Song, Uninterrupted.

May 25, 2014
by Michael
comments 13
Christ

One day recently I stepped outside into a hive of birdsong.  The sun was filtering down between the branches of trees at the edge of the yard, and the birds were dotted amongst the boughs, positioned instinctively behind leaf and shadow.  It was like entering a Bev Doolittle painting that had come to life.  Soprano spirals curled into the air, sounds that had been scribbled by the practiced hand of a master, as if Matisse had been doodling on the space before him in octave-colored inks.  Riding on gently bobbing twigs, their little heads turned in quick snaps, too fast to follow, their eyes always looking, scanning, searching.  I realized that seeing and singing, though given separate titles by our language, arise together.  There are no distinctions between them.

The fundamental meaning embodied by the songbird cannot be understood through the enunciation of its specific properties.  Giving and receiving are one, a flowing, effortless simplicity, a wholeness that cannot be divided into steps.

I heard a siren, then, from a distance– an ambulance maybe, or a fire truck.  The volume was just loud enough to eclipse the birdsong, but no more, as if its source came from a place located along winding trails through the sky that only a larger, black-winged bird might fly in a day.  I wondered about this sudden intrusion and the effect it might have upon the rhapsody all around me.  Curious how long it would take for the wake of this passing machine to reach the beach, I waited, counting…  One breath…  Another…  A third.  A beautiful, curious face trilled across the glade.  The Artist was still at play… watching… composing… listening… calling forth…  I exhaled again.  A black fly danced a loony jig before my crossed eyes.  My fifth breath was a consciously directed one that struck the little jigger like a typhoon, hurling him to far away lands, perhaps experienced as the blissful hand slap of a Zen teacher that shatters the buzzing of complacent desires.  Then I looked up in time to realize the siren was fading back into the void from whence it came, receding like a strange dream over the audible horizon, an ice cream truck turning the corner at the end of the block.  Throughout the brief episode, Matisse had never put his pencil down, never jolted upright and sent a streaking line into the margin, never paused to ask the question.

Having spent considerable periods of time over the preceding few days discussing the “issues at hand” with one or another of the more outspoken and discontented voices of my inner electorate, and yearning to break free again into  free air, I was struck by the overlay of one world upon the other.  On the one hand, I have this life within me where Jesus and I and you and Hafiz and countless others, both here and there, both creedless and devout, are all engaged in a flowing conversation that is the world.  We are like those songbirds: present and alert, our songs somehow mutually interwoven, each voice both a response to what has arisen and the cause of what arises.  Then, like the distant siren, there is this other world that vies for attention– a world punctuated by alarms and committees, by distress and striving, by shame and wanting.

Sometimes, unlike the wise birds behind my home, I am hooked by the siren.  It is like flicking a switch and suddenly seeing the world through an inverted spectrum, and finding oneself suddenly all alone.  It is as if the smooth and endless flow of being has curdled into chunky and awkward thoughts, like putting in special ear plugs that drown out the chatter of myriad beloved beings, and amplify only the sounds of whirling metal chopping the air into 700 slices per second.  It is selfish, in a way, this close-quarter drowning out of fullness, my imposition of structure on what never required any to begin with.  Witnessing the way those songbirds were unaffected by this other world, I was reminded that the living world is always there, even when I am seemingly not there with it.

Thought can be like a pause in between the seeing and the singing, an interruption that removes us from the continuity of what arises.  This is all that is unnatural, the only thing- to hold seeing and singing apart from one another by the arbitrary distance of a thought, a cloying uncertainty.  The question of how to return to the promised land is one that begs for answers, for thoughts, for a measured approach.

