Food-for-Thought on A Well-Lit-Path

sun salute

Mon, 21 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Today in the northern hemisphere we have leaned about as far away from the sun as we are able, and the amount of light and warmth received is at its nadir; the moon races round us in a white-lit lunar descant, and we ourselves whirl on this earth’s surface at the speed of sleep to watch and make sense of it all. From a simple Amen of planetary mechanics, the poetic and spiritual voice of every race and probably every species composes its narrative of life and (so dark, so cold, so silent) death.

The Prophets

Fri, 27 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Space looks like the ocean – where few eyes venture beyond the surface. This image presents our planet Earth, and scattered around it flecks that represent active satellites, inactive satellites, and debris: green, gray, red. Each object is much, much smaller than the dot that depicts it. Yet each dot is still a dot.

View the 3D presentation here

I looked at this picture of space crap, and imagined current or future spaceflights from Earth, tiptoeing into the sky like bathers at the polluted beach who, if they even dare swim, must pick their way through plastic flotsam and toxic jetsam and things that could, with any lack of luck, kill them. And as that metaphor surged up like a gritty wave, I thought of all the news stories citing our degraded oceans, the cradle of life made a sewer by the most self-centered, wasteful generations ever to wander the planet. Our destructiveness equal to our creativity, perhaps: is that a balance that Nature will always strike?

Inconvenient Truths

Fri, 06 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Our politicians continue to smoke the mirrors by talking about nothing of substance, and of making “security” or family life an issue of national governance, when much more serious issues continue to press.

Imagine you run a family farm, and one of the workers was painting a fence when 3 acres of tomatoes needed to be picked or rot on the vine. Imagine you run a business, and your accountant can’t explain where funds are going. Imagine you live in a village and one family is using the community well as a toilet.

That's not the moon.

Fri, 30 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The study of impermanence both demands and cultivates a steady mind. You would wish some of that learned gravity on our shrill leaders, whose gaming is driven at least in part by their fluttering avoidance of mortality, a blindness adopted to ward away their own short time upon the planet.

Politician or citizen, this week we are offered a lesson in humility. Not two weeks ago, observers in one of the world’s scientific groups detected a small asteroid far out of the normal plane of heavenly bodies, whose orbit around the sun carried it in the direction of the Earth. You might imagine the observer who first detected it:

starfall

Fri, 05 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Stars that have lit our little night, also fall.

Would I keep them in the heavens? I can’t catch a star. Would I keep their light from halting? All light flickers, falters, fails. I can’t breathe them higher; or should I, blowing on a candle flame, that wind might burn them brighter, but also burns them faster, gutter, gone.

I guess, embrace the failure (which is not failure, only gravity-graced easing down to earth), learn tearful laughter, joyful departures, let my heart be beautifully marred, so love is written on it while it beats; so beating it repeats that name, these names, this worldful of names, one moment at a time.

The twenty years

Sun, 24 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

… remaining were no shorter, no more weighted, than they were the day before; but the pang of loss or brevity was, quite suddenly, intense: I was wakened by a thought.

As every life is change, and we are bound to say goodbye, then how precious the gift of knowing it, to see the light, that makes you visible to me, and me to you.

The only tears I mind are the ones that were not cried, that drown love, that make us run and hide.

1 – Between

Sun, 25 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

- 5 -

And then the ramp was pulled up and the loading doors of the truck were closed; closed, too, the door of the storage unit, now emptied of its cargo; and years of living lurched away behind that burp of diesel, as though I had never owned it, and it had never laid claim to me.

I assume these trinkets and kitchen kitsch and bedroom comforts will join us again, that side of the Atlantic, but who knows? There are no guarantees, and all shapes and sizes of pirate. Maybe we can begin again… again. I half desire it.

7 – Horizon, Illuminated

Mon, 19 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday’s ice storm was erased by the night, and my little portion of earth has rolled around into sunshine, clouds dispersed, streets cleared, warm.

My flight (flight away from…? flight toward…?) departs in seven days, one week into which I will pour as many tangible tasks as I am able: a last box of odds and ends to be packed, a shipment of our personal belongings to be negotiated and executed, a three-automotive albatross (one broken car, one damaged car, one motorcycle to be stored), a “last dance” or “parting dance” in Boston, a rented house to be cleaned cleaned cleaned of everything that was us and is me.

Windows – 10 (Traveler)

Wed, 15 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I sat under the rain and the brim of my hat dripped as eaves drip and through the brim of my hat dripping as eaves I watched the leaves handing those drops heaven to earth one palm at a time, as though breaking the water’s fall. I moved under the skirt of the tree and let her shadow me, the arc of the rain drawing an ephemeral circle where the tree’s limbs reached, and stayed there a while, while the large drops collected above, larger and then larger and then falling with a plash unhindered onto the brim of my hat, as though the eaves had shrunk, or the storm had grown.

against traffic

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

For miles and miles and miles the southbound highway: stalled. A fog of idling cars’ combustion flogs the air: no progress. Stagnation is repeated in a wide arc to the city’s west and south. Every major and minor artery clogged.

To the east there are no cars: maybe a ferry or two: or a fishing vessel: Here Lies the Atlantic.

Glut is stamped into the morning of a major American city. Stamped on every other, major and minor, from sea to shining sea. “Glut” is the root of “gluttony”, one of seven cardinal sins. Wisdom traditions wisely name destructive behavior “Sin”.

