The Politics of Acceptance

February 17, 2016
by Michael
comments 53
Course Ideas

It’s that time again here in the US.

I’m increasingly confronted by discussions of politics.  They’re coming into the home, the office, the car.  Through the heating system, the mail slot, and the grocery bags.  And why not?  We’re saturated by it right now.  The incredible hype of the hero and the villain, the opportunity and the impasse, the failures and the victories.  The righteous, the confused, the willing, and the maligned.  The pasts, the futures, the confessions and the exposures.  It’s a difficult conversation for me because it so often comes with a certain scorn, or contempt perhaps, for the other tribe.  I don’t like watching anyone speak of others in derisive or dismissive tones, even the anonymous, though I am not totally naive to the impact human beings are making on the planet and one another.  Often the most difficult part of my day is dealing with other humans.

What we know is a trifle as compared to what sustains us, and yet we act as though our opinions are perfectly obvious.  It’s a brilliant strategy, because who can argue with the obvious?  We act as though we don’t have fallible perceptions at all, but knowledge, as if the little baskets of magazine clippings we carry around on our shoulders are definitive.  We are opinionated, wounded, vindictive, entitled, outspoken, and profoundly ignorant creatures.  What other type of being would think it obvious that Love was actually ours to give or withhold as we pleased?  This is the bottom line of our madness.  The worst part of it.  We don’t even know we believe this, it’s so deeply engrained.  But we wield this would-be super-power before we even know we took offense.

I have a tendency to view politics as a reflection of our collectively held fears and judgments, and to feel that a great deal of what is happening is a fairly accurate reenactment of our inner perceptions.  We’re swimming in them.  I especially feel this way when I see people snicker in disgust about other people.  We get emotional about it.  We turn colors.  We swear.  How could people ever, ever, ever in a million years think that way?  And our problems are always “out there” somewhere.  I recognize this sensation is almost impossible to avoid or escape, because the mathematics are ineluctable.  Get the other ones out of the way, and perhaps we could get on with living the good life.  It’s insanity of course.  When have they ever gone away, for starters?  Never mind that, the strategy is sheer and intoxicating.

I encountered a line from A Course of Love this morning that I felt mattered to all of this.  It said, “All time is included in the spacious Self.  Acceptance is necessary because escape is not possible.  Everything that is, is with us, which is why we are the accomplished as well as the void, the healed as well as the sick, the chaos and the peace.  Thus we heal now by calling on wholeness, accepting the healed self’s ability to be chosen while not encountering resistance or any attempts at rejection of the sick or wounded self.” (Dialogues, 14.1)

This recognition is a game changer for me.  There is no escape.  There is no ability to set particular persons or ideas aside.  All of this is who we are, and yet even as this is true, it does not mean that suffering is necessary.  Escape is impossible, but transformation is not.  The fact that sickness is within us does not mean that it must be expressed and given form, but the fact that we try to push all that we dislike away from us, and make it “over there” does engender its expression.  It divides us.  It inhibits the flow of what is natural.  It distorts and manipulates.  The fact that we think a distance can be sustained between here and there creates the type of experience we are having– with sides, with winners and losers, with insufficient means.

It is strange to consider that sickness can be “included”, but not expressed.  It doesn’t really make sense that it can be joined with, and Loved, and dissolved.  Isn’t there like a Conservation of Mass or Energy or something???  Doesn’t what seems so real have to go somewhere?  It’s hard to imagine even walking down such a road.  Think what we’ll have to contact.  Think what we’ll have to encounter, and touch, and become.  This is the way we think when we don’t understand wholeness, when we think it’s an either-or game we’re playing.  We think accepting sickness and chaos means eating rotten scraps out of dumpsters for breakfast, going swan diving into toxic waste, or becoming a full-time lobbyist for the rights of inside traders.  We think it means losing, in short, the things we love, to become the things we don’t.

Of course it’s not like that at all.  What we hunger for in our insulated worlds, is the feeling that comes from truly accepting what is.  The majesty of it.  There’s a real depth to forgiveness, a holiness that rushes in when the inside traders are taken in to our hearts, when the greedy are taken into our hearts, when the addicts are taken into our hearts, when the lazy are taken into our hearts, when the fanatics are taken into our hearts.  When we have become a refuge for them all, then we are complete, and invulnerable, and transformed.  We yield to the expression of what is whole and healed.

This is my vote.  This is the policy I would recommend, that I would encourage myself to move more deeply into.  Until I disappear altogether perhaps, and rediscover myself sitting next to you, playing Go Fish in the Void.

