Yesterday was perfect. After three months my best short story yet was rejected twice in the span of an hour via form letters of compensatory encouragement, which must mean I’m getting somewhere, in between which I used a shabby putter to sink two twelve footers in a row down the cubicle aisle. We made some jokes together and we laughed. We had to hazard a guess about how much natural gas will cost in three years, which […]
We’ll never know what it’s like to exist forever in a condition of perpetually transforming joy and goose-bump inducing discovery if we don’t consider it a very real and inevitable possibility. It does sound pretty out there, but so don’t NASCAR races to German Shepherds. If we don’t consider it a very real and inevitable possibility, we’ll likely take something perfect and beautiful just as it is, something like space exploration or boat building or […]
All day I am sitting. On that bench. There is some wind nearby I recognize, or maybe it is this: a dove has flown through the doorway? The sky I mean. Two timbers and a lintel in my mind, and the clouds that are playing house upon the ocean. A dove has formed from the sky and my heart trembles because it knows of such things, and also because all day I am sitting on […]
Fear is like knowing with a dreadful certainty there is a sixty-foot troll exploring the corridors of your existence in a pair of rubber-soled shoes like the spies are obligated to wear in all those books to sneak up on one another– a five-story, monolithic brute gliding through you like a dorsal fin through water who might appear at any moment and squish you flat upon sight as if you were a tiny black spider roaming a shiny […]
Things that appear to be so under one set of conditions, are often found to be quite different under another. It is for this reason that most of our conclusions formed historically, in the context of separation consciousness, are erroneous. What’s remarkable about the experience of life is that we can be completely incorrect about ultimate reality, and have a very real and vivid experience of our own false conclusions up to and even through […]
What does it mean to live from the heart? And why does it matter? In my experience, every difficulty I’ve ever faced has manifested itself as a rift between my heart and my mind—between what can be known most profoundly when words are left behind, and what presents itself as a seemingly irrefutable conclusion of the mind’s learning. When this happens we tend to look at circumstance as the genesis of difficulty, without realizing that […]
“I feel better. But I did that thing again, didn’t I, Hafiz?” “Yes.” “How come we both know what I’m talking about, but we can’t explain it?” “The horses giving chase always get mud in their eyes.” “That was easier than I thought. But giving chase to what?” “To whatever you think is over there.” He waved his hand limply towards the distance, indicating that somewhere along the periphery of my mind there were these […]
The last few weeks have been challenging for me, and I have felt the awkward stretching that comes sometimes when change is upon us. There is this desire to be certain of things, to know what lies ahead, to make nothing but informed decisions, and to navigate the consequences with aplomb. We want to understand the right way to go about things, to think about things– the proper way to perceive, and to know. Today […]
The sky in the distance is yellow because it is saturated with the living dust that is emitted by trees, who I happen to notice are standing quite silent on the matter of this atmospheric discoloration, as if you can do a thing little-by-little and it doesn’t count. But I see you can take a thing too far. Fresh from my coursework on the dangers of coffee dust and grain silos, I note that with […]
The description I love best is that each of us is an intersection of matter and spirit, the above and below, the eternal and the present, of knowledge and mystery. I am tired of materialism—so very tired of its laborious absurdities, the dead ends it tries to pretty-over, the delicate faculties of the human being it would all but silence. Even so, I would not discard logic or rational thought. I would simply hold them […]
Embracing Forever 