Carnavalesque

Fri, 06 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

It is beautiful to acquire skill – through meditation, through prayer or patience – to simply live with emptiness when it arrives. To inhabit your wisdom like a good father or a good mother, not become fragile and frantic like the little boy whose mother has left the room, like the little girl who doesn’t yet know her mother will return, a moment later, with a smile and something sweet, with her warm arms security, with nourishment.

Delible

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

In response to a friend’s question: “What kind of Mark would you like to make on this world?”

I was selected to participate in a poetry workshop some years ago, with British war correspondent & poet James Fenton. He held strong opinions, no doubt informed by atrocity and explosion, and his work ranged from doggerel to deep, from limerick to libretto. His writing was always clouded by a shadowy lining, even when he was being flippant. I was riding my old BMW motorcycle to an event down the Mississippi river road, and he – not being much for tame avenues – thumbed a ride. Indochina, he said, rode bikes a tenth the size of mine, with three times the cargo; I had spent time on Java, so I shared his appreciation of smooth pavement, limited traffic, and 900cc of German engineering.

as slow as spring

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Late last night I arrived home after looking for Home: here the footprint, here the small harvest, here the collected years of living; there (wherever There is), the path leading on, the planting for spring, the arrow’s arc.

I see that, as experiences accumulate, the urgency of a moment is softened slightly. Or, if I am the agent of my change and not the world, I take ownership of the softening: I begin to mistrust urgency. So many use emergency as proof for arguments that have no basis… when it’s only another mask for fear, and one that we don’t often recognize. It’s only a fear of time, when time defines us.

August 7th, 2011: A Day of Silence

Sat, 30 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000

A couple of years back, Amherst architect Tullio Inglese spoke to our ecovillage group about ways to build greenly: these materials, that insulation, this heating source, those solar panels.“But,” he said, “pouring money into a system that gobbles energy doesn’t solve a thing. You have to begin by USING LESS.”

Not a new idea, and wonderful to hear it again and again. One reason we are protagonists in war is our hyper dependence on oil. One reason we are leaning over an economic precipice, and our poor human non-heroic legislators are hog-tied and unable to affect change, is because We the People are arguably (and measurably) the most materialistic and consumptive culture the world has yet produced.

midthought

Sat, 16 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

“… but I do begin my sentences mid-thought…” she thought; and thinking about thought was to look in a mirror that reflected another mirror. She was a tunnel of faces that began at her glance, peered around the corner of the glass at another, inner face, and after that a smaller other, and another and other and other. She raised an eyebrow and a million eyebrows rose: “… that might be a tunnel into my soul - but shouldn’t I see a light at the end…”

Lessons Learned?

Sun, 13 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Lessons can be learned by watching.

A system is only as strong as its weakest link; make a nuclear containment structure (theoretically?) plane-proof and bomb-proof, still the generator sits outside, its water source exposed, and a shut-down reactor cannot power itself; powered by fission, not fusion, its “steady state” is detonation, not stasis.

A viable solution to the nation’s energy crisis (finite fossil fuels, unsustainable sources of electricity) and a response to a near-universal consensus that global warming is a dire reality (universal to everyone without vested financial interests) must not rely on building more, but on learning to live with and use less.

They walk I follow

Sun, 06 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Some art is as trivial and ephemeral as our youth: its willful innocence soon outgrown, and without resentment, but with a kind and condescending turn of heart, to be dismissed as a passing, as a light distraction.

Other pieces are soon discovered: those that remain with us are an artist’s masterwork, which once open our youthful eyes, a door to something larger than we know, larger than we are; and as we age into their beauty and their wisdom they make their way into our hearts along the lines of fracture and remorse we earn through our hard living.

Building a True Home

Sun, 26 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

There is an assumption that we hold as we approach relationship. Or: an assumption that holds us, often so deep inside that it seems to be the fabric of our lives, woven into us, inextricable. Perhaps it arises from our earliest days after birth, when what we need is provided for us: our food, our shelter, our warmth and clothing - for most of us, all provided, after some fashion or another, by our mother and our father. Being nurtured is a “given”.

voices

Thu, 23 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Arriving at the far end of the day
the passengers who had not stepped from the train
composed their books and closed their eyes
and sighed: we have arrived.

as quickly as our sight is shuttered
the blank horizon of the mind is lit
as though a sky inside, through sudden sunset
brightens with those quiet constellations
that seed the canopy of inner night

We survived the challenges of day
- those who, lost in thought, collided
- or, lost in fear or sickness, were derailed
and reassure ourselves that we were right
in all we did: we have arrived.

His truth; her truth

Sat, 11 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

-- The wind swept north and as the weather lifted, my spirit lifted, as though cloud held the weight of me, and sun held the lightness. Is it that easy? A wind? I wanted to believe it was heartache, it was joy brewing in my heart; but maybe heartache and joy are related to weather in the same way the setting of fruit or wheat’s harvest or a flower opening or wilting are related. The sky calls, the heart answers, whether the heart of a man or of an apple or of a grain or of the stamen.

Our Daily Dance: An Intention

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I returned late last night from the annual Dance New England summer camp near Lake Ossipee in New Hampshire, and woke this morning with dancing tape still on a couple of toes, the echo of taut and trained muscle still in the sinews, and the ache of separation from that vibrant and affectionate community of dancers already wringing out some sighs.