Do you have any lepers?

What about kings, spice merchants, gurus or lawyers?

(…)

What turns?  There’s no turns here…!

The Staggering Depth of Silence

February 13, 2016
by Michael
comments 40
Poetry

Eternity sometimes feels like
a boundless readiness
coiled up and squashed
into every point there is,
like a swoop of clowns
hidden inside a mote of pixie dust
that’s hovering in the air just
a foot or two in front of your left eye,
all of them banging on the glass
and reciting plays
and brewing antidotes
and tuning chainsaws
and singing scales
and lighting firecrackers
and twitching with anticipation in there,
just waiting on one of us
to snap our fingers just right,
or to utter the magic word
and peel the void right open.

It’s so close you can taste it.

I looked over at Hafiz,
who was staring placidly out over the city,
his arms folded on the railing,
beholding a sea of eerily motionless structures.

How could he stand it!?
Don’t you some days
just want to see the world drop its ruse
and come out with it…?!
What’s all this pitter-pattering around???

I looked at a building
shaped like the business end
of a ten story Pontiac Chieftain
rising up from the ground
and I started getting that feeling again.
It was something about the
realization that even though it looked
like a frozen extrusion of history,
it was obviously ringing inside
of every column, wall and elevator shaft
with the staccato clanging
of a thousand steel frying pans
being thrown one at a time
into a deep gully
of the most cheerily-shaped rocks.
I could tell there was a whole ballroom
of ecstatic auctioneers in there
wound up to a fever pitch,
wantonly extracting secrets from the air itself.

I was starting to itch all over.

So what’s the magic word, Hafiz?

…Hafiz?

 Shhhh….! he hissed.
Can’t you hear it?

Hear what.

Silence, he said.
Silence everywhere…
the sound
of everything happening
at once.

I rolled my eyes.
Sometimes I think
we’re saying the same thing–
just in different ways, I pointed out.

Well, of course we are, he replied.
He broke out into one of his patented
dawning smiles of realization.
Did I think anything else was possible?
The magic word is magic for a reason.
How else could one word
live inside of every word?

How else could one life
live inside of every life?

I nodded,
and continued my reconnaissance
of the unwavering architecture.
I kept thinking God
was going to honk the horn
of that Pontiac Chieftain
and send a city full of falcons
soaring into the sky.
The silence, I whispered to Hafiz,
to say it another way…
is staggering
and delicious.

The Times In Between

February 8, 2016
by Michael
comments 39
Creative / Reflections

“There are these moments, Hafiz, when it feels like Life called a thirty-second time-out or something.  Do you know what I mean?  Like when you’re getting ready for work, and you’re five minutes too early.  Or you show up to the store, but it’s not open for another couple minutes.  What are you going to do with five empty minutes?”

Hafiz and I were drift-hopping through the moon’s first arboretum like tired helium balloons caught in a draft.  My guide book was dangling between my thumb and my first two fingers.  I came down at an awkward spot and nearly took a digger over an embossed metal speed bump that was covering an extension cord so people wouldn’t trip over it.  The temporary lighting was for a photograph or something.  The first rose to bloom on the moon probably.  The chrysanthemum lobby was torqued.

“Hafiz—do you know what I mean?  Are you with me here?  There’s these little windows of lost time no one knows what to do with.  Your flight gets delayed.  The policeman is running your license through the system.  The nondescript pop-poof in the crisping sleeve comes out of the microwave a little cold in the center, even though you followed instructions.  Now you have to heat it again.  Your car spins the wrong way and you sink a fender into the snow, and you’re waiting for the tow truck.  The rest of life is so well-orchestrated, the way it moves with such incredible acumen and grace.  The way it staggers you on the whole.  I mean, think how we met…!  It’s surreal to even think about, but then there’s these moments.  These dead bands in the system.  They’re potholes of time that you can never fill in.  You know what I mean?”  I kept saying that.  “Hafiz—do you know what I mean?  Hafiz?”

He must have gotten a little over-exuberant or something for reasons completely unknown to me—he was hardly participating in our conversation today— and pushed off into a stride with a little too much abandon, because suddenly I was having a flash forward about the impacts of lunar colonization on the shatter-proof glass industry, and he was in the early stages of conducting low-g collision experiments with a young girl.  He’d had no choice but to wrap her up in a bear hug and position himself between her and the moon’s token oak tree.  And that thing wasn’t moving one bit.  It was representing all oak trees everywhere, and it knew it.

