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 […]
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 […]
I met Jesus while crawling on my belly beneath a rock, scratched and bleeding, panting with the effort to catch a single drop of dew with my swollen tongue, straining to taste its coolness before it swelled, and gravity plucked it out from under me. I’d been trying the same stunt every morning at this spot for three days. Now I was too weak to move on. At the last moment, I hesitated. It was […]
The Only Principle is this: Nothing happens that doesn’t unfold within a field of awareness, and every awareness is held by a greater one because no awareness is great enough to hold itself. This is precisely true, even though awareness is always, only and ever… One. (That last bit’s the Other Principle.) Using language as we are here is like trying to make a hole in the Emptiness by using teaspoons to scoop out little […]
This post has its roots in a number of threads that have woven through my awareness over the course of the past few weeks, and which as an ensemble beg a few of the questions I try to tackle. One of the delights of open-minded dialogue is its ability to reveal how little we know about the subjects regarding which we thought the opposite was true, and in making the discrepancy apparent, to inspire us […]
This poem comes with a Satisfaction Guarantee. That’s right. Here it is, in fact: Your Everlasting Satisfaction Is Guaranteed. In case you’re wondering already– (you haven’t even read the poem yet for Pete’s sake!)– what type of compensation you receive should you find by some law-bending fluke of nature that you’re a twinge dissatisfied at the end of this, I’ll tell you that, too. Anticipating such a question, the Beloved has written the Answer upon an infinitude of hearts, […]
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 […]
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 […]
Embracing Forever 