The conclusion can no longer be avoided: I’m being haunted by that weightless certainty from which no one recovers. Each day there’s at least one point in time that lingers, staring back at me, eyes level, while waving the wind through the narrow pass between us– unimpeded. The wind is whistling, and the machine won’t read my ticket. Something ten thousand feet down is yawning and long after I’m gone its baby rocks will float to […]
There are things we say sometimes to make a point– sweeping recapitulations of history, or statements of what is so in this world– and when we invoke them we do so as if they are self-evident. Obvious to those who would see. It is easy to forget how deeply we occupy our own lives and perspectives, and we can lose sight of the fact that what seems unmistakable to us is but the flowering of […]
Why am I carrying this barbed piece of steel around with me? Because it hurt when it was dropped into my open palms? And now I want to repay the favor should the world present me with such an opportunity? There’s no such thing as even-steven in this world, but there is holiness. There are rivers wide as ball fields that dredge bald tires and old box springs off the bottom and carry them off to the […]
This last week an asteroid passed through my solar plexus, and I wobbled a little back and forth like a transplanted tree testing its new roots. I swallowed the asteroid whole, and mostly because I had a bet with Hafiz, I didn’t spit it out. I asked him if a star would grow inside of me now and blow me up from the inside out because I swallowed an asteroid through my solar plexus, and […]
The wind is blowing softly, and just earlier today, three morning doves were nestled in the grass, their rounded faces poking up like a clan of bottle-tops drifting along together in a quiet green sea. We were watching from behind the window, and they were watching, too– each of us studying the way our own reflection was illumined by the vision of the other. We were all looking, blinking, beholding– when we touched hearts sweetly in a pane […]
Something is happening but I can’t see what it is, because the day sky is an impenetrable scattering of color, and the night sky is too deep to see the bottom. The moon isn’t a reliable reference either, because it’s just one point, and clearly an outlier. You can’t leverage it at all. Though the particulars are being worked out, I still take comfort in this vague arrival– in its presence– whatever it is. I […]
This post was written in response to the Inner Child Blog Challenge that Ka sent my way… Thank you, Ka, for the prompt… As children, what happens swallows us whole. We occupy slices of heaven easily. They’re what we expect to find. There are no beliefs to suspend in order to gain access, for our minds have yet to form them. Our physical brains are malleable potentials, taking in light and sound with curiosity, measuring […]
Without mindfulness, you might spaz out in a moment of adversity and plunge the toilet recklessly completely oblivious to the fact that only a little nudge is being asked for in that location, a gentle rhythm that will pass through a vast and holy maze of intersecting worlds that just happen for that one moment to share your half bath, so that in places broadcasting colors your eyes can’t understand, and sounding deft languages that long ago […]
A cardboard tube can make all the difference, and I’ll tell you how. Walking through a flavor of solitude in which I find myself sometimes, covering my face to ward off the trace of distant putrefaction, and squinting into the heat to see if my suspicion is correct about the horizon stockpiling behind its dusty curvature all the sad carcasses not fortunate enough to receive a proper burial– I’m wheezing in the fumes of my […]
One day I was astonished to find Hafiz giving instruction to a cadre of beggars. He was explaining to us how much better off we would be, if we were drunk right from the get go, and he was passing out copies of his latest poem, saying, Drink these my friends… Drink these with the rising sun… The idea being– all our surly ideas about fate and how things really work and who could of and should […]
Embracing Forever 