Yes, it really is. I've transitioned yet again jobwise, and it is a bittersweet thing. Many of you know how incredibly proud I've been of some of the accomplishments the kids and families have made, and that pride can only swell as I gently and gracefully take my leave from this particular position. It's with a sense of gratitude for serving that I step out on journeys unknown, and a sense of profound relief that I've at least for now decided to shelter myself from the gale forces of mental health "reform" in North Carolina. Many of you know how much I love the community I've served with a passion, and that love does not subside as I move into a period of transformation... I will be back, in a variety of contexts. Roots is roots.
It's also true that in 13 days you can watch this site for daily updates on my Oriental to Occidental Odyssey from Istanbul to London. I'll have pics, real time GPS data on where the hell I am, and observations from the road as communications allow. It's 27 days of 17 countries, mostly as a solo traveler until I reach Munich for Oktoberfest, where I join Joshua and Robin for merry making, sausage saluting, and beer bellying. I will be in the Balkans for most of those days, and with so little time left to get my logistics in place, time is being funneled into very tiny points of must dos and check lists. Minutiae never loomed so large.
So, despite the lack of activity in the past, I dunno, era, the blog will be cooking daily. Please join me in the coming weeks as I slide into purposefully perplexing portals hither and yon in the Old, and Older, Country...
Under the summer drunk stars
Around four in the morning
I left the house almost naked
Pushed out by a dream
To pet the cat.
She was about as surprised as I was at this behavior
Purring warmly on the lawn chair
A rather holy place to be.
Did you hear that researchers in Italy have recently unearthed some interesting documents in the life of the astronomer Galileo? The little town of Pisa was famous not only for its leaning architecture, but also a heretic in the making. One of these scrolls has just been translated, a 450 year old letter to the editor of the Pisa Citizen-Times:
“I am writing to complain about the scandalous activities of my neighbor Galileo. He believes God’s Earthly real estate revolves around the sun, and stars are not holes poked in the canopy of heaven, but other suns! Blasphemy! He also thinks the moon is too far away to reach, yet my meemaw, bless her heart, would climb up there every Sunday for our gorgonzola. I have some friends who work for the inquisition part time and I am sure they would love to talk with him about the heresy of rejecting common sense. It’s like saying that our beloved tower has an issue with staying erect. There’s a peeping tom problem in Pisa, so I wonder if his telescope is being used for other purposes, you know what I mean? Well, let me warn you, Mr. Astronomer, when moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s divine justice.”
We’ve got to wonder just how much in the world has really changed from Galileo’s time to our own. He was forced by the church to recant his theories and lived the rest of his life under house arrest. Though facing blindness and chastisement for second guessing the pope’s celestial dogma, he privately held firm to his heliocentric far-sightedness. Galileo joins a litany of countless martyrs snubbed not for being right, but for being objective.
In the blink of civilization’s dusty eye, we’ve gone from living on a flat Earth at the center of the solar system to billions of other suns, the Hubble telescope, and constant revelations of the mind-bendingly awesome and terrifying expanse of space. We’re mites on a windblown seed compared to the infinite map of the Universe ever unfurling deeper into starfields of knowledge and reckoning.
It was only a matter of evolutionary time before we looked out from our caves and wondered about the stars. By shifting our focus from digging through the mud for tuber treats and tasty grubs, the movements of the constellations suddenly became labors of the gods, and the crashing of the waves were the magnificent heavings of a breathing ocean. The shift of perspective from immediate survival to the eternal mystery, small picture to big picture gave us our myths, legends, and greatest struggles. Breathe deeply.
You’ve heard before that I was a weird kid, and rug-rat Jay thought that lives were lived in a black and white world until the advent of color television. Some of us still think the world is in black and white because of color television. Still, I wasn’t terribly far off, at least in cosmic time. According to evolutionary biologists, our ancestors didn’t gain full color and focal range until they stopped their nocturnal hunting, began to eat flowers and fruit, necessitating avoidance of deadly predators. We may have hunger and slithering beasties to thank for our ability to look deeper and clearer. Again, check it out: we can’t see the big picture until our survival as a species is threatened and we’re forced to evolve. That’s happening right now.
Just as the wilderness bound Israelites tested their willingness to see God’s big picture in that surprise delivery of the certified organic manna, our vision is grown when the unexpected suddenly appears. Not just eyeball vision; the vision of heart and soul is profoundly clarified by the light of sudden wonder. “When the people of Israel saw it, they said to one another, ‘What is it?’” Breathe deeply.
Way back when, at a Mt. Shasta campsite, I was bitterly lamenting in my journal that I had traveled two thousand miles for some good meditation, and couldn’t do it. I tried in vain, studied the ins-and-outs of dozens of meditative practices, and yet there I was… spilling my ink in the shadow of one of the most majestic mountains on Earth… not getting connected. During my unfocused kvetching, however, a bee landed menacingly on my hand, ceased the writing and grabbed my prickled attention. For over half an hour, the curious critter shook his honeymaker all up and down my fingers, and that’s all there was, the waiting, the care to avoid being stung, and the fascination of contact. Just as suddenly as it came, it went, leaving behind the gift of a powerful and unexpected meditation. That bee didn’t read the mindfulness books that were dog-eared in my tent; the bee helped me just be, and I just was. The song is by Asheville’s favorite son and original Jubilant David Wilcox…
“It's the choice of a lifetime & I'm almost sure
I will not live my life in between anymore
If I can't be certain of all that's in store
This far it feels so right
CHORUS: I will hold it up, hold it up to the light,
Hold it up to the light, hold it up to the light”
The internal struggle between big and small picture was mediated by a tiny insect who was only curious, resulting in an exercise of focus that forever changed the way I see. We’ve all been there, we’ve all puzzled with getting the big picture back. Mostly, the answer is right under our nose, jumping up and down for attention.
