The Function of Fir Trees

January 12, 2015
by Michael
comments 23
Poetry

A line of fir trees
have taken up watch,
wooden and resolute,
their tips a Gaussian congregation
of navy black steeples
hung upon a night sky
so clear and cold
you remember what it’s like
to open your door and venture out
into an endless, moaning whistle
that has frozen into place.
The trees–
they are like loaded questions,
sentries of the borealis
pantomiming secrets
you can guess at
if you pay attention
to the way their needles
dress up in shawls
of twinkling ice,
or the way their crowns
draw near to one another
to kiss with a light
you can’t even see.

Overhead,
far closer than the real ones,
are the manmade stars,
the satellites,
whizzing along through
barren territories colder still,
chirping and blinking
until the wheels fall off,
beaming messages in
all directions to whomever
will receive them,
chatterbox drones
divulging code
after code after code
after code
from their lazy arc
free-falls.

When you’re standing
below the boughs of fir trees,
looking up,
spinning along
on the surface of a planet
at about the same speed
as those manmade stars,
thinking about the way
a good solid evergreen
can sure strike up a deal
with the rigors of
a sub zero occupation,
you may not realize
you’re swimming in bursts
of bank codes
and gallery brochures, movie tickets
and maps, photographs of flowers,
babies, and nebulae.
You may not be considering
that information is zooming
through your skin
and into your bones
about the pyramids,
the migration of whales,
the steppes of Mongolia,
or the number of stops
between Chicago and Sydney.

But if you’re listening with
the whole of your being
you will realize what’s happening:
the real stars are broadcasting, too,
and fir trees in winter are devout antennae,
filling the earth full of futures–
stockpiling dreams
for the next seven generations.
If you’re listening with
the whole of your being,
you’ll realize
everything you’ll ever need
is pouring down right past you,
just beneath the bark,
and disappearing into the ground
for safe-keeping.

It could pop up just about anywhere,
you’ll think, and then you’ll laugh,
or probably stick your tongue out
at the whole universe.

Tag.

You’re it, Silly.

Our Quantum Heart

January 10, 2015
by Michael
comments 36
Course Ideas / Poetry

What we are…
is invisible,
alive,
dancing—
an incandescence
of possibilities
whirling through
the dark,
flickering—
always one step ahead
of the pin—
from one instant to the next,
traversing chasms between worlds,
discarding moments
that flutter softly to the ground
like feathers
pinched in the closing doors
of our fractured timelines.

What we are…
is immobile
but forever growing,
forever reaching out,
fruit-bearing and
branched,
a tree whose
upper-and-lower,
inner-and-outer limbs
snake through the
many-surfaced skies
of probability,
some here,
some there.

You and I,
we’ve looked right at It
without comprehending.
We’ve taken the quantum opiate.
We’ve heard about the particle
that became two
without ceasing to be one,
but still added up to none,
and we haven’t understood.
We’ve heard about the
spooky way realities collapse,
and doorways open,
but we haven’t realized:
every world spun off
from the spark-filled darkness
is a leaf blown free of the branch,
a frozen snapshot,
a lifeless image,
a withering perception
in which
What we are…
will never be caught.

We haven’t realized:
What we are…
isn’t showing off
by staying just out of reach,
by hiding behind worlds.
There are reasons for
every collapse and
holy cleaving.
We’ve forgotten, you see,
what the particles
are too simple to reveal:
that every room
into which hatred enters
becomes empty,
is one in which
What we are…
will not be found.
Having already
left the building,
every such room
is left to the fate
of a feather falling lazily
out of the sky
and back into the fire.
It is violence
that cleaves
a world free of the tree
and leaves it in dissolution.
It is the perfect preservation
of the sacred
that causes moments
to be plucked from
our astounding bifurcating field of simultaneity
and dropped into frozen collapse.

But never worry,
we are always
one step ahead
of what we are not.
What we are…
has always pulled us
out of every false hope
and hate-filled act,
leaving not one drop behind,
just like the autumn sky
claims for It’s own
each year
every hint of green
from every fallen leaf.

The Green Light

January 7, 2015
by Michael
comments 20
Poetry

I was weaving
my way through the desert,
trailing just behind them,
warmed by their presence,
soaking in their words–
a particle being carried
across the sea
by a raft of delicious
intelligence.

I came into a violent world,
the first said.
I came into a world
without a future–
a world on the brink,
a world on fire,
a world outflanked by death…
God “the Father”
was this idea
I came up with.
Alone in the darkness,
I created Him.
I found Him.
I invented Him.
And then I discovered
I knew Him,
and at the same time,
He knew me.
He was seeking me out.
I was His way in, His conduit.
Just as He was my way in.
We brought one another
to Life.