I am reminded of the famous line about living like birds of the field…  I’m not thinking we can “learn” to do that.  We can’t learn to be who we are.  We can’t hope to unify seeing and singing while maintaining a passport control station between these two most natural facets of being.  The birds have offered a welcome recovery.  They are happy to show us the way.  This realization expands through time in both directions, reaches backwards through the darkness, correcting the misperceptions of personal history and misguided concerns about a tragic future.  When the process is complete, we’ll be resting in the cover of leaf and shadow, dappled by afternoon sun, hearing and seeing and knowing and chirping all at once.  Like happens here.  It is simple.  The living world is always there, singing…

The (nth to) Last Temptation of M

May 21, 2014
by Michael
comments 27
Christ / Course Ideas

Roughly a week ago I wrote about acceptance and not looking back.  It was fun.  It felt good.  I felt whole, and alive.  I was aware of a nurturing Invisibility with which I was joined, as if I was wading into a body of water that has no opposite shore, shaking my arms loose, wiggling my head around, and generally preparing to dive forward and start doing a Michael Phelps impersonation at a right angle to my past.

It wasn’t just me that I felt good about, either.  Unity arrives with a joyous feeling about everyone.  Unity has the sensation of inclusiveness, of every being gathering around, of your own vantage point being a particular window with a view into the playground where all beings tumble and twirl, hang from the rafters, invent new whiffle ball pitches, blow bubbles, or sit on benches and make notes in their diaries.  We  are all such windows.  Some beings are looking through you right now.  You are looking through them.  Everyone is looking through everyone else, and, ideally, discovering the natural radiance we all share.

Then I had an experience that really brought home for me what Jesus speaks about in that same section of the Dialogues of A Course of Love as temptation.  I have for most of my life equated temptation with desiring something material that brings with it momentary bliss, but not lasting satisfaction- a status of some sort, the right location, a special recognition, chocolate cake, whiskey, an autograph, money, cool gadgets, etc.  The objects of our temptation are ultimately hollow, and we more or less know that, but there is something about them that lures us in, some short-lived upside we can’t quite do without in our moment of so-called weakness.  Otherwise, what would be the temptation?  I haven’t often thought of fear as tempting, but the tumblers in the lock that hangs on the gate that stands between me and every lasting good thing I desire fell into place- at least a few of them- and when they aligned I could see it clearly.  Fear is absolutely a temptation.

It is cleverly disguised, however…

At some point you have undoubtedly participated in a group endeavor, and the members of that ensemble came together for some sort of stated reason, whatever that was.  You may have worked in a company with more than one person in it.  You may have been on a team.  You may have been on a marching band.  You may have gone to school and found yourself in a classroom full of other people.  It really doesn’t matter the scale.  We could even go macro here and say that you are part of a team consisting of all humans alive on this planet.

At some point, a couple of things may collide in your thoughts.  One might be, this can’t be as good as it gets.  There is something still missing in my life, something for me to stalk out there in the world and attain, or make my own.  Some destiny with my name on it that I had better get off my ass and go find.  This may collide with the notion that whatever it is you are doing, it would perhaps go a whole lot better if you were in charge of it.  You might find yourself saying, if I started my own band, I could do things my way, and it would be good.  I should have my own art gallery, because my taste is incredible and the world would benefit from this missing ingredient.  And plus, if I did, I would have “made it.”  This is what creative people do, by the way, they get their name up there on the board.  And so it’s time for me to open my account, post a score up there in plain view before it’s too late.  You get both of those things going for you, and you got yourself a very interesting temptation, with fear en route to really drive it home and solidify it into a tangible conundrum.

Bear with me here, because I realize there is a time and a place for starting a new band, a way in which it could be a wonderful and appropriate thing, a vehicle for expressing who you are discovering yourself to be.  When you feel that way, you just wake up one day and start writing and playing music and it happens as naturally as apple pie.  But this is not what I’m talking about.  I’m talking about starting a new band because you need to show the world how to do it properly, or because you think doing so will fill the gap left by whatever is missing.  I’m talking about starting a band because you think, if you did, things would be somehow better, and with the riff raff from the old band out of the equation you could finally be you the way you were meant to be.  That’s when fear shows up.

