Reflections on Authenticity

May 29, 2016
by Michael
comments 36
Reflections

Authenticity is not unveiled in a swoop of the cape.  That only goes to show the last few days or hours or minutes– whatever the length of time has been since the previous flourish of unveiling– have been inauthentic.  What the flourish reveals is the port of entry to our truth’s harbor.  You enter by submarine.  Your instruments have failed.  The ballast is leaking and the batteries are dead.  The hull is creaking and popping in a very unsettling way, and you settle on the bottom of the harbor on a barge of sand.

(You wait for Hafiz to knock on the air lock!)

Authenticity is what we emerge with.  We need a lifetime to get down to it, and often even the moments of our most uncomfortable vulnerability and of our most passionate honesty are but preludes.  But we can’t know that until we have them.  Without them we would be stuck.  They open the door.

I’m not sure that honesty and authenticity are quite the same, but I think we need a great deal of the former to reveal the latter.  We are not our most authentic when we are chronically lonely, when we are painfully uncertain, when we are angry about a failed relationship or bitter about a recent diagnosis.  We can’t know this until later, though.  I am not saying authenticity cannot peek through at any moment, or even be spurred into revelation by these conditions, but I am saying they are not our most authentic patterns of being.  We have to be honest about this, without shame or blame or denial, in order to make contact with what is authentic within us.  If we want to give it room to grow, we have to give it room to grow.

A day of suspended judgment is a good start.  Then we can be ill and broke and alone and authentic simultaneously.

If what is authentic about us is that we are tarnished, defiled and helpless, then Jesus and the Buddha and many other wise and loving beings have wasted their time.  And I don’t believe that is so.  There may be honesty in admitting we find ourselves in these patterns.  Again.  And again.  But our addictions are not authentic expressions of our given nature.

We can have needs without being perpetually needy.  Our authenticity is a bridge between resource and need.  When we don’t know this we wander impoverished, or we stockpile.

We can fail without being a failure.  Our authenticity is equally revealed in its response to both success and failure, and by that measure cannot differentiate between them.  When we don’t know this we play it safe, hedge our bets, position ourselves strategically, or we fall into the pitfall of taking more credit than is due for the events and conditions of our lives.  By the same means we can succeed without being a success.

We can be honest about our brokenness, and very often this is helpful, but we are not broken so it is important to recognize the gift of the temporary experience of it.  There is some skin to be shed.  Some mask or costume we’re wearing.  Some ideal to which we yet cling.  Something that is not helping.  Authenticity knows how to remove these cloaks, and wash the old wounds gently.

Authenticity knows how to regrow a split tree, to unwind a knot, to mend a heart, to discover a path.  Authenticity knows how to dead-reckon across fields and fields and fields of endless futility, to find the lit house just up ahead.

We can be authentic in our brokenness, and that is in the instant when discover that it need not be.  In discovering this we find we are able to carry the weight of our present.  This is not a show of strength or heroism, but a display of what is true.  Inside of us, in our authenticity, there are legions of possibility and succor.  There are medics, chieftains, informants and counsellors.  There is peace.

Sometimes we use our brokenness as evidence of our failure and compound our difficulty.  But authenticity doesn’t judge.  Authenticity extends a hand.  Authenticity says follow me.  Trust me.  I have done this many times.  Your case is not as special as you think.

When we are authentic we can receive help when it is first needed, rather than when we are forced to submit to a crisis.

When we are authentic we are not telling ourselves how it would be if we were being authentic.  We don’t try to calm seas to prove we have the truth inside us.  We don’t seek for powers or gifts that have not been given.  Nor do we run from the ones that we have.

And when we are inauthentic, it is our honesty that will bring us back.  But it is a special kind of honesty.  It is the kind of honesty that says even though we don’t know how to be authentic, that is okay because we don’t have to know how to be what we already are.  There isn’t really a knowing involved.  We just need to be honest we’ve been living in the dark.  It is the kind of honesty that looks beyond difficulty, keeping the truth in sight.

It is the kind of honesty that refuses to weigh the evidence our pasts have produced against the inevitability of our given nature, but says instead, Yes, these things have been so.  So what.

What’s Killing Me

May 25, 2016
by Michael
comments 39
Poetry

Hafiz and I
have started an air band.
It’s a summer thing.
I guess.
A now and forever thing.
Like being eight years old
and playing tag with your cousin
on a wrap-around porch
on a day that will never, ever forget you.