Hafiz nodded thoughtfully.
When you are for everything,
he replied,
you can do this.
You create more of everything.
It all opens before you.
Because everything is for you.

We needed a way to
make contact, Hafiz.
We both needed a face
we could touch.
We were born of necessity,
to a time and a place–
to an urgency
and a desire.
But that was only a beginning.
What are there but beginnings?
So much…
So much is possible…
This Power
will never be done.

So, basically,
Hafiz said,
as mountains
loomed in the distance
like travelers lining up
for an audience,
you want all beings–
like this madman here
trailing along in the sand
behind us
with no idea where he’ll
wake up in the morning–
beings who are
gnawing on the bone
of Endlessness
and find themselves
crossing a vast desert
with naught but a canteen
full of need,
to realize they have
the green light…

Yes…
Yes to this feeling, but
what’s a green light,
my Friend?

That’s a round symbol
hanging from the sky
that people line up to see
because when it shines
they snap awake from daydreams
and start racing forward
with the wind in their hair
and the sun on their faces.

Yes…

I know.
I want that, too.

I’m Not Big on Conspiracies, But…

January 5, 2015
by Michael
comments 16
Poetry

I’m not big
on conspiracy
theories,

but, man

when
your heart
becomes a field
of grinning beings
pulling rubies
out of a passed hat

and, there

that goddamned
magnificent moon
is staring you down
with a pregnant candor
that makes rocks moan
in their sockets
and try to
sneak you answers
to the question
of your existence,

and all this with
the whole domed sky
watching,

I do
grant you
there’s a certain
bald logic
to keeping
on your toes.

Dust

January 3, 2015
by Michael
comments 25
Poetry

A film lies over the world,
a distortive coating–
a difficulty that has been sprinkled
throughout the realm.
Somehow we let the powder
escape from the bag:
the dust that causes permanence
to fracture and dissemble into half-lives,
the dust that causes recognition
to thicken and cloud into obscurity.
The wind blew it in all directions.
Now everything is a strange,
skewed cinema of what it once was.
Now fading has become natural,
and youth commoditized–
work-hardened into a synthetic ideal
useful for both squandering and prizing.
With that powder loose,
if we look too closely at something,
we’ll just be confused by it,
dazzled by its hard-wired motility
and intrepid survival instincts.
Profound stuff, we’ll note.
Do you see how it recoils from fire?
Amazing…
Surely it means something.
It must be a message,
a memory breaking through the film.
Here’s the strangest part:
since when did survival matter?
I mean, when was there ever an alternative?
I’m pretty sure that idea came with the powder.
Prior to that, our powers hadn’t been dulled,
or diluted by protocols.
The doorways between the worlds had been open.
Now we are each brokered through intermediaries,
filtered through sequence and chance.
We work through channels,
and the ones who know explain to us
how and why a thing is possible.
Even Light no longer teleports.
Instead of merely bridging the distance
from here to there,
knowing itself as the omni-present
entry point to every other point,
now it flies by the rules.
Now, like us, it is given instructions
and can occupy only one place at a time.
The laws of this land even afford it choices–
straight lines or possible reflections
ordered by crystalline probabilities–
but wild horses in an endless maze
of towering stone walls and dead ends
just wither and age, or lie down and sleep,
preferring their dreams and memories
to arbitrary confines.

We do not break this spell
by fighting against it,
or proving those wrong
who are under its sway.
We do not break this spell
by turning it to our advantage,
or becoming masters of its strange effects.
Nor can we hide out indefinitely,
away from its reach and
safe in our protected isolation.
Instead, we submit to the curious
admixture of grace, desire and utter necessity,
and discover
there are places no such dust
could ever reach,
places within us,
fields of violet flames
we carry along with us
wherever we walk–
passages through
stands of flowering
memories that never wane.
We remember
we are filled to the brim
with twinkling poetic beings
whose sight can penetrate
any circumstance.
Even coatings.
And to our
delighted
dawning
delectable
delicious
satisfaction,
we realize we
can build on that.
It is this
for which we are meant.
Dust or no dust.
Worlds or no worlds.
We were not
roused from Nothing
merely to reach an end.