Well, it did for me.  It’s tempting now at this stage, for my thoughts, spurred on by a six pack of refrigerated latte beverages and the punch lines of a thousand self help books at their disposal, to whip me up into this state where I’m going to feel like I suck if I don’t tackle this fear head on and make something of myself post haste.  Fear, after all, is the only thing that could hold me back.  I know this.  You know this.  We all know this.  We’ve got a hair-trigger tolerance set between every two thoughts and if fear comes along into view, we immediately want to go Greco-Roman on it.  Conquer it.  Why?  Because if I’m afraid, I’m obviously dropping the ball…  I don’t want to look like an idiot here.  Everybody knows: just choose love over fear.

What’s the problem, pal?  You don’t get it?

This state becomes a real travesty of a mental dwelling place.  Part of me knows that doing anything whatsoever for the reasons described above is going to amount to a wild goose chase, the loss of a few months or years of my life, and maybe some good “life lessons” at the end of it.  Another part feels like if I don’t do something, I’ll never live up to my potential.  Life will have passed me by.  Something precious will have been wasted.  You may not think this is tempting, but this is the cleverness of fear, in my experience anyway– to make this type of seeming decision an issue that clamors for resolution.  I’m not sure if this is a universal one or not, but it grabs me by the neck once in a while and tries to lay out a clear program for me.  It dares me to become distracted, to get focused on a side show, to inhabit a landscape of assumptions that is wholly arbitrary and meaningless.

Thankfully, this particular emotional roller coaster was like a 24-hr virus.  I opted not to take the bait, but I wrestled with it for a while.  After some time, I realized I was arguing with a straw man.  The whole thing is a set-up.  Being fearless doesn’t mean we have to walk the tight-rope between the Sears Towers, just because when we thought of it, we realized it scared us, and all fears need to be conquered.  Sometimes that little twinge of reluctance is simply saying that something isn’t our path.  The acceptance of the fullness at the heart of our being renders this type of trap meaningless.  It shuts off an entire layer of the world, leaving only what is real…  It is only that last vestige of wanting, that little piece of bait in the trap, that draws us in.

What’s oh so very tempting, is to walk around with the unshakable feeling that something’s wrong, or something’s missing, or some achievement will make us better.  Fasting from want means calling baloney on this feeling.  Stay close to the brightest feelings you can carry, and wave them like torches wherever you go.  At some point, everything will be obvious.

Over the Edge of the World

May 17, 2014
by Michael
comments 21
Christ / Poetry

A glowing vector shot across the sky,
the last, illumined fragment of a shattered world,
screaming in octaves
of fire and dissolution.
I peered into the majesty left behind,
into that gathering field of stars
and distances beyond measure,
of potency and shimmering songs,
feeling its Invitation draw the life within me
to the surface
the way the moon pulls the water
up through stone beneath the land,
the way tears rise to the surface
when a holy One is near,
and I said, “Yes…”

I said, “Yes…”
and uncorked a bottle full of ghosts
who fled my chest and careened
across fields of vision and dreams,
parsing my history into colors, heat and beasts.
A battalion of bearded soldiers, bereft of purpose,
marched lockstep towards the world’s stark edge.
An elephant charged at the sun
before a jury of on-looking hyenas–
a line of swollen tongues, chuckling fur and haunches.
In the distance, grass was trampled underfoot,
while here, a leopard stepped out from the trees
and came for me like a gliding death,
stalking, angry and fluid,
a fury without edges or corners,
a raw power aware of nothing
but hunger, nothing
but being haunted, nothing
but the need to tear me open and
spring through the wound, into the space beyond–
to free us both of this torment.

One by one the rows of men spilled over the cliff,
vanishing.
A pair of macaws shrieked and shook the trees,
and she sprang, rasping,
her warmth and weight crashing into me,
her claws a volley of hot, curled stakes
that dug through my ribs
and clutched, like fists of needles, my heart.
I gasped, withering in her grip,
sensing the last remnant
of a history I had once occupied
release, and slip beneath the surface of a mighty river.

