Until you’ve given yourself to it entirely–
until you’ve stepped forward in the silence
of your own heart,
drenched in commitment,
and called your life’s bluff,
or taken a sabbatical
from what makes sense
and spent a few
of those precious vacation days
sleeping in back
of a rusted car
that is flying awkwardly
in gutted stasis
on a litter of cinder blocks
strewn along the ground
like the crumbs of a passing
barrage of scrapped cities,
living on tinned oranges
and over-salted vegetable broth,
just to be near
to someone
whose devotion
is so complete
your nervous, wanting presence
is the very reason
they stay up all night
by the fire
huddled in a woolen wrap
saying thank you—
one whose knowledge
has been purified by
ten thousand nights
of exalted silence
awaiting your visit–
you won’t know what
the hell I’m talking about
when I suggest that
I awoke today
thinking of you,
and what the reality you are means
to every being in existence,
and I had no choice
but to take the day off.
All Of Us
What if we look into the night sky,
but can’t understand what it says?
This happens all the time,
because we sent Meaning away once.
All of us.
Banished it from our minds.
Cut ourselves right in two
like cosmic butchers.
Each from each.
Then each from each again.
For our own good, we said.
Looked up at the stars.
Lost count.
Lost our way.
Every half blamed the other.
We’ve got the right half, we said.
All of us.
Of course we suffered.
Walked a dry land.
It made sense to call the skies
unpredictable, to resolve
what was left into factors
and quotients,
random combinations.
Strange weather we’re havin’, ain’t it?
Just the way of it, we said.
Can’t be trusted.
World’s full of
strangers and half-breeds.
All of us.
Everyone’s a stranger
in someone else’s mind.
Don’t get infected.
Now that you’re cut down the middle,
keep your purity.
Cling to the half you have.
That’s what’s reasonable.
Some truths
you can’t avoid.
Example:
everything you see,
you’re mixed up in it.
You’re touched by it.
You can’t cleave yourself free.
All that Original Cutting,
it was like swinging
hatchets through smoke,
trying to cut space into slices.
Our minds became
choked on strange-shaped clouds.
We’re gasping for Meaning.
All of us.
But there’s good news.
Meaning never gives up.
She’s always hunting,
always prowling around.
She sneaks up on us,
crawls through the brush
with a face painted like
the first drop of water
that got moonlight
inside of it.
She steals up close,
holds her breath,
pops the hatch,
climbs inside,
pulls the wires out of the box,
strips the insulation from the leads,
Zzzt! Zzzzt!
Peooourrhhh!
Like hot lead and tiny lightnings,
mind and heart come together.
The smoke clears.
Then Meaning is all we see.
Meaning is all we’ve ever been.
Any of us.
Each by each,
Meaning undoes
what never was.
Example:
History finally resolves
into something less blurry.
We finally see It.
Everything we’ve
ever encountered has been
stalking us,
quietly orchestrating
a lifelong ambush
in plain sight,
masquerading as the life
we thought was ours
and ours alone,
waiting for each one of us
to give the signal.
Instead, we’ve been hiding
out like haughty bandits.
All of us.
Cackling like petty thieves
at the rendezvous.
Trying to shoot stars.
Hootin’ an’ hollerin’.
Unable to believe our good fortune.
Like we got away with it.
That’s what we fall back on.
That one triumph.
We got away with it.
Or did we?
How could we have,
if all the while
we were held
in the Loving embrace
of a stalking Justice
that was dressed up
like everything
we ever saw, and
everything we ever took
came right from Its
happily extended hand?
The Gaping Maw
Christ is a friend
best made
before you try
and set things straight
in the world,
because that’s
a tall order
usually involving
such experiential delicacies as
walking through fire,
negotiating with fanatics,
imbibing poisoned tonics,
standing trial before
a stadium-sized jury
of the bitter and scorned,
writing defiant op-eds
no one understands,
being shoved out of a
slow-rolling car,
or spraying something minty
into your mouth
right before doing something
reckless as a last resort.
