I’m still learning the lesson of the birds. The one about sitting in the cover of spruce needles wearing the colors of fire and not questioning my birdness. Just letting it happen. Not questioning the tides of daylight and nightfall that inhabit me, that rinse my memory clean of silt and jagged edges and leave me singing about sitting in the cover of spruce needles wearing the colors of fire. I’m still learning that lesson […]
My plan, Hafiz, is to start a movement. A beautiful groundswell. It will involve festivals, of course, local chapters, iconic images, bylaws, speeches that change everything and people who don’t bathe mixing happily with those who do. Food stands. Woven hats. And yes, a cool logo. It will have green in it for sure. The thing is that it must be worldwide— everywhere that people are. And some places they’re not, too. How great would […]
I came in the door grunting like a bison with four empty stomachs and a calf at home with a head cold, dragged a toe on the threshold and nearly sent five half-shredded bags of heart healthy fruits and vegetables two bottles of heart healthy wine a heart healthy dark chocolate bar and a glass bottle of the most perfect most heart healthy cold-pressed olive oil Mother Nature could produce shooting across the floor in […]
Eternity sometimes feels like a boundless readiness coiled up and squashed into every point there is, like a swoop of clowns hidden inside a mote of pixie dust that’s hovering in the air just a foot or two in front of your left eye, all of them banging on the glass and reciting plays and brewing antidotes and tuning chainsaws and singing scales and lighting firecrackers and twitching with anticipation in there, just waiting on […]
It started with an idea, as these things usually do. “I need your help with something,” I said. Hafiz was working on his Nerf ball free throw. “I’m listening.” His face was an expressionless intensity, but the perforated foam hope fell short of the mark. He seemed to savor the data point. Silent as a feather in long term storage, the ball hit the knob on the closet door, rolled across the floor and settled […]
Once I was mumbling under my breath about a feeling that kept coming back to roost in the lee of my chest like a forlorn and beaten pigeon– a feeling like I was mumbling at altitude and couldn’t get enough air inside of me on the upstroke, or like I was gonna’ blow my own heart’s timing belt if I did anything too, too crazy… …like play a few rounds of Truth or Dare with Hafiz. […]
We don’t really know how it starts. It just gets sprung on us. This life. Suddenly, we are aglow. In the open. Sensitive to the touch. Metabolic. Molten. Astonished. Hanging in space. Once, after years of an ongoing ruckus, I reached a certain condition– a sweet spot just above the wick where I was something between a whirl, a mountain pass, a coyote’s sidelong gaze, and a penniless hunger, all dressed-up as a flame. I […]
This place as we call it, so full of needs, is the silence turned inside out– a realm of voices and wilderness– as if the crumpled piece of paper with our Meaning written on it couldn’t be found by our groping alone and so the satchel with Everything in it had to be turned over and shaken loose onto the table, spilling out moons and raindrops, car keys, a flock of herons, thresholds and nooks full […]
I’d like to get better at letting the unknown flow through me in ways I never could have predicted, so that I can experience my own nature in ways that might cause our experience here to soften into a panorama of endless giving, but the community college near me doesn’t offer that course. So I’m taking one on the typical practices of automotive dealers. And sometimes when I look across the sea, if the wind […]
Obviously I am not a Christian, but Jesus is my companion. More than that, even. We were bound together in darkness, in a moment we both chose without resistance. The ropes encircling us are sacred. We are each other’s atrium and ventricle. We live in the same house. We love the same woman. We lay together on a raft sometimes, continuing our passage across the sea to visit the birth of life. At night, when I’m […]
Embracing Forever 