Our Real Work

April 12, 2016
by Michael
comments 43
Course Ideas

Hafiz and I
were standing
on the side of the world
letting our hands air dry
beneath the stars
while spring water fell
from our chins–
a delicious, plateau gestated
high mountain snowmelt
with hints of blue giant and juniper
that rolled around on the tongue like flute music
and made breathing a bit of a mad dash
through a brisk rain,
when I happened to see the moon
hanging there like a street lamp
making a complete mockery
of the local ordinance,
burning off a majestic secret
in heart-piercing foot candles
that left me wondering,

Hey Hafiz, what is the moon’s day job?

He was using his index finger
as a landing strip
for glow-in-the-dark moths
whose nature was best told
in the form of desert migrations
and seemed to savor
sipping on remnants
of blue giant and juniper
from the wrinkled skin of his finger.

Her day job, he said,
in cooing tones the moth
clearly perceived as the very winds
it was born to navigate,
as evidenced by a gentle
pumping of its wings,
is to remind you and I
of our real work.

Our real work…

My own wings fluttered
in my chest.

I looked up at the moon
and drank in memories
that poured out of me
as tendrils of ocean water
on a high desert plateau.
The memory of who we are
ran down my cheeks
and fell from my chin.
I caught an entire sea
on my index finger
and held it out as a landing strip
for glow-in-the-dark moths.

And sure enough.

One came.

The Engines of Experience

April 3, 2016
by Michael
comments 36
Course Ideas / Reflections

I believe a lot of interesting things, things I’ve collected along the way.  I have pages and pages of notes.  Scribblings.  Arrows and half-thoughts running up and down the margins.  Ellipses and question marks.  Coffee stains.  My life is a draft copy full of edits.  I’m always circling back– leaping from one passage to another, sifting through my notes, strengthening the narrative, discovering what was and might have been.

We are revealed in the living of it.

But I fuss with the details.  I should have worn red that day.  Red would have been different.  Or a hat with a feather in it.  Everything would have been different if I’d worn a hat that day.  With a feather.  If I had, what would have come next?  We have to imagine it completely, the life we had when we didn’t miss the turn, conjure it top to bottom, and squeeze it onto the paper.  If I had worn red and the hat, then maybe…  We’re caught by our own perpetual revisions.

We sometimes live in circles.

* * * * *

The ideas we collect are keys.  They open doorways to new rooms, new passages.  Perception is reconfigured.  Thought and experience reflect an ever-shifting maze.  This is learning.  I’ve learned so much…  I carry a chain around with so many keys I hardly remember the doors anymore.  I am standing in the dark, fishing through the keys, trying to remember where I am and which key it is I need.

Here’s a good one.  Right key, wrong door.  I’ve done this before…  There’s no rush this time.  I’ve been wherever that door leads, and here I am.  Back here.

Anyone have a light?

In between keys, while my hands are fumbling with the chain and the ground edges and the burrs and the cold metal, I think of a place of staggering beauty, where I fill the air like the scent of springtime, where I resound as a pure tone.  I remember something like it but I don’t have any keys that are specifically for that.  It’s like one big Yankee Swap.  We’re all trading in hopes of ending up with the same thing.

What am I doing with all of these keys?  What is this place?

Ahh–!  Here we go.

* * * * *

It’s an incredible problem, this idea that we can map our route to freedom.  That would be great if the territory wasn’t our own mind, and we weren’t the most finely crafted experience-generating engines ever known, plunged in a neutral reality of figures and forms.

The other day I was working on a short essay and I was struck by the realization that in unity there is never a reason to question our experience.  Call it what you like– unity, heaven, wholeness, selfless, nirvana– this unconditioned knowing is an experience (I lack the words for it, but I’ll call it an experience) one would never question.  What would be the merit in questioning such exquisite perfection?  It’s a ludicrous sentiment– to question the glory of what is when we’ve lost ourselves in its midst.

