Musings on Resurrection

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

The other day I had some old friends drop by for a visit– unannounced.  I was sitting in the plaza having a sandwich, reading or reflecting or some such thing, when Depression slid one of the free chairs out from beneath the table, making a real show of it– dragged it along in a gritty clattering of metal across stone that sent all the pigeons fleeing, and then flopped down like a rubbery fish.  Unshaven, bloodshot eyes, his hair mangled into clumps each of which seemed to be pining for a different escape path, he oozed down in the chair like an oil spill until he found his own level.

I could feel him regarding me coolly, giving me a once over top to bottom as he played some kind of nuisance game with his toothpick.  “How ya’ been?” he asked finally.

“Thought we were through.”

He smiled.  “Aww, now…  Hey!  Me and the boys was just checkin’ in on ya’, that’s all.”

You’re No One and Meaninglessness converged from opposite sides of the plaza, like NSA agents on a stake-out, sat down alongside of me, arms draped on the adjacent chairs, legs crossed, their black wool suits sucking the very light out of the air– a pair of real happy-go-luckies.  I couldn’t even bring myself to look at them.  I stood, took a final swig of my coffee, shut my book quietly, and set off for the street.

“Think we can’t find you?” Depression called after me, smirking, with his arms open wide, palms up like a preacher.  You’re No One punched Meaninglessness in the shoulder, laughing at the boss’s joke, while the other just stood there, expressionless, one of those stone colders, putting on his sunglasses.

* * * * *

They bumped into me on the corner of Seventh and Mason, came around the corner from the other direction and just stood there waving as I walked by, then again in the parking garage, and that night they insisted on watching a movie with me on my couch.  Four was a tight fit, but they wouldn’t have it any other way.  The real problem was they didn’t know how to keep quiet.

“Pretty good use o’ time here, Mike.  Real good.  Lots o’ people doin’ this now.  I mean, not people that accomplish stuff or anything, but you know, lots o’ people…  Just killin’ time…”

“Grab me a beverage while yer up?”

“What’s with the selection here on the brain box, huh?  That cablevision thing’s come a long way…”

“Hey, what happened to that thing you were workin’ on?  You know, that uhhh…  oh, yeah, that writin’ thing.  Not feelin’ it tonight?  Hey, don’t let us get in your way or nuthin’.”

And so on and so forth…

I tried to get quiet and still, get centered, make a collect call to Hafiz, but all I could hear is them whispering and laughing.

“Look, he’s doin’ that thing again…”

“Whooo-ooo-whoo-oooo….” like the crazy chant.

“Hee hee!  How’s that work now, Mike?  Maybe we could try.  Or help out a little bit, like.  What.  You just, like, ask for the bad guys in your head to get hauled away or something.”  A snap of the fingers.  More laughter.

Meaninglessness still hadn’t said a word.  He just stood in the corner, not amused amidst the giggling of this two bit partners, staring at me all night.

* * * * *

Thankfully this wasn’t my first rodeo.  “Time for a walk, gentleman.”

Depression and You’re No One look shot each other questioning looks and then shrugged their shoulders.  I grabbed my keys and headed out the door.  There’s rhythm in movement, and life in rhythm, and Christ in life.

“Hey boss, what’s he doin’!?”

Once rhythm was established, I called down to my heart, asked what it feels like to be absolutely free, and then waited.  At first it felt like a big flat nothing, and Meaninglessness drew closer, poised to strike, but then the whole world began to shift.  The buoyancy of Christ arose.  I relaxed.  I saw a dove leap towards the sun.  It felt like a resurrection.  It felt like this…

* * * * *

I am faced, I realize, with a fundamental choice, one I will make again and again and again until the illusion of choice no longer exists.

In the Treatises of A Course of Love, Jesus says, “Prayer must be redefined as the act of consciously choosing union.”  This is the purpose of each moment, until the choice is no longer necessary, and prayer is all I have.  I ask Depression, You’re No One, and Meaninglessness if they want to pray with me, by putting all their eggs with me into the unified basket of all that is, but they have gone.  Separation is what makes their painful stories of littleness possible to enact.