Crash testing your ideals, basically.
If you can’t
keep your wits about you
in these types of situations,
you’ll be pulped
in the world’s digester of dreams
and wind up
in some kind of
papier mache mentality
with holes in it
and oddly positioned
painted-on smiles
that never soften
and just preen like
airport runway beacons
at the passing fields
of nightmares
and designer beverages.
Christ is a friend
who saves you this trouble
by taking up residence
in your non-local
field of timeless
who knew?
pool of holy silent
recognitions that
open up inside of
wherever it is you are
or are not
(you pick)
like cloves of innocence
sprouting just off your right shoulder,
to then part the world before you
into beautiful, retreating waves.
The radiant time-space
bending in on itself
in all directions
Gaping Maw of
synesthetic joy–
Love
Felt as a giddy Logic–
that is revealed
is absolutely worth losing your self in,
let’s put it that way.
You can start practicing
with small stuff,
like traffic lights
or software upgrades,
but ultimately
you can flush caution
through a hole in the floor
and put the whole world
into your mouth at once
like a spray of something minty,
give a quick wink
to whomever may be looking,
and let the grace of Christ
transform it into something
very sweet.
It only takes an instant.
One flash of seeing right through it.
Then you won’t have to
mess with all that other stuff–
all that imbibing and whatnot.
Oh, you may face a mob or two,
but a gang of holy friends
dressed up as rampaging lunatics
is such a delicious sea
to become.
That Strange Memory We Have
The other day,
unexpectedly
and without
provocation,
because it
made sense
in a very incalculable
kind of way,
and eschewing
momentarily
all my previously
aggregated
momentum
of character
and personality,
I responded
to a clever
advertisement
stapled to
the picture
of a pet mountain goat
that by some accounts
had gone missing, and
by other accounts
been found,
that was taped
to a promotional photograph
of a local practitioner
of esoteric dietary arts
involving seeds and reeds
that was tacked
to the convex, fibrous,
bristling, sun-dried
mass of a utility pole,
and joined a cover band.
Now
a couple nights
a week after work
I put on dark sunglasses
and fake, voluminous hair
and take my place in
the ensemble.
Hafiz offers
two or three words
of instruction
to everyone at once–
nevermind we’re all holding
different instruments–
and then we go
tigers over teacups
like a punk band
channeling a thunderstorm
about Rachmaninov,
smirking and shimmying
and pretending like hell
we can really jam,
pulverizing the area
with some godawful renditions
of the song that gave
rise to tuna fish,
or the one that
created orchids.
Despite our jangly
bruising of the air,
something feels right
when we play this music together
without knowing how or why,
like we remember something
sacred that sifts to the top
of our brokenness,
something that only
makes sense when we
admit to this pain as one,
and revel in its power.
Later, we give each other
fist pounds and wordlessly
saunter off into the night,
knowing one of these times
this strange rust will wear off
and things are really going to click,
and then
and then
and then
…and then what!?
Creation.
That’s what.
* * * * *
The Missing Ingredient
Miracles work like this:
we stop trying
to choose a life
from the menu
and invite the chef
to surprise us
our plate arrives
twenty minutes
later, empty
but for a
once-folded,
scribbled note:
where have
you been
get your ass
back here
the meringue
is on fire
Suddenly–
we remember…
We enter the kitchen
to hearty cheers,
exploding custards,
the incoming flight
of a ripe tomato,
a glimpse of flames
from the open pit rotisserie,
the juggling of knives,
the vigorous chorus
of a familiar song,
and the lunging,
judo-style greetings
of our comrades.
We are given
a new moniker:
The
Missing
Ingredient
It’s no good
insisting on being
a polite customer,
if deep inside
we are all
such wild and crazy
chefs.
On the Nature and Use of Public Transportation
Calculus reveals itself
to be the study
of my fears.