Pierced and bleeding,
I staggered into her gaze,
into the starless void of her waiting eyes.
I stumbled along that hollow passageway
for a century, lost to thought,
bearing my pain like a lamp in the darkness,
pouring out from my wound–
out,
out,
out into emptiness…

The final act of annihilation
is the realization that the end
I once craved will never come,
that an ending had never been a valid destiny,
that I have been unmasked
and baptized in the river of all Being.
I emerge to find myself standing by the sea.
Mary stands behind me
with her hand on my back, just behind my heart.
She is presenting me to the rising sun.
In the distance, a line of small wooden boats
are spilling over the world’s edge,
the men inside them transforming
into great winged birds that dot the sky,
one after another,
in an uninterrupted convoy
towards the heavens.
Nothing is,
but what is saying,
with its own voice,
the Meaning that fills all beings to over-flowing.

Point of No Return

May 12, 2014
by Michael
comments 35
Christ / Course Ideas

There are so many amazing things a person could choose to learn about in this world, enough to fill whole lifetimes– like the way photons make decisions when faced with the conundrum of a diffraction grating, or the way high-speed traders manipulate the flow of money on time scales that make the pace of human thought seem like canyon-making, or how the fashion industry unraveled the mystery of the neons.  There was a time when these things or those very much like them seemed important, when I was filled by the desire to understand.  To make sense of it all.

That lasted for a few decades, off and mostly on.  Now I am simply filled by Desire, and I have eyes for only one Moment.  Making sense is an ancillary concern.  When it crops up, making sense means translating every scrap of thought to its proper orientation to Love.  To do this, I take a breath, look inward, and wait for a feeling.  I’ve done this enough to wait without interrupting, that’s the key.  It’s a lot like fishing.  You can’t will the fish to bite.

One day you look up and realize your life took a seeming wrong turn.  The lawn is a weed-infested travesty of modern horticulture.  Your job is milling your goodness into bits.  Your adolescent friends are emoticon remnants of the gang that used to sneak out at midnight, intoxicated by a wordless energy everyone used to exhale into the starry sky as plumes of warm steam.  Your whole reality is out of tune.  Take a breath…  Wait for it…  Six giggling beings from ten thousand years ago crowd into your mind like they just stepped off the light beam, eager to see what the buzz is about.  You expand into eight dimensions.

A month or so ago I was jump-starting my diurnal activities with a pastel purple mug of home-brewed coffee in one hand, and The Essential Rumi in the other, when I chanced upon the line, “Until you’ve kept your eyes and your wanting still for fifty years, you don’t begin to cross over from confusion.”  I made immediately to start the oven timer, but it doesn’t have that kind of depth.  The passage left me with that aching recognition you get when Forever bursts forth from the Now like a puma scratching its way out from behind the wallpaper in the den, an instant when making sense dissolves into a placid warmth that wraps itself around every aspect of your life.  Even though it hasn’t even been one minute, never mind fifty years, I’d been reminded.  The promise of those words had been fulfilled.

Though I’ve given up on making sense, I’ve not given up on the love of connections.  A few weeks later I was reading from the Dialogues of A Course of Love, and walked smack dab into a discourse by Jesus on this very subject.  He said, “You can only fast from want by realizing what it is you desire.”  There it was again, fasting from want…  Moving into clarity…  He and Rumi must be friends, I thought.  I bet they go fishing together.

Later Jesus said, “The condition of want, like all conditions of learning, ended with the end of learning… When you have felt the reality of union, you have felt the place in which no want exists.”  To put this in context, after a lovely build-up in the Course of Love and then a bit of eye-opening discussion in the Treatises, in the Dialogues we are standing on the beach, mending our nets and bad-mouthing the fickle ocean waters, when Christ walks up, looks us straight in the eye and pops the question: “Are you ready?”