The entirety of such an experience is evidence not only of the meaning inherent in the experience itself, but of our own meaning as the experience and the experiencer alike.  We over-saturate with possibility and it’s all happening at once.  This is unity.  But apply the same power to separation– to a false identification– and what do you have?  You have an experience that is evidence of the underlying idea on which it is based– the idea of separateness– an experience that is seamless and consistent in its every facet, but is not a valid reflection of what is true.

This idea that we can have experience that isn’t necessarily a reflection of what is true is astounding to me.  Think about it for a moment… how could that be?  How…?  The only way out of such a condition is to question the experience itself and the meaning we’ve assigned to it.  In unity this would be an utterly meaningless act as it would be to question truth itself, the truth as given to us, the truth as us, so it is profoundly confusing.  Why would we do that?  Why would we ever question our inherent validity?  Why would we do something so meaningless?  I think it is a difficulty I have under-estimated most of my life.

This is the shift from a life of effortlessness to a life of toil, for suddenly we are saddled by the need to question what seems to be in order to allow for the transformation of our experience.  It can be a heavy and tedious labor.  I think our keys help us, but they don’t necessarily get us out.  They inspire us to let go a little more perhaps, and that is good.  But ultimately we have to let the maze itself be undone– let the passages and corridors be taken down.  We have to let the geometry of our own minds be remade.

And then, as this occurs, we have to stop questioning everything and recognize the deed is done!  To carry this questioning attitude into unity won’t really work either.  This is why our part is so little.  Our contribution so small.  All we can do is make way for grace, until our experience transforms and we discover the miracle has occurred.

I’ve learned some interesting things along the way.  I’ve collected them and carry them with me.  I take them out when the darkness closes in and we review the nature of this problem together, and I am reminded each time– we live on a knife edge, afraid to fall, while grace is wiggling the knife to and fro, rolling Her wrist back and forth, hoping we’ll catch on to the plot and drop off the side– either side, pick a side… any side– into Her waiting hand.

 

The Lesson of the Birds

March 30, 2016
by Michael
comments 21
Poetry

I’m still learning
the lesson of the birds.
The one about
sitting in the cover
of spruce needles
wearing the colors of fire
and not questioning my birdness.
Just letting it happen.
Not questioning
the tides of daylight and nightfall
that inhabit me,
that rinse my memory clean
of silt and jagged edges
and leave me singing
about sitting in the cover
of spruce needles
wearing the colors of fire.
I’m still learning
that lesson from the birds,
just getting started with it, really,
which is why I was surprised
to turn the corner and find myself
face to face with a mountain lion.
The way they prowl,
like water on legs, well…
One step at a time, I was thinking—
and real loud so Hafiz could hear me.
I was broadcasting this thought
like it was a heat wave.
Did he really think I was ready
for the mountain lion
when I still hadn’t even learned
the bird one?
Are we in a rush here, I was thinking—
and I was intensely gritting my teeth
and squeezing my temples together
so my thoughts would find him.

But there was no answer.

And mountain lions, they have
a certain inevitability to them.
Even when they’re still
they look like an air raid
of the first Olympians
compressed into a mask of fur and claws.

So I was running, I think.
Or hopping on one foot, maybe.
Like the world was rolling on its side
and I was on one foot not quite keeping up
with the plot.  About to spill over the side
only you can’t tell what’s the side and what’s up.
But singing like.
Talking to this moment of falling.
Leaning into it.  Like the golfers do.
Body language and practice swings.
Visualizations.
Making the mountain lion think twice,
the way I was bouncing in place
like I was about to fall over on my side
for no reason either of us could think of,
and flapping these little wings I had—
did you know we had wings—?
and the way I was rising…
up and up,
up and up and away…!
dipping and swooping through the air,
and singing all these feelings
like they were made for me,
about what a bird sees
when the tide of night comes in
and it dives from one tree
to another, soaring in a sense,
right over a mountain lion.

And Hafiz is there,
this mountain lion,
watching me the whole time.
Watching me fly.
Watching me carry on about
I don’t understand birds
even though I wear the colors of fire
and I nestle into the spruce needles
just right.  Even though.

