However it happened—none can really say. I only know that I was standing in a pasture filled with mirrored boxes, like disco saunas, and that people were lined up in front of them in silent repose. We were like a host of jet-lagged arrivals waiting to get our passports stamped—or our eyes examined, or our opinion surveyed, or our future turned upside down and shaken out, its contents inspected for contraband bits of the past. […]
The limited predictive intelligence of nuance can sometimes permit the obfuscation of the glaringly obvious. Said another way: forecasts predicated on the data typically accrued during the life span of a single human being are known to be astoundingly flawed. This may explain why Hafiz and Rumi stare at me like a pair of dispassionate fieldstones on the verge of sprouting horns when I wax extemporaneously about the day’s events— as if my mouth is moving, […]
This writing has undone me, peeled away my knowing and my nonsense, and led me way out way out from the edge to where there are no shadows, to where the clear light is visible in every direction, to where the wind is always scented by the horizon– in hues of timber and sunlight, in copal, cedar, and jasmine. Some days flowers fall from the sky, but no matter. What would it matter? I remember […]
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 […]
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 […]
Sometimes Life is like you’re standing on a crowded street, oblivious to everything but a chunk of gristle encrusted steak of an idea of who you should be being that you’re politely chewing for years on end– years and years and years, utterly distracted, like it’s an antidote, like you’re a cat encumbered by a wad of something gooey and medicinal the vet jammed deep in your cheek just out of reach of the jawbone’s […]
I was sitting on the squishy bottom of a short stack of water about three feet tall, beneath a full sun, fully clothed, buttons made up, with little bubbles hiding out in my eyelashes, watching a fish watch me back through the grass, thinking about the strange economies of tadpoles and turtles, wondering what that brewing pain was inside of my chest, as I was somehow temporarily without my memory of the direct effects of […]
For a time it was vitally important that I witness the sunset, that I look up from whatever act of commerce or gastronomy had caught my attention that day and look west, to pause and listen to far away places that seemed, for just a moment, to pour through the offices of my heart in fleeting snippets of a cosmic dialect. That was the moment, the precise time to say it: whatever this is… I […]
All our assumptions were wrong. The strangest part is realizing we always knew this, even in the hour of our deepest pain. We’re like a secret of the universe that wandered through the trees to a scenic overlook and stood slack-jawed peering into a crevasse full of stars and comets choreographing the meaning of existence, then got whacked in the back of the head with a frying pan and splattered into a corpus callosum of inter-combinant […]
The Only Principle is this: Nothing happens that doesn’t unfold within a field of awareness, and every awareness is held by a greater one because no awareness is great enough to hold itself. This is precisely true, even though awareness is always, only and ever… One. (That last bit’s the Other Principle.) Using language as we are here is like trying to make a hole in the Emptiness by using teaspoons to scoop out little […]
Embracing Forever 