If you’re asking yourself ready for what? I think this passage about sums it up, wherein Jesus says, “I do not have to spell out this choice for you, for you know exactly what it means.  It means you will be as I am.  It means you will live from love rather than fear.  It means that you will demonstrate what living from love is.  It means that you will resurrect to eternal life here and now.  It means no turning back, no return to fear or anger, no return to separation, no return to judgment.    It means no longer trying to leave these things behind because they will be gone.  It will mean no longer striving.  It will mean no specialness.  It will mean the individual is gone, and the Self of union all that continues to exist.  It will mean peace, certainty, safety and joy with no price.”

All my life has been a prelude to the final resolution of this question, as has yours.  All lives are a prelude until the choice to return is made.  What I love about the Dialogues is that Jesus isn’t giving us instruction on how to prepare properly for this choice, on how to become perfect enough to be ready, or how to purify ourselves sufficiently to approach the gates.  He is simply asking if we will accept the Truth of who we are, right now, and walk away from a life predicated upon learning.  This is fasting from want forever, by accepting fulfillment.

As I wobble around this Moment, feeling those residual fears and what-if’s and self-judgments make their plays, I am beginning to sense the power of not understanding this at all.  Fasting from want requires that I simply let go of understanding what the present moment contains that I may recognize the response of Love to Love, that I may stumble into the fulfillment of Desire.  Fasting from want means that I give up all reference points about how or what I am doing, that I not turn back, and that I say Yes on that beach without knowing where I will be two days later.  This doesn’t necessarily mean getting in the car and driving without looking back.  This is about jumping off the conceptual cliff, and free-falling into the heart of our own being.

If you are considering acceptance of your inheritance and your rightful place in Timelessness, and feel that desire building to move in NOW, but find you are like me… uncertain of your merits or qualifications at times, questioning the reliability of your willingness, afraid of what will be asked of you, stymied by your emotional response to traffic or blatant human rudeness, sometimes unsure of how to respond in conversation, unable to hold the picture of yourself as you truly are in all moments you encounter, or pained by your inability cure the world of its horrible pains and evils, then I’m going to go out on a limb and say you are ready.  We are ready.  It is so hard to accept, I think, that this is precisely what being ready looks like…  I know it doesn’t make sense, but we gave up on that gambit forty nine years, three-hundred and sixty-four days, twenty-three hours and fifty-nine minutes ago.

There are so many amazing things a person could choose to learn about in this world, but only one real choice: to choose what lies beyond learning…  To redeem your heart-ticket for what comes next…

Window Shopping

May 9, 2014
by Michael
comments 27
Christ / Course Ideas / Poetry

With each breath
the possibility exists
that your heart will no longer
merely window shop
along the shores of Eternity,
sneaking peaks into that vista
of marbled light,
self-tending gardens
and  pain-free childbirth,
imagining
with aching joy
all the wonders
doo-dads and
luxuriant, long-lasting features
that you probably
can’t even begin to comprehend
that come standard with the Wholeness package,
but will pull open
the door, step inside
and ask itself,
really ask itself,
to whom or what
you will have to answer
if you were to
give yourself over fully
to the Possibility
that you are exactly the kind of being
who deserves,
is destined in fact,
having long ago been bequeathed
access to a whole boatload
of inner resources,
to walk into a shop like that One
and make one, definitive,
doubt-obliterating,
world-changing,
non-refundable,
and totally
outrageous
Purchase.

I know.
I have goose bumps, too.
Not to break the mood,
but it’d be more of a trade, really.

It works like this:
you give the Shopkeeper
every silly theory
you ever cooked up
about Him
or you
or the way Life really works–
the ones you tried to convince
the whole world were self-evidently true
while you wandered the streets
like an out-of-work drum major,
alone and bereft, but insistently rhythmic,
before you actually stepped inside of His shop;
and then…
He gives you Everything.

What.
Are you worried
it might not be a fair trade?

Ask your heart
if it cares about
what you call fairness.