There he goes now.
Hafiz the mountain lion.
Sauntering off into the trees.

This Little Game We Play

March 26, 2016
by Michael
comments 38
Course Ideas / Creative

I take the pack of index cards out of my shirt pocket, slide the rubber band off, and lay them on the table.  Hafiz has prepared a few placards and set them up at credible intervals.  They read, “No Way, José,” “I Sure Hope Not,” “Why, Of Course!” “Prepare Yourself For Tears,” and “Jesus Christ!”

I take a breath and shuffle the cards.  Place them in a neat pile on the table.

The first card I flip says, You are a thinking being.  I hum appreciatively– a safe and wholesome opening– and show my card to Hafiz, who nods.  It’s a nod like I just told him the out of doors is often filled with weather, or horses have teeth also.  I slide the card over to “Why, Of Course!”

I draw again.

Everything you desire, as well as what you need, must be earned.

I hum again, this time in acknowledgment of our little game’s escalation.  Bit of tricky business, this…  I hesitate.  “I Sure Hope Not” is looking like the one, but there’s more to it.  It’s definitely not all that I really feel about this card.  There’s something else and I’m trying not to look it in the eye.  I’m about to get tired.  I’m about to suggest we watch a Seinfeld episode.  “Prepare Yourself For Tears” is looking like a dark horse candidate.

How could I not know how I really feel?

“How ’bout a two-fer?” I ask.

Hafiz nods.  Yes, a two-fer.  Yes, the sky is often populated by clouds.  Yes, the table before us is made from the flesh of trees.  Yes, a thinking being can be confused, but it doesn’t change the fact that the spring follows the winter.

I turn over the next one.

Creation is joy extending forever, without limit or interruption or discontinuity.  There is nothing outside of it, and nowhere it is not.

I’m starting to sweat.  I may as well be reading machine language.  The words are standing politely on the other side of a cosmic pane of glass.  Over there.  Not here.  They’re there, and I’m here.  I can hardly read my own writing.  Joy?  I must have written this one down during the ecstatic consummation of a rocket launch, or while I was hanging off the back of a jet ski outrunning a wave as high as a small city.  The letters look like a seismograph recording of the day that asteroid hit the earth– yes, that one, when the dinosaurs succumbed to a wave of very bad feelings.  What if this card had been pulled on that day?

I start to hurt.  They’re there, and I’m here.  I wrote this down once so I’d remember, and now it is waving at me and I don’t feel a thing.  My faculties are on pause.  I don’t know a single thing.  This table is made of wood but what the hell is wood.  I feel trapped.  Just three cards in and I’m done.  Weren’t pterodactyls Creation, too?

I smile to Hafiz wanly and lift my hands from the table, palms facing the cards.  I slide back my chair.  I surrender.

“Write that down,” Hafiz says.  He slides me a blank index card and a pen.

I take the pen.  It is hard to use because it has a bouquet of mismatched feathers sticking out of it– turkey, toucan, chickadee, heron, eagle, chicken, probably a raven– and it seems prepared to dust off the whole world.  They’re tickling my nose while I write.  Why would you mix an eagle feather and a chicken feather?

I don’t know how I truly feel. I surrender.

My uncertainty dissolves in the presence of such honesty.  The room of my heart expands.

“Want to give me one of those other ones?” he asks.

I flip through the deck.

I find the one I’m looking for.  I can figure this out myself.  I pass it over.  Hafiz folds it into the shape of a paper airplane, pours lighter fluid down the center crease, lights the nose, and lofts it gently through the open window.  We watch together as the flames slide sideways through the night.

I’m thinking about ordering take-out.  Thinking about that Thai place we went to once.  I’m so relieved about my new card I’m breathing like a morning mist and tasting coconut soup and my eyes are clouding with tears.

And Hafiz is chuckling.

Yes.  Yes the sky will sometimes fill with flames.