The sky behind the house
turns pink and orange
in a valley between tall trees
and we appear on the widow’s walk
just as the bass line sets the table.
We’re both playing the bass,
letting it taunt our kidneys
and invite a few thunder beings over,
then Hafiz grabs the guitar
so it won’t fall down
and I spin and crouch and double down
on the reason we exist.
Suddenly we’re singing,
both of us–
who needs instruments–???
swirling around the same microphone
in a slow motion syrup
before I hit the drum riff hard
and start getting a little breathless.
I’ve forgotten my name
and what comes next
and why I ever doubted you.
Hafiz is dipping the microphone
all the way down into the earth,
and we’re both getting
a little tunnel vision,
a little inner pandemonium
before the power chords
put us on their shoulders
and throw us into the sky,
where we’re both singing again:

I love to play sing along…
I love to play sing along…

We land and compose ourselves.
We’re completely still except
for all these jitters and fritters
that are leaking out and crawling
up and down us.
We are movement spreading out
across the face of the land and
this is the grinding part of it,
the moment of recovery
and wondering about
the way orange and violet mix
and how perfection moves in circles
while we surf the momentum we have spun–
savoring what we have given ourselves to so completely,
soaring into a sky whose words have all
burned off entirely.

I leap back on the guitar
and Hafiz takes the drums.
The singing is taking care of itself–!
The forest beyond the field beyond the house
beyond the doubts beyond the quiet
beyond the day of being born
and the day of being dead,
beyond lost and found
is swimming inside of us.
Down is up.  Left is right.
We are dizzy but we don’t miss a beat.
Love is now and presence is vast.
Wide sweeping strokes and bubbles.
Thick viscous recuperated majesty.

We stop at the same time.
Slam on the brakes
and careen into silence.
We escalate into space.

“Woooo-weeeeeee!!!
Wouldn’t you love to know
how to play an instrument for real, Hafiz?”

It seems an obvious and relevant question.

He just looks at me.
He looks at the roof, the sky.
Then he pulls me close
to tell me a secret:

That question, he says…

That question is what’s killing me.

* * * * *

On Seeing, and Seeing

May 22, 2016
by Michael
comments 28
Course Ideas / Reflections

It is in my response to the world that I discover the thoughts most active within me, and it is quite often a humbling experience.  The movement stretches and pulls and teases to the surface residual uncertainties and doubt.  I have taken in reams and reams of information over the years intended to set me (and all of us) free, which my Undersecretary of Actual Motivations has taken under advisement, and accepted with a begrudging nod.

Did I misinterpret it as encouraging?  Very sly, that whole department.

The Spokesperson out front is under the illusion that taking something under advisement is code-speak for a done deal.  It’s only later, when I am doing something– doing something new— that I realize I’ve got vectors of intention dashing in every direction.  I’m a bureaucracy that’s closing ranks, hanging posters of gleaming enthusiasts in the cafeteria, holding after-hours meetings and coming up with a plan to return to safe territory.  I’m the point of origin of an air raid drill.  Everyone just doing their jobs.  Running across the yard, holding their helmets in place, looking frantically to the sky.

Yes, I took those ideas under advisement.  (We’re leaping over puddles and flinging ourselves down the stairs.)  They were very nice, but it’s not exactly the time or the place, now, is it!?

All this because responding to a calling pulls us into the open, forcing us to leave the (relatively) safe environs of our past.  It stirs the pot.  I think this is why our movement in the world is so important.  We can see and experience directly the way our patterns of thought play out.

* * * * *

Hafiz is seated with me at the center of the collapse.  He has brought his binoculars, as if we were going birding, and he is pointing out with great care the architecture of insanity.  Do I see that column over there?  It is on the verge of buckling.  He smiles.  There is no one to blame.  He has seen it a thousand times before, the ebb and flow of human suffering.  The way we construct it, the way we tear it down.  To him it is simply a movement, with laws no one can change, like the sea, but when conditions change the sea will change with it.

* * * * *

The thing I find is that the line between free and clear expression that brings to light the holiness within us and a demolition derby of dispossessed emotional tenants is razor thin.  The line is razor thin but the territories on either side are starkly different.  There’s just one thing different– the deepest sensation of identity– and it means everything.

The beauty of being in the world is that if we’re attentive this becomes quite clear.  We start to see what we’re doing.  We cannot hide from ourselves or the plans we’ve kludged together to navigate the crossing of the line, because as we march for the line a strange thing happens: we find ourselves more and more alone.  More and more transparent.  Right up at the line there’s nothing left but that gasping for air.  Like we’re trying to break the speed of light or something.  It’s all that primal discomfort that set this in motion.  I’m being driven forward by a strange whip that I once invented.

Jesus puts an arm over my shoulder, holds up his cell phone, shows our location on the map.  I can see the line.  I can see a cafe, a nursery school, the traffic conditions, an advertisement for a Buick, the weather… and the line.  Then he swipes for a while to a point several blocks over, and I can see the line doesn’t exist there.

