Embracing Forever

Disarmament (Part 2)

March 15, 2015

by Michael

This post is part of a short fictional series. It comes with a brief apology about the length. I’m aiming to keep each segment under a thousand words, but, well… yeah… The beginning is here.

* * * * *

Click.

They were gone.

The sound seemed to shrivel and disappear beneath the threshold, pulling every other sound with it. There was nothing left but my breathing, and the blank-faced stare of the walls. For a moment, I actually hoped the door would fly open and they would burst back into the room with smiles on their faces. With balloons on strings bobbing against the door frame. All of them fighting to squeeze through at once.

Surprise!

These desires only accentuated the emptiness around which I circled—an emptiness I was avoiding. Avoiding by dragging my finger back and forth across the upholstery. (It had a dull feel in one direction, and a more rippled one in the other.) Avoiding by hoping the next breath would reveal a way out– the arrival of angelic instructions, or the emergence of a secret passage.

On the in-breath I took hope. On the out-breath I sank to the bottom.

Anything?

Nothing.

Take another. Quick.

I looked around the room. What was even happening? Anything? Maybe nothing was happening. Maybe I wasn’t ready for this. What had convinced me I was worth such trouble? How was I going to find the wire anyway? I looked at the snips, floating on the other cushion like a dead mechanical bird—already a symbol of my failure. Already out of reach.

When I turned back I saw the empty receptacle in the floor lamp across the room, and I remembered the preparations—the careful way Hafiz had packed up the toaster and the microwave, the way Jesus had walked the perimeter hour after hour the night before. I remembered what they had told me, the little things they’d slipped into our conversations during the last few months.

You have to sing your way to the wire…

Be observant of the openings. If there’s a window, be watchful of it…

The messages will come…

I remembered Hafiz had taught me to chant. That beautiful night at his kitchen table, in the fluttering of candle light, I had wanted explanations. Answers. He’d just smiled and begun to chant softly. For an instant the flame had seemed to dance with him. Now those sounds were inside of me. They were growing, starting to move around in my chest like baby bears awakening from a long winter.

I stood. I moved to the center of the room, facing the window, my throat dry and heavy.

I wondered if the boys outside would hear me. What about the neighbors? The people on the street walking home from the bus with groceries under their arm. What if they came knocking? This wasn’t even my place.

I took a breath. Hope filled my lungs.

The first feeling I released—the first one to leap across the wire and complete the larger circuit—was that question about being found. About being seen, alone in an empty room, falling apart. If someone opened the door, I would have nothing to offer. I don’t know what I’m doing either. Get me out of here.

I let it come.

I hummed the tune, shakily at first. My voice felt shabby in the void, tarnished. But the tune had a rhythm. Each round seemed to strengthen a configuration in the space around me. By the third round I knew I was building something. A refuge. A little while later, I was actually singing, and the silence around me– still full of the previous verses– rang as if a choir had gathered. It was joyous.

I sat back on the couch, warmed. Emptiness returned to the room’s corners, but crept no closer. There were waves moving through me. Soft assurances. I felt as though I had built my first fire in the wilderness. Perhaps I would make it through the night.

The messages will come.

I placed my whole being into that thought. My out-breaths began to feel more and more like invitations, like desires pouring from my heart, and soon I was rocking gently in place. Carrying myself. Trusting in what was to come.

I waited.

All day, I waited, my faith falling slowly, like a sun, towards the horizon.

By nightfall my fire was down to simmering coals. The corners of the room were closing in again, and I could hardly see the stain on the opposite wall. No messages had come for me. No insights or revelations. I was laboring to quell a mounting despair. I knew if I let it overtake me, I would plummet into spaces beyond my reach. The night would swallow me whole.

Despite my premonitions, the descent was swift. A little later I was coiled on the couch. Begging. Please. Remembering the touch of Jesus’ cheek against mine. Please. Please.

Still, nothing came.

I was a tattered flag. Frayed strips of being. I was ashamed of my earlier hopes. Of my foolish desires. When the tears finally came, it took my whole body to shake them loose.

Sometime in the night a streetlamp flickered to life down the avenue, and a column of faded light shone through the window. It cast a yellowed rectangle high up on the wall. I watched it off and on for hours. Its presence was precious to me, like a beacon, but I couldn’t understand it. What did it mean?

I had nearly drifted to sleep when the thud of something heavy in the next room jolted me upright. I swallowed hard. My body felt like a rag, but I was instantly alert. Some spark deep inside of me had still been at the ready, had never faded. I listened to something clattering around in the bedroom—something big. Something with legs.

I waited for it.

The subfloor creaked as it strode in slow circles around the other room, searching. Then it came through the doorway into the hall, and paused. I could hear its breathing—a series of deep, full-chested draughts. I could feel its simplicity, its purity. The floor groaned once more and the sound of breathing approached until I could see two hot plumes jetting out of the darkness from across the room.

