A Poem For You

December 10, 2014
by Michael
comments 23
Poetry

I wrote this poem for you.
You wonder how this could be,
since we’ve never met.
You think I would need to know
at least a few things about your self
before I could make such a claim.
You think, perhaps, that our two bodies
should have shared a room at least once
before I could even consider
such a crazy idea as writing
this poem for you.
Or at least they should have
heard one another speak.
You would feel better, anyway,
if at least I had some physical artifact
produced by your corporeal manifestation
by which I could glean a couple of
juicy tidbits about what it is to be you.
Something you’ve written.
A fingerprint, a third grade sketch,
a picture of you posing by Big Bird.
Something.

What if we’re wrong about all that?
What if we could write poems
for each other all the time
without such chains of evidence?

I’m not talking about anonymity,
or not looking in one another’s eyes.
I’m not talking about escaping
the perils and wonders of physical presence.
I’m talking about realizing,
deep down, we already know
who we are…

So I wrote this poem for you.
Because you’re not here…
And I love you.
And neither am I.

On Looking Back, and Beginning

December 7, 2014
by Michael
comments 23
Christ / Course Ideas

This year I realized that in so many ways, I have scarcely begun.  The difference this time, is that having orienteered my way around the mountain in a great and unwitting circle– riding out storms and then reveling in the graceful vacuum of their departure, plotting the next day’s course based on a strange mash of signs, principles and self-argument, being nourished by glimpses of colored bird and flower, by moments of heartfelt communion with the vision of a snowy summit– this discovery of my old bivouac site is a reason for laughter.

A yearning that once meant everything to me has been seen through entirely.  The punchline is plain to see in the cold ashes of last year’s fire.  The once hot embers have mixed with the vastness of night, with the compulsions of day, with wind, mud and rain, and now seedlings of grass are poking through like stars in an underworld sky.  I have returned to find this place already taken back from me by the embrace of life’s unshakable ebb and flow.  I have a memory of a place that is no longer.  It was given for a moment, and has been dancing with the whole of the universe ever since.  I danced, too, that night, with everything, and then I too, felt the relationships and pulls of life move through me.

Returning to the start, I realize I have always been there.  I realize how carefully I was held in my imagining of everything else.  I realize how far I aim to reach, how meaningful each heartfelt feeling truly is, how each one touches every point in the galaxy.  Returning to the start, I realize also how filled with notions I was, and remain, and how those notions spun around and flipped over and moved in and through one another all year long, as if responding to a chaotic magnetism.  Yet here I am.  Back at the ashes of last year’s beginning.  Building a new fire.

Beginning.

Walking in a circle isn’t a bad thing.  Walking in a sacred circle around our Self is the ceremony of one year.  We walk through hopes and fears, through dreams and desires, through choice and consequence.  Walking through the doubts and trials of experience is the way we catch a glimpse of what was never at risk, as if our notions must be perturbed by the baton of experience in order to vibrate far enough from their protective posts at the periphery of our world to reveal a glimpse of what was always invulnerable within us, quietly tucked inside.  Walking in a great circle through seasons and storms is the only way to understand we carried the entrance to the heart of the mountain with us, inside of us, with every step.

Having moved through such transient experience, only to arrive at the beginning, we see it.  Without guilt or blame or shame, we laugh with it.  Because we see it without the baggage of what has already been, and perceive what is truly offered, it is a joyous discovery.  It… is the truth of us.

How many glimpses does it take, though, before we willingly trade all that we have made for all that is offered?  What led me off the trail, into the trees perhaps, in search of some wisp of magic?  What fears kept me from walking the next bend, and caused me to set off backcountry on my own, avoiding what I merely thought lay ahead, but was truly always within me?

In A Course of Love Jesus talks about the laws of man and the laws of God, and how our hearts are the cause of experience itself, but our notions– the constructs and beliefs of our minds, which adhere to either the laws of man or the laws of God– determine their felt character.  The thought system to which we adhere defines the boundaries of our experience.  The thought system to which we adhere defines what is for each of us, real.