The tangent to a curve is a line,
a rock slung into the void of space,
a cannonball flight
untempered by gravity,
a prognosis insulated
from relationship
and possibility.
If we take the vector properties
of this miniscule instant,
extrapolate them,
and play the tape,
well… uh oh.
When the Studebaker
is whipping around a turn,
an antique rocking chair
strapped inadequately to the roof,
once released from its lashings,
will catapult through space
on a straight line
and conserve its energy
upon impact with an oak tree.
Calculus confirms as much.
A sudden change in momentum
releases demons.
Wood shatters.
Pies explode.
Children laugh at this absurdity.
Atoms open their sliding doors
and their mysterious inhabitants spill out
onto the platform
like a troupe of break dancers
bottled up since 1985,
as if every moment were rush hour
and the secrets of time and space
utter adherents to public transportation.
Falcons high overhead,
they just swivel their heads.
Clouds drift. Thoughts tumble.
We latch and unlatch
our mental gears,
burning out the clutches
of our illusory
gearing of subject to object,
of perceiver to perceived.
At the moment of
greatest change,
the inaccuracy of
a forecast is greatest.
We shouldn’t place any stock
in their madness.
No one said calculus was sane.
Whenever reality is served
up in slices,
there is a limit on how finely
it may be shaven.
Christ is what arises
when we sneak through the Planck Barrier.
Every computation
exposed to such heat
catches on fire.
If you try to calculate
the forces at the center of an electron,
the math will digress into riddles.
Then what.
Anything divided by
what is happening
could lead to anything else.
The center of one particle
is the threshold of
every other point in existence.
I forget that sometimes.
I’m not a rocking chair,
I’m a mystery commuting
through space and time
in the Beloved’s subway car.
Who is driving, you ask?
Where are we going?
Last time I asked that,
we suddenly entered a tunnel
and darkness swallowed us whole
and the only light was the glow
of the front teeth
of ten thousand smiling saints
all around me,
and all of them shouting at once,
“I am! I am!”
Turtle Talk
I was sitting
on the squishy bottom
of a short stack of water
about three feet tall,
beneath a full sun,
fully clothed,
buttons made up,
with little bubbles
hiding out in
my eyelashes,
watching a fish
watch me back through
the grass,
thinking about
the strange economies
of tadpoles and turtles,
wondering what
that brewing pain
was inside of my chest,
as I was
somehow temporarily
without my memory
of the direct effects
of breath-holding,
and becoming
quite disconsolate
about this burning
sensation spreading
up and down my torso–
and staring at that fish
hoping it would turn
into an answer
to this feeling
or a marching band
or something,
when a face
plunged through
the bright, wobbling surface
above me
and suddenly
I felt like
a lost sheep
that had tumbled into a ravine
and been found out about.
A brilliant Presence
with curious, roving eyes
had thrust itself
into my strange world
and begun looking all around.
When Hafiz saw me
he immediately
launched into
a most loving tirade,
far too long-winded
I thought–
given the circumstances–
a glorious admonition
which looked to me
like a torrent of worlds
pouring from his mouth
and sounded like
a whale giving a speech
with a mouthful
of marbles
through a muffler.
Then his hands
dove into the water
like a pair of synchronized falcons,
hooked me by the shoulders,
and yanked me up
to the sky.
Coming up through the surface,
some part of me stayed behind
like ink that had been rinsed away.
I could see the spreading swirls upon the water,
but no sign of me or my Friend,
or of my arms
or shoes
or shirt sleeves.
We were nothing left but sky.
There were some turtles
on a log several feet away
who apparently see this
type of phenomena all the time,
this rinsing of beings
in the cleansing waters of confusion,
and I could hear them
thinking to each other
through the sky that I had become–
thinking about turtle things,
like shell patterns and
two hundred types of daylight
and the flavors of small bugs–
and it was good.
