Every Step of the Way…

October 14, 2015
by Michael
comments 38
Creative

This post is part of the Time Machine Blogging Challenge hosted by Linda Litebeing…

When I reflect on my life, the realization that emerges is that I’ve been guided in ways both more subtle and far-reaching than I would have imagined were possible in the moments when I was grappling around within the question of it.  That’s not to say my past isn’t peppered with opportunities to have lived differently.  There’s a business or two that didn’t work out, a Gettysburg Cemetery of missed opportunities to have been more vulnerable and more open around others, and a fear of falling down that spikes like a natural frequency the closer I come to crossing one of those arbitrary, yet sacrosanct boundaries we set for ourselves who knows when, to keep ourselves safe.

I’ve no doubt a line of experts whispering in my ear could have managed the gifts I was given to alternate now’s, and most, if not all of them would be marked by greater statistical evidence of success than I possess currently, but then I’d be just as lost as I ever was, dependent on a coterie of advisers.  My insides would still be caving in.  This is where grace comes into play.

We used to go to the Birmingham Public Library when I was little, and somehow I’d discovered the sport of soccer despite living in an (American) football-crazed south.  That somehow was at least partly a father’s reticence to see eight-year-olds suit up for a morning of collisions before bodies were developed and motor skills acquired.  At the library I found a book called How To Play Professional Soccer.  That afternoon, in the squelching summer heat, I was doing stretches and calisthenics on the floor of my tiny bedroom with the furniture pushed up against the wall.  I ended up writing a hand-written letter to the American Youth Soccer Association, which had an address in one of the appendices, because I read they had travel teams in different places.  A few months later I was at a try-out for a U12 team in one of the suburbs– the only one there in sport-agnostic patterned shorts and plastic cleats.  But it worked.  Playing sports became a stabilizing force for me all the way through high school.  I look back on that story, and how much playing soccer meant to me for the next ten years, and chuckle at how fragile the path to it seems to have been.

Now the self who navigated those ten years has shed that skin.  To a certain extent my focus and commitment on training were a postponement of the inevitable.  Playing soccer was the identity I could fall back on when things were most uncomfortable.  I could retreat into that world.  Later I realized it wasn’t a retreat that was tenable indefinitely, and I simply shifted focus.  When I say that I was guided, it is the emergence of a particular ensemble of feelings and intuition that precipitated a decision to which I refer, and that I find most intriguing.  It always felt at the time like “I” was making a decision, but I cannot account for the changing internal spectra of knowing and uncertainty that propelled me to tack in a new direction.  Something was given to me in those moments.  The wind changed at sea, and I moved with it, but I cannot explain the changing wind.

So I swung from one rope to the next, and despite being plagued by doubts about my educational path finished college and graduated.  I relocated across the country to move in with my (now) wife, but found myself in a new world without any past connections.  My new family was a small group of people who participated in Native American ceremony together, and this transition both geographically and personally triggered almost-debilitating fears about finding how I fit into this world.  Looking for a job felt like clawing my way out of a dark hole.  I was hidden down there– and safe in a way maybe– but also coming apart.  Sending out a resume and not getting a response, or getting no for an answer merely affirmed the futility of my finding solid ground.  My introspective personality wasn’t exactly a boon during this time, but big picture, this wasn’t the time for me to be on solid ground.  It was the perfect set of conditions for my continued unfolding.

Coincident with these secular difficulties I was facing, I was also feeling pulled to develop a stronger spiritual foundation.  I decided to do vision quest as part of this community I had found, and that began as a complete standoff between the feelings in my heart and the voices in my head.  It was like watching two huge forces tear each other to bits on the playground through the classroom window, only they were both me.  Every little step felt heavy and difficult.  I went into the woods a lot and found big trees to lean against and cry.  I made all of the preparations as well as I could, uncertain about each one, feeling the power of the path and a certain crushing doubt vie for supremacy at every step.  Wasn’t this supposed to feel like a loving experience?