My Plan

March 22, 2016
by Michael
comments 32
Course Ideas / Poetry

My plan, Hafiz,
is to start a movement.
A beautiful groundswell.
It will involve festivals, of course,
local chapters, iconic images, bylaws,
speeches that change everything
and people who don’t bathe
mixing happily with those who do.
Food stands.  Woven hats.
And yes, a cool logo.
It will have green in it for sure.
The thing is that it must
be worldwide—
everywhere that people are.
And some places they’re not, too.
How great would it be to land on Mars one day
and step out of the capsule
and pick up a rock
and find yourself face to face
with the logo.
That’s freaky.
That’s power.

That type of thing.

The thing is that it must
be worldwide.
Otherwise what is the good of it.
We’re so divided here, Hafiz.
We’re languishing for godsakes.
We’re wallowing here.
We’re mired down.
You see it, don’t you?
When we lift a foot to move forward
the boot stays behind in the mud
and we dangle like a photogenic stork
over an abyss of all holy hell,
and then what.
We just hang there.  Wobbly in the wind.
Trying to find that boot.
It’s quite troubling.
People can’t see the truth.
But if we had a half decent movement, you know?
Something festive.
The movement will carry the message everywhere.
Everyone will have a chance to see it.
It will have a logo.
It will change everything.

Hafiz was watching clouds go by.
I tried to join him, but
they were taking their sweet time
and the sky was wide as you dared
and I was antsy to get the show on the road.

Creation is my movement, he said,
giving me a firm pat on the shoulder.
He wanted me to know he loved me
even if he didn’t give two crossed eyes
about finding my sticker on a rock on Mars.
Silence is my uniform, he said.
Smiles are my logo.

Uh huh.
Little too abstract, isn’t it, Hafiz?
(Pretty sure I grimaced at that moment.)
Not a lot to grab hold of there, big guy.
I gestured facetiously at the sky
suggesting the cloudwork we were watching
like a couple of off-duty bloodhounds
keeping a close eye on some fence posts
was a little too ambiguous.
You have to remember who we’re dealing with, I said.
These people have wicks about as long as atomic firecrackers.
Who’s gonna’ understand that!?
Creation.
Ha.
Ha.
Ha.
Very clever.

I started wondering how many degrees of arc
I could see with my peripheral vision.

No one, he said quietly,
if you don’t.

Uh-oh.
My breath ran off to build a sand castle
and my mind fired off an entire clip of blanks.
Total shock and panic in there.
Coming out of hyperspace into an asteroid field.

Ba-pap-pap-ap-ap-ba-pap

Come again?

There’s only one of us, he replied.

I saw three of him then,
but I focused on the one in the middle.
What are you saying, Hafiz?

He shrugged his shoulders.

Then a stork flew by
dragging a banner behind it
of perfect silence,
and it just went on
and on
and on
and on.
And on.
I couldn’t take my eyes off it.
The bylaws were scrolling right past me.
The singularity was flashing the logo right at me
from everywhere at once.
Damn…

You should think about starting a movement, I said.
You’d be really good.

Then I punched him in the shoulder.
The one in the middle.

The Night Love Came For Me…

March 19, 2016
by Michael
comments 43
Reflections

Love came for me the other night and took me in.  She placed me on her tongue, in the darkness, and let me dissolve until there was nothing left, and she whispered to me all the while about every true thing until I remembered I was the blood in her veins.

I would say to whomever would listen, never forget we are the blood in Love’s veins.  We nourish every part of the great body, and the whole body nourishes us.  Silence is the telling of this.  The wordless, overwhelming joy that inhabits us is all that exists.  It is the whole thing– the blood, the heat, the organs, the chemistry, the mind, the movement, the electricity, the tears.

Love came for me the other night to remind me of these things.  To say we are real because we were given Life, and the offer will never be withdrawn, and that makes us the blood in her veins.  At the time, I was standing in the Orpheum Theater.  It was dark in there.  The seats are old velvet that still suck up the light.  They certainly aren’t there for the purpose of sitting.  It’s kind of a joke we shared, we who are the blood and the heat and the glory.  It was neon and trembling and we were gathered close.  It was pulsing and refulgent.

