11-14 March, written at the Meher Spiritual Center in N. Myrtle Beach, SC... [raw and unedited!]
To say “it begins” presupposes that nothing was there to begin with, which is silly. Something, some One (or more) is always there to help set up, to unlock the door and turn the lights on. This applies in the Cosmos as equally as it does within your soul and in the lakefront solitude of this gentle hermitage.
The forthcoming non-beginning strings of words are recording events which begin on 11 March 2010, just north of the fluorescent decadence known colloquially as “Myrtle Beach.” I’ve not yet seen that place, but I tremble in fear of it, a bit. I have been told it’s a ghastly infection of the American condition on the shores of a great Mother Ocean who seems to tolerate lapping at the feet of distracted masses. At this moment, however, I’m in a very small yet completely harmonious cabin set within a vast “spiritual retreat center” which thrives in a very natural state. Rain keeps rhythm on the roof, and for the first time in some time, I’m left with nothing but time. This is a free and open space to think, heal, and contemplate the unwinding spool of string that is my body in transit through Everything. As I write this, a spider contemplates the window while I contemplate contemplation, and how it is I will go about reconciling the self this go ‘round. I slept some following this, I think.
I left the cabin, friendlily called the “Tree Room,” and went for the beach as the rain held back. I remembered in the very deep of my gut the heave of the Ocean, my truest home. As I wandered I considered a troubling battleground; how intellect requires doubt to sustain itself, while feeling requires trust that it may be healthy. It seems there is no clear path through these brambles which mediates these two ecosystems of consciousness. The narrow footbridge which crosses the lake is ample for now in both its steadfastness and gentle wobble. I will come back to this.
Regarding Myrtle Beach; I knew to expect overkill, but this was overkill on overkill. I passed a building which presumably was a theatre; it looked as if, amid the downpour, that the building had gone ahead and unabashedly smoked a motherlode of crack while it was waiting for its erstwhile audience. I sought out the safe haven of a restaurant among the brash, turgid hotels and condos, finally settling upon an Italian place, allowing Dean-O and Frankie to lull me into familiarity in this exciting, new alien landscape. Even the rain was unfamiliar, not a sweet mountain mist but the permeating breath of the Sea Goddess, who I one knew so very well. Walking back to the Tree Room from my first adventure, I found a toad who stood unfazed, a wide-eyed gatekeeper in this pregnant night. I could’ve passed him, unfazed myself, but rather I stood over him in awe, asking how I could be more like that still, aware and fully realized creature.
Sleep that night was a mixed bag of nutty dreams, of salad bars and swamp foxes (which I’m told skulk about the area). I had intended to sleep much more deeply, in that I’m constantly running a sleep deficit and had hoped to recover relaxation in my body and make up for lost dreams; it was fitful but at the very last I gained a somnolent finale. Now, I’m met with blue skies and sun, a celestial bargain following the drenching onslaught. In a few minutes, I will stretch, do some yoga, and prepare for a day’s worth of good, long quiet walking. I’ll be interested to know what I write next…
***
It seemed to take a while, this getting up of the oomph to go out, but once I did, the rewards were many. I think my hesitation comes from the prospect of having to interact with two-leggeds. They’re why I’m choosing the seclude here, wanting to be away from human interaction for a while. On the winding path to the beach, which crossed through matrices of vine and shadow, I came across a large turtle. She seemed to be on a wander from one pond to the other. I spent a few moments with her, amazed at the complexities of her shell as if somehow completely oblivious to the complexities of my own body. Yes, mine is a familiar skin, and perhaps the fascination has worn out. Obscuring our names, labels, and speciation, we are not different at all. We both occurred as such.
{So did sleep- occur that is. I felt that I had a lot to write but longed for a thorough sleep that my body has been needing, and I succumbed to nearly 12 hours of it. Some might say that is a waste of contemplative time; au contraire, it is an element I’ve been lacking, therefore making it more difficult to access the subtler regions of thought I need to enter. But back to where I was…}
The path to the beach was on either end bounded occasionally by dark waters, into which unseen things slipped as my footsteps sent ripples through the delicate environmental senses they possess yet we do not. Bubbles, swirls, these are all we are entitled to see of that world. How many other worlds co-exist that I don’t even notice, what effects do these have upon my sensory map that I overlook in my rambling? Countless. I cannot imagine the eyes fixed on me as I can barely fix my own eyes on any single spot, it’s all full of wonder. Up through the dunes to the beach- the Mother was not holding back, she was as dramatic as ever, more than just exercising a duty to make waves, but doing it with a little extra fortitude. Here’s paradox; a completely unspoiled, virgin terrain did I emerge from, yet standing distantly on either side of me are monstrous hotels, condos, edifices not so much as facing the ocean but challenging it. Tombstones, I thought. I sat, and listened to the in-breath and out-breath of the sea, absorbing the vibration into a body otherwise absorbed with time and things so far removed from natural. A body absorbed with the woe and misery of so many, a mind which is preoccupied with finding hope for these folks, yet is often too exhausted to find the honey for itself (or taste the honey it already has). The ocean wastes no times in healing, and lifting these things into the current, and dissipating them among the foam and arcs of waves.
I made for the pier. Since I was little, I always sought out some distant feature on the beach to walk to. While it’s cliché to say it, the feature in question was never the point, it was getting away from where I started. Then, it was the chatter of family. Now, it was simply to go deeper into unfamiliarity. For a buck, you can walk the pier, which was being battered and swayed by waves eager for sand. Blackbirds cackled, a few bored fishermen tried their luck, and I savored the silence, and the lack of necessity in making small talk. I can see why sailors of yore were a feisty bunch- the horizon yields nothing but mystery and ghosts of far off lands. It’s as inviting as it is potentially deadly, the perfect mix for sparkly and unreasonable eyes. There was a quiet restaurant at the base of the pier, where I likewise savored a mustard-laden bacon cheeseburger, fries, and two pints. I do believe that many would find this antithetical to contemplative practice. Again, I must say au contraire, it might just be a requirement.
I thought of dualism and monism, idealism and realism. I consider our foolhardiness in just opening our mouths, how a choice of word or belief cleaves away limitless tendrils of possibility just as a butcher cleaves away what once was a living body. I find that wrestling with the cosmological is of no less import than in wrestling with my inmost “demons.” In fact, the two are connected intimately. The indwelling opponent is the by-product of an inflexible and insatiable material world, the rewards of gravity and the reliability of things; from flesh to coins. The self that I strive ever more to be, ever more to radiate, knows that the world and life is little more than soup made of stars, and the things we covet and crave are as meaningless as thinly painting the image you see out the window on to the window itself. Instead, we are fed by the nameless; the undercurrent which gives sudden form to the formless, the whip of ‘gator tail, the laugh of gull, the skittering under a leaf, that dream of holding a lover, the act of reconciliation with the opponent and walking away wiser. The opponent is not the enemy of the soul, but rather the frictive force that gives the soul its moral shape by testing virtue’s resolve. I will always have an indwelling opponent, as we all do. In my time of healing, I gain strength from it, I tame it, I draw my boundaries firmer and ensure its territory is beyond the field of my actions and words.
By doing such, I also make cosmological reckonings; the material world is not the enemy of consciousness, but rather a symptom of it. Awareness gives shape and color; should I not be aware, what is a star? What is a desk? What is a self? It’s worth noting that our conception of the cosmological is not just human-centric (by the consciousness of our species), but it’s identity-centric, the ultimate trickle down theory. My concept of the Universe is not just tempered by how science or religion explains it, but by my own psycho-linguistic-perceptual filters. I don’t speak English, I speak Me-ish. You speak You-ish. The language of our tongue is just a rough enough translation that when you say “watch out!,” I know to jump. Yet simultaneous to your exclamation, my brain runs through every meaning of watch, and every meaning of out, and fits them into Me-ish by context of the snake about to bite, or whatever.
I can tell you about the brambles along the dunes, or the choir of young tree frogs singing in time with the ocean’s breath and the play of red-winged blackbirds, but what does this scene mean? Something completely different to each of us, but we conjure together to pull meaningfulness from it. The less aware we are, the more meaningless, vapid and stupid walking along a beach is, but we can describe it just fine. “I walked along a beach today.” The more aware; it becomes the most important thing we’ve ever done, though we can barely cough up an adjective to make sense of it. “The awareness that is I moved with the Universe at this particular geospatial juncture where elements perceived as separate clash and integrate with each other, during this knowingly illusory fragmentation people call linear time and material space.” It’s as if we live with one eye closed; we sublimate the vastness of our vision and experience in order to be understood. We limit input in order to navigate. How to open both eyes, really? I’m sure if we were to do this more than metaphorically, we’d disappear completely, in a flash… something both enviable and terrifying.
Humans are terrified, ultimately, of purposelessness. But the closer we get to understanding the physical states of matter, which appear as orchestrated slam-dances of energy, the less purpose it all seems to have than just to be. How do we get to fit within all that? We used to sing on our way to the beach “We’re here because we’re here, because we’re here, because we’re here!” which might just be as great an incantation to a cosmic “truth” as we’ll ever really get. Our desire for purpose or meaning gives social order and safety; it drives the machine of beginning and ending. The closer we get to fully accepting the great heaving mass that life and consciousness really is, the less and less useful social order and safety really is, as we fall out of that system and become its madmen, heretics, and heathens who just love being alive so radically that we’re not willing to cage it in institutions, words, or fields of study. We want very much to know it, yes, and know it deeply, we just know that our knowledge is very limited itself because it’s all written in Me-ish or You-ish and is therefore an infinitesimal fraction of how the Universe finds meaningful expression of Itself. The Universal language is the Universe itself. It is that it is, you are that you are, and everything in-between is some kind of flavorful filler we’ve added to make it that much more digestible. There’s no translation of this language; if you don’t speak it in one way or the other, you’re dead. The key is to become aware that you’re speaking it, and that the world around you has been articulately pronouncing itself for all time, and you’ve got just enough years to become barely conversational in the Universal language. Better to speak a smattering of it than none at all.
That being said, it’s time to go out again, and find something to eat.
***
Humans, let it be said, are weird, especially in our endless desire for entertainment and distraction. One such peculiarity is the pack mentality, that we need do damn near everything in terms of group versus individual will. For example, the culture of dining out is a major social phenomena. There are a few seconds of awkwardness when the index finger goes up and the lips pronounce “one.” At the Italian restaurant, the server hurriedly removed the opposite place setting, so I’d “have more room.” Room for what? If I’d needed that much room whilst dining with another we’d be in a pickle, eh? I am a somewhat in a world designed for pairs, or more. There are few cultural outlets for the free bird, the solo artist. Even here, in a place designed for solitude and contemplation, I’ve been asked many times whether I’ve done this group thing or that. No, I explain as tenderly as I can forfeit, I’m here for solitude, to not interact with people but to dissolve my own personhood into the moist soil and surrender ego to context just as fungus digests the fallen leaves. Being a short-term hermit is not an outcasting or an antisocial enterprise; rather, it is acting upon the hunger of the soul to know its source, to concentrate via whatever tools it has to work with upon the rudimentary questions that cannot be answered when in the scuttle of social hullaballoo.
I soloed my way through a 3D documentary about the International Space Station at the Imax theatre, then through a round of pollo molé and Dos Equis. Prior to this, I walked along the beach, just because. I was exalted by the play of gulls, the strong wind that made the sand dance as auroras, by the random flotsam that found its way to these shores; a twist of nautical rope, shells within shells, a brittle and bleached old bone. What graceful remnants; if only we could be some careful to leave such beauty in our wake, rather than the plastic that remarks to the discoverer “hey, I consumed something!” Everything else rots, and rightly so, except that which we make or plunder. We refuse to allow the spoils of our civilization to just go away, as if thumbing our noses at time, to succumb to the decay that is gnawing at our feet second-by-second. If anything is gleaned from our excesses by the fantastical future, let it be that we were an insecure culture. Even our gods were plastic.
Sleep beckons. See, there’s entropy again.
***
While asleep, I time traveled. In a sense, it’s “Spring Forward” day and rather suddenly an hour slipped away. Dreams are always weird things, never routine. But last night was weirder, complete with cats sneaking into my cabin that were incarnations of the Master, collectively (it’s been said he will appear to folks here from time to time. A friend of mine thought his wife was wearing a Frank Zappa mask but alas, it must’ve been someone else). There was something else about a sombrero, but that’s all I’ve got. In a bit, I’ll pack up and return the Tree Room to it’s me-less state, and make one last time for the beach, to pay my kind regards to such a dear and eternal friend. When I was half-asleep there the other day, post-cheeseburger, my mind playing with the dream-world as a kid toes the tide, I thought that I could peacefully and happily die in front of the sea, that if I had a choice (many decades away, mind you), that’s where I’d slip away. To think of the elderly pilgrims who make their way to the Ganges who, once upon her banks, seem to turn off like a switch with little fanfare. Not only are the enlightened not fearful of death, they tame it, know it, just as I have sought to know and tame the indwelling opponent. I admire that self-control… this time though, I was thrilled to be alive and present before such a great power, even as the sun lulled me into a reverie.
Have I achieved what I came here for? I could best answer that if I fully knew why I was here. I think my primary thrust was a strong dose of inner peace, and a quieting of the constant self-doubt which tends to make me either more hesitant or emotionally awkward. Yes, then, I think I’ve achieved these points. Am I healed? Insofar as I acknowledged the wounds and allowed them to be dressed by either my own will or the weed-like creeping in of the natural forces which slip in through the holes in our souls and take root, making a balm from the inside-out. Fairer to say, I’m healing versus healed; there are many places on and within that need a balm, and I’ve had to choose the most critical functions of the soul and heart first. But I’m coming away with a hefty bit of contemplation, something my life allows little time for. For this, and for the Tree Room, for the turtles and ‘gators and laughing gull, I’m so grateful. Today, I’ll go to a sculpture garden as the grand finale of stimuli, but certainly not the final overture of this way of thinking.
And so the journey ends, but certainly not the Work…
I don't believe I ever sat down and actually watched the Super Bowl in my entire life, because generally I could care less about sports. Tonight, I watched it with (and for) lil' one. He has never sat down with a man to watch the game, never had a Dad who made wings, red beans and rice, and shook the house with a mighty roar at that first touchdown. Tonight he does- thank you Saints, you made champions of us.
I feel this is an odd sort of milestone- that connection between the odd geeky new-ish Dad who has no sports IQ, and the Son who has overcome many hardships and seen the shattering of many dreams now enjoying something together this simple. He said it meant a lot to him, even me reading up on the rules of football so I could follow the game better.
These little things, these passing minutes of our passing time, accrue such value. The moments are forever sealed in some holy place, tied to our names and our fragmentary existence. I cannot estimate the value to him to validate his passions, something that passes in about 3 hours, something as small as passing a ball back and forth.
Tonight, we have watched a game, but I feel that we've won something far greater.
Just a few hours ago, Bird on the Moon . com celebrated its 7th birthday. This coincided with a night of merry making and home brewing with my best friend Joshua, and neighbors Sarah and Lynn. Long before the "social media revolution" of instant status updates and breathless texting, this blog served as my voice when I frequently was too unsure of it. Over time, thanks to the feedback and support of the over 3,000,000 visitors from damn near every nation on Earth, I became more confident of that voice, and ever more aware of the power of each larynx, each fingertip to change the world.
