Depression

I see me in this picture. I haven't really changed in this respect, all my life. If you had the chance to view pictures of me at that age, you would see the resemblance too. I have always wanted a way out but also not to lose my way back. I'm pretty good at it.

"Seeing our moment-to-moment automatic conditioned reactions is crucial. Without that we will just continue the mess we are creating in our world, in our loveless relationships. Without clarity, the self-pitying or self-aggrandizing soliloquy takes up all the space; then there is just this little stage for the actor, the victim, the hero, the star. If that isn't seen, self-pitying and self-promoting proceeds and makes oneself and others miserable."
-Toni Packer

"Whenever we find fault with others, whether through anger, contemptuous certainty, self-righteousness, or gossip, it is often based in fear. We may not be aware of our fears, but when we look deeply, we may discover the fear of rejection, loss of control, of unworthiness, or the fear of disconnection. But refraining alone is not enough-by itself it is just behavior modification-and it is neither healing nor transformative. Only through uncovering and consciously entering into the deep hole inside, welcoming the fear with curiosity and compassion, can we ultimately reconnect with the basic wholeness of our true nature."
-Ezra Bayda

"Gratitude, the simple and profound feeling of being thankful, is the foundation of all generosity. I am generous when I believe that right now, right here, in this form and this place, I am myself being given what I need. Generosity requires that we relinquish something, and this is impossible if we are not glad for what we have. Otherwise the giving hand closes into a fist and won't let go."
-Sallie Jiko Tisdale

Now my turn:
Cognitive depression (not chemically forced and based) arises when a thread of anger is married to the meaninglessness of things. It is difficult to break depression because the meaninglessness is actually undeniable in a certain way and in certain circumstances also permits positive responses, based in the freedom from constraints that follows. Thus the depressed person battles with a partial truth which justifies the depression. Depression is embedded in a dark fear that one lacks sufficient power to change things and that nothing will ever change because that is so. In other words, depression arises when one feels terribly alone, fearful and lacking, realizing that nothing means anything and one is angry at the only person present, which is oneself.

The key to unravelling a depression may be to find that meaning is possible and thus to find an answering thread of hope for change. It is necessary to find a source of power. Hope may provide it, or else provide a way to crack the depression open enough to allow power from elsewhere to take a useful and visible shape and to stream in.

When I was overseas, in 1967-1969, the whole time, I was prescribed a low dose of Triavil, a drug used to treat anxiety and depression. This was in the aftermath of a four month stay in a facility called Alum Rock Hospital that treated mental conditions. I was in this facility for a mental disability brought about by the high fever I suffered during a meningitis I contracted in military basic training in 1964. I nearly died of this disease and it took a full month and a half to recover and be released from medical supervision. I was considered depressed in 1967although the outward expression of my depression was more active and angry than the more common kinds of symptoms depressions display. It was connected to brain damage.

I still have the journals I wrote during that period. I don't remember ever feeling depressed. I had begun using marijuana and LSD before I went into Alum Rock Hospital and it was in the intense use of these drugs that I was intervened on while living on the street, starving. I was arguably anorexic but more certainly broke and homeless. It is interesting how a guy can be broke and homeless and still find all the dope he needs, maybe more than that. I continued using marijuana (ganja) and hashish (charras) during my stay overseas. However, as I read the journals today, they read depressed. My favorite saying to this day, f*ck the world. I don't feel depressed now either. I find it remarkable that there is such a disconnect between outward signs and inner states. That same disconnect arises in alcoholism and addictions when people who are alcoholics or addicts insist that they are not afflicted with those conditions.

Depression

It is really hard
to take this unending dinge,
this life, all the drudge
of it fumbling for
purpose without the success
that comes with finding,
looking for the key
as if there was light to shine,
as if it mattered.