“The search for my future has brought me here
This is more than I'd hoped for, but sometimes I fear
That the choice I was made for will someday appear
And I'll be too late for that flight
So hold it up, hold it up to the light,
Hold it up to the light, hold it up to the light”
Shortsightedness does have its advantages, just as farsightedness. Choosing to see only the smallest picture unlocks the subatomic, the foundation of physical realities; looking for the big picture gives us astronomy, exposing the context of our cosmic interplay. Working the graceful ability of balancing perspective grants us the wisdom to know the difference, charting a literal and metaphorical route from our point As and point Bs. Forgetting the context by which we walk those lines trips us over the first little bump. Just watch any random streetcorner and observe how clumsy we’ve all become through the distraction and misplaced immediacy of our digital lives. We’re immersed in an ethereal world of virtual contact when we’re shoulder-to-shoulder with our friends and family. We watch videos about what’s happening outside and when we’re out there we’re so gadget-enthralled we may as well be inside. Distracted by the short-term, we forgivably forget we are a part of a swirling galaxy, and have come through the Universe just to be here now.
“It's too late to be stopped at the crossroads
Each life here, each a possible way
But wait, and they all will be lost roads
Each road's getting shorter the longer I stay…”
Think about it; for those of you in long term relationships, when you bicker, do you usually tussle over whether mutual love is free will versus destiny, or to blanche or boil the broccoli? Typically, we’re drawn to stumble over the seemingly smallest of obstacles, and the molehills become perilous divides. That’s until we have our “eureka!” moments, recalling that a disease of conflict begins with a paralyzed point of view. Relax the eyes, and bring the light in to help, and the conflict becomes conversation, and the conversation becomes music.
“Now as soon as I'm moving, my choice is good
This way comes through right where I prayed that it would
If I keep my eyes open and look where I should
Somehow all of the signs are in sight
If I hold it up to the light”
It doesn’t take much imagination to see why being stuck on just one way of seeing things is dangerous to our survival. Regressive politics, cultural narrow-mindedness, and religions which abuse their origins provide plentiful bad examples of what happens when we disregard the wonder of our visioning potential to hyperventilate over some otherwise forgettable point. Political and religious tunnel vision reveals the devil in the details. It’s those molehills that always, always divide us, not the mountains which beg to inspire.
“I said God, will you bless this decision?
I'm scared. Is my life at stake?
But I see if you gave me a vision
Would I never have reason to use my faith?”
What would happen if we reconciled these differences in perspective by holding up to the light that which we don’t yet understand but care to transform? Could a room full of antagonized politicians stand together against hate crimes? Yes. Could the leaders of the world’s religions stop proselytizing for a minute to gather and unequivocally condemn all forms of faith based violence? Yes. While it may not have happened yet, we can’t deny there’s a powerful movement afoot to create healing in the littlest of ways, by choosing to be a curative to despair by seeing the big picture emblazoned in every heart, by smiling at a stranger, and surrendering what we don’t know to the light.
“I was dead with deciding - afraid to choose
I was mourning the loss of the choices I'd lose
But there's no choice at all if I don't make my move
And trust that the timing is right
Yes and hold it up hold it up to the light
Hold it up to the light, hold it up to the light”
We do this every Sunday at Jubilee and hopefully every day as Jubilants, by pecking at the thin eggshell of our collective comfort zone and taking a chance on ways of thinking and doing that just might transform and heal profoundly and imaginatively. When we gather with intention and focus, we as individuals, not nations and religions, seize the day to be corrective lenses for a critical planetary shortsightedness.
“I will hold it up hold it up to the light
Hold it up to the light, hold it up to the light.”
Children are born into the world wide open in wonder, and for a few years there’s a great magic between each eye blink. Things exist without labels, the sky can be blue for whatever fancy that day. As we age, the eyelids gain weight, the labels stiffen, and world becomes fixed, routine. That’s where my godson comes in to do the teaching. We’ll go to a garnet mine deep in Madison County, looking for hours amongst the muddy creeks and rock heaps for these mere gems, tiny fragments of a massive geological artistry. In the silence and bramble of those hours, the eyes relax, and details I would otherwise stumble over become patterns and clues for yet more treasure. He’ll find a garnet, tell me to come and see. “What is it?,” I’ll say, and he will hold up to the sun an ancient stone of beautiful deep reds and purples, shining through a union of distant star and upheld hand, mouths open in wonder. Just for that moment, all the fighting in the world ceases, a holy symmetry emerges, and a creation story is radiant in the palms of our hands. For that moment, we just see, and through the miracle of vision, the vision of soul and heart, we all can just, and justly, be.
“I will hold it up hold it up to the light
Hold it up to the light, hold it up to the light.”
I've had it with Christianity... it's a ghoulish, enslaving practice that thieves free will from the young and the helpless. Yeshua would have long since disowned his so-called believers. Little more than the same money changers in the temple which he scorned, the Christians prey on the desperate and keep them plugged into a dogma which maintains weakness by obliterating the virtue of doubt, replacing it with the morphine of blind faith. There are millions of "good" Christians out there, but the Evangelicals and proselytizers wear the pants now. The bathwater and the baby are too tainted to be useful.
If you really want to be close to god, it's time to fucking evolve the fear out of you.
Yes, midsummer.
Locusts and fireflies are your doormen
Love and pain are your guests
"Madness and mendacity" your dichotomous motto.
So far, sand dunes have overrun the interstates
Moss and toads have taken the circuitry
And this place I've known, the subtle chamber of bone
Which hosts the electrochemical dance that I call me
Is dampened by creekwater and green tides.
You are called a host of extremes
And you enchant me with your humid streets and porch stories
Such leisurely things
While forests burn and islands drown in anonymous tears.
You've spiked the punch with authenticity, and danger.
You've shined the mirror to a terrifying reflectivity,
I can't bear to look more, but as a raven is drawn to glitter
I am forced to confront the light which bounced off me, into the glass
And all the illusion held captive in a second's peek.
Even the night birds hush in your breath,
Inhalations of fecundity, exhalations of reaping.
Midsummer, you throw symbols at me
And the least I can do is throw some back
And we're left in an exchange of colors across the fence
And even in the greatest pain, your verdant mantle soothes,
Leaves me not with faith, not with doubt,
But just this moment, clamor of dreams, just this now.
