Welcome Home Everywhere you go, silence follows. Peace and quiet have this down to a science. They send out their tails to watch and record everything that happens while you’re out there looking for that certain something someone somewhat somewhere– trying to get better. They blend in undercover and look like exactly what’s happening. They’re armed with technology. Don’t look for them, though. This isn’t the time for paranoia. Just be prepared: when you do […]
“There are these moments, Hafiz, when it feels like Life called a thirty-second time-out or something. Do you know what I mean? Like when you’re getting ready for work, and you’re five minutes too early. Or you show up to the store, but it’s not open for another couple minutes. What are you going to do with five empty minutes?” Hafiz and I were drift-hopping through the moon’s first arboretum like tired helium balloons caught in […]
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 […]
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 […]
I’ve been thinking lately about things I have no business thinking about, like how to reconcile the capital-‘S’ Self from A Course of Love with what I’ve glimpsed of the Buddhist teaching of anatta, or no-self. Let me say right at the outset that this is not purely an intellectual exercise. One of the great miracles of starting this blog has been the dialogue with people whose words, and possibly (though it remains hard to […]
A little over a week ago Linda nominated this blog for an award, and being Award Free here I graciously declined but expressed my appreciation for the recognition. Linda’s intent was clear and heartfelt, however, and revolved around expanding relationships and the threads of connection in this virtual realm. I felt I wanted to honor the intention in some fashion. So, I’ve been thinking since then off and on about relationship in general, and the […]
It’s only been a few days, but I’m back for more. The life of an addict. My moments have become cracked glass, but there is a hint of honey in my tears. It’s been a bittersweet epiphany: I’m not cut out to be the person I’ve been being. I’m a crash test dummy careening into the wall of nothing whatsoever. For a moment I was full and clear, a moment without the traffic, unfettered, remembering what […]
I can’t work like this, I muttered. (I get emotional sometimes around beings of the most radiant candor– the ones who tell you like it is without even moving their lips, who shatter whole lifetimes of log-jammed feelings with a kind of glimmering eye thing and an emanating peace that sneaks up on you like a heated seat, a peace that feels as though it’s backstopped by a battalion of compassionate mountain lions who keep […]
A self is a heavy burden to carry with you across the desert. Despite being invisible and weightless in principle, it is the often overlooked, but necessary battery of accoutrements that are required to render the self manifest and functional that take their toll. There is the steamer trunk full of historical data, for instance, with its rather robust coefficient of sliding friction across the hot sand– the modern take on an old classic, a […]
The process of shifting identity from the false perceptions of the ego to the valid identity we all share in Christ appears, at least for me, to involve passage through states that closely resemble one or more of the following: a flock of large metal plates approaching both the speed of sound and the US Naval Artillery Rail Gun Test Range; a repeating dream in which you hike up the side of a mountain to […]
Embracing Forever 