Speaking a few pages later in the Treatises about the resurrection, Jesus says, “The great experiment in separation ended with the resurrection, though you have known this not.  For the resurrection and life are now one and the same.  That they are the same has not meant the automatic realization of this change of enormous proportions.  The very nature of change is one of slow realization.  Change occurs all around you every day with your realization of it.  Only in retrospect are the greatest of changes seen…

“You are each called to return to your virgin state, to a state unaltered by the separation, a state in which what is begotten is begotten through union with God.  It is from this unaltered state that you are free to resurrect, as I resurrected.  It is through the Blessed Virgin Mary’s resurrection in form that the new pattern of life is revealed.

“The new pattern of life is the ability to resurrect in form.  The ability to resurrect in life.  The ability to resurrect now.

“Thus is the glory that is yours returned to you in life rather than in death.”

* * * * *

We may die and resurrect countless times, each death the latching onto of a fleeting perception of what it is to be separate, each resurrection the return to unity.  But unity and resurrection are all we truly have, and they are ours beyond any reasons we can comprehend.  Simply because we are they, and they are us.  They are all that can ever truly last.  The world has been reborn, and we are awakening to what this means each time we turn to Love and ask to be taken back.

One day we’ll move in for good, and that will be that…  The promise of the Resurrection will be fulfilled.

Unkempt, But Holy

April 18, 2014
by Michael
comments 16
Poetry

I’ve never really known
quite what to do with my hair.
Were I pressed upon by
violent circumstances,
fighting to defend the fort
or preserve the realm,
this would be of no account.
Instead my life sprouts daily,
like weeds in a field,
matters of no consequence
that require careful attention,
a trained eye,
and defensible motives–
matters best handled,
as the world well knows,
by well-ordered
professional-looking people
who instill confidence in others
and keep reasonable hours.
But my heart is both
a starry-eyed beast
whose power trembles
along the seams between worlds
and calls down the lightning, and
the naked maiden who rides
on the beast’s great shoulders,
chased each night by the moon,
whose tears nestle into the ground
and sprout at dawn into
everything
anyone
ever needed.

You can see plainly our dilemma.

Well,
I’ve made my decision.
That makes
this bizarre mop of
sculpted dervish cowlicks
a subversive antenna:
in case I get lost in here
running errands
or fetching documents,
my heart can zap me from
its hiding place
in the hills just outside of town
and remind me to scribble
that poem on the wall already
and then get the hell out of there.
Run through the corridors
with visions of holy longing in your eyes
and don’t look back, it says.
Come home to me.

Special Effects

April 17, 2014
by Michael
comments 6
Poetry

Time’s ruse is that it appears to pass.
Every appearance, even voices,
are a special effect.  These echoes
of the Invisible deceive me not.
Every instance of drowning I endured
came in the flood of something special.
Show me the One who never speaks,
and I will fall to my knees and listen,
unmasked, mute and reverent.
Change is the right-hand man of time,
his charlatan enabler,
the fragrance of sweet liquor
hanging in the aftermath of yesterday,
the drug of choice
for all those who would ransom
what can never be bought or sold, only given,
by hiding in worlds of unburned ashes.
If you can interpret it, or assign meaning
to or from it, then it will burn eventually.
You think burning means a fire, a blaze of glory,
but I say it is an ambush of a thing’s true essence–
fast time, a getting to the point.
Revelation is not an effect at all.

When You’re not around
my pain flowers, time passes,
and I resort to talk like this.
Caught in a cage that won’t hold still,
my longing makes anger look
like a silly board game.
I shake in withdrawal,
time’s trickery leaking out my pores.
Tick tock digital clock
the harbingers of time I do defrock.
Practicing the art of leaving
where I never was, I return.
Every moment is a prayer,
and every prayer this shift in focus.
Time is ill-equipped to handle this event–
can’t make sense of conscious lightning,
of our arrival at the willingness to Love,
of this everywhere-shared instantaneity.
What could have happened, some will ask,
if it looked like nothing at all?
What can there be that leaves no ash
in its Revelation?

If I am not a special effect,
then what am I?
I am that which leaves no mark.
This distinguishing characteristic
is all that remains after time’s fire has passed.
Do you not see it?
It is what we have been given.

