A Well-Lit-Path

Visitation

Sun, 21 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

When I first planned this trip to visit my kids in the States, I thought of dropping by to see my “spiritual brother” Bruce Davidson. Together with his partner Linda Reimer, and the gathered companions at Sirius Community, he had been carrying an inner light for decades, even through the past few years of declining physical health, after a fall from a tree had physically broken him.

He passed in November, and my desire to meet him again in this lifetime were ended as well. Since Sirius is not far from the Pioneer Valley, where both of my adult children are in residence, I took an evening to drive up into the hills, to add my presence to his lingering presence.

A Ceremonious Tea

Mon, 11 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

With a few simple changes in habit, adding a heaping spoonful of quiet attention, the act of taking tea may be transformed from ”drink" to “oasis”. Perhaps in the end, it is a medium for mindfulness, simple, profound… where repeated action with awareness is infused with ritual, is elevated by stages above the mundane.

Carefully choose ingredients

Attention to the tea you use is attention to your being. This plant was cultivated for medicinal and other uses before the first written reference, in the third century AD; there are many cultivars and nuances of flavor, character, and levels of caffeine. Your choice of leaf affects your experience in the moment and the continuation of your day.

the cry of i'm alive

Mon, 04 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

A child wakes before dawn crying Mama, mama Every cry her name Every name his breath:

Breathing in, he breathes her in Breathing out, he exhales her:

The cry of I’m alive:

Want was will wait when Now how he has here:

His mouth fills with what is A cry an inarticulate sigh As the earth wheels The sun to the point of being

“Proverbs Chapter 22, verse 6” by Kevin Williams @ DeviantArt.com

grateful for the given hour

Wed, 15 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

grateful for the given hour an open hand that lets the sparrow fly wings return the spirit from the sky like water to a flower

every element is born to die like water to a flower becomes a scent, a color fills the senses of the passersby

like water to a flower they, becoming blossoms, smile and sigh the petals fall to ground, the sparrows fly grateful for the given hour

Convava l'ou de la mort blanca

Sun, 08 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I was drawn to the spirit of Brazil before I knew two words of the language, through the open-hearted music of Milton Nascimento, playing over the vegetable fields in Glencoe, Minnesota. Similarly drawn by the music of Silvia Pérez Cruz, I wanted to translate this rendition of a poem by Maria Mercè Marçal, a Catalan poet who lived and taught in Barcelona.

A few days ago we learned that Catalina’s cousin in Sevilla had passed away from cancer; that afternoon I began this translation, only to discover with a chill and a cry that it was Marçal’s poem about her own impending death, from breast cancer, in 1998 at the age of 45.

la pau

Thu, 05 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I know my friends and neighbors to be peace-loving, cooperative citizens, and I know the long heritage of their culture enjoys many more days of enlightened rule than oppression. I know that the history of power in Madrid cannot very easily defend their own record in this regard, and that a disinterest in real discussion has led to this pass.

While I hope to read and understand better the Catalan motives for secession – more lofty than “mine is mine” finances, though probably that factors in as well – I prefer a diplomatic solution, brokered by disinterested third parties (should those exist), than a push toward bloodshed.

who's coming?

Wed, 04 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday’s general strike concluded without further agression – thank you to whomever had sense enough to cool the hotter heads in the room. Now begins the media battle, and probably some sort of legal battle.

To make sense of the right-wing response from Madrid (“Mine! Mine!”): at 20% of the Spanish GDP, Catalunya leaving the federation would be a bigger economic blow to the Iberian peninsula than if California, Oregon and Washington State joined to declare their independence, becoming some glistening, insane, ephemeral digitocracy, poised to shake into the sea with San Andreas’ next rumble. Catalunya has a history as an independent State, so a “bipartisan” Congress’ hard-line response would have the greater force of law.

Martial Law?

Tue, 03 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Since we have seen this same tired play performed over and over again throughout history, we actually don’t need to pick up the script to know what happens next.

Since an army has been sent, there will be violence.

The violence will not originate with the people who are gathering without arms. It will be provoked by the invading military, orchestrated, or barring success is creating a fight, invented.

The people who are marching will defend themselves as best they can from the aggression, which will then be labeled “insurrection” or “coup d’etat” (the latter has already been used).

democràcia!

Mon, 02 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

[audio mp3=“http://well-lit-path.thewaywest.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/October-2.mp3"][/audio]

pots and pans

Sun, 01 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

For the past week leading up to Catalunya’s self-declared referendum on independence – fervently contested as unconstitutional by the standing Spanish government in Madrid; equally or more fervently proposed as the only remaining action possible within an unjust and unresponsive regime – the people of the city have stood at 10 pm outside their apartments, on balconies or in windows or in the street, with large pots and pans and wooden mallets. For five minutes they struck those pans like bells, decentralized but united, is support of their right to decide.

wait

Fri, 21 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

A page takes flight, like a folded airplane, and lands on a desk. A public servant seated at that desk notices movement, glances toward the 752 paper airplanes before them, many having missed the runway and skidded off to the floor, or worse, having barreled into the undiminished pile like a stone into a drift of last night’s snow, cause and effect of chaos’ avalanche.

The public servant, secure for life in a poorly-paid job, paws briefly at the pile to see what just flew in, with no hope of distinguishing new wings from old, new paper from old; and eight hours minus 15 minutes’ rest in the morning minus one hour of sunshine at luncheon minus 15 minutes break in the afternoon reduces one day to six-and-one-half hours of mind-numbing bureaucracy, this day every day minus weekends minus holidays minus funerals.

The unfolding

Mon, 23 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

It was not the first bottle of milk, but one of the first. His mother begins work in a few days; today is a welcome to the world for this five-month old boy.

What he wanted: Milk, Mother, Maternal, to receive ’til sated, to sleep on the breast. What the world offered: his mother’s milk, father’s arms, to accept or not accept the blessing available, to be sated or not sated, to sleep satisfied or not sleep.

El Masnou

Sat, 02 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Catalina’s mother was able to travel and be with us for a number of weeks, shortly after the birth of her grandson, our son. On one of the Saturdays of her visit, the two decided to, finally, “Do the Tourist Thing”, and ride one of the big red double-decker buses around the hills and beaches of Barcelona. I was invited, but declined; they had a great mother-daughter-grandson outing, and I took my bicycle and headed north.

why why why

Sat, 12 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000

—Well, where do I begin…? (a pause, studying the wall, the window, the dark corner of the room)

—It doesn’t matter, does it? Everything is in everything else. Just… begin!

—I think you are thinking. Instead: try speaking. Just make a sound. Any sound, then follow sound with sound and before you know it your whole life is laid out here.

comfort

Mon, 08 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000

what was simple once that you assured me the color and the weigh of wool sustains the body

this fruit as well sustains the body and this word the soul

we talked, so often birds chattered in the eaves our breath frost on the window your hands were so young

and all our easy prayers easily answered: keep this family well

before we were tested

Nov 2003

Welcome 4 – Harmony

Tue, 22 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

What is the conversation between the them, in the silence at the center of things? They would speak it if they found it; they would find it if they did not look for it:

— The world is moving inside of me.

