Take That Tall Bush Out

This is a true story of the evergreen that was at the corner of our porch when we bought the house in 1981. In 1993, Annie was desperate for changes. Among them, she said she needed light on our porch, and needed our porch to seem more welcoming to visitors. It was a symbolic gesture. I tried to get her to change her mind but she wouldn’t and so I cut this straggly bush down. It was the sort of evergreen you can’t prune. It would not have grown back.

She was exactly right about what it did. It hid and darkened our porch. Through the years I pruned it to keep it in check. In the end I couldn’t get over the fact that a living being was losing its life for no reason other than esthetics. I killed that bush to her order. I cried through the whole thing.

Happy New Year, my friends and readers. Jesus, especially you. I hope you are well.

Take That Tall Bush Out

That evergreen bush
at the corner of our porch,
you said, "Take it out."
It lived long right there
and I trimmed it every
year so carefully,
but you wanted light,
daylight at the door. When I
took the first hard cut

I started to cry.

March 13, 2009 3:11 PM

Where The Cougars Live

Not everything is revealed. Look in the golden eyes of the big cat. Pick up the scent of the territorial markings. Watch the moon rise in the late afternoon. Find the right spot and right time. Inhale. Howl.

Where The Cougars Live

I have something here
but nothing to show for it,
nothing but clean air
this high in mountains
where cougars live, where vision
questers might set up
to pass the crystal
night centered in God's long sight,
nothing but my heart
punching my old chest.

I have something here, value
added by stars, cold
light warbling among
the aspen giving shadows
life and me secrets.

March 13, 2009 12:33 PM

Says The Student

The Taoists insist that the sages look exactly like tramps. They live lives of voluntary poverty, in the forests and when you come upon them the last thing you would think is to revere creatures who live so rough on the planet. It turns out that the Wise Ones are invested in the main in not looking so wise. You might think this is a feature of the Occult, to remain hidden. You might think this is a display of humility. You might think how this reminds you of Christ born in a stable among the beasts. It is actually a manifestation of balance. It is a posture of power.

This poem asks a question. I bet you know the answer. Don’t say it. Instead live with the question. Then go and make love.

Says The Student

It is said, Master,
that you are a heartfelt man
but all I see is
clumsy.

It is said also
that you contain the wisdom
I require.
All I know, you're daft.

Clumsy and daft one,
teach me if you dare,
give me the power to rise.
I want your voice.

I want better though.
I want stature and good grace.
I want shiny things.
Is this a problem?

March 12, 2009 12:44 PM

Probably

This is in its own way a true story. I just hate it when I’m the source of these things in my own life. Like when I lost that job one time, got so fired. You couldn’t get more fired. I still don’t really understand how that all went down but that only shows how over my head that job was. It was just like an avalanche catching up with me. I was ten years sober and ten years with the company that gave me that assignment. They thought I should be able to handle it. I was building a crew around me just like the bosses wanted. The crew survived. I did not.

Oh well.

Probably

I'm pushing myself,
hot dogging it down the slope,
my skis so well waxed.
I look behind me
and see a huge avalanche
bearing down on me,
wonder if it's me
that started this mass rolling
by my hot dog style.

March 12, 2009 12:16 PM

Now I'm To Be A Witness

This poem is about timing. It is about making big changes, and why. It is about letting go of the past, of my identity. I generally don’t do changes of this magnitude that well. My friend Vivian, sober for a long time now, the banker bitch by day, crankster gangster at night, she says it’s really hard to save your ass and your face at the same time. Her whole self marks that saying since she has perfect hair and a nearly perfect face most times. What if you were told you had to leave behind your whole reason for living and switch it for some other way? Who would actually be able to tell you such a thing? Maybe not even God.

Now I'm To Be A Witness

You told me my job.
My hot sweated brow furrowed
at the thought of it.
Used to building things
like fences and walls, bolted
shut doors, with my hands,
now you say I am
to use my dim eyes, brighten
them right up. Oh man,
I hate thinking this,
I'm to use my eyes much more
and my hands will lose
all the old calluses
as I open my doors up,
tear down my high walls.

March 11, 2009 12:59 PM

Touch And Go

I spent my Christmas with my family of choice. We ate well, feeding each other. We did not fight. No one got drunk. Not one of us got drunk, thank You, God. There were several places to go throughout the day. I did not get one present. I did not miss that except to acknowledge that the gifts are not tangible gifts any more. Now I am sitting here amongst you who read and comment, and as well the ones who only read. It is good and right that I am here as well.

My day started last night when I went upstairs from the AA meeting and joined the candlelight service the church was holding. This is a Unitarian Universalist congregation. I spent ten years among them trying a religious cloak on for size. It did not in the end work, though I still can return under certain self imposed future conditions. I sat there among them. There were many greetings and well wishes given to me. What was especially good, I ran into a friend I didn’t expect to see, a man who also went upstairs. I joined him, sat beside him in the service.

This is probably a Buddhist poem.

Touch And Go

I shall stand so still
I become light, a feather
in the holy wind
and each passing thought
shall not burst as I
touch, then let it go.

You said thoughts are delicate
bubbles drifting through
my mind, that I should
not break them open lest they
catch me up, away.

March 11, 2009 9:23 AM

To All My Loves, This Season

I wrote this in December, 2003 and gave it away to those who were in my heart at that time in celebration of Christmas. I wrote recalling the heights, recalling Maire and the story of the queen I once loved lifetimes ago. I posted this poem first on Nov. 17, 2008. Now I repeat this offering on Christmas Eve, 2009.
*********

Dec. 24, 2003
In the spirit of the season, in the spirit of the world's yearning, in the deep places in between all conflicts that persist even though we all know better - here is a musing that surprised me today, as love often surprises those who yearn for the beautiful, the true. Because I have loved this woman, I can love many women. Because I love women, I can also love men. Because I love men and women, I can also love God. Because I love God, I can live today.


To All My Loves, This Season

Ever in my heart, I am grateful for what has happened between us.
It is a piece of the soul's story, a flowering of the Beloved, eternal.
When you take me in, even a little, the present tense of the Infinite
Returns and lifts me into Beauty. Truly you are the Best One -

Truly not you as you struggle here and now, no not you like that -
Truly you as you cascade through all time and space, as we all do.
Maid of the Deepest Moon, you shine, you light a symphony of love -
And me, the Man of the Northern Wall, alight for all time through this.

This is what you have given me, what survives chaos and all pain.
This is what I celebrate in my best moments far beyond our dream.
As I travel on, when I can remember, I choose to sing the moon
And stars and the perfume of you lingers near my heart, calling me.

I shall never be lost again, not as I once was. Now I dance
To songs I know to sing. My heart stays open for you and beyond
To others as I must, following the call bigger than you or me
Until we meet at the other end of this time and claim our true home.

(This is why I pray I do not depart ever in the chaos of lost love,
but if depart we must, I pray to keep the truth of love alive.)


Merry Christmas. May there be much joy in the coming year for you and yours.
Christopher

A Small Bird

There is not really very much to say about this one. It’s inspiration was my visit to a website or a blog, I forget which one and this poem is the truth as it is. What I would add, the stories I know are true as well. If this life is all there is then this is what it is. But once I was a mage, the man of the northern wall, liege to a queen who was murdered through my fault, my failed protection. Once I was in an argument with God, so powerful that I was granted permission for this life. These two are as surely me as the man I am now unadorned. There are more stories of me, but I do not know them. These two I know.

This posting is for the 24th of December, a day that is the eve of a Christian holiday. I am not much for holidays but do my best to get along. I like better the nearness of this holiday to the winter solstice. It is said that the Dec. 25 date was the old Roman solstice marked because it is the first day that is an obvious increase in light. There have been other arguments that link the date with Mithra and Sol Invictus, but that seems now doubtful. The Saturnalia ended on Dec. 23. So the day seems to be returned to Christ as the ninth month marker beyond the Feast of the Anunciation on March 25, the traditional day of Christ’s conception. The earliest recorded celebration of the birth of Christ on Dec. 25 is 243 AD.

I personally favor scholarship that points to Jeshua’s actual birth as a spring event, Christ as Aries or Taurus. Christ as Sagittarius or especially Capricorn seems odd to me.

A Small Bird

This is what my life
is like without the stories
I must tell myself
in order to live.
This is what my life is like.
It is a small room
with open windows
and a small bird flies through it,
in one window, out
the other.

March 10, 2009 2:06 PM

Obstinate Wizened Fool

Just like you all do, I have many sides to me. These are two of my sides. I am either voice in this poem. Heh. This poem also reminds me of something else, someone else.

By the way, I really do wear store bought glasses, now at the strongest lens I can get in this certain kind, sold at Costco, a warehouse store that sells merchandise in lots. These glasses are sold with the claim of aspheric lenses and are sold in packs of three at a time for under $20. They are the only magnifiers that I know work for me and do not give me a headache.

If I get prescription glasses, I promptly lose or break them. I don’t like the astigmatism correction either, can’t see much improvement, certainly not worth the headache that astigmatism correction gives me.

Obstinate Wizened Fool

You say get glasses,
new ones, with built in wide views,
show me what's what.
I say my store boughts
are just fine for me. I'll paste
pictures on for views.
You say what a dork,
what a backward wizened fool,
and obstinate too.
You'd hurt my feeling
(I only have one) if I
let you in my head.