Idea Power

April 14, 2014
by Michael
comments 11
Course Ideas

I don’t believe there is any greater power than that of an idea, deeply held, and slowly it is becoming clear to me that all we behold is the product of these generative seeds.  In the three books of A Course of Love, Jesus speaks frequently about ideas, and in a passage that I love he says, “Giving ideas life is the role of creatorship.”  This statement comes in a section of the Dialogues– the third book of the set– in which Jesus is speaking about the ease with which a new heaven and a new earth may be created.

Ease?

Did he just say ease?

Well, no– to be fair, he did not.  But I’m a big fan of synonyms.  Gives me that feeling of being on the team, you know?  Consider the following passage, “When you are fully aware of your oneness of being and begin to create in unity and relationship, you will do so simply by being who you are being, just as you have ‘created’ during your time of separation by being who you have thought yourself to be.”

See what I mean?  He did say simply.

He also preceded that passage with these words, “You are called to nothing short of creating a new heaven and a new earth.  This does not entail specificity any more than does the miracle.  It does not entail choice.  It is a way of being.”

So, basically, by being who we know ourselves to be, the world is remade.  Without the power of ideas– the creative power bestowed upon and within and as us– this would be a much more difficult proposition to entertain.  What strikes me most about this passage, and one of the avenues through which I’m able to relate to it immediately, is the notion that we’ve been doing this all along.  The world we experience is the expression of the ideas we carry around inside, and it always has been.  How difficult could this be if we’ve been succeeding straight along?

The elephant in the room is so massive, however, we overlook it.  Our minds tend to think in terms of specifics and so we make the simple complex…  We muddy the waters.  Yes, there are many ideas at play, but ultimately there is but one idea at the core of every thought system.  A core idea at work in this realm for a long, long time has been separation.  Every experience of lack or limitation, every disease, every doubt and fear, every act of violence, regardless of its form or seemingly obvious chains of proximate cause, is the effect of or related to the idea of separation.  Without it, these would simply not exist in physical expression.  We did all that without even knowing “how”, and once we wrap our minds around that one it becomes obvious that we can do so again…  With true ideas this time…

This relates to a premise developed in A Course in Miracles that there is in truth only one “problem” that we experience in myriad forms– that problem being our adoption of a mistaken identity.  That was an idea, too.  One bad idea and– poof!– it crops up in every facet of our experience.  Such is their power.  Consider what would become of the idea of one having more or less, in the absence of separation.  Consider what the benefit of violence or attack would be, in the absence of separation.  What would be the meaning derived from cheating or engaging in deliberate deception, in the absence of separation?  Would anyone feel the need to “spin” the meaning of events or circumstances, without the idea of separation?  One idea…  Kazaam.

Ideas have power.  Do any of you remember taking classes down at the community college and spending hours and hours of rehearsal time on trying to coax that false idea into spinning off all these various and sundry effects?  Here is a question that makes me laugh: could one of us really be any better at this than another, at getting ideas to play ball?  Would practice make a difference?

No.  Practice cannot make a rock better at being a rock, or you and I any better at being who we are.  Water cannot be any more or less watery.  We are idea wombs.  Walking creative incubators.  Pop an idea in, let us absorb it through our acceptance of it, and it is given life.  This is the ease with which power works through us.  Replace a false idea with a true one, and live by it, and everything is remade.

It is astonishing (and joyous) to consider that the greatest transformation will come not from willful, pre-meditated acts, but the quiet acceptance of Love by one heart after another.  Choice, as Jesus said, is irrelevant in this process.  He asks, “How can you choose when what you create is everything?”