A beautiful family event that has been going on for some 30 years, DNE Camp attracts top-quality teachers and chefs and musicians from all over, offering the best of what they have to upwards of 800 participants. The cost of classes, food and lodging is all part of the modest fee. This year, like most years, there were community elders in attendance, and adults who at one time were babies born to this once-a-year village; there were newly-inspired youth from all over the States and abroad; and toddlers to teens who arrived with their parents for this summertime camp.

Magic

Sun, 13 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

First I believed in magic, and then I didn’t, but that was only because I had learned - or been taught - the wrong definition.

You see, when the faeries existed, back then, when the spirits existed, they really did exist. When a quarter appeared under my pillow (or was it a dime? or was it a note carefully written by someone watching out or me, from another world?) it was physically, but magically was not, by the hand of my father or my mother. When I read C.S. Lewis’ amazing words of hope and of challenge, it was not as if those worlds and those creatures existed; they were there as real and as tangible as my breakfast, and realer, perhaps, and more tangible than most of my lessons.

Shard

Sun, 24 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Somewhere among the trials of innocence, lessons of winning and losing.

And then: that young mind, that open heart, has almost no distance to travel, from saying “I won” to “I’m right”, and… ah! Then my dear hearts, dear children, you have lost your sight, your liberty of movement, and each step forward will be a step to be retraced.

I have taken a few lessons from another text. I traveled, I went as far as I was able, to Asia – such gratitude to an early lover, who was my guide to losing self, how could I have done it alone? – and stayed until I could not recognize my thoughts. They came and queued up at night, they spilled onto page after page of notebooks, they tripped out into the night over a bowl of gudeg and a cup of sugary tea, they danced back and forth from my west to their east, a blurry trance of who? who? who am I? I seeded doubt like a farmer seeds rye, deliberately, to defeat the ragged weeds. I embraced doubt, with love, like a man embraces his partner, or a woman embraces her mate. Ah, into that beautiful blindness.

Trust Me

Mon, 11 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

There are two kinds of roads.

I see the first so clearly: I can allow my eyes to drop from the horizon for a moment, and there are my feet, one before the other, one after the other, while the world slips away underneath a pace at a time. That’s about two yards, if I am running, or one if I am walking with purpose, and maybe only a foot if I am sad and feeling slow. I can close my eyes and see that progress. I can close my eyes and feel my weight, feel the world’s attraction, and the gentle roll of heel-to-toe that’s like a dance, we learn to stand and swing to it, and make our lives the music of accompaniment. Those magical shoes you put on early and can’t take off, that dance you to joy and to sorrow, from birth to death.

the surface of the lake is solid

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

The illusion of independence begins with the snip of the umbilical, is furthered with a slap, is fulfilled as we are weaned, walk, and then withdraw to our own beds; we lean into our own efforts, rise to our own challenges, inflate with what we perceive to be our personal successes, deflate before our personal defeats. We desire a fruit, find it, and bring it to these lips: so the feeling of hunger passes. We choose a destination, a mountain peak, and climb with these limbs, fuel this body, attain the summit. This body tires, we lay it down, and it finds rest and soon recovers. We reach and do not touch, and our heart sighs. We touch and the one we touch departs, our heart cries.

November

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Here is the canvas of the sky: one long stroke of gray where it is brushed upon the blue blue pastel of the day, it is an overhead wave, a sun-shade, a blanket pulled up past the eyes, water-color wrung from a sponge, a light’s-decay. And then it rains, of course. As cold as it can be, with just enough vigor in the shortening sunbeam strands to heat those flecks of ice and melt their hearts as they hurl earthward. So they fall instead of float, merge instead of mass, drop instead of drift, and winter waits another week or more to make its white appearance.

Every love polishes the jewel

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

And every lover brings as his or her gift another reflection of the quality or your loving, and the quantity of your love.

Sometimes the arc of a love is as long as years, sometimes a lifetime. Or the music of a relationship may last some months, crescendo, soften, then complete: the dancers bow to one another, and leave the floor to take a ittle rest, or step to find another dancing partner. Or there might be the shortest, sweetest meeting, like a flash of light or lightning, the flash of a camera, the flash of his smile, the flush of her face. No matter the length, all loves are transformed; all loves end. If the agent is time or illness, if the agent is fear or frailty, even if it is disinterest… all loves polish some facet of your life, show you your desires, light up the little dark places you had kept hidden, and make your loving better (if you are watching), and your being warmer and brighter (if you are watching or not).

beads of living

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

The beauty of travel is not the road but instead the footprint of the traveler; not the wind but in the taste on the wind; not the cathedral but in the stillness its walls contain, in the cool of water two hands cup from the river; not in the kiss, but the moment before the kiss, the sweetness of meeting, the poignancy of parting; not in the song as it reaches the ear, but when it reaches the heart, or shakes the limbs into dance; not in the fruit but in the body’s knowing how fruit sustains; not in sleep but in the freedom of dreams; not in life but in the fine beads of living that comprise it.

nothing to say

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Samuel Pepys did not have a laptop; but if he did, imagine the number of words.

I imagine also that the kinds of conversations between Sam and his digital ego. Cataloguing the mundane, the divine and the profane, the human attempts and the human failures, the hope that attends the former, and the regret which follows the latter. In the polaroid snap of an internet eye, it is all captured, clearly or blurred, and offered up like a neon flash on the downtown strip.