March 10, 2009 2:32 PM


"What would it be like to welcome yourself home, to welcome home your whole body and mind? To make it all right to be here? No more worry about not being good enough, no more worry about not being perfect. Welcome home. What would it be like? What kind of mind would you be willing to feel vulnerable with?"
- Ed Brown


What would it be like to welcome yourself home even with an attitude like that obstinate wizened fool, or his judge? Why is it I believe I have to go somewhere else to find home?

The Wandering Jew

I did not die. I tried and did not die. It is my doom to wander the world. I watch. Sometimes I speak. When I speak I do not say who I am, where I have been, how long I have been on this journey, where I will go. When I speak I tell other secrets. They have told stories about me, that I am the victim of a curse. This is not true but the stories persist. Shalom Aleichem.

Heeding The Call

At every age
it is the same call but not
the same responding
because the hopes change
and the body will also
and time does speed up
and more stuff repeats.

It gets more urgent
and more relaxed. Both ways show
truth in my passing.
I have no time left
but I have all eternity.
What is still hottest?
That I show you how I love
and see you wake up.

March 10, 2009 11:49 AM

Caring For Each Other, Northern Goddess

Here is one of the better visions of compassion and one world view that supports it.

Caring for Each Other

The Buddha has suggested that we are without a mother and father to take care of things for us. Mother Earth, once thought to be all-forgiving and capable of absorbing any abuse we could heap upon her, is not the infinitely benevolent resource we thought she was. As we learn of our own mothers at a certain point of maturity, Mother Earth can and does get worn down by giving and forgiving in the face of our persistent demands. And our Father who is in heaven, though perhaps immensely old and lord over a host of devas (as the Buddhists view him), is nevertheless subject to the laws of karma and is not sufficiently omnipotent to make it all work out for us in the end.

If we do not care for one another, who else will care for us? Who among us has the right to say of another, "He is of no use to us?" For better or worse, whether we like it or not, we are all in this together. Learning how to care for one another is a central part of the path and of the practice.

- Andrew Olendzki, Ph.D., "Medicine for the World," from the Summer 2008 Tricycle.

I feel deep accord with Andrew, though I would add that Father God takes his less than sufficiently powerful position by agreement with us and with the planet, with Mother Earth as well. He could clean this up but He won't, because He promised not to. That is why this is God's Permitted World, not God's World.

I take the position that the primary Trinity is the Taoist one, Heaven, Earth, Man and that we are equally pivotal through the point of soul, co-creators of our destiny in ourselves and on the planet. This is by the deeper collective agreement that upholds the thematic personal agreements that we keep or break in individual lifetimes.

But I am too smitten to leave it at that. I require by my erotic nature that Mother Earth take another aspect. I need a lover. I need not only the triune aspect of the world's co-creation and the quaternity of my crucifixion here and yours, I need as well the duality of communion and the orgasmic nature of encounter with holiness within this lifetime, with Goddess and with you.

Northern Goddess

Your heart is thunder
and you stand so lightning struck
with your smoky hair,
a goddess, true north
for the creatures of the dry
found south of your lines.

March 10, 2009 7:34 AM

What It Is

I have changed worlds more than once. At least twice. This is not my home. :}

What It Is

I'm just overwhelmed.
This place takes my breath away.
I can't quite make out
the reality
here. The colors are too bright
to be real, too red
reds, too green, and smells
and sounds beyond bearing, so
sweet, so true. So harsh.
It's savage, and you,
you are savage, and your love's
a savage love. Lord
I don't know if I
can take this life very long.

I know it began
in mystery and it will
end just the same way.

March 9, 2009 7:40 PM

Spiritual Judo

How to stay in love with nearly anyone, that’s a good question. I had a nearly five year committed relationship. Now she calls herself Francesca. She reads this blog sometimes. Hello Frances, I love you.

This poem comes from that relationship. I know this is what she did in her way as well with me. I am not that easy to take sometimes. This is how to stay in love, at least one way. We did separate. She emigrated to Canada. We have stayed in love. I know it’s true for her too. She’s still looking after my welfare just as she always has.

Spiritual Judo

When you give me looks
like that, I know you are just
about to tell me
what's good for me, what's
right by God, if I'll listen
to you this one time.
I long ago learned
how to use your force to throw
you past me, to give
you to God, saying
You deal with her, my Brother,
she's too much for me.

March 9, 2009 7:23 PM

Like Dylan, What He Said

As I have said before, I am an old dope dealer, 69-71. How that ended, what I call hitting bottom for the second time, is directly related to this poem. The Dylan in the title is not Bob Dylan. It’s the other Dylan, Mr. Thomas, the Welshman (correction by YogaforCynics after checking) who wrote these lines

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Like Dylan, What He Said

And right here I want
to rebel against it all,
rebel against you
who created me,
you who will take me so soon
that even now I
feel the coming dark
in the pains of joints, dimming
sight, the loss of love,
leaking confidence.
I want to stand up straight, shake
my fist in your face.
I'll stand my ground, force
the fire to consume me right
in front of you here.

March 9, 2009 3:54 PM

I followed his advice. My second bottom involved betrayal of friendship, lying, a sting operation, a set trap that somehow didn’t spring, a girlfriend who couldn’t measure up, who I had to leave, the destruction, but carefully of my entire life, leaving town, going from California to Arizona for a couple weeks, coming back to town and after that living a completely different life.

How that worked, when I realized I was in deep shit, my body took over, moved my conscious mind aside, said in effect I had neither the experience nor the intelligence to do what had to be done next. It was a weird ride. I was not in charge, not at all, just sitting back and watching all of it unfold. The things that happened next were like a play, perfectly staged. First I completely evaded the trap, several hours of nighttime driving over roads I did not know, had never been on in order to get back home, totally freaked out, knowing I had to do this perfect at both the buy end and my arrival home. Over several days I cleaned up, demonstrated the uselessness of trying to leverage me for the crime that I actually did not commit (though they had me on others that I did commit, but it wasn’t me they were after), and then carefully leaving town, leaving false trails as I did. I found out that my will to live was only partially in my control. For lack of a better way to say it, my body took over, was determined to neither go to jail nor die without a goddamn good fight. What terrified me, I was not built right for the pressure the narcs could exert. I feared they would make me snitch and then I would simply have to kill myself. I am still convinced I would have killed myself in that condition.

That didn’t happen. I was never even picked up, never charged, nor was the guy I was protecting. The last I heard of him he had made his nut, bought a boat and retired to the South Seas, all from skills and philosophy he built fighting the NVA in Viet Nam. He was a decent man, just thoroughly counter culture and pissed off about the war. He was doing his subversive bit, ripping the system off directly and helping others to do the same. That's how we saw things in those days. He was one of the main suppliers of weed for Hot Tuna. Hot Tuna was a spin off band from the Jefferson Airplane. When they split, that's when the Airplane became the Starship. His smuggling partner had been my roommate in San Jose before my roommate moved to Oregon, bought property and built his house. I loved that man, my roommate, fiercely. I loved my life in those days too. When I had to tear down my life to save myself, it nearly killed me losing so much. My body made that happen, a completely different kind of consciousness. I could not have done it. There is no question I was raging against the dying of the light.

Instead I met my future wife, moved to Oregon with her in a year, and got a career three months after that. I found a continuing education course, signed up and was hooked up with a mentor and best friend who changed my life over the next six years to boot.

Bless My Return

It was not so long ago that as a culture we blessed each other or pointed out to each other that God does. The old biblical stories tell of a father who blesses his son, of a son who knows that he is in trouble without his father’s blessing. This blessing thing is a power transaction. A blessing lifts the one blessed into a raised position of privilege. Here is another example of magic so many of us have left behind.

I notice the email chains are often attempts to reclaim blessings and to pass them around. I think they would work if the people who sent them had a clue what they are really doing. They would look very different from the way they look, though, most of them. Sometimes I get one of those blessing chain emails that lifts the hackles on the back of my neck. Not very often.

I hope my poems go out as blessings sometimes. I don’t write this to get you to tell me they do. I write this to express that giving blessings is square in the Bodhisattva ideal to which I devote my life in the magical world where I can do such things.

One key is, though, the blessing is nearly always singular. You can’t bless large groups in any way which invokes power. Of course you can bless a group. You just don’t have enough power to gift that many at once. Throw the blessing out to the many. One of them catches it. He or she may never tell you, perhaps never even know. This way of blessing people is thankless, reminiscent of the aphorism about doing a good turn in secret.

Bless My Return

I climbed to the edge
of the world, to the tree
completely covered
with snow, ice, and light
found only there, at the edge,
about to fall off.
And me, I'm slipping
a little, resting, getting
my breath. I want you
to bless my return.
I'm afraid I'll lose myself
without your blessing.

March 9, 2009 3:21 PM

Taking Winged Shape

I want to be angelic. Here is a really good reason. I am nearly 100% certain that angel relationships are so much simpler. Sometimes the negotiations of relationship make me really tired. I know why at least some of us fail at relationships. We just get too tired. It shouldn’t be this hard, what my bones and sinews say. Music gives me the same trouble. It just shouldn’t be that hard to master the whole thing. Calculus, I couldn’t even start, even though I am supposed to be really smart, but calculus scared the shit out of me. I want to be angelic because I sense they don’t even have to try. I really, really want to not have to try.