No…  Looking our difficulties in the eye is never easy.  Not for me anyway.  We pick up a lot of strange notions out on the periphery, and returning to the center strips them away, churns them up, and puts them on display all around us.  We move through a world of image, temptation and danger.  The first year I did vision quest nothing happened quite as I had hoped it would.  Or so I thought.  All the preparations I had made and hopes for that moment vanished– and I sat there alone, in the darkness, my confidence eroding until it was completely gone and I had no ground to stand on.  A few days later the gift I was given became clear: I walked away knowing I was simply not capable of dealing with the demons inside of me on my own.  This I could be certain about.

I’d found the bottom.

I call it grace because it was exactly what I’d asked for day-in and day-out for months, just not in the mind’s conjured form.  I’d prayed for some evidence of the truth of myself, some ending to the difficulty of floundering in painful uncertainty.  It came, just not the way I had asked or anticipated.  It came without any sparkle or glitter, without visions to talk about.  It came as a one-way ticket to the bottom, while I was trapped by my commitment in the safest place on earth, right at the center.  A month later another book found me, and I began to study A Course in Miracles.  Step by step the foundations were laid for seeing clearly, and eventually peace emerged and stabilized.  Life has become enjoyable and sweet.

The world would have had me doing so many other things those past couple of decades, but the wind never blew me in those directions, and that is how I know I was steered, or carried along.  Because the pressures are there.  That, and I had my best friend in the world beside me along the way– my wife– cracking jokes and bursting my balloons of self-importance and heaviness.  Looking back in the Time Machine, I’m absolutely certain we are given just what is needed when we are ready to receive it.  We could never heal on our own, of our own power or prescriptions.  There is a wisdom to what is given that leaves me dumbfounded, and looking for a tree to water with my tears…

Next up is Mary on the 16th!

No. I Am Not.

October 11, 2015
by Michael
comments 63
Poetry

Obviously I am not a Christian,
but Jesus is my companion.
More than that, even.
We were bound together in darkness,
in a moment we both chose without resistance.
The ropes encircling us are sacred.
We are each other’s atrium and ventricle.
We live in the same house.
We love the same woman.
We lay together on a raft sometimes,
continuing our passage across the sea
to visit the birth of life.
At night, when I’m done
staring at the ceiling
and my tears
are passing out of the harbor
in a galloping herd of waves,
and the stars are keeping watch
over each one,
marking each surging shoulder
with the incendiary memory of
sodium, hydrogen, helium and argon–
Jesus is the tide that carries them.
Jesus is the road we walk that leads us to the sea.

And clearly I am not a Buddhist,
though I dissolve into the Buddha’s robes
with every breath.
More than that, even.
We play hide and seek together
in the light beneath the trees
that fills some of the leaves with color
while others are still and black.
You won’t find either one us there–
just a tapestry of whispers.
When I call the Buddha on the phone,
my presence goes digital.
I subdivide into an infinite field of pixels.
When I look deeply into one,
I see the one beside it.
When I move over to look at that one, I see you.
Every pixel is saying something necessary
about all the other ones–
twinkling off and on for that very reason.
So I look closely at my hand,
and see a mystery I cannot explain.
In the same way that my hands
think they are the ones responsible for these letters,
I think I am the one walking across the street,
and not the sky.
But really the sky is walking across the street.
And really the Buddha is what’s filling all of space.
That’s why the nature of breathing is so obvious.

And by now of course you know I am not Lakota,
though there is no one who is not Lakota.
If you sit in the darkness
beside the glowing stones
and learn a few of the songs,
you’ll finally be just a person full of tears.
No longer more, and no longer less.
Only now there’s a channel
pouring out of you onto the earth.
The Earth who knows your name,
and raised you.
There can’t be spirits there, of course,
to help you walk your path–
not if you are a Christian, or a Buddhist.
But I am not any of those things.
I am not Lakota,
or Christian, or Buddhist either,
so some of those spirits who came
into the silence filled with drumming saw me,
and took pity on me,
and listened to what I had to say.
They got on the string-can telegraph
with the stars
and the grass
and the bear
and the clouds
to help this little one out.
To help him find his way.
They sent the fire to be the light that guides him.