Since those early golden days, I've become a Dad twice over, a published author thrice over, and have been within an inch of my life a few more times than I care to count. The point is, as the lyrics go to "Indiscipline" by King Crimson: "No matter how closely I study it- no matter how I take it apart, no matter how I break it down, it remains consistent." My life has been spelled out for a few million strangers for seven years, and though each day I may acknowledge its fragility, this life persists. This name, just like yours, just won another minute. All the more reason to speak more clearly from the heart, and more powerfully from the mountain top. The words that we emit may not be constrained to a single place now, in this age of constant connection and the madly addictive buzzing of an entire planet learning to speak. They spread out, and when the lights go out, we are saturated by words from throngs of souls we'll never meet. Provided we do something with the strange knowledge that we are all connected in ways that cannot yet be comprehended, we are fulfilling the dream of ages- being humanity and simultaneously sharing the same stage.
The Internet is just a very rough and queer step on that path to true interpersonal, international interconnection. It is a primitive and crude simulation of that uncanny feeling we all know subconsciously, that feeling where we know that we are surrounded by the very knowledge we lack but just can't yet touch it. Each of us is tapping on some steampunk telegraph to the rhythm of our soul, at the least calling out in wonder from our common biology. It is still a young tool no matter our comfort with it. It is an opportunity awaiting your Next Important Search.
So, what does all this really mean? Heck if I know, but it has been and continues to be an immense pleasure to hold this place dear to me and share it with you, bot or Bolivian, with unconditional peace. For the next year, Bird on the Moon will persist in one way or the other, and the Internet will grow in untold ways, and hopefully you will be given the opportunity to use your voice in transformative ways... come what may and for whatever reason.
In the spirit of our endeavour, as searchers and teachers, I can only leave you with this spellbinding gift:
Do you think we might be made of
Something more than what the scientists say?
I might be a smörgåsbord of old photos
Or the random bits of old game pieces
Found scattered on the shag carpet.
You might be some wind blown note, crumpled,
Only to land at my door, ink blurred and intent lost.
You might be the strange fog that settles over the city in January
The obscuring factor, the breath of a ghost.
Are we more than places, bits, together tumbled
In time's ruthless wind?
Are we more than a collision of consonants and vowels
Pulled off the highway, waving for the attention of passer-by?
In these later hours, the questions pass
As onlookers on the other side of the glass
Determined to get somewhere but too compelled by the shadows
Not to be curious.
As a stranger snuffs his smoke
I close my book- no closer to answers
But merged deeper with the question.
When the thin sheets of fog veil the city and hush her silver lights
And the snow, which fell as stars that entranced our tongues
Recedes back to the rivers, I too will melt, be absorbed,
Even in the stillness of this house, shadowed by a single dancing candle.
Snowmen collapse to Earth- I too lose my form
Somewhere between here and sleep, and drip back to oblivion.
The mind is softened by the loosening of shape and the returning of flow.
***
My slowing and darkening thoughts numb the impossible- I fly through the mists
And the shadows which blur the sharpest line… winging unbound,
Singing myself raw in the song of a newly freed slave.
Gravity unchains me, in dreams as real as a lone flame in the night.
To become a meteor in reverse, streaking in a flash of re-binding
Hurling my sulphurous way into the cold shimmer of heaven.
No-thing touches me here, even light relaxes because fantasy is faster than law.
You can take anything away, but none dares ransom this dream.
***
Before nightfall, I read that telescopes found yet another planet out there
Watery and massive, circling a sun seemingly unremarkable.
One could hail the discovery, save we have not yet discovered our own world.
Where is an observatory of the soul?
Where are the lenses that can focus upon the light of life
That we may name it, constellate it, give shape to a nameless radiance?
Just as there is no net fine enough to trap a soul and the photons it loves
There is no glass which bends life into a single, discernable image,
And no place high and dark enough to entice a freed thought to come back down
To take its place back among the alphabetized litany of “what makes sense.”
***
As the snow continues to merge with the swollen stream of yesterday
I will cling to the worlds in-between… the gentle minute between frozen and wet,
The unshackled thought which ran deep into the night and
Defied the roughened bounds of assumption like a fleet-footed vandal,
A dream on the wing parading through a mist-softened city at midnight.
A man in that city edges toward sleep
While evermore clutching in gratitude all that awakens him.
...has always been for me to ask for help. It's something I don't seem to have a problem coaching my clients on, but for me, it takes a lot. Here's the skinny: after knee surgery, loss of insurance, a failed return on investment from the new book, losing over a week's work (as a contractor, this blows the most), losing savings through failing mutual funds (I know that American poverty is still a luxury), not getting paid for services, vet bills, my cousin being sent to Asheville for me to "fix," and other recurring unexpected expenses, I'm at a total and complete standstill. Today, despite what the lender called very acceptable credit, I was turned down for a loan that was the last ditch effort. The lender has been leading me on continuously, saying that everything was clearing. Alas, he leaves it to a coworker to break the news. Now, whatever gas is in the tank is all that there is or will be, and despite my issues with Christmas, my son celebrates it and was looking forward to the just rewards of his incredible, blossoming character. Unless a miracle occurs, the last of the dominoes will fall in short order.
I know I'm not alone in asking for help, and as I said, my dire situation is an opulence most of the world cannot enjoy. We rats have been bred to accept this paradigm, and create dependencies that are beyond what is reasonable to sustain life and thrive. While in comparison this is small potatoes, for the moment, it's an emergency.
I am squeamishly and humbly asking for any donation possible. I need at least $250 to breathe, but about a paycheck's worth to relax. Anything you can provide is a wonderful gift, and accepted with gratitude. Even if you can't help, I'm grateful that you're reading this. Every thought does indeed count, and while I ask for help this way, I know I have it through the incredible generosity of my friend's spirits and hearts.
For that, I'm eternally grateful, and by that I am truly sustained.
Only a sliver away from empty,
She says, as the brokenness in her eyes mirrors the brokenness of her home.
Only a gust away from collapse,
He says, as shelter recedes into the gale and again, the familiarity of loss overtakes.
The worn chairs of an emergency room
Harbor memories of a million kinds of anguish
Hunger- madness- desperation- being utterly alone
Under the glaring white of anonymous lights.
How many children will only know this?
How many grandparents will die waddled in regret over what should’ve been?
If time would only stop long enough to allow love and reason
To dodge the seconds and dash into hearts long hardened by fearing
The gaze of a stranger who knows only pain, and doing something about it-
If time would only stop long enough to re-order our disassembly
Into new patterns where the least of these are pulled back from the margins
And return to the center of the spiritual city
To pull down the dividing fence between want and harvest
To welcome humanity back into itself
To be more than neighbors, but family-
To be more than family, but species-
To be more than species, but alive-
Not merely out of consequence
But of intention.
To live in hunger and lack may be an accident of our forgetfulness,
But to live in balance and community-
That is what we shall do on purpose,
Only a sliver away from happening right now,
Only a gust away from becoming strong again.
(Poem written for the 10th annual WNC Hunger Banquet)
Birdonthemoon.com, quiet though it may be, holds a very important place in my life. It's the studio that my house doesn't have (yet), dusty though it may be, the place where I come face-to-face with my creative effort. Through the archives of the past five years, I collected hundreds of poems and prose, culling here and there, and after well over two years of planning I organized that material into my third published work, One For The Nameless, which was officially accepted for publication just before midnight yesterday. It's through your feedback, interconnection, and support that this work was made possible. I'm humbled and awed to have nearly 900 pages of printed material from the past ten years, in addition to magazines and other print media.
I can't yet say I'm proud of this- that'll take time- but I am grateful for all of these opportunities to create, both in verbal and visual media. Thank you, again, for occasionally popping in the studio and saying hello, even if the desk is dusty, it means that this place holds value to you as well.
If eyes are the windows of the soul
You have pulled at those safe curtains, and the
Wind is blowing through, there’s a big storm coming
With each passing second that my eyes are pressed against yours
All manner of love is raging between us,
As all saints come passin’ through.
I made a bonfire out of yesterday’s fallen heroes,
Holy crackles be-glitter the night
And my words are burning- and my heart is burning-
And my eyes are burning with
The pure revelation of your love, heat and gusts of leveling breath
Rocking my foundation
Shaking me and transforming me into the very cinder I feign to master.
As we collapse into ourselves, I hear the distant anthems and
Proud hymns as all saints come passin’ through.
The last exhale, my Beloved, your hurricane of re-affirmed yes,
A symphony of innocence
That crescendoed through the valley and shook the dome of the night, Made the stars waltz, those very lights where you were and I am
So temporarily placed under.
Your name is now flung among the constellations,
The twinkling play of suns
Where you now run, full of love, as all saints come passin’ through.
I ask who will stop the time- who will stop time- who stops time
To honor the faces that fast become as thin as air, who we
Too easily forget when once we held them warm, alive?
We once stopped time for each dearly Beloved,
For those once-opened eyes where all saints came passin’ through.
This isn’t a metaphor or a convenient way to say to the
World how holy you are for having been incarnate- no-
When we touched I knew that same dizzy love that makes champions Of the dispossessed and raises up chiseled busts from
Rough hewn rock, and there ain’t none
That can question the virtues which arise from doing something more With love than just sighing.
Eye to eye, breath upon breath, this isn’t death because
There’s no stopping love.
Death stops no champion, no hero, no lover,
And at the moment the veil of life is loosened to the wind,
All saints come passin’ through us,
Among us… we bridge the mystery of light and shadow
By holding on to dear life as each determined heartbeat
Turns a gear in the clockworks of every soul you dared touch.
Today, I heard about a rush of leaves that came from heaven
Flocking through sunlight as a million fiery angels
A sudden blaze in your colors- the rustling was your name,
And that was enough for us to know
That you, my saint, my hero, my beloved,
Just came passin’ through.
FYI: There's a lot to be said about how discomfort pries loose mediocrity and exposes a raw and sometimes unnerving creativity. Perhaps, it's what's left of the animal in us- we grow stronger because of the wounds, not because we avoided them.
The Queen's many nicknames: Bear, She-bear, Betty-bear, Sweezle, Floor Biscuit, Lady Bucket, Lady Head, Princess from Outer Space, Sistah, Empress of the Known Universe, Lezbot/Lezboterian, Love-a-bear.
When I walk, do I remember enough the symphony of bone and muscle
That takes me through the streets, through the rain,
And into such a gentle night?
Do I remember enough the impossible synergy of tendon and energy
That propels me into your arms, that brushes me against your leaves?
It is so easy to forget
The strange convergence of some billions of forces
Which have built from nothingness this fluid body,
Forces constructing weathered words
Spoken out of breath, into your ear,
Into the Earth that is the you I name.
Just as all rests within all,
So does the abyss from which some artful surge
Pushes forth this world upon us.
This is as terrifying as it is ecstatic;
Nothingness is not immediately comforting-
It is the hoary ghost which hides behind silence,
It is that mystery which will one day completely encompass you.
You keep it away as desperately as you want it, want inside it,
Want to know the carnality of the ineffable.
Just as I mindlessly cross intersections,
I mindlessly choose to be enamored
By each crack in the street, each rustling and discarded thought,
Each bold weed which declares its belonging by root alone.
These things are the purest of privileges;
The experience of time passing,
Sentinels which declare “Today, you remain alive and in connection,
Do more than witness this- know this.”
To be in connection is to be a wayward and brazen anomaly of time-
You have emerged tenderly from the dark into this rush of everything
Grasping what you can, fashioning from elemental clay your work,
And going away...
And when you touch another, any other, the other-ness may dissolve,
Leaving you with it All
Clutching a bundle of nerves that holds you as much to the Earth
As it does some unnamed star, some cresting wave,
Some shimmer elsewhere.
We become each other’s connective tissue
When we, at last, become our selves.
***
When I walk, bone and muscle and tendon and energy
Are remembering, deeply, the symphony that is time.
I notice the woman who moves slowly up the hill
Under a large and twirling umbrella.
She is at once the center of the Universe, and its entirely,
And the nothing from which it came.
She does this so simply
Just by walking
Through a night where the cicadas keep time with the good rain
And the shadows merge silently.
I am
So rapt
With the sky
Which passionately
Paints the day in bold
Arcs, no matter the banal
Goings on in the grids and highways.
Funny how a sky's moon is oft linked to madness.
She has been so damn noticeable the past few days
Days in which there was great tumult scribbled into the calendar.
Sensible people lured into burning buildings of the mind, only to scream.
Sensible hearts drunken and flailing for words, longing for upheaval.
Making love after clocks dismantled explosively around us.
I cannot make sense of it all, this circus of emotions
Born from fecund neural landscapes I'll never see-
Can only hold so many souls without losing mine.
Somewhere afar, a star silently goes supernova
All its material surrendered to the artful
Play of the void, much as the imagination
Holds close our dreams, then bursts
In unison with the passionate
Delirium of the moonstruck.
Only containing so much
Until the pull of
Gravity takes
Our spirits
Beyond the
Horizon.
(inhale)
You are no different than the stars, really.
The same atoms that form you are dispersed all throughout
The night sky that brings you such awe.
You seek to unite all your disparate parts
Yet you are the cosmos, walking,
An aspect of an ever changing awareness;
You are a messenger, an observer, a nerve cell.
(exhale)
You took a dare tonight, and flung yourself
Haphazardly into the arms of strangers,
You cupped fire in your hand and danced on red-hot constellations.
To love is such a dare, to trust, to just feel is a risk.
That you chanced it is evidence enough you're alive
Every action is as dangerous as it is beautiful-
Your next breath is just as transformative as any ceremony.
(...)
To be invincibly curious (for Solstice/Father's Day)
In the vivid days of childhood you felt such a thrill
When you ran out the door for the forest, freeing yourself from time
Skipping into mystery and shadows without fear
Upturning stones in the creek to catch a salamander, to be invincibly curious.
You recall the wonder of the sun, some yellow star in a book,
That brought out your sweat and blazed your trails
Through a wilderness of thickets and souls.
By sunset, your name was called, tugging at you like a yo-yo string
And you brought yourself hesitantly home, perhaps a little late, out of breath,
Perhaps a little wiser.
In the mirror now, in these days,
The memories of youth are plotted in fading freckles
And we are punctual, and we enter the forest
With maps and caution as if we were once defeated by it.
However, there is a message inscribed
On the other side of that mirror where we mourn time;
There is adventure yet, for you are still a child of a Universe made of mysteries
There is exaltation in little things yet,
For you are still a child of senses which awaken further each passing day,
You are still a child even in your frailty,
For there is an eternity of graces yet to know and teach.
As a child, we do the walking for our ancestors,
Our mothers dwelling within our skins, our fathers anchoring to the bones,
And from these names in our blood emerge new children, new names,
New ripples in Creation’s pond.
The word made flesh.
From this newness comes an amazement in responsibility, and I am a father now.
From a child’s name comes a wonder in infinite outcomes,
And you are a mother now.
From the forest comes the child trotting,
And we uplift the goodness of their freedom, even when they’re late.
More than flesh made whole, the child before you and within you
Yearns that we never outgrow adventure.
I will affirm this in my muddiness,
As this father runs with the son into the forest again
Chasing dreams, catching holy glimpses of infinity
As easily as we might catch a salamander and laugh long
On the first day of summer, freed from time, the flesh made whole.
I'm on the bridge
The river is a muddy rage
And the sky, a battlefield of clouds.
There's thunder somewhere, could be in my head.
