I’m a vein of flickering ore woven through undisturbed rock, a compacted silence. I’m the tunnel winding past, an opening pulled from one darkness to another, in a line, and a walker who wanders along its length. Each direction dissolves into vacancy. In the half light of a torch someone left behind, I look at the wooden braces and sense the immensity of the weight above. Who built this place? Where were they going? What […]
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 […]
I am fragile, but when I shatter– as I must, and soon– a warmth will remain. You will find me again. That is the most dazzling magic. This realization comes while standing at the edge of this life, looking down, hovering weightless– a sand grain witness to a vast sea. Each arriving wave softens the distance into which my longing stretches. I am readying to dissolve. Together, can we cover the Vastness? Or will I buckle, […]
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, […]
We can’t be happy, Hafiz says, until we discover we’re not who we think we are. Then he leans near, whispers… So… how are we going to pull that off? I think he’s going somewhere with this. I can’t help myself: I’m grinning like the operator of a prison search light who’s secretly pulling for the inmates to escape and run riot, waiting for my Friend’s next words to bust through the cell block wall and stride […]
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 […]
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 […]
There are so many amazing things a person could choose to learn about in this world, enough to fill whole lifetimes– like the way photons make decisions when faced with the conundrum of a diffraction grating, or the way high-speed traders manipulate the flow of money on time scales that make the pace of human thought seem like canyon-making, or how the fashion industry unraveled the mystery of the neons. There was a time when […]
The construction of bridges can lead to the forgetting of rivers and the strengthening of commerce. In this way, thoughts can erect theoretical scaffolding to cross safely the tidal pools of the heart. This is far more efficient than wading through marsh and muck each morning, once in each direction, to pick up the day’s fresh batch of metrics. Less smelly, too. One day I was walking the planks when a great wind came up […]
When I stepped out of the building in which I work this evening, my head seemed to have been pressed into a perfect, steaming cube– a polished alloy ingot of ordered rectilinear thoughts. You could have bounced a laser off it. My normally fluid mind had been sintered by the heat of prolonged concentration into a dazed ceramic. Even my cells had conformed to the geometric demands of the day’s efforts, having tugged their cytoskeletons […]
Embracing Forever 