I’m not so naive as to think I fully understand my own beliefs and feelings, nor to assume they form an exactly rational system when laid bare by attempts at explanation. But in making the effort, I discover things– inconsistencies in thought, many of them delightful(!); powerful feelings that cannot be explained, yet explain much; ineffable inner realms I realize are part and parcel to who I am; or the existence of ideas operating one […]
Each of my wounds, every pain, was a withholding. Never mind the reasons. You don’t need ten plagues to make the point if you have the miracle of uncertainty in your life. It teaches unceasingly, without relent. I realized the other evening in the car: the only fear I’ve ever had is a question about what I might be asked to give. Jesus knows this question well—has explored its every angle— but no one can […]
They said once, in the papers, they found sea shells in the Rocky Mountains. To minds so disposed, these findings– like all such mockeries of the mundane– sparked a series of concomitant revelations. I know this because Hafiz pinned me to the wall, told me to hold quite still, and then cordoned my life– which suddenly felt like a pop-up trailer with ten thousand doors– into endless sectors of moonlit bedrock and crushed eons. We […]
Every once in a while reality gets in a mood. Wants to bust up the ice. Show us our options. Get the lead out. Crumple up history into a ball. Rubs its hands together. Blows on the dice. Not for luck. Oh no. The devoted– the ones alone in the gym before daylight about to shoot their five hundred free throws– they do the same. Twirl the world in their hands. Breathe deep. Visualize it. […]
When Jesus was young they thought he had a learning disability. At the very least, they reconciled themselves to the fact that the boy possessed an incurable obstinance. At the dinner table, for instance, despite the most pressing tutelage, he refused to concede that an apple and a pear were innately different, choosing instead to refer to them both giddily as flowers. His mother and his father were also not permitted to enjoy the rights and privileges of […]
I was weaving my way through the desert, trailing just behind them, warmed by their presence, soaking in their words– a particle being carried across the sea by a raft of delicious intelligence. I came into a violent world, the first said. I came into a world without a future– a world on the brink, a world on fire, a world outflanked by death… God “the Father” was this idea I came up with. Alone […]
A film lies over the world, a distortive coating– a difficulty that has been sprinkled throughout the realm. Somehow we let the powder escape from the bag: the dust that causes permanence to fracture and dissemble into half-lives, the dust that causes recognition to thicken and cloud into obscurity. The wind blew it in all directions. Now everything is a strange, skewed cinema of what it once was. Now fading has become natural, and youth […]
Everywhere you look, everywhere your gaze lands, there the angels, carpenters, playwrights and arborists, bus drivers, tanners, rain-makers and silversmiths populate the invisible, dashing into position at the end of your glance, blossoming from time and space wherever your vision rests, hidden but present inside your every view like the blood in your own hand, just out of sight, just behind the world as it seems to be, just giving a bit of color to the […]
When asked to explain the self, the Buddha demurred. How would this help? Likewise, a trusted computer will not look too closely at division by zero, not because it is impossible, but because of the hypnotic ramifications. Caught in its beguiling web, the self resists clear understanding. Better to consider the photon. When a filament of refined metallic earth is filled to the brimming point with a humming sweetness, or space itself collapses into an incredible, […]
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 […]
Embracing Forever 