It may be worth noting
that He has been in business
for a very, very, very long time.
In certain circles
filled with beings
who inhabit
the space within
your every breath
and dare you at the apex of each inhalation
to do something wild and crazy,
His Place is practically an Institution.

The One Great Desire

May 7, 2014
by Michael
comments 18
Poetry

Once,
when he was still learning his craft
of ushering the anxious and doubtful
from the shadows of falsehood
to the river of poetry
at the center of their own being,
and in a well-intentioned effort
to raise the general morale,
Hafiz gave away
two court-side seats
to the Explosion of the Sun.
Because,
as we all know,
sometimes
having something
to look forward to
can make all the difference.

In this particular case,
the tool selected may have been
a tad over-matched for the task,
because a general panic ensued
and Gabriel
had to rewind the Earth
two full weeks
to restore the equilibrium.

That was the day Hafiz discovered
a great many people
really were confused
about the validity
of Existence,
and not just acting
serially businesslike
out of some long-standing commitment
to a really, really
elaborate inside joke.

This realization
hit him like a wave
of granite headstones.
He crumpled over
and fell down in the street,
gasping for air,
stung by the magnitude
of this great Difficulty,
flooded with compassion
for each and every being
who had been given so much,
yet received so little.
That night,
as his tears dried,
he felt his heart tremble
and whirl into Life upon its moorings.
It began to speak
through him,
into the darkness
of a little room
in a forgotten place,
about the
One
Great
Desire
of all beings
for all beings…

You and I,
we live now
in the holy shelter
of that heart-talk,
and of the talk of every heart
that has remembered
the Same.

There are still a pair of tickets
available by the way,
if you want them,
but by now you
may have figured out
they were never more than a joke anyway–
a restatement of the obvious Truth
that Everyone and their Brother
will be there
on the day the Sun Explodes.

Closer

May 4, 2014
by Michael
comments 8
Poetry

The construction of bridges
can lead to the forgetting of rivers
and the strengthening of commerce.
In this way, thoughts
can erect theoretical scaffolding
to cross safely the tidal pools of the heart.

This is far more efficient
than wading through
marsh and muck each
morning, once in each direction,
to pick up the day’s fresh batch of metrics.

Less smelly, too.

One day I was walking the planks
when a great wind came up
and I went tumbling over the side,
straight into a teeming soup.

My legs and arms sprawling in all directions,
I must have looked like
a somersaulting human star plunging
down from the heavens.

I brayed in panic
and thrashed wildly in the goo,
certain that at any moment
leeches or leviathans
would emerge from the darkness below
and violate me forthwith,
ending me immediately, or worse…
leave me alive with a festering complication.

When the adrenalin wore off
I collected myself
and swam for the nearest structure
in desperate lunges,
aching with the knowledge
I had made contact with something
that could never be washed off entirely,
trying not to breathe or swallow.

The doctors could find nothing wrong,
but I have not been the same since.
Now I catch myself stopping
half way across some bridge
to look over the side,
to stare transfixed at
the patterns of swirling water below,
unable to shake the vertiginous feeling
that I am peering into
the very meaning of Existence
like the weird ant in the colony
who glanced straight at the sun
and realized
that every leaf has a Plan.

The other night
the moon was full
and I found myself
sneaking through empty streets
then across the damp grass of my neighbor’s lawn
to clamber down some rip rap,
banging my shins
and nicking my hands and feet,
just to get closer.

Next day I have a look about me
they can only explain in certain ways,
and none of them good.

Closer to what? they ask.

I open my mouth to speak,
but only empty space comes out,
like you’d find inside a hollowed-out tree
where last year an owl lived.

That isn’t a fair question.
I falter.
Silence places Her hand on my back.
She is my sponsor now.

The crowd disperses, mumbling.

