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...

“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.”

Dedicated to the congregation of the TVUUC

Rise up Roma!

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.

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.

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.

“In the universe before the bounce, all the general features will be the same,” said Singh. “It will follow the same dynamical equations, the Einstein’s equations when the universe is large. Our model predicts that this happens when the universe becomes of the order 100 times larger than the Planck size. Further, the matter content will be the same, and it will have the same evolution. Since the pre-bounce universe is contracting, it will look as if we were looking at ours backward in time.”