Who are we to say what is what?
We who stumble and spit and irk.
We who judge and pontificate and cajole.
We who need all the help that we can get.

I don’t know anything, really,
and I think that’s why the trees
don’t mind shooting the shit with me.
Because there’s no pressure
to be that kind of tree, in that kind of world.
We just sit close to one another, and wait.

So now you know who I am.
And maybe who you are, too.
I hope so, for we need this knowledge
more than ever today,
we who are still naming,
we who are still blaming,
we who are still shaming.
We who have been given,
all there is to give.

The Haunting

October 8, 2015
by Michael
comments 29
Christ / Poetry

The conclusion
can no longer be avoided:
I’m being haunted
by that weightless certainty
from which no one recovers.
Each day there’s at least one
point in time that lingers,
staring back at me, eyes level,
while waving the wind through the narrow pass
between us– unimpeded.
The wind is whistling,
and the machine won’t read my ticket.
Something ten thousand feet down
is yawning and long after I’m gone
its baby rocks will float to the top
and stare wide-eyed
through gaps in the night sky.
Meanwhile the tides are recalculating
because the moon won’t hold still.
It’s a Mexican stand-off.
Man and microchip are both frozen.
Neither can compute the angle.
The little pebbles all around
the concrete dais– they think
I’m the regularly scheduled programming.
But I’m not.  We all get swept away together
into a world that lies between cause and effect.
They’re wondering
if what’s happening with me
up here on the concrete,
so close to the sun,
so complex and unexpected,
is the predecessor to the moment
that will dissolve them forever.
They’re mothers told them–
while their fathers sat proudly below the harbor’s mouth,
holding up the ships–
one day the light will wash over you.
One day this place will be forgotten completely.
One day.
And it will happen
just as easy as getting picked up
by a girl with braids and a journal
and being carried across the country
to stand watch for decades
beside her music box
and a picture of her cat.
That’s when I feel the haunting.
My concentration flickers.
A bee too far from home
on a fall evening wanders onto my shoe,
and I look up to see
the tails of your robe
disappear over the horizon,
dragging my breath into your vision.
I sink to my knees.
In my dreams
I let them cut me into pieces
and carry me off, slung over their shoulders
like crates from the Far East
that have ridden in darkness
since before they were born.
When I awaken,
the silence is still warm,
and the emptiness
I’ve been daring myself
to heed with my whole attention
is obviously with child.
It doesn’t matter whose…
Why do we keep asking that?
Who did this?
No one could have done this.
We have to start preparing ourselves
for life outside of that question.
When Jesus awoke behind the stone
and knew nothing could ever be taken
from any of us ever again,
he knew exactly what I mean:
no one could have done this.
But still, this is who we are.
It’s time to prepare ourselves,
because it’s happening
with increasing frequency–
faces are freezing solid into building windows.
A leaf is pulled off the branch, never touched.
A sound previously unaccounted for
discovers it exists because of a meaning inside of it.
I know it’s time because
whatever I was before this
just closed its eyes and slipped
back into the water,
and now its gone.

The Wisdom of Who We Are

October 4, 2015
by Michael
comments 29
Course Ideas

There are things we say sometimes to make a point– sweeping recapitulations of history, or statements of what is so in this world– and when we invoke them we do so as if they are self-evident.  Obvious to those who would see.  It is easy to forget how deeply we occupy our own lives and perspectives, and we can lose sight of the fact that what seems unmistakable to us is but the flowering of our own perceptions.  When we open our mouths, we sometimes forget the voice that emerges is a particular voice– the voice of our own desire, our history, and our interpretation.  The words that come out are sculpted by our own dreams, our own wisdom, our training, and our inner topographies.  This is the voice we offer, and it is beautiful and good, but if we lose sight of the fact that our voice is populated by our past, by the limits of our experience and of our own knowledge, we may lost sight of the fact that what is true for us as individuals, is not necessarily true in the absolute sense.