It’s the feeling of clear joy, unfettered, a river of the stuff, flowing through you top to bottom, flowing through the space around you, flowing in every direction until you’re just an awareness bobbing on the tide in the center of your chest, and you can’t tell if the river is flowing through you or you’re the one flowing, a message to all points, and your memories are drifting off with the current, swirling, bumping into others, into the memories of those who are with you—strangers on another night, but not here, now now—and each one of them a humbling gift.  No memory is yours.  No memory is not yours.  And time is nowhere to be found.  Time is doing positive affirmations over in the administrative building, trying to put the pieces back together, pretending this isn’t happening.

Because eternity just pulled rank.

Metric Smoke_1_low

It probably helped I was standing in a darkness riddled with smoke and light, and waves of sound that came swirling through the blood.  It probably helped that Metric is a band whose singer wrote a song or two about Love, though it terrified her, but she did it anyway.  It probably helped when she confided in us that the modern world crushes her soul, so she has to do things like that.  Sing about Love.  She confided in us it was humbling to know their songs had found a place to live in our lives.  What I think she means is that its humbling to know we were given each other for all eternity.  It probably helped that Metric is a band whose mission at this point in their trajectory is to be authentic, to accept their identity as their own and revel in it, to be loving, to be the blood.  They should be playing venues ten times the size, but it probably helped that everything is perfect.  It probably helped the venue was small and intimate and dressed up like the engine room of a small star.  It probably helped Love doesn’t care the route we take.

Metric_Singer_Low

The glory of a good show is that you forget stuff.  You forget you were worried, or ashamed, or uncertain.  You forget you have a thought still festering in you like a bad tooth.  You forget the momentum of the previous thirty weeks.  You forget about the needs of tomorrow, and all the crazy things somebody said that still might happen.  And when you forget everything, that’s when you remember the beauty of it all.  When the barriers are down, it all comes flooding back.  That’s when I have this feeling I call Jesus so present to me I can’t tell which of us is which.  We’re just blurred together into one another, and everything else.  That one moment has everything etched upon it.  Truths appear on the walls.  You remember that you’re the blood in Love’s veins.

This year I went to church on St. Paddy’s Day.  It was dark, and we came apart and it was holy.  I wore earplugs.

They closed with this one, and the video does a much better job than I’ve done here of capturing this feeling.  Thanks for a great night, Metric!

Back to Basics

March 13, 2016
by Michael
comments 26
Poetry

I came in the door
grunting like a bison
with four empty stomachs
and a calf at home with a head cold,
dragged a toe on the threshold
and nearly sent five half-shredded bags
of heart healthy fruits and vegetables
two bottles of heart healthy wine
a heart healthy dark chocolate bar
and a glass bottle of the most perfect
most heart healthy cold-pressed olive oil
Mother Nature could produce
shooting across the floor
in a real-time cornucopia
of slime and color and shattered glass.
Nearly…
Then I caught sight of Hafiz,
sitting exactly where I’d left him,
with a pencil to his mouth
and a blank sheet of paper on his lap
and his eyes motionless, but open,
using the window as a metaphor
for actually looking around or something.
Apparently he hadn’t moved in hours–
it’s one hour each way to the grocery store
that has my chipotle marinade
and that Quintuple Chocolate Fracas ice cream I like,
and the bank isn’t exactly on the way—
and I gave him a real smug look.
Plus I had to get gas.

What have you been up to?

I’ve been sitting here
enjoying a few hours
with the heart of Creation,
thinking of you, he said.

Really…
And…?
(I was softening up by the second.)

And to be quite frank with you, he said.
I’m exhausted.

Uhmmm– okay…???

(I made one of those faces like,
This means what…
you think too hard maybe…?)

