Why am I carrying this barbed piece of steel around with me? Because it hurt when it was dropped into my open palms? And now I want to repay the favor should the world present me with such an opportunity? There’s no such thing as even-steven in this world, but there is holiness. There are rivers wide as ball fields that dredge bald tires and old box springs off the bottom and carry them off to the […]
We circulate blood to warm the engine, to launder our thoughts through a flickering screen of cells, to give our last remaining questions the dignity of heat, a name, and color– to work them over day after day from within these visceral bindings, pressing against them and metabolizing them and hoping they’ll somehow end up different than they once were. The mind takes a peek out, intrepid, eager as a hunter, giddy with the leathered […]
I walked out into a field of grass and golden light to place my hand upon the sky, and spun the heart wheel. The world blurred into songs– the old ones, the ones that can fly– then became the memory of human heads nodding in the darkness as the truth was shared one to one. Knowledge poured out of me to join with the Directions. It told me that every tear will be wiped away, then […]
In the inky darkness of the void, beneath a tender moon, a door cracks open, and perfect quiet spills out to form a shadow… A moth appears– wings a-flicker from the very first, as if it has been curiously darting to and fro for quite some time, and the door has appeared of its own volition. To be polite. To show the way. The weaving gray feather is hardly more than a tickle upon an […]
Hafiz and I on a bench, basking in a rosy sunset. Falcons gathering on the limbs overhead– some Merlins, some Sooties, a Grey– all of them edging awkwardly close, coalescing into an artillery of vision. The theater is full. A door opens like an out-sized black pixel on the face of the sun– a cuckoo-clock pronouncement– and brilliant birds of flame fly out to swoop across our sky like smoke rings blown by the sun’s innermost […]
I remember falling in love with Bucky Fuller’s use of the word artifact the first time I ran across it– the way the modern world, seen through his eyes, was an assemblage of present day artifacts. These were not clay bowls and petrified implements unearthed from a Sumerian archaeological dig, but mass-produced silverware, jet engine airplanes, and home heating furnaces. An artifact in this sense is the embodiment of a particular era’s state of thought. […]
Staggering through the dim light of Heaven’s front yard, slinking into the greenish shadows of distant outdoor halogens as if to hide forever, and ranting silently about the burden of makeshift woes and ramshackle postulates with which I’d saddled myself– including my favorite one about the pending arrival of something hellish but indeterminate in nature that no being should ever have to face– why wouldn’t I accept the cocktail napkin and the nice sandwich offered to me […]
Without mindfulness, you might spaz out in a moment of adversity and plunge the toilet recklessly completely oblivious to the fact that only a little nudge is being asked for in that location, a gentle rhythm that will pass through a vast and holy maze of intersecting worlds that just happen for that one moment to share your half bath, so that in places broadcasting colors your eyes can’t understand, and sounding deft languages that long ago […]
If the premonitions of being that scythe through your soul’s back forty all day like shadowy pendulums hung from a pivot so insanely near to the nodal origins of your existence that it’s a perpetually mild discomfort to your otherwise undistracted mind cause you to tremble, take a quick, nervous breath and brace for impact, dive towards an embankment, spontaneously recite procedures for exiting sunken cars, or climb the stairs of tall buildings to burden […]
What I told Hafiz when I opened the bedroom door and entered the main living area after my daily five or so minutes of high-intensity, mid-morning meditation on the illumined heart of being, was that I was finally prepared to commit myself to crossing the Sea of Meaninglessness– to enduring the winds of fate, the firecracker heavens, and whatever battering-about goes on out there– to gritting my teeth at the sight of hungry kraken and […]
Embracing Forever 