Imagine an early Easter morning, one in which an eager curly haired little girl could not wait to open her Easter basket. This precocious and determined child had woken dad up early so as to get a good head start on finding her goodies, and her Daddy obliged, as only dads do. The bounty was discovered, and amidst a likely pile of wrappers and egg shells, Dad (who was probably a tad sleep deprived) nodded off and dozed. Now, to some children, dad’s nap would either be disappointing or opportunity-making. Brooke was different. Her big heart, caring nature and kind soul was evident even as a young child. She doted so much on the needs of her friends and family, gave so much thought to how to reach out to those in need. That was Brooke’s way. Dickie realized this for himself when he woke up, and found that Brooke had been diligently trying to feed him a whole chocolate candy rabbit in between snores. Imagine, between the crumbled and melting bunny and the chaos of an early Easter morning the great laughter and surprise that rang through the house. That was, and is, Brooke’s way.
Breathe deeply.
Early on, Brooke liked to team up with me when we were at the beach. I remember exploring the bug house with her, looking for salamanders and toads out back, and generally adapting to my weirder and older interests for the sake of company. We ate mustard sandwiches together. Yes, just bread and mustard, and it was good. She believed in the power of friendship, and as we grew older, the message was clear: “we’ve got to stick together cousin, we’ve got a heck of a family to hold together.” I remembered that conversation we had when performing her wedding to Eric, and seeing the whole family together, joined that day in the infectious joy of watching two people scatter their love like some radiant confetti. Nothing is perfect, and love is not an exact science; but for Brooke, giving and receiving love was a devotion constantly practiced, and practice makes perfect. Today, we welcome her into perfect love. Lyrics from a favorite song of hers by Michael W. Smith represents her passion for cultivating love and friendship:
“And friends are friends forever,
If the Lord's the Lord of them
And a friend will not say "Never"
'Cause the welcome will not end
Though it's hard to let you go
In the Father's hands we know
That a lifetime's not too long
To live as friends.”
Breathe even more deeply.
Brooke’s favorite quote, and perhaps her motto, was from Alexander Pope; “Act well your part- there all the honor lies.” Brooke sought, through her relationships and her beliefs, to have a clear role in the world. This is clear through her constant availability to her friends, and Eric says that no one could talk her out of this readiness and steadfastness. So strong in her convictions, Eric also says that there weren’t a lot of things you could talk Brooke out of. That was and is her way, a sincere and steady devotion to the pursuit of a personal truth. For all the quirks and challenges of that pursuit, it is indeed the only path we truly have, and some discover that too late. Brooke got started on this early, and leaves this world with cherished convictions for us to drink deeply from.
We mark the passing of a life with memories and stories, yet sometimes in these rituals of celebration and letting go we become so enwrapped in our shared grief that we neglect to illuminate the departed’s virtues, and make commitments to take these on for ourselves as a way of honoring them. Her love for her cats, and all animals, speaks deeply to an infectious compassion for the helpless and the small. May we carry this on, for Brooke. Her attention to and love for national politics speaks to a profound caring for a troubled country, and a desire to make right the injustices of this world. May we carry this on, for Brooke.
Her love for her ancestors and for the land from which they came, Ireland, is a reminder that we are all connected not only through the bloodlines of family but from the cradle of history, and as descendants we are charged with the duty to know our individual heritage and defend our cultural treasures. May we carry this on, for Brooke. From her favorite musical “Rent,” comes a lyric to remember this commitment to carry on Brooke’s passions:
“Find Glory
in a song that rings true
truth like a blazing fire
an eternal flame,
from the soul…”
As we gather in this sacred place to recall the warmth and breadth of Brooke’s life, and the lives of those who proceed her, may we be so bold so as to hang on to our laughter, and our chocolate bunnies. May we be so bold so as to hang on to our faith, and its transformational power. May we be so bold so as to be a family united, just like on Brooke’s wedding day. We speak of a person’s legacy upon their passing; seek Brooke’s legacy and lesson for yourself, just as you’d seek out Easter eggs on a hunt. It’s there, and it’s your job now to find it.
When Brooke was born, she was a mere five pounds and change, and mother and father could cradle her with a single arm, just as now she is raised up on eagle’s wings. Angels, together we implore you to make your wings big, for Brooke has grown a lot. Brooke, may God rest your soul, and the souls of those who cherish you. Thank you.
With a heaving breath and a bold foot forward
We say “at last!,” to this long day of longest light
Of our own star and the billions unseen in even the clearest night
From the twinkling of atomic dances deep inside our bones
To the lightning bolts of dreams, flashing us awake…
We say at last to the rooting of our own feet
To this soil, the touching of our soul to the compost of generations
And we turn the soil as if turning a page,
And our fingers are trailing historians through the dark skin of the mother
The mother who moves us to slough our own seed-shells and grow upward,
Perilously, hopefully, brazenly upward to the height of the summer sun.
We say at last to the golden days of reverie and discovery
Amid the brambles of our thoughts and the thickets of desires,
Pulling from the undergrowth some magical thing we rush home to tell everyone about,
“Lookit,” we say, “I found something amazing. Wanna see?”
We say at last to our streaming of curiosities, which we nurture in the hours of heat and ardor
Along the creekbeds of the soul, where we are bent over in wonder
At this thing we call our reflections, in the clear blue,
Some future self calling us to dive in, no matter what you’re wearing.
We say at last to passions finally spoken and tears and sweat spilt
To the wrestling of shadows along the sweltering sidewalks
To the thick and humid afternoons where even the molecules siesta
And even our firmest intentions waver and stand still.
We say at last to a season of paradox, of exultant joy and trembling sorrow
To the fruitful green which tendrils from the cemetery
To the abundant table and a hunger which cannot abide.
At last, we stand in celebration for the longest day,
And bow gently to the slowly creeping night
Which brings yet more starlight
Welcomed by the cadence of crickets
And the sweet, soft murmur of breezes
Through the leaves and branches of the summer soul.
At last!
As holy fireflies take flight
And the cicadas intone golden orchestras,
Cry for innocence, for as we are steeped in the worldly stew of summer
A child loses his childhood, syllable by syllable, second by second, robbed blind
Of reveries and curiosities, replaced by the putrid promise of false properties and cleverly disguised viscera...
Who steals this but the society which prizes innocence, or so it righteously claims,
Burns books to keep the tawdry words in ash but sells them back with
Some god's careless permission and redemption in blood money?
This world is fetid enough, from the humid wretch of birth
To the broken mirror of death, and the children know
There is cruelty even in the benign past the
Window's vale, and so tonight I damn
Those who selfishly thrust the murk
Against the pale years where the entitlement
To mystery and secrets of time are now the endangered sacred,
What for the morphine of palliative entertainment, and the subjugation of the prophetic
To a mere profit margin.
