I’ve been reflecting lately upon the nature of knowing- of knowing anything at all. How exactly do we come to know? And what is it that may be known? The context for my reflections is not a vacuum, but my life, and the way that my deepest desires have driven me to wrestle with questions of meaning, purpose and identity. As is unavoidably the case for each of us, I have had to answer the […]
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 […]
After reading the final passage of Haruki Murakami’s Dance Dance Dance, I pinched the book shut in one hand and took a deep, satisfying breath- the kind of breath you might take at dawn on the Seventh Day, a breathing into and through kind of breath. Part of that satisfaction was the rich fullness of having encountered a work of art that spoke to me on a deep level, a story and its telling that […]
Sometimes me and the boys like to go on jaunts. Get outta’ the office. Fact-finding missions what we call ’em. Get a handful of shirt, press crumpled cotton fists towards unsuspecting chins and make eyes into accusatory coals. Speak calmly while turning the place upside down to shake it for loose evidence. This will only take a moment, sir. See what coins fall out and jangle to rest on the pavement like glaring statements of […]
That longing at the center of your being is Hafiz and Christ, the Buddha, ten thousand angelic beings, my mother, your great great Uncle so and so, the not so famous one, his pet Lhasa Apso Louie, along with everyone you’ve ever loved and ever will love and all their friends and neighbors plus a few party crashers and so on and so forth– hell, it may as well be Love Itself!– shouting and waving […]
One morning Hafiz was giving a seaside discourse on the subject of Love. The wind was whipping in off the surf, causing flags to flutter and hats to fly. Overhead, gray clouds and brilliant sun were vying for dominance, swirling around one another so that the sky appeared to boil like a kettle. A woman near the back stood to ask a question. “What about the hockey problem?” The wind carried her words directly from […]
One day recently I stepped outside into a hive of birdsong. The sun was filtering down between the branches of trees at the edge of the yard, and the birds were dotted amongst the boughs, positioned instinctively behind leaf and shadow. It was like entering a Bev Doolittle painting that had come to life. Soprano spirals curled into the air, sounds that had been scribbled by the practiced hand of a master, as if Matisse […]
Roughly a week ago I wrote about acceptance and not looking back. It was fun. It felt good. I felt whole, and alive. I was aware of a nurturing Invisibility with which I was joined, as if I was wading into a body of water that has no opposite shore, shaking my arms loose, wiggling my head around, and generally preparing to dive forward and start doing a Michael Phelps impersonation at a right angle […]
A glowing vector shot across the sky, the last, illumined fragment of a shattered world, screaming in octaves of fire and dissolution. I peered into the majesty left behind, into that gathering field of stars and distances beyond measure, of potency and shimmering songs, feeling its Invitation draw the life within me to the surface the way the moon pulls the water up through stone beneath the land, the way tears rise to the surface […]
Embracing Forever 