We Are That…

December 29, 2014
by Michael
comments 15
Poetry

Everywhere you look,
everywhere your gaze lands,
there
the angels,
carpenters,
playwrights
and arborists,
bus drivers,
tanners,
rain-makers
and silversmiths
populate the invisible,
dashing into position
at the end of your glance,
blossoming from time
and space
wherever your vision rests,
hidden but present
inside your every view
like the blood
in your own hand,
just out of sight,
just behind
the world as it seems to be,
just giving a bit of color
to the proceedings
you’re so used to endorsing,
planing boards,
planting saplings,
banging pots and marching in circles,
inventing musics,
fashioning dialogue,
forging bracelets and street lamps,
forming clouds
and giving tours,
scenting shrubs,
erecting thresholds,
tents, and fairgrounds–
and so on and so forth.

One subtle shift of your mind,
you see–
one instant of resonance
between you,
your mind
your heart
and that Idea–
and the ocean begins
yielding flowers
instead of fish,
vines drop down
from the sky
for climbing,
or for swinging,
and talking elk
appear along the plateau’s edge,
grazing on sweet yellow fruit.
Every being
is astounded,
you included,
for who is there
who can say,
I saw this coming…?
Who is there
who can say,
It is just as I planned…?

This is how it really is.
The rest of it–
what you’re accustomed
to dealing with in a manner
which some have called
perseverance–
that is all
very deceptive
painted-on buffoonery,
the graffiti of the so-called “ones”
who keep trying to sign
their name on everything,
as if to say,
Yes, I did that…
It is just as I planned…

My astounding colleagues,
there is no power
in make believe.

A Few Stories By the Fire

December 26, 2014
by Michael
comments 12
Fiction

I am ever grateful to you who have given of your valuable time this year to lend the gift of your presence, and to share a moment or two with me here by the fire.  As a token of my heartfelt appreciation I have posted two new stories on the Fiction page today.  They are intended as gifts to you, and I hope if time and desire present themselves in equal measure, that you enjoy them.  I further hope that if the confluence of such proclivities do not naturally arise within you, that you feel absolutely free to leave the physical gifts untouched even as you receive the sentiment in its purest form, unadulterated by all of my words, which is what really matters.

Thank you, and best wishes for the coming year!

Michael

The Gifts of 2014

December 24, 2014
by Michael
comments 26
Course Ideas / Creative

This post is part of a series of posts written by several bloggers in answer to the Blog Challenge hosted by Linda Litebeing, and I thought it would be a great way to look back upon the last year.  The warmth of the holiday season has provided a nice envelope of peace and cheer from which to reflect on a year that, as Linda pointed out in her invitation, has not been without challenges.  And yet so often it is these challenges that do bring the greatest blessings…

What lessons did you learn?

Since discovering A Course of Love I have been drawn to the notion that the function of all learning is to bring about authentic knowledge of who we are, of our true identity.  Once this is known, not as a concept or as a belief, but as knowledge itself backed by experience, then the need for learning is complete.  We are released of our conceptual cages, freed to be who we are without conflict or division.  Not because we are perfect, or better in any way than we once were, or than anyone else, but because our identity finally rests on truth.

This year has brought me many experiences where I have noted the pattern and conditions of learning recreated in my life– circumstances that have triggered sensations of lack or incompleteness, of doubt and uncertainty, of frustration and desire for some form of accomplishment or another.  As the calendar year winds down, however, I am also seeing the beauty in this process, and noting how such circumstances have indeed brought about a deeper appreciation for who I am, and who we all are.  Learning is always perfect and profound, while it is needed.  And it is needed so long as I maintain a concept of myself, an ideal against which to compare, a vision for myself to attain through devotion or service of some sort.

I have witnessed the conflict and discontent within myself, and sensed the ways in which it is softening through the path of experience.  I think the greatest lesson I take away from this past year is a greater acceptance of who I am, less the world, and of the circumstances in which I find myself.  I feel as though I am leaving 2014 with the realization that so long as learning is required– so long as I cling to a particular concept or brand of fear– there is nowhere I need go but where I am to work with it.  Things are splendidly okay, even when they’re not.  So many games of chicken with our fate compel us to seek out something else, and I am thankful to have come full circle without moving, to discover beautiful inklings of the depth and purpose all around me.

How did you serve others?

This can be a loaded question can’t it!?  It can take me right to the heart of a question some of us grapple with during the time and conditions of learning: am I doing enough?  Should I be doing something more?  Shouldn’t I be spending more time doing x, y, or z?  Couldn’t I be making more of a difference?  Several of the other participants in this challenge whose entries I have read have made reference to the idea that their greatest service has been in allowing themselves to be who they are– the idea being that the daily practice of offering the gift of our time or presence to others, precisely where we are at, is truly a service.