In the strongest words I know,
Curse the damed robbers of youth,
And cry, wail, and thrash for innocence,
For if I were to die in battle, let it be for those few years
Where the auric song of the cicada and the vigilant light of firefly
Overwhelm the petty and neurotic saccharin which contaminates the sugar of youth.
Suddenly, I feel a great resurgence of hope and pride... I know, "Hope" and "change" are quite ambiguous. We will ensure that Barack is clearly guiding us to these, but certainly getting there will be far easier with genuine and inspired leadership than crotchety old men who feel entitled.
In this blog's 2nd year, I endorsed Dean. It it with even greater pride in the redemptive power of inviting every citizen on board that I gladly endorse Barack Obama for President.
Coming down here, I thought much about the cliché of the freedom of the road. Writers tend to be observant, if downright hypervigilant, of such overused phraseology, much like a neurotic nature-phobe smack dab in a snake infested woods. Yet, there is a deep and unavoidable truth to the road, and the freedom-process it generates as you get further and further behind the place you once were. Or, the person you once were.
I had several stops along the way, and worked hard to remember that it was I, not the people around me, that were suddenly decontextualized. The silver haired waitress at the bagel shop, at the center of the first state to secede from the Union, who reminded me that they don’t sell pork products. Or the gentleman who shared the lobby with me as I waited for new tires on the car, whose voice was long and golden, whose countenance was remarkably gentle and accommodating as we awkwardly noted the physiological inconveniences the free coffee generates when the bathroom doors are locked. These people become consonants and vowels in the sutra of peeling the self away from home and comfort and lackadaisical routines. They serve as sudden reminders that our self-important journeys are not so pivotal to the flux of the Universe, that every breathing conscious entity is also trippin’, and that Chaos must always visit and transform the ordinary as soon as it begins to crystallize. We are variables, random factors, and yet the greatest Universe our presence distorts is our very own, the one we peer down long and hard when we suddenly realize, at last, that we are not where we once were, and are utterly vulnerable. You can learn these things from trivial banter with store clerks and passer-by on their way to their own jolting somewheres.
Out my window in this temporary place is the ocean. The ocean, well, it oceans. It does what it does, and my heart exhilarates to find it in the process of oceaning. I delighted in the tidal pools, the evidence of an always working Mother, and the neat piles of spent lives in shells and fossils. There was an old boat which had tried to wash ashore, but didn’t make it, now covered in the green hair of a graceful decay. There was a hint of phosphorescence after the sun was through sunning, and the pier which juts a thousand feet into the Atlantic was excitedly alive underneath as the waves bullied the pylons and lovers and fishermen found their respective romances above. The beach is an intoxicant, an immediate Earth-based psychedelic, it makes us do things we wants so badly to do but are otherwise conditioned against. Like being in awe without being casual. I can stop and stare and be jaw-dropped by a flight of pelicans in a way which could render stares and quick judgments on city streets. I can stop and pick up things and marvel at them like a three year old, and no one gives the slightest shit, nor I them in their own exaltations. My own biological imperative becomes enlivened if exaggerated, and last night I drank and ate and slept and dreamt of sex. How unlike a sea turtle or a dolphin or a mere gull am I now?
I went to the islands further south, and found the most quiet forests you could dare not hear. The occasional red-wing blackbird, the rustle of a sudden snake black as midnight and as slick as a pickpocket. Skittering crabs. Breezes here and there flirting capriciously with the palms. That was it, no other buzzing or grumbling or beeping or barking. It was such an eerily pristine place that it’s little wonder that the locals feared those groves, as it’s from such awesome silence that howling gnashing-teethed beasties emerge from to scare your soul back from whence it came. Love it.
And the stormy weather came, and if you listened close enough in the howling winds a crooner questioned why there was no sun up in the sky, et cetera. The waves became decreasingly serene, and their thrashing reminded me of how precious little we know. We can say that the moon’s gravity, and wind, and the shape and grade of shorelines makes a wave, which is all well and good scientifically, but there’s more to their story. There is a mystery in each foamy curve, a question as to what the wave is carrying to shore, what it takes away. There is also a powerful realization which takes our concertmaster’s mind and turns it inside out; they stop for no one. I dreamt again, and this time I saw the waves stop when no one was looking, and the ocean became placid, and a single ripple would’ve been news. It was black and eternal and terrifyingly still, which is the stuff of greatest fantasy. The whole Universe is a storm, and there is no power or organ within our mind that can cease the thrashing. It will always be a violent maelstrom that we, as desperate barnacles, cling to. The placid dark of utmost impossibility might just be death, but even as one barnacle is loosed by one particularly brazen wave, another will follow and another. World without end.
Then, from the ocean to the marshes, the swamp. The word swamp is wonderfully onomonotopeic, as it is rather the sound of that humid and biologically tawdry place. The murk presents a whole other kind of mystery versus the ocean, and conceals a primordial violence which will certainly ensnare the wayward and careless, be that a tumbled nestling or a cocky upstart human. Alligators. I was mere feet from one who certainly could’ve entertained a me-sized appetizer. I stood, silent, as we contemplated each other’s fate. In the end, it happens as it always happens; we each went our respective ways without so much changing the course of our mutual, if completely alien, lives. There was an agile snake too, ebony and stealth, who I observed from a safe distance. She stalked a cardinal, and a frog, and neither were so inclined so as to experience the opposite of life on such a lovely Friday. Pity for the snake, but such wondrous suspense for the human, for whom time was completely obliterated and was taught, again, that rapt attention to the world (a very deliberate choice inspired by holy, profound curiosities) is the simplest pathway to being-here-now. How sweet it works. Rapture is a muddy and fecund and raw agreement to recognize how much in this Universal body this name inhabits so quickly is unknown, unexpected, and yet so deeply entwined in our Natures. I know that snake, that alligator, and the cardinal, and the small squeaking frog; they are me. Though they “happen” a few feet away, they register in the meat and sinew, they belong to the labyrinth of the mind, their fates are magically threaded with my own lifeline. I cannot explain this feeling any more than that; I think it comes from Mystery.