In this regard, I learn a great deal about what I carry around inside of myself by listening to the sound of my own voice.  What emerges is not always true, not always kind, and not always truly helpful.  If I listen, I can see this, and then I can dig around in there to see who is hurting, who has been forgotten, and who still anticipates a skyfall.  When our mouths open, and squawking birds such as these fly out, we know it.  Our hearts shudder, and we wish we could take them back– fetch them down from the sky and give them the love and support they need.  On the other hand, if we are attentive, we’ve been given the gift of insight.  This is the grace we give to one another when we see the one behind the words, and judge them not by the voices that speak through them.  In this way, we can create a safe place for one another to discover what is alive within us.

Our world today is full of these birds– our skies darkened in fact by so much we have thought and said.  We live in fields of criss-crossing shadows, beneath their searching presence, roving eyes, outstretched wings and heady glances.  Our task is to absolve these creatures, to welcome them home and give them a safe place to roost within us, whether they were ours to begin with or not.  This is why sweeping statements of what is so scare me off.  The simple truth is that I have no idea what is happening in our world, or what exactly has gotten us into the experience we are having today.  I haven’t a clue about trends and patterns.  Though they are perfectly valid ways of extracting order from a vast dataset, I’m perpetually at a loss to explain them in terms of the person next to me– the one wrestling with his or her own gestalt of compulsion, desire, and love.

I suspect the only wisdom needed to heal our world is the recognition that we are complete, and the attending insight that our experiences are the living, tangible feedback of whether we have accepted this or not.  We simply don’t understand that our own experience– regardless of our philosophy, religion or viewpoint– is leading us back inevitably to the discovery of our inherent completeness.  We think our experience is something else altogether.  We think it provides us with meaningful data about the world at large, not realizing how deeply our personal perspective is enfolded into our every sensation.  Then we succumb to the temptation to think our way of seeing is the solution the world needs.  We fail to recognize that we keep our own deep-seated sense of incompleteness hidden behind the desire to correct the world, and alleviate it from suffering.

We make the mistake of thinking the world out there– the one we make real by giving it a form we can grapple with through all our trending and pattern-identification– could be tweaked with a little dose of our own hard-won perspective.  We’ll find completeness later.  That’s not a luxury we have while the world around us is so screwed up, and so many are hurting.  What we know, right now– what is brutally obvious– is that if more people knew what we knew, thought like we did, believed as we do, then things would be different.  We are so confident in this we race into the madness thinking we can come back to our incompleteness later.  We think if we can put things right out there, this little bit of discomfort within us will take care of itself.

And it’s astoundingly incorrect.

We can, in truth, help the being next to us find peace with the gift of relationship, dialogue and presence, but we will never budge the world “out there” with our philosophies and our theoretical arguments.  We can only influence what we touch, and what we allow to touch us.  This means we have to encounter and seek to understand one another deeply, first and foremost.  This means further that we have to come to understand ourselves.  We debate too much what should be done, what should be believed, what should be taught and legislated, when in fact the relationship at the center of our existence is the only vehicle possible for reshaping our experience, both within and without.

We are here to heal through the very activity of discovering who we are.  This requires relationship, honesty and vulnerability, but no understanding whatsoever of who is doing it right, and who isn’t…  Such distinctions simply do not exist.

How This Works

September 30, 2015
by Michael
comments 27
Course Ideas

Why am I carrying
this barbed piece of steel
around with me?

Because it hurt
when it was dropped
into my open palms?
And now I want
to repay the favor
should the world
present me with
such an opportunity?

There’s no such thing
as even-steven
in this world,
but there is holiness.
There are rivers
wide as ball fields
that dredge bald tires
and old box springs
off the bottom
and carry them off
to the deep end,
just because it’s awesome
to watch stuff disappear
out there.

I dug a hole
to get the adrenaline out,
and then I set
that bloody steel urchin
of bitterness
into the ground–
next to my own.

Hafiz offered a few words,
then I covered them up.
They were good words,
and for a moment
I was damn near jealous
of those pointy jobbers.
Because after words like those,
they were probably
down there in the dark
getting high on silence
and their wheezing laughs
while they wrote jokes
about us crazy people.

By the time I had
the dirt mounded up,
they were just
subterranean obstacle courses
for curious earthworms,
geometries
emptied out altogether
of everyone else’s
promises.

