I remember once when I was a boy, wondering if my knee would ever heal. A baseball slide on hard-packed dirt had torn it open. Then I had fallen off a bike. Mashed it into the ground in a soccer game. Made a heroic dive across the playground during PE. Every few days, the same. Finally, infection set in, and with it came the reality of an uncertain outcome. The improvement from one day to […]
What will it be like to Remember? Rumi advises we give up on this question1. My American football analogy goes like this: this is not a first down that we’re after. We can call out the chains and ask for a measurement, but the umpire will be dumbfounded and probably feint. Our questions are all boats without bottoms. The instant replay, on closer inspection, will reveal ten million angels on the nose of the football […]
The other day I had some old friends drop by for a visit– unannounced. I was sitting in the plaza having a sandwich, reading or reflecting or some such thing, when Depression slid one of the free chairs out from beneath the table, making a real show of it– dragged it along in a gritty clattering of metal across stone that sent all the pigeons fleeing, and then flopped down like a rubbery fish. Unshaven, […]
I’ve never really known quite what to do with my hair. Were I pressed upon by violent circumstances, fighting to defend the fort or preserve the realm, this would be of no account. Instead my life sprouts daily, like weeds in a field, matters of no consequence that require careful attention, a trained eye, and defensible motives– matters best handled, as the world well knows, by well-ordered professional-looking people who instill confidence in others and keep […]
Time’s ruse is that it appears to pass. Every appearance, even voices, are a special effect. These echoes of the Invisible deceive me not. Every instance of drowning I endured came in the flood of something special. Show me the One who never speaks, and I will fall to my knees and listen, unmasked, mute and reverent. Change is the right-hand man of time, his charlatan enabler, the fragrance of sweet liquor hanging in the […]
I don’t believe there is any greater power than that of an idea, deeply held, and slowly it is becoming clear to me that all we behold is the product of these generative seeds. In the three books of A Course of Love, Jesus speaks frequently about ideas, and in a passage that I love he says, “Giving ideas life is the role of creatorship.” This statement comes in a section of the Dialogues– the […]
Barreling down life’s asphalt highway in a vehicle of some description– a modern coup of surface rocketry whose every line represents the fulfillment of computerized crash-testing and the collected fall-out of Greek ideas, gathered like a powder, fired in the furnace of time and sculpted into the shape of silent, diving falcons– a machine built for catapulting over the ground in space-blurring borings through wind and air that leave behind a shimmering, perfectly tubular quiet […]
Like a thread of yarn stretched in a line flying flickering fluttering behind a thrown stone to which its utmost limit has been lashed, we fly. When the stone exhausts its given momentum and burrows into soft soil, motionless, we come crashing on after, lazily collapsing into a coiled, tangly heap, awaiting the curiosity of the next passer-by. Like this Our loving unfolds in in accordian-like phases. Stretch. Contract. Fly. Land. Wheee…! Thump. We are building […]
Today, for the second time in my life, I finished a Thomas Pynchon novel. Now the hard part: how to convey the dizzying nature of this journey when all I have are snapshot memories and fragments of awoken dreams staggering around the underworld of my consciousness. I read most of Against the Day in twenty page segments, and so it took me quite a while, but I don’t think there was a single sitting that […]
Jesus has been known to suggest that one’s experience of our collective dream of separation is marked by an upside down, inside out view of things. We experience Love… as bound up with our pain, or perhaps we are afraid of what Love would offer us. We fear the things that offer us peace and eternal happiness, because of what we think they will cost us, and we are drawn into attachments with those things […]
Embracing Forever 