Then he pulled a hot pink water pistol
out from between the seat cushions
loaded with a full clip of jasmine water
and really let me have it.
I forgot everything else
and dove at the gun
and the bottle of olive oil
rolled all the way across the room
like a perfect crescendo-building device
and we struggled like a pair
of semi-retired pistoleros
who’d foregone
any formal training in the martial arts
until we were laughing so hard
we couldn’t breath at all
except for little scoops of air
that sounded like
we were choking on whole mallards
and I remembered how badly
I needed what I always
already had

and still got lost sometimes
trying to find.

After the Memories

March 6, 2016
by Michael
comments 54
Christ / Course Ideas

Our pain is bound up in our memories.  We don’t see what’s in front of us, we just see strange reenactments of our past.  It’s not really our past even, just the things we concluded from our past.  Our conclusions travel with us wherever we go.  This is what Jesus calls learning.  It’s our loyalty to all the stuff we made up.  We keep these little statues woven to the inside of our coats to remind us.  We place them under the bed and deep in the closet corners.  Up on the shelf, behind the pots and pans, there’s a memory we put there.  They’re everywhere.

We think we hid them away, not realizing they’re all in plain sight for those who can see.  Plain sight is all there truly is.

Partly we don’t understand the power that we are.  We don’t understand the implications of locking something away inside.  We think it’s a dark and silent space in which we chose to hide things away, an empty place no one could find.  But we only have one type of room in us, and it’s a projector room.  Everything we’ve ever learned—everything we’ve ever hidden away—swims past in the world around us, in symbol form, over and over and over again.

The remedy of course is brightly colored dreams of the future.  We write them constantly and throw them down the well.  Up ahead somewhere, the brilliance that awaits us will neutralize the misunderstandings that haunt us.  Then we’ll be free.  We have projector rooms beside and inside of projector rooms, and so we play our future over our past.  We neutralize one with the other.  We’re experts at noise cancellation.  It’s a shouting match to produce silence, a game of tuning the colors just right, but still…  The picture is all mixed up.  Our smiles are sometimes strained.  Our trust is something we give or withhold depending on what we see.

Or perhaps we’re tired of authoring pretty pictures, of painting things over with the ideas we like, and tuning lamps and sampling colors.  It’s a lot of work, and we’ve grown tired.  Perhaps our conclusions are all that remain, all that we see.  We sink into them, and everything becomes a vote of confidence for what we have learned.  The evidence is conclusive.  It’s everywhere.  It’s obvious.

But it’s a dream…  If only we could trust that for the merest instant…

We forget everything we know or carry is connected directly to the stars, to the sea, to the warp of space.  The projection room is unbelievable.  The depth and subtlety arising from the seeds we carry inside is astonishing.  It’s so beguiling we can hardly trace the thread of cause and effect.  Most of us conclude it’s not even there…  What I see has nothing to do with me.  It is objective, independent, and hardly so sentimental in its workings.  It’s vast and elusive.

Then the moon rises, the light shifts, and the future we were writing on top of our past fades a little.  A tear forms in the corner of the eye.  The past shines through the future, in the present.  Everything is tarnished.  Rosy cheeks are replaced with skeletons.  We buckle.  Because the light shifted.  Because a cloud drifted across the sun, or we passed into the sodium glow of a street lamp.  The construct we fabricated to give us hope has disappeared.

We’re all quite convinced of ourselves, of our learning, of the symbols that dash across our lives.  Who would we be without them?  That’s the scariest question of all, the one we all must ask.

My favorite de-constructionist spiritual texts suggest that with healing comes the end of time.  Some have interpreted this to mean the end of stars and seas, the end of tree and stone, the end of winged-flight and furry hibernation.  A return to nothing but unified light.  So people dream of a time of uninterrupted bliss, and no light bulbs to change, or groceries to grow or buy.  I think such a return is certainly possible in an ultimate cosmic sense, but I also think maybe the end of time just means the end of our efforts to cancel the past with our future.  Maybe it just means we call our own bluff.  We see the pain is our own idea come back to haunt us.  We collect our statues and hidden memories and place them into the fire.