— I see the world moving inside of you.

— I am becoming a new, multiple me. The heart is growing toward every horizon. When I stretch toward one, I am pulled by the others. I am fuller than I have ever been. You cannot see all of me.

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.

Sólo lo tengo 24 horas

Sun, 06 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Entre los varios sueños que me visitaban ayer noche, este fue lo más problemático. Perderme, tranquilo; sufrir una pequeña accidente de coche, aguanto; llamar a casa, encuentro mi pareja cansada, sin tiempo hablar conmigo, está bien, está bien.

Pero cortando esta paisaje cinemática, como la voz del narrador, unos pocos palabras: “Tienes veinte-y-cuatro horas para vivir. Disfruta-las.”

Lo que pasa en el sueño es tan real. Quién estaba hablando? Dios, ángel, diablo? Tengo veinte-y-cuatro horas. Se ha hablado. Puede ser?

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?

Welcome 3 - Elanboat

Mon, 16 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

As though you were on a wide, gently rocking sea, and the mist that formed from that cool and incoherent night had been touched – who knows where? – by the morning sun. Gray became golden, chill became warm, and shapes materialized out of the glow. “Ah, it’s the lighthouse!” “Then this must be the point…” Near the shore the pine boughs are threaded with cotton. The earth awakens and takes a breath, the breeze shreds that veil. Stones whose forms were outlines begin to reveal themselves as mottled, lichen-laced. As you drift slowly into the day, what is around you becomes clearer and clearer.

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.

The Standing Desk [reborn]

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

When we traded from one side of the Atlantic to the other, not everything could come along. One of the items whose value was less than the effort of shipping was the home-made standing desk I had built on the cheap from a reused children’s desk and a few two-by-fours. In two years of use, that desk revolutionized my workday, magically removing (the causes of) neck and muscle strain that had plagued my seated self, making the flow between work and quick exercises “sprints” natural and easy, straightening that slump in my desk-riding posture and, according to the Aussies, had increased the quality and length of my life by a number of years.

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:

உப்புமா | Rava Upma or Rice Uppumavu

Mon, 31 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Though it was a product of the grain belt and specifically from my home town, I didn’t grow up with Cream of Wheat on the breakfast table. We were a cold-cereal-and-milk family (to the best of my recollection), with oatmeal and raisins dusted with brown sugar on Sunday evenings in front of the Wonderful World of Disney.

Later, voyageur trips into the Boundary Waters between Minnesota and Canada introduced more variety of hot breakfasts, including homemade combinations of grains, or Canada’s famous Red River Cereal (a favorite of my trekking companion Bruce Hooke). To these we would add whatever dried fruits we had along, and some nuts or pepita seeds or sunflower kernels, sometimes a handful of couscous to lighten the porridge, a dash of salt, a dash of sweetener.Tasty. Sustaining.

Casa dels vents

Sun, 23 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

When the sun rises the wind rises, mostly from the sea slightly acrid and full of the tide, sometimes from the land laden with dust and a broad swath of heat, in either direction pouring into and over Barcelona, east-to-west or west-to-east, breathing in or breathing out.

At street level there are pedestrians and cars, the pungent aroma of century-old sewers, the sycamores’ daily fall of leaves, and still air. Walk up a couple of flights, and the atmosphere lifts with you, tourism gives way to neighborhood (Sr. Carles and his little dog on the second floor, the acid-rock teen on the third, the divorcée and her daughters on the fourth, the colombiana next door). You meet them at the door of the tiny elevator, where they smile and wave and turn away to walk down to the street; you meet them with their bags and boxes and baby strollers, with their garbage bags and umbrellas; and you meet them in their quiet or loud domesticity, the bellowed phone calls to hard-of-hearing relatives, a raucous chorus of feliç aniversari to a friend or family member, the deep silence of all these families sleeping during a personally restless night.

Welcome 2 – Every Life Your Teacher

Sat, 22 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

A few weeks ago, we signed ourselves up for a ten-month pre- and post-natal class, offered by the birthing center where we plan to welcome our son into the world. The choice was more instinctual than it was intellectual: we had heard and experienced so much more in a one-hour visit than in so many trips to obstetricians and hospitals, it was like falling into the arms of the Wise. Adela, our midwife tour-guide, was in no hurry whatsoever, and answered every question, posed some of her own, asked newcomers to wait comfortably on the terrace as we talked on and on. When we finally stood and kissed her goodbye, once on each cheek, we stepped out into the sun and shook our heads: where were we? When did people start giving their time so freely (other than ourselves and community-minded close friends)?

Welcome 1 – The Midday Wind

Mon, 10 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The mind is like the body in that it settles over time: these joints, my joints, supple yet some of their spring is past; I dare say the arc of my body has moved beyond its height; and I find my thoughts these days are as informed by a personal history as they are by the all-possible present, gravity being the agent of change.

These thoughts. They are gently urged to earth, so that what was once a bright green fancied flight flutters down to a slightly darker summer tone, or to September’s dust, not somber yet but… sobering. I knew (when first I stood) that gravity pulled on my frame, but hadn’t yet understood how the gravity of time, experienced and therefore set in the stone of my bones, made New in my eyes less likely, almost an act of will: I refuse to allow the prevalent physical violence of Brazil to invade the relative peace of Barcelona, and I resist – to the best of my abilities – the psychological violence of the United States, as it places the beautiful circle of my family and friends under siege.

Ferment!

Tue, 04 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The ancient art of food preservation was left behind with new invention, and has slowly returned to favor as we recognize, with some chagrin, that these novelties can cost more than their worth.

As I describe our space-age engineering in this way, the word rings true: novelty suggests triviality, connotes superficiality, a side-show trinket, a toss-off. They won’t last; they can’t last; we cook ourselves as we cool ourselves, we burn ourselves out as we speed ourselves up; the math only works if you ignore time.

A fleet flight from the street

Sat, 01 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

A flight of steps takes you from one floor to the next. If you are at ground level, you could fly upwards, as high as needed, to reach your roost; if you are floating somewhere above, you would flutter downward to reach the street.

If your ceilings are high and your walls short, a stretch of stairway may not fly you from one floor to the next. In our building, the stairs double back on themselves once between each floor. The segments in a flight of stairs are called “flits”. Our building boasts two flits per flight. My friend Sal, master of the moist (or much) arcane, would enjoy researching the veracity of this, or extending its coinage.

Deep roots draw water

Thu, 23 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Catalunya is an arid place, particularly this time of year. Mid-summer, the chart of sunup and sundown tracks the volume of breeze to stillness, the world’s big breath, maps the rise and fall of temperature which rarely varies from day to day, and over all or under all the heavy mass of heat that never threatens rain, that watches us all wandering from home to work to home again, from beach to plaza to rambla to bed.

I'll end today at home

Sat, 04 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Fields of heather reach from the tarmac east, unbroken by even a single tree, rarely by a road, knee-high unbowed flowers that reach the sea. An inlet, in reality: behind you see a ridgeline rising, and on the ridges snow; past the ridges, over there to the north, Iceland’s 66th parallel, a frosty whisper south of the Arctic Circle.