They ricocheted off the trunk, giggling like people who’d been injected with 200 cc’s of the funniest jokes of the previous century.  Like cowboys shooting paint balls at one another at high noon.  Like they’d mistaken a six pack of canned laughter for strawberry spritzers.  They landed on their feet, in the center of the arboretum’s aisleway, and gave an impromptu bow.  Somebody clapped and I got in on it.

Then we all ended up in the same waiting line for a short film about the impacts of reduced gravity on horticulture, approximately seven minutes too early.

I couldn’t resist.  “You see what I mean, Hafiz?”

“Yes,” he said.  “I do.  These are the moments set aside for gratitude.”

First I got hot and my face flushed and then I think I winced.  I tried to think of something smart to say about the absurdity of nurturing one’s gratitude practice in the waiting room of some malpracticing dentist.  But then, with Hafiz just standing there doing that thing he does that works in any gravity environment you can find, and that I still don’t understand, I had a flashback to how good it feels to feel good.  To just drop the rest of it.  And I picked that.  If you can just blunder your way into the choice, so far into it you can truly see it, then it’s easy.  Before I knew it the doors were opening for the movie and I wasn’t going anywhere.  I wasn’t ready.

“There’s not enough time, Hafiz!  Just five minutes!?”

He patted me on the head, and the girl riding on his shoulders did the same, giggling, and then they went to the movie.  And I just sat there on the carpet of the lobby of the lunar arboretum theater for approximately forty-five minutes, feeling good.  Feeling myself dissipate a thousand frozen moments I’d been carrying around with me into nothing whatsoever.

A Selection of True Awakening Experiences Part II

February 2, 2016
by Michael
comments 58
Christ / Reflections

I happened upon Barbara’s site a few weeks ago when she was mulling over the idea of a second round of Awakening Experiences, and told her I would like to participate.  Then I promptly disappeared into the marrow of my life for a few weeks.  She pinged me with a reminder last week sometime and asked if I was still willing, and wondered if I would take February 2nd.  I chuckled at her unsolicited selection, because it seemed the perfect day for a bit of contemplation—it being the last day of my fortieth year.   And Barbara of course, wouldn’t have had any previous knowledge of this timing.

There’s a quote from A Course of Love that at least partly summarizes my feelings at the present time.  “The challenge now is in creation rather than accomplishment.  With peace, accomplishment is achieved in the only place where it makes any sense to desire it. With your accomplishment comes the freedom and the challenge of creation. Creation becomes the new frontier, the occupation of those too young to rest, too interested in living still to welcome the peace of dying. Those who could not change the world one iota through their constant effort, in peace create the world anew.”  (C:6.17)

The processes at work in my inner life have often been fueled by the question of how best to invest my time in this world.  This question stretches back to my days in elementary school, when teachers singled me out for special studies.  It appeared I had some potential.  I was sent to the library when I finished my coursework to delve into things, but I had no idea what I was to delve into exactly.  I just wanted to read spy novels.  The Cardinal in the Kremlin, to my fourteen year old mind, was astounding.  I had no idea what the potential was that I supposedly possessed, or what I was to do with it, and this unknowing was difficult to bear.

Uncertainty is a strange and tugging satellite in our lives—a little uncomfortable in its waning, quite painful in its waxing, but always a generator of transformative tides.  When I graduated from high school I sat on a stage next to the principal, and the Bishop, and when it was my turn I gave a speech.  I wrote it alone at my bedroom desk the week before, surrounded by posters of triumphant soccer players.  It was all about looking past the pursuits of the world, to the richness of living with meaning and depth, even if it meant looking past the treasures the world wished us to crave.  Our hearts are always rampant when we give them a chance to speak uninhibited, at any age, but I was not entirely prepared for the follow-through.

I changed majors once in college, and nearly dropped out to work on a ranch in Montana.  Instead, I met my future wife, finished school, and moved a few thousand miles across the country.  I took a writing class my senior year in college as an elective—a bit of an odd choice for an engineer—and loved it.  I wrote half a novel that year but my confidence and my enthusiasm fizzled.  I felt inadequate about the whole thing.  I still didn’t know who I was or what I was doing.  I eventually got a job and some days it hurt like a sonuvabitch!  Not the work, but the echoes of my uncertain state.  The way I failed to find it meaningful.  The way so many interactions were permeated with disconnection and dissembling.