Thus, what is needed to eclipse suffering is an experience of the reality of the thought system of truth.  For with this experience we would at last discover, and accept, the solid ground on which we have always stood, knowing it not.  No more circling, looking for signs.  No more wondering if it could be, or have been, another way.  No more uncertainty and doubt, as our notions are flipped up, down and around by the weather of circumstance.  Only truth.

Getting beyond a thought system can be harrowing work.  We may wander around the mountain a few times, returning to the beginning.  With each return, however, we see the gifts that have accrued in our pack: the gift of seeing what our allegiance to a particular thought system has brought us.  I see now how frequently I was pulled into dilemmas of thought this year: how I compared my experience to others, how certain I was at times that I would be more fulfilled through certain accomplishments, how my thoughts provoked me into feeling wronged or on the outside of what I deserved, how the laws of man demanded that I take particular types of action against another, how the laws of man goad us into feeling we are not living if we’re not risking it all for something, how the laws of man provoke us into moving swiftly to protect an advantage, an insight, or a dream, how the laws of man compel us to protect and defend– in short, how the laws of man insist we must always be on the look-out, always vigilant, always seeking for the moment or achievement that will make us into something true, to protect against that which could destroy us.  Neither concern is meaningful within the thought system of truth.

The beginning is a point, a marker, and each time I return to it from one wild goose chase or another, I have the chance to remain.  I have the chance to sit with the fire for a little while, to remember after a few long nights of thoughtless detoxification how to hear its whispers, how to commune with every point in space at once.  I have a chance to remain, and keep the embers hot, and make a place for friends to gather.  For I know that in the end, the experience that shatters the past somehow involves a fresh vision of everyone, a sharing back and forth of the truth, like the passing of a cup of living waters.  None of our responses to the laws of man matter, or make us who we are in the least.  Compassion is knowing no one is who they think they are, or are trying to be or not be.

When we remain by the fire, others show up.  They literally materialize out of the night.  They were already there, waiting.  In the laws of God, our secret realities merge, and one by one we realize we’ve all been circling back to the same fire, looking for one another, looking for the only reality that matters, for the spark we find alive in each of us.  It is not that the laws of man limit the actions we would take in this world– that the world would be a better place if we were all fit for a Nike commercial– but that the laws of man blind us to one another, blind us to the certainty that can only be found in the reality flowing through every single heart.

Bag of Tricks

December 1, 2014
by Michael
comments 8
Poetry

High up
in a cathedral of sky,
in an alcove
sunken into a sheer face
of towering stone
where few sounds dare to reach,
where first percentile
vultures congregate
on weekends
like a caste of the chosen
and on whose sunbaked ledge
adolescent mountain goats
dream of one day
standing motionless but
for the waving of their beards
in the icy winds
and the steady chewing
rhythm induced by
a mouthful of snowbells,
there is a being
whose devotion is total,
whose every thought
is a heartfelt sensation
containing all of time
that settles in between
the high peaks
like a gentle blanket,
whose every breath
is a diamond of compassion
blown from the palm
of his hand to fall like
crystalline flakes of snow
upon every
other thing that breathes—
a being who
fills the silent space
of his alpine retreat
with wanton and unceasing acts
of break-dancing and air guitar,
a being who,
at the end of this poem,
I will take down
from the ledge
and place back
into the napsack
at the center of my being
before giving the sack
a few good shakes,
and then reaching
into the darkness
to pull out another
surprise.

It really is unbelievable
what you find in there
some days.

Drilling Down

November 28, 2014
by Michael
comments 9
Poetry

We have to drill down.
Straight through it.
Through the door
we nailed shut
all those years ago.
Through the weathered planks
and carefully placed stones.
Through every concession
we once offered to the sky
that the sky could never take,
and still be a place for shining.
Through all those fragmentary hopes
that never went anywhere.
Through that half-light
we never really wanted.