Going Nowhere In a Hurry

April 12, 2014
by Michael
comments 8
Poetry

Barreling down life’s asphalt highway
in a vehicle of some description–
a modern coup of surface rocketry
whose every line represents
the fulfillment of computerized
crash-testing and the collected fall-out
of Greek ideas, gathered like a powder,
fired in the furnace of time and sculpted into
the shape of silent, diving falcons–
a machine built for catapulting
over the ground in space-blurring borings
through wind and air that leave behind
a shimmering, perfectly tubular quiet
into which matter is compelled
to repair, invisibly, one quivering particle at a time,
in a riotous coagulation along the cut,
while I, navigator and cargo,
esteemed bearer of intent,
occupant of the confounding moment and
strange beneficiary of a delirious history,
am seated comfortably
in a climate-controlled cabin
sipping rooibos tea, thinking…
thinking about what lies beyond the
vast horizon up ahead that
you and I both know I never quite reach,
inevitably pre-occupied with satellite transmissions
of terrestrial weather reports, political machinations,
butterfly migrations, transoceanic bridge conditions,
the latest evolution of our species, and the height of the sun’s corona–
plus practicing my zazen as night turns to day
and then back again all around me,
as if I were motionless
and an army of clouds were lined up single file
passing one by one in front of the sun.
(I like driving towards the sun.  The flickering is faster…)
Oh, yeah… plus my fifteen minutes every ten sunrises of my zazen.
I’m trying to get better, daring to understand just one thing.
If I could only do that…
And all this just
inches from a caterwauling incandescence
on whose outcome my speed continuously depends,
of whose existence my cells have long suspected
and now whisper when I am focused elsewhere
and not lecturing them thought by forsaken thought
on their duty to be reliable and productive
contributors to my long-term existence.

Eventually, I decide to stretch my legs the old-fashioned way.
I say as much to my untiring steed.  We locate a pull-out
a few hundred miles ahead– just moments away.
I sit on a stone wall overlooking the sea,
sipping hot coffee from a paper cup–
(the sensation of stillness is the same
whether moving or sitting)–
contemplating the many miles that lie ahead
and musing about where this road must end,
when I see the edge of a rolled yellow paper
protruding from a gap in the masonry.
I reach for it and unroll it.

How many laps were you planning to do, anyway?
Hope you will be joining us for supper.

Love,
Hafiz and the Gang
(from beyond the horizon)

Some glass part of me is shattered,
the fog inside of me lifted by one true parcel of Love.
When Memory returns, it floods everywhere at once.
Have you ever felt all your cells weeping together
in unison?  There’s no pain in that collaboration.
When you do, that’s when you realize,
like I did on that stone wall,
the decision has already been made…

There’s no going back to what never really was…

* * * * *

“You can walk a million miles and get nowhere.
I got nowhere to go ever since I came back…”

Building Up For Freedom

April 8, 2014
by Michael
comments 6
Christ / Poetry

Like a thread of yarn
stretched in a line
flying
flickering fluttering
behind a thrown stone
to which its utmost
limit has been lashed,
we fly.
When the stone
exhausts its given momentum
and burrows into soft soil, motionless,
we come crashing on after,
lazily collapsing
into a coiled, tangly heap,
awaiting the curiosity
of the next passer-by.
Like this
Our loving unfolds in
in accordian-like phases.
Stretch.
Contract.
Fly.
Land.
Wheee…!
Thump.
We are building resolve
with these practice flights
through the known realms,
so that on the day when
Hafiz catches sight of
these intriguing goings-on,
wanders over,
leans down,
burrows through the woolen maze
to collect the precious stone,
holds it gently in his palm,
and whispers about flight un-tethered,
of a passage through endless ages of Light,
something akin to a bullet shot into a cloud chamber,
on a collision path with the Beloved–
an offer designed to change everything–
a voyage that would ostensibly begin
with Our being loaded
into the darkened chamber
of the void-splitting bazooka
he’s clearly itching to fire–
a real corker, let’s put it that way–
we are prepared to say
without hesitation:

Yes, please.
Let’s blow every last
thought of resistance
clean off.

The Life Between the Lines

April 5, 2014
by Michael
comments 6
Book Reviews

Today, for the second time in my life, I finished a Thomas Pynchon novel.  Now the hard part: how to convey the dizzying nature of this journey when all I have are snapshot memories and fragments of awoken dreams staggering around the underworld of my consciousness.  I read most of Against the Day in twenty page segments, and so it took me quite a while, but I don’t think there was a single sitting that went down without my crashing headlong into a delectable passage of prose that resulted in my hopping up out of my seat immediately– (thump! as the mouth of the book chomps down on its mark)– taking a few deep breaths, and bouncing gaily on the balls of my feet.

