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