This post is part of the Time Machine Blogging Challenge hosted by Linda Litebeing… When I reflect on my life, the realization that emerges is that I’ve been guided in ways both more subtle and far-reaching than I would have imagined were possible in the moments when I was grappling around within the question of it. That’s not to say my past isn’t peppered with opportunities to have lived differently. There’s a business or two that didn’t […]
Obviously I am not a Christian, but Jesus is my companion. More than that, even. We were bound together in darkness, in a moment we both chose without resistance. The ropes encircling us are sacred. We are each other’s atrium and ventricle. We live in the same house. We love the same woman. We lay together on a raft sometimes, continuing our passage across the sea to visit the birth of life. At night, when I’m […]
The conclusion can no longer be avoided: I’m being haunted by that weightless certainty from which no one recovers. Each day there’s at least one point in time that lingers, staring back at me, eyes level, while waving the wind through the narrow pass between us– unimpeded. The wind is whistling, and the machine won’t read my ticket. Something ten thousand feet down is yawning and long after I’m gone its baby rocks will float to […]
There are things we say sometimes to make a point– sweeping recapitulations of history, or statements of what is so in this world– and when we invoke them we do so as if they are self-evident. Obvious to those who would see. It is easy to forget how deeply we occupy our own lives and perspectives, and we can lose sight of the fact that what seems unmistakable to us is but the flowering of […]
Why am I carrying this barbed piece of steel around with me? Because it hurt when it was dropped into my open palms? And now I want to repay the favor should the world present me with such an opportunity? There’s no such thing as even-steven in this world, but there is holiness. There are rivers wide as ball fields that dredge bald tires and old box springs off the bottom and carry them off to the […]
Two, three—call it four decades on, and I’m both better and worse. I’ve settled into it in the way that precedes disappearance, as if I was placed in the back of an otherwise empty cabinet, sheltered by the presence of wood, where I’ve become a study in knowing something more that you can only glimpse in the repair of oily machinery, or the bailing of water from a low spot on the land where two surveyors […]
This last week an asteroid passed through my solar plexus, and I wobbled a little back and forth like a transplanted tree testing its new roots. I swallowed the asteroid whole, and mostly because I had a bet with Hafiz, I didn’t spit it out. I asked him if a star would grow inside of me now and blow me up from the inside out because I swallowed an asteroid through my solar plexus, and […]
They’re at it again in there– getting organized so no one gets hurt once that one drummer we all love catches hold of a comet in each hand and starts hanging on for dear life. He’s the one the elephants still remember from the last world that went south, who appears in stories kept alive in their great ribbed vaults, where his memory ages with each migration into the delicate musk of ancestry and power. They’re […]
We circulate blood to warm the engine, to launder our thoughts through a flickering screen of cells, to give our last remaining questions the dignity of heat, a name, and color– to work them over day after day from within these visceral bindings, pressing against them and metabolizing them and hoping they’ll somehow end up different than they once were. The mind takes a peek out, intrepid, eager as a hunter, giddy with the leathered […]
Power is a word that evokes a strange spectrum of thought forms and connotations, reactions and prejudices. I think this is largely because the power we are most familiar with is the type that involves a victim and an oppressor. We view power as the ability to cause events to occur despite the competing will of another. That is our definition of power– a definition that makes perfect sense in the minds of the separate […]
Embracing Forever 