July 17, 2009 11:49 AM

Annie Showed Up

Candidates for Compassion

I have reframed and expanded the following quotation. The quotation was originally offered in a talk given by Rimpoche Nawang Gehlek, founder of Jewel Heart, an organization dedicated to the preservation of Tibetan culture and Buddhism. The subject of the talk was 9/11 and how to respond to the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. However, Gehlek Nawang's observation really applies in more general circumstances and so I rewrote it for that purpose. The original issue of course was the hatred with which so many of us view the actions of the hijackers of the planes of 9/11.

We must see that when we feel anger, hatred, or some other resistance toward another person, we are not really reacting to the harm they may have caused us but we are reacting instead to that person's inability to adjust to the world and to feel about the world accurately. In such a state people act as if they are blind. It turns out they are unable to stand up for themselves, that they have caved in on themselves. They have submitted completely to their negative emotions about things. They may consider themselves righteous in the way they are approaching their own lives and the lives of others, but we can see how stupid they have actually been. They have allowed themselves to be enslaved by one or more of their negative emotions. Who are better candidates for compassion than those who have been enslaved, perhaps without even knowing they have been enslaved?

This observation is of course fundamental to the vision with which the Tibetans resist the Chinese occupation of their own homeland. The statement, “we must see…” at the beginning of the passage is a statement that if followed leads to wise behavior. If we do not see this as we must, then we risk being condemned to the same enslavement found in those who have done us harm.
******************

“Here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

My poem refers to the ghost of my former wife, Ann Sheekley, who died in 2001, five years after our divorce, and a little over a month after 9/11. What befell Ann called me to the kind of compassionate vision I have described above.

Annie Showed Up

I am confounded.
Where did you come from this time?
In my face again,
telling me, only
you can, how I lack all earth
and float above things,
not a good thing now
that I am to choose a way
to continue, to
love the world again.

July 16, 2009 8:22 PM

Applejack

I used to live here. I moved. What was I thinking??


As a keeper of cats I have been there, done that, have the t-shirt.

"Love should be the only way for men and women to live together. No other ritual is needed." -anon.

"If you are playful about meditation, mind cannot destroy it. Otherwise mind will turn meditation into another ego trip; that will make you dangerously serious." -anon.

"Don't take yourself so goddam serious." -Alcoholics Anonymous

"Just let things be in their own way, obey your own nature, and you will walk freely and undisturbed." -anon.


Johnny Appleseed’s name was John Chapman. He was actually a fairly wealthy man at least at one point because he had so many orchards of his own. He really did plant apples freely, not only on his own land, and he was a purveyor of applejack. The apples of his time were not the sweet eating apples we know. They were largely inedible but they did make credible alcoholic cider. That was the principal drink of his day. The grain fields did not yet exist, and what grain there was went into breads and such, so there was not much beer or whiskey either. Rum was imported.

John was well known as a complete eccentric, one of a kind.

Applejack

In those days, they drank
apples. Applejack, Chapman's
gift to the frontier.
Johnny Appleseed
brought them good strong drink
and they paid him very well,
so well that he grew
orchards all over
those long valleys and low hills,
good cider makings,
safer than water.

July 16, 2009 12:48 PM

Catch The Wave

Billy Collins was a recent Poet Laureate of the United States, a position held in the Library of Congress. In his tenure, he put in place a whole group of published poems designed to be an English track on poetry for high school students, a poem a day. He is one of our best poets. This video gives you a chance at eight other recorded poems and I believe Billy is reading his own work.

I have continued my own poetry push, renewed from last spring. A high tide has come up on me. I have written 54 poems in a month. Not only that, I have reached out to two poet groups using prompts to write to. I have been doing this following of prompts impromptu for two years, using the blogs of others and posting the results there all along. One guy named me Johnny Applepoem because I keep planting poems where I go. I know this could be rude to some, that some folk might not understand or want that, thinking I am competing or believing myself the better poet or some such, but it is more like I am catching the wave. I am replying as if it were conversation. My blogfriend Rachel has understood and has joined me happily from time to time. Now we assume we will do that poem and response thing. There are others who get me. I am particularly happy when people leave poems behind on my site. At least if I am rude to some, I have hold of this truth. I am not doing to you guys that which I would not have done to me. I want your inspiration. I am happy to receive your poems any time here on my blog.