(Wow… Holy @#$%~!  Shake it off…  Breathe…)

Just because.

Well no, dammit, not just because.  Because.

There are times in our lives when the meaning behind the moment is a fairly abstract concept at best, and yet I sense that when we reach the end and look back, the incredibly complex pageantry of cloud-like feelings that arises will prove to be the smoke from one, irrefutable, perpetually exploded grenade of knowing: something happened.  Something happened, because someone was transformed– us included– and that transformation was always and forever the meaning of our lives.  Everything else was just shadowy movements.

Was it planned?  Was it ad hoc?  Was it worth it?  Does it even matter now?

Something happened.

This realization is initially nothing but an inexplicable feeling.  You’re not sure what it is, but for better or worse you have it.  It has you.  Like all good art, reading Pynchon is depth-plumbing and evocative, an encounter riddled with cracks and with spaces in between the lines you are drawn to reach out and fill with the marrow of your own living.  Reading Pynchon is like piloting a horse-drawn carriage with oblong and wobbly wheels through a mine field of half-buried pinatas.  They burst open with impact, filling the air with the ticker tape innards of ten thousand fortune cookie fortunes, all of them hastily dashed onto flimsy papers just one week prior by a whole country full of unemployed prophets.  You grab hold of one, and are reminded the reason you have any response at all is because you know It– this concoction of symbols you have confronted– and It knows you.

The last paragraph in the book contains this passage: “For every wish to come true would mean that in the known Creation, good unsought and uncompensated would have evolved somehow, to become at least more accessible to us.  No one aboard Inconvenience has yet observed any sign of this.  They know– Miles is certain– it is there, like an approaching rainstorm, but invisible.  Soon they will see the pressure-gauge begin to fall.  They will feel the turn in the wind.  They will put on smoked goggles for the glory of what is coming to part the sky.  They fly toward grace.”

Our lives, too, will end in a flight towards Grace.  If Against the Day was nothing but a roundabout reminder of this truth, it was well worth it.  The journey was effulgent with symbol and scene, mayhem and mechanism– some real, some dreamt, some both at once.  Pynchon’s parallel but interwoven worlds would not have resonated with me had I not been able to understand his allusions to birefringent crystals, radionics, Hamiltonians and quaternions, vectors and imaginary numbers, or had I been unable to read lightly enough to simultaneously render the curious admixture of comedy, sarcasm, tragedy, and debauchery in a common light.  But that’s just me.  I suspect that if there were these hidden, esoteric gems that twinkled as I walked by, there were that many more that I missed, that lie in dormant wait for the passage of another.  To say I should have read the book twice before trying to write about it is an understatement.

The challenge of reading this novel is to simply be present with the passage in front of you.  That is also, I think, where lie the richest rewards.  Is it not the same with living our lives?  It is tempting to want to understand the overall arc of the story, and we are accustomed in reading novels to at least think we are able to connect each scene to the characters’ desires and trajectories, but I find with Pynchon I have to eschew these common conventions more often than not, and embrace the indeterminate moment.  Only in the end, after it is over and I look up and look back, do I realize… everything has been made new.  Something has been safely and miraculously birthed in between the lines, lines that were oh so distracting with their anarchist bombardiers, Mexican brujo-shamans, the love child of a vigorous menage a trois, cornucopias of ethnic dishes and rare distillations, civilization-liquefying mathematical weapons, the ghosts of dead fathers, the doppelgangers of robber tycoons, and forays into the minds of mercury-infused alchemical tinkerers.

Despite all of that, Something… has happened.  It was never discussed, never obvious, never plain to the casual viewer, (which is what you had to be to take this ride at all), but it has emerged in the end, and has left me that much more aware of the meaning behind the moment, that much more dumbfounded at the paraphernalia of existence.