I watched, transfixed. My feelings escaped my ability to comprehend them. It was as if I was in ten places at once, but all of them right in that room. I felt both vulnerable and powerful. Like life itself. Minutes passed. An hour maybe. I just watched. She breathed. Two clouds of gentle mist. On. Off. On. Off.

Later I understood the realization had always been there, but it came to the surface slowly, like the way our bodies age. She was waiting for me. She had always been waiting for me. Since before I could remember. And now she was here, at the edge of the room, and her every breath was an invitation.

Disarmament (Part 1 of the Rest)

March 12, 2015

by Michael

comments 41

Christ / Fiction

Well, I couldn’t squish this into a single post… I promise it won’t be too many. Welcome to my short foray into serial fiction…

* * * * *

It was just a small apartment. I don’t know what I had really expected, but not something so patently vacant. It would end here? There was a dinged up coffee table, a faded olive sofa that didn’t match the carpet, a landslide of unsorted mail on the counter. A stain on the wall. It was a place abandoned—a place forgotten. I imagined the current occupant was probably spending nights over at his girlfriend’s. Or maybe he was backpacking in Europe. Finding himself. Falling easily into laughter. Smoking cigarettes. Cursing at something delightfully obnoxious. Everything in front of him.

I was jealous in a way.

Because I was here. Taking the full tour. Staring down the pain.

They told me before we came: we can only show you which wire it is. You have to be the one to cut it. If it depends on me, I thought, there could be a problem. Then Jesus had grabbed one of my shoulders in each of his hands and given a firm squeeze—had held me still, like he was cementing something into my middle. I wished I had seen doves lifting into the sky, but all I’d seen was a tub of that fake butter we used to eat growing up. I felt like abandoning myself altogether. I couldn’t match his willingness at all. Not even close. He said afterwards, when all this was over, even breathing would be a joy. He said we’d go somewhere and just breath together. Sky diving maybe. Lots of air up there. We had laughed.

Then they’d brought me here. They led me through the door and sat me on the couch. Slid the coffee table out of the way. Made the room an empty space. I was already starting to feel it then. The pressure. The need to be somewhere else. Couldn’t we go out for a sandwich? Why couldn’t we just do that? Just sit by the window and talk about something philosophical while we watched people wobble down the street. Maybe I could achieve the purest realization that way, too. What did method matter?

Last night, every so often but never quite relenting, you could hear the wind-up of tinny engines straining on their mounts. There’s something farcical about the sound of beater cars trying to haul ass down the alley back there. All those meshugganahs gunning their way through the modern ruins. They all think they’re going somewhere. To them, the act of accelerating is perfectly reasonable, but all I could hear was something hungry in the sound of their passing. The sounds didn’t stick. They just glanced off the sides of buildings and dissipated into the darkness.

Gone forever.

We had talked some during the night, but mostly they’d been in the next room working. Out of sight. Preparing… listening… making sure.

Jesus was at the window now, peeking out through a gap in the curtains. Waiting patiently. Earlier he’d made the rounds one last time. Walked along the outer wall, then down the hall and through the bedroom. Across the hall into the bathroom. Back through the kitchen. He took slow, measured steps. I could see his mouth moving occasionally, as if he were whispering to someone, but I couldn’t hear the words. I could just feel something rising– my commitment and my doubts together. A sea full of shattered timbers.

When he walked past the refrigerator, he paused, listening carefully. His breath slowed right down and his eyes closed. I pictured the guy who lived here swinging open that refrigerator door. I heard the rattle of condiment bottles, imagined him reaching for a beer. So effortless. So easy. Just because. Then Jesus was there, statuesque on the linoleum, receiving instructions. Setting a boundary. Discussing the matter that lay ahead of us with Power itself, with a woman perhaps.

All I could see was the way every fiber of his being was present, the way he seemed to be a conduit to places I could scarcely comprehend. Places that were arriving to set up camp. Doorways.

Openings.

Now he was at the window, and Hafiz was handing me the snips. For cutting the wire. A bottle of water. A blanket. Nothing else.

“Feels like Gethsemane in here, doesn’t it?” It was meant to be a joke.

It just fell into the silence and disappeared. It stung.

They were slipping away from me, easing out of my space.

Hafiz, his back to me, was up on a step ladder in the hallway taking the batteries out of the smoke detector. Coming back through, he flicked the light switch one last time. No power. Good.

They were scanning the place for any last minute tasks. Any moment now, and they’d be gone. I was on the verge of tears—could almost taste the loneliness creeping in along the seams where the walls met the floor. Could sense the silence hiding in the folds of the curtains. Another whiny four-banger turned the corner and sped down the avenue outside. The noise faded, emphasizing the magnitude of something hollow into which I was slipping.

Hafiz kissed me on the forehead, silently, his hands on my cheeks, lingering for a moment, and walked out the front door. Jesus waited by the window for his cue. I could hear the faint whoo-hoos of a couple of boys on bikes from down the block. He took one last breath. A long one. Then he came over, leaned in and placed his cheek next to mine, his mouth close to my ear.

He told me to just let it come.

All of it.

Let it come.

My hand, holding the snips, was shaking.