Transcending Choice
One of the core concepts of A Course of Love is contained in the statement, “There is no loss, only gain.” While there are a number of contexts in which this sentiment offers an opportunity for a deepening understanding of what is meant by the term unity within the Course, recent events in my own life as well as events observed in the lives of those around me have led me to reflect upon its relevance to the types of changes that threaten to strip away a particular way of life.
It is one thing to speak of being fearless and taking on the challenges we pick out for ourselves, and another to apply it to changes that seem to strike without our consent and dismantle core elements of our lives– changes such as the closure of the local mill in which a person has spent the better part of his or her adult life working, the loss of the family farm in the face of drought and the pressures of worldwide commoditization, the dissolution of a child’s family as his or her parents pull away from one another, or the forced abrogation of one’s cultural heritage by the ruling authority.
Where is the gain in these events?
How does one assert trust in what is, when the particular vehicles that once served as conduits of sustenance, love and meaning crumble around us? Sometimes I think it’s even worse when they but threaten to crumble, and manage to cling to an indeterminate state, teetering and gasping, their fate held in some invisible balance. That’s when the certainty so easily proffered during a boon starts to feel real dry in the throat– hollow and parched. Should we accept what is coming, and just move on? Or is this the moment we’ve read about… the time to make our stand?
What does trust even look like in these moments? Does it look like unshakable trust in a particular outcome? Is acceptance of what seems apparent in the trends a lame resignation, the first in a series of sliding tumbles that reinforce our limitations? If we were fearless, committed and clear in our intentions, could we turn the tables? What if we gave ourselves wholly to the pursuit of an outcome, and failed? What if we bet the last resources at our disposal, and came up empty-handed? What does trust mean, when suddenly one is encircled by a platoon of such risky alternatives?
Don’t the wise people we admire avoid these situations altogether somehow…?
All of these questions, I think, lie on the near side of embracing the statement offered at the outset, “There is no loss, only gain.”
My inner responses of late to the rather minor wobbles in my own life highlight the extent to which the experience of separation, as opposed to the experience of unity, leverages the ever-changing flow of creation into the deep-seated feeling of crisis– usurps the ever-present stream of grace and twists it into the mirage of existential threat. When we find ourselves facing life in the arena of risk and threat, egoic perception has established home field advantage. With the whole stadium clamoring for a decision, for an identity-forging act of will, it is all but impossible to hear the gentle whispers of unity. This is the state from which the ego, or the experience of separation, derives its (non-existent) power. This is when its offer of seeming protection is most tantalizing and attractive. This is when the insane idea of forging a truly independent existence, an identity born of its own efforts and accomplishments, is most alluring.
Do you see what your trust has brought you? Is it not time to give up these fool games and idle dreams of freedom, and buckle the @#$% down?
Never mind that you’re already about as buckled as buckled gets… Seldom does the drive to succeed and accomplish– to strive and overcome, to engage and outwit, to assert our strength and will– burn brighter than in these moments. We can come under incredible interior pressure to make a decision of magnitude, and while it is entirely true that our relationship with the heart of creation begs for a response, the distortion of the moment precludes any genuine response, leaving only the barren field of choice.
Choice… barren?
In A Course of Love, Jesus describes the experience of unity as being one that is free of choice. What is the difference between offering a response, and making a choice? Everything, I am discovering.
Choice is the means of navigating the experience of separation, the primary mechanism we use to establish ourselves as the cause of who we are, the evidence that we are responsible for our own lives, a power unto ourselves. Choice is what we are faced with after eating that psychedelic fruit in the Garden, the fruit that turns our vision of the world upside down by shifting the experience of meaning and identity from the seamless expanse of being to the stories told by our personal histories and accomplishments. Choice and blame arise together, as everything occurring in such a world must be the product of someone’s choice, and if the choices are not the right ones, things go wrong. And loss is epidemic in a world based upon choosing.