Next Step

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

So many people looking for new work these days. Not only because their position was economically eliminated, but also early-life or mid-life change, or a lack of satisfaction or fulfillment that has crept in over time. On a long mountain hike this past weekend, two of our companions spoke of their desire to move out of their current employment, and into something… new. Something better, and not only in terms of dollars, but mostly in terms of feeling fulfilled.

love, not love

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

“So is it study or is it art?”

The first is a wick drawn by a practiced hand, straight through wax. Patience dipped again and again to fill out a candle’s form, layer on layer for length, strength and stability. There is dedication in study, repeated practice like a mantra, mastery a form of devotion. You give yourself and you give your time, your attention. You receive something human-born, earthy, quiet.

how many springs

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I suggested yet again that our death is introduced when we are born, the seed of our departure planted upon our arrival, and perfect darkness as a backdrop for all the colors and sights and sounds of this little, lovely (hopefully at times seen as lovely) life. Can’t I just hang that one up for once?

No.

I don’t think I was ever one to wade in the shallows; all you need do is raise your eyes once and there it is, the Ocean, and I raised my eyes early. Once you have seen the Ocean, who can look at land the same way, or pretend that only the ankles will get wet, and that there is no danger of drowning?

busy?

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I haven’t written so many poems. Nor have I penned a single novel, though there is one waiting, and behind that one, who knows?, maybe another. I have been blessed with a few songs. I used to draw well, a lifetime ago. I am responsible for a half-carved Buddha, who patiently waits inside a few inches of wood for some courage and deftness of my hand. I have several recipes I created which really come out well. I was partly responsible for a couple of beautiful kids, who are still beautiful but hardly children anymore.

Land!

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

At first it is a passage of days, and you measure them in days from, your eyes and your heart reaching outward, and the familiar - perhaps the mundane - gently is displaced by the roll of the deck, the expanding horizon, the constancy of the wind, the salt on your lips. Run your tongue gently over the upper lip: it is the taste that lingers from a lover’s skin, when you have left a kiss, it runs in small rivulets from your forehead to your cheek to the lip, it drips in small dewdrops from the tip of your nose, the mist shrouds everything that was your past, and clouds anything that may be your future, covers it all, covers it all in salt.

rain is the one

Sat, 16 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I don’t seek painful experiences; but pain, and its companion-echo, anguish, find me.

I suppose that, as often as not, this is due to unskillful navigation in the waters of life, whose shoals and reefs demand the best of a master sailor: hard to starboar–! Oh. Get out yer hammers and yer cotton caulking, lads; we’re shippin’ water!

As often as not, no matter of seamanship would have spared me…

joy

Sat, 09 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

The sun’s touch soft today, the air perfumed with sweetest taste of spring, simple, with no effort, the round globe leans toward its lover, longs for love, and every living thing becomes a blossom. I gave myself an hour - no more than an hour was needed - and left my labor to rest, set it on the desk, and stepped out into sun; it was just as I remembered it. The sky soon filled with overcast, the same moist cotton, grayed with pending rain, the same full drops suspended, the hint of ozone and the songs of birds, the motion that is not my own yet part of me, of which I am a part…

untethered by day

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I woke before an alarm, like a shorebird stepping in before the wave. That’s more natural: a piper is never caught by the curl. Those winged fingers flit him skyward if the crash and roil of the sea comes too close. He lives on the waters: not in them. He eats what the sea has offered, running along the margin, and the sea always brings enough, if a little, if a lot; always enough for a meal, or the winged fingers reach upward and away.

not exact but precise

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

There are innumerable anecdotes regarding the paradox of the straight line - even modern physics has brought forward a brighter sun, which casts a shadow where Euclid (preferably) would have none. The concept that I am backing into – leaving the paragraph’s position statement back-to-front, and rather than simply telling you what this is all about, suggesting what it is instead, by wandering in oblique circles ‘round the real garden, whose flowers are blooming all over the Universe, while a visitor stands inside-out within a small brick cubicle, before a mind-sized door, holding a mind-sized key (hand won’t tell the mind it’s been there all along, will it?), imagine feeling a visitor in one’s own universe, with the bricks of imagination cemented all about, keeping the garden out of sight – is this: sometimes the easy way is quite the poorest way, however you or others might convince you otherwise.

Nightlight

Mon, 09 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

The moon is overhead and filling every night, so bright the world can’t sleep, but rolls from dusk to dawn, trees and human objects limned by its smiling sight; into its stillness a single person sails, his water the blue-lit road and ship his own two heels. Solitude the hull’s name, it move at peace, guided by the hunter who stands off in the winter sky, by the bright dog at his heel, and the call of the surf that whispers beyond a wave or two of homes. The ship is carried from home to harbor, and at the harbor pause, to wait a while as moon wheels on the tide, to sigh, and there abide.

Mr. Now

Sun, 01 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

At a birthday party the other night. A glass of wine, a meal, a toast, easy talk, genial anecdotes, a circle of laughter, good night. Somewhere along the thread of a conversation, one of the party-goers mentioned (wistfully, patiently, perhaps resignedly) that she was wondering when she would find “Mister Right”.