This really resonates with me, as I am realizing that anything we do that comes from a notion of what we should be doing will lack the essential ingredient, and anything that is truly offered from the depth of our being has the capacity to resonate profoundly with others.  The opportunities have been all around me this year, as due to challenging times we’ve had extended family living with us to varying degrees throughout the year.  I’ve driven kids to soccer games, helped with homework, cooked meals, and most importantly, been able to deepen relationships by sharing and creating space for those who’ve needed it.

What blessings did you receive?

I’ve touched on a few above.  Realizations about ourselves and our internal obstacles or resistances to love are always blessings, as are opportunities to deepen relationships with those around us.  My wife’s recognition of who I am, and support, is an ongoing blessing that spans far beyond the time it takes our little planet to circumnavigate our nearest star.  In addition, through blogging I’ve been brought into contact with some amazing and passionate people, and it has enriched my life considerably.

(I was also gifted a sample pack of Liga Privada cigars and Thomas Pynchon’s novel Against the Day.  Blessings come in many forms.)

Was there something you lost that turned out to be a blessing in disguise?

Leaving the obvious aside– e.g. my mind– the loss of a professional comfort zone left the ground feeling wobbly underneath me, but brought to light various fears and sources of discontentment that had been idling within me in a manner that allowed to me process them in my own time.  Likewise the inclusion of more family members in our home on a regular basis has also brought various changes in the status quo, such as losses in refrigerator space, limited access to clean drinking glasses, a strange curtailing of the quiet, inadequate space for both cars and snow banks, and of course a contraction of time itself, but these shifts were all rendered moot by the unexpected gifts of being part of more lives in an increasingly meaningful way.

 Did you receive any “gifts” in terms of powers or skills?

No.  🙂

I did, however, set a new personal best by making an order of chorizo nachos disappear in under five minutes.  And I wrote a lot more poetry than in any previous year of my life.

* * * * *

Linda is up next with tomorrow’s entry.  Happy Reflection Times to all.

Savoring the View Through a Single Pixel

December 20, 2014
by Michael
comments 21
Christ / Course Ideas

The last half of this year, and the last two months in particular, have reduced the aperture of my life down to such a tight radius that I feel as though I’ve been scanning the field of experience and possibility one dim pixel at a time.  There’s not much plot to derive from such a view– not much context or depth with which to work.  Day and night are shades of brightness, but little more.  Is it night again, or just cloudy out?

Is that the alarm?  Already?  What about dreams?  Do I still have dreams?  Who has dreams any more?  People who can afford to shut their minds off at night and use the time for something besides catching up on the minutes of the previous day and assessing their potential impacts on events six months out… they have dreams.

What can do this to a person?  What forces can result in such a contraction?

Being busy.  Feeling busy.  Feeling burdened.  Being poured from one day into the next like a slinky tumbling half out of control down a staircase that has been lowered down from the sky.  In my case it has been the influx of professional responsibilities that will wait on no man, with financial consequences should they not be attended to in a timely manner.  This may sound wholly unappetizing, but the particulars are not where to focus, as a similar contractive pressure could have been brought on by any number of situations with other types of forcing functions– needing to get the harvest in prior to a turn in the weather, tending to the wounded or dying around the clock in a makeshift field hospital, working double shifts for weeks to fix the electrical grid after an ice storm, being the de facto caregiver for an elderly parent who is losing their rational faculties, being a single parent with children at home and any number of jobs outside of it, or simply having your house blown away by a violent atmospheric outburst.  The mind has a tendency to rank these in some order of severity, but I encourage you at least for my purpose here to treat them equally, as circumstances or inciting factors that focalize our lives, and trim the fat from our wandering minds.

As Jesus says in A Course of Love, our lives are our curriculum.  Life is what’s happening.  Life isn’t what happens when we’re done attending to what needs be done.  That’s a modern notion rooted in images of success and desire that often breeds resistance to what is.

Regardless of how you rate these various circumstances, the main point is that sometimes things get busy in ways we cannot control.  The conceptual life to which we were trying to attend, that version of life we were trying to invent or distill from the one we already had, that one is cleaved from our conscious reach.  We are honed to a functional point.  We find ourselves in continuous service to the needs of the moment.  There can be a certain relentlessness to it, though if we’re paying attention we will also find moments of beauty and grace interwoven throughout– like the way a brilliant yellow moon settling down onto the horizon near the end of it’s nightly journey shone upon me like a great, full eye during a 4 AM commute through a wintry wasteland, catching me off guard and flooding me with a thousand whispering reminders of what lies beyond the single pixel view.