Realizing there was really no need for me to feel so uncertain or forlorn, I used the immediate present of my life as the vehicle for learning to be at peace.  These decisions to turn around and face our difficulties are moments of grace.  I could have run for the hills again.  Over the decade that followed I slowly grew into myself, and set my fears down one by one.  Eventually, I looked up and realized I could be at peace with myself, and with the world.  I think that is really what awakening is.  It’s the moment you realize you can be at peace with what is.  Then you find yourself in the position of the quote above.  You don’t need to cultivate anymore modalities, practices or insights to be at peace.  Peace has been established.  Peace is rising to the point of over-flowing.  This is the moment when we activate our true potential I think.  We discover we’re in love with the whole thing.

Sometime—I can’t say exactly when—I began to move with greater certainty.  I began to write again, and I started this blog.  I made wonderful connections here with others who were walking in this direction.  My creative acts began to feel like endeavors of authenticity, and little by little they seemed to find their way closer to the mark.  Meaning began to flow back and forth through more and more channels.  This mark I speak of is the certainty that moments taken to collaborate with the river of meaning present in our own hearts give rise to vehicles of expression that ripple through the world.  Whether small or large in their external recognition, it matters not.  Our authenticity pumps the bellows of the world nonetheless, and fuels its creative fire.  One day we look up from engaging freely in what love, and we discover we are in dialogue with the world itself.

This is the new frontier.  The frontier of creation.

This is the movement that takes place in eternity, but twinkles still in time.  Awakening isn’t a state, but the giving of our answer to the cosmic role call.  Yes, I am here.  Yes, I love.  Yes, I desire to share even more deeply in the discovery of what that means.  Yes…  Yes, I would lose myself over and over into this creative flux, knowing that what we gain is everything, is meaning, is one another.  So this is where I find myself these days– drifting along, one step at a time, slowly expanding the conversation that my life has become.

Kimberly is up tomorrow.

What Is a Miracle?

January 31, 2016
by Michael
comments 39
Course Ideas / Reflections

Our dear friend Hariod asked me after my last post what the word miracle means to me, and as I thought about how to answer I realized my response would very quickly get out of hand in the post commentary.  Hence this post.  It’s a question I savor answering because I don’t quite know how I’m going to do it.  I have a feeling about what I wish to say, but the closer I get to the center of it, the more delicious the dead reckoning becomes.  It’s a bit like holding a black hole in your hand and attempting to point out its properties with a laser pointer, then seeing something interesting– what the–? and peering closer, then closer, then falling in…

The word miracle has come to occupy a similar place within my psyche as the word God.  They’re both so muddled by the baggage of variegated usage, fundamentalist distortion and over-simplification so as to be quite meaningless as terms that stand on their own.  We use these terms at our own risk.  Yet the ideas, heartfelt sensations and whispers of knowing that these terms represent to me are utterly enmeshed in the arising of my experience.  What I am cannot be pulled apart from those inner lights.  The words can certainly be taken from me– retired in a bank vault, or appropriated and defiled by harsh doctrines and talking heads– but the realities to which they point are all I have now.

The word miracle for instance often conjures images of the supernatural.  Walking on water.  Feeding multitudes of people from a few baskets of bread and fish.  Raising things from the dead.  (Usually mammals.  Very few fence post resurrections in the literature, for instance.)  And so on and so forth.  I know these examples are culturally myopic and that other cultures have plentiful examples as well.  A book I enjoyed very much when I read it a number of years ago was The Way of the White Clouds.  The author tells a story therein of leaping very long distances from boulder to boulder up in the mountains, as if skipping lightly across the sky.  It conjured a very Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon image in my mind.  (Refer to video below.)  And then there’s always Crazy Horse shaking the soldiers’ bullets from his bone vest periodically in a sacred pre-enactment of Kevlar.  (Makes you wonder if Kevlar is taking the long way ’round.)  The word miracle can loosely be applied to all of these phenomena.

But I don’t think these are the essence of miracles.  I think these images that burn into our minds are the outward representations of what the miracle truly is.  I think miracles are invisible.  I think they are a restructuring of one’s mind and heart.  They are an instantaneous shifting of one’s patterns of thought and knowing that yield an opening, an expansion, an inversion, a piercing of boundaries, an inrush of clarity.  They are miraculous because they provide an avenue of understanding that previously didn’t exist, or seem available.  It couldn’t be chosen because it couldn’t be seen.  It laid outside of history, outside of previous experience, and thus outside of one’s vocabulary of possibility.  Miracles insert letters into the alphabets we use, and words into our languages.  They add colors to our palettes.  They turn us inside out, and render entire epochs of time moot because of what they bring forth within us.