I saw, as we flew in, the sparse houses huddled in the even sparser green, huddled near the shore where the demands of weather are not impossible to satisfy, the incursion of ice not quite a glacial burial, and the overlay of lava not too frequent, so that somehow, somehow, through experience and (equally important) sheer persistence, these humans just like you and just like me chiseled a foothold into the stone and tundra, so here they stayed, and here they remain, twelve-hundred years of history, speaking a language left them by the Vikings, composed in blood-lines and written out in lines of these faces.

Warm welcome away

Fri, 03 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The rustle of the river over the hill and behind the trees is constant, time’s current, and fills the emptying vessel of the day with sound. I am walking barefoot up the road from friend Bruce’s hilltown home toward the community of dancers, whose annual retreat here is part exploration, part homecoming: everyone arrives ready to listen, ready to speak, the conversations made of movement and trajectory, and geometry and the (morphing) architectures of bone and sinew, intention and opportunity, lift and release.

every which way

Fri, 26 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Thirty years of summers as we entered our middle years, our parents becoming grandparents, and our children, adults: their growth as imperceptible in the moment as the changing girth of trees, and as startling in retrospect as the forest that replaces thready saplings and threadbare underbrush.

We’ve grown every which way. At first in the same direction, though now, as each one finds their feet, in a more cavalier flight of seed and leaves, the roots in some shared soil (which one? where?) and reaching for the same sun (that one, there) but to the east and to the west. That’s the nature of Being, and the nature of beings. Take flight!

with the tide

Tue, 23 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Self Portrait as Stone

Self Portrait as Sand

Self Portrait as Shell

Self Portrait as Stick

I found myself refracted on Brackley Beach, Prince Edward Island.

days that frame an age

Mon, 08 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Four-and-one-half years ago I sat on a hill in southern Vermont with my daughter Bela. I had a check in my hand to the Phillips Exeter Academy, where she had been accepted with nearly a full-ride scholarship into their “Leader-Maker” high school program. A gateway to the best schools, PEA promised amazing education, discussion-based study, and intense, laser-focused learning.

She had pretty much decided, though there were some misgivings. Then she had a meeting with her favorite Montessori teacher, who heard “Philips Exeter”, and said “Have you ever thought of the Putney School? The environment there might fit you better.”

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.

Catch

Wed, 03 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

– It’s pulling hard!

– Yes, it’s a big one. Don’t jerk the line, just keep…. wow, yes, just keep hold and bring it in slowly…

The line in the boy’s hands bucking and tugging, this way, that way, desperate to escape the fingers. His expression more determined than seven years of puzzles, seven winters, seven pairs of shoes, seven circles around the sun. A case for karma, the man thought, watching.

good-bye

Mon, 25 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I am not finding new music lately – the guitar gathered weather-checks and dust in Newburyport, while Cata and I made a home in Barcelona – but I am finding old emotions, well worn like a favorite coat (frayed hem, splitting seam, threadbare around the collar), that in the same moment keeps me warm and lets in the chill.

Friday I arrived at our annual dance weekend, and sat in a circle with a hundred friends, for the eighth or ninth or tenth time: here were the easy smiles, the welcoming hugs, and lives I have come to know through stories shared (or shared stories). Always comforting, a great community.

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.

Here I am

Thu, 23 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

– Will there be any left?

Stars were falling all around them where they lay, backs against the earth, faces to the sky, in the summer night.

– Stars? Or wishes?

– I have an infinite number of wishes.

– There are an infinite number of stars. Or, at least, there are as many as you can wish in one lifetime.

– I wish, I wish…

– Shhhh, don’t tell or it won’t come true.

the elements

Tue, 14 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

the tide is made of the arc of the sun of the moon

a wave is wind over water over sand over time

I thought I was alone: but alone is only a thought

how many elements am I

“Lumi” by Raluca Dumitru @ DeviantArt.com

Els jardins del Poblenou

Tue, 07 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The Gardens of Poblenou

I’ll tell you how I discovered them.

In September of last year, when Catalina was making her tour of European research groups, I was similarly engaged, researching the cities surrounding those research groups on foot, by bus, by tram and by train. The focus of her search started large and ended in pinpoints on the map; my search began in the pinpoint where we landed and slept, and spread out from there, a personal Big Bang, encompassing as much and as varied a landscape as possible.

A Practical Justice

Thu, 05 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

For Arthur Henry Schultz, 1898-1961

He poles a stem of rye before his face
	wide as the number one, true as it is.
		“But son, have I ever turned you from your place?"
			“I am I, not we,” the younger says.

The dove depends its wings upon its breast
	then bends its head, as if to think on this
		then falls upon the door-sill, dead.
			Whose fault was this?

The statement, or the question weighed amiss?
	A word is a want with decoration;
		a nod is a sword, unclassified;
			without a sound a dove has died.

The younger turns as though to turn the world;
	the elder lays a hand upon his chest.
		“It was I who made you bone and blood.
			Don’t forget. I fed you of the best;

Were you in need, my interest stayed;
	if you would call, I left my place;
		My day began when your sun fell,
			my night was by your day erased.

Whose is this ground beneath your feet?
	Whose harvest shod you, set you walking straight?
		And now you tell me – tell me to my face –
			to work with me is your disgrace?"

Guilt is an arrow will only pierce the good
	while good already lives as best it can:
		the younger stays, a boy, or leaves, a man.
			“Father,” he shows his hands, “here’s blood:

for every cell of me, a cell of you
	your dust in which I sleep, your clothes I wear
		your field-stone keep kept me secure;
			from birth this was your child’s due

his blood watering the fields you till
	his blood trickling at your heels.
		Now I make my first and one request:
			stand aside,” he straightens. “Let me pass."

Youth and wind demand a destination
	that bends around an indistinct horizon.
		The old man steps away, a little older.
			The door sighs to a rest against his shoulder.

“Wait!” His blind hand fumbles in his vest
	to find a coin, the smallest he can guess
		and throws it in his son’s unyielding wake.
			“That’s the last of me you’ll ever take."

The copper tumbles lifeless onto stone
	a spiral ringing til its breath is gone;
		the doorway holds the shadow of his boy,
			the nothing but the rust of evening sky.

The Map of the World - II

Thu, 19 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The lines connecting this landmark to that begin to fill in. I am the spider who, having cast a first thread into the wind, having that thread carried by the wind to a neighboring tree limb or ledge, adds with patience effort those radial spokes that construct his web. Then the outward spiral begins, and the zig-zag connection of this strand to that. Welcome to my lair! (don’t get stuck)

the eye that stops the world

Tue, 17 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Not suggesting that the beauty in the eye of the beholder is anything but subjective, nor that the lenses and optics, rods and cones, and strands of nerve are tuned similarly from one pair of miraculous orbs to the next. We have colorblindness to thank for the physical proof of an old adage.

However, I do believe our amazing sensors and possible extra-sensors comprise a “What’s Out There” kit that takes in the last wavelet of light that rushes in our direction; that warmth doesn’t stop at the surface of the skin (hold your fingers up before a bulb to reveal your beautiful transparency); that the slow tide or mad rush of Things is fully taken in, is physically seen, whether we register them or not. In fact, we are probably engaged in a moment-by-moment triage effort to weed out what is vital – will that creature bite me, or that storm electrocute me? will that truck run me over? – from what is simply the noise of living, a bird in the bush, a little rain over the city, the constancy of human transit.