On the Nature of Being Lost For Good

April 3, 2014
by Michael
comments 10
Christ / Course Ideas

Jesus has been known to suggest that one’s experience of our collective dream of separation is marked by an upside down, inside out view of things.  We experience Love… as bound up with our pain, or perhaps we are afraid of what Love would offer us.  We fear the things that offer us peace and eternal happiness, because of what we think they will cost us, and we are drawn into attachments with those things that offer us only suffering and death, because we think we can hold onto them and achieve at least a semblance of value that is our very own.  In thinking about this journey without distance, this awakening from isolated terror to the holy accompaniment of all that is, I found myself struck by the parallels between getting lost, and returning to Love.

This makes sense, I thought, since getting truly lost is horrible, and that is precisely upside down from truly finding Love.  But the logic of this metaphor doesn’t stop there.  No ma’am!

Imagine you drove out to a beautiful forest on a bright sunny day, with the birds singing and the butterflies flitting to and fro, and you said to yourself, today I am going to get lost.  You might then say to yourself that you really mean it.  For good measure.  There are a number of problems with this willful misplacing of yourself in the wilderness, however.  For instance, at what point do you begin to wonder how well you are doing?  You might walk for an hour or two and then ask yourself, am I lost yet?  Well no, not yet.  You find you’re quite confident if you walk back the way you just came, while you might not recall every step, you’ll get back to the car in roughly the same amount of time it took you to arrive at the location in which you are standing.  The type of vigilance that comes from checking in on our progress every fifteen minutes is far from conducive to actually losing our way.

I think it is the same with reaching a place of deep and abiding peace, of warm communion with the heart of our being.  All this asking, am I there yet? plays against the very objective that is sought.

Next, it is apparent to me that being lost is a state of mind.  When we first begin to wonder where the hell we are, the mind begins its litigation against the conclusion that we are lost.  No, no we’re not lost, we tell ourselves.  We’re just temporarily getting our bearings.  We may not know exactly where we are, per se, but you know, the sky is clear, we’ve been heading south all day, so the car and/or the highway that brought us here are to the north.  Simple.  Or else we’re convinced that up ahead there will be a village, or a clearing with an old map tacked to a tree, or some other delusory circumstance that will turn the tables.  We’re not lost at all.  Just exploring.  Live a little, would ya’?  In this way the mind insulates us from the fact that we could be lost, even in circumstances where this might very well be the case.

Likewise, on the flip side of this coin, our minds insulate us from the experience we are having right now, the one of continuously arriving in the discovery of the Loving Reality in which we all share.  No, no the mind says.  This experience–such a word!– is just an ephemeral state of dancing hormones in your glandular system.  You’re tired is all.  You’re not any different than before.  You are who you’ve always been.  I told you who you are, remember?  We had an agreement.  We know what’s going on here.  You’re no different than the other day when we decided the right road is small, incremental adjustments.  Otherwise, how could you keep track of what’s really going on?

Then there’s the Big Moment.  Oh shit…  We’re lost.  What’s next is panic.  Or grim determination.  Or an exercise in suddenly deploying our long lost tracking skills.  We fall back on skills learned vicariously through television.  What’s next, ultimately, is the sense that something has gone wrong…

Flip the coin.  The acceptance of Love is hovering near.  We’re on the verge of a radical reversal of thought and perception.  The sensation arises that what lies on the other side of this reversal is not only wholly different than our past, but unknown and unpredictable.  Oh look, a butterfly!  A sign!  Distraction.  Or… oh, no!  I’m not ready.  There’s one more thing I need to do, but now I know where to go, I’ll just go do that and come back tomorrow…

So I think that accepting Love wholly, is a lot like getting lost.  It’s inevitable, once we learn to walk by feel, blindfolded through the woods, without keeping track of every little turn and fork in the road.  It’s inevitable, once we realize, we never really knew where we were to start with…

If you’re not lost yet, fall in love with whatever you are doing right now, and don’t look up until it’s over.  The other thing you can do is commit to keep walking, further and further into the forest.  Commit to never looking back.  This type of commitment is what I believe Jesus means by willingness.  You just take a step, and then a step, and then a step.  Until you don’t even dare think of what it would take to get back.  Plus you’ll be traveling with a group by then, sneaking about under the stars at night, writing poems and telling stories about a place and time you’ve nearly forgotten altogether.