I am not possessive of my work. You will see no copyright statements here.



Catch The Wave

The ebb and flow is
mystery, tidal, inner
moon of hidden world
not shaped like this one
and there is nothing to do
about that shifting
tide but surf or nap.

There are times to move quickly
and times to idle-
best to stay alert.

July 16, 2009 9:01 AM





July 16, 2009 9:01 AM

The Duet

I am of the nature to grow old.
There is no way to escape growing old.
I am of the nature to have ill-health.
There is no way to escape having ill-health.
I am of the nature to die.
There is no way to escape death.
All that is dear to me and everyone I love
is of the nature to change.
There is no way to escape being separated from them.
My actions are my only true belongings.
I cannot escape the consequences of my actions.
My actions are the ground on which I stand.
~ Buddha

This afternoon I received a "non-urgent" message from my doctor. As of yesterday's blood tests and my recent complaints, I am now a low level diabetic. Somewhere between last year's look and this year's look I turned a corner and my body failed in yet another area. Growing old is not for sissies.

Getting harsh news somehow fits this poem which just sits next in the normal order of things, the oldest poem in the queue. This poem was written in my pre-diabetic days. The song in the poem seems beautiful though it is part of the flood. This makes me think of the classic Taoist symbol which directly transmits the message there is good still present in the worst of things and nonetheless there is evil in the best. Heat carries its own death within it as do I but the muck brings forth the flower.

The Duet

Amid the rapids
the silver shaped voice sings out
kinder melodies
than those that loosed floods
and forced us into these small
and fragile reed boats.

I shall learn these songs,
sing them in my lower tones,
in harmony with
the higher silver
notes rising out of the floods
as I navigate.

July 15, 2009 12:33 PM

So sing the duet with your own life rather than bewail its fate.

Desert Life

Photo by: Koshkin Dom

Work on Oneself
The horse is our emotions.
The carriage is the body.
The mind must learn to control the emotions.
The emotions always pull the body after them.
This is the order in which work on oneself must proceed.
- G. Gurdjieff

Comments:
Watch first your body and your emotions before anything else. Watch your actions, your feelings, your thoughts, your moods. Watch how you walk, sit, eat, sleep, rest etc...

Make sure to begin with the first step because all other steps will then come on their own.
*******************
"I have a friend who feels sometimes that the world is hostile to human life - he says it chills us and kills us. But how could we be were it not for this planet that provided our very shape? Two conditions - gravity and a livable temperature range between freezing and boiling - have given us fluids and flesh. The trees we climb and the ground we walk on have given us five fingers and toes. The "place" (from the root plat, broad, spreading, flat) gave us far-seeing eyes, the streams and breezes gave us versatile tongues and whorly ears. The land gave us a stride, and the lake a dive. The amazement gave us our kind of mind. We should be thankful for that, and take nature's stricter lessons with some grace."
- Gary Snyder
********************

Deb at Big Tent Poetry writes: This week’s prompt comes from one of the West’s most esteemed poets, William Stafford: “Think of something you said. Now write what you wish you had said.” Once you’ve pared it down to one idea and a resultant poem, come back starting Friday and leave us a link

So tomorrow this poem will be linked into the Big Tent

This poem does not deal with the exact words so much as a situation behind the words. I am not trying to blame anyone in this situation but I don't mind if you do. In fact as I read my own work, I feel myself leaning this way and that depending on who I plug into the two character places. Putting this poem into the desert suggests something...where's the water, what could be the water and its scarcity, and am I prepared to live here? Why is the bird a predator? It didn't have to be, or even be a bird. What other characters live nearby and who are the shits? Heh. I have no idea. I just make this stuff up. If I did have an idea, I wouldn't say. I think this situation is real though. How many people live here today?