So I run like hell over there.

By the time I arrive, there it is.  I’m crawling and wheezing again.  Like I’m climbing to the top of the Sears Tower wearing a bag full of books I’ve read.

Jesus holds up his cell phone.  Yup.  An advertisement for outdoor patio furniture, two more cafes, an update on the traffic conditions… and the line.  Swipes a few times and I can see the line doesn’t exist back where I was.

This universe is rigged, I suggest.  My eyebrow is twitching.

Jesus says to close my eyes and consider the street we’re on and imagine the most beautiful flowering of its potential I possibly can.

It comes with surprising clarity when it’s all that you’re after– the stunning goodness in things.  Okay.

Good.  Now can you see that living inside of the street your eyes show to you?

I look at the cheap construction, the scooped-out roads, the dented fenders and the squabbling birds.  I’m squinting pretty hard here.  That man on the corner is a beggar with violent eyes.  The vision is getting pretty wobbly.

The man on the corner is you, Jesus says.  He’s us.

I look a little closer.  The man is talking to no one and shaking his head to the sky, then he throws a seed to the pigeons.  I see it!

Jesus nods.  So live in response to what you see.  That is all.

* * * * *

Hafiz has never moved.  He is watching the waves come in, the buildings topple over, the streets crack apart.  The structures give way to a beautiful city just beyond, and all around.  The line is nowhere to be found.  He hands me the binoculars.

Thanks, I say.  Did you happen to bring any snacks?

Regarding the Archangel Zorro

May 14, 2016
by Michael
comments 34
Poetry

My friends–!

May the awareness of Love
settle upon you
as if the discarded cape
of the Archangel Zorro
has curled down through the great skies above
in curling volutes of black velvet wonder
like the skyfall shuffle
of an impassioned chorus of sting rays–
enfolding and squishing and fluttering around,
riding currents of wind and smoky light,
hugging thermals and insights and
suddenly scooting sideways
with gusts of certainty shot through its belly–
to settle gently upon the bench beside you,
undiscovered as yet–!
perhaps taking the form
of the Archangel Zorro himself–!
so that when you look up
from the weight of the last few decades
to see if the bus is on time
or if you’re being forced to suffer
yet another faceless injustice
when you’ve already endured
about all you can stand,
you find yourself looking
into the crystalline eyes of a holy friend
you haven’t seen
in many dogged years
who now has snuck up on you–
a specter of joy arising before you
to rescue you from all those
leagues of insult and public transportation
with an unexpected smile,
a loaded heart ready to fire,
and a black velveteen swoosh of wonder.

May the awareness of Love so described
settle upon your shoulders
and accompany you
wherever it is you go.
May you dash and whirl as you travel,
or at least appear to do so
because of that school of holy sting rays
circling and brandishing and gleaming
in your rippled wake
that will never leave your side.

May it be so,
for even now the Archangel Zorro
is riding across the sky
on his holy steed,
flinging capes of rescue into the breeze.

After all, that is what
the Archangel Zorro does.

Too Far

May 9, 2016
by Michael
comments 33
Poetry

Once in a while
Hafiz takes things too far.

Like after I took him
to the Celtics game
where he noted
with ear-to-ear
enthusiasm
the musical ambush
they sprung upon us
during TV timeouts
that filled the entire arena
and every soul in it
with raucous abandon
and a preview of the apocalypse.

Next day I’m sitting quietly
on the living room floor
in a stare down
with some hint of brokenness,
stirring the kettle of Love
that is warming in my heart,
when a Marshall half-stack
catches fire in the front hall closet.
Pentatonic scales
start burning dust off the overcoats
and bass lines begin pounding
the floor boards into shape.
My heart grabs a gear
and my eyes open directly
into slits of probing blame.

You have gone too far, Hafiz,
they say.

I just wanted to remind you, he yells,
and I can only “hear him” because
of a miraculous acumen I’ve somehow developed
in the field of lip-reading,
that you are on the Home Team!

Then that’s it.
We’re out the door.
The two of us.
Headed for the courts,
to daydream and shoot the rock,
to set the pick, and roll,
to draw the charge,
to spin past imaginary defenders
and dust off the crossover,
to argue the call
with invisible circumstance.

To remember the glory
hiding inside of us,
and to wax triumphant.

* * * * *

The first fifteen seconds of this arena classic will perhaps put this in perspective.  Continue listening at your own risk!