I think I have heard this, that I am not making it up. Angels are complete and perfect creatures, limited in only one direction. They only possess a smidgen of free will, not the main meal that is ours but just a dash, a splash of it, like a good spice. Enough to make rebellion possible, but so rare that only a few have tried it and only one mustered enough to fall into rebellion completely and take some of the others with him.

Man on the other hand is required by his nature to rebel.

God loves Man best. Sometimes angels find that difficult, knowing that. It is said that is why Lucifer fell. God's love for man may be merciful but is not just from the angelic point of view. Lucifer fell for justice.

But Man’s work is the thing. It is so fucking hard.

Taking Winged Shape

That I should want this
thing with more than I ever
could gather from hills,
the grassy long sweep
of wind washed blades and flowers,
white starred stalks among
the green green old hills
of the far planet behind
my flight. That I should
want so much from this
sky into which I now go,
why I learned to fly.

March 9, 2009 1:41 PM

I Was Feeling Blue

Here’s a little slice of life, how love is not license.

I Was Feeling Blue

Then that gal came by
and began to tell me how
I should feel as if
I didn't have someone
inside me telling me that
all the fricken time!

But I love you so
is all the reason she could
give to invade me.

March 8, 2009 8:03 PM

In The Hole

Here’s a shapeshifting poem. I wrote it in third person. The thing about shifting into a gopher – that’s too far down the food chain. If you shift in, you better leave behind a trail of clarity so you can shift back out by rote. Otherwise you are stuck for the duration. Granted a gopher life is not a long one, but the dying is generally not pleasant. Once in a gopher soul you can’t marshall enough to inaugurate a shapeshift back out, so your out has to be there already formed.

Granted, I don’t know why someone would actually want to be a gopher. But here’s another issue with shapeshifting: it is easy enough to slip sideways if you don’t keep discipline. You can end up a gopher by accident. That’s what I did. Shit.

In The Hole

The gopher digging
his way past the tangled roots
of the rose above,
wondering what's next
and why he should encounter
the hint of fragrance,
the sign of sharp thorns.
It's dark in his hole, but life
glows, lights his dim thought.

March 6, 2009 8:50 PM

I Keep Losing Things

I love the play of things in a world of magic and love. I am firm in my belief that the spirit world has a power dimension. I believe that the power issue was primary in the oldest forms of the spiritual walk, that the earliest human groups needed to get the world to cooperate, the prey to come to them, the storms to hold off at critical times, and similar issues, on pain of death. This was no joke. I believe the need for spirit power produced in certain locations a “science of spirit” over generations that in a certain sense could be handed down from master to apprentice.

After literally millions of years the institutions in place were tribal, forms of shamanism. In China, Tibet, and Southeast Asia this was brought forward and institutionalized in aspects of Taoism in China and other local forms elsewhere. These traditional forms of shamanism were deeply transformed by the advent of agriculture but in essence were unbroken.

The shamanic roots of Taoism remain in place still today, why Taoist thinking is overtly alchemical in many areas. Elsewhere on the planet, especially in the near East, India, Egypt and through that influence in Europe, the advent of agriculture broke shamanism and replaced it with priesthood religions that match the political power structures of empire. The shamanic traditions had to go underground, because spirit power could not be allowed to be that democratic.

I love the play of things in a world of magic and love. I am shaman at heart. I have taken my own spirit journeys. I believe music, art, poetry can be alchemical in nature, transformative in ways difficult to fathom without intimacy, magic, love. And with coyote, I say, “you better be able to take a joke along the way.” There is pithy bar talk for that sentiment, because drunks are sky pilots too.

I have a growing relationship with a practicing Homeopath. I know he is certain that spirit power is essential to healing, that the problem with mainstream western medicine is that it has divorced from spirit power in favor of “science”, as if western science is the only kind. This of course ignores literally at least 50,000 years of wisdom. It assumes the ancients were rubes and boobs, buried under ignorance. It is clear the ancients were at least as intelligent as we are all the way along. It is also certain they were highly motivated by their uncertain life to achieve success in marshalling spiritual power. Why would it be surprising that they achieved spirit power along the way?

Here is a poem that comes from another world strangely like this one.

I Keep Losing Things

I see you coming
my way out of the forest,
that place that the moons
of this world visit,
nestling in the trees.
You hold a basket of rose
petals and I know
you are going to
give me a shower of them,
expecting that I
hold the golden key.
I'm sorry, but I lost that
key two lives ago.

March 6, 2009 11:58 AM

You Have Found Your Way

It's always a dialog. I know that too. Even in the alone moments, even if only talking to myself, it is always dialog that makes a difference. The space between, the distance, is required. That is why for me God cannot only be within, and the experience of God's presence cannot only be an inner knowing, and also why this whole thing does not make sense for me without God. It's always dialog and the distance that permits dialog.

I am making no claim for ultimate reality. I am making the claim for the reality of my own spiritual walk, the level of spirit appropriate to my destiny, to the agreement that has me on the planet. I will never really make a good Buddhist. I need someone to wrestle with. Buddhists will tell you God may or may not be there, but He is not necessary. I can only reply, that is not this lifetime for me.

Likewise I really need all of you. I need the distance and the dialog. I need the love. Love is the distance. There is a myth, I think, that claims for soul mates a union like the embrace implied in many wedding ceremonies, that the two shall be as one. No. Love is the distance and the tension and the resolution and the high of very temporary orgasmic union (whether sexual or not, it subsides).

Years ago I had experiences like that on LSD and realized I was seeing the truth for real. I still think so. I tried very hard to stay there and my life told me in no uncertain terms it was not going to happen that way because love is the distances and the tension.

Love is the power that joins polarities.

You Have Found Your Way

The world love creates
possesses all the magic
clothed in white feathers,
able to lift us,
to provide powerful wings,
to provide the space
we need to begin
our own weaving of white light.

When you tell me this
I know you have found
your way into the magic,
into my sore heart.

March 5, 2009 11:50 AM

As She Touches Me

Vinisha pointed something out. If I may paraphrase it, “Is there no solitary path?”

I think I will sit with this for a few days. I know that what has moved me most are the relationships that have engaged me, and I believe that is the spiritual walk of most of us, in and through intimacy with family, friends, even strangers. I also know as I wrote not long ago that the great price of being self taught is a too heavy passage through the material, that the burden of the self taught is very heavy. It is too much responsibility. Yet I also know that God meets us right where we are at. That means a solitary call comes to some of us. There is no question of that. I think that is all I shall say, though I should add this: some of the most erotic love poems to God come from solitary contemplatives. That is a fact. Vinisha, remind me in a while. I am letting it sink down now into the deep of me. What I mean is, Vinisha, that I took your question to mean a practice of some kind not in the monastic setting or in vows. That is the direct answer of course. There are monastic orders designed to accommodate a solitary path.

As She Touches Me

She contains power
collected from the craggy
outcrops, from the cones
of the northern trees,
from the cries of the osprey
building atop poles
set by men for them
though men thought for their own use.

She gives of that force
let out carefully in small
measure, gentle, sweet
as she touches me
in the sore spots and they melt
lost, fallen in love.

March 5, 2009 10:47 AM

Walk On

In my last post we got around to how we need each other to traverse the spiritual distance between worlds. But maybe not this much.

There is a line in this one that points to a piece of my pie. "you were laughing with/all of me..."

I am convinced I am not all here, cannot be contained in finitude that way. That's what the line refers to, that the pratfalls I take are probably funny to me too from the celestial point of view. However, you don't see me laughing all that often down here in finite-land.

I am here because I am not all there. :) But I am there because I am not all here.

Walk On

I tried to lean on
your strength, your lead - slippery
slope that. All I got
was a muddy face
and you laughing. Then you said
you were laughing with
all of me about
my dependent need, how I'm
holding foolish hope
when all I have to
do is walk on down the lines
of my own great soul.

March 4, 2009 4:03 PM

Looking For Answers

Imagine looking for answers like Galileo did, aware as he must have been that there were people in the world so sure of the answers they had already that they were not looking for more. Imagine looking for answers in a place and time when if you find answers, others will refuse you and your effort. They will condemn you if you actually find enough leverage somehow and refuse to go away. They may kill you for your answers, should you actually find them. Imagine this is such a time. Trust me, this is such a time, if you seek answers in the wrong places, just like always.

Looking For Answers

You all say today
I know nothing, that's the start.
I look for other
opinions, maybe
I can know something, but that's
just my vanity.

I'm just a small stump
in the forest, timidly
putting out a shoot,
looking for answers
in the gray grassy daylight
of my tiny glade.

March 4, 2009 8:54 AM

No Separation

Who has the courage to reach love's peak? The easiest way is of course sex, but it is not the only way. And of course most sex doesn't reach love's peak. I am only talking to the women here from the distance of being a man. I will leave it to some woman to talk to the men. My mother was an award winning (in college) Dramatist, an English teacher, and in yet another career, a minister and then a teacher of ministers. She told me it takes a man to really get a woman, and vice versa, at least in writing, because there has to be distance and tension for this. She said the best men in literature were written by women, while the best women, by men.

