One day recently I stepped outside into a hive of birdsong. The sun was filtering down between the branches of trees at the edge of the yard, and the birds were dotted amongst the boughs, positioned instinctively behind leaf and shadow. It was like entering a Bev Doolittle painting that had come to life. Soprano spirals curled into the air, sounds that had been scribbled by the practiced hand of a master, as if Matisse […]
Roughly a week ago I wrote about acceptance and not looking back. It was fun. It felt good. I felt whole, and alive. I was aware of a nurturing Invisibility with which I was joined, as if I was wading into a body of water that has no opposite shore, shaking my arms loose, wiggling my head around, and generally preparing to dive forward and start doing a Michael Phelps impersonation at a right angle […]
A glowing vector shot across the sky, the last, illumined fragment of a shattered world, screaming in octaves of fire and dissolution. I peered into the majesty left behind, into that gathering field of stars and distances beyond measure, of potency and shimmering songs, feeling its Invitation draw the life within me to the surface the way the moon pulls the water up through stone beneath the land, the way tears rise to the surface […]
There are so many amazing things a person could choose to learn about in this world, enough to fill whole lifetimes– like the way photons make decisions when faced with the conundrum of a diffraction grating, or the way high-speed traders manipulate the flow of money on time scales that make the pace of human thought seem like canyon-making, or how the fashion industry unraveled the mystery of the neons. There was a time when […]
With each breath the possibility exists that your heart will no longer merely window shop along the shores of Eternity, sneaking peaks into that vista of marbled light, self-tending gardens and pain-free childbirth, imagining with aching joy all the wonders doo-dads and luxuriant, long-lasting features that you probably can’t even begin to comprehend that come standard with the Wholeness package, but will pull open the door, step inside and ask itself, really ask itself, to […]
Once, when he was still learning his craft of ushering the anxious and doubtful from the shadows of falsehood to the river of poetry at the center of their own being, and in a well-intentioned effort to raise the general morale, Hafiz gave away two court-side seats to the Explosion of the Sun. Because, as we all know, sometimes having something to look forward to can make all the difference. In this particular case, the […]
The construction of bridges can lead to the forgetting of rivers and the strengthening of commerce. In this way, thoughts can erect theoretical scaffolding to cross safely the tidal pools of the heart. This is far more efficient than wading through marsh and muck each morning, once in each direction, to pick up the day’s fresh batch of metrics. Less smelly, too. One day I was walking the planks when a great wind came up […]
Here in the Meanwhile, on the shores of Forever dotted with the charcoal stumps of forgotten fires, the mossy walls of collapsing wooden shanties and various debris of antiquity, such as: half-buried edges of glass, torn diary pages, ice picks, the bones of dead birds bleached by the sun, and a curious face caught in sepia, the faint notes of song drift past on the breeze, pastel tones that have nowhere else to go and so […]
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 […]
Embracing Forever 