Anyone with some measure of intimacy with their own heart would recognize the source of that comment and, judging the intelligence and sense of the speaker, would guess this wasn’t flippancy, a cliche that echoed some dull ache, but rather carried the volume of sentiment, height, length and depth. The words we use float on the surface; the waters described can be impenetrably profound.

No Drug Required

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

It is wonderful to sit out the sleepless night, which the fire of anger has lit! Like watching the full moon rise over a lake, or sun ignite the ocean: a little light comes, then more and more, until a new whole landscape is revealed, in spite of yourself.

In the case of rolling and turning in your covers, your sheets tying you in a knot, or if not your sheets, your thoughts: when you have practiced the art of watching, and watching becomes a habit as opposed to effort… then the mind’s parade, illuminated, entertains, exasperates, troubles, triumphs. A blaring, dancing dream of possibility and otherworldliness, each idea capers in, accompanied with sense, each sense cradled in a rivulet of heat, at its heart an explosive charge: as one draws near its features clarify and colors smear, its sweat and power reek and roil, its face approaches, flares, then rears and turns away; another steers into your line of wonder, blunders into this and that, falls flat, lifts itself and shivers dust motes from its hat, winks, and thunders past; the smallest steps so softly it’s a whisper in the din, imagines invisibility and it within, its sound is thin, as if to hold it would draw finger into thumb, then what have you, what have you; a great volume of water crashes to the ground!; a paper figure passes, flicks your finger, catches tinder, touches flame to each encounter, makes a word a cinder, becomes a sheet of little substance, if it holds you leaves you empty, more crashes, this time ashes; then the brass; then drums; then drumming heels; then humming ears; echoes like ghostly fears; empty tears; farewells; stories left to tell; quelling; quiet; quit.

A thread to string it on

Sun, 28 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Lately I have neither composed melody nor lyric, because music, however you follow its fragrance, requires the flower. Simple or complex, the blossom must open, the color be expressive and expressed: if that bud is all-potential, then the hand must wait for later summer, for more sun, for rain; and if the petals have stretched, dried and fallen, then the mind must imagine flowers, and the tongue will wait for spring. Either way, an absence makes the heart redundant, the song oblique, a tangent, and all attempts to coax it hither are nothing less than calling butterflies from the sky, with similar result.

An abbreviated story

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

My cats, of course, obey another set of spheres, and while I quiet into the solitude and the slightly muffled end of the day (even the blue TV glare has left the neighbor-houses, and the most convicted night birds have for the most part decided that sleep is good enough) as I write a few lines as exercise, or as a ladle dipped into the Well, my friendly, black, male cat, Shadow, has wandered into the influence of the front door, guttering a deep and slightly swallowed yowl, the one I have come to recognize, in the language of cats, as being a call to his mate (platonic though their mating is, no less Love, ranging to if not attaining the coital: embracing the familial, the time-worn, the touch-comforted and the understood), his call announcing Success in the Hunt, as evidenced by the flesh of a creature smaller and less offensively appointed than himself, and accustomed as a species to being prey, now prey again, a rabbit.

Conversa

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

“Pois, deus virou vida, assim mesmo: virou gramado, virou ar, foi respirado, e apenas então aprendeu perder…”

“Não diga.” Meio-sorriso, rosto virado para que desconfiança seja oculta, perdida na sombra.

“Digo, sim, querida. Digo sim. As terras foram secas, os lagos apenas buracos no pele da planeta, ocávo, esperando…” Mas não quis saber. Oferecí água; não quis saber. “Deus tinha o meu rosto, e o teu. Olho para olho, alma a alma, e o deserto entre os dois. Aprendia perder, sim. Não acreditas?”

Wait

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

“Waiting is work.”

My father, on the telephone, waits for the return of my mother, away in Sweden. One fills her eyes with her history and with the world; one fills his eyes with the familiar and with a brief emptiness.

But a small emptiness echoes the greater one, just as a shadow in the sun is kin to those of the evening, those of night. And absence that ends reminds the heart that lives that there is an absence which lingers, lengthens, and deepens with the days.

Negatives

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000

"
Mountains did look in
the windows of the thin aluminum room
over loud tar paper roofs
We could see how
peaks
covered with lime or snow
backed away
a little wounded
from their literal distance
" - Mary Kinzie

I wondered, tonight, as the full moon flooded my room as it flooded the landscape around me, as it flooded the night from one limb of the horizon to the other, how it is that words describe the darkness so easily, while the light can be elusive as a star in the evening fog?

Less | More

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

In many conversations over the years I have found myself planted on one side of a fence, leaning in, looking over. And according to my companion’s words – through words thoughts, in thoughts timber, trimmed timber rails, rails become fences, fences framed vision, in pictures a mirror of one’s Self – there was a way of being that was correct, a way of being that was incorrect. There was – is -- one practice which brings you to wholeness, one God (as it were) telling you the way to walk most clearly, telling you what to do and what not to do, in words shaped by your mouth and in commandments shaped by your mind.

Edges, Ledges and the New Frontier

Sun, 13 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000

A phrase often heard in physical training programs, from triathletes to bicyclists to climbers to yogis, is “working your edge.” No matter what level of experience we have attained in a given sport, there is always a level of activity or mental acuity beyond that which we are familiar. There is always a more open or more human experience waiting, just outside of our comfort zone. Sometimes the highest experience is far outside that comfort zone, in fact.

