, some little thing maybe, but as well the biggest things, I have noticed if you know and try to say and someone else really doesn't know, then they don't get it. It is better in the long haul to just shut up. It is better, that is, unless it somehow figures in your destiny to be a Don Quixote figure.

The Taoists emphasize this. They say the really enlightened often look just like street people or better, the countryside version of street people. It is well known that when you are busy discovering something really not well known you will look quite foolish to those who don't see. Someone pointed out that is like you looking out at the universe and them looking at you looking. They will mainly see your arse. Cover it well.

Hmmm.

Nothing for it...hammer away. Say it this way, say it that, try to avoid dead language and cliche. Leave the cracks open. Occasionally someone falls through a crack and everything changes.

Not everyone who reads here comments. In fact, most don't. I have one reader who has been back 161 times since the end of May. I know where the people who read and comment are, more or less. None of them are in this location, I am fairly sure. I can only think of one person who comments (rarely) that I don't really know where from. This person does not comment as far as I know. Kudos to this person and whatever he/she is up to.

I have not copyrighted anything. It is not my aim.

I am healing and I am also leaving town for a couple days. See you when I loop back to my perihelion. I am going to go sit in a prison visiting room again, with the low uncomfortable tables designed so you can't pass anything under them, but you can't lean on them either. You can't wear levis. You can't take anything in except coins for the vending machines and a few photos. You sit in rows on the same side as the other visitors while the inmates sit on the other side with a wider aisle on that side for the guards to traverse. There are three long table sets and two long aisles. The center table set is actually two sets with the visitors back to back and a skinny aisle between. They would never let the inmates sit back to back. That is an example of the shitty little things done for control that if you are an inmate you notice and have to learn or get in trouble. Don't hang out back to back for any number of reasons. The other inmates want control also, by the way.

Over in one area are some glassed in seats where people very occasionally visit problem inmates but usually they are empty. There is a big guard station at the inmate entry end of this area and a totally enclosed and protected station at the visitors' end. There are several doored rooms for private visits that I have never seen used. There is a children's area that some inmates can take their children but usually this is not used either even though there are several families with kids. Everyone, inmates and visitors alike enter one time. If they have to leave, that's it. The visit is over until the next main time to enter. There is a morning visit and an afternoon visit. There is a five day visit span. If you could you could go twice a day, five days a week. There are a few women who do that. They moved so they could. A couple of them run houses for a few others to use to cheapen the price of the visit from out of town. There is a visitors' culture right along with the convict culture. That's where I am going.

Enlightenment And The Doorway

"Enlightenment is only the beginning, is only a step of the journey. You can't cling to that as a new identity or you're in immediate trouble. You have to get back down into the messy business of life, to engage with life for years afterward. Only then can you integrate what you have learned. Only then can you learn perfect trust."
quoted by Jack Kornfield in After the Ecstasy, the Laundry

Jack is Mahayana, or at least this vision is basically a Mahayana vision. The Tibetans are Mahayana as well but it is they who also tell us that we are in a privileged position in the stream of life, very close to a doorway that can radically change your and my position in the universe. If we walk through that door, if we have the blessing and privilege of walking through that door we will rapidly alter our state of being and will no longer be visible from this side of the door. That is the Buddha's door and Hinayana Buddhism (Theravada) takes seriously that we have been directed to open that door and enter that path beyond it. Mahayana takes seriously instead what Buddha actually did, which was to refrain from entering the door and taking that path until his long life here was done.

I take both of these visions quite seriously though I am not Buddhist in my practice. I believe that Buddhism has hammered out a technology of spirit and their claim that you don't even need God is more or less the truth, at least to the point that God seems not to care if you engage in the spiritual walk without Him. Thus He is at least as pleased with high flying atheists as He is with the religious folk who take this whole thing seriously. He probably has to exercise infinite patience with most of us no matter what we profess. Infinite? Do I really mean infinite?? Of course I do.

It is a matter of destiny and fit to me. I think a person could find the door and then go beyond, and then turn and serve as likely as the Bodhisattva who refuses the threshold and turns on it to serve. The former is something like an "ascended master". There are opinions that the planet would have already crashed and burned had not the Masters turned their care to us. This is the Shambala story. I see nothing wrong with the idea. I claim I follow the Bodhisattva ideal. I don't claim I am good at it, nor do I necessarily think I must take the Buddhist explanations and directives as essential to a Bodhisattva path. I was directed quite explicitly in my youth to follow a template that is within me. Though I can fall short and use this as a way to avoid real commitment, I in the main have not done that. I do follow what was given me, though I realize more and more as I age how far I still have to go to really fit myself to this service. I had an inflated opinion in my youth, in my skill at overlooking stuff.

I know however, that I am very close to the door, have never been far from it, that the idea of a spiritual "shortcut" is quite true not only for me but for you in the human predicament, and that Buddhism is exactly right about that. I am not afraid to intend Bodhisattva. I assume however that I cannot do it from my side of the door, that if I ever manifest that state even for a moment that it is a gift from beyond the door, a state of grace, assistance from the Ascended Ones, from God Himself.

I believe there is a question. The Greater Vehicle (Mahayana) declares the Bodhisattva ideal, declares that it is the Way for most. The Lesser Vehicle (Hinayana) declares that Buddha told us to get across to the other side for real purchase on this thing, then decide whether service to the planet is the right thing. It may not be for any one of us who goes. There may be other concerns on that side of the door. Here is where destiny comes in. I know at least in this lifetime I am "supposed" to attend the Bodhisattva ideal. I also know that this is roughly a 75%-25% split or more if the numbers of practicing Buddhists are any guide. Mahayana is basically three fourths of all Buddhists, if I recall it correctly, though not everyone is explicitly aiming at the Bodhisattva path. That path is a monastic one and most Buddhists are not monastic.

Finally, the Caveat. I am not, repeat not a Buddhist and this essay is my tailored version of things to suit my own inner template. All I say here is me saying it for me, not an expert on Buddhism instructing you. I know what I know, I hope. It is enough for me but I am scientific enough that if I am told convincingly another truth, then I go there instead of here. I am responsible and hope I do not mislead. I don't think I am. But I am not able to protect against my own ignorance, nor yours.