Then he walked out, too, and the door clicked shut.

A Good Treatment

March 9, 2015

by Michael

comments 28

Creative

However it happened—none can really say.

I only know that I was standing in a pasture filled with mirrored boxes, like disco saunas, and that people were lined up in front of them in silent repose. We were like a host of jet-lagged arrivals waiting to get our passports stamped—or our eyes examined, or our opinion surveyed, or our future turned upside down and shaken out, its contents inspected for contraband bits of the past. Whatever the hell was going on here, having just found out you were here, and not somewhere else entirely, the obvious thing was to wait your turn.

The whole thing was quite stately once you took it all in. Placid. A beautiful row of mirrored boxes, each of them roughly ten foot square, lined up through the field and down towards the water like drips of blood from some fleeing crystalline god. It was quite a sight. Even at the front of the line, there was no escalation of mysterious intensity just because you were next. It felt right to wait calmly, with a quiet demeanor, which I was doing until a woman stepped out of the mirrored pane before me with ash all over her face and coveralls, with tears streaming down her cheeks, and with eyes that sparkled to the light of a setting sun whose origin defied location.

She was looking right at me, but seeing somewhere else.

A hand reached out from the box and yanked her back, and she was gone. Her eyes stayed with me though. There was no sunset in this field of glass mysteries. No fiery amber orbs dipping out of sight. What could she have been seeing? And how? From where I stood, in this field of pleasant beings lined up in front of these glass disco saunas, there was only a benign tranquility. Like that first page of the book that’s intentionally left blank. And then that woman, and her tears.

I coughed into my balled fist. Was it my turn?

The hand reached out from the box, finger pointed right at me, a finger that swiveled around in a perfect half circle and curled upwards, beckoning me forwards.

Right then.

In you go.

I walked right through the plane of mirrored light and into the examining room.

The doctor began by asking me to have a seat on the examination table, which I did of course.

“You have to imagine,” he began, “the point at which non-existence realized it was you.”

“Could we have introductions first?” I said.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t know who I am.”

“Well, you seem very familiar. Do you write poems?”

“No.”

“Were you in a movie?”

“No.”

“Is this place real?”

“No.”

“Well, you seem very familiar.”

“Been doing this a long time. Plus there’s only one of us. Now listen up. Lots of people to treat today. You have to imagine,” he began again, “the point at which non-existence realized it was you.”

(It comes easier than you think, I have to say.)

“Good. Now at first, it’s a benign tranquility, right?”

“I think that’s my line.”

“Well of course it is. Whose would it be otherwise? Now—first, it’s a benign tranquility. Then there’s a moment in which you realize: you don’t have a clue who you are. But it seems… it seems as though suddenly, for the first time, you might be some thing. The reality is, you could be most anything.”

“I’m me, you mean.”

“Yes! Yes, that’s it exactly!”

(I realized I was a natural.)

“But think back! Think back very carefully! How did you get there?”

“No idea.”

“Think back to the point at which non-existence realized it was you. Where were you right before that?”

“No idea.”

“But you were there, right? Just before you were there– there you were.”

“Non-existence was there, yes.”

“Yes! Now, here’s the thing. What if the point at which non-existence realized it was you was the point at which non-existence realized it was so much more than a benign tranquility?”

“I’m listening.”

“What if non-existence realized that it never wasn’t, meaning that it never began and will never end, and that it was by its very nature—an immaterial nature neither created nor changeable—an endless plenum of goodness and beauty?”

“Then it would turn into me?”

“Exactly.”

“We’re unbelievable, you and I.”

“Indeed.”

“Thank you, doctor. I really must say, this has been quite helpful.”

“You’ve had a good treatment today. Name’s Hafiz, by the way.”

“Pleasure.”

“Likewise.”

High Fidelity Stillness

March 4, 2015

by Michael

comments 40

Course Ideas

My unfolding as a being has undergone a few prompt jumps in self-expression. In the 1990 time frame I went from viewing rock music as one of the influences most likely to lead to my destruction– in the same category as cigarettes, underage drinking, and not doing your homework– to buying Nirvana’s record Nevermind. And feeling somehow holy about it. It was auspicious. The lightning I had anticipated failed to strike. It takes all of thirty seconds to change everything, do an about face, become one of them. One week later I was playing Nirvana’s prior album Bleach in the cassette player, and a good friend at the time asked if we could go back to Brown-Eyed Girl on the radio.

He was disturbed by my life choices. Who are you???

My first concert, aside from being on the business end of a few My Country Tis of Thee’s at St. Richard’s Parish Elementary School, was a Dinosaur Jr. show. They were on tour for the album Green Mind. I was a shy and introverted freshman in high school, and this was one of my secrets still below ground. I had devoted the better part of my free time during the preceding four years to learning how to kick a soccer ball with either foot, and making it go where I told it. I had a goal in the back yard I had built out of downed pine trees dragged out of the woods, and some rope. My altar.

