Some would say that faith is like a padded suit you put on because you’re too scared to face the obvious reality that your life is a swift, knee-scuffing blood-curdling tumble down a steep and rock-strewn escarpment towards the waiting gaping dark, ugly and hungry empty irreversible vacuum-powered inescapable abyss of non-existence. You’re afraid to die, they say. Some of those same ones would say there’s a real sweetness to the glimpses of wild flowers […]
Your body is an ambassador, a communication technology, really, and you are the Message given it to convey to the world. Right off you might assume there would be far simpler and more reliable delivery mechanisms available in the cosmos for sending Messages, but the Writer has a unique problem in that Everything She touches comes to Life… Alright, alright, shush and look here, now- it’s not a problem, it’s an Opportunity is really the best way to […]
How many times can one being crack open? We are walnuts in the world’s vice. Smart walnuts. The kind of walnuts that have figured out how to manufacture from within our very matrix of nuttiness the two-part epoxy of judgement and littleness, and smear it in a thin layer at every point of our periphery to keep our cracked shells welded tight. Now your normal walnuts don’t do that. No sir. They just lay on […]
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 […]
I was standing on the end of the pier on a crisp morning, leaning against the half-petrified rail, watching gulls weave in and out of one another without ever getting anywhere– watching my breath roil into translucent clouds that caught the sun and held it for a moment, and then fizzled. In the background the gulls were rising and falling on the wind, their heads swiveling back and forth with the persistence of algorithms as […]
Been ‘way fer a few days. Vizit’n friends… what I wish I could call it. Nope. Cain’t say ‘at in good faith. Got me real serious like. Focus-al-“I”-zed, ye might say. All et once, yer walkin’ in a world o’ coloured glass. The whole thing’s a mirage, bunch o’ movin’ pitchures yer tryin’ like almighty hell to tame, to ketch hold o’ an’ shake some sense in’neh. An’ it jes crumbles in yer handz… Ye […]
Embracing Forever 