I slept that night deeper in the city, deeper in the arms of another, deeper in the tangle of a self purposefully unraveling. The ardor of the world which burns and scrapes the skin, which entraps small prey in a sudden moment of resigned horror, which inspires the violent dance of waves, also excites the smallest of things, mere atoms that become enlivened and blossom at the touch of another in passion. The joy of a lotus blossom exploding into the light, the thrill of night jasmine; this is the sacred adventure also writ into the body, and at last, I adventured and guided such through the hoary unknown of our dual natures. And I laughed like I haven’t in ages, innocently, convulsively, just for the hell of it. Why not, and why not more often? Why are we all not guffawing in the streets? I only ask, but with no expectation of an answer. Damned if I know, and frankly, it’s early and I’d like some coffee.
…
I had to go home. I ran out of time. The danged road is always circuitous.
“I ain’t got time” may as well be the abbreviated national anthem… as tiny windblown seeds at the mercy of the infinite, it is in fact all we have. But we are so beholden to this trip of mortality that this does not compute, in the least. Divide by zero. We live within the heavy parenthesis ( ~ ) of birth and death. But the old city, the ocean, the swamp, these all dance within this queer cycle and are crushed and remade from time. I’d just heard that a fish in a Washington lake has experienced an accelerated evolution, and they are now armored, the first such mutation in a million years. Add some chemicals to the water, et voila, the cycle is broken and the sacred inventiveness of our genetic fabric throws on a new fashion. It took little effort for them, and so what are we waiting for? More time? We both fear it and crave it. The horseshoe crab knows only its life but the shoreline knows well its shape, from fossil to crawling right up to your toes. We all must come home.
I can’t count the waves and I certainly lose track of time. I cannot conceive of an Origin, nor can anyone, so we make up stories. In the beginning, God created the paradox, which was perplexing as he didn’t mean for that to happen. God looked upon the face of the paradox, and like Groucho Marx it was an old slapstick routine of the mirror that won’t quite conform to your reflection. God, with nothing but time on/in her hands, tried but could not quite synchronize herself with the seemingly autonomous reflection now before her, and moved on to other creative pursuits. The sky. The critters. And such. They also were first produced from God’s imagination, yet were peskily acting beyond God’s control. The mind of God became much less a canvas on which to paint creation, it became a crowded stage of impatient actors, clamoring for scripts and asking for rewrites. God had a decision to make; cleave from the chaos of their creation, or dive into it, a great swan dive into the pool of God’s own excited tinkering, which was done so hastily that each created thing had its irony, of not its opposite. Why I did this, I do not know. Perhaps I should ask you.
All we have and don’t have is time, and the time could well be used to find out whether God dove in or hitchhiked out of town for a second chance somewhere to get it right, free of paradoxes (which, itself, it, you know, a paradox. Right?). It is in these times of heightened curiosity that I’m thankful that I don’t have a clue and for the most part know nothing of this. I think I knew once, but forgot, which is fine. There is a great relief in spending time with the tides and the pines and the sudden creatures… I don’t have to know these things to be dazzled by them, and thus to learn from them. I don’t have to be a cartographer to understand my sense of place, nor a scientist to grasp the reactions around me. I think I just have to know, as much as one can, myself. I see traces of me in the washed up shells, and hints of you in the laughing gull. Comfort enough. Evidence enough that we are entitled to witness and exist. World without end.
Yes, it was a beautiful day,
That cliché, past tense exaltation
Cannot be denied. Not today.
A friend and his family found beauty today,
As his mother's ashes were poured into the ground
And the petals of cherry blossoms snowed in the comforting heat
And it was so quiet there, so simple a punctuation for a whole life lived
A name reduced to dust, as the trees trembled, and memory breezed.
What troubles me is not death, that pouring back
Of body into originating body, nor its random
Calling- no, it is that this finite body
Has so little time to know all these
Other finite bodies, and to
Bless them, and to
Say goodbye, properly,
Though a little less than hello.
Like cherry blossoms, I desire interconnection
So brazenly that I beg it to rain on me in torrents
To soak me to the bones and soften them in the realization
That ultimately and finally, all that stands between me and thee
Is the quality of our animating principles, that which
Drives us to be, and do, and revel in it as madmen.
I've lost some big connections recently, though
Not as overtly as my friend, whose calm,
Noble stance was a testament to his
Mother's tutelage. Yet these losses
Are for me deaths, though not in the sense
That I need contact a mortician; these are the
Deepest cuts of life, the severing of bloodlines and lifelines
Between generations of jadedness and misbegotten fortunes,
Those deaths that need not be, but are cold stares
Across the chambers of the heart, and you know
That, regardless of history, it is finished.
There is no idyllic churchyard for these
Broken realizations, nothing but a
Heap of unspoken regrets and
Pleadings, but alas.
There are more to these generations,
Because just as the priest fumbled with the
Ashes of that fine woman, some human somewhere
Was writing with holy ink a reflection of a promise
I'd made, never to abandon, never to judge, never to cast off.
I held that paper about an hour after that mother, a Cherokee legend,
Met the improbable womb of her mother, the goddess Earth,
And realized that even after the deepest cut,
The body to which we belong heals fast,
And makes dazzling connections
Not out of obligation, but
Choice, love, and hope.
As those petals
Fell in the music of mourning,
I felt a stranger near me; not some
Apparition, not some metaphor newly released,
But a stranger of time, from time, that exotic country
Where we expel our castaways of memory, and to which we
Are yet bound. The stranger, amid forsythia, magnolia, and freshly dug earth,
Was myself, shimmering in Creation, with you, and you, and her, and him, interwoven
Though not yet realized, a generation within eternity though not yet
Grown, a fiber of continuity just beginning to be woven
Into legacies, and that even as words do not
Pass in death or brokenness, there is
Assurance that we remain
Touching, regardless,
And it is love
Which tightens
Our mere strands,
Makes them shine in the
April light
Just
So.