I think the outward, phenomenal representations described above arise because the essence of who we are is coupled to the entire field of form in ways we have yet to fully grasp.  A miracle isn’t the product of one, isolated personal will magically commanding matter to comply with its desires, or even a field of individual wills aligning.   It is a flash bulb pulse in the invisible, a hidden strike of lightning that reveals and mobilizes unity.  In unity there are no play-books or scripts, no schemes or planning, no parts to be played, nothing that could go wrong.  There’s just a line that crackles in a zig-zag pattern through eternity, yielding exactly what’s needed.  A fish.  A restructuring of time and space.  A buoyancy.  The result needn’t be considered supernatural.  It’s just that more of what is natural became available for an instant.  In unity, we couple with the world in ways we cannot predictably understand.

I’ve been thinking of these words more and more lately– the ones I can’t explain– because as I said, they’re all I have now.    I know the difficulties we share in this world cannot be healed by invention and technology, by policy or debate, by legal or military action, or by ethical arguments.  The hidden roots of the world arising around us must be nourished– the roots that extend deeply into our minds, and are caught in the ferment of our pasts, our fears, our guilt, and our judgments.  The miracle is needed because we can’t see beyond our own conclusions.  We can’t see what is possible outside of our own constructions, projections and hand-drawn boundaries.  We can’t figure this out on our own.  We fabricate the boundaries of the possible in ways we can’t understand, and become trapped by our own rules.  The miracle is the gift that pierces the false screen of our minds, and shows what lies beyond.  It is the gift of insight.  It is the surge of recognition and potency that will remake the world.

Miracles are natural, and all around us.  Thank God…

The Reason We Need Miracles

January 28, 2016
by Michael
comments 32
Creative / Fiction

The electric yellow moped caught my attention because it was bright as an eye exam, despite the distance, and because it was tracing a gentle line through space, humming its way along a cock-eyed geodesic around the hill.  My focus collapsed, and I lost myself into a cloud of blank-faced calculations.  When I came back from wherever it is I went, I was convinced the small vehicle and it’s intriguing cargo were very likely inbound.  This realization was quickly superseded by the fact that I was hanging out the side of a backhoe by the steering wheel, shouting in two languages at once to a platoon of unflappable ditch diggers.  I had two other machines working the area fairly intensely, stacks of wooden pipe tucked here and there in the lee of small rock formations, and a little hut on the far hill where the moped had just cruised past– full of plans and surveyor’s instruments.

The bill of my ball cap was a salt flat of dried sweat.

The moped and its curious pilot disappeared behind one of the crazy geographic features we were hoping to circumvent, and I hopped down from the machine to inspect the most recent assertion of certain failure by one of the workers.  Sure enough, at the bottom of the half-baked excavation, I saw it.  A clay pipe the diameter of a redwood, thousands of years old, well-preserved by some freakish characteristic of the local shale, and filled no doubt with the explosive gas of fermented triceratops dung.  Just like the last one.  I put two fingers to my lips and let out one of those ungodly whistles that tells everyone in hearing distance– which was me and the two guys beside me– to stop moving until further instruction.

I couldn’t believe it.

A steady rainfall of molten swears began to come out of me, as if I was muttering spells.  It’s a strategy I had used many times before in similar circumstances, in an effort to soften up the land and reduce obstacles in our path into mush, and with similarly negligible results.

The electric yellow moped arrived shortly thereafter and glided to a halt, ending the only residual motion in the entire canyon.  The driver deployed the kickstand, rotated his satchel around, flipped his hard hat onto his balding head, took up a position about three feet to my right, and made a show of putting his clipboard in the business position.  Then he began to study our linear hole in the ground, our machinery, the offending pipeline, and our means and methods.  It was a clear attempt to try and discern just what in the hell was going on, but it seemed to be biased with the expectation of benign novelties.  After a few minutes of placid observation, he smirked at the sky and scribbled down a few notes onto his notepad.

He was so far down my list of urgent mysteries, I couldn’t even afford him the benefit of a well-mannered guess as to who he might have been.  Chuck arrived around the same time as our mystery contestant, and I pointed into the hole while looking away towards our thatched hut of drawings and field instruments.  I’d already seen the damage and couldn’t bear another look.

Chuck whistled appreciatively.

Most of our best communication with each other involved whistling of one sort or another.  Then we shared a wordless moment full of thoughts about the local economy, the relative scarcity of employment unrelated to the Prince’s obsession with full-scale reenactments of Mesopotamian river gardens, and the implications of yet another unforeseen obstacle of massive proportions.