A Discussion on Karma

May 1, 2016
by Michael
comments 48
Dialogues

During the month of April, Hariod and I had a back-and-forth discussion on the idea of karma– what it is and isn’t and how its effects may play out in our lives.  It turned into a somewhat lengthy discussion by blogging standards, but we didn’t think it made sense to serialize it, so are offering it here as a PDF file.  It should read easily in a web browser, an e-book reader, and/or be easily downloaded for review at your leisure.

A Discussion on Karma

We are most interested in any thoughts or responses you may have and hope you will add your insights, reactions, and conjectures to the discussion in the commentary below, to which we will both be able to respond.

Many thanks,
Michael and Hariod

A Technical Discussion, Cont’d

April 28, 2016
by Michael
comments 43
Poetry

(This post is a continuation of the previous…)

What’s a teckinal discussion, Hafiz?
the child asked.

Well! Hafiz replied,
sitting down beside
the little one,
that is a very tricky thing, you see.
That is when we try
to identify what each thing is
all by itself
with such great precision
any confusion in it
will be squeezed right out.

Sensing immediately
God was an idea
that would break apart
beneath such pressure,
the child turned its delicate attention
upon more accessible concerns.
Where does it all go, Hafiz?

The confusion?!
Into us, of course!
It has to hide somewhere
when the squeezers
come around, doesn’t it!?

Then he plunged in close
and wrapped the child
in a cloud of high-speed tickles.
The child laughed and wriggled,
then hopped to its feet
and began running in circles
around Hafiz on the top
of the rock, head back,
arms flopping mightily,
legs misfiring at all angles,
laughter spilling out in bursts
like a volcanic cleansing.

Time passed
and they sat down together again.
The child’s mind settled back upon it
like a falling feather.

Hafiz, are we
still having a
teckinal discussion?

No, my dear…
We are not…
Why do you ask?

Because I want you to tell me
about God now,
and I don’t wanna’
squeeze God flat
and make a ka-fusion.

Well I’m going to tell you a secret,
Hafiz replied, leaning in close.
If you don’t squeeze it out,
it’s everywhere, and it’s
very mysterious…
Everything you see, Hafiz said,
is just a copy of something
that’s alive inside of you!

The child’s eyes lit up
at the thought of such glory.

Then Hafiz and the child
demonstrated together the art
of standing on one foot
with your other leg
cocked underneath you
like a stork, and your eyes
full of the fading sun
and your heart so full
of glories yet to be born
the silence must make room for them,
and they both had wild hair
and swooping moves that tickled the sky.

And the sea smiled.

And it was good.

A Technical Discussion

April 27, 2016
by Michael
comments 28
Poetry

One time when Hafiz
was balancing
on one foot
atop an intriguing
round stone
the size of a small house
that was sunk into the sand
beside a very fine sea
and dimpled by the impact
of ancient particles of dust
from outer space,
with his arms crossed,
or flapping like wings
against a blue beyond,
or hitched to his side,
and his other leg
folded up yogically–
alternately very stork-like
beneath him–
or resting on the stone
beside the first
in a pose of great couth,
as he filled the air
beside the sea
and around us all
and in every place
where there is
or ever was
a little quiver
of anything at all
with the most
beautiful and spontaneous
meanings using
words and colors
and wild hair
and swooping moves
that segued into
firecracker handstands
that crumbled very quickly,
breaking into smiles
for which the sea
would ever be thankful,
he  was asked
by a quiet voice
if God really exists.

He gathered himself
into a little hovering bead
of focus and stillness,
like you would in such a moment,
and looked down
to collect a little more
information
about what was happening.

So! he replied,
squinting at the
lovely child seated
before him
who had scampered
up that big rock
the size of a small house
while Hafiz wasn’t looking,

you would like us to have
a technical discussion.

Resting on the Present

April 21, 2016
by Michael
comments 42
Reflections

It is hard to grasp the mind’s power.

In this regard I would say I have largely attempted to judge the mountain based on how fast it can run.  It rather misses the point.  But lately it feels like there is power in the quiet.  The patterns of fence mending and worthy-making want back in from time to time, but somehow I’ve unsheathed the knife that cuts through the web.  It’s kind of fun.

I should really blankety-blank blank.  Hiiiiiiii-ya!

If I was a better such or such, my life would be more like that one.  BANG!

(Blows the smoke off the barrel, twirls the piece on the end of a finger and slides it into the holster in one fluid movement.)

The things that provide for me now are eroding and one day will be gone.  It’s never too early to prepare for a potential disaster.  Ooaooww-fuh-fuh-HA!

Eventually we all find the way to breath into something deeper.  It’s kind of like breaking a habit.

