The endings I love most are the ones where appearance is turned inside out by the fall of this one little domino—think Sixth Sense, or Interstellar, or another personal favorite, The Thomas Crown Affair. (Or what actually set me off on this post, which was the final episode of the Showtime series Homeland.) When that last piece falls, the meaning of everything that came before it is transformed. I particularly like when this reveals an […]
The other night I got that inkling. A tickle of spaciousness. One minute I was trying to decipher an ambiguity in the building code, and the next I was alone in the room at dusk, standing beside the window, trying to decipher the ambiguity of a meadow. I relaxed, settled—something moved within me. Unity, like freedom, is the utter magnitude of being. Later that evening I witnessed the great truth of our moment: the real […]
Our world is being stretched. The tightened skin becomes translucent. It’s like a magic trick, only the illusion is punctured instead of unfurled. What’s really there can no longer be hidden. The make-up is sloughing off. It’s challenging, but clearly it’s needed. We have far to fall. But the ground is close. As close as we make it. That’s because the ground is us. We are the ones who will catch each other. Not the […]
The weeds in my heart have gone to tassel. They are purple and rose edged in the soft light from Beyond. The sun here is setting, rising, calling, giving, knowing, holding, flying, burning. And I am listening, watching, walking, dreaming, dying, wishing, burning. Shadows of the unkempt reeds are dancing together on the ground. They are playing in the mud without getting wet. A world without shadows, I whisper, is a world without magic. I’ve […]
I have come to an important realization I think. And it’s not to say that I didn’t sort of know this already, but there’s a difference in knowing something and really knowing it. We’ve all seen these dichotomies: the zone defense or man-to-man, materialism or spiritualism, unrestrained capitalism or comprehensive socialism, cardio or strength training, STEM or liberal arts, the Right or the Left… And we all have at least one or two thoughts on […]
My days are no longer numbered. That’s one thing I’ve noticed. And I feel okay about being up this creek without a paddle. I’m even starting to think whatever it is I don’t know is probably the best part, and always will be. Today, I must confess, the full moon cracked me like a nut, and I wasn’t the only one. For a while we were floundering. All of us. Working up a righteous indignation […]
I wrote last week about the idea that bias is inescapable because the world that we experience is not a fixed reality, but the product somehow of our perceptions. A related idea is that we each experience the world differently because we each have a unique relationship with it. I think that gives an insight the previous statement does not. In any case the word “world” is a difficult study, and here I mean it […]
In his landmark paper “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” philosopher Thomas Nagel suggested that an organism is conscious when there is something that it is like to be that organism. It’s a beautiful definition, I think, and one that can be expanded to all sorts of questions of identity. What is it like to be American? To be a farmer? To be an art critic? To be a woman? To be Latino? […]
Once I asked Hafiz what it was like to be God and Hafiz told me one night when he should have been sleeping he asked himself the very same question and when he imagined what it was like to be God he discovered God was imagining what it was like to be Hafiz. A psychic tremor occurred in the air of his breath like when you know your mother is calling right before the phone […]
Hafiz with a pick axe. A coil of rope laid over his shoulder. This is a rare sight. He’s standing in a flood of holographic daylight which doesn’t cast any shadows whatsoever because somehow in my living room the light of three majestic stars has intersected, and I swear we only ever had one star in the area capable of this when I was growing up. Behind him a few angels are stretching out in […]
Embracing Forever 