We have to drill down.
Down through our
belief that things
might get better.
Down through the wish
that we could perhaps hold on
and make a lasting peace
so long as we had
a quiet, wooded place
in which our secrets might graze.
Down through whatever
interpretations may arise
at the last minute
like a tempting glow in the distance.
Straight through those,
with jets of steam and mud and stone
streaming all around.
Down through this veneer of adequacy.
Down through this hesitant way of seeing.
Down through all that we have gained,
through everything that could be lost.
We have to spring up the ladder
and climb into the rig
like a pouncing cat,
our lives already gone,
those nagging tugs
and sweet sensations
kissed on the cheek
and put on a train
back to the stars.
We have to set
the bit and raise
the hydraulic pressure,
all the while
knowing exactly what it means–
this moment
we cut through everything,
through every strata
and layer.

We have to drill down.

Buddhas Everywhere

November 24, 2014
by Michael
comments 25
Poetry

A mind enamored
of its own disguise
cannot see all the
imminent Buddhas–
the ones stationed everywhere it looks.
The Ones everywhere it can’t quite see.

(Stop here for a moment and
take a look around.)
(Do you see?)

A mind convinced
of its own fabrications
cannot imagine
that experience itself
is an omni-sided doorway–
a passage to every form of grace.
A passage to every glory, seated in circles.

(Don’t worry where, just imagine…
that you walk out into it…)

A mind accustomed
to writing its own script
cannot fathom
the depth of compassion
that has resulted
in the whole universe
of imminent Buddhas
agreeing to dress up
as all the parts in its
shabby plotting–
like a clown show
of gladiators, lottery winners,
lovers and companions,
dealmakers in cheap suits,
creeping thieves with dark eye-liner,
and close friends that died too soon–
just to be present alongside it
in every moment,
to be near,
close enough to touch,
when it stumbles into
the hatching darkness
born of the schemes
it has so carefully, so proudly,
and so tragically plotted.

A frightened mind begging
to just catch a break
is unable to grasp
the transcendent bellwethers
peeking through its own nature,
unable to recognize the enormity of a mercy
that will not permit even one
scrap of falsehood to pass unchallenged,
incapable of recognizing that the task before it
is not merely to endure,
or find a passing comfort,
or to settle for just one little
patch of sand it can call its own,
but to open its petals wide to the sky
and embrace all that rains down
and become a blessing
to all beings
forever.

You may have realized by now,
sitting for this brief moment here with me,
as you glimpsed the face-painted
somersaulting Buddhas
vaulting through your sky,
as you felt the invisible carousel doors
opening in every direction
from the place where this now finds you,
that such a strange mind
as I have described
does not
and cannot
and never could have
existed.

This is what
our lives have been
trying to tell us
all along.

And now we see it:
compassion is a net
stretched alongside us
from every direction,
and we are such
magnificent
little jumping beans
caught in its web.

Relinquishing Difficulty

November 20, 2014
by Michael
comments 18
Christ / Course Ideas

Recent events in my life served the function of popping the vacuum sealed lid of a small glass jar of fear I had been carrying around in my coat pocket.  I smacked dab into some real world events—moments of indeterminate outcome surrounded by a steadily gathering mob of foreboding consequences—and you could hear the audible inrush of air as the jar was pried open.  Out spilled vestiges of a future I had sworn to abandon, puzzle pieces of a compromised self, and a lackluster world absent of meaning—a world without a floor populated by people whose faces had been replaced by magazine clippings.

Feeling caught between two unfortunate choices, each inhabited by its own particular breed of inner kryptonite, my difficulties metastasized until even the pauses at the poles of my breath had been taken from me.  Each end of my being had become a dull ache.  You try to reason your way through these quaggy mires, but the biggest shortfall of the mind is its inability to recognize when the situation has eclipsed reason altogether.  It’s like being a man standing in the midst of the Great Fire of London with a half-filled canteen in one hand and a brochure about safe-making campfires in the other, unable to stop trying to mentally rearrange the canteen, the piece of paper, and the water in such a way as to put things right.