Canção Amiga

Sun, 15 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The year is 1990, and I am standing in a field in Glencoe, Minnesota. The horizon is wide here; the trees that rush from the east to greet the Mighty Mississippi seem hesitant to venture far from her safe waters, into the wide, wide prairies, and huddle here and there around farmsteads, brought two or three generations ago by the sodbusters who begged shelter from the merciless Alberta winds, even partially, even for a moment, that sped unimpeded from the Rockies to the Great Lakes.

heights

Tue, 10 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

What is around that bend in the road, the one than climbs out of sight through the gap made by two obscuring hills? It is narrower than the main highway; it is little used; it may lead nowhere… but obviously, it leads somewhere.

What’s out there, beyond that horizon? It’s a line drawn in the water that is erased as you approach, only to be redrawn a mile further out to sea. Some people left, never to return. It may be a water grave… but obviously (to me, obvious) there is land somewhere.

The Map of the World

Tue, 03 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

There was a graceful fall of land on the street where we lived, from the top of the block, north toward the south, bowing in the direction of the lake. If you looked at a contour map, you would see roads shaped by shoreline, connected to others that radiated away like rays from a child’s drawing of the sun, that gradually straightened and conformed to the surrounding grids of houses.

0 – Every Unknown Is the Same Unknown

Tue, 27 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

– The decision is hard enough, she said, without my friends telling me I am making a mistake, that a woman shouldn’t give up her dreams for a man.

There are the words that we speak, that make sound from thought; and there is the timbre of the voice that carries other, deeper truth.

– And it’s not just him. There is so much I would be missing, the last months here. This has been a home to me. I’d miss my little cabin, my friends preparing for graduation, springtime on the hill…

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.

3 – Maré baixo

Sat, 24 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

A couple of days ago, I chose to ride to town by way of the river, where a cycling and pedestrian path runs a ribbon, downstream toward the sea.

Usually, when I am in the middle of some list of accomplishment – all too common lately – I take the shorter route, the backstreets past the park, bisecting the rail trail, within earshot of the Catholic school whose children are invariably running about and shouting at their play, through the sidewalk back alley and over to State Street. That day, the geese were louder than the grade-school kids, the sun was out and warming my heart if not my hands, and… you know, it is -downhill- to the river, and I roll there without even pressing on the pedals.

A song for sailing

Sat, 24 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Multi-instrumentalists Round Mountain deserve more visibility. What fine music, with references and calls out to all parts of the world. It is amazing how much two brothers can do with what they inherently possess.

This track from their album The Goat has as many faces of travel in it as do my next few days – acknowledging their authorship and musicianship, here’s St. Joseph, for your listening enjoyment:

St. Joseph - Robbie and Char Rothschild

Two

Sat, 24 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The broad sheet billows and embraces wind The wind escorts the voyage out to sea

The shoreline spies the receding craft: Why have you gone away from me?

The passengers seek the shrinking coast: Why have you gone away from me?

As the racing stars and their distant masses Faintly lighting the slumbering planet

Reflect the infinite choreography: Why have you gone away from me?

Porto Alegre, Brazil – December, 1990

4 – The Curvature of Hope

Fri, 23 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

As it leaves your hand, the trajectory of a skipping stone makes a shallow arc, a rising line that perfectly describes the curvature of hope. Gravity takes charge immediately you relinquish control, as you knew it would, as you have learned it does: instead of despair for what is certain, enjoyment comes in testing your command of grade-school ballistics, no attempt to defeat the pull of time but to dance with it, reach your hand beyond a hands’ reach with it, and help that stone be less of a stone for just a little while.

5 – Lines and Circles

Thu, 22 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I do see how straight-ahead thinking gets you there, faster. I’m not convinced, however, that the destination to which the don’t-look-back, no-holds-barred train is heading is a place I really want to be.

So, no – lest you ask – I haven’t published my novel, because I haven’t written it (yet), and I haven’t pressed a CD because I haven’t filled one (yet), and I haven’t built my house in my dream property because the dream hasn’t ended, and I haven’t stopped spinning because there are too many jaw-droppingly incredible places to visit and languages to learn and people to embrace…

6 – Sliding into Home

Tue, 20 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The image of an 1800s ballplayer from the NAABP rounding the bags came to the “mind’s eye” last night. The throw is coming to the plate, horribly accurate, from way out in right field - that guy’s got an arm! - so the runner, well advanced down the third base line, hits the dirt to avoid the throw. There is a cloud of dust near home plate. It’s as close as it gets: did the catcher make the play? Did the runner score?

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.

8 – Westward ho!

Sun, 18 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

We brought her from the shelter at 1 month of age, and she has followed me from farmhouse to rented barn to mountainside home and back to the seaport where she began. Now, three months with a friendly caretaker; next, flight to a new home in Hilo, Hawaii. She loves people, and responds well to new environments – she seems to like to move around.

Travel well, fortunate Minstrel the Cat! See you in the Spring!

9 - When I met you I met me

Sun, 18 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Those funhouse mirrors and glass alleys were gentle amusement. It only cost a ticket or two, and I didn’t have to sprint through, I could pause when one of those distorted images was particularly entertaining. I liked the one that made me look like a pinhead pyramid, or was I a pear? It was just weird enough I wanted to figure out how they did it. It was physics, of course, so I can blame the state fair midway for leading me straight to Northwestern University’s Integrated Sciences Program, similar to a funhouse mirror, full of twisted expressions and personal compressions and an enlightening attempt to force myself into a shape my spirit simply could not acquire.

10 – Harvest

Fri, 16 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a feeling that accompanies the creative impulse, whether it is writing, or singing, or painting (if I painted, I imagine it would feel the same) or carving or cooking…

It seems as though it would be, or should be, an expressive sort of energy, an outflowing, but in fact I experience it as almost the opposite: a deep listening, an electric stillness: what will you whisper to me? You have to be very quiet to hear.

11 – Momentum

Thu, 15 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

There is a certain rapid-fire, reactionary mindset at play during times of great change. The intransigence of weight at velocity: the more mass in is motion, the less its ability to change direction.

(Aside. Since everything is in everything else, use anything as a metaphorical lens to make big things smaller, and small things bigger. When considering mass in motion, please apply this lens to our notional [sic] politics, corporate belligerence, world-as-our-battleground stance. Of course it will fall apart. It is a train that can’t escape the track, can’t escape its wreck, no matter how gradually its approach.)

12 - Minor Miracles

Thu, 15 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

12 Minor Miracles

The commuter train pulls away from the platform, and before we roll out under what will eventually be winter-leaden skies, we first creep along beneath highway overpass, suspension bridges, massive concrete tunnels-not-tunnels, that form a pragmatic monument to decades of construction.

(They are monument to equally massive amounts of collusion and kickback, of course: major works seem to be twin brother to power grabs and inelegant behavior.)