If we’re not careful, these are also the times when we will be ambushed by the sensation that something is wrong.  Something isn’t right is a thought form all too easy to endorse.  Whatever philosophies regarding cause and effect that we carry around inside of ourselves will be badgering us at peak intensity levels to take stock, and take action.  Look!  Here’s a story about a person who created the life of their dreams!  All it takes is a few upgrades!  We, too, can get back on track with the types of lives in which we can flower, make a difference, or follow our passion!  Be all we can be.  We all want to maximize, and take our shot.  No one likes being derailed.  Such responses can hide the deeper meaning and purpose of these experiences, however– can render us insensitive to the holy messages they convey to us.

It is not that the dreams or passions towards which we grow are unattainable or problematic, but that we must be brought to the point where we can see what hinders their realization.  We must be delivered into a face-to-face encounter with whatever hidden machinations aren’t working, so that we can choose anew.  So Life, ever compassionate, presses upon us.  Pressure refracts the ideas of our lives into their individual colors and paints them on the wall for closer inspection.  And as we squirm under the pressure, we see just how strange some of the ideas are that we have carried.  Reduced to a shrunken point of tenacity, we find our anger.  We find out who or what to blame.  We find out about our doubt or shame.  But the holiest of our desires, too, press up from within against the cover-slip our live’s boundaries, like the cytoplasm of the inner life to which our magnified focus has been drawn.  Their beauty and possibility comes into focus.  As we yearn to reach for the fruits of this sanctified fire within us we discover where our reluctance has been hiding.  We discover our fears, and they also are magnified, and become tangible– like a choking heaviness in our center.

We reach the point then– the sacred fulcrum at our center– from which new forms of experience are possible.  Jesus suggests in A Course of Love that when we are free our hearts will be the cause of our experience, but that so long as we remain trapped within the thought system on which illusion rests, we experience the illusion and the suffering.  What our hearts know and desire is unable to fully arise as the cages of our thought systems establish the boundaries and parameters of the possible.  When we ask to break free of these cages, then I think sometimes we are dragged into this slow motion world.  Everything slows down so we can pick the lock…

Today, in a brief window of time in which I’ve been able to rest and allow my vision to stretch out a bit, I find I am immensely grateful for the past few months.  Yes, in moments I have wanted to abandon the ship of circumstance, or at the very least make a righthand turn.  Yes, I have been confused and disappointed, uncertain and overwhelmed, contemptuous of my own stagnating efforting at times.  But it has also whittled me down, and brought me to intimate contact with something that’s always present, even in a single pixel of reality.  Ask for Love, and you will be obliged to take a tour of the ways you distance yourself from it, and you may find your life is reduced to a single pixel you can square off with.  Inspect that pixel very carefully, for you may find Love looking back like a full moon flooding every corridor of eternity with soft light.

We do well to remember in times like these: one healed pixel is all it takes…  We don’t need to fill an entire screen.  Just one pixel will do.  For there is only one pixel, anyway, and it is everywhere…  Always…

Choking on Gristled Thoughts

December 16, 2014
by Michael
comments 18
Poetry

Sometimes
Life is like
you’re standing
on a crowded street,
oblivious to everything
but
a chunk
of gristle encrusted steak
of an idea
of who you should be being
that you’re politely chewing
for years on end–
years and years and years,
utterly distracted,
like it’s an antidote,
like you’re a cat
encumbered by a
wad of something gooey and medicinal
the vet jammed deep in your cheek
just out of reach of
the jawbone’s axis of rotation
and the tongue’s exploratory reach,
thinking to yourself
very privately and secretly
the whole while
that eventually
if you get it just right
that gristled bit
of law-abiding citizenry
is going to break down
into a twice-baked potato
or a pastry puff or something–
something that’ll go down easy–
while unconsciously
you’re smiling bemusedly
at anyone
who takes notice
of your all too public
masticational devotion.
And the whole time
you’re thinking you’re
on the verge.
You’re thinking
a couple more hard chews
and this thing’ll soften up.
Then it’ll go down naturally.
You keep gearing up
for that moment.
You’re perpetually
daring yourself
to just swallow it,
and reeling backwards
from the brink
with awkward nausea.
You’re at odds.

Hafiz has an idea
for such situations:
Spit that bull puckey out.

There.
Notice anything?
The absence of
something in you
fighting back
with rubbery persistence?
Peace is overwhelming
when it’s been this long–
like there’s night, and day,
and then this…
This other phase…
This way of feeling your whole self…
This jaw-numbed wakefulness…
This seeing all sides…
This gob-smackedness…
This beauty…

The moment we stop
trying to choke down
this world’s
strange notions,
that’s the moment
when things
coalesce to a point.

And oh what a fine point it is.