With a flutter, a white pigeon flies toward the mayhem above.
Lost, it seems, anxious circuits above the bridge, flapping with vigor,
As if its life indeed depends on this upward thrust to chaos,
There is reorientation and calmer winds yet.
Not along ago, a woman jumped from here-
For a moment lost on the air,
For a moment, free.
Life does indeed
Depend on being
Found, and at
Peace with
The sky.
Should she
have seen this
White bird swirling
Amid the impending weather
She might have chosen to be winged
And chase the very airs which troubled her
Finding herself in command of the wind, not merely blown
By it but meant to be upon it, intended to be made ever more alive.
I deeply revere these passing seconds, and the coming
Storm, and to behold this white pigeon flying for
Its freedom, flying for its life, flying perhaps
For these eyes only for they are lost too.
I uplift my vision to the passion of the
Sky, that I may too be reoriented
And clearer of my surroundings
More knowledgeable of my own
Feathers and their ability
To course through the
Very mystery which
Hold me back.
To the sky,
May I again
Be found
In you.
We talk about the corner of an eye
When we know it's round
Fooling ourselves into boxes and lines.
We're more fluid than that
Flowing from here to there, streaks of vision
Seldom aware of the limits
So swiftly made just by naming a thing, fixing to now.
The Big Dipper hangs as a
Question mark over the house, paradoxically casting light
Long since old but no less mythic.
I with those stars form the arcs of a riddle
Joined by our mere points in space
Orbiting in nameless absurdity as strangers then, now and yet to be.
Inhaling the sweat of suns, you can exclaim
There's something here or something there
When both and neither are true,
As real as an almost-kiss.
There's something behind the wall, within the grove,
And surely, there's something in your cornerless eyes.
As a tireless mockingbird I exclaim
Multitudes of somethings, perhaps senselessly.
There's no proof of even the stars
Of even the bird's song
Of even your eyes.
I could live without proof, and besides,
I would rather dare a dream of life
Than to deny that there's something there.
Today, at the hospital, a patient I was evaluating became increasingly hostile and unsafe. He was getting belligerent with staff, and the police were called in. I was wanting to get the guy some help, but I knew he'd forfeit that if he blew his top and broke the law there, which seemed increasingly likely as the minutes escalated and buzzed.
An African-American nurse walked by, who was just doing her rounds, and in his explosion he yelled out the dreaded N word. I turned to watch her sink, her head coming down to her chest as if her spirit just deflated. "Arrest him," I said, which they kindly obliged. I don't think I've ever seen a word so cleanly puncture a person's soul.
After he was carted off, I looked around for the nurse, whom I'd never seen before. She's from Africa, and said she'd never been called that word as long as she's been in America. I've seen people slapped, kicked, bludgeoned, and she was justly in shock over a wound just as real. She said that in her culture, if you offer a stranger a piece of bread, you acknowledge that you're their brother or sister, that the community takes care of each other. She said that's what she tries to bring to nursing- I said that she's giving an even bigger gift, that of sharing a great cultural value that "ours" needs so badly.
I was immensely touched by her spirit, even as it was wounded. For while she was reeling from such unkindness, she felt so badly for the patient. That he was arrested brought her no comfort, only sadness for him and such selfless compassion.
I've a lot to learn from that hour or so. And I'll never forget the haunting image of a proud, beautiful and strong person so suddenly broken by the careless arrogance of someone who is refusing what this nurse so freely gives... compassion.
The lilac tree uproots itself
And dances in the street at night.
Exuberant hues of purple thrill the air
With each sweep of a branch, each flourish of blossom.
Or, it could be you who's dancing,
Your spine arcing across the starfields
Fingers play with the wind, loosened from names and time.
Dancers, of dream and of now, you were once bodies
And are now words, blazing through the music
You are the poetry of some love-mad fool
Each footfall an answered longing
Each leap a wish unbound by reason.
Is a lilac any more reasonable than a poem, a dance?
If you have transcended bone to become a word
Do not be timid in your pronouncement,
Spin for the audacity of spinning,
Dance close to me that I may be moved by your orbit,
Swayed by the language in your steps.
I look out the window
And behold the lilac tree...
Still for now,
But waiting to be caught dancing,
As I look on and on, wordlessly,
Waiting for a poem.
It has come to our attention that this blog is being infrequently updated. Pleased be advised that the blogger is experiencing time-related deficiencies and this situation is being closely followed by Management. Remain out of your homes. Disregard the warnings and emergency broadcasts. Do not panic, as area authorities and the Great God Pan have the situation under control, as much as it can be controlled, which is actually quite little.
In the woods today a breeze
And a rain of petals on the path
Each a dancer in the moment,
Each spinning in homage
To the space between twig and ground
Falling is coming home
Lying there as crazy as a starfield
As purposeless as anything else,
Purposeful dancing only unto itself.
Being witness to such a game of chance
While so gracelessly be-forested
Casting out for such breath and sun
Is a daredevil's compact with gravity and happenstance-
I'll fly through time like those raptured blossoms
Singularly created for this very moment
To have my one dance seen by some stranger from afar
Admiring the winding path ahead
And might notice the petals fall.
This is one of those blog posts that is intended to be a mere blip on the radar, a brief surfacing for air, a sudden spike in the EEG. Things are, well, as the recent meme goes, just what it says on the tin. I'm still here, to quickly reiterate, but I've been frightfully immersed in such wondrously time obliterating pursuits, such as:
Learning my lines for the ghastly play, which I barely agreed to be in a few weeks ago, and now is one week from opening. I'm the lead, and this wretched script, dug from the very bowels of a publisher's hell, is brutal on the English language and even the most easily entertained.
Feverishly working to complete the final FINAL draft of the new book, as I need a stack for sale by this time next month. The miracle of modern printing will likely come through for me, but with the cancer upon time that the play is, I have a monumental task yet ahead.
Working. Stretching my brain around horribly warped dynamics and sadness. Also beginning to prep for my Substance Abuse boards in June, itself as fearful as taxes.
Co-parenting at a very critical time for the lil' one. I can't use this space to get into his stuff, of course, but it's fair to say that as he faces struggles, I face them with him with the added benefit of my experience in maneuvering similarly, yet with the added fear and unsettle-ment that time and memory bring.
As with the rest of America, experiencing severe financial discombobulation. Alas, poor Yorick...
I feel badly that my twittering (a somewhat gut-wrenching reworking of that lovely verb) has been far more frequent than my posting here. Perhaps, it's a side effect of our rapidly dwindling time/attention as a society, or my own, heavens, internetty laziness.
I will post more dispatches from the front as time and situations allow.
If anything, I am a stalker of words
The right words, their accompanying sounds
In dense trails through the brush, holding my breath to
Catch a glimpse of a semantic beast, a toothy emissary of the wild
At my own peril, to bare my chest to the creature, to drop my weapons and dare it.
I am not a killing man, yet there’s something terrifying- my bare hands are to confront it.
The very nature which draws me out, adrenaline shook and skin chilled
Are my own pronouncements gone feral, once gently past my lips
Only to get that crazed look in their eyes, and dash out into
Shadows, howl, and enter the thick symbolic bramble
And rage, and thirst for blood, and lead the chase.
Supple mouths are but gates that swing in the
Wind, and the entire menagerie creeps
Out, and that screeching is mine
The clawmarks are mine
Myself my own prey.
How is it that that which
Is tame so suddenly succumbs
To intoxicating instinct and becomes a
Wholly different animal simply by sniffing a
Breeze kissed with the freedom to run, even into chaos?
It is night, and it is still and I am waiting for you, for that which
Was once mine, was once me, now young and feral and uncompromising in appetite.
What will I do with my hands when finally, the words are caught, and time is nigh?
I may tense them in a hunter’s unforgiving grip, or open them, and embrace
Something once cherished, once escaped, now beyond recognition
In that moment of capture, but as I hold those words
Those savage nobles, those fearsome beasts,
We break down in sudden remembrance
I howl with you and you gently
Go with me, the fight is over
Leaving us to merge again
Into our homeland
Of air and
Flesh.
I've just finished the rough first edit of the new book. Yes, the new one, and incidentally, the third one which I've been sitting on for some time. The beast is at least weighing in at 350 pages of my gibberish presently, and with some cuts and additions, that's about where it will likely settle. Not that the page length has anything to do with it, really, but being a man there's something quite comforting in such a long, ahem, piece of work.
I'm still aiming for an April Fool's 2009 launch, and the free time between now and then is so, so thin. A poem ("Kick up the dust") originally seen on this site and performed at Jubilee will get an interpretive dance work-over in mid-April at the Diana Wortham Theatre, and I'd love to have a stack ready to go by then. It's quite an humor, obviously, and thanks everyone for your hand in the inspiration and the drive to keep this thing going.
If anything, this blog is a personal archeology rather than a public compendium of interests and whimsies for the masses. I've never been much of a consistent journal-er, yet I find another Groundhog's Day/Imbolc is here and Bird on the Moon adds another year to its dusty stacks.
Happy Birthday blog, you are 6 years old today!
What is especially interesting in this is that I'm pouring through all of these entries for material. I am closing in on having the first rough draft and edit of the and so much of it has its roots here. Yes, my frequency of posting is wanting, and perhaps the public substance has been less than immediately mind-blowingly transcendental, but what you do with these words is your business dear reader, I just arrange them. Transcend as you will.
So, no gloaty and self congratulatory posting here, just placing a marker here along the path. I am certainly keeping this going, because while it may benefit the passing reader (okay, over 2 million visits since the start) it is ultimately a time capsule for myself and perhaps for others... maybe my lil' one will be interested in going through all this some day. If at least to help him sleep.
Well, thanks everybody. It is an honor to be among the most senior of Asheville bloggerati, and it is an honor that some folks I'll never know hitch along on my journey. As the glam metal 80s song goes, "I don't know where I'm going, but I sure know where I've been."
Here's to not knowing tomorrow, and being thankful for so many great years!
The house at its quietest...
The little one fell asleep listening to
Old stories, oral histories, fantastic fictions.
I laugh, kiss his hair, and tuck him in.
Now alone with myself after a day of
Cold and muck; we sought out stones
At a disused mine, deep reds
Which emerge through the
Sleeping dirt in perfect geometry.
A brief moment of eureka, holding aloft the find,
When the stone is not the found thing at all,
But that moment itself now merged with
The crystalline, no longer the stone,
Just time in the sun, even as cold
As we were, even as entranced
And exhausted, and free.
Now, though, a flickering candle,
These fingers, these words, and this
Fruitful silence where the gravity of my
Changing life is not less heavy, but more comfortable...
The gravity of transgressions, regrets, awkwardnesses, shadows
Is reclining, may as have its feet on the table, whistling
"Round Midnight" or some other hymn to these times.
Tonight, I am just as able to converse with the
Heavy burden of my worn and addled secrets
As I am to hold those rocks we found,
Thinking of the holy effort not in the digging
But in seeing, savoring, exalting.
Perhaps, stories exist to lull
The child in us to dream
Just as much as they do for the teller
To find new passages through the mystery,
Unexpected paths through the bramble of our days,
And laughing in the quiet of a small house, at ourselves.
As the Universe created itself, and as we are the Universe embodied, so it is our course to create ourselves. We must further look to the stars to see that all creation, all forms, must one day un-create, disembody, and dissolve back into darkness and light and all that lies between and beyond.
To fight this is the ultimate denial; to take charge of it is the ultimate strength.
There is a great fascination in conceptualizing the Other,
That alien, that shadow, that ghost who makes a home
Just between the atoms of our Everyday, and lurches,
Suddenly, into our own, taking our breath
Without ever having to ask for it.
I was listening to this wind we've been warned about
Rattle the edge of my world, surely freezing
Any still thing, when a spider larger than the eyes watching it
Crept down, carefully down, the lampshade.
The Other moved with such precision
In strides that surely inspired daVinci
Mechanical is a crude word for it
A perfection of organic orchestration.
I do not move with such gentility,
I bumble dance and zig-zag through the symmetrical corridors of days
Not altogether graceless, yet not as aware
As the arachnid whose mission has now advanced to the bookshelf
Moving through pages which attempt to strenuously capture
The awe of the creation in which we find ourselves
Waiting for the Other,
Surrendering to the intruder
Without ever a breath of understanding between us.
It pretty much weakens a blog post from the start to say something like "I wish I could say more, but...", and this is one of these cases. I've got to be up frightfully early in the morning for the annual pilgrimage to Delaware, get the house ready, and somewhere in the middle of that, acknowledge a calendar flip to the much anticipated and feared '09. I type this while still annoyingly encumbered with a lingering laryngitis, which tries my patience even when the words are spoken by my fingers. So, a proper year end review would take more times than I am allowing myself, so I will process Zero Eight with a run-on sentence, thusly:
"It started with tossing some fireworks out the back and attracting the new neighbors attention, and continued on with a dire amount of unblogged work panic related to my own damn procrasination which actually lead to a vacation in Charleston where I met a fabulous gentleman with whom I still try to correspond amid the new duties ascribed by me as a Godfather-plus which stretched joyously into the springtime wherein I found a short poetic resurgence which couldn't have prepared me for the sudden death of my cousin Brooke whom I still miss and feel strangely about not being physically incarnate, then again even the most base matter is incarnated somethingness though by July I'd had it with a certain religion which would've argued even the above loosely worded observation, of which I increasingly shared at Jubilee to good reception, mysteriously, and it was to mystery I flew in September after resigning from a company that took over my older company, to which I retreated to a different division, but more excitingly I traveled from Istanbul to Bruges (Belgium) for about a month where at the midpoint I rendezvoused with Joshua and Robin for Oktoberfest and zaniness in Bavaria, and when it was all said and done after returning home I felt out of place by remaining in place and back home I tried to undertake a sabbatical but the new division of old company snatched me up and suddenly I was a "crisis counselor" full time which flew by as the autumn colors splashed across the mountains like a spray can shot off a fence post which isn't "Green" but whatever it's a metaphor, and fall grew into wintry-ness faster than I anticipated and the responsibilities and rigors of an emerging parenting role consumed me and lead to a few dark nights of anti-confidence which quickly dissipated each time I saw my lil' guy's happy eyes, which makes everything worth it, and despite losing a shitload in the markets and living a much less financially secure life (who isn't?) I find that I am happy and can leave Zero Eight wiser and, quite possibly, happier than I entered it, so in forty minutes I'm going to throw some fireworks out the back, and..."
Jeez that was exhausing for me too. Happy Arbitrary Passing of Time Day, y'all, and with joy and care may we welcome yet another symbolic chance to get things even more right.
David Corn: [Obama] stepped over a line by picking Warren to deliver the invocation at his inauguration--even if this is only a symbolic gesture.
By all means, Obama should work with Rick Warren when there is common cause. For political reasons, he should not eschew Warren because of his anti-gay views. Warren can be a powerful ally when it comes time to persuade the public to support climate change legislation. Success in governing often depends on forging coalitions with those with whom you disagree.
But Warren's opposition to gay rights is more than a mere policy dispute. It is an act of bigotry. Sure, Warren does not believe he is being discriminatory. But that's what it is. He is denying rights to certain Americans because he disapproves of how they love. By handing Warren this prime slot at the inauguration, Obama is saying that he recognizes Warren as a spiritual leader and is reaffirming Warren's position as such. This is an insult to gay Americans and those who support equal rights in this nation.