“The Universe writes you a blank check,” Clipboard finally says, “deposits it at the center of your being, so that you can do anything you want, and this is how you cash it in…?  You guys are pressed right against it around here…  Wow.”

He was making a careful study of my facial expressions through eyes that were twinkling pageants of generosity.  For a moment I wondered if he had any vacancies.  I had a sudden feeling about moving in.  Then I made a mental note to tighten security on the job site.

I couldn’t stop myself from thinking about linked chains of cause and effect too big to touch that had been pummeling us for years– the absurd shape of the earth out here, with its stubborn geological fortitude, the Prince and his steady diet of gaudy projects, the plowable pile of invoices for equipment and fuel, and the gargantuan task of motivating farmers from the next principality to trade in their hoes for jackhammers and uninterrupted sunshine.

“Look,” I said, “we’ve got to get water to the seventh mesa resort by the third full moon after the Prince’s birthday, or heads are gonna’ roll.  This rock is a phenomenon packed tight as a traffic jam of black holes lined up for the Apocalypse, and it’ll be a month of Sunday’s before we can get any hydraulic fluid delivered out here.”

Clipboard nodded, content with an undisclosed conclusion.  He slipped me his business card, winked, and spun back around to hop on the moped.

“Well,” he said, before gliding away stage left.  “…we all have our reasons…”

I look back now on those days from time to time, and reflect on how insane it was to keep that card.  The sheer madness of it.  The card that didn’t fit anywhere in my life.  The card that felt like a ticket to somewhere else entirely.  The card that said:

Hafiz
Expert Witness of Transitory Phenomena
(Remodels Accepted)

The Delicious Letdown of Losing Oneself

January 22, 2016
by Michael
comments 47
Creative / Poetry

It started with an idea, as these things usually do.  “I need your help with something,” I said.

Hafiz was working on his Nerf ball free throw.  “I’m listening.”

His face was an expressionless intensity, but the perforated foam hope fell short of the mark.  He seemed to savor the data point.  Silent as a feather in long term storage, the ball hit the knob on the closet door, rolled across the floor and settled against my heel.  I picked it up and tossed it over to him, and he began the recursive process all over again.

“I need a tag team partner.  It’s a steel cage match kind of thing.”

He nodded, fired the silent protagonist off the backboard this time, and watched it land in the same spot as before.  I found myself automatically engaging in the recognition of patterns, anxious to uncover their hidden meanings.  “Standing eight counts?” he asked.

“It’s a steel cage match, Hafiz.”

“So no holds barred.”

“Everything goes.”

“I’m partial to the Vulcan nerve pinch,” he said.  “Who’re the other guys?”

“You Could Still Die Badly, and I Wouldn’t Do That If I Were You.”

His face was an expressionless intensity.  The ball sailed wide of the hoop and through an open door casing.  It landed in the toilet bowl like a wintering mallard returning home from a few errands.  He looked over at me, his concentration broken.

“I need your help, Hafiz.  That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”

“I see what you mean.  That Die Badly’s a real sunuvabitch.  When?”

“Soon.  Soon as we can.”

 

I showed up in my favorite I Might Be Good Enough outfit and stood awkwardly next to the cage.  I tried to brandish my cape with élan, but it got wrapped around my throat and face because of vigorous ceiling fans above the cage, leaving me momentarily blinded and a little too vulnerable in my ill-fitting tights.  It was a bad feeling.  Where the hell was Hafiz!?

Die Badly sauntered over, punched my shoulder hard enough to knock the last person in line clean off the planet, and told me to sign the waiver.  I Wouldn’t Do That If I Were You was waggling his finger at me in warning, but not the friendly kind.  It was more like the condescending kind, implying that I Wasn’t Really Enough.  Well that did it.  I wasn’t having any of that.  I signed the damned thing.

Next thing I knew Die Badly was coming at me with a small kitchen table as a lead blocker, and I Wouldn’t Do That was shaking his head in amused disbelief at my gullible nature.  I panicked, tried to duck and got clobbered into the next county.  Thankfully I landed in arm’s reach of Hafiz, who slid through the ropes and kissed my outstretched hand.

“Go get ’em, tiger,” I mumbled.

Then I blacked out.

 

I’m not sure how we got from A to B, but when I woke up Hafiz had his hands on Die Badly’s waist.  He was angling the big man just so and showing him how to flick his wrist on the follow-through to get a little arc on the shot.  The foam basketball, oddly saturated on the one hemisphere, flew like a drunken beach ball and straight through the hoop.  I Wouldn’t Do That was practicing off to the side, pantomiming glory.

