I was seated on a tall aluminum stool, in the middle of a high school gymnasium, at three in the morning. I wore a silk beanie on my head from which there stood a single aplomado falcon feather, pointed straight up like an antenna. My eyes were closed in concentration. Hafiz was seated opposite me on a stack of encyclopedias he had built just outside of the circle at midcourt. In front of him stood […]
Unsure of how to proceed, the fabric of my inner experience the tattered banner of yet another failed self-concept, snapping and flapping in the rushing wind, I was washing dishes. One by one. Soak, scrub, wash, rinse, dry. Repeat. There was the hope that performing this activity manually, with ritual focus, would result in my being permeated by a bygone purity, one that would cool my smoldering core. The dishwasher was a pace or two […]
This past week I was shaken by an acute pain in my heart-soul-being. Like a fever in the body, it began as a dull ache, but ramped up into a full blown grippe. It was an inner aching that shook me to the core. If you have felt this, you will know the attending symptoms- the way a ghostly pallor slides over the world like a sticky film, the way we withdraw ourselves into a […]
I can imagine a life after this one, in which I am the same, but different. I can sense the timelessness of Being- the possibility of not ending, of becoming a long vista of compassionate quietude, of hearing every Moment as it arises with simple clarity: because Love is a seashell placed over the Heart. but I can’t remember beginning or being born or ever having been anyone else. Somewhere, along this way, the being […]
Sometimes I imagine a breaking free, an unrestrained way of being, a way of living immersed within a beautiful and timeless feeling, and my heart soars. It is the sensation of climbing onto the back of a great and powerful bird called Peace, whose wings are as vast and wide as school buses, and vaulting into the air to glide endlessly over a deep blue sea. I am filled with warmth. I am the exchange […]
here’s the thing about That- (your heart’s lock). the Love inside You is the same Love that was inside Houdini. (do you see?) and fear… is a clumsy lock maker. his locks are rusty, ineffectual, and overdone hunks of metal, as functional and sophisticated as a cabal of mouse traps. sensing his own ineluctable incompetence, he applies them in copious quantities, disguising nothing at all as a vast and interwoven steel conspiracy. eschew this shammery. (those clodding forgeries […]
The hut in which I live is a simple shelter made of wood, set on a foundation of piled stones, with a roof of hewn wooden shakes. The chimney is short, the hearth just deep enough for a piece or two of firewood. It is perched on a rise near the side of a mountain, overlooking a valley that fills with morning mist and gliding birds. There is a trail that winds along the ridge, […]
The central sun is blackened and hollow, a rotating furnace of unimaginable heat without boundary or Beginning. It is the heart of all places. Where maths meet its circumference, they dissolve into music. Then disappear. There are no boundaries, but simple beings walk along the periphery in thoughtless becoming. They walk in circles called orbits with arms behind their back, in repose, while tigers and shadows tumble and slash in the distance and formations of doves swoop in […]
Last night the Beloved and I changed the Rules of Engagement: I agreed to stand quietly and listen. She agreed to do do the rest. She blindfolded me. She rolled me up in a sail that came with its own ocean. She hung me upside down from the ceiling- (you know, like a carcass)- and pulled the plug. The door latched behind her as She left the room. Click. My concepts took their cue and spilled […]
The banana yellow 1960 Impala convertible drifted to a stop about ten feet from my front porch. The top was down and Hafiz was perched behind the steering wheel, motionless as a statue, wearing an over-sized floral shirt, an Oakland Raiders ballcap turned backwards, and a pair of mirrored sunglasses. Near as I could tell he was staring straight down the boulevard, waiting, as if I knew what the hell was going on and would […]
Embracing Forever 