Up north, they say the trees bent and cracked with ice,
Billions of temporal crystals bringing the day down,
Cities on pause as in amber,
Time for the observers to rush in.
No such thickness here, that you can touch anyway.
Though I cannot tell if I am inside the shaken snowglobe, perpetual in mid-wonder,
Or outside it, shaking vigorously, questioning what has really ever changed.
Time for the observers to rush in.
I do know that the cold has twisted and crackled the branches of my tree
Gnarled them unrecognizable from spring’s gay pageant,
And we are in greatest upheaval when we are unseen to ourselves.
Time for the observers to rush in.
The winter is fearsome only in that it renders the obscure naked
Reduces flamboyance to only the most essential of movement,
Making the hide-n-seek of summer’s festive play a pointless act; nothing disguises you.
Time for the observers to rush in.
I was born on the cusp of the season, a rainy Thursday which surely washed leaves into the gutter.
Suddenly, skeletons around which we build the meat of our names, our craven necessities, are revealed.
I am spending the rest of my life peeling away to the origin, the naïve twig, the fragile bone.
Time for the observers to rush in.
From these heaps emits a gasp of timelessness, even as they whither under seemingly permanent stars.
Do you remember the games you played with yourself, dancing between two opposing mirrors?
It seemed that distance blurred you, but in fact you merged with that light, dissipated within the glass.
Time for the observers to rush in, one of them is you,
Finally seeing yourself.
When my mind wanders, just before sleep,
I enter the world of make-believe, the province of my younger and unstained hands,
Where I would simply play the day away,
To be some brave an noble figure commanding the world from my bottom bunk.
It is so often said so as to be second nature
That not-knowing, a celestial sort of innocence, is the closest we have to the child inside.
The first star I see tonight, I wish I may,
I wish I might, un-know all that has made my steps more pragmatic and careful,
All that has informed my restraint,
So that for even a mere hour I could reclaim the naive woodland paths of my forsaken years,
Where the rigidity of knowledge couldn't obscure the boldest of dreams.
Even though as my fingers are wrinkling with the millions of minutes spent wrestling Truths,
I see too enticements to play and pretend, to make believe
That the world's radiance cannot be overshadowed by the limits imposed by fear and pain.
Perhaps I can still pretend, even as the map of my body and soul
Succumbs to separatist movements of the competing flags of truth, honor, and virtue.
There are tree houses yet unbuilt, worlds yet untouched.
Though adventure may be tamed by the clock, I must jam the gears for child that follows,
And dare to never come home on time.
Only rust red and thin veins of gold cap the mountains-
This morning, I heard the syncopation of a tree letting go of it's final tiny hands-
The weight of heavy down is shield enough against gloom-
The very breath of the Earth is ferment now, roots into roots-
I crave spice, artificial heat, edible furnaces.
All life is clockwork, yet there is no universal agreement
What time it really is.
All I know is that autumn has arched the pinnacle,
An almanac page loosed from its binding,
And we flutter now into the nurturing dark and chill
Again, one with the province of stars, again,
Left to calculate our place and pace in the passing night.
What senses record your history?
What undiscovered dimensions of feeling are the dutiful scribes of your name?
I tremble before the venerable and exact chronology of mountains,
Of the iron in my blood and the exultant push skyward
Of mere ruddy leaves, southward flocks,
And the coming still nights.
Life has changed, and always will. It's the thankful litany of the ages that ours is an incarnation as variable as the autumn leaves, as random and resplendent as the stones along the shoreline. For this, I of course offer gratitude, but for that changing life, I must also offer concern.
Ours is a world that has been overwhelmed by the weight of its own divisions, a world that is collapsing under the strain of wars, disparity, and entrenched idealism. While beauty abounds and potential runs as freely as starlings, there is a very tenuous grip on the future here, and it's straining, and the gravity of millenia of carelessness is pulling us down. Each of us, from ivory towers to the shanties of the poorest slums suffers.
This year, I was asked to take on a responsibility that has transformed my idle minutes into measures of necessity. I was asked to be a Godfather, and beyond. For years I've been against the grindstone for children who've been cast off by a society too drenched in judgment and obligations of artifice to give the powerful mercies needed to help them recover from the suffering inflicted by the grand scale selfishness of society, abuse, and poverty. Suddenly, all of my efforts were contextualized into the needs of a child frequently disdained, labeled, written-off. Suddenly, I was asked eclipse the work-a-day world and be a champion for a soul whose merits were overlooked because of his challenges. I cannot imagine a better thing to say yes to, and a greater cause. I cannot imagine a greater challenge, and a better reason to fight for a future which is ambiguous at best, fearsome at least, prosperous at most.
I now have, finally, something greater than myself to fight for, to die for if need be. I never took the future of America as seriously as I do now, and never have with as much fire in my belly screamed aloud for change as I have in the past weeks. For this reason, for the sake of my responsibility which I view as sacred and as necessary as my next breath, I implore that all Americans take the time to look around them and undertake action which honors and magnifies their own responsibility. I implore you, my homeland, to seek out the greatness of your own callings and do what is required to grant a just and peaceful legacy to those who will follow us into histories yet unwritten. We have been too long negated, exploited, and like my Godson, written off. We have been mere pawns in a sickening political game, which does not honor the soul and the justification of a nation. The birthright bestowed upon us by our ancestors has been sold to high bidders and profiteers, and I don't believe freedom was a virtue intended to be commoditized and traded like cattle.
I believe that freedom was a virtue intended to be improved upon by successive generations, perfected, and practiced. This child who calls me Dad reflects a deep abiding wisdom when he says "it doesn't make sense that we make a big deal about hate speech but our institutions are themselves hateful." Can we not aspire to the words of children, and cease our nationally ignorant contrariness?
I believe that, in some form, we can at least begin that great work by using the best of our remaining democratic opportunities and elect Barack Obama the next President of the United States. Since I was young, I've always watched politics as a sport, at times a blood sport, but always without great inspiration. It was with a certain schadenfreude that I watched the powerful tear themselves down and see what mere virtues remained. Yet this campaign has proved me wrong. I see in Barack and Joe the best of America remaining unscathed, because they refuse to bow to the blood sport and spoil the justification of their message. They stand uniquely equipped at this time in history to create dramatic shifts of hope and opportunity, nit for myself as much, but for the one who depends on me most.
For the sake of the most innocent, and thus the must vulnerable and the most often victimized, do what is right, America. Do what is the essence of our birthright, do what composes the blessings of truest liberty, and vote.
Vote with love, vote with compassion, vote with confidence, and vote with hope.
I was once a boy,
Now, by default a man who through chance
Ran the gauntlet of time to hold these small words in my hand.
I was once a boy in my mother’s house,
With a forest at my back and silent meadows full of magic
Left to make worlds out of silent hours, to make sense out of paint,
To learn the world through yellowed paperbacks, rope swings, and the kids down the block,
Our secrets bigger than any treehouse, darker than the stagnant creek
By which we made our pacts.
I was once a boy in my father’s house,
On the brink of a river whose tides once ripped the basement, and would carry you away,
Where the clink of glass and the echoes of lonely proclamation
Were the make-do comforts of a misfitted bumbling frame,
Told with such fervor that there was something I stood for just by the heaving of my blood
Told that there was no trying greater than signing a once privileged name
But the driftwood boats could ferry away my soul, a hobo, a prince, to some greater ocean.
I was once a boy,
Now in my own house, quiet save for the cats and the chestnuts that hit the roof with each breeze.
I am wrinkling, I have numbers sewn into the spine of my worthiness, a chest of old stories.
The boy, once ruffled and curious, inexperienced and blessedly naïve,
Now has seen too much, inventively forgetting the scars, a luxury where once he was entertained by mud.
I wish I knew, even remembered, the goodly comforts of innocence, life before obligation.
I was once a boy, now a man, now a father,
With only years between this house, and the houses of my earliest days,
Years that pass radiantly, from my storied hands,
To those of the boy.
2045: First off, I soon hope to return to higher-minded posting, but politics has always been a sport I follow with a Neanderthal's zeal for the good-guy-clubbing-bad-guy-on-the-head-with-a-mammoth-bone kinda stuff. American politics is certainly the world's lowest common denominator, so to speak, but Obama seeks to bring the dignity and respect back to the gladiator's ring. We'll see how joyously he wails on the tired old awful Walnuts. Poor Walnuts.
2057: Mmmm, reheated garlic lemon rosemary elitist chicken! With capers!
2104: Walnuts is hurting right now, and he's angry.
2106: As always, I'm mentally yelling at my router. Barry comes on strong an energetic, Walnuts is puddling-like.
2109: If this is what "going on the attack" is, it's like playing war with balled up socks. Barry continues to sound presidential.
2113: What's wrong with spreading the wealth around? It might be "socialist" sounding, but so is nationalizing banking. Which Walnuts voted for.
2117: I'm sure Walnuts remembers the Great Depression. He voted for the 10 trillion dollar debts that will hobble our kids.
2125: Frankenstein has the scars to prove it, too. Why can't McCain return the respect he's being generously given by Barack?
2131: "Politics as usual is not working for this country."
2134: How dare Walnuts not acknowledge the bafoonery and evil statements that have gone on at his so-called rallies?
2141: Walnuts scrambles like a drowning rat at the end of the Ayers question. I will grant that he's a master at changing the topic.
2144: What's weird about the instant reaction feeds is that it relies on reflexive, not thoughtful, responses. Oh, and Walnuts is ridiculous in pulling out the "special needs" card. She's not even taking care of her baby.
2156: Still here, just dumbfounded by the fact that Walnuts gets to have the last word on every pivotal question.
2159: What's with Walnuts' cocky and unpresidential smirk?
2205: Yippee, you can drink now because Walnuts mentioned the gold plated Caddy! I swear, I've never seen more reprehensible rhetoric from a major candidate than tonight from McCain.
2209:I could consider eating a lobster, Sen. McCain, and perhaps I should get credit for considering it. Fact is, no way will I actually eat a lobster. But I can get some points for at least thinking about it. Right? That's what you're saying.
2215: the issues are not really being represented here. it's a gotchya tit for tat, a sifting for soundbites. the questions are weak.
2218: We trail the rest of the world in education because of our approach to education. We can't factory farm the power of the human mind. Intellect is a commodity that can't be created though a model that is so geared toward profit, but through instilling a classical desire to learn. I don't expect either candidate to address educational philosophy, but the way we educate has a lot to do with the failure of our system... we don't allow for the great variety of capacities, curiosities, and inclinations that make a big difference in a child's success.
2226: Okay, you fucker, bring it on about autism. Show me, Sen. McCain, how the administration you palled around with increased the funding and likelihood of effective treatment and education for autistic children. Show me.
2230: An eloquent (new elitist buzz word) finish from President Obama, while Walnuts was again scrambling with his fake hubris. It's over now, thank the heavens.
I was expecting to be posting journal entries from the Odyssey by now, having completed processing the pictures, video, and audio as well. Maybe I would've finally gotten some time in to work on the book, itself long overdue. Yet, what have I done, other than accept some contract work, dig a firepit, and play house?
I've been absorbed in the "correction" we've been seeing, the collapse of our entire financial sector (my investments included), along with real spasms of inadequacy in our energy sectors affecting real people, not just speculators in a pit. I've watched with great dismay the desperate thrashings of an old, power hungry man and his Manchurian compadre as the last democratic exercise we possess, the election of leadership, turns suddenly against him and the paradigm he represents. The venom, the whipping up of frenzies and lynch mobs, and the incitement (or, at least, tacit approval) of violence is sickening, appalling, pushes the bounds of realism. Is Barack Obama being called a terrorist? Is George Bush nationalizing our banks, the very socialism his ilk have blamed Obama for suggesting with regards to health care?
Is America so intellectually vacuous that these arguments have merit with even the "lowest" of low information voters? Apparently somewhat, as the mobs seethe and roil, yet it appears that gains continue to be made by Obama and the forces that hold dear to what remains of our democratic institutions. It feels as if there is almost a cleaving, a separation, occurring whereby partisanship will be generationally and regionally entrenched. With Obama's certain victory, a sacrifice is made, that of growing disparate populations who have accepted spoonfed hate and isolationism, in a time of great turmoil. Many will overcome their racial biases, and fears of "otherness," yet many will also hold fast to cultural and intellectual xenophobia.
I need satire to vent, base and thoughtless as it may be, we all do. But after we salve each shocking sting as the world we know melts away, there's got to be some action behind it, some energy that is prepared to fill the gap. Energy higher than the merely partisan, action more powerful than the pronouncement of words and opinions. My goal for today is to find my action, for words and opinions I've aplenty. What am I willing to do? Whatever it is, it must be far more than mere voyeuristic witnessing of a collapsing paradigm, as has been the American luxury.
I am back, and have been for a week. Updating the site has been a lower-echelon need, but I'm getting at it. I'll add a link to all of the goodies you were enjoying on the splash page last month, and now that there is time (albeit presently from concentrate), I will get back to blogging more often, and more meaningfully.
This weekend, the big O is coming to Asheville, and I and a jazillion others will be packing it in to watch him speak on Sunday. I was proud of my little home state last night, at least of being of the same geographic stock as the good Senator Biden. He sure ate some mooseburger, ya betcha.
Tonight is a wedding rehearsal for two great friends, and I have the pleasure of doing the duty. So, back to work on the ceremony, and the peacefulness of this terrifyingly gorgeous autumn day (so damn gorgeous that I'm worried that a glitch in the simulation software will occur, and the Universe as I know it will have to reboot for having exceeded the memory capabilities of the System).
I guess I could've taken the train to Prague tonight, and in hindsight maybe it wouldn't have been so bad. But I think my mind and body just needed a break. My stomach and innerregions are troubled somewhat, and there are other indicators which lead to tonight's brief hermitude: the abortive attempt to cool my heels (and ferklempt ankles, which have never seen this much activity) at the thermal pool, the constant running to hither and thither, the energy required to communicate ideas, and perhaps just a need for a static and peaceful few hours prompted this respite. I'm abiding the break comfortably in this oddly shaped hotel room directly overlooking the minaret where I once stood nine years ago, seeking some sort of connection. Now, almost a decade later, I'm feeling overconnected, and glance through the rain at the minaret as a symbol for not only a call to larger contexts, but also to the self that seeks it. We embiggen ourselves to find ourselves in the Eternal, almost stepping on the snail that crisscrosses the footpath.
There is some guilt in not adventuring tonight, gastronomically or otherwise, as I am obviously not in Central Hungary everyday. Yet I've feverishly chased town every rainsoaked street of the main centrum, lost or otherwise, I've put my sweat and drive into the day's unwritten adventures, and perhaps the kindest one can be to oneself is to stop and just be in the body for a while. At least, that's how I will justify my downtime tonight. Anyhow, a bucket can only hold so much usefully before it becomes an awkward comedy of excess, so tonight, I'm emptying.
...is what is now playing here in this quite net cafe in Ljubljana. I take a 0625 bus tomorrow morning for Trieste, and through the help of certain stateside goddesses, I have been able to print out what was lost in Mostar, just down a few momentos from the binder, but no great loss (provided of course I can work out the issues with Deutche Bahn regarding my lost ticket).
