The heavy lifting is done in the invisible realms. What’s left to be done here is simplicity itself. Beauty emerges from tending to the obvious. Get some water. Carry stones. When we’re like this, we live inside of choreography, though we’ve never seen the script. We couldn’t read it, anyways– ten million movements on planes of existence whose names we cannot understand, all conspiring to make our next step plain. Just take it. Don’t wonder about what […]
They look at me funny when I tell them I’m a cosmic stunt man, like I have a condition because I can’t stop coming to Jesus about the elaborate nature of this phenomenal ruse. Like indifference is a rational response to having undergone such a prompt step into existence, to having donned that stretchy, knowledge-retardant suit and climbed down the business end of a circus artillery piece, only to fall asleep just prior to the moment […]
See if this helps: Christ is a fisherman whose nets are cast nightly into the sea of non-existence, pulling haul after haul of shimmering beings out of the abyss. The seas are black as ink, the waves like rolling hills of liquefied obsidian, impenetrable to plain sight, but the nets emerge from the deep full of wriggling, unspeakable colors. We were each caught like that, scooped out of the darkness in nets woven by angels, hauled […]
It is possible, strange though it may seem, to imagine that right now is a most exquisite Love note written with you in mind, to imagine that this very moment– with all its shortcomings, flaws, minor aches and pains, pain killers, and just plain killers, the war department, the paperwork, and the miffed populace in which you’re mired– is a tactical choreography offered in the only language you yet understand, suggesting with all due respect that […]
I was in Washington, D.C. this past weekend with my wife and her eight year old grandson, and we went to an IMAX film to see the story of Fred and Norah Urquhart, who spent much of their lives in a quest to understand the migratory path of monarch butterflies. After several weeks of an extremely busy schedule at work and an annoying skin infection that has been insistent on delivering its message– a time […]
Illusion is a grid of two-way streets, an endless network of choices. Asphalt riddled with diesels, sirens, and street lamps. Buildings with decisions stacked up to the sky like trays of factory-laid eggs waiting for chicks. Dropped ceiling meanings. Angled views. Helo pads on top. A strange silence up there. What if the engine fails? Parachute racks, lightning rods and hose reels. Tightropes strung from peak to peak. Wind socks for safety and guidance. The heavy […]
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 […]
The title to Peter Kingsley’s Reality is about one word short in my opinion—that word being “Check”—but is otherwise perfect on all sorts of levels. It is at once ambiguous, provocative, presumptive, tantalizing, engaging, slippery, and so-simple-it-stuns, much like the work itself and the classical Greek philosopher-shaman-necromancers whose timeless wisdom Kingsley brings to light therein. My favorite aspect of the title is that its simultaneous ambiguity and depth act together as a self-limiting rhetorical throttle. […]
A skull is a resonating chamber, a human-shaped bottle for storing echoes. A Great Mystery holds me up to its ear– who is listening to Whom? Awareness merges with such a sound, vanishes. A skull is an organic amplifier, a condenser of ethereal transmissions, an inwardly-curving bone around a hollow void, meant to be dipped daily in a field of silence– held to the ear of a Great Mystery. Over time, carefully tended, the silence […]
Some nights are for forgiveness. I can only let the mail pile up for so long. Then I have to open the notes I’ve been sending myself since who knows when, and really drink them in. Notice the handmade paper, the choice of twine, the careful hand-writing, the postmarks from places I never knew I’d been. How did I get there? When was I lost at sea? I realize… a distance has been opened, and […]
Embracing Forever 