A tear forms in my left eye
and rolls down my cheek.
It is so delicious
to have a feeling
that needs no explanation…

Pure Empty Endless

May 3, 2014
by Michael
comments 8
Christ / Course Ideas / Poetry

Here in the Meanwhile,
on the shores of Forever
dotted with the charcoal stumps of forgotten fires,
the mossy walls of collapsing wooden shanties
and various debris of antiquity, such as:
half-buried edges of glass, torn diary pages, ice picks,
the bones of dead birds bleached by the sun,
and a curious face caught in sepia,
the faint notes of song drift past on the breeze,
pastel tones that have nowhere else to go
and so wander idly amongst
other ethereal vagabonds
and the shed skins of past illusions.
Here
where holiness is
an encrypted premonition
carried by the air itself,
buried beneath the suggestive chatter
and dramatic stand-taking
of the day’s black and white re-runs–
a patient conspiracy
that stands watch behind
the white noise of ganged memories
and the acrid taste of wrongdoings
that never mattered,
not in the way this matters…
Here.  Now.
our greatest work
is not invention,
or strength-making,
but the practiced
discipline
of keeping the ache
at the center of our being
Pure
Endless
Empty
as the type of sunlight
that travels in a curve
over the horizon.

Like a flock of birds
united by a vision of spilt seeds
that coalesce upon
the branches of a single tree,
black dew drops congealing from above
squawking and gawking and
all lusting in the same direction–
when your aching
narrows down and
begins to inhabit
a dream of this world like that–
walk over towards it
like a farmer protecting his fields,
feeling the dormant abundance
that you would protect
alive beneath your feet,
clapping your hands and shushing loudly
until the Desire
at the center of your chest
scatters and takes flight once again,
filling every corner of the sky
with your own particular
Conspiracy of Love,
leaving you
Pure
Endless
Empty
as a human being
whose Vision
travels in a curve
over the horizon.

A Leaky Heart

April 30, 2014
by Michael
comments 11
Christ / Course Ideas

I remember once when I was a boy, wondering if my knee would ever heal.  A baseball slide on hard-packed dirt had torn it open.  Then I had fallen off a bike.  Mashed it into the ground in a soccer game.  Made a heroic dive across the playground during PE.  Every few days, the same.  Finally, infection set in, and with it came the reality of an uncertain outcome.  The improvement from one day to the next was below my threshold of perceptibility, and I couldn’t help but feel I had stumbled into something well beyond my miniscule powers of making-right.  The waiting was agony.

If this had been the only issue I was managing, it wouldn’t have been too bad, but life has a way of flying into the breach like platelets into a cut.  Around the same time, I was having such a hard time at the school I was attending, that I cried to my mother when the car pulled up to the curb, and begged her not to make me get out.  It was a new school and I didn’t really have any friends, and I was bumped up a grade to boot after about six weeks of class.  Too smart for my own good.  Smaller than most.  It was an awkward age, and I had moved from a small town to a bigger city, and I couldn’t make sense of the jokes about girls and boys.  I couldn’t think my way through any of them.  I tried to laugh it off, but they saw right through me.  I was never really on my feet there.

My first day in the new grade I was escorted up the stairs and into the instructions for a multiplication test.  In the old grade we had been all about addition and subtraction.  In the new one, my first gift was one hundred and twenty seconds with which to solve thirty problems.  All the other kids had been given the chance to memorize their times tables, but all I had was this brain too smart for its own good.  I knew enough to know that multiplication meant a lot of addition, and felt obligated to do something besides sit there like a fool, so I ground my teeth and tried like hell to solve two hundred addition problems in the remaining ninety seconds.  My teacher was, I think, impressed by the valiant effort, but I was stretched tight as a drum.  I fought back tears as I stared into my chicken scratch.  I felt like I had some kind of goodness in me that mattered, but that I was hopelessly over-matched.  In other subjects, it was the same.