Desert Life

I struggle with you
and I don't know why this is.
I would like to be
like the hawk to your
cactus life, easily perched
on your flowered crown,
calling out your love
and telling you this. Instead

I flinch at the stabs
of your spines, your sharp
hooked barbs, and I say the mean
things you are used to
getting from the shits
who flock around you because
you are just all that.

September 9, 2010 11:14 AM

Labor Of Love

Table of Consanguinity (from Wikipedia)

Consanguinity is a legal term that comes to us through the French from its usage in Roman times for exactly the same purpose, to determine degrees of inheritance or descent for legal purposes. Notice the numbers in the table. If my blood is 100% me, then my mother is 50%, my grandmother is 25%, my great-grandmother is 12.5% and so forth. Likewise my son is 50% (because of his mother's blood), my grandson is 12.5%, and my great-grandson is 12.5%. Refer to the table and see how these degrees of relatedness run out through cousins. In imperial and royal matters, it became important to know the degrees of relatedness to the emperors, kings and other lords.

Con* means "with" or "through" in a similar sense to "with", while *sanguin* is Latin for "blood". The state of affinity through the blood.

I have met through Facebook, two of my first cousins, once removed. What a blessing. This is a part of the family that was distant for reasons I understand but are no longer relevant. They were never relevant to me. We are all getting along in years. So welcome to my life, Penny Noordwal-Ware and Ruth Noordwal.

Note also that second cousins are not the same as first cousins once removed. That is a common misuse of terms. If you aren't sure, then saying "distant cousins" will suffice for all the other relations.

This is ever an informative site.
*************

Three Word Wednesday has offered up the words "charm", "feast", and "robust" for use in a creative format.

Here is my offering

Labor Of Love

I have worked a charm,
taken your blood, just a drop,
a small bright red pearl,
laden with your life,
and mixed with right potencies
from secret, sacred
stashes of power.

I have created a feast
of dreams arrayed like
silken Chinese fans are,
crafted from complex thready
mists, sacred incense.

If you are robust
then I am at cause, carry
my weight willingly.

September 8, 2010 8:34 AM

Where I Live

The Aurora Borealis as seen in Iowa, photo by Richard Big (taken from the NASA website)

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."
- Mark Twain

"Finding inner peace, this is a point of no return. You can never go back into the struggle."
- author unknown

Driving on the midnight road, headed south, wondering what next. I have no idea what this poem was tapping the day I wrote it. Neither do I know why I wrote the first sentence of this paragraph. I like them both though.

My poem is true to the history of my relationship with my mother also. She really did move here to be near me when she got old enough to be concerned. There was no other reason for her to move to this area. Her sister followed her. She had stayed in the Kansas City area while my mother moved back to California for a few years from there, but when Mom came up to settle here in Oregon, it was apparent that she was settling in. That’s when her sister decided to make it a family gathering and moved here too.

Now I live in the house Mom left behind when she died in 2001. She died in three days of a stroke from onset to last breath, just a little over. I had come to visit her in the convalescent facility where she was recovering from hip replacement surgery. We were talking and she raised her hand as if to make a point, interrupting the conversation, then she rubbed her ear and everything stopped. She was out like a light. I called for help and that was that. We were on the death watch while her brain swelled shut, finally depressing her ability to breathe and she died. The swelling is what took three days. She was awake but not very comfortable the first day. Then she lost consciousness, but not completely because she did some orchestrating of events even in coma. She knew on the last day that my sister was not yet in town so she pitched a fit when her breathing started to falter. We quieted her with a morphine drip. Then it was time and I risked going to get my sister at the airport. There was no one else could do it. When my sister and I arrived and sat by her, we had forty five minutes (this was about five hours after starting the morphine drip to ease her struggle), and our people, a small gathering, sat vigil with my sister, her daughter, my mother and me. When Mom started to struggle again, I moved to her side, held her, telling her it was okay, really okay. It was over quickly and that was that. This was the end of January in 2001. In May, she would have turned 80.