Ljubljana is stunning, and as I twittered, it should be a haven for expats. I am now 12 days into the trip, two weeks left, and I am getting better in adapting to the wear, team, and grime of cross continental travel. Albeit, I am less daring than backpackers who throw themselves across borders with little more than tattered guidebooks. But this is who I am, no more, no less. I have been asking myself what standard I hold myself to, regarding what I should get out of the journey and what I put into it. I feel that my expectations of myself are almost completely beyond what is immediately achievable, in the realm of the mythical attainment. While I must keep one foot across the threshold of higher purpose, my forward foot needs to be more grounded in the now, the journey, the topography of this minute´s adventure. I think I have grown up in such a self analytical and critical climate that it makes it impossible to ever achieve enough, the same struggle I see in school kids. The same I see in seniors, struggling to put an exclamation point at the end of life. Overreaching creates an underreaching within, discarding an aspect of the soul/self for what it is... there, present, singular, and briefly anchored to a material incarnation.
Today, I will dive deep into Ljubljana, for the joy of it. What I come up with is what I come up with, and I will be happy with it. As the cafe radio now blares from the depth of the ´80s, "It´s my perogative."
It is a hot day here in Nis and I cannot find the apostrophe key on this haggard cafe computer anywhere. My phone is about toast, and I do not know if I will be able to twitter much without it. No problem, really. I have a bus ticket for Herceg Novi, Montenegro for 1715 tonight, about 24 hours behind schedule. No worries, though,I extended my stay in Dubrovnik to cover the lost day and am making Mostar a day trip, from which I will leave for Ljubljana of the 10th. My hotel here, though, is a thing of beauty and cannot be forgotten. As the elevator heaved its way to the 13th floor at 2 this morning, I felt so grateful for a temporary shelter against the elements of grime and sleeplessness. Alas, the room was stacked full of old mattresses, there was a pile of old rags in the bathroom, and a full tilt Serbo-rave going on til 5 in the blessed a.m.. It is the best of post Soviet hospitality. I wish the shower had an option for sanitizing gel.
Despite the hiccups, though, I am enjoying myself ragged. The language barrier has been fun, and in Sofia last night I was reduced to making a choo-choo noise to the cab driver to indicate the train station. We both laughed, and he sold me a CD of Bulgarian hits, actually quite good. Today I wandered in the heavily accented heat around the fortress of Nis, which has since fallen into use by drunkards, and its historical value is only discernible through intuition. I know it was built in the 1700s, and surrounds much older structures. But for the ubiquitous cafe umbrellas and the retired carnival rides littering the outskirts, you just soak up the history by osmosis.
The sun is now full tilt on the monitor and I can't see a damn thing. UPDATE: the gentle cafe host jury rigged a cushion resting on top of my journal as a shield. I was about to say, and thus am saying, that the sun here is more brutal than the sun at home. Hotter than Balkan political rhetoric. Even more than that. I think metal is melting around me. AC does not exist here, at least in any perceptible way, but again I'm not here for my comfort, but to learn and be open to the lessons of the road.
I still have an hour before I have to get to the bus station, and I'm computered out. I suppose I'll look around for a burek, the local cheese filled pastry wonder.
Istanbul is a city of remarkable and thrilling contrasts. Perched on the arbitrary edge between Europe and Asia (which I briefly entered yesterday), the city must reconcile its ancient history with the adrenaline of westernization. I am impressed with Turkish pride, and the resistance to anglicization, though it does make basic communication a tad tricky. It almost feels like a frontier settlement, though not because its roughshod. This type of frontier is entirely mental, a philosophical border upon which I am now perched upon in more than one metaphorical way, naturally. I'll write more, much more, tonight. The bustle outside is tempting me out.
Last poem written in America, at least for a little while!
“Kick up the dust” by jay joslin
This body is held to the Earth by the long golden light of another passing day
Is made a lengthening shadow by the rush of protons from a heaving star
These footsteps fade into the gentle late summer night,
Falling in rhythm to the whimsical dance of stars
Under the opulent fantasies of constellations,
And the whirring chorus of cricket song.
Your body is held to the road and its curiosities by the ever quickening drama of time,
Is implored to move across the map by whispered promises of legends to behold
Your footsteps kiss the paths through a wilderness made to be known-
The Universe desires passionately to know itself through your bones,
Seeks to feel, dance, laugh, and run uphill through your skin
Longs for brambles parted by your hands in discovery.
Our bodies are held to their destination by the urgency of mortality and the blessing of names,
Are composed of atoms that are but dust, kicked up in the exertion of self-awareness
Our footsteps are made in the agreement that for this life, we must know it,
Must know the surging waters of love and the drought of disillusion,
Must wander in the moonless night for shelter, warmth and song,
Savoring holy moments of meteors and sudden friendships.
This body is held to the Universe, as much as it is an extension of it, soul within soul, star within star,
Is choosing to make camp in the rugged wilds of the unknown, for where else is there sanctuary?
My footsteps kick up the dust along a well-worn path trod by every living hungry creature,
An irresistible highway worn by the endless gypsy caravans of our young intellect,
I cannot help, like you, but to cross this perilous terrain of Earthly existence,
Thus, let us make camp together, light the fire, and tell stories
Over the embers of yesterday, marking our progress
On this tattered map, agreeing we have no choice
But to kick up the dust, kick it up within the soul
In torrential recognition of our rambling nature,
Kick it up along the road into swirling eddies
Of improbable molecules, and ride the trail
Into ourselves, in this long golden light,
Through this shimmering landscape.
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.
Songs, not necessarily new releases, but the ones that made the biggest impact for me:
13. Tool "Lateralus"
12. Justin Bond and the Hungry March Band "In the End" (Shortbus)
11. Wolf Parade "Dear Sons and Daughters of Hungry Ghosts"
10. Bat for Lashes "What's a Girl to Do?"
9. Covenant "Humility"
8. Masala Sound System "Od Tarnobrzegu po Bangladesz"
7. MIA "Birdflu"
6. Seabound "Watching Over You"
5. David Wilcox "Hold it up to the light"
4. Iggy Pop & Teddy Bears "Punk Rocker"
3. Syke 'n' Sugarstarr "Like This, Like That"
2. Peter Mayer "My Soul"
1. VNV Nation "Arena"
Photos:
Poem of the Year, "Holy Elemental"
I
Standing there,
Half in, half out the door
Between the darkened house
And the autumn morning alit with glories
The invigorating chill that greets the face: a kiss from summer
Passing down the road, heading south, waving goodbye with long golden light
Trailing across the dew-blessed grass, tiny prisms, a thousand stars at my awakening feet.
II
Do you recall
When you dove headlong into a pile of leaves
Your smile-creased cheeks tenderly touched by the fallen green of yesterday
And your childhood laughter echoed across the idyllic fields of the passing years
As crows kept time, and the night crept in, and when the fires were lit to keep you warm,
Your eager mind wandered into the shapes in the flames,
And you wove fantasy from the heat, lulling you into sweeter dreams, as frost wrote
Sonnets upon your window?
Do you recall
The last plunge into the lake before the ice took the water away?
That moment in flight, forever a child of the winds,
To be swallowed in a splash, the last of the year,
And the chattering of your teeth were mantras of the ruggedness of simply being alive?
Do you recall
That you are holy elemental?
That you are a spinning wheel of all that which combines to vivify today?
That you wade through the cosmic brazenly, in the face of entropy,
With a face of a singular being quizzically raised from ice, fire, void,
You are as much the rough embrace of sycamore bark
As you are white water, a sky as blue as faded jeans, a fire from darkest cracks of Earth,
A star…
III.
With mystery, you move forward slightly,
Past the door where you stood astride the equilibrium of the Equinox,
With the galaxy of memory that is your darkened home behind you
Toward the brilliance of the shortening day
Toward the bliss of rediscovering the steam of your breath
Toward the music of bending milkweed, the red leaves on the crisp wind;
Kissed by another summer now receding,
This is the first morning of Autumn,
And as mockingbirds intone sutras toward the lowering arc of our sun
You do recall
Bravely
That you are all of these things, these images, these songs,
These hopes and dreams of matter against the vastness of space.
You are still a child
Who, as a sudden act of creation, is made of all of this,
Who can play even as the flowers fade
Who can jump sprightly even as the chimney swifts spiral south
Who can learn, ever more,
That it is you who are the season, changing:
Holy elemental, how do you dare, right here, right now,
With these gallant and young steps ahead,
How do you dare to transform
The Earth
That is
And can only be
You, yourself, your own celestial body?
In order to create a powerful new year, I hereby unleash a pent up torrent of bitterness, so that opportunity, creativity, and clarity may flow in:
Proselytizing, pandering, arrogant, and manipulative people of any faith that wave around their Glorified & Righteous™ symbols and expect others to just plain submit to their intellectually numbing and spiritually vacant religiosity and clap loudly for their magic tricks and circus acts. I'm so utterly and completely done with the vampires among us that prey on the young, ill, poor and uninformed to bend to kiss the feet whatever poobah is the ever-lovin' source of all your comfort. I've seen far too many abuses lately of what *were* great spiritual traditions for the sake of stroking the collective ego of insecure and unethical people. I'm not disclaiming religion, spirituality, or faith... quite the contrary. What I am condemning in no uncertain terms is the practice of vomiting religious screeds all over those who are down and out, lost, and thus easy to manipulate, and guilt tripping them into following along like good little sheep. It's sick, and only served to keep the dumb on in a society who has the complete ability to turn dumb off.
Anyone whose greed overtakes their love, reason, and moral obligations, and runs away with it. You know who I'm talking about. And as much as it personally hurts, I'm over it and goodness will prevail.
Politicians. In this election year, unless you're willing to stand up and insist that you will make massive changes in this utterly broken system of government, you are every bit as responsible for the brokenness, and good luck piecing the system back together. So far, only Mike Gravel, Dennis Kucinich, and to some extent Ron Paul are showing their cojones. Because the system is rigged against political will that falls outside of the neat little boxes we've designated as safe, these folks are devoid of any chance of winning, and that sucks. So, revolt or sleep. Take your pick.
Gay men that are pussywhipped by the narrow limits of social acceptability into playing weak-willed characters instead of actually doing the hard, sometimes painful work of self discovery. It's not all Andrew Lloyd Webber and tight jeans... it's a distinctively difficult life path we've been given to live in a heavily dualistic society where our love breaks the mold and causes uncomfortability. Do we play along and accept our apparent role as snazzy, witty, and materially addicted, or do we create social change by being rugged individualists being who we are most deeply compelled to be? I've talked to so many of you that scoff at your deepest desires... why? Why gracefully submit? It's just another form of victimization, so stop playing along, stand up, and be someone other than who you're expected to be.
Pity. Yeah, I've played that game, used it like a dishrag time and time again. I've been over using it personally for a while now, years in fact, but I see so many people who are taught by their environment to use pity for gain, it's terribly sad [but not pitiful]. Why? Why lower yourself to get something you could easily gain by lifting yourself up? That includes the "pity fuck," welfare, time on Dr. Phil's couch, emotional hostage taking, and a spirit numbing false sense of entitlement. Stop it. Pick yourself up. You're better than that, right?
There. Now that I've grumpily released my curmudgeonly misgivings, I've got the space to intentionally create and further become the opposite of my vexations. It's a choice. Wanna join me?
I want to invoke the names of the old gods
Those beings who inhabit the gnarled wood
The stone faces of sacred mountains
The curling waves which tell stories to the shores.
I want to raise, in the dark and hushed hour
A tribute from the harvest
To meet it with my lips
And pronounce, with good company,
The continuity of life.
I want to declare the right of all beings to be revered.
I want to stand in defense of the weak and broken.
I want to rise with you into the ineffable light, dark, and unknown.
I want to break the mirror of our shared delusions.
I want to grow, that one day I may bend and whither and be glad for having lived.
It is one thing to express a want
Another to justify it
Another to fight for it
Another to give yourself to it
Another to give it away completely.
All these things, I want,
So I may give them to you,
And walk away relieved for having
Finally, with a simple act, set myself free.
There was rain on the roof
Rivers ran down the thin glass
That keeps here from there.
Touching the window,
Tracing the storied waters
Something like catching stars in a net.
I want words here
Words to trickle in stellar trails of truth
Words to rain down on my mute wishes
Of these stormclouds to speak for me
For the rain to cry for me
For my door to be opened
[some muse off the street comes in
folds an umbrella
and says hello]
I want the linguists of the soul
To name my unspoken troubles
Which thoughtlessly tremble my hands
Which know every cell I am.
I wish to succumb to the flooding
Of some holy lexicography
I wish for the roads of my body to slicken, ice,
For my creeks to rise, and overtake the bounds
Of my understanding
And to go downstream,
Toward some hypernymous sea, some inexplicable sky.
I wish I were named something like this rain
Which makes December music tonight.
I could patter on your roof
Roll down your window
Even your finger
And at last
Be given
Wholly
To the
Earth.
First, before I unzip the squishy tumblething that is my brain, you should know by now that this blog is quite periodic as its author has more-or-less been significantly distracted away from the medium and will post periodically as time allows. Management sends its regards, nonetheless. Some day, a new manifestation may appear, or some bloggy zeal may reinhabit these pages... until then, be content with the constantly updated fresh postings that can been seen through the feed called your window. The whiplash inducing comments in Reality threads are quite addictive.
Cryptic asides aside, things have been well-ish, if scattered and somewhat overrun with the onslaught of responsibilities and minor personal fuckups that I've been privy to. The good thing is that there are good things afoot, such as a new drive to solidify my philosophies into something more tangible and workable than the common late night rants with good friends; I'm writing things down and trying to craft a cogent and useful system for myself. It's like playing hide-n-seek with yourself in a mirror, though; the best I can do is to catch myself and all the inconsistencies that lie therewith. I need more bounce, more avenues to sound off and thus receive critiques from the thoughtful minds that live beyond my brain. Yet, save one soul, I'm too shy to air my quizzical laundry for the whole world. Very few see the delicate underthings of my inmost thought, so suffice it to say that I'm getting things done and am doing the Work.
Today just so happens to be the 35th anniversary of my signing on to be on this planet with y'all. I plan to do a lot of self care and some minor indulgence today, to create a little personal levity in what has been an otherwise stressful season. Again, those things (the stressful bits) tend to stay under wraps here on the blog, so that when I do post, I can hand you something more useful than Eeyorish wankery. I save that for the mental health profession.
Thanks for sticking by these sporadic broadcasts, and know that like a elf in the night, the blog will occasionally drop you a treat when least expected.
Love is the force most mysterious
For it abides through dark and light
Above and below
Through the royal sky of day and the bejeweled canopy of night.
Love has infinite names and no definite place
Yet it is written in your own bones
It wakes you and dreams you
Crystallized in a clear moment which none can own.
Love compels us to know ourselves
When distraction and hullabaloo competes to win
Self knowledge is galactic
Through it, we propel forward, and give from within.
Love propagates from itself
And creates potential in its wake, a gypsy dancer
You cannot help but to jump and exalt
For the question of love is its own answer.
Love is the force most mysterious
Yet somehow, you can touch it now, here;
You chose it, love chooses you,
Just this once, trust its embrace, for as with all Creation
It is ever present, and yet you are the one who chooses to hold it near.
Below are some journal entries from 29 October to today. I was in Marin County, California with good friends. Below the post, enjoy a slideshow from the experience.