These devotions resulted in my making the varsity soccer team, which meant I would be playing ball for Grady Cain. He had coached the arch-rival club team from the other side of town that had always whooped our ass in the State Tournament during the developmental years so discussed, so this was going to be interesting. He knew what I was made of, though, so that worked in my favor. He was a plumber with a Trans Am that he required to be sand-blasted and repainted every year: two coats of tar black beneath two clear coats of pure shine. He wore mirror sunglasses and listened to Suzy Q and smoked long brown cigarillos on the sideline while coaching up young men to be all they could be.

Grady was an unbelievable man, and I wish I’d had the perspective a few of the seniors had possessed– to just enjoy him. But I was just trying to find a way through. He was a fan of deep honesty at halftime, and calling it like it was while we chugged down our electrolytes.

“Michael– you suckin’ out there today, baby. You look like a three day old wind. You wanna’ tell me somethin’???”

No, sir.

“Pick your head up. They eatin’ your lunch.”

Yessir.

Then he’d turn to the next person. “Brandon.” Long pause. A trail of smoke from the cigarillo. “You playin’ good ball, son.”

Yessir.

“You stick with that number twenty-seven. He ain’t got nothin’ you don’t got two or three of.”

Yessir.

One night at the end of practice we were all sitting around, and one of the seniors intimated to his friends through a sudden flurry of high five’s that he would be attending a rock concert the subsequent evening. A school night. Well, guess what– so was I. Maybe time to speak up, here. Make some new friends. Isn’t that what pre-season was for?

Me, too. (kind of a croak)

“What? …get outta’ town. Who you goin’ to see???”

Well, now I’d stepped in it. I bought the album, but that didn’t mean I was ready for anyone else to know about it. I understood these guys drew the lines a little differently than I did, that this conversation could lead me rapidly to my demise. They probably liked the kind of bands other people actually liked– not the ones esteemed by slackers and punks. But there was no way out but through. You sense that. In every moment of difficulty, you know this.

Dinosaur Jr.

“What the– Holy shit! Right on, man.” High five. I think he wanted to make me his little brother.

Phew…

Brown-Eyed Girl is just lookin’ at me. What the hell, man… What in the world…

The thing about rock concerts, if you can get to the right ones, is you realize that what you’re accustomed to experiencing in the mini-van sound system is second hand. There’s a raw power to a live performance– if you catch the band on the right night, and it’s the right crowd, and you engage with the entire auditorium. You become the leaf in the hot water.

Smashing Pumpkins twenty years ago, on the right night, on tour for Siamese Dream, suggested a thing or two about the nature of all existence. There was something holy about it. Not something about cheating a school night, or getting high, or doing something just because you could, but something about feeling like a completely still stone in the midst of a reverberating ocean. A quiet that could carry all the waves.

Later I’ve come to realize, I can hear the concert inside of the song while the radio is playing. I can hear the concert through my headphones. Anywhere. Any genre. You can hear what it would sound like live. You can taste it. The concerts themselves hardly cut it anymore, in some ways. I’m already hearing too deeply on my own. We have this part of ourselves that’s always in high fidelity mode, and once we awaken it, we can add depth and color to every experience. Buying granola can be a peak experience. We can hear the audacity inside of it, the way putting a bag of grain on the rubber belt and looking the cashier in the eye can be a way of blowing holes into a second hand world.

That feeling of watching Kurt Cobain’s hair being blown around from the fan he kept by the pedals, while he chord-shifted without looking and dispatched a rare, gravelly form of authenticity– that got me flowing in a direction. Nudged me off of top dead center. That was just a taste of this reality called holiness. This high fidelity experience. You learn to hear the concert inside of the moment. To realize each encounter portends something raw and powerful.

This is what Love is. A purity of knowing. One hundred percent experience, maximum fidelity, but no objects. Being a leaf in the water. Being a stone in the ocean during a hurricane. Being at peace while the world rages. Being a whisper that can change everything.

* * * * *

What Was That?

March 2, 2015

by Michael

comments 21

Poetry

Every once in a while
reality gets in a mood.
Wants to bust up the ice.
Show us our options.
Get the lead out.
Crumple up history into a ball.

Rubs its hands together.
Blows on the dice.
Not for luck.
Oh no.
The devoted–
the ones
alone in the gym
before daylight
about to shoot their five hundred free throws–
they do the same.
Twirl the world in their hands.
Breathe deep.
Visualize it.
Take the measure of it.

Swoosh.

Feels good to move like that.
Feels pure.
Bounce, bounce. Twirl.
See it again.

Swoosh.

You’re leaving the cafe,
and this guy that seems to like
wearing his headphones
like a bowtie
and accosting perfect strangers
asks you what ya’ got?

In your pockets, man!
Whatcha’ got!?

Normally you wouldn’t, but…
this guy feels like
an off-duty amnesiac archangel
that crashed into your best friend’s older brother
and inherited all his crazy jokes,
like he’s never done this before
and he knows exactly what he’s doing.
He’s something innocent and in between.
With a backpack.
Dreadlocks.
Dark sunglasses.
Where’s he sleep at night???
Where’s he gonna’ be in ten minutes!?