I just needed to say that to someone. That someone happens to be you, I suppose. So hello, I say, with perhaps a tinge of feigned joviality. I have been a slave to this computer screen for the past several days, completing a task Sisyphus himself would not envy. I think at this point, I have thoroughly and completely lost my blessed mind. And because I'm dyslexic and a horrible typist, I've taken to using voice recognition software, which is accurate about 75% of the time. In this moment of reaching out, I thought I'd share with you perhaps the most bizarre piece of failed recognition. I present it to you entirely out of context, fresh from the stinky sulfurous pit of hell where instead of flames and molten bitty bits dripping from the Ashcroftian hopeless expanse above, there is nothing but endless painful bleeding paperwork for you to struggle through, this comedic mistranslated gem:
"Think he may be how how how I can't in Kenya. I loses wind and wave, my name is Jay, I'm going to wrap lodging counseling on flying alcohol."
The soil knows exactly what to do;
No clocks, no procedures, no sanctimonious dictate,
The soil is wild and free, and is the place of beginning.
It's spring now, and we emerge from our dens
As the sun emerges as warmth on the skin, days on the wing.
You can smell the Earth's thinking
As the soil, common dirt, is awakened and electrifies the slumbering underworld,
And within days the mountains here are buzzing
With anxious tendrils of birthing and returning life,
Their holy codes activated with a mother's whisper
And we are reminded of the resolute autonomy of the thin skin of our host.
See us from a distance; we are mere seeds.
We ourselves shall shed our casing, sprout, fruit and whither,
And do so with desperation, like weeds, shadowing all else for more light,
All else be damned.
Weeds do have their place,
Yet in zealously controlled gardens their clinging is loosened by the scythe,
Brought down by their own nature,
Brought down by the gardener's desire for a productive season-
This I must ask myself; when am I gardener, when am I weed?
Through the holy soil, the sacred dirt, intermingle roots;
I am entwined in you, and you me,
Our growth is in correlation.
My roots are my gardener's hands,
Just as my roots are the shimmering strands of fellowship of my weed nature.
Our world is as much below the soil as upon it,
As much in darkness as in light,
Yet, like the soil, we cannot resist the sun's impassioned blessing.
I cannot but grow along with you.
I cannot but be pruned by strange hands.
I cannot but live as the coiling secrets invisible in my body command.
Standing, rooted in seeming contradiction, I rise yet.
You will rise through the dark with me,
Silently, in exaltation for the random tossing of mere seeds.
Delivered Sunday, 9 March '08 at Jubilee Community, Asheville, NC
Diary of a firefly, Summer, 1986.
It was the big night tonight, and all the boys were glowin’ mighty fine before liftoff. I myself had supercharged my bioluminescent enzymes for the purposes of tonight’s courting, and gave a little zing to my antennae, which I’ve been told are my best feature. As fate would have it, however, my lightshow was cancelled by some human brat with a glass jar. Haven’t those pesky bipeds gotten the memo that we have an important job to do? At least the clumsy mouthbreather poked holes in the lid, but next time I do hope for a cleaner jar. Reeked of peanut butter. Happens every time. Using the usual strategy, I withheld my flashing so as to underwhelm him and win my release as a presumably boring specimen. It worked, I was dumped in favor of brighter fellows. By then it was too late; everyone else had found love and turned the lamps down low. Everyone except Charlie, whose last-minute flashing caught the kid’s attention which landed him in captivity. That bug has one bright tweeter but is still quite the dim bulb. Oh well, I’ve still got some flash in me yet. And the stars, which the bumbling human failed to notice, were putting on a heck of a show. Now, I’d love to know how to catch one of those beauties!
Or so one might imagine the journaling of one of thousands of fireflies from those innocent days when light and fire drew our combustible childhood curiosities into nights of adventure. When I was really little, I knew for a fact that the fireflies which lit up the fields like roving carnivals / were star-seeds, looking for a place to land. With a promise that all was not fearsome about the dark, they softened a night then also filled with boyhood monsters.
Darkness by itself is imperceptible; we perceive it only because light will never completely surrender. We know this just by marveling at the night sky; we know this because even within ourselves, even when drenched by darkest nights of the soul, there is an ember that will stubbornly never cease radiating. It’s this indwelling soul flame that is the most captivating kind for this fire bug.
So, can you imagine the scene when fire first took off as a commodity among our prehistoric ancestors? The cave parties must have been a real hoot; “hey blokes, come look at this, this stuff lights up the place and makes things disappear at the same time! UGAAH!” It’s that magical quality that also compels the pyromaniacs and the mystics both to drop what they are doing and burn stuff. Come on, I know that there’s some other pyros out there beside me, right?
The pyros, scientists, artists and mystics all love fire because it reduces matter to its most skeletal and primal nature, the fundamental chemical element from which all life on Earth is fashioned. The charcoal which was used to graffiti those primeval fire-intoxicated caves is mostly carbon, our organic godfather.
When I was that scrappy ragamuffin carrying my jar of fireflies, their twinkling brought me happiness just as the stars gave me awe. I felt that somehow, even despite my troubled childhood, I was a part of all of this crazy light around me. There are dark times in being a child, and those fireflies gave me holy nights. I can’t thank them enough.
As I tore into grade school science, I was bugging out over the concept that fire was energy; pure, raw, transformative energy, the breath of the Universe. Somehow, through our own biological spark comes a realization that we share a strange commonality with the fireflies and the leaves and twigs I’d burn out back for kicks. We are all star-stuff, all made by and dependent upon the same solar heat.
In those smoldering days of youth that I learned to pray. Isn’t it interesting that all around the world, the act of prayer commonly is accompanied by lighting a candle? Isn’t it interesting that, when we pray, we are usually provoked to it because some darkness, some thick and dim mystery has encroached? It’s as if the flame acts as a stand-in for God, being with us as we endure the gut-wrenching unknown. In its small and tenuous flicker, the candle stands as a beacon, like a firefly who whispers “don’t be afraid of the dark, you are never truly unseen!” While that might be hard to remember when we’re in the dark and off the map, it’s by these little lights that we find each other.