Intimacy changes things. Love's peak cannot happen without intimacy and trust and faith because there is always a cliff and always jumping off the cliff. At the critical moment of decision no one can help. The best lovers learn to halt all encouragement just before. The leap must be freely taken, unhindered by promises and visions.

No Separation

In the deep of you
is a gate that love can reach
and reaching open.
I tell you surely
that you display the divine
the moment the gate
opens and the light
flames forth into the warm lamp
of your holy heart.

At love's peak I see
no separation between
the goddess and you.

March 3, 2009 12:45 PM

Too Damn Hot

I don’t know if you people love the poetry that tells you a real story as much as me but a master at it, you can find here at The Buffaloe Pen. She tells gritty stories of the South. Her site will lead you to really cool sites too, not only other blogs but as well quarterlies and other master poets. She wrote a great story poem involving a mule and so I wrote one too. I would highly recommend her archives. She publishes in many places, so she doesn’t post on her blog as frequently as I would wish. She will tell you where to find her poetry though.

Too Damn Hot

I sit, flick my long
brown ears at the flies, sit here
in this row all done
and I would laugh at
that skinny-two-legs plowing
without me, braying
out a long, long laugh
but she already bit me
once right on one ear
and I don't know what
she'll do next if I laugh now
but I ain't plowing,

not one more row here,
not today, it's too damn hot
and I'm too lazy.

March 2, 2009 2:56 PM

We Once Loved

This might be too preachy, but dammit, it’s the truth.

There was a T-shirt a while back that said, “He who dies with the most toys wins.” It’s time to say it again…He who dies with the most love wins. I am pretty sure you understand my point. I am far from in the running for the most sex. I have some grand male friends with whom I share a special love. I am sure you know by now, reading my work, that I am not gay. I could have been with one man, many years ago. I loved him that much. I could have made love with him, but only if he asked it of me, because I am not gay. Neither was he.

Any of my love poems are to women, or to God, or the Goddess.

We Once Loved

I am not here long,
not long at all, nor are you.

We are called to love
in the moment as
we can, as if we had all
the time in the world,
as if it could last,
as if someone else would care
that we were once here
and that we once loved
like the ancient mountains grew,
slowly wearing down.

March 2, 2009 2:28 PM

The Shoes You Threw Up There

My house is situated in an older part of the town of Gladstone, a totally residential neighborhood, a mix of older and newer lower value houses and on my street at least duplexes. This neighborhood is only a couple blocks from Gladstone’s main streets, Dartmouth and Portland Avenue, which splits the town into east and west. I am a duplex of sorts too, taxed a little unfairly because the other domicile is really a studio apartment though it is in a stand alone building. I cannot rent it for a price fair to the taxes. Nearby there are apartments where once there were only houses, some older and some newer. Some of the older householders here lament how the neighborhood has gone downhill. Really though, I think it’s a pretty good neighborhood, and I am friends with the neighbors next door to the left and across from them. The neighbor across and to my right is caring for my old cat now and my cat gets to be much warmer there in the laundry room instead of here in my garage. I have taken to feeding Hellboy on my porch. He’s the feral cat who lives on that neighbor’s porch. It’s only fair.

It has gotten colder. With a nod to my friends in Whitehorse and Mendenhall, it gets dark at 5:30, not 3:30, and by colder I mean above freezing still. The goldfinches have regained their bright yellow breasts for some reason. They flock around my feeder still, and the Canada geese herds are still mining the grassy verges on the road. A hundred or so gather sometimes, with two or three on watch while the rest dig for food. I love the geese from a distance. They do not love us, but they do trust we will stay in our cars.

There is a school, Gladstone High School not far to the northeast. Due east three blocks is an elementary school and behind it Gladstone’s main park where every year the city fair is held. We have a parade, you know, just as we did in the Willamette neighborhood where I lived before. On the high wires of a couple nearby intersections are one tied pair of sneakers each, dangling there for years now. I watch them slowly degrade in the seasons. They have held up quite well.

There. I hardly allowed any sentence fragments in this post. That better, Mom? This is her house I live in. She bought it to be near me in her last years, since Lees Summit, near Kansas City, Missouri where my sister still lives because Mom lived there once turned out to be mean streets for her.

The Shoes You Threw Up There

I couldn't throw them
today, not if I tried, not
to save my old life.

Shoes across the wire
take shoulders that swing easy
to toss them high up
and over to stay.

My shoulders complain often
now, and so the rest
as well, twinges that
speak clearly of the sometime
journey I will take.

March 02, 2009 2:15 PM

I've Gone To Ground

I once took on an affair that involved me in subterfuge. The only way I could do it was to deliberately and deeply follow my heart. Then I quit all debating about the awkwardness of my position and the risk. We needed to protect her kids from the eruption of her affair in the middle of her path to divorce. We succeeded. Over the course of two years this affair never got back to her family even though we were less than secret in some circles. In the end she left me for another who was new enough that she could bring into the open after her husband had a girl friend and the divorce was well established as going forward. The kids did fine. I met them at one point. She has ultimately accomplished that separation, including separating from the necessary boy friend to match her husband’s girl friend. I actually knew I could not succeed in keeping this woman my lover and am grateful for the two years we had. What she gave me was my mature poetic voice.

What all that has to do with this poem, the quality of waiting in it is very much the quality of waiting for my lover to come to my house, especially on the days I took off from work to make it happen. I’m an old outlaw, not only this way. This is one of the prices.

I've Gone To Ground

There's no advantage
to this hideout, too many
splinters, not enough
light, and they shut off
the power decades ago.
I think you'll not find
me here, haven't had
a bath for days. This ain't fun,
this rash, these splinters,
nothing to do, not any
damn thing, just waiting for you,
you said you would come.

March 2, 2009 9:16 AM

This Ache In My Heart

I have been busier today not working than I would have been working. To the doctor’s three times today. Phone work, to the Auto Body shop because someone hit me on the road last night, a glancing head on with a towed car that swept wide because power steering wasn’t there. Very low speed accident. I always use sentence frags. Does anyone care? My mother did. She hated it when I deliberately did shoddy shit like this because she knew I know better, and I do. Filing the accident report. Getting the estimate, $3500… Their insurance saying, “no problem.”

The physiatrist said that my screwed up vertebra really should not cause pain and numbness, but my pain and numbness there anyway. I don’t care if that is so but what I do care about is finding out what is going on. I will return soon for an in depth test of the nerve pathways in my leg. Oh fine! Needles, effing Teflon coated needles. This will pinch a bit…I hate it when they say that.

This is not how it was, but on another world, how it could have been.

This Ache In My Heart

How you lie there still
after the wave has passed by,
after the heat fades,
and I wander off
to pray for the day's return,
kneeling in the grove
beside our campsite
out of your sight on purpose
because I fear love.

March 1, 2009 9:54 PM

The Sighting

I don't think I will add much to this one...

The Sighting

It was diamond
shaped and shivered, spitting light
from the three corners
as it hung weightless
small and close, far and larger,
I don't know, she said,
and I can't tell what
I know because I am sworn
and they keep watching.

March 1, 2009 9:32 PM

You Wouldn't Like Me If You Knew

I am still today a shame driven creature when the right conditions arise. If in shame, I will tend to extremes to get out. If not in shame but at risk for it, I will tend to similar extremes to avoid it. I don’t care, really where that comes from. It matters that I know it and that there are two streams of practice regarding shame that I can avail in order to live a better life. I can practice towards avoiding known causes of shame, but while this practice is useful and necessary, a better practice is aimed at moving beyond shame into forgiveness and compassion.

I am so filled with the tendency to treat myself better than I may deserve in any condition, that I have often felt doubtful toward such statements as “the first person I need to forgive is myself.” In fact a minor condition of my shame is knowing that I give myself too much of a break. But here again, I must concentrate on the known predicament I am in. My insight is often profound but it is also distorted in ways I cannot see.

I am 64 years old. I have seen much come and go. Nakedness of all kinds is not such a big deal anymore. I have learned the truths of clothing, of walls, of mirrors, of truth telling and of deception, of double lives and disguises, and how to spin the truth into a lie. I am still the victim of this poem if I relax my grip.

A very good friend of mine tells me her code as a runner on the track and in her life, relentless forward movement. You cannot finish the 5k course and more without a vow to relentless forward movement. I agree. In my place in order to transform beyond a shame driven reactive creature living a grief stricken life, I must recognize I swim against a current that changes all apparent straight lines into curves of a backward tendency, that forces me to tack like a sailboat to move forward, that any rest I take will cause me to work harder to catch up later, that if I just tread water for a time, I will be going backward. My life cannot have any straight lines for long because the backflow always curves them. This metaphor goes on and on with useful applications. Relentless forward movement.

It is not grim, it just is.

You Wouldn't Like Me If You Knew

I am sitting blank
trying to say what I know
but it holds me back
even as I am here
willing and I thought, no fear.
You said secrets keep
me sick and I know
how they erupt like boils do
yet shame blankets all.

March 1, 2009 3:04 PM

An Old Door

Sometimes I feel really nourished and cared for. Today, something really kind happened to me. I am astounded and grateful for the gift. In fact, several remarkable things have happened in the last several days. My life may have changed nearly beyond recognition. I have new responsibilities. There is a quest coming. We shall see.

