A body is neither a limit nor a cage, but a flower on the vine of who you are. And those bees buzzing all around you? Those zoom-zoom experiences that keep swarming your life? They just want to collect your holy nectar and take it back to their hive so they can toast you all winter long, quite possibly for the rest of their lives. Best to stop swatting them away and open your petals […]
All our assumptions were wrong. The strangest part is realizing we always knew this, even in the hour of our deepest pain. We’re like a secret of the universe that wandered through the trees to a scenic overlook and stood slack-jawed peering into a crevasse full of stars and comets choreographing the meaning of existence, then got whacked in the back of the head with a frying pan and splattered into a corpus callosum of inter-combinant […]
I met Jesus while crawling on my belly beneath a rock, scratched and bleeding, panting with the effort to catch a single drop of dew with my swollen tongue, straining to taste its coolness before it swelled, and gravity plucked it out from under me. I’d been trying the same stunt every morning at this spot for three days. Now I was too weak to move on. At the last moment, I hesitated. It was […]
The Only Principle is this: Nothing happens that doesn’t unfold within a field of awareness, and every awareness is held by a greater one because no awareness is great enough to hold itself. This is precisely true, even though awareness is always, only and ever… One. (That last bit’s the Other Principle.) Using language as we are here is like trying to make a hole in the Emptiness by using teaspoons to scoop out little […]
Sometimes I get the feeling everything so far has been a few of us stragglers wandering around this old museum just before closing, picking up little polished stones one-by-one and pewter sculptures and moon rocks and animal claws and ivory eye sockets and a fake cutlass and playing make believe and telling each other all sorts of cute fictions about ghost conjuring and sunken ships and people who eat nails or swallow flaming swords while God has […]
I am fragile, but when I shatter– as I must, and soon– a warmth will remain. You will find me again. That is the most dazzling magic. This realization comes while standing at the edge of this life, looking down, hovering weightless– a sand grain witness to a vast sea. Each arriving wave softens the distance into which my longing stretches. I am readying to dissolve. Together, can we cover the Vastness? Or will I buckle, […]
This poem comes with a Satisfaction Guarantee. That’s right. Here it is, in fact: Your Everlasting Satisfaction Is Guaranteed. In case you’re wondering already– (you haven’t even read the poem yet for Pete’s sake!)– what type of compensation you receive should you find by some law-bending fluke of nature that you’re a twinge dissatisfied at the end of this, I’ll tell you that, too. Anticipating such a question, the Beloved has written the Answer upon an infinitude of hearts, […]
We can’t be happy, Hafiz says, until we discover we’re not who we think we are. Then he leans near, whispers… So… how are we going to pull that off? I think he’s going somewhere with this. I can’t help myself: I’m grinning like the operator of a prison search light who’s secretly pulling for the inmates to escape and run riot, waiting for my Friend’s next words to bust through the cell block wall and stride […]
The instruction to just be myself resulted in a pretty meandering to-and-fro up-over-and-down there and back again maybe, but maybe not, should I educate myself better or get a few more life skills first type of thing until one day when I was brushing my teeth I came to a scrunchy halt, arm cocked like a frozen piston, and I looked into the silvered plate hung on the wall, the one framed by garishly bright […]
One night when Hafiz was working the phones, a call came in. The man began by announcing that he had a few questions, as if he were preparing his counter party for a barrage of heavy artillery. The way he said it made it sound like he had a few answers, too. Look, he said, you can’t really know if there is anything beyond this life or not, but consider: if there isn’t a God, […]
Embracing Forever 