~
I’ve been in California since Monday, and haven’t written as voluminously as is typical. This can be attributed to a variety of factors, but mostly it’s due to immersion in the visual medium to record my thoughts, whimsies, and dreams. Of course, this medium can be rather “one way,” but so are words; I’m pointing to something that I hope magically conveys what I’m needing to communicate, making assumptions that the syllables or colors are adequate messengers of the language-less, the formless. Photographing a sea lion emerging from the turbulent and frigid depths has been just as accurate as a rhymeless poem about my own tides and emergence. Touching stones smoothed by a thousand years of friction has bee just as useful as sculpting a theory of time and place from logical chains of order and analysis. This now, as the ever renewing mystical state, remains the medium of greatest use because it’s immediate; the reflection in camera lens or ink has power in the after-now only. It’s the post-orgasmic floating above the self, and not the ecstatic contraction and expansion of the body. Metaphor about foreplay excluded for the purposes of imagination.
Yesterday, I walked the Golden Gate, an inexplicably massive ode to matter and form. Entirely wrapped in fog, it was an experience of being suspended above and below nothingness, only the suggestion of the bay below and the sky above could be made out in the blur. Fog horns blew damn near apocalyptically, with such urgency and knowledge of doom that I may have well been blindfolded in a valley of dragons. The wind only brought a sensation numbing chill, and did not abate the dull white that obscured every hard line and boundary. The bridge was merely a plank that mercifully mediated the void, and the sight of cables thicker than any body disappearing to an unperceivable upward left innumerable points to question. Because of the interplay of fog and sun on the ground, I saw a fog-bow, and my own form haloed in rainbow hundreds of feet below. For those that jump off of this beast, that illusion may be their final bull’s eye, but for me it was a blessed apparition and validation of the self in such a puzzling relationship of scale.
I’ve been alone with the ocean, too, a terror-able restless goddess. The softness of water has no time there, it is too absorbed in being thrust with cold, relentless force that a mere drop or ripple is purposeless and thus overruled by heaving currents that would rip the very name from my muscles should I dare it past the ankles. Yet, standing so near to this, are redwoods and sequoias that confound any sense of creature-hood you’ve ever had. Put all these trees together and they vie with the Golden Gate for massiveness, though their survival is measured in millennia versus coats of paint and bolts. The contrast is so simple as to be easily dismissible, yet I must ask as to the persistence of man’s nature against the persistence of nature’s largest of sentries. I titled the photographs I took there as a series called “Mere Words,” because my mere words are utterly useless and wasteful in the presence of such graceful yet unrelenting avatars of the Universe’s desire to grow against odds. Mere photographs are equally as useless, but it’s what I have. I humble myself before the trees as a bumpkin, a mute, a mere drop of spittle in a heaving tsunami of life.
The West Coast is home to so many of these contrasting and rugged events of life affirming contact that this must be why the contagious easy-goingness is as ubiquitous as the Bay Area’s fog shrouded valleys. The people here, save the occasional waitress and speeding sportster, are infected with a strange tendency to smile even when no one’s watching. Here at the Koffee Klatch in Fairfax, the bespectacled waitress just affirmed that “nothing’s normal anymore,” a perception that doubtlessly informs the lack of shock or fear that comes in some level with most human contact events. My glasses are rose colored, sure, because I am a visitor here, but I’ve been in places far less welcoming. I can say that humanity is not pictured on the back of the milk carton, headlined as missing. If anything, what’s missing here is that dark streak of suspicion that is genetically emblazoned within the hearts of most rats in this race.
Today, I think I am going to the City, to find what I find. Or elsewhere. I have a few days left to be purposeless and free of the restraints of the ordinary. Odd that we have to displace the self in order to shake it up, rather than displace the mind. The former is far easier to do, though the latter is far easier to hold once accomplished.
~
Thoughts cannot be continued from the previous, too much time passed to stitch new thoughts onto it without being terribly unjust to the moment. I’m at the airport now, and I’m on my way out. It’s a bittersweet waiting, this. I leave here not in awe of any one thing in particular, but in complete appreciation of the power of friendship, strong enough to move a person across a continent for a week of respite from routine. I leave drawn back to the same, to my friends in the mountains and the home which now is intermixed with my name and history. When returning, it can be as much of a discovery as the new sights of the destination… things become displaced in memory, the delightful way shadows arc across my own home is as moving to me as the mists of the Marin Headlands, or the quality of light in the ancient temple-like Muir Woods.
Today I took a curious journey to an old prison, situated on a desolate, lonely island. Alcatraz. The name is certainly not euphonious, and it feels as sharp and foreboding as the fading razor wire and rust-eaten bars. I had to consider the strange confluence of my freedom and choice to wander those grounds, versus the cold and cruel theft of free will that went on there since the late 19th Century. True, horrible crimes created that prison, but it served as a place where persons were stripped on their personhood and hidden behind cold stone in their rage and death throes. I could not help but question how tenuous and fleeting our freedom can be when plugged into a system which organizes humans by their economic worth and vague, subjective notions of productivity. We are in a sense choiceless upon birth regarding our entry in to this system, itself arbitrary and made entirely of successive layers of the detritus each generation’s brute force. To not subscribe to the same brute forces that dictate rule and order is a risk, and surely some who dared that system died within the walls of that place. Interesting that Native Americans seized the island in 1969 as a protest against the dissolution of their own personhood by the grievous designs of the wards of our troublesome mode of meting “justice.”
About time to board the plane, which is a bird that we gladly employ for own trifling escapes. These escapes may be into ourselves, as we wish and are able, though frequently it is the self we wish to escape from, to embrace a place. I may have done that with the ocean, the bridge, the giant trees, but the self (or this one) is not so easily lost.
Countless words I’ve spent to process vacations, and escapes, though I puzzle over why I seem to spend so few words when I am utterly and intensely involved with the present. Perhaps it is losing my place that jiggers the words out, yet when in place, the words are neatly arrayed in my mental bookcase, and dusty. Often I’ve speculated that my artistic life would be best served by constant motion, and yet I know full well that my orbit around this star and the void is faster and more profoundly pioneering than other coastlines and mountains. This trick, as it always is, is to act upon these speculations, rather than tumble them further in a mind already strewn with too much thinking.
Climbing to 37,000 feet, it’s warm and cramped. Below are countless worlds racing by. I cannot ever see or known them all, and it is enough work to see my own. Perhaps, that is what I will come away with this time.
~
Postscript
I’ve been putting my words and thoughts together since coming back to the mountains, much like unpacking the well-traveled bag of suddenly small and oddly detached souvenirs. The beaches where days ago I played and hunted for green stones have now been besmirched by gobs of heavy oil, leaked from a tanker. This was highly unnerving. I connected to those beaches, those birds who calmly rode the waves, the staggering trees that kept sentry. It’s all suddenly in question, as each species relies on another, many of these from microscopic to mammoth are under the threat of the sick, black, stream of industrial vomit that is now coursing through that heavenly bay. I don’t know what to do but to thumb the green stones that are now in a small china bowl, so utterly out of context from those now-fouled beaches, and thus so alone (as far as stones go).
California is slipping, pebble by pebble, into the dreamlike for me after mere days away. Yet, pebble by pebble, fresh realizations churned up by wheeling down the roads of the soul are now before me. These are precious stones, sacred stories, and points on a map of the future that unfurls so fast that I can barely make out the landscapes at my fingers. But, I am nonetheless experiencing a profound comfort in being animate within this perfect storm of a universe, with all its woe, suffering, calamity and isolation. I am holding hands, tenaciously, with mortality and the forms it takes. The flesh that explores these stones is terribly impermanent and will have a much shorter story than they. But that’s alright. That’s what I signed up for. It’s a switch from the anxious teeth clenching that vexed me terribly when I recently had a bout of the mortality jitters. It was troubling to accept that my bones were dust waiting to happen, and this voice, this history, was as helpless to time as a milkweed puff to the wind. Yet after watching the sun, our source, toe the horizon to illumine oceans unseen, I felt alright about my impermanence. Seeing that was enough to turn the condition into joyful surrender. I can’t say why.
So, that was California. I have the greatest of caliber of friends out there. To Casey, Gustav, Richard, Carol… thank you, deeply. To the Ocean, to the Shores, to the Trees… long live the holy pulse of all that which was not made by man, long live your battle to survive amid our madness.
It's quiet in the yard today
Even the crickets
Have slowed their orchestrations
So it's up to the crows
And the kids on bikes
To make the music of the hour.
Black cat, a neighbor's, skulks
Through the grass, stalking its own shadow
Or mine, or yours, we can never know.
It's quiet in the yard today
So every thought I have is louder
And I try not to think, but to bend down thoughtlessly
To look at pebbles, feel the dirt
As an iteration of sunshine past
Through which the dandelions, ever industrious,
Break through one more time
Like those memories I had presumed
Long since been taken by the wind.
Persimmon fruit hanging lower
Its sweetness building as I forgo
Intellectualizing and analyzing
The majestic outburst of autumn's old trumpet.
It's quiet in the yard today
And I sit here, afraid to make a sound
To be a good citizen of the grass and greens
To let the westerly winds do the speaking
And whatever it's saying I'll agree
For how can I resist that deeper poetry
Inked by the secret composers of Sundays
With verses wrought of acorns and found feathers
Not hollow images
But the metaphors themselves that leave us rapt
When we find these real words, pick them up, hold them,
Nature examines Itself...
Wren explores the porch in hops and flaps
Eye contact, for a moment, each of us foreigners of a sort,
No chirping or verbs, but a knowing connectedness, and we both fly.
Yes, I know...
I've been woefully neglecting the blog, and no, I won't offer excuses. I've been through too many of these dips and spikes in activity to count, and as Bruce Hornsby sang in his late '80s buttery way, "that's just the way it is."
Today, I'm out sick with really vicious back pain (and some genuinely wicked exhaustion), so it's only appropriate that I take the time I have to say hello, and offer you this appetizer of a blog posting, though it's up to you to find the cocktail napkin that goes with it.
The house has been taking up the time it really ought to; I love this place to a fault, in that it's so hard to leave and so hard to not feel the compulsive desire to stalk the grounds, find something to fix or improve upon, or just sit with. It has a life and personality that is charming me, daily. The house fixes me a drink and woos me to bed, starry eyed. I continue to be culture shocked by something as simple as shelter.
My creative output has been embarrassingly slim, though you will notice a new poem and new pix on flickr. I'm gearing up to make a short film, as I feel the need to play with a variety of media. I hope that by winter if not sooner, I'll have my first 15 minute mini-documentary up and ready for viewing. This is ambitious, yes, and I haven't told anyone about it yet as the idea for it has been swimming in my mind for a while but hasn't until now set foot on metaphorical shore. But if you're in AVL you'll soon see me with a little camera, and if you know of any interesting characters who would agree to a 1 minute interview, let me know. I won't discuss the topic because I want the responses to be fresh and un-thunk.
I've got to go now, but I will try to mind this old bird a little more often...
Standing there,
Half in, half out the door
Between the darkened house
And the autumn morning alit with glories
The invigorating chill that greets the face: a kiss from summer
Passing down the road, heading south, waving goodbye with long golden light
Trailing across the dew-blessed grass, tiny prisms, a thousand stars at my awakening feet.
II
Do you recall
When you dove headlong into a pile of leaves
Your smile-creased cheeks tenderly touched by the fallen green of yesterday
And your childhood laughter echoed across the idyllic fields of the passing years
As crows kept time, and the night crept in, and when the fires were lit to keep you warm,
Your eager mind wandered into the shapes in the flames,
And you wove fantasy from the heat, lulling you into sweeter dreams, as frost wrote
Sonnets upon your window?
Do you recall
The last plunge into the lake before the ice took the water away?
That moment in flight, forever a child of the winds,
To be swallowed in a splash, the last of the year,
And the chattering of your teeth were mantras of the ruggedness of simply being alive?
Do you recall
That you are holy elemental?
That you are a spinning wheel of all that which combines to vivify today?
That you wade through the cosmic brazenly, in the face of entropy,
With a face of a singular being quizzically raised from ice, fire, void,
You are as much the rough embrace of sycamore bark
As you are white water, a sky as blue as faded jeans, a fire from darkest cracks of Earth,
A star…
III.
With mystery, you move forward slightly,
Past the door where you stood astride the equilibrium of the Equinox,
With the galaxy of memory that is your darkened home behind you
Toward the brilliance of the shortening day
Toward the bliss of rediscovering the steam of your breath
Toward the music of bending milkweed, the red leaves on the crisp wind;
Kissed by another summer now receding,
This is the first morning of Autumn,
And as mockingbirds intone sutras toward the lowering arc of our sun
You do recall
Bravely
That you are all of these things, these images, these songs,
These hopes and dreams of matter against the vastness of space.
You are still a child
Who, as a sudden act of creation, is made of all of this,
Who can play even as the flowers fade
Who can jump sprightly even as the chimney swifts spiral south
Who can learn, ever more,
That it is you who are the season, changing:
Holy elemental, how do you dare, right here, right now,
With these gallant and young steps ahead,
How do you dare to transform
The Earth
That is
And can only be
You, yourself, your own celestial body?
First post from the new house! I'm kinda pressed for time [procrastination/obsessive home stuff], but as is custom [?] it seems right to at least wave hello to you from the new place, one week after the official move. Tomorrow is housewarming, and I'll liveblog it...
The Chimney Swifts Return, And This Is All I Can Say
Swirling in twilight
The chimney swifts spiral toward sanctuary
Down the chimney of a forgotten church
So effortless in their whirling
Feathered electrons, planets spinning in orreries,
A sky dance of late summer
That brings in wing a chilling of air,
A tremulous line twixt light
And ever encroaching night
A rite dictated by the stars
And felt in familiar morning clouds
Which descend over us, wordlessly.
I inhabit some new grounds
As an impending new season overtakes the stubborn heat
I touch new Earth
Dig in it
Lay upon it as the animal I am
Place a heart-shaped stone in the dirt
As some metaphor I can't decently explain.
The street is only interrupted by the industry of squirrels
And the artful passage of shadows.
Inhabiting this place,
As the swifts dip and exalt in the purple heaven
I take my place among the countless names and nameless
As one who suddenly, vexedly,
Finds himself anchored at once to place
And longing ever more for the placelessness of sky.
It's dark now,
And the door politely sighs shut
And the swifts are roosting in the least known of holy places
And I'm face to face with my words again
Writing them in some new context
But still, despite the distance,
Wrapping them around you, the one I dare to love,
To warm us amid our home in this swarming of stars...
It is hard to summarize the wave of emotions of the past several days, but this week will certainly go down as perhaps one of the most surreal and memorable. I was alone in the new house last night, suddenly taking in the awesome if bizarre sensation that I will live there for some time, and that it and I somehow will merge unlike anyplace I've ever lived... an odd marriage of place. A compact of sacred balance, honoring the land for, in name, it is mine. That's so weird, but at the same time, who really can own anything on a six billion year old planet of constantly recycling molecules? The house and the trees and the dirt may be mine according to a piece of paper, but it owns itself, and if anything, the Earth owns us, sunglasses and all.
We complete the move this weekend... I doubt I'll get used to this feeling anytime soon.
I now am a homeowner... very strange and unsettling feeling. The whole process was painful, but that's gone now and what remains is a move. The first boxes go in today.
I had a sweet dinner with friends last night to celebrate. I feel so incredibly grateful, and, as evidenced by this short post, speechless.
It's finally, dreamily here: today, I close on my new house, and, humbly, I took receipt of a new, kind of insane car. Life is changing freakily fast, and yet there is somber bittersweetness as all of this odd fortune is born from the death of my grandmother on 11 June. It will be her picture that will enter the house today as the first thing moved in, followed by the traditional little porcelain dragon which has preceeded every move for a decade now.