Let’s see…
You start digging.

Car keys.

He’s staring off into space.
Mumbling something.
Smoothin’ his fingers together
like he’s about to pull
a rattlesnake out of
a potato sack.

Cell phone.
ID.
Receipt for fish tacos.

No, no man!
Put that shit away, bro!
That one.
He’s pointing like a stage actor
to your winter coat’s
hidden pocket,
the one that was specifically designed
with the urban spelunking crowd
in mind.

The one you never use.

Dog whistle.

Hmmm…
Weird.
Where’d that come from…?
The kids… Last year at the, uh–
Oh yeah…
Right.

You’re grinning.
Was that the punchline?
He’s pretty good, this guy.
That was pleasant.

You ain’t done yet, man!

Wait. What!?

You reach in to your pocket,
fish around for a bit,
pull out a mint condition
Cracker Jack toy
like you haven’t seen
in probably four decades.

Swoosh.

A tiny book of tattoos.
You’re fumbling with the pages.
Time is dilating.
Dreadlock’s doing that laugh
that sounds like he’s imitating
a washing machine with a sinus cold.
He’s got one hand over his mouth.
He’s about to fall over.
But you’re oblivious.
It’s been so long
since you tasted this feeling.
Your eyes are leaking.
You can smell pine trees.
You remember how
you used to kick ant beds
just to see what would happen.
You remember there’s still
such a thing as
pristine, raw wonder.
Blissful curiosity.
You had it once–
there was nothing in the world
but meaningful things, then.
A glass bottle in the dirt
merited a full inquiry.

Why did someone put that there, Dad?

Your world has broken open.
You’re at the center of the Tootsie Pop.

You look up.
He’s gone.
You’re walking.
Just walking.

Some moments
just don’t fit
the usual taxonomies
of experience.

But they sure do happen.

Creation of the New (a.k.a. Muck-Wading)

February 28, 2015

by Michael

comments 21

Course Ideas

Several posts I read this week raised a similar question about the New: what would it look like to you? What would it feel like? Who would we be? I wrote in one response that it seemed to me we would trust one another and all that is around us— meaning the heart of the world itself—in a very deep way. Then I went out and lived the type of week that made my musings seem silly and naive. The actual application of these ideas can be incredibly difficult.

I take this matter of the New seriously, because I feel that it is already alive within us— breathing, dreaming and desiring to come forth. We’re desiring it to come forth, too, for we are it. We are desiring ourselves to come forth.

We know, at some level, even if it’s hard to describe in words, what we are up to here. We can feel it within us. This jubilance. We can feel its heartbeat. We can sense its enormity. We wonder how such magnitude will flow through the birth canal of our beingness and into the world. We sense that getting this New into full swing—into evident reality, into the relationships and interactions that collectively result in the climate, the condition of wild salmon fisheries and bison herds, the cost of housing, the subtlety of our healing arts, the discoveries of particle physics, the zoning ordinances, or the architectures of our commerce—will require our living it into form.

Living it.

This all sounds wonderful, until you see the extent to which we are woven into relationships and systems in which living it seems to mean facing an endless string of difficult choices—choices between people, choices between opportunities, choices affecting livelihoods, happiness, and outcomes—none of which seem at all related to jubilation. In order to avoid particulars I will paint a picture of my experience this week.

Imagine you own a farm that has been in your family for several generations. It is the type of mid-size farm that has been forced to compete for business in an increasingly competitive and global market—a farm that has managed to hang on through innovation, through meticulous attention to the maintenance of assets and equipment, through innovative branding and selling strategies, through building relationships in the local community, and through changing the means of production five to ten years ahead of the emerging trends.

Margins are lean, and it’s time to invest again. What’s working now, won’t be working in another five years’ time. You decide to automate the growing systems. This involves installing a complex system you don’t fully understand—an unnerving array of computers, wireless transmitters, remote soil hygrometers, light cells, anemometers, solar cells and charging stations, pumps, control valves and instrumentation.

Now imagine you speak with three or four potential suppliers of the system, and pick one you think will do a good job and be reasonable to work with. The work begins. The supplier discovers that the slope of the land is such that the standard pumping system won’t work. It must be supplemented by a secondary pump station. There was no way to know this without performing a survey, and surveys are typically not performed at the time the job is bid. You accept.

Two weeks later you are told that in order to properly supply water and nutrients to one quadrant of your best field, you will need a signal booster for the instrumentation in that sector, and an extra solar panel station. Now the costs are increasing to levels that cause alarm. You may become angry, feel pushed into a corner. The supplier indicates that the need for the additional equipment could not have been known prior to performing the detailed study of your farm that was offered as the first step of the work.

Bullshit.

Bullshit is how you’re feeling. Bullshit at the surprises you can’t fence off your land. Bullshit at the surprises you can’t afford. Bullshit at the difficulty of trying to do something well, and being stymied once again. Bullshit at the precious savings you’ve spent that can’t be recovered. Bullshit at the thought of stopping, and losing it all. Bullshit at the thought of telling your kids they’ll be going to a different school. Bullshit at the thought of going forward and losing even more. It’s difficult. For everyone involved, it is difficult.