The Hopi have a ritual that is never missed; each day, dancers must gather on the mesa before dawn and dance the sun awake, to call it to blaze through the dream-soaked canyons and give meaning to the day ahead. The choice to dance reconciles the long night with the emerging day, interweaves them. The choice to search out that light gives lift to the dense unknown, and allows understanding and reckoning to ascend through the long, lonely nights we all must navigate. The song we are singing today is written by Bruce Springsteen (c). Band, take it away:
Can't see nothin' in front of me
Can't see nothin' coming up behind
I make my way through this darkness
I can't feel nothing but this chain that binds me
Lost track of how far I've gone
How far I've gone, how high I've climbed
On my back's a sixty pound stone
On my shoulder a half mile line
Come on up for the rising
Come on up, lay your hands in mine
Come on up for the rising
Come on up for the rising tonight
This portrait of fire and light we’re painting is intimate, and personal. Yet fire in the forms of disaster, bombs, and war makes for the biggest headlines and the most breathless reporting. Like most everything natural and beautiful upon the Earth, human ingenuity in the adrenaline-filled quest for power has wrestled fire into napalm and split atoms. If you look at the timeline of human history, I guess it’s easy to sigh and say that it was bound to happen. While this song we’re singing was written in response to September 11th, it’s not about retribution, nationalism, and waving our torches angrily, it’s about what flames teach do in those times; to rise above, to arduously carry what we’ve surrendered to the stars.
Left the house this morning
Bells ringing filled the air
Wearin' the cross of my calling
On wheels of fire I come rollin' down here
Come on up for the rising
Come on up, lay your hands in mine
Come on up for the rising
Come on up for the rising tonight
Consider the phoenix, that flaming bird which rises from the ashes. Its flight represents the freedom and new birth that personal transformation brings by reducing to cinders what holds us back. Consider Prometheus, the Titan in Greek mythology with a craving for fairness who stole fire from Zeus and gave it freely it to the mortals on Earth. Zeus wasn’t keen on empowering the little people and punished this brave light-bearer for the sin of riling up the population. It’s all too familiar that we see the same cycle of the light-bearers being scorned and ridiculed for blessing the masses with luminous gifts. Jesus encountered that. So did Gandhi. So did Socrates. So did Mandela. Why must illumination be so dangerous? Why must history make martyrs of those whose love for life burns brighter than the risk of death? Perhaps the answer is simply that while names can be blown out, there are lights that never extinguish, and with each passing generation the human flame of goodness and passion will rise as high as each soul dares it.
Spirits above and behind me
Faces gone, wise eyes burnin' bright
May their precious blood bind me
Lord as I stand before your fiery light
Come on up for the rising
Come on up, lay your hands in mine
Come on up for the rising
Come on up for the rising tonight
I believe each of us has the power of the Prometheuses and Brighids and Christs and Gandhis of this world. I’ve seen it in the fiery selfless love in the parents of the kids I work with who have been held hostage to poverty and abuse. I’ve seen it in their kids’ strength not to succumb to the doubts of others who write off their potential for a full and beautiful life. I’ve seen it in the hospitals of Haiti, where we put joy of living ahead of sorrow and held dying children who would never grow to play in the sunshine. I’ve seen it in this community, right here at Jubilee, where without question we have dispatched ourselves to New Orleans to bring light to besieged St. Bernard Parish, where we have stood up for the homeless and the hungry, and where we accept, without question, every imaginable path to God as the birthright of all beings. Bearing light is not just for mythology and antiquity; it’s happening right here, in this room, with something as simple as holding hands and being together through all the tears and laughter that life so miraculously shines forth.
Come on up for the rising
Come on up, lay your hands in mine
Come on up for the rising
Come on up for the rising tonight
La la la la la la la la la lah, etc.
From the cartoons, I learned the phrase “fight fire with fire.” As we further kindle and feed the growing light of generations, we are facing the cost of fruitless fighting for something so wonderfully common and ubiquitous. The light we’ve fought for, created religions and dogmas for, and drawn sharp borders across the Earth for, has been, is now, and will always be within us, just like our firefly in the jar. We speak of fiery passion to renew the world; you may confront the artificial fires which are charring the planet by rising and shining with a transforming radiance born from making a holy commitment to yourself and your singular life. Rise and shine, to energize and inspire this world, right down to the molecules dancing in excitement from this sacred heat.
Come on up for the rising
Come on up, lay your hands in mine
Come on up for the rising
Come on up for the rising tonight
La la la la la la la la la lah, etc.
May you be moved to pass on this ancient progression of increasingly magnifying light by kindling it, to watch it rise in the most needful of places. May you find a cosmic hint of yourself in the shimmering sunrise, and may you be visited by dreams of fireflies encircling you, themselves enthralled by your own mystifying and compelling glow.
There is an imperceptible light; thin, quivering, just below the surface of your vision that connects and holds all that you know, all that you are, and all that you shall be.
Scientists, artists, musicians, madmen; they all see some shimmering of this light, but can ever completely discern its blinding luminance. For to know that all light- to know it with your eyes with your heart with your mind with your spirit- will tear apart all that we know that is our fragile human consciousness. Perhaps that is a good thing that we don’t all stare at the sun. Some to truly dare the fiery brilliance of that light at risk of their own soul. Revere these beings, for while they are overcome by brilliance, theirs is a holy reeling in the flames, theirs is a sacred compact with the ash of our charred assumptions and limitations.
...that the typically creepy and largest theo-fascistic B*ps*st Ch*rch in West Asheville had quite the point illuminated on their cliché sign tonight:
Love is a risk, but never a loss.
It got me, and got me in the gut. I've said in so many ways so many times before that I'd rather risk everything I am and could be for the sake of delivering yet more love than accept blindly a path of greater comfortability. This strangely is ever so true tonight, as this evening is a confluence of forces reckoning with each other. Too complicated to explain here, but it truly is better to dance the jig of love cliffside than to safely entrenched and numb to it all.
A profile on this here web thingy for the upcoming edition of Q-Notes, the newspaper for the queer community of the Carolinas...
Approximate average number of page-views each week? Month?
I rate about 6000 page views a week, and hover steadily around 30000 per month. While I've not posted as gregariously as I did at the blog's inception, I think the high number is due in part to the fact that most blog's lifespan is about 2 or 3 years [BOTM is 5 y.o.]; being around for a while in a variety of incarnations pays off with reader loyalty.
Tell us a bit about you. Where are you from? Where are you living now? What do you do?
I live in Asheville NC and have been here in the mountains since escaping from Delaware in 1997. As much as I feel a link to the soggy landscape up there, I have always felt more at home here nestled in this slightly more rugged patch of Earth and anywhere else. The 'what do I do?' question is deliciously open ended, so I'll start by being as such... I dream, I question, I sift information like a mad Gold Rush prospector, and I enjoy overturning presumptions whenever possible, especially my own. Being more specific, I work in a therapeutic capacity with emotionally/behaviorally challenged children and families, do after hours mental health crisis work for a rural hospital, and am a majordomo of sorts to a famously funky spiritual community in downtown Asheville.