I'm a little dizzy, but utterly, deeply, profoundly thankful... and this day I dedicate to those who are disenfranchised beyond belief and are forced, unjustly, to the margins. Margins forever be damned. I'm wearing a bracelet made by Afghan orphans today... as a powerful reminder that while I bead one very bright day, most of the world will today thread a bead of hunger, and want. I will make the most of this gift to bring more light, and more hope, to those who thread tomorrow.
Last week's posts were rather feeble blips on the collective radar screen of blogophilia, I freely admit, but I can now gaily admit that many forces have finally come together to enable regular installments again.
Much mystery surrounded my cryptic posts about being awake for ungodly amounts of time; this is from a marathon session of answering crisis calls at the hospital, paired with prepping for a major audit at work (who writes a kickass treatment plan? That's right, naysayers...!). In the midst of the marathon, I had an apparent blood-sugar crash and fainting spell type thing that felt vaguely convulsive. It was a blur to Monday, audit day, and a mad dash to the end of the therapeutic summer program which I've helmed for the past 9 weeks... concluding in a tearful speech and pie in the face. Allow me to state that, unequivacably, that this is a laughable yet generally horrible fate... the shit stings your eyes and for the rest of the day, no matter what, you reek of curdled cream. But such is the way of the fool: invite the trickster in, and the trickster will most certainly strike without.
So, the focus of much energy and attention has gone to the upcoming purchase of my first house. This has been a wild ride indeed, and surely the move will be yet another distraction soon. I am a little overwhelmed with the numbers involved here, and the suddenness of it all has been akin to having a house land on top of you, Oz and tornado style. That combined with having a get a car, and quick, and various issues with jump starting school again have been all intense stressors which originate from well-intentioned sources.
But without further ado, so as to reinvigorate a sense of normalcy, here's the Saturday Random 10 out of 5,614:
1. Science Fiction Double Feature ~ The Rocky Horror Picture Show Soundtrack ("where's the best place to f***?")
2. Gidelam ~ Baaba Maal
3. Walk the Walk ~ Poe
4. Afrika ~ Tukuleur
5. Try (Just A Little Bit Harder) (Live) ~ Janis Joplin
6. Heart And Soul ~ Wolfstone
7. Indian Stomp ~ Cyrus/Random Trio
8. Poor Boy ~ Nick Drake
9. Space Age Love Song (KMFDM) ~ A Flock Of Seagulls
10. Don't Think Twice, It's Alright ~ Joan Baez
Random mp3 of the week(s): Charlie Parker ~ Chasing the Bird
Sounds like it is, a stray starling poking around a rain slicked Greenwich street, playfully dodging Studebakers and winos.
And for the viddy, here's the funny courtesy of Joshua.
This is a brief telegraph from someone who's been awake for 29 hours, and is hardly cognizant of posting it because of the intense amount of stress and, well, intensity I'm dealing with right now.
I received in my inbox last night a scathing and insulting overview of my life, apparently, as seen by some random person. If anything, it's emboldened me, strengthened my self concept against the grandiose, the petty and the puerile. My friends always seem to hint that I could use a boost in the self esteem department, so here it is, ironically delivered by someone determined to shoot a hole through my spirit with their judgmental pomposity. Didn't work.
On Reckoning With Wasted Time and the Indulgence of the American Daze
For those that have emailed, you're on my list. For those of you that have called, I swear I'll check my voicemail. For everyone and everything else, I am getting to you, I promise. These have been the mantras of my Everyday lately... it's admittedly trite to admit that I've been 'oh so busy lately,' but all I have left to say to that is the trite. Note my rapid neglect of the blog, my dismal creative output, and if you could tap my dreams, they're mostly a mosaic of dispassionate numbers. The light I'm missing outside is streaming peach juice, and I'm just now beginning to think larger thoughts than the Pavlovian, drool inducing enticements of food, sex, and territory.
Am I being unduly harsh on myself? Some friends would say yes, undeniably. Yet that harsh-ness is quaint to the self-immolating monk, the Darfur refugee, the shattered toys of a blown up Baghdad kid. I am so deeply and somewhat frenetically attached to the buzzing world of obligation that I tend, on days like this, to run from the World Itself. I've been thinking, when time permits, lately of the "burdens" and "woes" of our puffy, industrialized, one-size-fits-all-mostly western hemisphere monoculture. Our diseases are so obviously symptomatic of living in our self-built maze, our perils and crises are opulent dilemmas indeed. I know this, even as in these glittering, tranced out valleys I succumb. Should I throw myself to the slums, then, to live in the open sewer of the castaways, the lowest caste, the exiled? No. I still brazenly believe that the whiz-bang of the technologied West can be used to pioneer new campsites for the soul, I still believe that our affluent afflictions can be reckoned with by getting our soft hands dirty in hugging the seamy underbelly of Life Itself, venturing with the unspoken others, dancing fearlessly the shadows. Our collective cure is what most on high would call the disease.
You might read this as a guilt cleansing rant conveniently typed from my comfy chair. True, lately the turns in my life are taking me closest to the most sacred absurdities in the Occientalist Canon; purchasing a home, eliminating old venomous debts, anticipating the sleekness of a new car and the sudden security of investment. Upon death, we bequeath wealth in our society, to the point that it's even enshrined in law (i.e. Social Security), albeit in monthly payout of a paltry pittance. With my grandmother's death comes this strange, awkward to hold gift. This gift is not her, but it's her enabling hand, her energy, and her final line item. I've not received other inheritances in this family for a number of obscure reasons, and I'm grateful for that, oddly. It enabled me to understand the value of work. But now, I am admittedly at a time of financial sink or swim, relatively speaking. This lifeline that will transit in an envelope soon will change that. But it is not without some sense of guilt that I will gingerly tear its seal, withdraw the weightless paper, and enter that even stranger club of stepping up to the American Dream, touching it, and entering it with a readied pen and tremulous footsteps.
It was fifteen years today that I boarded a Greyhound bus for the undiscovered country, the mythical West, and the pulsating galactic night. I was naive, idealistic, obsessively iconoclastic, and terribly unprepared. I went into the visionquest under Wyoming stars pale, young, and open to the lessons of the road. I left it burned, hungry, infected, blistered, and chastened for my youthful ignorance. Yet happily so. Blissfully so. Thankfully so. I am today that boy again, with my heavy bag shouldered painfully, moving toward a new, if frightening, constellation of lessons. I will soldier breathlessly up the sun beaten path, and will hope to only drop that bag when I've gained new perspectives in struggle that are in line with most of humanity, not just the small, well equipped splintered-off tribe from which I come. I'll walk into this place for my Grandmother, for the monk in his poverty, for the Baghdad girl in her fear, for the places where unfairness is the rusty edge of a battered blade.
I type this in knowing disparity; I type this in the hope that my malaise is lifting not through the chemical reactions of coffee and Benadryl, but through the reckoning of six billion other tragedies, six billion other possibilities.
*****
The Lost Hours
My second, third or fourth morning of the day
And the sun's nearly in bed
The shadows are too long for my eyes to track
And the kind of tiredness that has wrecked me
Is a sad privilege
To the few in the world
Who dizzily whiz about
Thinking that somehow, there is time to waste
Sneezing, sleeping, practicing the prone delirium of death.
Pot of coffee, Ritalin, black cherry water
My last chance for Saturday and a million things undone.
Perhaps there is something more profound
Waiting to be said
Something about the infinite pleasures of coneflowers
And the alluring bliss of jumping through recursive thought
But today I'll leave that space blank in penance
[ ]
For the reality of the sick luxury of listlessness
The gross uprooting of the eager soul by the laconic
And halcyon couch cushions
That stalled my movement today
That stole my breath
Those irretrievable hours.
I have been busily coursing through the swollen river of summer life, but still know that I desperately need to blog. And believe me, there's so much to say, so much changing. What a tease, I know, but please don't give up hope on this old blog.
Eight days ago I met the ocean
With this body, which as any instrument
Has been played with both mournful and thankful tones
And I remembered how tears taste like the sea
The one thing our bodies took with us
As we arose from the mother's Mother.
The ceaseless industry of the waves
The goodly sand moving through my fingers
Faster than time
Those stones of a million years the fragments
Of a continent, broken and rebuilt
In more lifetimes than there are footprints
On any beach, anywhere... eight long days ago.
Since then, my words have been driftwood
Un-anchored, adrift, smoothed by the pounding of hours
And a calendar of storms.
Like any flotsam, these words will be washed ashore somewhere
For some future hand to toss back in.
Perhaps my own identity is an ever-circulating
Armada of gnarled wood in the turbulent waters
Of our ancestor's rising.
Far and wide, we are a vast flotilla of disparate parts
Which quixotically assemble as happenstance sees fit
Then dashed again in the roiling currents of now.
Like stars, we constellate ever-so briefly
At the whim of the observer, and resume our holy innate twinkling
When their gazing eye blinks in the black of time.
Now, the interstate is the surf in my ear
And those stalwart summer cicadas are my beach music.
Yesterday, I saw a pile of glistening rocks
Circling the base of an old pine tree-
There for the moment, a moment that lasted forever.
Yesterday, I walked in an empty house
And felt my Grandmother's gentle laughter
Echo off walls she'd never touched.
Yesterday, I held a seeker long into the night
Breathing together, exploring the chemistry
Of desire, and of the still warmth the animal of our body radiates.
These days,
Of oceans and old trees,
Of holding strong memory and becoming its ambassador
Of writing thank you notes to old monsters
Of touching driftwood and stars
Of being the living eyes of ancestors
These days have jarred me into something
My drifting words cannot come together to describe
And that is a paradox
Which oddly brings
Such relief
Because it leaves me open
And this poem unfinished
Mixed Media Saturday (sort of), Delaware mini-edition
I've got to keep this short and sweet- I'm in Delaware getting some closure on my grandmother and experiencing the emotional trying-ness that is family life. I'm very lucky to be here actually; my car mysteriously died Monday and my super awesome company let me use the company vehicle to get up here. I'm soon on my way to the beach, and will rendezvous with long-unseen friend Dennis, from my gold-plated fuzzily formative years. I'm on my way home, as it were, Monday morning. So, since time is tight and while beaching I will have amply time to write, here's the Saturday random 10 from my iPod:
1. Siyavuya ~ Miriam Makeba and the Skylarks (South African Jazz)
2. Go Back ~ Analogic (Techno, no other info)
3. High and Low ~ The Crystal Method (U.S. Techno)
4. The Green Brook Running ~ Tse Chun Yan (Chinese Folk)
5. Is Chicago, Is Not Chicago ~ Soul Coughing (New York, Alt. Funkiness)
6. Big Fat Cloud ~ The Orb (U.K. Trance)
7. Can I Have It Like Back In The Day ~ DJ Jus Ske (New York, Hip Hop)
8. I Would Die For You ~ Prince (Minneapolis, Pop)
9. Oh ~ The Pearl Sisters (South Korea, Jazzy Kitsch)
10. 4AM ~ VNV Nation (U.K./Germany, FuturePop)
Can't do the mp3 this week for uploading reasons, but it would've been "There Is No There" by The Books...
Sweet video of an airline pilot's perspective on flying several thousands miles in just a few days.
The coffee is on, the lights are up, and I'm staring at a blue-eyed fish named Sunan. This is the latest edition to my already cluttered but lovingly repositioned desk, from which I oversee catnaps, pokeberry bushes climbing virulently, and the slow steady sun of a half-gone Saturday. I need to clean house, do megabytes of paperwork, exercise (yes, folks, I'm losing weight fast, down close to 30 lbs in six months in an effort to live in the south but remain northerly in figure), design two websites, and at some point contemplate the wow factor of being incarnate today. Ho hum.
Yes, folks, it is also true that in the past week I have experienced Passion™, and yes, it was most fruitful and wonderful to connect so easily with another human bean. This thing is what it is, though; just know that I'm happy+spellbound, and this gives a nice spice to an otherwise ordinary summer sun. I'll tell you more in person, should we be so fortunate.
This seventh day of the week is typically a day of recharge from emotional exhaustion, and today is no different. This week was difficult, yet began to uptick nicely as it wore on towards today. In a matter of days I undertake a rare northerly journey to Delaware in honor of my grandmother, who passed nearly three weeks ago. The lack of time to deal with it and experience the reality of it has created a strange space which will be shattered as it should as I am confronted with her empty home, the static photographs, the dust on memorabilia, and finally, the grave and family plot. Mortality; it's what's for dinner, ultimately. But so strange, so bittersweet, so utterly plan and complex to comprehend. I am no less sad than I am in awe of the invisible clockworks that tick in every muscle, behind every eye, within the space between each muttered profession of love.
So, um, that was a fine burst of multisyllabic thought. The day looks nice. I think I'll go see...
This week's random 10 of 5,474:
1. Can I Get Get Get ~ Junior Senior (Denmark)
2. Moja Stikla ~ Severina (Croatia)
3. The Human's Race ~ Sweatshop Union (Canada)
4. Liberdade ~ Das Primeiro (Angola)
5. Sexy Boy ~ Magnifico (Slovenia)
6. Any Hopeful Thoughts Arrive ~ Hood (U.K. Leeds)
7. Everything Reminds Me ~ Le Chevre (U.S. S. Carolina)
8. How Does It Make You Feel? ~ Air (France)
9. Fight The Power ~ Public Enemy (U.S. New York)
10. Endgame (Drowning by Numbers) ~ Michael Nyman (U.K.)
Random mp3 of the week: Some Like it Hot ~ Robert Palmer and Powerstation (buy @ iTunes - view @ YouTube). Gosh, I remember this first coming on MTV, and my pubescent brain puzzling over which was more attractive; the cartoon neon ladies or Robert Palmer. I believe that we've finally settled on the latter, though his dancing pale-faced vixens seem to be more agents of sensuality than gender representations. Their curvaceous forms and deep eyes welcome each of us into sensuality, orientation irrelevant, while the song joyously and cheesily beckons from the dayglo Reagan years of a repressed but rising tide of healthy sexuality. Besides, it's just plain correct; we do in fact sweat when the heat is on. We tend not to otherwise.
The viddy this week was a tough choice, especially when there are just over 100 viddies that deserve this relatively lowly distinction. I will simply say that the BBC's series Planet Earth as narrated by Sir David Attenborough is jaw-droppingly awesome and worthy of being watched by every single living human being. Good endorsement, no? Watch this small clip and follow the bunny trail to the goods on YouTube; the whole series is there. This is just one watery hor d'oeuvre:
On this walk, overhung by a half moon in a haze
Reminiscent of some smoky celestial tavern,
I delighted in the fact that my shadow is longer
And more subject to the whim of light
Than I'll ever be.
I saw you peeking through the thicket
So dense that even the orange hum of streetlight
Cannot faze the low hymns of shadows.
I heard you in the holy boom-boom-boom of the dancehall
Where lovers like stars will form new constellations
If only for tonight.
I felt your photons fly through me
As distant heat lightening titillated the sky
Toward a climax of light and forces mysterious.
I tasted you in the last drops from the bottle
Just enough to swoon a June mind toward July
Just enough to make my assumptions spill awkwardly to the pavement.
You may have been the rose tonight
Tended by that eccentric old lady down the street
That collects rusty bicycles by the score.