Imagine the supplier is your son. Imagine he’s right. Imagine it really couldn’t have been known without two weeks of careful study.

Just like this, in ways both big and small, we are brought into difficulty on a daily basis by circumstance, by constraints and desires, by the very nature of the systems in which we live. If the supplier had a magic wand, he’d supply what was needed. But maybe that’s his rent money for the next six months. If the farmer had a magic wand, it wouldn’t matter either. But she doesn’t have one either. And we are miles away now from that feeling in our heart about the New. We are miles away from the jubilant feeling of trust. We are in the difficulty, the compromise, and the sacrifice.

The muck.

The burden.

You could take my example and come up with all sorts of ways it could have unfolded differently, or been done better. You could apply them to the next farm, but the secret of this world—the Old, separate world— is that they wouldn’t help. The challenges there would be unique. The people involved would have different biases, different triggers, different rivers of reality flowing through them. The surprises would be present, pushing it to the brink. Difficulties have a way of finding us. The muck flows in through cracks in the scenery.

What then?

The New absolves us of the muck somehow, but not by managing it. You don’t manage the muck. The New handles these situations in the invisible realms. The circumstances arise, but there’s margin in them, a ray of light, a way to wiggle through. It’s just there. You’re never quite backed into the corner. Your main tool is a needle, whose eye is very worn. I think that is how it begins. It’s like reality judo. You have just enough presence to sidestep a lunge and let it tumble past, out of reality. If you’re really good, you grabbed the person next to you and held them out of the way, too. When the muck arrives, you do the very best you can, knowing there are no guarantees.

No matter what happens, what is said, how it goes down: you love the farmer. You know the farmer loves you.

The farmer calls a friend for advice. He’s an attorney. The attorney has the desire in his or her heart to give the farmer every advantage possible, to take words and explore their nuanced possibilities, to line them up like sand bags along the sea wall of this difficulty. Meanwhile, the supplier has a closed door meeting with his or her partners. The farm is beginning to look like a chess board, the fields like black and white trapezoids. Everyone is trying to understand the moves. Every word starts to glisten with sweat.

You love the supplier. You know the supplier loves you.

The muck is the problem. The muck has distorted what’s really happening. Because, really, this is simply what it feels like to find a brother you need, and one who needs you—to grab hold of one another, and wade out together through the muck, your needle-eyes out before you, probing the darkness for a way back.

The Four Directions of Light

February 24, 2015

by Michael

comments 28

Poetry

The limited
predictive intelligence
of nuance
can sometimes
permit the obfuscation
of the glaringly obvious.

Said another way:
forecasts
predicated on the data
typically accrued
during the life span
of a single human being
are known to be
astoundingly flawed.

This may explain
why Hafiz and Rumi
stare at me like a pair
of dispassionate fieldstones
on the verge of sprouting horns
when I wax extemporaneously
about the day’s events—
as if my mouth is moving,
but only strange runes
and soap bubbles
are coming out,
as if they’re waiting patiently
for what I’ve just described
to be translated through
three different languages
bridging the perceptual gaps
between nine different realms
before they can even attempt
to make sense of it,
by which point what I’ve said
has become the sound
of a chestnut dropped onto a car hood
in plain sight of a convenience store.

In attempts to compensate
for the pitiful audacity
of my conclusions,
I’ve found probing
the extremes can often help
reveal the trends
subtlety obscures.

Consider:
if you take your life up
into the hands
of your mind,
gently,
as if you were gathering
the folds of a great,
rainbow-colored tunic
and folding them into
a living rose,
and then you picture
how that beautiful life
might have transpired
had you been
the only human on the earth—
e.g. truly alone—
if you’re honest
in your entertainment
of such a position,
I think you’ll
soon see the reality
of what a “self” really is,
as I did in one such simulation,
wherein I witnessed
the inevitability of my
wandering destitute
across the landscape,
mumbling strange things
to myself and
my adopted family of pine cones,
pigeon feathers
and sea glass bits,
my form decorated
with a legion
of home-crafted
talismans and trinkets
designed to keep
the bad things away.

Eschewing nuance,
I was able to see:
my personal magnificence
was tawdry.

And:
we need each other
with sublime urgency.

I was stunned speechless
by the impact of this insight
upon my forehead,
which was like that of a chestnut
dropped quite precisely
out of a clear blue sky.
Overwhelmed with gratitude
for every last detail
of existence,
I lost all recourse to language
and hand signals,
at which time
Rumi and Hafiz simply nodded,
shrugging their shoulders
in acknowledgment of the obvious,
having just heard the sound
of several fine oxen debating
the benefits of a stomach
with four compartments,
one for each direction
of Light.