I am not yet fit to return to work but I expect that my efforts will have me released for work by next week. However, then I will enter the queue, eligible for a return as soon as a suitable project appears and the current work force adjusts. There is a pressure on my boss to fund the medical insurance he continues to carry for me though I am idle. This pressure is on me as well to return as quickly as I can. However, my boss cannot just dump someone currently active to make room for me without risking that man’s return at some future time. It just isn’t done, nor would I want it to happen. These people are all my friends too. So an ending has to be reached in normal order.

As for this poem, if I did not practice diligently, this is who I would be. It is certainly who someone on the planet is.

An Old Door

This old door, not locked,
will fall off if you try to
open it. That's old.
I am not that old
though if you try to open
me, I'll fall off too.
That's why I keep closed,
because I'll fall off the edge
of things otherwise.
That's just how I think
even though you say I know
better than that now.

March 1, 2009 11:54 PM

Looking At The Hills

I actually wrote this about God.

This reminds me of the pop song going around lately with the lyric

What if God was one of us?

A while back Paul Simon pointed out that God is old. If He’s anything, old is what He is. She? If She, then I might be in trouble here.

Looking At The Hills

One time I saw you
step out completely naked.
You were really old.
This was like looking
at the rounded hills that once
(you told me) were tall
and jagged mountains
fresh from tectonic forces.

I saw you by chance
and did not tell you
I was there. I just backed out,
gently shut the door.

March 01, 2009 9:53 AM

I've Done It Again

It’s time for a little resizing. I might be just a tad too fat for my tights. I’m a terrible gardener. Mostly now I hire someone in to keep my yard civilized. Here is one man’s version of my plight:

I have a rock garden. Last week three of them died.
-- Richard Diran

That one had me howling. Dancing around on all fours, wishing I had thought of it first. Then I Googled Richard Diran. Try that. Talk about resizing.

Maybe I start to sound sometimes like I am not just another bozo on the bus…

I've Done It Again

I'm coming apart
and they say I am right where
I'm supposed to be
and I ache for you
now that you've sent me away.
Why did I do this?
Right where I'm supposed
to be, learning how
I make my own misery
by judging your heart.

What can I do now?
Pretend nothing's wrong?
I don't know how to stop this.

February 28, 2009 7:53 PM

Still Sleeping

You never know when something will change nor from where it rises. Even then, perhaps it’s an opportunity and perhaps something else. What to do? I claim that all the main turning points in my life come out of my life rather than me deciding to follow some plan. This is true, but it is also true that the responses I make must be immediate and generally with some kind of clarity. If anyone should ever wonder if my way of living is responsibility avoidant, it cannot be for the simple reason that I say yes or no to the opportunity. Recently that has happened again. Several years ago a man with a unique way of living in the world came into my life as I followed a lead. We interacted for a bit and I felt an old hunger rise up. I remember a time before this one:

Back in 1973 I began a partnership, active for six years and I thought it might lead to big things. It did, though not what I thought. What came of that partnership was many things but not the change of life and way of being in the world that I thought. Instead, in 1981 I was awarded a degree in completion of college level work based mainly on our partnership. I thought he was going to be a partner in building a new life. Instead I had my new Oregon life and in it he transformed into the mentor of my completed degree. We did not partner much after that, though he was a lifelong friend. When I married, he was my best man. When he married I was his. He was thirteen years my senior. At the end, he contracted a form of Parkinson’s and died of it. I have his dictionary and several other books, left to me.

I lived hungry with him, wanting developments which could lead me out of the life I lived. I didn’t have a clue how to do that but I thought he did. It turned out I misjudged him in this way. He was living his life not building a new one even though he talked about it. Talking about these possibilities was a fun thing for him. It was not only me that misjudged. I know his wife went through a transition of realizing that he talked plans he was never going to actually do. One famous one was the book he was going to write (he had already written one) and that book turned out to be about different subjects over the years. From time to time he would even get three chapters in or so. Then something else would turn up. He lived for research, not for the book.

When I met this new man a few years ago, the same hunger rose up. Here is another established man in a world I feel better suited for. Last time with him I became the subject in a training video. There are people who have knowledge of me that I do not know through this video I have never seen. Then we parted company but we both knew not necessarily permanently. This time there is a project, and we have agreed to explore how I can serve the project. Who knows where it leads? I am much closer to the end of my life, not nearly so sure I need to go anywhere.

Still Sleeping

You woke up today.
I can tell because your rim
has gone all rainbow,
visible, growing
the bubble of clear vision
all around your eyes.

If you look into
my heart perhaps I too will
awaken today.

February 28, 2009 6:21 PM

A Small Fish

There is another world. I know there is. Once a guy in AA said, “This is not God’s World. This is the world God Permits.” So there is this world and at least one other. I am used to it.

We play music these days in Equal Tempered tuning. At least that’s the tuning we use most commonly, and only use the other tunings as specialties here in the West. I took a music course a while back and learned that in Bach’s time tuning was more various, but a common tuning was called Well Tempered. Bach wrote music entitled The Well Tempered Clavier. What happened in this tuning was that different scales had different temperaments due to the various ways that the tuning was handled note to note. In Equal Tempered tuning the notes are similarly flatted high and sharped low in order to make as far as possible all the note values the same, octave to octave, no matter what. In Well Tempered tuning there are different values based on other esthetics. When a composer in Well Tempered tuning wanted to evoke lighter and darker moods, he could compose in certain keys which actually did that, were more sharp (bright) or flat (dark). I don’t now remember which keys were which, but I know this is true.

What basically happened over time, musicians wanted to maximize the ability to change keys in the same piece of music without ending with cacophony doing it. That is not so easy in the other tunings. That is what the Equal Tempered tuning did. We have learned to hear past the slightly sharp bass and slightly flat treble. When I listen to my keyboard however, especially in certain voices, I can hear the flatness in the treble.

I think the different worlds are something like that. They are music in different well tempered keys. Perhaps there are worlds in even more difficult tunings, that can only be played in one key. Played together the worlds would be cacophony.

A Small Fish

I am the small fish
in between the stones below
the silver surface
all dappled nearer
the bank, the north bank of you.
You are the far world
in the open air
way beyond my darting life.
I hardly know of it
at all, just stories
the elders tell when they die.
I want to believe.

February 28, 2009 11:09 PM

Turning Around

The false strikes…I was wondering what to post with this poem. Tonight, a man, recently separated from his wife, confessed a large fear today in front of a mixed crowd of people. He said his ex had a new boyfriend and he didn’t know who this man was. His daughter is living with his ex and now the boyfriend has moved in. This means inevitably the boyfriend will be alone at times with his daughter. The man said that he couldn’t sleep nights for fear of that.

First it told me that this man truly loves his daughter. When he told us he realized how powerless he was in this situation, that told me he was struggling to stay real. He even told us his ex was asking him to trust her judgment. This told me not necessarily that it was wise for the man to trust her judgment, but at least that he knew he had little choice.

You would have to have been there to catch how poignant this was, at least to some of us, and how unlikely too. This man is not known for good judgment. However, grasping hold of lifebelts as only the drowning can do, this devastated hurting man listened to others and to his heart and chose a course of action.

He called the man up and told him he was too frightened to leave it alone, that he needed to know who this man who was with his daughter was. With that honesty offered the other man responded and was willing to meet. They are going to meet tomorrow.

Can you see how many other ways this could have gone? All of them probable disasters? This man showed more courage than I might have at my command today, confessing his fear to a stranger. And it is an object lesson in how courage arises out of necessity.

A false strike averted broke my heart with gratitude today. I am grateful when I get the privilege of seeing the pain of the world eased. As one of my good friends said, these two men have the opportunity to become friends over the common bond of the one man’s daughter. She is six, I think.

Turning Around

Now that you have turned
this way, you can see the spring
coming as it comes.
Your eyes have opened
as I hoped so long ago.
It helps as you swing
the axe to cut wood
for the stove and avoid false
strikes, wounds to the world
and to those you love.

February 28, 2009 10:53 PM

You Keep Interfering

A taste for irony has kept more hearts from breaking than a sense of humor, for it takes irony to appreciate the joke which is on oneself.
-- Jessamyn West

This is such an obvious truth. And yet it would seem to contradict the thrust of my recent posts. I would suggest that she has used the term “heart” differently. She exercises the lead in making her statement and behind her lead Jessamyn’s “heart” is as surely broken as is mine or yours. There is no irony without that. In fact, that IS the irony.

Instead what is at stake is courtesy. What is at stake is what we used to call deportment, how one carries oneself in the world. To be broken is essential to the spirit, thus my heart must be broken, or else grace cannot enter. To the rest of the world, in which this brokenness within me may be an imposition, then I must act with courtesy, carry myself in such manner as to tread lightly. I cannot be too heavy a creature, spilling my weight over onto the lives and territory of others unless they invite me in.

What forms the irony is the apparent return of one’s former self, the appearance of a closed and shut off creature for the sake of courtesy.

This is one of the primary renditions of this Zen saying,

First there is a mountain (the heart is shut)
Then there is no mountain (the heart is open)
Then there is (the return of courtesy)

And here again is the appearance of Colton H. Bryant when he says, “Cowboy up, cupcake.” This is a fundamental statement of courtesy.