Live, and Learn

Sat, 24 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Better to travel with someone who is looking for God
than with someone who has found him.

Thanks

Fri, 23 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Today unlike other Thanksgiving holidays I find myself alone. The day began in silence, shrouded in fog from the eastern seaboard; it passed quietly in a town whose shopdoors shut tightly against profit and house doors opened wide in favor of family; and ended in fog from the eastern seaboard, backlit in a dusty red, dusky purple, then dark.

There was no turkey except for those roaming the wood behind my house, and no stuffing or potatoes or pie. There was, in fact, nothing special whatsoever, except for this contrast of need (a darker color?) to necessity (a pure white sheet).

Empty Tornado

Wed, 07 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000

“I feel like an empty tornado inside
with nothing to tornado about

and then it starts to rain on my tornado
and it rains for years…”

~ Isabela, age 10

Yesterday - or was it the day before? - winds from Alberta met winds from the Gulf, somewhere over the plains, at the heart of the continent, and the two in their meeting squeezed the sky, so that wave upon wave of hurricane rain washed east. Another spinning cell sat over the Atlantic, so that all of heaven and all of earth was a howling torrent, and the lives arranged upon its surface blowing leaves.

The Edges of Reason

Sun, 23 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

My younger brother is a musician and mathematician, an adventurer whose inquiries lead him to landscapes most people would never dream existed, much less find themselves exploring them. It isn’t enough to walk along planar geometries and simple proofs – that would be to walk in the Garden without admiring the flowers. The walk is well-trodden, and the flowers are the Mystery. So these flowers attract his attention, and once in a while we share some of their colors.

Innocence

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0000

My daughter Isabela – less formally, more naturally Bela; though she is capable of carrying her more regal name, when called upon by the drama of the moment to do so – has traveled to Florida with her mother and brother, to be with her Brazilian grandparents and uncle and aunt for a few days. Ah, yes, and to meet the newest cousin, little Lucas, Luquinho perhaps, born a year ago in a country far from the familial home.

Procession

Thu, 05 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0000

A certain slant of light or the softness of the breeze tells you; the brightness of the birdsong tells you it is morning. Most of the world is waking now, refreshed, while the night shift yawns and paws its way to bed. The light turns green. The light turns red. The morning traffic pauses.

As though drawn by an invisible mote of gravity, or pulled by a magnetic line of force that points south toward Boston, from seven directions a procession of coffee cups floats four-and-one-half feet above the sidewalk, looks both ways at the crosswalk, steps up 6 inches above the curb, stops at a bench, settles or hovers, waiting.

Speak, Memory

Tue, 01 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

There is nothing in midnight but a fleck of ink on the otherwise empty face of the clock, or an electrical pulse which dis-integrates into a soft dash of light in an otherwise seamless river of life. We make the marks against which we measure our lives and call them time: they do not exist without our pen striking the hours and the days and the years.

Gravity explains the sands of our lives by dividing moments into falling grains of silica, whose gently wrinkled whorl descends a crystal flue, gravity which draws it through in only one direction, toward the center and to rest, toward the sea. As smooth as grains can be, still they click in quantum resonance like a smaller tick of the clock, a smaller and less useful error of the time we make, one which can never be pointed out, so never be discussed.

Dust

Thu, 19 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I looked into the mirror and found that the dust of time has softened the edges of old pains and blended the colors of old joys; as though every footstep were muffled somehow, walking through snow toward night, walking in the dust of an extinct volcano toward a summit. Everything had become quieter, from the head to the body to the heart; love had grown quieter, insisting less, and accepting less insistence. What once felt like threat now felt like old thunder, a storm that had swept the plains clean and rolled itself, complaint and all, toward the east. Where once there was the need for a father’s blessing, remained the embrace of a father’s presence.

Will you marry, Charlotte?

Sun, 18 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

A moment arrives and a moment passes, water through your fingers. Beautiful water: touch a drop to your lips, your thirst is lessened; touch a drop to your eyes, they are cleared; touch a drop to your forehead, you are baptized; touch a drop to the soil, the flower grows.

From the electric arc of that instant, a trail of Past streams out, like smoke from a sparkler spun through the air, or heat from a flame that burns and consumes itself as it gives light… like words on a page, a trail of markings left behind the hand, a narrative guide, a history, each word a nod to a line that began and continues to be written.

It is now they need comfort

Sun, 11 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Night deepens toward its nadir, just as winter toward its coldest point. The body sleeps but the spirit is waking, as though through eyelids closed, still a subtler eye is watching. My cats have curled to sleep on my bed, caressing each other as they wash, then bundling themselves together for their rest. And around the wide world, people fall into slumber in the wake of the waning light, as though the shadow of the earth, like the soft hand of death, brushed each one gently into short oblivion, to be called to rise again by morning’s light.

Here to Be Here

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000

A winter storm has covered our earth with snow, like the sands of a beach, but deposited by waves of wind; now the air temperature rises and sleet makes a slick glaze overall; now the sun is left behind as we spin toward the east, – whatever East is: we spin in the direction of our spin – and the temperature drops again, and the whole of her body is draped in a white sheet. I have been inside most of the day. I have worked, because wires and wireless have taken my words, in streams of zeros and ones, from the tips of my fingers to the video screens in Boston and elsewhere. I can be a hermit without isolation.