It was pressed against the fence
Yearning to poke through
To cross the border from property to placehood
To entrance the passerby with the most fleeting of rosy thought.
You may have even been that panhandler who wanted three cents.
I'll find you again.
You're on the map,
A map so deep within its occulted by swarms of veins
I'll never see.
I'll walk that road to glimpse you again...
Since it's only ten minutes to downtown.
Mixed media Saturday: A Slow Trudge to Normalcy Edition
For the first time in weeks, the ingredients are slowly heating in the omelet pan, the cats are at ease, and the morning coffee is not a rushed affair. Not that this Saturday is not bittersweet; my grandmother's rather sudden and brief funeral was this time last week.
My words (scroll down) were there, my body not, my heart and soul yearning for her but perhaps not for a hastily assembled family ever weary of being in close proximity. To my right, I've got candles burning by her portrait. Her smile is as vivid and as real, now as ever.
Last week I was living in Brevard, as I was after hours mental health on call for the hospital. Good times. My calls were great learning experiences, if trying. I had to think on my feet to protect some vulnerable folks, and make some pretty weighty decisions. All the while living out of my office, prepping the first week of the therapeutic summer program I direct, and mourning Nonnie when I could. Those were most definitely exceptional times; as out of my element as I could be in every way. Somehow, perhaps at the expense on that seemingly unshatterable exterior that I've outwardly ducktaped over my soul, I persisted. Perhaps even at the expense of the delicate soul which hides therein.
People seem to think of me as this perpetually "on" character, with charisma and stamina fully recharged. Perhaps that's what I want to be seen, but obviously, there is the wisdom of books, covers, and all. I've got a reputation for being frighteningly positive and encouraging, and I can easily apply this to my interactions with others. But when it comes to my own inner conversations, I am exhausted; the words are short, my body is tired, and I retreat from the world of people eagerly into the world of moths on the window screen, the light of the leaves, and the reckoning of memory. Yet having established myself as the perpetual people person, I am called ceaselessly to stand up and speak loudly. I do this with such reluctance at times, other times I relish it. Because of this, my moods and my ability to process what I'm really feeling are fluctuating, even fickle things. I guess I'm just trying to say that I've been "on" for so long and had so little time being "off" that I crave desperately the latter. I need time.
This under consideration, I did have the time in between mourning and working to pen an ode to the Solstice, which passed me by as a truck whizzes by a hitchhiker. Now summer is here, full force, the most fleeting and easily lost of seasons. I intend deeply to retain it fully this year.
We stand as a circle, upon a circle, within a circle;
We contain, effortlessly, billions of circles within our body
Which, itself, grew from the merging of worlds.
How magical it is that we are surrounded by
And daily circumnavigate through endless abodes of the infinite!
How more magical could it be if we paused in our scurry to notice and feel
The uncoiling of the eternal in the bold green of summer's body?
To be animate, here, now, as emissaries of the eternal
Is to stand as progressions through the generative womb of the Universe.
We are combined in the secret alchemy of the stars
As a single element, life, borne of the ardor of mystery.
We are Earth, rising;
We are Fire, walking;
We are Water, moving;
We are Air, singing;
We are Spirit, becoming.
These are not lazy summer metaphors-
Touch these things, then see how the landscape of your skin
Is as raw and wild as the elements which do conspire to be real beneath your feet
And through your body.
Earth rises through you as the curious green tendrils of the tomato plant, reaching toward fruition-
Fire walks you as flames lick through your campfire of holy embers, that blessed warmth in the night-
Water moves you as ocean waves which brought to your young eyes messages from the sea-
Air sings you as the thunderstorm wind, the awe-bearing breath which rattles you temporal shelters-
Spirit becomes through you, randomly and unexpectedly, as the summer's dream unfolds in the lushness of your heart.
These gather together to form your body, which stands upon a body, which is cradled
In the starry body of this timeless Creation.
Consider the next step you will quite literally take
As a being united through these forces that wanted so longingly for you to exist,
That you may witness this elemental dance that formed you,
And all you love,
And all you know,
And all that you are,
And all you shall ever be,
In this grand show of exuberant life,
On this first of summer.
Blessed be.
Here's this week's random 10 of 5,416 from the frightfully huge iTunes library.
1. All The Right Friends ~ REM
2. After the Goldrush ~ Neil Young
3. Toura Toura: The Medina Remix ~ Cheb I Sabbah
4. I Feel Fine Right Now ~ dj BC and the Beastles
5. Gonna Fly Now (Theme from Rocky) ~ Bill Conti
6. Work It Out (Beyonce vs. Dave Matthews vs. Jurassic 5 vs. Deee-Lite) ~ Lenlow
7. The Divine Self ~ Jah Wobble
8. Sun Is Shining ~ Bob Marley vs. Funkstar Deluxe
9. Much More ~ De La Soul
10. I Just Want To Celebrate ~ Rare Earth
Random mp3 of the week: Every Grain Of Sand ~ Emmylou Harris (Buy album @ Amazon / Wiki)
What an anthem. I knew this song long before I ever delved into Dylan's version (I know, when I was a scraggly Bohemian (as opposed to the present day blurrier Boho) I really should've known every lyric in the Dylan canon, but I didn't) and it's always served as a musical statement of my own beliefs about preciousness and infinitude. I can't think of a voice powerful and sweeping as Emmylou's; her take on the song is a raven's feather cutting through the earliest light of dawn; wake up, look up, and remember who you are. Who you really are.
As for the viddy of the week, this has gotten a lot of traffic, but still, it brings such beautiful hope... a cellphone salesman's dream to perform one of opera's most powerful arias ever coming true. This, despite its origin in crapTV, evokes such wonderful, deep joy:
O Virtue of the starry night
In the affirm'd sanctuary of friendship
That carries aloft the tears to the clouds
To let the crazed proclamations of seers and sages
Rain down as love and goodness upon the drought-strick'n land
I raise to this the offering my own heart's illogical celestial drumming
...that through the life-willingness of the Earth
Shall ever deeper love and faith sprout
From the smallest and hopeless of
Seeds.
Everyone take a nice, deep, rejuvenating breath for a moment.
First I’d like to thank Paull for delivering this on my behalf. When we talked on the phone, Paull said something that was both reassuring and enlightening. He said “everyone knows how you feel about Nonnie.” That is very true, and at the same time, each of us has a relationship with Nonnie that is particular to our life story. This is to say that no one can image what Nonnie will always and forever be for me. When we hear her voice, see her face, and get those cute little cards with the Westie terriers, signed with Xs and Os, it opens for each of us a storybook in which she and you and forever intertwined. For me, our storybook together is rather like “The Velveteen Rabbit,” which she read to me one beautiful summer’s day. I was young, and blond at the time, and aloof. I’m not sure I paid a lot of attention to the story of the Rabbit, and his desire to become a real, live hopping bunny. What I remember most is the timbre of her voice, the gentleness of her presence, and the knowing smile that would emerge subtly from her wise, luminous and loving face.
Another deep breath.
My teenage years and early adulthood did not appear promising. Yet, despite my ragged appearance and risky ways, Nonnie sustained me with that loving smile, no matter what. It as if the Rabbit would lose it’s stuffing from time to time, and her love would always fill and stitch it up. The storybook Nonnie and I wrote together is ragged, dog-eared, and you can find the occasional dried flower pressed in the pages, especially in those tough times when the Rabbit really truly doubted it would become a real, live, hopping bunny. Every phone call, every card, every kiss on the cheek spoke volumes of the peacefulness and embracing love she gives with each wink of her eye. We would talk of the amazement of watching this strange world change five times over, the revolutions, the technology, the constantly rewritten rules of society. I was amazed with the grace of how she handled it all; with a shrug, a laugh, and an “I don’t know what to make of it anymore.” That graceful assessment of things will teach me volumes for years to come; she was saying, in a way, “Jaysers, don’t take it all so seriously, but enjoy it all the same.” I will, and I am, as not only a descendent of yours, but an aspect of you. We all have the opportunity to be Nonnies to the world now.
One more deep breath.
It’s not easy at all not being here, in the physical sense. Know that, at this time, I am seeing all of you here, in this old church in which our family history is writ. Perhaps, with Nonnie coloring my every thought and action right now, I am far more here than not. At the very least, I have the storybook we share securely nestled in my arms, embracing it in the same way she held me when I was small enough to bounce on her knee. The good thing is, the storybook still has many blank pages. The thing about my love for Nonnie is that it will always be renewed, each time a memory floats by, each time I see the beach and toe the tide, each time I think of a woman I know who serves as a role model on how to live life fully, gratefully, and with a good measure of laughter along the way. In the story of the Velveteen Rabbit, we are told that someone become real once they become loved. Nonnie gave me that gift, and gives it to each of us, right here, right now, just as we uplift her name and celebrate her eternal spirit.
I would like for us to remember one of the most endearing, if sometimes silly, of Nonnie’s qualities. Let us commit to use in our vocabulary forevermore, the words mush-toad, cat-soup, bumpershoot, cackleberries, full of beans, and cow-juice. If you don’t know what these mean, just ask.
I am not going to “close” this remembrance; if fact, I’m leaving it wide open, like the “barn door,” as she’d say. Open for newness. Open for more stories. Open for new expressions of love, of gratitude, and of all the unspoken wordless feelings that forever shall abide with me. In fact, I plan on seeing Nonnie really soon… in the sunset, in the blooming of daffodils each spring, in the tolerant smile of any grandmother overwhelmed by a hyperactive scruffy kid with dirty fingernails, which desperately need to be trimmed and cleaned. Billie Holiday sang it much better:
“I’ll be seeing you, in all the old familiar places, that this heart of mine embraces, all the day through. I’ll be seeing you in every lovely summer’s day. In everything that’s light in gay, I’ll always think of you that way. I’ll find you in the morning sun, and when the night is through, I’ll be looking at the moon, but I’ll be seeing you…”
Nonnie, I’ll be seeing you. Home again, home again, jiggidy-jig. May God bless your soul, and the souls of all who cherish you. Thank you.
G'day, and I know I've been quiet excepting the silly pics I posted earlier. I'm really on overload right now, and hopefully after tonight's monster fundraiser downtown, I can come up for air soon. Meanwhile, to get a sense of what I fundraising for, watch this:
Mixed Media Saturday: A momentary oasis of unbound time
Well, hello there pilgrim. By jove, the past seven days have been an exhausting parade of humans on the edge, all glittered out in their drama gear, float by float, hour by hour. They invited me to join, to sashay down streets littered with emotion and indecision, and I kept pace for as long as I could, until retreating to an obscure alley of obscuration, whence I now take my repast and gently sate my senses with sensory vittles so thankfully low in emotional calories.
In other words, this week very nearly sucked. If it weren't for good friends and morsels of support from my work-a-day world, I'd be a mere ember of a person, a crisped shell, waiting to be swept into a dustbin. Yea, verily, I'm feeling life creeping in, through the shell of the shocked emotions I plow through as part of my daily on-the-clock routine. I've tried to come home to quiet evenings, free of emergency phone calls and pestering paperwork, to only marginal success. My friends are right: I am dangerously close to burnout and overwhelm, the mental swamp of blown fuses and derailed trains of thought, festering in the mud. How to correct this heuristic malady? How to free myself from the sticky trail of my commitments?
I say this to my half-eaten frozen pizza and luke warm coffee, to the cat sprawled on the floor, begging for belly contact, the empty hammock rocking ghosts in the breeze, the hours left in Saturday... I dunno, but it feels good to spend some time with words, putting this shapeless feeling to shape with verbs and consonants. I cannot peter out, though; people depend on me, and not with widgets and wares, but with my shot-in-the-dark at problem solving lives, hearts, souls. It's always an honor, no matter how exhausting, to be entrusted with this. Yet I must entrust myself with "jay care" in order to keep up with this potent parade of purposefulness.
Now that I've spilled alphabet soup all over the keyboard, on to the mixed media which is eluded to above. The pic below is Ursula earlier in the week, soaking up the sun. Despite her shuttered eyes, her sight appears stable, and the eye issue seems to be clearing up. She's such an awesome sprite. In order to maintain cosmic balance, I should feature Avatar next week.
This week's random 10 out of 5,394:
1. You're Forever an Hourglass ~ Benzos
2. La Verite ~ Fadela & Sahraoui
3. Bombs Over Baghdad (Rock Remix) ~ Outkast / RATM
4. Each Year ~ Ra Ra Riot
5. The Kleptones (24 Hours) ~ 0245 If Not For The Ambulance Driver
6. Phish ~ Access Me
7. Takeda no Komori Uta (Takeda Lullaby) ~ Ayuo & Ohta Hiromi
8. The Way You Dream ~ 1 Giant Leap (Featuring Michael Stipe & Asha Bhosle)
9. Ride my Seesaw ~ Moody Blues
10. I Remember Learning How to Dive ~ Animal Collective & Vashti
Random mp3 o' the week: Where I Belong (Red Astaire Remix)~ Sia
This might be what passes through your mind as the light of an unexpectedly hot sun goes down on your favorite mythical city, full of characters straight out of novels and pigeons listless in the heat. You're unfazed, feeling sexy, and on a mission. That's what this song is to me, anyway.
This viddy is just sweet. A video camera is played on a conveyor at a Japanese sushi restaurant; the result is a Jim Jarmusch-esque circuit of the place, with the surprised and unsuspecting faces caught mid-chew, delighted or oblivious. It's just great, watch it...
Really, I am. Time has been few and far between for delightful things like blogging, finding transcendent inspiration through the alchemy of the written word, et cetera. How many apologetic posts like this ping the blogosphere daily? Quintillions, I'm sure. I hope that tomorrow I can begin to be consistent again. Meanwhile, the invisible support of your visit right now is a very nice thing.
This week, the apparently high levels of stress finally caught up with me. By Wednesday, I think, I was reduced to a tweaking cinder of a person, punchdrunk from the shortness of time versus the greatness of need to do many big and important things that are theoretically helpful to the world. Today, the first moments I have to cloister and regain, through mindwork, the vivacity that I've spent on the perhaps quixotic dream of helping others feel the goodness they deserve. Yet I deserve it, too. I've earned these quiet moments, this still Saturday morning.
Sweetness. Crass, a bit of grave dancing, but thankfully the world is includes one less boogeyman of snake-oil pseudo-virtue.
As for other eventfulness this week, there's not much to speak of. I do feel as if I'm getting into rather good physical shape, and my creative juices were possibly extra-fermented by the intense pressures of the week. I did have a moment of awe, when I hiked Cedar Rock Mountain with a client and absorbed the verdant rolling sea of bright green
Birdonthemoon.com, quiet though it may be, holds a very important place in my life. It's the studio that my house doesn't have (yet), dusty though it may be, the place where I come face-to-face with my creative effort. Through the archives of the past five years, I collected hundreds of poems and prose, culling here and there, and after well over two years of planning I organized that material into my third published work, One For The Nameless, which was officially accepted for publication just before midnight yesterday. It's through your feedback, interconnection, and support that this work was made possible. I'm humbled and awed to have nearly 900 pages of printed material from the past ten years, in addition to magazines and other print media. 
I've just finished the rough first edit of the new book. Yes, the new one, and incidentally, the third one which I've been sitting on for some time. The beast is at least weighing in at 350 pages of my gibberish presently, and with some cuts and additions, that's about where it will likely settle. Not that the page length has anything to do with it, really, but being a man there's something quite comforting in such a long, ahem, piece of work.