How would you describe your blogging style?
It certainly fluctuates with my mood and what's happening in the moment. I like to highlight stories and information that contain some sort of obvious transformational value, so I'll post links to breaking news on consciousness, health, ecology, and urgent political opinion. I will provide commentary when needed, but will also let the links speak for themselves [old school blogging style]. Inversely, the blog is a sketch pad of sorts for my poetry and wordplay, and even though those works are somewhat veiled by personal symbolism, it's the closest I get to publicly emptying my bucket of psychic beans.
What issues or topics do you like to speak and write about?
Expanding consciousness sounds "retro," but it's our future, the only one we have as a species if we choose to thrive in this world. It can be spoken of in a number of ways, because our consciousness is not limited to the domains of gurus and neurologists. Anything, in fact, could be used as a transformative tool to wedge open the skull and allow for previously unseen and unthunk ideas to percolate within and through our world. I suppose that's my main thing, vague though it may be. To narrow it down to issues that are affecting us now, we cannot afford not to talk about the Earth, our poorly evolved political and religious institutions, and basic human rights. You'd think that the future we were promised would preclude us from having to march in the streets for those basic rights, against torture and bigotry, but alas the work is not yet done. It takes passion for us to live, and boredom for us to succumb.
How does your online personality match up to your "real world" personality?
I can be sharper tongued with my fingers typing than my tongue wagging, but there's not much contrast between my written self and my real world self. If anything, I bumble more through the real world. If I were to critique my online/written self, I'd say that I am more far more humble, pliable and goofy than the words portray.
How do you use your blog to address political or ideological principles? Do you use your blog to write on progressive or LGBT issues, and how so?
My blog is there specifically to play with beliefs and allow space for examining them within your own context. I like to place the rigid entities of politics, religion and culture in a philosophical crockpot and reduce them to the soft states they fight against becoming. I will blog on LGBT issues when they are relevant to me... While being gay is an aspect of my identity, I don't wear it as a chip on my shoulder. I acknowledge and praise those warriors that have fought for the recognition of our right to live and love freely, and am passionate about unlocking society's taboos about sexuality and personal freedom. Our diverse sexualities no doubt influence our whole beings, yet I don't personally feel inclined to "metaphyisically graffiti" my gayness everywhere [excepting when I feel especially pathetic about being hopelessly single, wink]. I think sometimes we as a community frequently overcompensate for the millennia of oppression by becoming caricatures of ourselves and our movement... we all do that from time to time, but there's a time to wave our flag and a time to be in the big fat human picture, too.
The only way to begin
Is to start at the place
Where you first forgot why
There was anything at all to do.
This house is so quiet
There is nothing, nothing,
Nothing to indicate I am anchored
To any one fixed place in this midnight void.
Is there any reason to doubt
That there are no reasons to believe
The ensconced gilded myths we go glibly accept
Are little more than some kid's rock skipping across the water?
Perhaps the most terrifying thing
One of us can do is to heave away the trust
We hold so fervently to our love-starved breasts
Into the darkness, eaten by the moon, dissolved by some unknown breath.
I want only that.
Though I am shy to admit it,
I want the terror and vastness of not-knowing,
Not-thinking, not-filling-in-the-blanks, not tripping over my own shadow.
There's no time for sanctimonious pangs,
Only a moment or two for remembering when life was the color
Outside of the lines, the untamed scrawl that dared shallow conventions,
The sweet realization that we are creator first, created second, and responsible always.
It's time for music;
Time for some Slavic circle dance
For the starry night which overhangs this house
Which I come to inhabit beginningless, endless, as slowly I bring the lights up.
It's true, and I thought that, gasp, I might have shuttered things by now. Not true, but it is hard work to keep a metapersonal meme fresh (so long as one frets and worries about it). I've obviously been a lot more relaxed about it all, and that's been a relief as I've been mired in logging vast and creatively fecund realities, let alone blogging them. I could be less cryptic, but I can't be (?) at present, because there are things going on that are somewhat painful in the familial sense, and work is an ever-present umbrella that follows me everywhere I go, and work just isn't something I can talk about online. So, WYSIWYG, and hopefully that's enough. It is for me, though I'd certainly like to rekindle the blogging fire.
Here are those 2 February (or Imbolc) milestones of the past 5 years, just fer kicks:
If I didn't have to go right now, I'd wax poetic and whimsical, but, as aforementioned, I have to go. As do we all, in our own quirky and seemingly pointless ways... where are you headed, my friends?
It has been windy
Here in this valley of winter
Here in this fantasia of familiar turned skeletal
Here in this body, even, this weathervane of memories.
With the wind, much is scattered about
Reckless debris being driven to who-knows-where
And who-knows-why.
Among the leaves, the bottles, the crumpled rejects of some scribe,
I know that scraps of love, pure love, are on wanton trajectory.
Ownerless love, spent and used love, outgrown love, love beyond repair...
Blowing around as plentifully as any other careless thing
You wouldn't know that there's so much orphaned and stained love
Rambling about each time the wind picks up.
There may be a worried and passion-worn photograph
In a flurry with all our other forgotten nameless jetsam
Skittering across the road, and you're lost in your own whirlwind,
You might not see that one scrap winging by,
You might not see your own face
Caught in an amber of momentary bliss
Now darkened, now sloughed off, now as common as twigs and paper bags.
With all this bluster,
Let there then be a madman...
One who chases fruitlessly after all the trailing bygones
Who stitches together the improbable random stories of love lost
Who collects the discarded tears of broken dreams
Who exalts the song of love from atop a heap of time's rubble
Who, though sullied and calloused by dashing here and there,
Vindicates love even in its waste
And from his daft collecting,
Holds up one for the nameless, the forsaken, the broke,
Summoning light to again enter the trashed years
I've left thoughtlessly behind in the wake of desires untouched.
Let the madman's work remind, no, exclaim,
How great is the right to love
And cruel we are to toss it out the window
Wheeling down the road
Done with it
Without passing it on.
