I should give a warning here. Unless you’ve already read the book To Rise Again At a Decent Hour by Joshua Ferris, after reading this post you’ll know a great deal more about it than you did before. I’ve tried not to give too much away, but of both joy and necessity I’ve said more than a little. I think regardless of what I’ve noted here, the wit and audacity of Ferris’s prose merits a read […]
We’re going to perform a thought experiment, Hafiz announces. What wonders to behold, I answer. (Why does he always assume that just because he wants to do experiments, I do as well?) (What irks me most is that I do, of course.) Hafiz bounces a rubber ball off of the wall and catches it with the same hand, without really even being aware that he’s done so, then holds it over his mouth like an […]
I started this series of posts because I came to a realization: I was not being who I know myself to be in some way. It’s like watching yourself when you’re just coming under the influence, observing that what you’re doing is strangely inconsistent, and a little unexpected. It’s called dissembling. For me this came across in my attraction to discussions that in some sense were futile. We do this sometimes because we care. Because […]
A quality of wholeheartedness is peace. There is a knowing of Creation’s completeness. We sense the unchanging center on which all things depend, and know it as our own center, too, as beings. We know it as the center of the bluebird on the branch, the center of a field covered with snow, the center of the Himalayan mountains, the center of the Tokyo Stock Exchange, the center of the sun. When we are wholehearted, […]
The desire to write manifests as follows: a warmth in my chest accompanied by the sense of possibility, and the awareness something wants to be said, though I don’t know what it is. Last night I discovered and read an e-mail exchange between Sam Harris and Noam Chomsky that was published a few years ago. I’d been listening to some of Sam’s podcasts lately, and discovered the two men’s correspondence. I’m not expert on either […]
Remembering perfectly, so that you produce the type of knowing that actually yields light, does not take practice. But you do need to clear a space. Give it time, and allow it to happen. I left home once, you see— pulled the door softly-to behind me so the others wouldn’t be woken. Clapped my hands in the cold and breathed into their midst. The night was so thick you could smell the absence of light. […]
For meditation this morning (for how else would you describe it) I read the last fifty pages of To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. Then I walked the mile to the town library and collected some new pages to consider. On the way back I passed a yellow farmhouse—the tractor and the corn wagon were parked across the street in a field of pending silage—where I heard a knocking hand against glass. I looked up […]
Hafiz and I were up on the widow’s walk beneath a flaming sky prancing to and fro, lunging, parrying, regaling the light with our imagined swordplay when his foot slipped unexpectedly on a pebble some bird had set there as a gift and my blade plunged into his belly and he gasped, staggered, and tumbled off the edge of the roof. I found him draped over the hedge with his leg cocked behind his back […]
[Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4] [Part 5] I want to close this series by stating that I believe Love, and expressions of Love, are all that truly exist. When I say that expressions of Love truly exist, I mean that they endure, they are timeless in a sense, they add unto the eternal fabric of being, they open pathways to new modes of being, and they enrich all aspects of being simultaneously. […]
[Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4] When I was a boy who needed to be in nearly continuous motion on long summer days, lest I become bored and try to rappel off the porch using a clothesline, or hitch the family dog to my bicycle so we could pretend we lived in a Jack London novel, I went (briefly) to a summer camp about thirty miles east of Birmingham. I was dropped off […]
Embracing Forever 