She followed the advice of Mark Twain given above throughout her life. She aspired to the inner peace of the second quote in the last third of her life, so much so that she became an ordained and award winning minister in her quest.

And it is true, really. This house is not and can never be my home, and that is okay, really okay.

Where I Live

I miss the ocean.
You are the ocean. I miss
you like that, like mist.
I live in Mom's house
she bought to be near her son
in her last ten years.
When she died, moving
here was practical for me,
the right thing to do.
But I miss you now,
dispersing mist on water,
fading, not my home.

July 14, 2009 1:30 PM

As If In Wonder

Pavel Pronin
Site: http://raskoll.photosight.ru/



"Stress is basically a disconnection from the earth, a forgetting of the breath. Stress is an ignorant state. It believes that everything is an emergency. Nothing is that important. Just lie down."
- Natalie Goldberg

“Sadness, anger, envy or fear have nothing bad in itself: a painful emotion indicates only that we left the center. When you are at peace, the whole universe is at peace. What seemed like a cacophony becomes like a heavenly music: a symphony for an alone mind.”
- Stephen Mitchell

Nothing is that important. That’s what Natalie Goldberg says. Will I believe that? Can I believe that? Don’t sweat the small stuff and it’s all small stuff. I am sitting here daily conscious that I am going to die because the state of my body clearly declares the clock is ticking. So what. It’s all small stuff. I might be forced to sell this house just to live soon. Nah. That’s small stuff too. See? I am practicing.

When I was a small boy, my mother saw me practice many things in private. One was speaking. She claimed I was nearly mute long after the normal time frame for starting to interact in that language way. I would babble to myself behind my closed door bedroom. Then I came out but when I spoke it was a complete and complicated sentence. That’s what she said. I didn’t do the intermediate steps. She claimed my first real talking words were something very close to, “Mama, the panda is under the bed. Will you get it for me, please?” Since I can’t remember, I have chosen to accept that my mother remembered such a thing.

As If In Wonder

I wish you had not
run off sure of what I thought,
sure I would condemn
what last happened when
I asked after your true dreams.

I am another
light in the wide sky
of various lights shining
as if in wonder,
as if in longing.

July 12, 2009 2:11 PM

Travelling To Spain

Spanish Castle


The Greek Island of Symi


Houseboat on Lake Dal. The boat that was mine was actually much smaller and the land in the background was far steeper too. The garden was barely recognizable as a garden, with the remains of low walls in some spots, all overgrown, but still well kept.

This poem is an actual conversation, recalled and shaped to fit in poesy. Annie and me, we had this talk several times but never got free enough of daily life to actually do it. She had been to Spain in her college days as a nanny to her college history professor’s family. He went to Spain on research each summer. This particular summer was Ann’s turn. She fell in love with Spain and wanted to give me that gift.

For my part, I had been around the world, while spending two years in what is now called Bangladesh. During that stay, I traveled to Kashmir, to the city of Srinagar and to Lake Dal. On that lake, moored in a garden that was planted by Alexander of Macedon, were houseboats for rent. That is where we stayed. It was heaven. Many of the Kashmiri are red haired and blue eyed, with olive skin and wonderful straight noses, a legacy of Alexander and his troops. They are the most handsome people on the planet in my book.

An oddity: there were guest books in the boats. The guest book in ours was signed, George Harrison. Now that’s a common enough name. But I have always wondered. George visited that part of the world for sure. It was the right time frame, 1968. It was a colorful and private place to stay. It seems to me reasonable to keep open the possibility that I stayed in the same boat as George.

Later, on the way back to the States, I flew into Athens, and stayed a couple days in Greece while on the way to Rome and finally Naples, where I was to board a liner to New York. During my Greek visit I got out to one of the Greek isles. It was beyond breathtaking and a completely different swimming experience since there was no bottom or beach really. You swam out ten feet and already the bottom was unreachable because the island was a mountain top with a steep slope. The water was so clear but you couldn’t see the bottom. It just went straight down, pretty much.