That doesn’t sound all that bad really—just kind of foolish.  That’s not me, we say.  That guy with the brochure’s just an idiot.  But to keep shuffling the canteen and the paper around while being slowly burnt, and to feel the intense pain of it but to still be unable or unwilling to turn and make a run for it… what is that?  What keeps a man rooted in such a place?  Is it bad to want to extinguish the fire?  What’s wrong with wanting to wave the wand of peace?  Is it bad to keep hoping an answer will come?  Is it fearful to retreat?  Is it a failure?  A regression?

What if the people you love were in a structure swallowed by the flames two blocks away?  What if they might still be alive, and it’s impossible to tear yourself away from your spot, despite such pain?  What if the journal that contained every important thought you ever had was also in that house?  Pain is precisely this sort of conflict.

A burning face.  Tear-filled eyes.  An inaccessible heart.  A heart filled with bitterness.

This is the quaggy mire from which I have emerged.  I’ve reached the other side, but I’m not the same as I was, for the dissolution of this particular entangled state brought home to me the distinction made in A Course of Love (ACOL) between the time of learning and the time of discovery.  My experience also revealed the importance of the passages contained in ACOL related to the release of bitterness and the desire for reward.

Bitterness is inescapable when we’re confronted by those circumstances from which we can neither run nor hide, situations where it seems that our losses and our love are seemingly intertwined, where justice and compassion seem unable to co-exist.  It’s so easy to forget that any such experience is rooted in false premises, particularly when something we view as necessary or vital to us is threatened.  When our visceral feeling is that something is wrong—when that little jar of fear has been pried open—it’s nearly impossible to bring the mind out of its recurring analysis of the situation, to keep it from continuously retracing its steps through a situation utterly devoid of answers.

This class of situation is the way we’ve brought ourselves the gift of learning.  We use these intractable difficulties as both the motivation and the means of revealing to ourselves our deepest lessons.  But what if we don’t need lessons anymore?  What if that age old instinct is over-applied?  What if you’ve looked yourself in the mirror, seen the worst you have to offer, blessed it, and now it’s time to let it go?  How do we stand in the freedom and power that resonates at the core of our being if every situation is a reminder of what we’re missing?

On the day this fever broke, I spent some time in seated meditation focusing on forgiveness.  Inexplicably, a few hours later, without any reasons as to how or why, the difficulties lifted.  The weather shifted.  In place of a shaken sense of self I possessed a brewing confidence—a confidence without reasons or evidence, a confidence I could not possess while perpetually learning my lessons…  The thing about this particular departure of weightiness was that it was devoid of reasons, events, and histories.  It was devoid of clarity about how and why.  It was simply forgiveness.  An acceptance, and a friend who helped me to see that standing in the fire was not a defeat.  Maybe that’s just who I am right now.  If you need to stay close to the place you once lived, stay close to it.  Without the bitterness, it’s simply a choice.  Without the sensation we won’t be complete until we learn what needs to be learned, it’s a moment of revelation.

In the few brief days since the cooling of my proverbial jets, it has been a joy to confront situations that just a few weeks ago would have put me on my heels.  It has been a relief to know they aren’t signaling me to take a look at something that needs adjustment—to feel that twinge of self-doubt and let it fly along, to know the perfection within me and within all of us is already complete, and that the encounter is simply a moment with which to work.  I’m not going to say I’ve conquered fear, for I’m not sure that you can, but it has become clear that fear results, at least in part, from viewing circumstances as some type of evidence about who we are.  When we realize that no event, no circumstance, no action of those around us has any ability to define us, we are free of them.  This is the type of fearlessness I’m closest to mustering.

Burrowing through difficulty requires a certain mindset—the mindset of learning.  Learning isn’t bad, but learning ends.  Recognizing there are no right choices to be made, no outcomes that offer accomplishment, no victory to be had either in avoiding the fire or in enduring it, then we are finally free to speak with it.  Our power is no longer forsaken.  We can stand in the fire and be burned, and it won’t mean a thing.  This is simply what we have chosen to be, and we are free to choose again.

