This is Part 4 of 5. One more to go… Part 1 is here, if you wish to start at the beginning. * * * * * He must have gone for help, the little junco, because when I awoke there were two of them. One on my side of the window, inspecting the sill– making those erratic steps that come in packs of four or five– and the other one outside, moving only its […]
This is part 3 of a short fictional series. So far the posts are all in order… So far… * * * * * They’d told me about the wire probably six months ago. The jumper wire. How it grew within us from the anode to the cathode like a clever root of ivy. The fuse of a self. A short circuit. It was a strange trick: cutting eternity out of the equation. Without access […]
I don’t know who or what God is anymore. Each time I say this, my Loving doubles. Once I stepped into a room with block walls and old, worn carpets to sit in the circle with a prayer in my heart while the man who travels through worlds was bound at the center. Light was extinguished, and darkness soared. Singers joined us from the air itself. The drummers poked holes in our boundaries. Lightning tickled the […]
Recent events in my life served the function of popping the vacuum sealed lid of a small glass jar of fear I had been carrying around in my coat pocket. I smacked dab into some real world events—moments of indeterminate outcome surrounded by a steadily gathering mob of foreboding consequences—and you could hear the audible inrush of air as the jar was pried open. Out spilled vestiges of a future I had sworn to abandon, […]
One night when Hafiz was working the phones, a call came in. The man began by announcing that he had a few questions, as if he were preparing his counter party for a barrage of heavy artillery. The way he said it made it sound like he had a few answers, too. Look, he said, you can’t really know if there is anything beyond this life or not, but consider: if there isn’t a God, […]
After fifty odd years of reckless living, things finally came to a head for Elroy Pontchartrain late on the afternoon of August 9th– a Tuesday. The sun was blazing down upon all men equally that day, like a walk-in furnace advertisement, but this equanimity was hardly any consolation to Elroy whose access to reason was temporarily suspended for the duration of his personal apocalypse. That was when the cycles aligned, when he finally rounded the corner […]
“The way will be muddy and seemingly alone, even when you find yourself in crowds, even when all the refugees are funneled together through a narrow pass. You will find yourself trying to avoid being crushed, trying to avoid being left behind, trying to avoid being starved, trying to avoid being plundered. You may dream of blue skies and sunlight, but your path will wind beneath overcast skies and sprinkling rain. You may dream of virgin […]
Once, when he was still learning his craft of ushering the anxious and doubtful from the shadows of falsehood to the river of poetry at the center of their own being, and in a well-intentioned effort to raise the general morale, Hafiz gave away two court-side seats to the Explosion of the Sun. Because, as we all know, sometimes having something to look forward to can make all the difference. In this particular case, the […]
I’ve been developing a condition of late, a seizure that wracks my whole identity, an electric longing spun taut within an endless Answer. Out of the blue– tears. The core of my being, a wash cloth squeezed tight. The vast hands of compassion twisting and pulling, braiding me into a rope that is twined with all beings. Mary knows what I mean, how to hold this space, how to be flooded by the riches of […]
I have had a longstanding interest in both science and spirituality, and since I don’t even know what these words mean anymore, let’s just call it a longstanding interest in desiring to know and understand the experience you and I have found ourselves within. This process of coming to know has been alive within me since early days, and it has been fueled by my daily encounters with a broken world, with a self whose […]
Embracing Forever 