Traveling To Spain

You said we would go
to Spain and I said, that’s good.
Then I said we would
go to an island
off Greece, a mountain submerged
in the sea, and then
by air to Kashmir,
well, to India first of course,
all the best places.

July 10, 2009 1:18 PM

How We Met

Marischa Slusarski, 30 Percent Chance of Raining Toads (2007) Mixed Media on Canvas, 48 x 36 inches

Recently I lost my old cat, over nineteen she was. She took to extremely bad behaviors, exposing herself to any passing situation at any time she felt like it. She was going senile and didn’t care about much any more. Her eyesight was going and she couldn’t really see over 15 feet. I know because if my kitchen door was open to the garage, she couldn’t tell even with the light on and the garage dim. Her ears were going too. So she lived in her own little world. I wrote a poem about that when she was eighteen, over a year ago. I am skipping that poem now. I guess I want to say that I catered, we all in this neighborhood catered to her disabilities over this last year until I missed her presence behind my car several days ago. I ran her over, but she was endangering herself for over a year before something happened. I still am sure that if someone had to run her over it was best that I did it. I am not going to be free of guilt and grief for a long time over this one.

"We sit silently and watch the world around us. This has taken a lifetime to learn. It seems only the old are able to sit next to one another and not say anything and still feel content. The young, brash and impatient, must always break the silence. It is a waste, for silence is pure. Silence is holy. It draws people together because only those who are comfortable with each other can sit without speaking. This is the great paradox."
- Nicholas Sparks

"Listen closely. The eternal hush of silence goes on and on throughout all this, and has been going on, and will go on and on. This is because the world is nothing but a dream and is just thought of and the everlasting eternity pays no attention to it."
- Jack Kerouac

What the poem does not say remains flat true. We could not meet like this if we did not also meet in silence.

How We Met

You said, it happens
just like that. I said, of course
it does, like feathers,
fluff floating in air,
like parasol seeds gliding
down the sloping drafts.
We could float away
because we met like gardens,
like summer winds do.

Jul 8, 2009 11:40 AM

I'm In My Own Way

Difficulties are meant to rouse, not discourage. The human spirit is to grow strong by conflict.
- William Ellery Channing

How to Grow Clouds
"It takes a lot of work: it is necessary to weed very carefully, to toss out muck and small stones by hand, to kneel on the earth, bend over, dig about in the soil, water profusely, collect caterpillars, exterminate aphids, loosen the ground and serve the earth; when your back hurts from all this and you straighten up and look at the sky, you will have the prettiest clouds."
- Karel Capek
translated by Andrew Malcovsky
wood's lot

Here's another offering for Three Word Wednesday. The words in italics are the words given to appear in the work. At this moment there are forty two offerings, forty-three different creative pieces from all over the internet. My poem will become the forty-fourth.

****
As usual in these matters of love it turns out I am my own worst enemy.

I'm In My Own Way

You have given me
a real break, a fine, fine gift,
yes, one for the books,
and me, the guy who
stands here all so negative
in spite of your love.

I feel like a tired
swimmer struggling so toward
the surface of things.

September 2, 2010 9:38 AM

Living A Long Time

"Although we have no actual written communications from the world of emptiness, we have some hints or suggestions about what is going on in that world, and that is, you might say, enlightenment."
- Shunryu Suzuki
not always so

A good traveller has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.
Lao Tzu

Sometimes we come up short… Or maybe there is a time for love and another for some other thing… I know I have been single for nearly three years and it’s okay. Even now that my cat has died and I really am in this house alone, it’s still okay. Far too old to change…it is just so much work! I don’t know why I want to work that hard any more. That’s part of the reason the bosses out there don’t want older workers. We want to be well paid for not much any more. We know we deserve that because of forty years of service, even if it isn’t realistic to anyone else. The same may be true in loving. If it isn’t okay to just be me, then the love engagement is too much work. I need my energy elsewhere. I need to write the poetry, play the music, encourage my friends, serve in AA, find my peace before I go. I am fairly busy. Building a new world...Oh.....My.....God.