The Moon Is On Fire

February 21, 2015

by Michael

comments 24

Christ

The place itself, the physical structure, was built to produce a return. It’s all right angles and flashing from a tube, inoperable windows, and two-tone exterior panels of artificial masonry. But it’s where we do it. Each morning we drive in from all points of the compass to the center, gathering together as befits us, to produce work. That’s the key, really. To produce work. To offer something up. The flimsy walls don’t matter. The dropped ceiling and droning lights. The rattling ductwork. The flat beige interior dotted with random images from our past– welded pipes and glycerin-filled gauges captured on film that remind us of what we did last time.

None of that matters.

It’s the people and the ideas that make it real. The ones right now. The frustrations and the perseverance. The jokes that nudge us into a different timeline. The bitching in the offices, the break room, and the foyer. The resilience. The quirks and hang-ups, the stunning hubris, the fuzzy-headed pencils, and the perpetual pining for fairness. The pressing against one another’s souls. Asking all day for things we simply don’t need or understand. Washing into and smoothing one another out like stones in a spring river.

It’s late, and I step outside– find myself eye-to-eye with the faint gray suggestion of a moon, and it’s resting on a crescent of glowing reddish-orange. The space shuttle used to look just like that when it was crashing down through the sky. There must be an invisible flame out there in space none of us can see, a black river of heat expelled by the sun on which the moon floats. Venus sits nearby, gleaming.

Why do we have a security system on the building when we have that?

The lot is mostly empty, a windswept enclave sheltered by a ring of driven snow piles. A place for looking and seeing. My heart is an astronomical body, too, a drifting silence pockmarked by collisions– a wholeness, mostly hidden, with one side illuminated by an invisible wind.

The amount of communication required to bind a motley collection of half-built lives into a single movement is staggering. The chance of flare-ups and sparks– of crossing wires– often holds steady right around 100%. Identities crackle. Things chirp and buzz all day. E-mails appear from over the horizon like a steady river of pilgrims. They don’t know I’m not ready yet, that I’m just a man behind a curtain. They don’t care. They’re not that type of pilgrims. All day, hopefully singing, hopefully in rhythm, we paddle up a river of information. We give the pilgrims bread. A pat on the back. The message they came for.

You start to think you’re immune to Alcyone’s blue whim, that your world is truly in plain sight. A scope of which you can conceive. If only this one thing could get pressed free of wrinkles. Just this one thing. That would be nice. You’re working on that. Everyone else is working on something else. From a dimension adjacent to our own, this box of beings looks like a bazaar quantum appliance– a washing machine for scrubbing the daylights out of our tangled thinking. Coffee cups and computer monitors are swirling in circles. White boards are sloshing in the center. Ideas are blossoming everywhere at once, then collapsing, like a militia of churning soap bubbles. Schedules are banging around like old boots. But everywhere you look it’s the eyes that draw you in. Eyes all over the place. We’re a cloud chamber full of eyes. Miffed eyes. Hot eyes. Cool eyes. Heavy eyes. Not-on-my-watch eyes. Brown and hazel ones. Eyes trained to listen before speaking. Eyes that want to get to the fucking point. Hungry eyes. Knowing eyes. A trusting pair. Unwavering, been-there-done-that eyes. Blue eyes. Not me eyes. Eyes that draw lines everywhere they look, like ink jet nozzles torn free from a Hewlett-Packard.

The trick is to walk in there in the morning like a white sheet of canvas the Buddha stretched, realized was perfect, and set to idle in the sun while he made tea, and then to walk out in the afternoon or evening in just the same way. Clean and whistling to the birds. Ready to look the moon in the eye. Then wink at Venus.

Some people don’t like this kind of thing. Getting up in the morning, going in to the washing machine. Getting scrubbed. Pressing soul against soul. Being pushed and pulled by the soap suds, friction and gristle. Coming out covered in the ash of detonations. But when I’m honest, I see how brilliant this is. This cosmic appliance of life. Where else can we get all of our bullshit and resistance into one place, where we can see it? And clean it. Let it be rinsed away.

I don’t know.

It seems to be working, anyway.

How could it not?

You chuck a flotilla of saints into a wormhole. Put the moon kettle on boil. And you brew up something everlasting.

Out in the Open

February 17, 2015

by Michael

comments 20

Christ / Poetry

This writing has undone me,
peeled away my knowing
and my nonsense,
and led me way out

way out

from the edge
to where there are no shadows,
to where the clear light
is visible in every direction,
to where the wind is always scented
by the horizon–
in hues of timber and sunlight,
in copal, cedar, and jasmine.
Some days flowers fall from the sky,
but no matter.
What would it matter?
I remember there was a shoreline,
somewhere we moved in circles once–
little spiders crawling all over
and around each other
underneath the sun,
always dragging lines of silk
from here to there,
trying all day to politely
undo the knot.

Now it’s like this:
nothing but a line of weathered faces
with soft black eyes
set into the wind,
all of us walking this trail
towards the…

(I don’t know…)

The shape of the human shoulder–
it could be enough for one day,
could lead to weeping.
Like the taste of a single, shriveled berry
drawn out from the pouch.
Out here it becomes obvious:
the ones who mean the most
are everywhere.
Sometimes we can hear
each other’s silence,
and when we rest,
we know to sit in a circle.