Sometimes lying in bed at night listening to the odd siren, I worried the Russians would launch their nukes, or that someone might grab me when I rode my bike through the park about a mile from my house where people were reputedly killed by knife fights.  One involving swords.  Laying awake in my bed, looking through the curtains of the French doors that opened from my room onto the length of the upstairs hallway, I realized that if I squinted, the light at the end of the hall would distort into a line, like a beam of light you might see coming from behind a saint in a painting.  I wondered if I could ride that light to places.  I wondered if I had discovered something unique, something that mattered.  How does my eye do that?  Maybe I can live this way, too.  Squint towards the future and have it stretch out before me like a ramp to a bright place.

My goal in the morning was just to relax and let my knee heal, not take stuff so seriously.  Then Rebecca came in with some kind of collage art shoebox textile whirly-gig ensemble that she and her graphic artist mother had made together in just one night, and I plummeted.  My goal for the day was just to get by.  To not get blown over by my thoughts.  If I just wait long enough, my knee will heal up.  And here this girl was already setting the world on fire.  I couldn’t help but ask myself: do you see what happy children accomplish?  How effortless it could be?

So much of me was plain to see even then.  Goodness, over-matched.  Somehow an outsider to my own life.  Caring, overwhelmed and uncertain.  This past month I have worked long and hard on figures, analytics, and graphics.  I have loved it, and I have found others that do, too, yet Life can still find ways to multiply excessively.  Inner seasons turn.  The tide comes in and the moon is hidden by clouds.  Later, the tide recedes, and the sky is revealed.  These times of inner witnessing have a way of opening us up.  I feel that gnawing hunger to sit alone under the night sky with Hafiz, with myself, holding onto the silence like a refugee pleading for asylum.  I know if we do, the silence between us will draw my heart out into the open, melt it into ribbons, wrap me in them, bless me top to bottom, bathe me in the sacred, show me a dimension too often curled in on itself.  My little secret is how much I care.  My secret is how much it hurts sometimes, how much we give to just occupy one transient moment, fully.  To be real enough to be swallowed whole.  To recognize the bounty we receive in witnessing just one drop of Silence.

Loving isn’t necessarily long conversations.  It sneaks up on us.  Someone we work with every day but hardly know, one day we realize, their Presence changes the tone of our existence.  It’s not always easy to look up from our lives, to let it wash past for a while like a stream through the forest.

Jesus, I ask, when will the awkwardness in my Loving disappear entirely?

He laughs.  My friend, whatever on earth are you talking about?  If you only knew…  If you only knew what I see, when I look at you…

Looking Back

April 27, 2014
by Michael
comments 3
Poetry

What will it be like to Remember?

Rumi advises we give up on this question1.
My American football analogy goes like this:
this is not a first down that we’re after.
We can call out the chains and
ask for a measurement, but the
umpire will be dumbfounded
and probably feint.
Our questions are all boats without bottoms.
The instant replay,
on closer inspection,
will reveal ten million angels
on the nose of the football
down on one knee
taking instruction from Walter Payton
on how to jump over grown men
in a single bound.

A measurement to where, again?

Well, what of it…?
Are we there yet?
This week I was angry.
As a result, destitute and impoverished.
The star of my own zombie flick.
But my questions… those got lost in the heat.
Now in rags, I am thinning out,
losing my grip on the Important Unnecessary,
bleeding into the distance,
evaporating into this holy hunger,
becoming ecstatic once more.

The illusion of falsehood is self-regulating.
Time and impermanence are
our everyday saviors.
They keep stirring us up,
bringing us to a frothy boil,
heating us to a vapour
until finally… we’re gone.

I can’t go
for many days
without falling in Love
with You
all over again,
but you know that… don’t You?
You watch the level in the pot,
inhale the vapors as a prelude
to my final act of devotion,
and wait patiently for my
last drop of resistance
to disappear.

What will it be like to Remember?

You and I,
a scent the air,
Everywhere.

* * * * *

1 The inspiring lines from Rumi, translated by Barks:

“The mystery does not get clearer by repeating the question,
nor is it bought with going to amazing places.

Until you’ve kept your eyes and your wanting still for fifty years,
you don’t begin to cross over from confusion.”