“What is this, Hafiz?  You’re teamed up with Die Badly now?”

The big man interrupted his shot and looked over at me in surprise, then extended his hand in greeting.  His eyes were burning hot reservoirs of compassion.  “I’m Your Perfect and Inevitable Destiny,” he said.  “Nice to finally meet you.”

I Wouldn’t Do That got into the bizarre action and introduced himself as Every Good Thing.

I looked at Hafiz and raised my bruised and blackened eyebrow, to which I pointed significantly.

Hafiz shrugged his shoulders.  “You asked for my help,” he said.  “You want to go back to the old way?”

For an instant I felt myself becoming Perturbed At My Loss of Control, but Every Good Thing was flickering back and forth of the spitting image of I Wouldn’t Do That If I Were You and my pattern recognition skills were at an all time high.  “Nah,” I said.  “This is good.”

Then Perfect Destiny smiled, picked me up and tossed me miles high into a sea of blue.

Breath Incarnate

January 17, 2016
by Michael
comments 68
Reflections

Peace taken up by the flesh has a rhythm to it.  A field of frozen grass and falling snow, mixed with true inhabitants, will ripple with tongues of steam.  Life will move in and out of itself, and possibilities will disperse from their smoky origins, drift into the branches of trees at the field’s edge, and nestle into nooks beneath the boughs.

We share a breath that’s always breathing– here and there and all at once– a breath that snuck into itself and made a circle, and then snuck into itself and made a circle, and then snuck into itself and made a circle.  We share a breath that claims every face as her own, every emptiness as one of her dwellings.  She presses against our root, drawing everything near, and pauses for a moment, losing her every distinction into our silence.  Then we give her back, and she washes out all the way to distant shores, exposing the silt of our dreams.  Steam fills the air and sparkles as it cools into ash, while a trace part of us is carried even farther beyond, to every point of the sea.  Rising and falling with the water.

Sometimes we like to think otherwise, but when we are at peace we understand that it is the nature of our being to erode bit-by-bit until we mix with everything, touch everything, and mingle with every shore.  Our concentration is a gradient without a boundary– a swirling, scattering pattern of breathing. We are loci of a swaying proximity to everything.

When we stop seeking, this is what we find: the world is breathing us.  And we are breathing the world.  Each time it looks the same– a billowing cloud of white gases that billow and spin and vanish, fading back into the greater breath– but every time it’s also a little different.  The world hinges on subtleties contained in our breath.  That is how the world moves.  Every time the wave of this great breathing washes into us, symbols and stories mix, and a little more of what will be dissolves.  The shorelines of our silence erode and become fluid.  The dye of our beauty is released.  Circles inside of circles inside of circles– we are the points of contact with a vast and hidden continent.  We are the caves in which the breath we share once hid its secrets.

And we keep wondering who we are.  We keep wondering what we mean and what we can be, when what we can be was already given.  We have already been deposited in endless glaciers of rock, and they are slowly dissolving into the water.  It simply takes the action of our breathing to shake us loose.  It takes the breath that’s happening everywhere.  And listening to it.  We are the bellows of world-building, and the grains that wash out of us with every silent tide are our prayers– wordless particles that mix together in the sea.

I think it takes a while to learn that loving isn’t a skill we learn– that no one can be more or less loving.  We can only get out of the way.  We can only keep breathing in synchrony with the breath that is breathing us, with the breath that is climbing into every being for a look and then climbing back out into the sky as something else altogether.  We can only give ourselves to it, so that our prayers have a little of everyone in them, so that our circle can live inside of other circles, that live inside of other circles, that live inside of a breath that’s always breathing.

The Sensation of Miracles

January 10, 2016
by Michael
comments 56
Christ / Course Ideas / Creative

The other day there was a miracle, but I was looking the other way when it happened and it blew past me like a round of silent artillery.  So does it count if I figured it out a week later?  If I pieced it all together?  And if it does count, do I just make a notch on a piece of wood or something?  Once I get ten, can I trade ’em in for something else?  Do I get an extra man or a free throw of the dice?

I think at the time I was imagining how it would be if I was more rustic.  Like if I knew how to hike up into the mountains in late fall and not come down until the ice broke, and I was comfortable banking fires, setting traps, cleaning skins and knives in the half light, and getting on the same wavelength as the mountain slopes and the snow squalls, if it would be any better.  Part of me likes to think it might be.  Part of me likes to interrupt from time to time and carry out some inner discourse on topics such as these, and I miss things.  The miracles streak past, and an hour later I discover the life I thought was my own has a hole in it.