We make our way bit by bit.  If I hadn’t felt some pain of late, for reasons neither here nor there, I wouldn’t have written this.  I wouldn’t have walked on the beach with Jesus for a little while, outside of time, in this gentle light, and let a few memories dissolve completely.  There is a quote from A Course in Miracles that I found recently that speaks to this I think…  I will rest there for now…

“And when the memory of God has come to you in the holy place of forgiveness you will remember nothing else, and memory will be as useless as learning, for your only purpose will be creating.” (T-18.IX.14)

We Are There, Yet…

February 29, 2016
by Michael
comments 41
Reflections

This is the part we’re at.  This one.

We want to ask if we’re there yet, but it’s not clear who we should ask.  Who should we ask?  These days it feels a little like if you’re asking the question, you’re probably on the list of people most likely to give a decent answer.  And what do we mean by there, anyway?  Anyone?  My favorite part of all this is that we know exactly what we mean.  This isn’t our first moment of recollection.  It’s not our first hypotenuse through a cloud of dust.  This ain’t our first cosmic whodunnit.  Or maybe it is.  Probably they’re both true.  It is and it isn’t.  Yes, we are there.  And no, we are not.  Either way, deep down, we know exactly what we mean.

I can’t help it I have a mind that wants to understand how things work.  But it’s more than that.  I pull on a thread for a while and it leads to the edge of a cliff, and I look down and see darkness and a field of stars, I say good.  Clears that up.  Clap the chalk and charcoal off my hands.  Never mind there’s a hole in the earth goes down to a field of stars.  Knowing how things work gives you permission to accept the obvious.

How could we be there if we’re not?  It should be clear by now, one would think.  That’s just how this works.  You can be there even when you’re not.  In fact, I’d say that’s a requisite.  And meanwhile, this is just the part we’re at.

I wanted Hafiz to tell me a joke tonight.  He just whispered in my ear, ask me for a loan.

What am I borrowing?  What’re the terms?  Kinda’ like to know these things, Hafiz.

Listen up, he says.  Where you always are, but you’re not quite there yet, it’s not finite.  So you could take an advance on all of it.

You mean like something to hold me over.

Yeah– couple o’ sunsets to hold you over or something.  That way you’ll have it even if you don’t have it yet.  And then you’ll get there, and– well, listen close… sunsets can’t go missing if they never run out now, can they?

Guess not.  We’re at kinduva’ strange part then, aren’t we, Hafiz?

It’s always a curious time, he said, when people start admitting to themselves they’re there.  Even when they’re not, if they just try and admit it, you know you’re in some very auspicious days.

Well, that’s about all I could stand o’ that.

I ate some protons and electrons tonight, but they weren’t necessarily in the right form.  Some forms are good and some forms are bad.  That’s what they say.  Some help you get there and some don’t.  Depends on who you ask of course.  But if you ask ’em, they’re right.  So ask the right ones.  I have to travel five hundred miles in one direction tomorrow and introduce myself to a stranger.  Me, who’s not even here yet, or there even, introducing myself…  One blip of non-existence to another.  Making all the difference.

I tell you what, we’re livin’ right up to the damn edge.

Course this part we’re at isn’t the only part.  But it’s the part to enjoy right now.  It’s the part that’s here and needs to be held and touched and known.

When people say it doesn’t always work out, they may be confused about one of two things: what is meant by always, and what this part is part of…

Flying Dreaming Loving

February 21, 2016
by Michael
comments 39
Reflections

The dream is unobtrusive, glowing where no one can see it, following beside me but deep in the ground, visible only by looking straight down through the center of myself, from the inside of my senses.  It’s a thought immune to the semi-annual dental check-ups, the unsolicited catalogs that arrive in the mail, the bouts of automotive repair and immune system reconfiguration, and the dangerous lines of cars queueing behind plow trucks that plod along flashing orange in the night.