You think sometimes…
while you still can…
(before it fades entirely…)
of what was…
of going back…
to the shoreline…
to the boxes and glass…
It’s a thought…
Just that.
Like putting on a really old sneaker.
Crusty and awkward.
Stars half-way burned
sometimes tremble
at their own given audacity,
and ponder returning to the darkness,
but also realize:
the only route remaining
involves giving everything away.

The first steps are always tentative.
You start out alone, excited maybe–
frightened, purposeful.
You have an idea of it.
Eventually none of that matters.

You’re pulled out into the open.
You’re starving, wounded as the light itself.
You find footsteps, others…
You know to form a circle,
to keep your faces into the wind,
to walk in a line.

At first, Jesus was just on my bookshelf.
Hafiz was like a buoy,
on the border,
bobbing in the waves,
an invitation…
Love dropped on a wire
down from the sky,
crawled all around me,
weaving in silk.
When I was bound,
they hid inside my tears
so I could taste them.
One drop at a time.
Never too much at once.

This writing isn’t writing at all.
It’s just what brought me out here,
where we pass through one another,
far beyond
the possibility
of ever
going
back.

Ditching Progress

February 14, 2015

by Michael

comments 32

Course Ideas

The sleek apparatus we call progress has failed us. The signs are all around, if we but dare heed them. I’m very clear, for instance, that the curdling of country lanes into frost-heaved mogul courses should be a bygone phenomenon. You shouldn’t be forced to drink the day’s first cup of coffee while your kidneys are undergoing paratrooper training. Similarly, had progress been successful, tests of the Emergency Broadcast System would have been moot by now, lawyers would be blowing our minds with ever more efficient and transparent mechanisms of cooperation, and food would be both everywhere abundant and perishable.

These shortcomings are trivial, however, compared to the full-blown letdown.

We know progress hasn’t delivered on its promises, first and foremost, because messiness endures. Not group text messages or awkward high school photos that surreptitiously find their way to the Internet, but Grade A messiness– moments in which we are up to our knees in the raw yolks of our pain, when our most practiced visages come flying apart and a whole lot of we-don’t-even-know-what stumbles out into the open. The jail that once housed our worst fears is blown apart, and our polished presentation of selfhood is preempted by a gritty parade– pouring straight from us– of shame-faced beggars, pompous actuaries, neglected children, and hyped-up prima donnas. The whole sordid collection.

Progress was meant to save us from that unmasking. Part of the deal was that, if we applied ourselves, we’d be able to maintain a sense of reasonableness and decorum throughout. That gnawing black hole following us all around– full of horrible, no-good, very bad nothings– would fade from memory. Our merit badges would shine it into oblivion. We know something has gone wonky, though, because to get anywhere worth being you still have to go out back a few times in your life and hold yourself while you tremble, sink to the ground, and weep into the arms of a willow tree– your vision reduced to a blurry heat. To truly live, you still have to take the risk of your scariest, deepest and most confusing feelings coming to light in the presence of your lover. And some day, some where, a decision will find you that involves urgently choosing between bad and worse– a decision that will feel exactly like finally accepting your place in that strange ensemble of dilapidated demons that trot out every time your vigilance wanes.

Progress has failed to keep our worlds neat and tidy. But how could it have? That would have been like taking the world’s greatest gymnasts, at the peak of their powers, and telling them they could experience all the same things by becoming bookkeepers. We need a few brushes with muddy intensity along the way, just like a high-performance engine needs the soot blown off it once in a while.

But take away progress, and what are we left with?

Don’t we need a guiding vector or something? A compass needle? Don’t we need something to push off of so we can grow and expand?

This is my favorite part about ditching progress. When you’re left with nothing but what you’ve already been given, and you finally call that good enough, it starts to grow all on its own. It’s as if you unsuspectingly whispered the magic words. Acceptance is the moment when rainwater settles down into the soil and nestles around the seed, and that first tonal latching of molecule to molecule deep in the seed unfolds. Just by saying to yourself, I love you… I trust you… I know you… it all starts to open up. You welcome the return of that line-up of little horrors to the stage, and they become a ballet troupe right before your eyes. It’s not progress when veins of copper and tin become shiny trombones… it’s revelation.

In the absence of progress, what we’re left with is revelation. And that’s much better.

Beyond progress lies every good thing we are. Every good thing imaginable. The whirling of the present thickens us up into something delicious, like whipping cream. We recognize vastness without anonymity. Beauty and compassion become tangible in movement and form, and ubiquitous in our silence. Freed of the mandates of progress, we respond as we truly are, and it results in more of everything. We can be broken, vulnerable, happy and whole all at once– stumble into a puddle of mud, and then stand back up and laugh about it.

We can start living as beings who will never get to the bottom of ourselves. Ever.

And eventually, it’s quite possible, our roads will improve, but by then it’ll probably be too late. We’ll be bouncing along, splattering coffee all over the dash, our speakers long since blown, our voices crooning into the distance, loving everything just exactly the zany way it is.