Free in every moment to choose anew.

Ode to a Quaggy Mire

November 12, 2014
by Michael
comments 19
Poetry

I’ve done it now.
I’ve stepped into It.
It’s gotten all over my shoe and
It’s made walking a squishy awkward.
Also, a certain quantity
of the material
ended up in dollops
on the rug in the front hall,
like a band of slugs that
woke up and had no idea
where they were.
Too stunned to move.
Just laying there like a constellation
of invertebrates collectively embodying
a deeper meaning.
Like tea leaves.
They must have come-to
and seen one other located just-so:
everyone splayed out on the rug,
and said each to each,
holy shit, man,
you seein’ what I’m seein’?
Nobody move.

Now the other pant leg is tainted.
From trying to pop the bad shoe off with the good one.
From trying to minimize the damage.
The damage was mostly psychic in nature,
but resulted in the urgent, instinctual need
to get that bad shoe right off there,
and played itself out as a kind of manic shuffle
that started in the hip and by the time it
got down to the good foot was like a
man teetering on the edge of the cliff
trying to pry the whole cliff up into the sky
by leveraging it all against a little stone
which had adhered to a certain insidious material on his shoe.
My foyer is full of grimacing angels.
We are never alone.  Remember that.
Consciousness solves one problem,
but still, It gets shaken all over the walls, anyway.
Some painters capitalize on this instinct,
but I don’t have quite the right mindset
to call this a job well done.

I’ve done it now, you see.
I’ve taken the bait.
I’ve considered the evidence–
and it would seem
I have a choice to make.
Maybe.
I might have a choice to make.
Maybe not the one I think?
You know how these things go:
a good mind can run with one choice
for a couple decades if you give it
some room to work.

Where does Love fit into all this choosing?
Funny thing that, isn’t it?

The heart chooses like this:
One of Everything, please.
Hold the slugs.
I love you and the world
you rode in on.

Without my heart,
I’m just making choices
like this:
A – B > Scenario 1.278
to the natural log
of my bitterness.
(Footnoted)

And that’s, well,
that’s a tad disconcerting.
Jesus has suggested
via various mind melds
and the suggestions
of mutual friends
that if I want,
I might go out later
and get myself a mohawk.
That’s how serious
things have become
around here.

Open

November 8, 2014
by Michael
comments 34
Poetry

A lawn
bordered by backlit trees,
and a sun pouring forth
on the matters of this age.
Such consistency in the face
of my impromptu madness.

The smattering of robins
working through the yard
understand exactly what
the sun is saying.
Their curious heads
turn in silent clicks
from one world to the next.
Some have scruffy necks
and perform shutter-speed calculations.
They all have Open, upturned eyes.

Open.

I’m catching on.
The quality of light at this hour
suggests something about
how all this madness might end.
That’s how it feels, anyway.
Even if I can’t put my finger on it,
something is obvious in
the scuffling hops and knowing faces.
In the worm dangling from a skilled beak.
In the warning signals
that send them scattering
into the cover of trees.
The sun is dreaming out loud all the time,
a spectacle of voices all at once,
beaming Andromeda pointers gleaned
from becoming an age of dinosaurs,
dreaming into the robins:
Forty sunsets.
Then winter.
Keep moving.

My heart is a sun
much like I have described, but
from inside a tank of thoughts
certain plots echo off the walls
and bang together
with no way out,
shattering,
duplicating,
colliding to form a mob
of haunting proportions.
A false magnitude.

Receiving instructions,
one robin’s beak
punctures the side of the tank.
He peers through with one Open eye,
head twisted between worlds.
It is the moment of my dissolution.
My boundary pierced,
my shell become a pinhole camera,
the Messages sneak inside.
I realize:
this space is for silent dancing,
for whirling on stocking’d feet.
One hint of the beyond
changes everything.
Our heart.
Our sun.
This spectacle of voices.
Such consistency in the face
of my impromptu madness.