13 - Dragonskin

Tue, 13 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

You may have read the children’s story of a perfectly beastly boy who because disoriented, wandered into a cave, fell into an enchanted sleep, and turned into a dragon. An unpleasant combination of events.

Upon waking, he frightened himself nearly out of his wits: the left hand moved, a claw!, the right hand moved, another! So, he was surrounded by a boy-eating creature. He ran – scuttled in fact – out of the cave and to a pool of water, which reflected his true nature.

14 - Tracks

Mon, 12 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

My shoulder leans against the wall of the commuter car, my head rests on the window; below my seat as we pass I see the brown rushes of the salt marsh blur by, and lazy fingers of the coastal rivers reaching inland and taking what they find seaward. A hawk on a pin-oak branch, both bird and bough wearing winter dress, and equally impassive and we clatter past. Salt marsh, wood lot, salt marsh, wood lot. These are my favorite scenes.

15 - River Run

Sun, 11 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

With fifteen days remaining before I travel. the pressure both increases and is released: as there is only so much one person can do, it becomes abundantly clear that the list of tasks not only will not be completed (oh no!) but truly cannot be completed (ahh, ok).

It is a superficial drama. It affects this little constellation of cells that is Me, and maybe a couple of nearby galaxies of other “Me"s, but in the grand orchestration of sun and planets, and other suns and other planets, there’s nothing much to see here. Move along.

16 - The Freedom of Limitations

Sat, 10 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I think it was my son who recently asked: “How do you get enough food if you just bike to the grocery store? It must get pretty dull making double round-trips every time you need to eat…”

This was a reasonable assessment: the side-bags, when empty, flatten to almost nothing, like deflated balloons. And even filled, we are talking about two to three plastic grocery bags of goods. How long can that last you, before you’re on your bike again, chasing down the evening meal?

17 - Deconstruction

Fri, 09 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

It’s difficult to see how much the sense of self is tied to surroundings, until of course you begin the process of departure, whether it’s a trip, or travel, or a birth or a death. Family and friends most viscerally part of your stone and sinew; but structures and walkways, weather and seasons, even the most subtle of daily habits are all you, all me.

“The Moment Before Knowing” by Brooke @ DeviantArt.com

18 - Home, Away from Home

Thu, 08 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s the re-issue of a photo that looks like magazine copy, but is in fact an iPhone image I myself took in Poble Nou, residential neighborhood of Barcelona, which is soon to be home-away-from-home (or home-a-short-hop-from away-home Boston, or from away-away-home Minnesota, where my heart still resides): a landing pad for my kids and family whenever possible; a vital new life for Cata and me; and fertile soil for many new friendships and projects.

19 - Countdown

Wed, 07 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The ticket has been purchased, and phase one of my journey to Catalunya begins in 19 days. I’ll be meeting Catalina, who will already have arrived on the 15th of this month, and we’ll begin our search for new digs, new friends, and new living patterns. I’ll return April 15 for 2-3 months, to attend my daughter’s graduation, participate in a family vacation with my parents, and tie up any loose ends I haven’t been able to put in order in the next coupe of weeks. Then… whoosh!

Looking for Angels

Mon, 05 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

An indeterminate date before the turn of the millennium: we both live on our own by now, but find ourselves together that night (a holiday? a vacation from school?) in the basement of my parents’ last family-sized house: the one down the hill from the church, whose grand oaks shaded the back lot until wilt took every one; across the road from a square mile of meadow and marsh, where we would walk our errant husky, waiting an hour until she was ready to return home; a modern design for the pastor and the nurse, dark brown panels accented beautifully (almost nordically) by three graceful birch near the front door.

Os sinos da manhã

Mon, 05 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

What is the source of songs? I would think it arrives from somewhere deep within, and is related to your birth, your education, your mother tongue. In short: your music begins with your roots. I would think that.

But then, a song like this arrives. We lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, far from the Midwestern farms and towns and kindnesses and communities, and further from the complicated, vital Brazilian noises from the south of that country. Isabela was just of school age, Nicolas a few years her senior. We walked to their classes each morning.

The Argument We Never Had

Thu, 25 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

To live inside of words… how could I unlodge him?

My body spoke, my eyes listened; a stone, he heard nothing.

I said, Boot; he answered, Dollar.

The mind feels no wind! I cried; The wind’s in the mind, he replied.

With time the bell tolled measuring a death.

I walked to the fields, where the sun was rising.

I asked my questions there and all the grasses bowed to me.

Seitan - Home Production

Mon, 22 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

What a great feeling, to tend to yourself. Each time you go closer to the earth, or closer to the source of the things that are needed, the sense of security and self-sufficiency grows. When we are safe, when we are fed well, we are not as susceptible to the kinds of negative whispering so prevalent on the Internet and cultivated in the news. Hope! And pass that hope on to others.

men and flowers

Fri, 19 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

“Offering” by Niavaah @ DeviantArt

If a man forgets he was a child
	the flowers, I am telling you
		will have to regard themselves.

If a boy is never asked his opinion
	does it matter if the flowers were planted?

There's Your Medicine

Fri, 28 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Overnight the fog and mist had been met with sudden chill, and every surface, twig and branch, and all the remaining leaves were covered in their contours by a sheet of ice.

– The world is glass, she thought; and she thought: How fragile it seems, as if a clap of thunder would bring it down. But beautiful as it is fragile…

She reached out to a glazed, late-season rose, whose heavy head bowed from the neighbor’s garden, drooping over the fence. She touched it: cold. Is that the look of death, beautifully wrapped in ice?

remembrance

Thu, 27 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

"… only perchance remembrance breaks the heart"

You won’t find that phrase in any Internet search engine – at least not until I post this page. You won’t find it in a book in the library, or on a video clip; buried, maybe, in a tattered notebook in some out-of-the-way cottage, hidden in an attic box or gathering dust under a bed, with pages as weathered as last season’s leaves. Probably the ink will have faded, if that notebook exists, or the pencil-line will have by friction and time been dissipated, so the words once alive in thought will have been undone, like a whisper in the wind.

So...

Thu, 13 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

So they set me at the crossroads where no way crossed and said, Here you go, boy… thus a vast horizon. I admit it attracted me. There I saw a life progress man or woman, who could tell home upon the trackless savanna!