A response is not a choice, but a communication, an act of relationship, a movement rooted in trust. Trust is implicit in offering a response because in relationship each response is a movement that alters the stance of all participants. All of what is moves together. A response shifts the totality into new terrain. One response evokes another. What arises from response cannot be known in advance, and responses don’t have the same repercussions as choosing. A response isn’t an attempt to make something of ourselves, with the possibility of success or failure, but the offering of what one has to give. In this there can be no failure.
Choice has no place in unity, where the nature of our being has already been determined. How could choice matter, when our identity is no longer up for debate? Fueled by the recognition that there is no loss, only gain, and freed of the need to make the right choices, thereby demonstrating our prowess at navigating this upside down realm of separation and loss, what response would we offer?
A Desert, A Being, and a Need
A self is a heavy burden
to carry with you
across the desert.
Despite being invisible
and weightless in principle,
it is the often overlooked,
but necessary battery
of accoutrements
that are required to
render the self
manifest and functional
that take their toll.
There is the steamer trunk
full of historical data, for instance,
with its rather robust
coefficient of sliding friction
across the hot sand–
the modern take on an old classic,
a ballistic nylon upholstered
carbon fiber case
with kevlar bottom
and shattered mounts
where the useless spindled wheels
lopped off in the last existential crisis
once resided. The trunk
contains all of the
maps, slides, instruction manuals,
theory books, server racks,
fold-out solar panels,
instrumentation, servo motors,
coiled wires, oscillators,
piezoelectric crystals,
spy glasses,
solar flare almanacs,
pirated algorithms,
notes to self by self,
torn out journal articles,
scribbled judgments, conclusions,
and prognostications that
the self has accumulated
over time.
Without those,
the leather bound
book of procedures
with the locking gold clasp–
procedures such as the
Instructions for
Masking the Scents
of Your Passage
From Skulking Bands
of Rabid Coyotes, or
The Stepwise Chymical
Reactions Used in the Production
of Rattlesnake Anti-Venom—
would be all but useless.
And without that book, well…
as the rules of a self dictate,
all would be lost.
It is the self, after all,
who takes care of things–
keeps track of how many steps
are taken in a day,
weighs the count against
your physical capabilities
and the weight of what
lies ahead, understands
the quantity of calories
required to facilitate
your continued progress,
maintains the log
of the distance
already covered.
(If only the book
contained a procedure
for determining
the distance remaining…)
A self is a heavy burden
to carry with you
in such a place,
too much, in fact–
an assurance of failure,
notwithstanding the fact
it’s sole stated purpose
is to the contrary.
What remains
when the self is discarded
is a field of experience
consisting of a desert, a being,
and a need that has been
released from its shell.
The being and the desert
will feel the need and respond.
Stars will feel the need
and twinkle to life in the skies above,
raining ten thousand years
of possibilities upon the
being and the desert.
The earth below the desert
will feel the need
and place those possibilities
in her timeless womb.
At dawn, the being will walk
over the next rise
to find the stone
placed there by the desert.
The being will tap
on the stone
and the stone
will yield water
from the earth.
Neither the being
nor the desert
nor the water
nor the stars
nor the earth
will think of this
as a sign
of worthiness,
or a product of chance,
for it takes
a self to entertain
that sort of interpretation,
and there are none to be found.
Instead,
there will be
a field of experience
consisting of a desert, an earth,
a being, a stone, the stars, water,
a bird,
and a need.
It is not hard
to imagine what happens next,
for this is how it began
and always will be.
Moulting
The process of shifting identity from the false perceptions of the ego to the valid identity we all share in Christ appears, at least for me, to involve passage through states that closely resemble one or more of the following: a flock of large metal plates approaching both the speed of sound and the US Naval Artillery Rail Gun Test Range; a repeating dream in which you hike up the side of a mountain to audition for your dream job, don’t get the part, but meet a lot of astoundingly outgoing people who do; a series of days spent in slow motion wandering the desert in continuously degenerating circumstances without ever quite dying, and a thriller filmed by Alfred Hitchcock based on your life as it would be presented on Wikipedia.