It’s a journey without distance, but it doesn’t mean you always stay in the same place…  Your hopelessly lost heart won’t abide it.

Ecstatic Seizures

March 31, 2014
by Michael
comments 21
Christ

I’ve been developing a condition of late, a seizure that wracks my whole identity, an electric longing spun taut within an endless Answer.  Out of the blue– tears.  The core of my being, a wash cloth squeezed tight.  The vast hands of compassion twisting and pulling, braiding me into a rope that is twined with all beings.  Mary knows what I mean, how to hold this space, how to be flooded by the riches of Meaning that flow through and around, never to be repaid.  And yet there are no debts.

We meet together beside the gorge, walking amongst a gathering of tigers.  They have come to sit near, to just be close, to bathe in a warmth they recognize but cannot define, their eyes narrowed and serene.  Where else would they go?  Our hearts have become the most precious sort of catnip.

Inside of my core, relief and desire hug one another close at first light, huddled and shaking, momentarily unaware of the cold wind or the dry earth, glimpsing the sun through a tattered shemagh.  Moist eyes, a single rivulet of escaped pain, and the knowing that what I could never find the words to contain– this awareness that has ambushed me and pinned me to the wall– has been in love with me for all eternity, and I it.  The content of my interior trembling drifts so far off the scale of gratitude, that like ultraviolet light, it is a transformative and revelatory sort of darkness.

The shadows you see are ancestries of beings whose Meaning is contained in my own, as mine is in theirs.

* * * * *

I am thinking tonight about the concept of lineage.  We are each members of a family that goes all the way back.  How could we possibly fathom what that means?  Let your desire be your standard, raised high, and see who rallies around your flag.  The help we need is the most potent form of smoke, wafting through the lives we seemingly occupy.  You will know you’ve inhaled when your heart twists into a delicious knot, your eyes glisten, and you find yourself unable to move, unable to even whisper the words floating through your mind.

Thank you…  Thank you…

While the seizure grips me, I think, how could I not have known this…?  I realize how much that forgetting hurt, how much suffering I carried around with me because I thought it was the only way.  Like two divers stranded at the bottom of the sea, sharing a bottle of oxygen, this Knowing is the only currency we can truly share– the only Exchange that matters.  How to give this away to each drowning being?  Look up.  The stars have been trying to make this Answer plain all along.

Flying in “V” Formation

March 29, 2014
by Michael
comments 2
Christ / Poetry

One day
the Beloved
glanced over and
saw me schlepping
my burlap bag of memories
dull dreams
and weathered photos
across a landscape
of cars, glass bottles,
and tinted-glass personalities
like a lonely tortoise
having a near death experience
during the evening commute.
Curious, She picked
me up.  My legs dangled awkwardly,
pumping the air
in their usual slow,
auto-piloted circles
as if nothing had happened,
as if I might still actually
be plodding along,
as if She wasn’t
holding me next to her ear
like a seashell.

I don’t know what She heard,
or what I expected to take place,
but I do know
that what happened next
cannot be explained
by either one of us,
as doing so would
probably annihilate the whole
lot of us.
It is apparent
to me in hindsight
that it– e.g. what happened–
was the outburst of a spontaneous power
incapable of erring,
whose essence is a Rule
so vast it is
the calculus behind every Moment,
and unbreakable.
I was
reminded
in that thunder clap
of mutually expectant Listening,
never to peer
down the barrel
of an antique artillery piece
loaded with a
passel of freshly minted Bodhisattvas
in the illusory, but oh so effective form
of an armor-piercing shell.

As to what
may have occurred
when She held me to Her ear,
if you know
anything at all about
resonance, amplifiers, feedback or
blown speakers, you may be able
to piece together the
joyous implications
of an under-damped
Silence
passing back and forth
between us,
permeated with hints
of Remembrance
and Recognition.

Telling secrets
like these ones
is dangerous.
Very obviously,
something had to give.

As a result,
I’m not like
other turtles–
I am other turtles.
Also I have become
an invisible goose
with eyes like
compassionate arrows
and a
penchant
for flying
with my friends
in a V-formation
straight into the sun.