* * * * *

Sometimes I Forget

November 5, 2014
by Michael
comments 19
Christ / Course Ideas / Poetry

Sometimes
when the door slams
and the house wobbles,
we forget the stew
bubbling happily on the stove.

We forget the scent
of roasting carrots.

We forget the light
dancing softly on the candle.

Sometimes
when the light turns red
and two horns joust in reply,
we forget the fresh cut flowers
on the passenger seat.

We forget we were
celebrating an abiding love.

We forget the other reasons
for this plane are moot.

Sometimes
when birds are scuttling
from branch to branch
like unsettled children
with a strange babysitter,
and the sky above
is turning in green circles,
we forget our breath.

We forget eternity
is in a glance.

We forget the moment
whipping past
will never be repeated.

We forget.
Sometimes.

When someone owes me
and hasn’t paid,
that’s when I forget to ask:
how can I serve you
from the deepest center
of my being?

When someone has let me down,
that’s when I forget the truth:
this One has traveled through
more space and time than
you or I could ever fathom
to be present in this moment.
It has been a long and difficult journey.
Would they like a cup of tea?

Sometimes
I forget this simple truth:
silence is never offended
by the sounds passing through it.

A Few Words on the Photon

November 2, 2014
by Michael
comments 28
Course Ideas / Poetry

When asked to explain the self,
the Buddha demurred.
How would this help?
Likewise, a trusted computer
will not look too closely
at division by zero,
not because it is impossible,
but because of the hypnotic ramifications.
Caught in its beguiling web,
the self resists clear understanding.

Better to consider the photon.

When a filament of refined metallic earth
is filled to the brimming point
with a humming sweetness,
or space itself collapses
into an incredible, whirling Power–
a photon comes into being.
This child is a weightless propensity,
an extension of its source…
An idea?
A particle of tungsten?
A memory of the sun’s interior?
A painted-on resonance?
A wave packet of probabilities?
A message?
The child dashes through space
like a aye, aye, yessir! trained army squirrel
with a one-track mind,
a pack on its back bearing a dispatch
and a tiny twinkling helmet.
It weaves through whole battalions
of other commissioned squirrels also whisking
through space in every direction
up down diagonal sideways and perpendicular,
forming an invisible, zooming plaid of fur–
a gauntlet of bushy tails scarcely interacting,
each a skittering remainder term
loosed from one cosmic equation and
eager to dive into the cover of a certain other,
full of desire to convey its re-balancing to all that is.
While in transit, where does balance reside?
In a massless flight through non-existence?
A photon is a qubit of light
shimmering with frequency and color,
the pace car of time,
invisible to all but
its final beholder,
an indestructible potential
that must be caught and held eventually
to register in the fields of evidence,
to deliver its innermost quality to another–
to spin the turning wheel of phenomena.
A photon is a relationship,
a link between Sender and Receiver,
an inheritance, a memory, an urgency.
What is a photon
without a leaf, or an eye,
or a woolen sweater
in which to burrow?
Where do captured photons go?
Do they still exist?
If the leaf is later dried, and burned,
will the photon that was caught
be the same one to emerge
and catapult from the flame?

How would we know?

Two photons of the same color blue.
One from the sun.
One from the burning leaf.
They are indistinguishable–
the selfsame point on Planck’s Curve–
but somehow not identical.
Where did the first one go, then?
Notice how seldom
you’ve worried about this.

Why?

Because photons are vocabulary.
Without explanation or training, we know this.
Photons are linkages, inseparable from their
beginnings and endings.
They are messengers
from the glowing heart
of phenomena that pour through
cracks in the world–
words in a flickering conversation.
The self resists clear understanding,
but still, we can see that we are gifts.
We have been given, and we will be received.
We will disappear, only to reappear.

Will the next be the same one as before?

This is our deepest worry.
Because we thought we were vocabulary,
but not the story.
How very strange.
We are the story,
the only story there is,
a story that takes up residence,
brimming and humming
in every particle of its telling.