As we turned to leave,
I noticed
a puddle of water
resting on a stone walk
that was pretending
to be the sky.

I was grateful
in the end
that the bitterness
had found me,
and that my own
had stepped forward
for the class reunion.
I was glad it had all come out.

We got rid of a shackle today.
The mangled grip
we have on the world
loosened.
We planted something
into the ground,
Hafiz and I,
and one day,
after the oceans
migrate a few more times
and their bottoms
fill up with bones,
swollen timbers,
and brass rings,
and then move on yet again,
a shrub will grow there.

One holy shrub
where there used to be
a deep end–
waving happily
as a clam.

Each Day’s Distance

September 27, 2015
by Michael
comments 35
Poetry

Two, three—call it four decades on,
and I’m both better and worse.
I’ve settled into it
in the way that precedes disappearance,
as if I was placed in the back
of an otherwise empty cabinet,
sheltered by the presence of wood,
where I’ve become a study
in knowing something more
that you can only glimpse
in the repair of oily machinery,
or the bailing of water from a low spot on the land
where two surveyors once had a stare down.
I used to swear when the leather strap
on which everything momentarily hinged,
broke.  I used to flinch and stumble backwards
and send the wooden stool flying.
Now I know when the whole thing buckles,
it means we’ve reconsidered.
Now I’m not going after it,
and it’s not coming after me.
We’re just both wounded with each other,
our needs infused in ways you can’t undo.
Each day is a landscape
painted with the mixed-up visions that spill out of us.
We work it from both sides, sifting.
The dawn is the signal that sets us out
into the sound of wings taking flight
and hooves dashing through leaves–
the spooked markers of our passage
into one another.
To get back to the beginning.
It’s a traverse we haven’t quite managed,
though sometimes we catch a glimpse
of one another on opposite horizons,
our shadows framed by fire–
all our beauty poised in an outcropping
that’s hung over the edge
with only one way in or out.
Unless you count disappearing.
I stop, looking up from
the collection of rusted hinges
I’ve spread out on a barrel head,
and there you are,
transfigured up on today’s holy heights,
while all around me
the unwieldy weights of silence
have paused to pay their respects.

The path through the field
matters more than ever now.
Every curve and stone has a name,
but not ones that I’ve given them–
rather, the ones they showed me,
ones that cannot be spoken.
They’re images that spontaneously reconstruct
to tug at my chest and limbs
when the sun and the clouds
are suddenly balanced inside the other.
Each image is the most meaningful excerpt
of history for that one being–
like the face of yours I saw once
at the bottom of a valley,
in a stream that laid flat
beneath a dull sky,
your eyes turned down,
your lips pursed–
the one moment I lifted
from a whole life of hoping
that no one saw because I turned away
just before the light came,
turned into this landscape we share,
the one I’m talking about here.
It was that one face,
held between us,
motionless,
that gave sadness
a safe place to rest,
a low point in the field
where it could collect
into rippled reflections.

I’m both better and worse now,
but none of that really matters.
We get better and worse as we go.
It’s the meaning that has changed.
Each day is a landscape
of the visions that spilled out of our wounds,
and knowing time is only the distance between us,
I hike farther now than ever before
up into these canyons,
pushing the day to its limits before I buckle,
to find you,
and rest your head upon my knee,
and place water upon your lips,
so we can sink into nightfall
together,
at the end,

when we disappear.

Call and Response

September 24, 2015
by Michael
comments 50
Christ / Poetry

This last week an asteroid passed through my solar plexus, and I wobbled a little back and forth like a transplanted tree testing its new roots.  I swallowed the asteroid whole, and mostly because I had a bet with Hafiz, I didn’t spit it out.  I asked him if a star would grow inside of me now and blow me up from the inside out because I swallowed an asteroid through my solar plexus, and he just laughed.  He likes my dubiousness because it never stands up.

One more isn’t gonna’ do anything.

Then he thought about it for a minute and told me they rarely come just one at a time.  Would you like to travel for millions of years through a veil of dust and ash by yourself?  No.