The question becomes then, how do we return to the world, broken in the flow of God, such that we do not impose, hold our boundaries as if in all humility we hold God back from unwanted display? How do we allow as He does, the continued full exercise of self will in others unknowing, unready, unwilling, and in rebellion? How do we even keep this from ourselves in those moments that we need to forget the mountain is gone?

Jessamyn replies. A sense of humor is not enough. A sense of irony is essential. Humor does not require humility and irony does.

Here is one facet of the irony. You cannot really behave otherwise than to keep to your right size in any case for long. To attempt to live too large, spilling over onto others cannot but at some point be your undoing, for you lack sufficient power without help and that power that is sufficient cannot be mastered at will unless some ultimate goal is yours as well God given. This attempt at power’s mastery will reveal your lack of courtesy for what it is, a form of gluttony. Those who become skilled at avoiding the price are catastrophes on the planet, never far from the scale that measures rudeness in the small and monstrosity in the large.

This is so common, such an everyday occurrence for us all in small ways, that we require of ourselves to offer forgiveness for such transgressions. Yet in larger ways we do not. Thus it is between us locally and between nations, the source for much displeasure and real suffering. Irony helps to keep the heart open nonetheless.

If you wish to be pain free, then you risk monstrosity.

You Keep Interfering

I tore up floorboards
and found a rainbow, hollered
What the hell is that?
This is just too much
the way you keep following
me around, catching
me up, sending me
skyward no matter how low
I still try to go.
Now I want to know
what you want from me. I don't
think I deserve this.

February 27, 2009 3:42 PM

Field Theory

I am really happy I did not fall for the idea that I should somehow be captain of my soul. My life is so far from anything I could have planned. Every time I bring some new venture into my path it seems that everything changes. I have often said in one or another context that I am on the cutting edge of my own life. I basically am not competent to run it because I have never been here before. There are some roadmaps and guidelines available. There are principles that I have chosen to follow, but these don’t really tell me what to do on this day to day basis I might be able to really use. So I have to go by rules of thumb, some dead reckoning, and take suggestions as they arise. It is in this context that yesterday’s post was offered.

I quite literally can’t do worse if I flip a coin. I have in fact run my life on coin flips before. Actually, there is a system that offers a formal treatment, a ritual that encloses coins and the random nature of things. It is very old in its oldest form and is widespread now. I Ching. I have worked with that ancient Chinese wisdom system since 1969. It started in a fascination and led to serious study.

At one point, I returned to school and took my BA degree using my work in I Ching to figure in about half of the 28 credits I needed to graduate. Astrology figured in the other half, but also systems theory and other aspects of philosophy and psychology, and more than a little interconnection with quantum mechanics and cosmology. Astrology and I Ching are legitimate subjects of college level learning when they are classed as metaphysical systems and treated formally in that way. Also, Astrology has been used in psychological settings as my colleague and I did. Both Astrology and I Ching reveal aspects of psychology, arising as they do out of the human psyche and can be used then as investigative tools to plumb that psyche.

See? This actually works, but I was up to that time, 1981, the only student to receive credit in metaphysics as a branch of philosophy in the prior learning experience program that I went through. Others tried unsuccessfully. The year after I was awarded my degree, they reconstructed the format of the program, and I believe what I did became impossible to do in the new format. I think it means I have been the only student in that program to do something like that. It took me two years, but the first year was burned up trying wrong directions before I settled on this practicum I produced.

Here is another example of that sequence I wrote about yesterday...that I must make the gesture first, knowing I have little chance of actually getting it right, in order to get my world to reply or respond to me, guide me into the actual workable path.

Flipping coins to decide my fate…why not?

Field Theory

I took you from fields,
brought you into my home state,
expected your blooms
and the scent of you
to change my life forever.
That is what happened
but in a surprise
move, you pried my hands free
of their hold on you.
Sailing off on winds
that I could not understand,
you gave me myself.

February 27, 2009 2:24 PM

Who You Left Behind

I can’t do this thing alone. If there is anything I have learned in sixty four years on the planet it is that. I simply cannot subscribe to a philosophy that tells me to revere individualism, rugged or otherwise. If I wander in my own mind alone, I have entered a bad neighborhood, so I have relied through the years on trusted guides, whether in books or in classrooms, at homes or in gatherings.

I really resist advice. I doubt that people have enough wisdom to lead me directly. I also doubt, have learned to doubt my own direct vision…it is too full of my own prejudice. This is like scientists who know that what they call objective vision relies on a set of specific procedures, tools, and on peer review, which includes agreement through repeated results. I get a result. Then you repeat and get the same result. In this agreement we begin to trust the result. That is why when they say certain things scientists have credibility. They should be trusted. The procedures are reliable, time tested. I too can appeal to the procedures. But not when they say other things.

So I resist advice, but I do not resist certain procedures I have tested for myself and put in my life.

Here is one. I open. I ask of my world in openness. I become alert. I don the garb of the hunter in a certain sense of patience. I make certain gestures, knowing that while sincere, they are inadequate, ill framed, of themselves not useful. I also know that they change things and that in the changes there will appear situations or items that are useful. This is like the hunter flushing game. Then I trust this as true and turn into the skid at that moment, follow what rose up.

This procedure has held me in good stead. I got sober this way. It led to 12 steps and eventually a way to take all 12 steps. I got a career this way, a wife this way, Oregon this way. I started blogging like this. Now I have searched for healing like this, keeping the gestures in place (this must be, because I gestured in good faith and integrity demands follow through), but mainly following the path that has risen before me.

In this way, I am not alone but in dialogue with my world.

If I were alone on the path I could not run for long. If I were alone on the path, if I had to stop, I would wither. Sometimes on the path I do have to stop and watch the pacesetter disappear in the distance. Then the wolves nearby had better be my friends. Otherwise I am lost.

Who You Left Behind

Running the long path,
you outpace me, the others
who also race on.

I call for you, Wait,
I call, but you are steady
with a graceful lope.

Winded, the wolves halt,
turn yellow eyes to question
me as I stop too.

February 26, 2009 9:08 PM

Carried On The Wind

Yesterday, my cat who was dead came alive, resurrected by a neighbor across the street who found her wandering, apparently disoriented, down the block. My cat was so low profile that the neighbor had never seen her and so the cat seemed a stray to her. This was last summer when I thought she had wandered off to die.

So when another former neighbor who did know my cat was talking to this person who now has my cat, he saw a picture of the cat and said it was mine. She came over and offered her back but I pointed out that my cat was doing better with the neighbor than she had with me for years. That’s so because the cat apparently wants to live there and behaves like it.

She never wanted to live here and behaved like it here too so had to live in the garage rather than the house. That was so I could clean poop up off concrete instead of rugs. I am very happy the cat is alive and close. I am hoping for visitation and by no means will I be a deadbeat dad if they will let me pay for things. The neighbor apparently wanted to keep the cat. She seemed okay with it. She was impressed to know she had an eighteen year old cat. I was impressed with how healthy she looked. Of course that was relative to her age. She is senile quite often and we both know it.

Carried On The Wind

Today it was love
that came on the wind
and lifted the skirts of life
in order to make
more love, enough for
tomorrow's need, enough for
you on the mountain,
me at the river,
enough for all the small ones
and the high flyers.

February 26, 2009 8:45 PM

New Weather Coming

It has been too hard to sit here and use my left typing hand. Never mind. I have been through the worst of my storm and am in the rehabilitation mode now. I am hoping for a full release. There is still work to do.

New Weather Coming

I walk the long shore,
through the sand, the gravel, shells,
the strands of brown kelp,
with gulls calling me,
telling me to heed your name
whispered in the salt
breeze, and out to sea
the cloud banks rise up building
the new front.

Beyond
all, you sail my life.

February 26, 2009 8:21 PM

The Legend of Colton H. Bryant

I wrote this toward the end of yesterday evening, but I was involved and couldn’t post.

This book by Alexandra Fuller, The Legend of Colton H. Bryant, is, a prose poem from start to finish. I cannot recommend it more. But I warn you, it is likely to break your heart. It has broken mine. It is rare to read the raves of reviewers, read the book, reread the raves and decide they didn't do the book justice.

The story reads like a novel but is a true story of Colton, how he grew, what he did, and how he died. It is also the story of those closest to him, how they loved him, and he them. It takes place in Wyoming, on the high plains, and because Colton made his living at the last on the gas and oil rigs, it is about that as well. It is about the wild horse he tamed, and in the end it is about life and death, beauty and loss. It is about cornflower blue eyes and mind over matter.

Most of all, it is about how we go on, no matter what, no matter freaking what. "Cowboy up, cupcake," Colton would say.

I apologize for not posting sooner. I was busy reading. I was also distracted by other things. And I cannot post right now either, because I am downloading the 89 meg Itunes player at 4.5 kbps, a 5 hour download. I rarely do that but it's in a good cause. I will then have a way to play for free the whole remastered Beatles set, 16 cds of Beatles which was saved off for me in .m4a format or whatever it is that Ipod and Itunes defaults to. I sniveled about it, but Windows does not play that format.

Cowboy up, cupcake. Or as we say in bar talk in Oregon, "Oh well." You have to say that with the right inflection. Heh.