Miracles scurry around like fugitive bolts of lightning, like firecrackers that leapt off the end of whipped leather and dove for cover, so if you want to see one you can’t be distracted.  Because they also blend right in with everything else.  You stand looking at a street corner, watching laundry wave from the balcony, watching cars and spinning hub cabs and big buses, watching faces.  The miracle is looking right at you, piecing together the next world from the one already here, but you can’t cull it out from the rest.  You can only squint and listen quietly, and then feel yourself slip away.  Feel yourself loosen from your coordinates.  Feel the way faces are oddly familiar, the way dimples in curb stones and painted street markings couldn’t have been any other way.  That’s when I feel closest to it, when everywhere I look it’s looking right back.  Invisible.  Massing like a cloud.

It’s not whether the cars collide or not, whether the sirens come or not, or whether the deal gets made.  It’s something inside of all that, something like a rock climber with one grip on the moment in front of you, one grip somewhere ten years ago in a corn silo, and a foot that’s carrying the weight of everything, pushing off the darkness inside of an egg.  Then that climber moves and the whole world moves with it, but I can only see that the light turned green.  Everything shifts but it all moves together so it looks like it was always gonna’ do that anyway.  The front two cars burst off the line, boring a hole through the cloud.

What if I could just look at somebody and know their regrets, or their shoe size, or whether or not they were in love?  What if I could just stand on the corner and send little ingots of light into the people walking by, and the ingots of light always knew exactly what to do– like go to the pancreas and throw a few switches, or ride the blood up into the pituitary gland and sing a song, or grab a few hooligan-shaped molecules from their liver and crack them into little tiny flower petals?

Would it be any better if that were so?  I can’t answer that.  The whole world flickers through its eternity and reappears fresh in every direction, and all I can see is one thing at a time.  But it’s enough to suggest a closeness– an intimacy with places far away that brought me here.  When a large bird takes off in the forest, too far away to hear, you just see fragments of wing tips, and tree trunks lined up still as posts concealing splashes of white and warmth.  I get carried along by that.  The world moves me along even though I froze ten years ago, and ever since I’ve been trying to piece together what I saw.  With each breath, we all get whisked over the edge by the current, because it was always gonna’ be that way.

The best thing is to just relax and catch your thoughts– the ones that were meant for you.  They crawl up inside of you and then go to work.  They open up over time.  That’s the whole world, taking you with it.  The miracle is realizing it’s all happening at once.  Everywhere at once, it’s just right.  The miracle is the ticket mashed deep in your heart, crumpled and silent, that you were given to this ballet of wing tips and ruffled darkness that somehow takes you exactly where you need to go.

A Winter’s Meditation

December 31, 2015
by Michael
comments 74
Creative

We had our first snow the day before yesterday—a sticky-heavy whiteness you could tamp into stable shapes—then a smattering more yesterday, and this morning I am witness to wonders I realize only now have been in the making for days.  The third act is the revelation.  Soft golden light pours sideways across the sky from a low-lying sun, and the second ridge is garnished with fog.  The air and the land are rising together, drawing thin.  Closer by, bare trees in the yard are tipped with orbs of flickering color—beads of blue, red and green that twinkle and dance, then fall to the ground in lengthening streaks of glowing yellow.  Beneath the trees, it is raining.

But only there.

There’s a meaning in the scene that fills me.  I know what is on display, but its history eludes me.  The raining tree is a dictionary of potentials.  I realize each instance of beauty is only a clue, a hint of far greater conspiracy.  The part I can’t piece together is what I’ve always been, effortlessly, alongside of everything else that’s always been.  The tree is losing its colors and I’m passing through myself like a spring breeze, bubbling over, transforming, a hot breath condensing into steam.

A sparrow finds an opening in the sky, and settles on a slender branch.  The next leap will involve dissolution.  We watch together, wondering who will leap first.

On the best days, I am given a thought that transports me to this edge.  Yesterday it was a pink flower, resting on a platter.  The platter was my chest—the sensation of giving, a hot stone emerging from an oven, the presence of beauty.  These thoughts convey the conspiracy.  They are the wordless blood that passes through us.  They rain down from the tree, and find us in the elevator, motionless, in the stairwell, or balancing on a log at the beach, our arms stretched out towards the sky in both directions.

Thoughts like these, images imbued with sublime potency, remind me of endless configurations of light and being.  Of smiles.  Of whorls in our fingertips.  Of touching the horizon.  Of all of us, drifting down from the sky, to cover the world in our quiet presence.