Living A Long Time

If I took your words
as serious as you meant
I would have to change
my love, transform it
beyond my understanding,
answer completely
with all new bright words
as if you were no longer
you, but my lost maid
come back to me now,
at this late stage of my life
and me far too old
to change.

July 7, 2009 12:58 PM

Orchids And Butterflies

"...for happiness is above all a love of life. To have lost all reason for living is to open up an abyss of suffering. As influential as external conditions may be, suffering, like well-being, is essentially an interior state. Understanding that is the key prerequisite to a life worth living. What mental conditions will sap our joie de vivre, and which will nourish it?

"Changing the way we see the world does not imply a naive optimism or some artificial euphoria designed to counterbalance adversity. So long as we are slaves to the dissatisfaction and frustration that arise from the confusion that rules our minds, it will be just as futile to tell ourselves “I’m happy!” over and over again as it would be to repaint a wall in ruins. The search for happiness is not about looking at life through rose-colored glasses or blinding oneself to the pain and imperfections of the world. Nor is happiness a state of exaltation to be perpetuated at all costs; it is the purging of mental toxins such as hatred and obsession that literally poison the mind. It is also about learning how to put things in perspective and reduce the gap between appearances and reality. To that end we must acquire a better knowledge of how the mind works and a more accurate insight into the nature of things, for in its deepest sense, suffering is intimately linked to a misapprehension of the nature of reality."

From Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skills, By Matthieu Ricard, 2003 NiL editions, Paris. Translation, 2006 by Jesse Browner

It bears repeating:
"Happiness is above all a love of life."

"Happiness is both the purging of mental toxins such as hatred and obsession that literally poison the mind and it is also learning how to put things in perspective and reduce the gap between appearances and reality."

And again:
Now you cannot say you do not know what happiness is. Happiness is the practice of loving life through the careful purging of toxins, through the careful gaining of perspective, and carefully moving from the appearances of all things into the reality behind them.

I have said so three times.




Orchids And Butterflies

I sit here in gray
aftermath to the heat wave,
faded heat and sky.
I listen to new
music while thinking of you
in your own summer
made of northern lights
and the urgent rhymed display,
orchids, butterflies.

July 6, 2009 2:08 PM

A Lifetime

Where we stood, once, on the shore of a long time dream




Who you were once, standing windblown on that lake shore in the time before this one


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

This is an old and familiar love.

A Lifetime

I lie where I can
touch your breasts as reminders
of those days and you
permit it, my old
familiar touch when it comes.
I hum low and deep
in my baritone
as I caress these deep dreams
reaching to the start
of things for us so
many years ago, decades,
in this timeless day.

July 6, 2009 1:46 PM

Like A Melon

I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can't
you can't you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don't write
- W. S. Merwin

I would add to this. Writing is for me a practice. It is not enough to write when you feel like it, to dabble in it. You write far beyond that point, forging into the murky regions where your will falters and you must rely on something deeper than that. It is not about how good you are, not about how much the public will care, not about your place in the long line of wordsmiths on the planet. Writing perhaps leads to such things but if they are primary there is an inherent end to the road. Write for the love of words. Write because you must. Enter the practice of writing, knowing the path it reveals is one that lends substance to your life though it may lead nowhere. Because you write, your ghostly presence on the planet solidifies. Your life will be filled with grace along the way. Now return to this question: “how can you ever be sure that what you write is really any good at all?” Of course you can’t be sure. You can however realize that it is the wrong question and stop asking.

Like A Melon

Today I arrived,
broke open, revealing how
ripe I have become
in years of waiting,
years of silent cries, yearning
after the promise,
hope waxing, waning
waxing again as you stirred,
seemed to look at me.

I, like a melon
have been thickheaded to your
knock until this day.

When you rapped, I sang
out my ripe red fruity song
and here's my display.

July 5, 2009 2:24 PM

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”.
*******************

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