The Enigma, Old Business

"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth."
-- Umberto Eco

I am very happy Eco said it. However, I can't stop there because it is not only madness that attempts to interpret the enigma from our side. Sometimes it is a yearning of the deepest heart, and that creates when there is talent and skill, much of the greatest art. And in my experience, the penetration is not only one way. What I mean is, the enigma sometimes interprets me. When that happens it is not always terrible. Sometimes it is a new birth. When the music broke loose in me in the nineties so I could return to it, I feel this is what happened. After the turning point, the world is no less a harmless enigma, yet it is now married to the yearning I have had lifelong where once it was somewhere beyond me, and maddening for that, just as Eco says, terrible, demanding an interpretation which is impossible.

Is this also the force behind the experience of mothers and fathers who fall in love with their infant, that the enigma is delivered directly into their care, just as they once were delivered? Is this not as well the position of the mystic? Is this what happens in the best love making? This is as well, I believe, the best way to die, embracing the enigma.

That quaternity is the true cross found at the heart of the harmless enigma that is the world we live in.

***************************

I am an arrogant man, but I am a recovering arrogant man. I try for gracious gratitude, even though I think gratitude is beneath me. Practice. I am glad to have learned the musician's lesson about practice, even though I really think practice should be beneath me too. Can you imagine how embarassed I have been at times, getting caught in my arrogance? I am unfortunately not arrogant enough to avoid shame successfully. I am shame driven when I am smaller than fits my true heart. I have to keep my arrogance a secret from myself in order to function that way. Or else I must practice, practice, practice until I learn to live right sized.

Old Business

I didn't ask you
to help me, did not accept
graciously at all,
in fact I rushed off
as if I found something new
laying on holy ground.
A unique moment,
a unique new man was born,
that's how I thought then.
Now I know how this
is old business, common,
belongs to us all.

February 26, 2009 7:50 PM

The Dancing Girl

This is a memory. I once had a woman dance for me in my living room in a full costume including a long flowing black-haired wig. What a gift. This moment was one of many that changed my life.

The Dancing Girl

You told me secrets
about dancing, it's costume
that makes it real,
that's what you said, then
you twirled your full skirts so high
I saw your full shape,
the shine of your shoes,
and the grace notes in my heart
all from the rhythmic
swirl of your sweet world.

February 25, 2009 7:40 PM

A Sudden Appearance In Cold Waters

I really need a little shapeshifting just now. Last February it was winter I was escaping...

A Sudden Appearance In Cold Waters

I take my dolphin
shape to cut through life's cold wash.

I am sleek and slick
with tropic waters,
with the sunlit spells you cast
beside the noonday
shoals of tropic fish
near the coast I promised you,
where I keep your hope.

February 25, 2009 8:11 AM

The Tender Spots

"Of all the pitfalls in our paths and the tremendous delays and wanderings off the track I want to say that they are not what they seem to be. I want to say that all that seems like fantastic mistakes are not mistakes, all that seems like error is not error; and it all has to be done. That which seems like a false step is the next step."
- Agnes Martin

What a statement of faith. I agree. I am dark right now, on a treacherous path, in too much pain to do much and without a clue how to get out of it. I am still on track. I choose to believe so.

Love, compassion, forgiveness. Prayers for healing.

The Tender Spots

The tender spot's found
in between
the dark and day
or day's end and night,

or in between me
and
you dancing in twilight
lit by rosy flame.

You said eternal
life
is found in us. I said
Yes, within our hearts,

In the tender spots.

February 25, 2009 5:03 PM

Your Lifting Capacity

This has been said so many beautiful ways and this is one of them. I have called it seeing with God's eyes. It changes things to know the world from this other position, oddly the same, the identical position to this one, and yet never easy to attain until you do. At that point you know how easy it is to reach it, so easy that you will be embarassed, but in a harmless way. Mostly joy and laughter rules in the birth of things, compassion in their ceasing.

Currently, I am in the darkness. Yet I remember.

"Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Can't you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front."
- G.K. Chesterton

************************

I am quite sure that not one of us can rise on his or her own. But this is paradoxical because in the end it is entirely up to us. Identity becomes something other than what we know. So does the emotional life. And like said above, we no longer come in through the back door, the servant's entrance, but through the front door, like the prodigal sons and daughters we are.

Your Lifting Capacity

You left mundane some
time ago, lifting your eyes,
your heart, your soul to
reach the rainbow prism
in the eye of God, well past
the rainy clots, spray
of worn out old words.

Look how you bring us along
with you as you go.

February 25, 2009 9:23 AM

And I Said, I Will

Here is a teaching moment. It is the connection of magic with the heart of the world. At the micro order of magnitude, down around the size of Plank's Constant it is actually difficult to tell which direction is past and which future. The arrow of time is revealed to be an artefact of magnitude. There is no question that the manipulations of magic have to reach into this realm.

Sometimes, as with the tale of Merlyn, mages can live the arrow of time backwards, from future to past.

And I Said, I Will

A mage remembers
both forward and back, standing
here, now, centered in
the land, poised, at rest
but not indolent, he said.

He spoke as we walked
the path I, yearning,
cannot walk without his wit.

Do not, he then said,
keep only yesterday
but keep tomorrow as well,
and I said, I will.

February 25, 2009 8:42 AM

On Hearing MacArthur Park

If ever a song production was over the top MacArthur Park is it.

******

I just finished reading Philip Norman's book, John Lennon. What struck me, the thing I liked most about Beatles music was actually mainly the work of George Martin. I absolutely loved the seamless arranging, every bit as profound as any symphony. George Martin was classically trained of course. Early on, I was struck as a singer myself at how really good the Beatles were at vocal harmony. Another thing that struck me, how their lyrics seemed so strange, but as Norman points out over and over, knowing where they lived clears up a great deal because they just wrote about places and people they knew.

******

I have really been knocked down by this low back injury. I can't work and it's been three weeks now. I don't know what I did, woke up with it one morning. I have no clue how I stressed my back. I went for an MRI today. I have been referred to Physiatry but haven't received the scheduling call. I find myself sleeping as much as possible. So far I have been able to cook and bathe and all that, but not without complaint. I can't even type for very long at a time because there is muscular intertie with my low back. I thought sciatica but mostly it stays on my left side in my hip area. We have proved that it is not hip though. This is the first time in my life that back pain has afflicted me like this. The only thing worse I have experienced is gout, but this is coming in a very close second.

*******

On Hearing MacArthur Park

If I had a cake
I would keep it away from
rain in any form.
I would not use green
in the icing either. Weird.
But underneath that
is a spirit song
that rises and fills the wild
places in my heart,
then spreads out from there
reaches the dreams in your life,
changes things for us.

February 24, 2009 8:27 PM

The Deer Trail

Sometimes I really tire of what I believe is the universal condition. I ache for our illusions to become real. We make our own roads, intending them to go somewhere, the passage easy, efficient, but we know all the while that we are travelling in wilderness, following trails we did not make. We call for true companions, simply decide that someone nearby has to be that companion, desperate from waiting for our true companions to be revealed. But we really know there is no true companion, not like that, not like the inner dream. We take on a sense of humor about all this in order to get along. We go to considerable lengths to deny that suffering is our lot, or else falter in the burden of it.

I struggle to remember how I wanted to be here, argued with my maker to get here. It seems to me so much easier to blame another for my fate.

Here am I, Lord. Walk with me.

The Deer Trail

The woods loom over
the path we take, this deer trail,
wide enough for us
right here, falling
gloom like rain, so little sun.
When I have touched you
like I did today,
walking near enough to, wanting
the feel of your skin
from my hand to heart,
I say I trust you, I trust
this trail, where it leads.

February 24, 2009 11:22 AM

Final Proof, The Sweetness Of The Rose

It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.
-- Peter De Vries, "The Mackerel Plaza," 1958

An AA speaker, Bob Earl, would say the same thing this way...Without God, I'm fucked.

Exactly.

In real life, unlike in Shakespeare, the sweetness of the rose depends upon the name it bears. Things are not only what they are. They are, in very important respects, what they seem to be.
-- Hubert H. Humphrey

It was my mother's lifelong distress that she built her public self so completely, with such excellence, such art, that those of us close to her could not break through. If we caught on to the differences between private and public self, we would eventually think of her as not genuine, and become accusatory. That would never work because her persona was too tightly woven. To my great good fortune, I realized possibly a decade before she died that what I took as false was not false and she was in very important respects exactly who she seemed to be. It was possible to map her public persona character back onto her mostly hidden private self. It is in this area, in the consequences of this structure that at least two of her five marriages failed and also where she almost lost her last two siblings. In the end as best they could her youngest sister and middle brother both decided that keeping the relastionship was too important and they tried to look past this appearance of falsehood in her persona.

I don't know if her siblings ever figured it out, because she really was difficult in her way. In many real respects she not only raised me well, but I also survived her and had to struggle to do it.

Meanwhile as is often the case in such matters, there are a very large number of people who remember her, who continue to be taught through her books, who loved her dearly, knowing and needing to know only her public self. She was celebrated and decorated, and was one of the leading lights in the ministerial program for training ministers in the field in Unity School of Christianity. She accomplished a great deal in her lifetime, including writing three books, training ministers, teaching high school English to a whole army of baby boomers, and winning various awards for acting and also directing plays. In her youth, she turned down the opportunity for a movie career to go to university, and there she graduated PhiBetaKappa and was valedictorian of her graduating class, sharing the stage at Berkeley that year with Harry Truman. She got a lifetime achievement award from Unity School near the end of her life, of which I understand only one is given a year.