But Hafiz, I said, I thought we were never truly alone?  Hee he he…

He just raised an eyebrow.  Little clue for all of us to share in here together: being smart and using words like clever power-ups typically backfires.

I agreed I wasn’t quite ready for that one.

After I got my poetry book all put together, which began as just a feeling after I had written a few poems and begun to enjoy it, I knew instinctively that if anyone was going to hear about it besides you guys, I would probably have to show up in some way.  I say I knew instinctively, but Hafiz reminds me that I knew in many more obvious ways, too– like the time I found myself wondering about saying words out loud into a microphone and then suddenly I got this feeling like I was standing on the cornice of a tall building that was undergoing seismic-like spasms while I was trying to catch a flirtatious moth between two hands.  Or the time a longtime friend who is very good at seeing what comes next asked me what my plan was for “getting it out there.”  I had to confess I had no idea, but at least I admitted my reaction to the question felt like squaring off with the final level of Wolfenstein at 2 AM, or staring down a dark alley that eats asteroids for breakfast.

Last week I attended my first open mic event and spoke some words aloud, and this week a second, and aside from living to tell about it I think slowly I’ll get my legs underneath me.  I think it will be a process of building up my asteroid-eating muscles one-by-one, but it did feel good to find myself in one of those moments where trepidation has broken loose to crawl all over your skin, and is only marginally eclipsed by your need, and your silent certainty.  I think such potent stalemates are related in some manner to living.  The best part for me was that it all came about simply, as a process of responding to a gentle calling– of exhibiting a willingness to be nudged.  I haven’t any grand designs– I only know this was what “next” felt like.  We’re always standing in square one, looking out at a board without boundaries, are we not?

The result in the intervening week was a flurry of bad, unfinished, ramshackle poems– poems rooted in trying too hard, trying too hard to be stable while passing through an inner renovation, trying too hard to put even a finer point on the tide of mysteries I feel inside of us.  You have probably noticed.  I felt like the warm comments received this past week were due to momentum, and the graciousness friends extend to one another.  (Thank you…)  I think I’ve settled back down, and perhaps now I’m along for the ride again for a little while, able to see the scenery again, able to forget about myself again, able to relax into new orbits…

This is the dance of who we are, in the simplest and clearest of terms.  The calling.  The response.  The tumbling forwards into the unknown…

Here’s a poem about autumn:

The summer’s zenith is breaking up–
the days dropping off
one by one, often three at once,
to wobble through the air
and settle flat upon
the evening’s tender flow,
there to drift downstream,
nudging each other gently
through the turns, spinning,
floating upon a golden light
that meanders along well-worn gradients
to a world beyond the trees,
between the stones
and into the open knapsack
of a gaping solitude.
This is what we’ve worked for,
this passage around the bend
into places that needn’t be understood
whose foyers are the marriage
of light-gathering foliage
and our surrender into one another.
Nearby decorative grasses
reaching over the tops of my shoes
wave in the wind,
hoping to make that journey soon
across the softening horizon,
their tips pregnant with symmetry,
and for a moment
their excitement borrows me:
I have gone to seed.
I am a kernel of hidden futures
preparing to scatter upon the wind,
to snap free of the roots
that once became me,
that poured into my center
for days on end in
a thickening braid of instruction,
sheathed in fragrance, chiral folding,
and ancient purpose.
I loosen,
let go,
and for an instant
I skirt along an orbit blown open
like a bubble,
to land upon the earth,
to feel the moist electric soil beneath me
and the residue of yesterday’s sunlight.

In any moment,
a chickadee may land
to pluck me where I lay,
to carry me into the sky–
or I may be crushed into the batter
by the hoof of some passing kingdom of antlers,
to lay still during winter’s brittle night,
my shell etched by a sheath of crawling ice.

Resting on the shoreline of the sky,
I am unable to discern
a difference between these possibilities.
There is no point in choosing.
We were poured into
so that we could be given away.
Healing is the recovery of this knowledge–
the memory that every outcome is the product of singing.
This is what we’ve worked for,
this tumbling, drifting release
into the teeming whole of things,
into being carried around the bend
and ushered beneath the tree’s protective wings,
to find ourselves again
in the pure fields
of nameless, unceasing
whispers.