My assessment is that in order to know life without fear, we must be willing to be ambushed by glory.  It’s weird to be crossing the desert and allow oneself to be offered a recliner, a foot stool, a potted shade tree and a glass bottle of sparkling water.  It doesn’t compute.  By rights, we should be high-tailing it.  Peace doesn’t feel right when the smoke of the battlefield is still massing in the sky.  But I think that’s precisely when we should settle into that quiet.

We don’t really grasp the mind’s power, and we have no clue how deeply we are loved.  These are intensely related phenomena I think.  It’s one thing to accept we are loved by God, or Jesus, or Hafiz, or our partner, or our best friend, or Love itself.  It’s quite another to discover we are loved by every single person we encounter.  It would take a certain madness to go there.  Oh.  Shit.  We’re not prepared for it.  Say what!?  It’s easier to let the past prove otherwise.  Then we can go back to taking pot shots at reality.

But there’s a physics to Love that insists upon the fact that we are loved by every being.  Otherwise Love would be a conjecture subject to proof, a contingent reality, and I’m convinced that cannot be.  If you’ve felt Love even once, you may agree the notion that it is a contingent reality does not seem at all rational.  Love is not built up out of particles; nor is Love the integral of particular thoughts over time.  Love is not a commodity.  The heart of the world’s problem is the insistence that Love is complicated somehow, that it has properties, that it’s not quite here yet, or there’s more of it over there.  That there’s something between us and it.  A better time.  A holier place.  And it really feels that way nearly all the time when we have our stopwatches out and we’re keeping an eye on that mountain.  When we’re gasping for air.

Sitting-still often helps.  Or something like it.  I don’t think the benefit of sitting-still is that we stop thinking, because thought itself is beautiful.  But an instant without thinking will do us a world of good– as a means and an end perhaps.  It’s like the point at the end of the pendulum swing.  Sitting as quiet as possible reveals the nature of our relationship to thought.

It’s a lovely insight that we have a relationship to thought.  That relationship is Love, and thought itself is never-ending.  When we sit quietly we can encounter our relationship to thought, and open up an honest conversation.  Of course it’s awkward being in conversation without the use of words, but if we don’t try we’ll never understand how everything has a relationship to thought.  And I think once we discover we have a wordless relationship to thought, grains of sand and entire mountains begin to make sense.  We start to grasp the power of the mind.  We start to see how like to everything we are.

That we think and we have a relationship to thought makes our situation unique in some respects, but not fundamentally so.  It is our relationship to thought that is fundamental.  Love is fundamental.  How strange, how compelling, how beautiful to watch the full moon rise and realize we have a relationship to that which has a relationship with all that is.

To realize we are in Love.

And the Walls Came Tumbling Down

April 18, 2016
by Michael
comments 28
Creative

After a day of you gotta’ be kiddin’ me and please listen to the following menu of options before making your selection, I sat on the couch with one knee up– one arm dangling off it like I could give a damn– and eyeballed the Flyers in a must win game.  I eventually slid down the hill of one day I’m gonna’ teach this world a lesson and drifted off to sleep, only to find myself in a dream that was your basic underground roller derby of lion-maned enthusiasts with elbow pads the size of mattresses, staged in the basement of an apartment building being rigged for demolition by former members of the KGB.

The enthusiasts in their Greco-Roman skating outfits were flailing around the short-timer concrete columns and tossing me around like a rag doll.  They formed up into some kind of slingshot move that launched me into a turn at speeds well above the posted limit when I awoke to discover Hafiz had pulled the sofa into the middle of the room, and was marching around it with my neighbor’s kindergarten class fanned out all around, all of ‘em blowing like mad into their kazoos and smiling like it was nineteen ninety nine.

[Cue the video for the full effect.]

It dawned on me that I was in the midst of an honest-to-goodness Walls of Jericho reenactment.

What’s happening, Hafiz!?

We’re going to tear down those walls, he replied.  I had to read his lips to garner this information because my relocated speakers were on the verge of shaking apart.  He pointed at his head and winked.  I turned to take in the full room and was caught in the eyes of a young girl, very quick on the uptake, who pointed to her own head, and winked.  I was being rescued by a troupe of joyous prodigies.  Prodigies of joy.

I turned back to Hafiz.  You would do that for me?

He rolled his eyes and gave some kind of pre-arranged signal, because suddenly they were all doing some kind of stomp-stomp clap-clap waddle-waddle in a procession around the room, hips and elbows flyin’.  Most of their eyes barely cleared the coffee table.

Hafiz leaned in so he wouldn’t have to yell.  It’s our mind trapped in there, too, you know.

Yeah! the children yelled.  And we’re bustin’ it out!

Then he began to pass out the sauce pans and the wooden spoons.