“The Savanna in Sweden” by Erik Tjernlund @ DeviantArt.com

Vietnamese Pho, Straight Up

Mon, 27 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I am attracted to new languages. Not for the reasons one might imagine – desire to visit another nation, or make some kind of business, or win a language stamp, like an “I’ve been there” label plastered proudly on my luggage. No, I love languages because they allow me into a previously-unimaginable part of myself, which is a previously-unimagined facet of my (or our common) humanity. Some dive into the sea, some fly into space: I mine myself for the ore of my Self, and the more words you know, the easier it is to name emotions and ideas that were always whispered, never said. When I discover something new, I discover a new 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.

a wind from the north, the sky is clear

Thu, 09 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000

last night I had to close the window, woke up shaking, dreaming ice in a frozen ocean shifted around my bed, that I ran barefoot on a glacier; found the blanket thrown, I was naked in the dark with the first northern night, as it breathed frost into my room
◦
and this morning I swept a few early leaves from my step, sweet maple red, under a sky turned cool, the color of a clean December lake, thinking so it was no dream. there was a letter fallen in my box, my friend in Indonesia asking another fifty I don’t have, she the grandmother whose shoulders like dried sticks no longer carry water from the river. “how is your job?” she writes. “I am almost well again.” she needs the water pump most, but today the poor can spare nothing for the poor. I tell her, “my bills are never paid, in America, the wealthiest nation. I am glad to hear your heart still speaks to you.” I carried the broom to the upstairs closet, knowing leaves would be falling all the next week, the maple gone, last of the elm, mountain ash, the two oaks.
◦
when noon came and the wind came down from the north with its sharp teeth, I was in the street where screaming oh god help me a woman lay on the pavement, was dragged, two men into their car shouting quit lookin’, and we did, not knowing this woman to die for her, not like a sister, not family; doors slammed like fists against metal, the wheels’ scream longer, a curse, the sneer of the city, around the corner, I ran safely after, saw no plates, no police, no neighbor, let my anger shape itself in words, one more swallowed sound, one more inch my heart squeezed smaller as the abduction disappeared; I stood with my brother and as the cry rang like electricity in our heads he whispered what we did not wish to think: she’s still out there somewhere.
◦
there is this wind from the north; I stand against it, both hands raised to hold it back, discovering a wind as wide as a nation, wide as the world, a tongue lashing out quit lookin’ as one woman dies carrying water, another because I did not know her name.
◦
so I have folded newspaper into all the windows, worked extra hours for oil for the furnace, put in a supply of candles, washed the wool coat. it’s all I can do, and I know it’s not enough, the dream of cold still huddled in my walls, waiting the decay of insulation, or the last drop of steam in the pipes, waiting for the earth to lean away from the sun, as it always does: I will wake up naked and alone, hands out, protecting nothing.

“Shadow Cares” by Samuel Moulin @ DeviantArt.com

The fact of a fox

Mon, 15 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

– There! Did you see it? – I don’t… think… over by the water? – No no no, down there (look where I’m pointing). OH! It moved again! – I can barely see your hand.

By now the children had returned from the shore and, having been hushed to quiet, came on exaggerated tip-toes to stand behind their parents. What is it? What is it?

– I think it’s a fox or a mink. – A fox! (stage whisper) – What’s a mink? (the fewer the years, the louder the “whisper”) – Quiet, quiet. There’s a little light between those two trees… it must be coming off the water? And every once in a – there!

Os cais do porto

Tue, 09 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Lisboa, Portugal

I should think that at some point writers (insert: travelers, artists, readers, wanderers) would have taken in enough sights and scenes, they might permanently retire to their rooms like Sri Aurobindo, spending the rest of their days quietly reciting the poem of what had been seen. Wouldn’t a mariner look one day upon yet another new bay, or new port, and say: There is one ocean: I have sailed it again and again. A breeze is a breeze, and a wave is a wave; a shore is a shore, and a landing a landing.

Small-town Catalunya

Tue, 09 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

… includes a castle, of course. Girona is one bullet-train ride north of Barcelona, on a line that continues on to Paris. The train reaches more than 250 km/hr (some 160 mi/hr) in stretches, and whisks you far out of town and into the hills in under 40 minutes. So superimpressed was I by the fell and flow of Barcelona, the quieter nature and proximity to land provided by Girona was probably overshadowed: when I stopped by tourist information for help getting “quiet”, the only option I was offered was the public garden space (and a local outdoor market that day). Somehow, it felt less welcoming than more, certainly a reflection of my interior than a representation of the town’s character.

Poble Nou

Wed, 03 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Barcelona, España

On this whirlwind tour, Barcelona suffered misconception similar to Brussels. How could it be otherwise, when the city is built on a few snippets of internet, a few personal experiences of people who are not at all like you, and a travel resume that includes nothing approximating Flanders or the Iberian peninsula? I watched an excellent video called Bye-Bye Barcelona, reflecting on a huge influx of tourists that annually outnumbers the local population by a factor of 3 to 1 (is it more? less?); I enjoyed a more positive take on the place, as reported by expat Brazilians, O mundo segundo os brasileiros - Barcelona, which I have to admit was colored pretty heavily by the culture doing the reporting.

jardin botanique | jardin oblique

Fri, 29 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Bruxelles, Belgique

Brussels is the first stop for me on a four-city tour of potential jobs for my partner Catalina. Potential job means potential home, and while she interviews and is interviewed, I have a similar but much more free-form conversation with the people and structures and cultures that we pass through. There are dramatic in their differences, and perhaps equally dramatic in their sameness: oil has made car owners (or at least desirers) of us all, and these European spaces, designed and built hundreds of years ago, simply do not translate well. They seem to hiss one thing with their modern tongue, but sigh about something else with their next breath.

Tiger is Tiger

Wed, 28 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Muscular I took the tiger’s tail in hand As his stripe in terrible elegance flashed Into view, in the sun, in the tall, tall grass Me at my prime – just past my prime – and confident I owned the gift of taming still…

But still

Tiger is tiger, and man is man And man, I did the best deluded can ‘Til he ran away and away he ran. I looked around to reassure me, friends Had each eluded the talon’s tear

habitation

Tue, 27 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The wind blew through new leaves, now completely unfurled, southwest to northeast. That is the direction of the sun. I sat with my daughter and thought: “How I will miss my mountainside, riverside seat.” And then I thought, better: “How much I have enjoyed my mountainside, riverside seat.” One thought closed the heart, the next opened it.

When the night had fully fallen, I cooked myself a meal: I was contented with the vegetable flavors and the tiny torch of habanero. I poured the last of that bottle of wine. With glass at eye level (dramatically, for an audience of none) I turned and saluted my rooms. They were as they had always been: Buddha in the corner and Bible in the bookcase; a banner for the Earth in the window, while a guitar dreamed against the sill; the successful house plantings overflowing their containers; and chairs set casually away from the table where visitors, late for their homes, had pushed them. What I have watered, I have been.

Eastern Window

Wed, 21 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Every day I want to write a poem to you but every day I swallow my song

then every day a small bird rests and every day a shaft of sunlight brightens him why not be alive? and right now? every day he takes a little breath there at the height of the eastern window and every day my song is in his voice and your voice is in my song

hay before rain

Wed, 14 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I am up late working, as is the case so often this year, when personal and business projects demand most everything I’ve got (and I give it). To make sure this tired self doesn’t oversleep, I set the alarm, so this daily cycle of which I am proud (and somewhat repulsed) to be champion might repeat, again, and again.

I see myself a very clever and determined machine. I know success to the right may be failure to the left. I know this is a passage, not a destination. I’ve got the muscle; I’ll climb this mountain.

the inner ear - 1

Fri, 25 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

“The last year I lived there, I had only a blanket between my self and the deep night, my soul was naked to its maker, and its maker told me stories I could not forget and I could not write; I was filled with darkness and with light, with shapes and with sounds that moved within me, now a stampede, now a flight, then a wind so strong I couldn’t keep my feet…

villa verdad

Sat, 19 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

One reaches back to draw those memories forward. You catch the hand of the child and when you pull, he ages or she ages, the seasons spin yellow green brown white and those colors light the face as bulbs on a carnival ride, light the smile as well as the fallen eyes, light their delight and their terror, the waves of time washing from toes to ankles, from knees to thigh, until fully a woman or a man they stride into the ocean, confident in their ability to swim, til the tide takes them away.