It’s a feeling about the way one post transforms into the next.  Words are enfolded into vision, and encounters into awareness.  Moments steep within moments, fractals of hope, and we spill open again and again into an uncut silence.  We pick up the words we find, clean them off, and try to put them in order.  These gifts.  We gather speed, and momentum.  We wonder.  We shake and we threaten to come apart.  One thought transforms into the next– spinning, whirling.  Trees watch us whip past, until the wheels leave the ground.  Until the last rope is cut free and thrown back to shore.  Until forever is the whistle in our ears.

As kids we ran in the park, with our arms out beside us, thinking of this flight.  We ran and ran, stumbling over uncut grass and sunken pockets in the soil, until we came to the railing.  The sky didn’t stop at the railing, but we did.  We did and something else didn’t.  It kept going.  Going and going and going, until we looked away.  And then we ran again, down the path this time, with our arms out beside us, filled by our memories of everything else.

I read a book once from the library.  A history book.  It had a story about a small group of people, a small village’s worth maybe, that went down to a lake and remembered how much they loved one another.  I don’t know what they did, if they were silent or if they spoke.  The book called it a ceremony.  But that just means an opening.  A time for powers to intersect and draw near.  I don’t know if they sat by the lake and remembered specific things together, or if they took turns talking about things inside of them they couldn’t understand.  Or if they even talked at all.  One of them had a name with the word Kettle in it, I think.  I could be wrong.  It was a translation.  A historian’s name.  There’s an assumption that one word can equal another, and bring everything about the first word along with it.  I don’t know if you can do that or not.  And the story went that for a window of time, none of the soldiers’ bullets could touch them.  They stood together by the lake and couldn’t be harmed.  That’s what the history book said, from the academic library.

You don’t hear about power like that so much these days.  It’s a little taboo.  To think we’re so close to the unexpected.  To think it could interrupt our regularly scheduled programming at any moment.  It’s frightening.  Do we really live our lives in such proximity to a power of particularity and need?  A non-conforming power.  A hidden power.  Power that strikes swift and total in a single fragment of space and time, and then is gone forever.  Power that invents the rules as it goes.

All our power now comes from systems and structures and codification.  It has to be beta tested.  It has be considered– its up sides and its down’s.  It has to comply with the rules that have been accepted before.  All our power now is powerlessness that’s gotten organized.

But if you think about it, life is the story of pan flashes.  A gene or two went AWOL, and now we can see.  Sight wasn’t there in the beginning.  Boundaries had to be broken for that to happen.  The past has to be transcended.  Life never really pays all that much attention to what has been, does it?  It just folds it into itself, and responds to it the way movement responds to movement.  But what is Life responding to?  This is the kicker– the thought in the ground following me around.  Our modern talent is knowing what we’re responding to.  We are reasoned.  We must be.  It’s the promise we made to one another.

When we decided to make this world in our image, and then made up the image too, we lost our way a bit.  Now we do things the hard way.  With reasons and precedents.  With indictments and proceedings.  With influence and sway.  It takes four miles of walking to equal one mile.

Then you think how much beauty Nature offers, on such a limited budget.  It’s nothing really but starlight and gravity.  Gravity is a millionth as strong per unit of mass as a baby’s joyful touch– her grasping of your finger, her slap of your face and arms.  But it’s everywhere.  From that alone– starlight and gravity– holiness echoes in all directions.  The thing I find in Nature’s beauty that is so startling is the utter absence of motive.  The absence of reasons.  It’s what makes it real I think.  All of it is just because.  Because.  All of it is like a power by a lake.  It is immediate and unprecedented.  It is a story about Love.

We have to throw our reasons back into the water, I think.  Nevermind what we’ll eat for supper, or what bait worked before.  Maybe those are not the fish we’re trying to catch.  Maybe we need to stop seeking explanations of one another, and just let one thing tumble into the next for a few nights.  Maybe we need to become free of all motive whatsoever, so that Love, weaker even than gravity and starlight, can defy the rules and gather Herself once in a while.  To claim a flash of space and time as Her Own, when we least expect it.  When we’re silent, and forgetful of who we used to be, and once wanted to become.