A vida é uma dança

Tue, 13 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000

…atrás dos corpos e das mentes que nós vestimos, para ter algo tangível que podemos tocar…

We spend so much time tied up within our thoughts and our bodies, we think This is It, I am here to avoid as much discomfort as I can, here to do what this skin tells me to do, now eat, now copulate, now sleep, something unsatisfying here, got to uncover it, got to feed it, to fuck it, to put it to bed.

The richness of a rainforest

Tue, 13 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000

The beauty of other languages is that you can see… beyond the walls your own grammar has constructed. The mind finds easy passage in some avenues, where in English, say, or German or some other tongue, it had been constricted. Why consider the Earth an anarchy, a Babel? Were it not for the incomprehensible complexity of our language, we would reduce the richness of a rainforest to the flatness of the desert. The mind is master and the mind is also the creation, and our thoughts draft pathways that our spirit can walk, from early lessons to later experience.

Consuming Anger

Fri, 09 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000

We tell ourselves that what we experience in a moment’s time, also passes in a moment’s time. We step out into the street, for example, and while crossing a car ignores the red light, and you are nearly hit: whew! That was close. And now it is history.

That is a mistaken impression, however. We have trained our eyes on our next paces, or we laughingly pick up the thread of conversation from before our scare, and move on as though nothing had happened; but something has happened, and we engrave the events of our physical lives in the same way a tree writes rings into its body for every hard winter, or an animal writes scars into its flesh and into its spirit for the threats it has narrowly avoided.

This Life's Riches

Wed, 07 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000

When the eyes are open, all of Creation is reduced to surfaces… imagine the poverty in a world of surfaces. As though all that an ocean offered us was its waves! As soon as the eyes open, the interiors begin to close, the interiors of everything that sight obscures from us, the interior of our selves as well.

Eyesight is the sense of abstractions and of interpretation; we interact with the world at a distance, when our other and more proximate senses cannot give us their information. To close the eyes, one is taught, is to live in darkness; but to close the eyes with awareness, to be listening with your being, invites light – so much more than one can imagine.

Fathers and Sons

Mon, 15 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

It began the year that you became a father, the year of your transformation. In those months following the birth of your first child, your son, the chaff of accumulated living was burned away, and those things you had believed with more and more conviction to be True, became in the end only ideas you thought were true, mere thoughts you wore like styles of clothes, which now were worn out, out of fashion, out of season, useful only to dress yourself in nostalgia… in those few moments you found time to indulge in nostalgia.

What sustains

Sat, 06 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Work is what sustains us – work that we have chosen – sustains us by bringing bread for the service we have provided, gives us purpose and, hopefully, a sense of satisfaction as the world turns on its axis, and whirls us into shadow of the Earth once again.

Todo amor é sagrado e o fruto do trabalho também é sagrado, meu amor	every love is sacred and the fruit of your labor is sacred as well, my friend

The fruit of your work you bring into your home, you offer to your partner and your children, to your friends. So choose well, that the fruit and its offering be sweet. As important as our daily labor becomes in our lives, however, it offers precious little cord for our fingers to grip, when what we think is immutable inevitably dissolves, and what we have built crumbles under heavy weather… to make way for something new. It happens – or if it doesn’t happen, you’re even in worse shape, having run as far from change as possible, into a far corner of your life; and while you may have decorated your cell beautifully, you cannot alter the fact that it is a cell after all.

Cultivation

Wed, 20 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

You walk through your day dissatisfied; there is something missing, or something amiss. In the evening you are tired, but it is weariness of spirit, not a physical depletion. Your body has not been a channel for a day well lived, life flowing into and through you, now ready to be replenished; instead, your energy is bound within you, collected and unreleased. To a full vessel nothing may be added, so everything the world had to offer went untasted. Something is missing, or something amiss.

Becoming Human

Mon, 18 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

There are so many useful goals for a life. There seems to be one for every occasion, all so very useful. To be a success, to raise fine children, to travel the world, to follow pleasure where it leads, to save souls…

My goals have been high, now they are not so lofty: to write one beautiful poem; to avoid hurting those I love; to smile more often; to become human before I die.

Sunset

Mon, 18 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

You must acknowledge the beauty of loss: it makes your smile more natural, your glance deeper, your touch more compassionate. How many adults have been toughened to rigidity by the demands of a life, only to be snapped – like that – by an event that should have been expected?

It’s too bad if you try, try, try to get ahead, try so hard that your body becomes stiff as a board, your kisses dry up, your lovemaking becomes the memory of a memory… Too bad. But no fear, the world won’t forget about you: tomorrow or the next day it will give you a gentle nudge… then a nudge that is slightly less gentle… then a firm shove… and finally stick it’s foot out and drop you in the middle of your next step, what nerve!

One Thing Sacred

Sat, 16 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

If you do not meet the sacred in yourself, you will not meet the sacred in anything; if you meet the sacred anywhere, even in the smallest thing, you will have found the sacred within yourself.

That is the first lesson, before all others. If you have not learned this lesson, reaching for another will reveal nothing of permanence, will move you further from the truth, and questions will be answered with questions.

"The Milk of Human Evolution"

Fri, 15 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Evolution is a process that most of us associate with a geological time scale — the slow elucidation of life over the last 3.5 billion years. We also tend to assume that the most recent signs of continuing evolution must be happening in species with short life spans and rapid reproductive rates.