Look!

Tue, 15 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Because the wind lifts from the south, these clouds rush by, matted together like felt here, and pulling apart like cotton there, until the deep opens before your eyes; and there, racing toward that pool of sky, or rolled into it like a white china ball (muddied as it is, here and there, by tar or pitch, God’s fingerprint) the bright white moon.

A moment like this; a place like this. I say tonight with certainty that, in a few short weeks, this particular ridge and its careening satellite will no longer be available to my eyes: this moon’s been sold; as well, these skies. With equal certainty I (sadly?) say that in a few short years – they pass as quickly as these clouds, wherever they’re blown – the skies that once were mine are mine no more.

the emigrant pauses on the hill of mirrors

Sun, 06 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The world spins and we spin with it. Years ago I was born near here; a year later I moved to there; then there, then there, then there. I changed cities, I changed countries, I changed continents; I walked as far as I could, and took a train when the road stretched too long; I boarded a plane when I ran out of rail; I ended up here.

I each of those places I called my home, I had the fortune to arrive after strife and depart before strife, at least as my heart measured it: others might have called my smallest journey struggle, and certainly the act of getting to know a new culture, and you yourself in relationship to it, is not for the faint of heart. Still, it becomes an art. (As Elizabeth Bishop famously, sadly wrote: The art of losing isn’t hard to master…").

too many names

Tue, 25 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I was introduced to my first second language in seventh grade, at a particularly progressive time in a particularly progressive school district in Minnesota, where our monoglot heritage – an assortment of Northern European languages cast off, to be replaced by a new, common identity – had begun to feel uncomfortably small against the backdrop of a the rapidly expanding world. Since my parents and older siblings had already studied German, I of course chose Spanish, one year, two (Estaba Susana en casa? Sí, estaba, para la gran parte de mil novecientos setenta-y-seis, en la cocina…) before a change in district, a change of heart. Later, there would be German in High School and at University, then accelerated French, a dash of Greek, a dose of Indonesian, a dousing of Portuguese… but that first ear-opening and tongue-thrilling experience, that was the seed from which all the other flowers bloomed.

five steps to standing up

Wed, 19 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

1	the day begins with stillness, then a bell drops into a pool of the night your sight ripples; you sip sunlight

2	dreams are water you leave behind your hands smooth the linens’ sands for tomorrow’s dreamers’ wandering

3	oh, yes: the metallic chime of saucepans silver spoons, frypans, saucers, porcelain teacups topped with steamed milk, memory

4	is the morning’s recipe your finger follows inward, traces your childhood table raise this to your lips, yes, first taste best

5	I remember how many days I remember the same old sun lit the same old skin warming this little room I’m in

Image credit: Before you wake up, by Darija Blue @ deviantart.com

A Topic of Leisure

Thu, 27 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The branching of the Arne River is by this hill where its voice grows adult from upstream child, no longer rippling and eager to overflow in this course or that, but gravity-bound for the north and a great flooding finish, a heavy waterfall managed by Verlag dam; were you here to see the ages change? That stone, wider than the rest, severs left from right channel, seems to halve the river while leaving it quite complete, all rush, boiling to be one again; there’s the damage that makes the flow more determined, cuts the deep bed; later on, past three dry fields and under a county bridge, it joins again, but never with this spirit. I watched birds spinning over a pool; I was waiting for wind to blow loose leaves or seeds to turn several times in that water question then head downstream, as everything does. And, listening to a little water over a few stones I imagined a running child, the same light step, or myself in the water, or the water in me; there is sure to be a common language through these things. I would see the ages change, too. Let someone drop a paper boat up by the mill, and we know nothing of the act, but wrapped here in the autumn chill see it float, white and half-capsized, around that bend, over the spill of tangled logs, into the brief frame this view allows – then around again and out of sight forever. So we could be delighted and puzzled for a while, imagine our own fingers bending paper into that shape, how would it feel to be so young, or young-intentioned, and with such faith that two people involved with the current, away downstream would see the boat and know it for a careful gift. Well, someone may yet do that. Or, we may have to be content with sticks and other wood debris that weather slips into the river, a slight downward-casting scene down from treetops, down from hill heights, down the slope of the land, down to the sea.

sing or be silent

Sun, 16 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

the complexity of peace all I want for me		what we call lack of striving is to eat

beyond that		there is a world, must be

banners and fine streets children carried the smell of rich air with advice of elders move it toward the lake its changes below		shoulders lifted the delicate portage hands strong put to a stone a dark mirror we cannot see

towers of solitary men polite but sorrowing what we cannot see inconstant motion		windows facing north beneath the sorrow the traverse of blood what satisfies the hidden

thousands of these it gives you nothing you had hoped for what you expected but more complexity change to change wheels of birds, beggars men do not change but birds sing or are silent artists wonder this beautiful		and then the sea: not the empty roar not the likeness yourself to be water speaks to water the arousing, rising artists and brides do not become husbands beggars die brides first believe half-truth

under the haycart a stray cat		I heard a cry finishing its prey

what should I say? our world is this way? we are taught to sing our lowered eyes to spend blood more costly		look, love this is the song under our breath the complaint of the dead to have blood spent more weighted than gold?

Parade by Toms Murnieks @ DeviantArt.com “Viewers smile and troops are marching on: an army parade (18th November, the day of independence of Latvia)”

dark and spark

Thu, 06 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Two lay side by side: one dreamed a moon, one dreamed a sun: when done a heaven- dance was made.

Now light was doubled; now it was snuffed; and any Thing that skipped or seemed inanimate Was that dream’s reflection:

white-washed morning into whose epiphanies the sleepers stiffly rise fog in their eyes what was that? what?

(Oh, dream with me longer if you can: for us, the domed forever’s held suspended on the stem of a single flower that you tended plucked and gently placed into my hand)

stillness assembled

Mon, 05 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000

The “In Box” always occupied a particular flat area of my desk, a particular field of view just in front of my mouse, where I could (and would) clearly see it fill and the mound of papers build, day after day.

Sort-of to-dos – those important enough to stay in my awareness, but not quite important enough to handle immediately – would land on the top of the pile, be buried by the next falling document, and never leave. This became my Pile of Disappointment, and I did eventually empty it, once a month or so; but in that month, oh what an emotional toll it took. It’s little lash reached out to lick my hand several times a day.

strike here

Mon, 24 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

There are places where effort is quickly rewarded, and others where you feel as though you are bailing the tide: no matter the size or your little beach bucket, or the passion you summon into your two human-sized hands, that water is coming in – lifted and poured onto the sand by the sun and moon! – and then out it goes again, while the waves tug at your heels and pull foot-fulls of grains out from under your feet.

