The construction of bridges can lead to the forgetting of rivers and the strengthening of commerce. In this way, thoughts can erect theoretical scaffolding to cross safely the tidal pools of the heart. This is far more efficient than wading through marsh and muck each morning, once in each direction, to pick up the day’s fresh batch of metrics. Less smelly, too. One day I was walking the planks when a great wind came up […]
I don’t believe there is any greater power than that of an idea, deeply held, and slowly it is becoming clear to me that all we behold is the product of these generative seeds. In the three books of A Course of Love, Jesus speaks frequently about ideas, and in a passage that I love he says, “Giving ideas life is the role of creatorship.” This statement comes in a section of the Dialogues– the […]
Today, for the second time in my life, I finished a Thomas Pynchon novel. Now the hard part: how to convey the dizzying nature of this journey when all I have are snapshot memories and fragments of awoken dreams staggering around the underworld of my consciousness. I read most of Against the Day in twenty page segments, and so it took me quite a while, but I don’t think there was a single sitting that […]
When I stepped out of the building in which I work this evening, my head seemed to have been pressed into a perfect, steaming cube– a polished alloy ingot of ordered rectilinear thoughts. You could have bounced a laser off it. My normally fluid mind had been sintered by the heat of prolonged concentration into a dazed ceramic. Even my cells had conformed to the geometric demands of the day’s efforts, having tugged their cytoskeletons […]
When I was young, my favorite Saturday morning super heroes were Aquaman, the Wonder Twins, and Superman. Now they are Rumi, Hafiz, and Jesus, and I am the one in the cartoon. Every day is a new episode in accepting freedom. Wonder Woman had a strong effect also, but I was hesitant to admit it at first. They haven’t made her a movie yet. The thing is: I believe in balance in the Force. I think […]
I’m slowly losing track of who I was. The other day it hit me: somewhere there’s a body running around with my name on it, leading a committee probably or picking fruit from a scissor lift or counting inventory on aisle 5. Giving directions to strangers from the street corners of cities whose names won’t mean anything to you or I, or anyone living for that matter. Just laddy-dah, hands in his pockets, whistlin’ away. […]
The simplest awareness is like this: an ocean. And then: Waves. Rhythm, or Wind. Light, translucence, and the empty sky. You and I, arising. This is all that has ever been. Hidden from view, a moon is cracked open– its yolk plopped into the ferment. Illusion is endorsement of the sensation that something Happened, and it stuck, and now we need to find out what It was. It is the locally embodied transient intoxicating ramshackle belief […]
I have made modest progress over the past eight or nine months on the draft of a novel. If the 100k word mark is what puts you in the ballpark to being able to say a novel has been written, I’m just over 2/3 of the way there– sans editing. I have no previous experience in this sort of thing, but I figured the first and most important part was just to write and don’t […]
The places within us that are not yet healed, and have not yet been dissolved into the pure and guiltless and shameless and never-confounded substance of being, are like movie stars, and the events of the lives we lead the flash bulbs of a traveling horde of annoying paparazzi. Our wounded places simply can’t avoid them—can’t get a break. Offstage, without their make-up on, these stars just want to be left alone. Can we not […]
It’s easy to think I have made a breakthrough, put the pieces together just right, as if I were a scientist grappling with and making plain the mysteries of salvation. It wouldn’t be all that difficult to conjure an image of myself twirling a dry erase marker in one hand and sloshing a cup of coffee absentmindedly in the other while pacing back and forth in front of wall-to-wall white boards. On them are scribbled […]
Embracing Forever 