She said she understood Liz Taylor very well. I think she did.

The Remedy

I was too deep in health issues to blog til now. Oddly enough this is the next poem in sequence.

Homeopaths call their decoctions remedies and they do so because they believe them to be restoratives, enabling our selves to bring our systems back into balance on their own. Allopaths offer their drugs to directly combat specific symptoms, assuming if you get the symptom out of the way the body can do the rest.

I will be getting an MRI on my back on Thursday.

The Remedy

It doesn't matter
what I believe, or you, or
how the sky reaches
into the farther
shape of space, nor that lemon
scent is present now.
What matters now, we
learn to forgive so truly
that nothing's left out.

February 21, 2009 8:54 PM

Sky Blessings

"When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power. Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world, and like spells, they only work if people believe in them."

-Wolf Hall (Mantel)

Damn. I wish I had wrote that. It's a really big clue. If you understand how that connects, how that works, how utterly essential both laws and spells are, if you understand all that, you are truly headed down the right Path.

Here's a spell...er, poem.

Sky Blessings

When hawk calls to you
I know you answer, soaring
higher than before,
becoming distant
to the rest of us, to me
while leaving your note
singing you'll be back
sooner than the next song plays
in my heart for you.

February 21, 2009 9:03 PM

Hard Pressed

I am breaking from my usual practice today. I feel my limits more than usual.

This morning I read a passage from The Path To Bliss written by the Dalai Lama in which he points out that the universal only appears in particulars in our experience, that this applies to teachers and students of awakening as much as anything else. Thus the presence of God Incarnate on the planet, even that, is ever and always deniable by those who cannot see. He points out that the message delivery, being particular even if the message is perfectly universal, can only succeed with those already prepared to receive it in just the way it is given. He calls this preparation the karmic bond between souls.

That is why there must be many teachers of enlightenment. It is not enough that I am ready to receive, in itself miraculous. As well there must be a teacher or a teaching intimate enough that the message would seem to rise up from within me, as if a memory.

Hard Pressed

He cast his salt on
the seasons of nearby souls,
knowing only some
would receive from him,
those who have traveled in his
company, dancing
with him through ages.

Though my heart's universal
my armor is stone,
my salt has true grit,
and I'm hard pressed against my
limited presence.

October 31, 2009 7:33 AM

A Way Through

I am not a fan of A Course In Miracles. I have read both Gary Renard and Marianne Williamson. I very much like what Marianne has to say on many topics. It is clear that forgiving is the key to miracles. With that I agree. It is a radical calling. Love is transformed when forgiveness is free flowing. If you have a problem with loving, it is almost certainly an issue with forgiveness failing or lacking that is the problem. Sometimes it is as simple as waking up. Sometimes it is the whole life walk that is required.

It occurs to me as I write, afflicted with a life threatening pain, that it is probably a forgiveness issue too. I am overweight. This has contributed to my condition. Obesity too is a forgiveness issue. I know this because when I look at solutions bitterness rises. Forgiveness is the antidote to bitterness.

The worst blockage to forgiveness I ever encounter is my certainty. There is no forgiveness in this attitude, cannot be. I am certain I am right. You ask if I am prepared to die defending this hill. How much of me instantly says yes to that? I don't even have to start my defense. I have already lost.

A Way Through

I need an open
door at this point, a way through
the wall I have built
holding intentions
corraled, herded together
behind resentment,
wariness, distance,
uncertainty, deep dismay.
I need a passage,
a safe place to walk.
When I ask it you say I'll
get that when I learn
to forgive.
Damn.

February 21, 2009 4:01 PM
Modified October 30, 2009 7:38 PM

Exoskeletal

The grass is always greener. What if I was a bug?

I don't know, perhaps I was feeling more vulnerable than usual.

Exoskeletal

If I could expose
my bones, wear them outside me,
then I could be soft
through and through, secure
in this bumpy ride we have.
I could paint myself
in psychedelic
colors, graffiti to show
my true views, my love.

February 21, 2009 9:11 AM

I Tell You Three Times

This is one of the prescriptives, of which I have very few, but this is a key magic. The power of words, incantatory, must be based on principles and this is one of them. I tell you three times. Saying a thing once may have effect, but no matter how powerful the idea, the effect is unpredictable. Saying it twice reveals the passion. Saying it three times releases the inner power if it is there. This saying cannot be complex in essence and is better if it is not complex in the words themselves. Do not use the passive voice. Assert. Say it as clearly and succinctly as possible, and if it cannot come clear and succinct, then wait until it can. Be careful of your audience as well. It is better to not say a thing of power than to say it in front of those who cannot hear. This does, however, not mean that everyone must hear. Those who can hear, let them hear.

I Tell You Three Times

This is a truth of
open spirit, this threeness,
triune spell of love
given, trident to
the heart of the fallen world
that impregnates those
who are ripe for it
and even rings the wind chimes
of those still not ripe.

February 20, 2009 4:54 PM

In My Blood

Where I don't feel so much connection to Britain's present, I do feel it to the past. I am told I am related to Scottish royalty, to Robert De Bruce through my father's lineage. When I read John Michell's View Over Atlantis there was a stirring in my heart. I don't really know what to do with such things. I love the Ley lines, feel there is really something to them (but what??). I am too well trained in our scientific disciplines to easily entertain alternate sciences, but I am too much a poet to not give credence to the fantastic. I have one foot in both worlds. Last February there were serious archeological articles appearing that tied Woodhenge and Stonehenge together.

There is Woodhenge and Stonehenge within walking distance and the tracings of the path, which includes the nearby water. The path goes to the water from Woodhenge broadly, then along the water, then is discernable as a straight track to Stonehenge from the water. The living quarters were near Woodhenge and it is now surmised that there was a ritual interconnection of life(wood and village) and death (stone and solitude), that this was the first use and that this use continued in later iterations, though the astronomical placements seem clear as well. The astronomy may well be related to the spirit realms.

In My Blood

I, immersed in time
like drowning in deep water
walk the living path
from wood to stone, there
to worship the dead, and back
to wood to praise life,
both henges my own
by right of birth, by divine
right, by right of blood.

February 20, 2009 2:18 PM

Or Maybe My Eyes Are Dumb

I have suffered a disaster. I had hoped to return to work. Now I know I can't. I tried. I had to walk to get to places to do my work, couldn't just sit there. I left at 2, defeated, in too much pain to even concentrate. I am not very much better now. Too much walking has left a residue of pain and wiped out any gain I may have made over the last week of staying home. I have placed the table leaf under my couch cushion to stiffen the "bed" (I am using my couch because I can elevate my legs better). I had to call my boss and say all this, offer to get out of the way. I will stay home tomorrow and probably go in the next day to hand my work off to someone else. That means I may not get back to work for a while, just because there won't be any with someone else doing it. But I won't be returning for a while anyway because I can't physically do it. Terrible. I have no idea how long this back thing is going to take.

In the meantime, unrelated, they have me on a 24 hour blood pressure monitor (every 20 min. or so) to see if they can better time when I should take my heart meds. This all makes me sound like some kind of invalid. I don't feel like one in most ways.

This back thing is just too odd. I don't understand how it started (somehow in my sleep) and it is most like sciatica but then not really. I can twist and bend and do all the things I would think I shouldn't be able to do. I am not any more "stiff" than usual. I just can't walk very far without the pain starting and then building to the yelping level. It doesn't even really shoot down my leg much like it is supposed to, just sits in my hip quietly and manageably until I walk too far (which of course is not far at all).

****************************

I am not sure of my ground here. Don't ask me what this poem means. As noted, this is a poem from February, and not about my situation now. I have no idea what it could have been about then. I can say in general I am a rather good photo subject. My deceased wife on the other hand was one of those unfortunates. She was a plain woman verging on pretty in some ways, but almost never took a good photo. For every good photo of her there were at least ten that lied about her, made her look awful. For me, I think one in three or four make me look decidedly better than I am in person, and most of the rest match me. Sometimes I look like a dog. That would be true of everyone. The camera eye is strange that way. I am told television is worse for many but I wouldn't know. Whenever I have seen myself on tv, I think I look like me.

The voice recorder is another thing. I hate my recorded voice pretty much, don't think it sounds like me, hope, really hope it doesn't. Anyway, I can't give a context to this poem. I can say it is one I rather like though.

Or Maybe My Eyes Are Dumb

My thumb is too fat,
my fingers much too rigid
and anyway I
find this shot very
unbecoming to the fine
shape of my glad hand.

Maybe you've taken
an allegory, my hand
standing for some clod.

February 20, 2009 10:22 AM

Walking On Eggshells

Sometimes, life gets intense. I spent two years at one point feeling like I was on thin ice or as I call it here, walking on egg shells. I could have said going through the mine field. Actually it was only eighteen months. I woke up from my habits at two years and realized the power was out of my situation and had been for about six months. I was so used to living the way I was that I continued for half a year needlessly, not even really understanding what I was doing. At least when I woke up it was easy then to drop the attitude.

Walking On Eggshells

I spent so long on
eggshells that I got fairly
good at no more than
cracking them some
as I took this newer path
out of the mean woods
of my wasted life.
I did have to pick shards out
of my feet sometimes.

February 20, 2009 10:11 AM