Some Forgetting Required

September 20, 2015
by Michael
comments 26
Poetry

They’re at it again in there–
getting organized so
no one gets hurt once
that one drummer we all love
catches hold of a comet
in each hand
and starts hanging on for dear life.
He’s the one the elephants
still remember from
the last world that went south,
who appears in stories kept alive
in their great ribbed vaults,
where his memory ages with each migration
into the delicate musk of ancestry and power.

They’re at it again in there–
the rollicking band of baby minotaurs
and the off-duty angels,
the men wrought from fire and clay
and the women who remember
they all gave birth to saviors–
parading in circles
around the center of my chest,
orbiting ash-pile plantations of fallen stars
and rainbow-terminus dreams
cordoned off by sinew lashings
hung with dog tags and neck-ties,
each point of contact hidden inside
a maze of asphalt-paved pedestrian crossings
and yellow-enameled walk signals
beaming instructions in every direction.
The land between is silted with mystery book pages
and discarded assembly instructions,
patrolled by an ornery castle guard
with beards as long as winters
who’ve been entangled
with my deepest fears
about volunteering myself,
without limits or qualifications,
to a life of simple meaning.

They draw swords and mumble painfully
from beneath their diaphragms
every time a minotaur calf even looks their way.

Everything in there
is on the move again, rallying,
catching one another’s tears
in small glass bottles and leather skins,
hurling spears straight out of existence,
circling round through the smoke
rising off the ash piles,
and materializing from the edges
that wobble with the drumming of caught comets
to lend their support
to the pleasant discussion
Jesus is having with the well-dressed man
seated on the folding chair
placed at the door to my heart,
with his one leg folded across the other,
who’s holding the key in his pocket.

The seated man thinks it’s a power.
He thinks all this is somehow
to do with the office he holds–
that it’s the only reason
he’s still alive.
He doesn’t realize that key of his
is just a pebble
he picked up from the ground
the day he made this game up,
or that the man he’s speaking to
was also once shattered into
a whirl of vacant powers,
before he gave his stone away
to the quiet one before him.

The man in the folding chair
simply doesn’t realize the enormity
of what can come
from the simple choice
to let the stones
be stones.

Each Moment, the Last

September 17, 2015
by Michael
comments 61
Poetry

We circulate blood
to warm the engine,
to launder our thoughts
through a flickering screen of cells,
to give our last remaining questions
the dignity of heat, a name, and color–
to work them over
day after day from within
these visceral bindings,
pressing against them and
metabolizing them and
hoping they’ll somehow
end up different
than they once were.
The mind takes a peek out,
intrepid,
eager as a hunter,
giddy with the leathered vision,
only faintly suspecting that
every tick of the heart
is a replay of the final one—
the moment before take-off,
the last switch we throw
before reconciling with majesty.
If only we weren’t so cavalier
about the things we once decided.
If only we weren’t always
scrambling back uphill from the edge,
digging our heels into pretense and boundary.
That’s all time is…
a line continuously drawn between
ourselves and the sea.

I know this because
the other night
I was sitting at my table
when the cuckoo clock
dove off the wall and hit the floor.
I walked over to find
a puff of sparrow down
and a long, striped feather,
still quivering,
where there should have been
a dented cuckoo bird
with shiny lacquered eyes
looking up at me.

I looked up from
the shattered linden wood
to see a sparrow
leap from the hedge into the sky–
a tiny screen displaying a falcon heart,
leaving a braid of words behind in the leaves
for me to find.

Silence broke me open,
and the falcon came for me.
He could see,
so I gave him my eyes.
He was endless,
so I gave him my body.
His blood was fire,
so I gave him my heart.
We’re soaring now
across the tumbling dawn.

My melancholy and my need
released from their separate chambers
and mixed into a potent slurry,
and my blood, ever since,
has been swirling in circles.
My cells are flooding with forgetfulness.
The sky has opened its mouth–
the sky with no name
that has me thinking
of giving it mine.