These are transitory states that yield in due course of time– with no small amount of patient allowing of what is– to states of joy, peace and contentment, as well as a heightened awareness of what authenticity means, but while they’re in full bloom it feels a lot like playing chicken with your own destruction. On the one hand, there’s the thought that these states are transitory and that their accompanying feelings are nothing but the unreliable residue of misperception, but if that’s incorrect, and their voices carry weight, then you’re actually careening on a constant vector of decreasing distance towards an inelastic collision with a poorly lit and imminently solid object.
If you’re crossing a stream by jumping from rock to rock, that moment of being suspended in mid-air probably feels a little awkward to at least some of the cells in the body who may have been ignorant of the game plan. Likewise, I think our minds can get more than a little disoriented when we give our hearts enough freedom to set the course. Our hearts know exactly where to go, and that’s what they do. Our minds have no idea such a place exists, so they think they can’t come along. Our minds are like dogs wearing the shock collars of our pasts. In A Course of Love, Jesus suggests that healing this gap between the heart and mind is priority numero uno.
But how to have the experience we don’t know how to have?
The old approach was to put it on layaway– make this life either the last or perhaps one in a series of payments on that particular miracle, and treat death as the moment when the magician yanks away the curtain. An aspect of A Course of Love I really enjoyed was the notion that we do not need to wait for death to experience unity. In fact, it wouldn’t entirely be in keeping with the current druthers of Creation to do so. In other words, experiencing life from the condition of unity rather than the condition of separation is not only an experience that is available to us, it is one that heals and transforms the world. There is a certain desire rippling through Creation itself to get on with the next chapter of the story.
This is where my heart cheers. Yes!!! And my mind says, okay, so… what do we do? Or on a bad day, arms crossed, prove it. These transitory states of consolidating every residual ounce of fear and uncertainty into a brewing cesspool of emotion seem to be moments of complete failure, as if the test results are in and the Christ indicator dye came back negative. But afterwards, when these storms have passed, they always feel as though they were incredibly tame– no more than the arising of the realization I’ve been chewing the same stick of gum for twenty-five hours straight and it’s time to chuck it. There’s relief in getting that old flavor out of our mouths.
It takes me a while, but it’s becoming more obvious that this acceptance and expression of the true Self in this realm has very little to do with what my mind thinks it is doing, or should be doing, or thought it did, or any of that. How we spend our time is not unimportant, but neither is it the means of unifying the heart and mind. I’m sure there has been and will be fruit that arises from this holy union of heart and mind, but using time in an effort to produce fruit in evidence of the accomplishment will only yield a false positive. And trying to earn what we’ve already been given is an idea on par with running the furnace and the air conditioner at the same time. We can’t devise a plan, a regimen, to bridge that gap between the heart and the mind. We have to desire it, and let it swallow us whole.
So my mind and I, we’re becoming increasingly accepting of the fact that we have no idea what we’re doing. We’re imagining beauty before retiring in the evening, inventing mantras on the ride to work, writing poems when we feel inspired, sharing what grace we can find as best we can, and sinking a little deeper each day into the sensation of living in the absence of lack. When the evidence of lack arises, we just back away slowly, feeling backwards through time to the last place we were when we knew our heart was fully present with us. Then pick up from there again.
These impasses with non-existence are not failures, just a little coughing and sputtering as the engine is dusted off and ancient cylinders catch fire. The condition of separation, which is akin to the condition of “learning”, is like setting the choke. Once the engine catches, the choke is no longer needed and becomes an unnecessary and excessive restriction. Learning brings us to the brink of discovering who we are, but cannot carry us across the line. As the engine rumbles to life, at some point we have to accept… we’ve ignited… and release the choke… and let some power flood through us…
Embracing Forever 