A team of scientists has now discovered that an important human genetic trait — a tolerance in adults for the milk sugar called lactose — might have developed in several East African ethnic groups 2,700 to 6,800 years ago. That is astonishingly recent.

Disorganized Sports

Fri, 15 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

As a driver, you choose where you are going (usually within the confines of paved roadways), when to get there (depending on traffic), and how stressed you wish to be over the process (all options available). But as a driver, your field of vision is drawn in: to a narrow strip of pavement ahead, to one or more sets of tail-lights, and to a small mirrored square of your traveled past.

Heliocentric

Thu, 14 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

It is not the Sun that turns around us: the Sun doesn’t come to shine down upon us. In fact, it is we who turn our faces toward the Sun.

An important distinction. The sun was not made for us. We were made, and the Sun exists.

From a birthright to a gift. From a spoiled child expecting plenty, to a child grateful for what is received, acknowledging that we are part of something Greater, we are not here to be served, but to participate.

Technical Difficulties

Sun, 10 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

It is interesting that, in a country whose infrastructure is far less consistently developed than that of our own digital nation, I had far greater success in posting thoughts and impressions to this journal than I do now that I am home.

Part of it is, of course, that the sheer volume of experiences, their water filling me to overflowing, demanded that some channeling be done and some sense be made of them; and I prefer to make sense in words. The ability to catch hold of a virtual mooring, whose anchor was just inland of the Plum Island Sound, also supported daily journaling.

Look, this beautiful dream.

Mon, 04 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

A counselor was speaking to a small gathering of people, those who had just recently been informed of a diagnosis of cancer. It was a mixed group, some were patients with treatable forms, others were less certain of the prognosis, and a few advised that the time left to them in this life was quite short – the time to see the colors and feel the textures that the body had allowed, to taste the richness of foods or the salt of a lover’s lips, hear the song of a flock of migrating birds perched in the trees outside the house, or that of the soprano who had spent years perfecting her angels’ art. Knowledge that the morning’s printed news, both good and bad, would be an echo far away, like voices in another tongue and another land, voices whispered into the wind, would no longer reach their ears. That the endless daily striving after endless daily goals was vanity; that there was little time left to dance that dance.

That something greater exists

Tue, 28 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I find in my readings that many of the experiences I have had, many of the thoughts to which I have been exposed – to which I have exposed myself – along my seeking path, have been spoken before. Some of them in ancient texts, whose context and imagery demand a certain patience and quiet of mind to embrace; others whose proponents are recent, almost contemporaries. These voices have of course fed many seekers and writers, and the most current theories and practices usually owe a great debt to a long lineage of similar travelers, each one standing on the well-lit path of someone who had spoken before.

Acquisition

Tue, 24 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Manny asked: “What do you wish to gain from this travel?”

I struggled for a moment to find an answer – everywhere I looked inside of my heart I could find nothing that I wished to add to my life. How often do we fall into an old habit: the search for what is missing? When in fact, it is not something we hope to gain, but rather all that we hope to lose. All of the automatic and assumed attitudes, all of the activity, the movement without pause…

Of Dollars and Drugs

Tue, 17 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Typhoid 0.5cc IM.
Tetanus 0.5cc IM.
Hepatitis A 1cc IM.
Polio 0.5cc IM.
Mefloquine Hydrochloride 1/1 week.

When you travel from the United States to other areas of the world, you are strongly advised to renew your boosters: a couple of days of discomfort to stave off life-threatening or life-shorting diseases endemic to your destination. Mefloquine HCl is the latest in a long series of anti-malarial drugs, the evolution of which has closely followed evolution of the parasite itself, as it builds resistance to current treatments, rendering them useless. It has a number of potential side-effects, some of them rather nasty and potentially permanent, if you have a tendency toward the depressive or have struggled with psychological problems.

Is today Ecoday?

Mon, 16 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

If you haven’t been amazed at least once today, you haven’t been paying attention.

Meaning, there are so many mundane tasks begging this moment of your life, and the next and the next, that quite easily – predictably, I would say – an entire day slips along on that bubbling and familiar current, sunrise to its setting, and nothing remarkable seems to have come of it. Yes: the employee or employer or colleague at work who never fails to get under your skin. Or: the story about someone that someone you know knows, who won some money, lost some money, recovered or lost health. All of it swirls along the surface, most comfortably, as one day becomes the next, the wheel of a month becomes the wheel of a year…

Home in the body

Sun, 15 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

One aspect of travel I greatly enjoy is the rush of colors and smells and sounds, the intense (and sometimes forced) awakening of what may have become complacent senses. The teaching of Buddhist Tantra is a realization that you are not an isolated chuck of matter, not part of a duality (you vs everything else), but in fact an integral part of the world around you, both seen and unseen. When I find myself dropped into an ocean of new sensations, I feel my Self stretched, while parts of me which I had never before experienced surface and float along on the waves.

Ornately-painted box

Fri, 06 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Early yogic and other Asian traditions gave great attention to inner space. It was the science of that day, and like the science of any other day, it was a human attempt to understand the nature of existence, employing the clearest and most powerful tools available. The closest subject, and the one which yielded the greatest wealth of insight, was one’s own physical and psychic being; the experiments, rather than being humbled by what we might imagine a lack of powerful technology, resulted in empirical knowledge, which developed over time into philosophical and physical traditions which have lasted millennia.