Reflections on Power

September 13, 2015
by Michael
comments 40
Course Ideas

Power is a word that evokes a strange spectrum of thought forms and connotations, reactions and prejudices.  I think this is largely because the power we are most familiar with is the type that involves a victim and an oppressor.  We view power as the ability to cause events to occur despite the competing will of another.  That is our definition of power– a definition that makes perfect sense in the minds of the separate and uncertain.  But this is not power at all– not in the absolute sense– for being predicated upon falsehood it cannot express what is true.  Real power is the expression of unity, relatedness, and truth.

There’s another definition of power we entertain sometimes, and that’s the idea of an occult power, the power of action at a distance.  Ostensibly wielded only by a few– by the ones who know the secrets and perhaps have sold their souls to obtain them– this version of power carries with it the threat of sorcery and unreality.  The word power sometimes brings to mind the notion that a true power would be magical or supernatural.  If we could wield miracles at will, that would be power.  But this idea is also of no account, and besmirches the nature of true power– the spontaneous expression of truth.  Action at a distance takes many forms, but is also meaningless when it is not an expression of unity, relatedness and truth.

We could stop here and leave this idea of power alone, but I think it’s important to continue onward.  I think it’s important because the recreation of our experience in this realm depends upon our willingness as individuals to offer the true power of who we are.  This is the power of who we are in truth.  Power isn’t something we wield, but something we become.  Power has nothing to do with competing wills or desires, or sorcery or special effects, and everything to do with opening ourselves to the expression of the goodness alive within us.  We become powerful by dissolving our false ideas of who we are, our false ideas of power, and the patently false idea that we understand the full parameters of what is possible of our existence.  I think power is important to discuss, because without it we will not be able to heal the various tragedies of our current  individual and collective experience.  In a sense, it is the withholding of our authentic power that enables the world as we see it to exist at all.

A key step for each of us is to develop the insight that genuine power can only serve, not harm– and that it serves all beings.  A Course of Love says it this way, “This is the new realm of power that few in physical form have practiced and that has never been practiced by many at one time.  It is a major shift because it is not neutral but creative.  It is of creation and can only flow through those that have mastered neutral observation because the intent of creation, rather than the intent of the observer, is the creative force, the animator and informer.  This power cannot be misused because it is unavailable to those who have not realized their oneness with the creative force.”

The idea expressed here is that transformative, creative power is not available to us so long as we occupy a divided land of separate wills.  It is not a skill we can practice and claim as our own to do with as we please.  We cannot be in relationship to power, and still carry secretly within us the desire to be special, to reach some exultant state, or to have power over another.  We must be unified within, and without.  Becoming powerful isn’t about making a single life better– such as our own– but about allowing the energy and intent of creation to further the movement of the whole through the yielding of our presence unto its grace.  Ideas like this leave me with the inspired feeling of how little I’ve managed to open myself, and how deep the experience of unity can truly be.

When we ponder ideas such as these, it is natural to wonder what the next steps are.  How do we enter more deeply into a relationship with the power of creation?  I am increasingly thinking that this type of questioning is a classic example of how a mind rooted in separateness might proceed.  What do I do?  What are the skills I must practice, and the knowledge I must perfect?  Increasingly, I find myself trusting that this will all take care of itself as we open ourselves more deeply to the presence of Love.  As we stay near to this holy life within us, we find we know what to do next.  Our own role in the process dissipates.  It takes care of itself.  There is a sense of peace in the simplicity of this for me, for that ease of unfolding is itself a validation of the idea that true power never harms or divides.  We know this, because it’s expression doesn’t require the focused efforts of any one of us to execute our will– merely the willingness to be open to the ideas and inspiration that speak to and through us.

Perhaps most importantly, power isn’t nothing at all.  It’s something, and it’s big.  I don’t want to leave on the impression that it’s just a nice idea.  It is the potential within us, accessible through unity, to heal and transform this world, to make the unseen seen, and to move mountains.  As we transcend the historical patterns of separation and specialness, we create the space for such power to express freely, through lives in which bitterness, uncertainty, scorn and anger have been dissolved, resulting in the discovery that true power is all that remains…