Ful Medames

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

There are many kinds of comfort food: something sweet to treat your child; a slice of watermelon split right there in the field on the hottest late August day; the right tea when your aches have caught up to you, or a choice coffee when the day hasn’t yet.

Over the past few days I have been over-engaged with the stuff of the world, in control of things at work (and so, of course, they were in control of me), and out-of-control and out-of-sync with the hidden workings of my country, learning more than I really wanted to know… and certainly more than those in the shadows wanted to reveal.

What is and has been

Thu, 30 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

A few days ago, my friend from abroad suggested I might bring a poem to his gathering: a men’s circle to meet and honor his upcoming wedding. Some take any excuse (including a night before their marriage) to degrade themselves; others welcome every opportunity to become more noble, more responsible, more human.

It’s been many months since poetry has been one of my languages. If words have wings, the weather had been too cold, and their sounds had all flown south; some inattention on my part, or brusque gesture had brushed them away… So I greeted my friend’s request like spring sun: I walked through finished works and works I had partially-completed, and each one alit like another forgotten flock, and with many smiles of recognition, the trees were suddenly filled again!

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”.

Simple Mitt

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I was reminded of a man who brought me firewood last week. My neighbor had rented to him previously, and told me the wood he cut was good, seasoned, and at a good price. Still, not knowing him directly, and knowing how much green wood is cut and sold – how unregulated the market for firewood is: buyer beware, like in crazy Brazil, or like in America’s Banker’s Haven – I had this uneasiness as I waited for delivery. “I’m going to have to stack and measure the cord, to be sure I wasn’t slighted.” “I’ll need to see the checking on all the pieces to make sure they’ve been drying”… in short, I didn’t trust the guy.

Rijsttafel

Sun, 23 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

That was many years ago.

One of my last meals on the island of Java was on a side-street of Yogyakarta. It was near the warung where stayed the first two months of our journey, before being sponsored by the owner of the research center and his wife; before borrowing their bicycle for trips into the surrounding desa; before climbing the volcano in the night; before the relationship had ended.

collision

Thu, 13 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

There are points in the career of an artist, whatever his or her art, where the collision of beautiful forces – the fluency of artistic technique, the fullness of life experience, the vibrancy of physical form, and the collaboration with artistic equals – like the splitting of atoms, crash together to release pure and nearly-perfect light.

It is the brilliance of beginnings. No: it is the brilliance of what follows just after, when the uncertainty of a beginning falls away, and there is a comfortable happiness and ease in creating something together. As an audience for that art, you hope that as your favorite performers mature their skill increases, their stamina holds out, and beauty continues to flow from their hands or mouths or minds: like Joni Mitchell or Paul Simon; like the best works of Woody Allen; like Bob Dylan or Georgia O’Keefe, like the dancers and composers and writers and painters that have decorated your generation.

the day I went away

Fri, 24 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Caetano Veloso is one of the founders of the Tropicália movement in 70s Brazil, a great songwriter, an amazing voice, a remarkable and unique spirit. This early song shares traces of the rural roots of that country, and for me at least reflects the generational and geographic distances between the small-town “campo” families and their urban and world-hungry children.

Elis Regina was the most-loved Brazilian singer prior to her death by unnatural and self-induced causes. Check out her cover of Aguas de março by Tom Jobim, available on YouTube.

another loss

Sat, 14 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Last night the wind picked up and, as I gently dropped into sleep, it not so gently opened its mouth and blew and blew and blew through the branches-spread-wide summer forest dark.

This morning, the alarm woke me. Wait: was it the alarm? Dream-dazed. It sounded like an alarm. No, it wasn’t the alarm. It was further away, it was down the stairs, it was the phone ringing.

Sign; groan; whispered curse; first thoughts. Who calls at – what time was it – 7 a.m. on a Saturday? The phone stops ringing. The body relaxes. Long, slow breath, like a yawn but not a yawn. Imagine an hour’s more sleep.

how they reached for one another

Sat, 07 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Were I to write an historical novel, I would begin with the letters they wrote one another. Begin with their words of the daily, with a thread of love woven around them, then find the works of art that survived the bullets and the winds of time until today: here is a cross, there a mosque. I would look broader, and look wider, by reading academic works, listening for those that by some miracle of honesty escaped retouching by a political pen, escaped the fundamentalist desire that humanity be excluded fro the story.

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.

Crows

Wed, 04 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Between the hills and the channel, the crows flew into cornfields as they had two hundred years before; the crows were chased from the nests of sparrows and starlings as they had been a thousand years before; the crows made their raucous calls as they had as long as earth could remember.

"Crows" by chrissymllr @ DeviantArt.com

On the shore, the channel waves pushed and pulled grains of sand as they had under the same sun, time forgotten. The salty water, warmed by the same rays, made little lives from its brine, time undefined. The breeze rose from one direction and flew to another, mixing sun and sea, making fog and rain, until no one and nothing remembered when it began, until the habit of creation was no longer noticed.

Respuesta al tiempo

Tue, 03 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

El día comienza con memorias dulces de la noche: hizo más melosas al recordar los toques de la mañana

Así el tiempo no és la muerta distancia entre fechas pero historias vividas momento en momento por los que conocen amor

“Time to Grow” by goRillA-iNK @ DeviantArt.com

An Answer to Time

The day begins with sweet night’s memories: made sweeter still remembering the morning’s caress

So time is not the dead distance between dates but stories lived moment after moment by those who learned to love

Declaração de amor

Mon, 25 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

A number of years ago I prepared to leave the country for the first time. Later, I prepared again… and again. Each time I departed the shell was thinner; and each time I returned, the distance between those I loved at home and those I loved abroad was shorter. I held and was held by wonderful people of all races and all religions and all economic levels – those who were easiest to love often possessed (or were possessed by) the least material wealth.

Canción de la soledad

Thu, 21 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Casi no hay quién pasa por áqui en el sábado solitario sábado de las ausencias

cuyos ángeles, de bocas cerradas posan detrás de las ventanas del piso más cercana al cielo.

Es el sábado de tu silencio. Sin tu voz, tus palabras se manifiestan hasta en las llamadas de los pájaros

para las cuales no tengo respuesta sino aproximarme más aun a la tierra: yo no sé del lenguaje de las alas.

We Don't Run

Thu, 07 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

“What was that!”

They were on the river trail, a few minutes’ walk from the town center: far enough out that traffic noise was hushed and self-absorbed, yet near enough in that the bank of the waterway was tended like a garden, perennials were in bloom, annuals in bud, the grass clipped neat and paths swept clean. Comfortable benches had been placed every so often, that couples might rest in public privacy, leaning together, their words becoming soft and intimate, their breath merging as their thoughts merged.

Wildlife News (page two)

Tue, 05 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The female cat was sleeping next to me on the couch, as I watched a movie. Sleeping, I thought: suddenly she sat bolt upright, stared out the window, and started that guttural growling of hers.

I know better by now than to doubt that growl. I put my head down next to hers and followed her gaze. Nothing.

“So what’s up, Minstrel?” We sat unmoving for half a minute, intermittent low noises of disapproval from my little companion.

every meal weaves miracle

Sun, 03 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Every meal weaves Miracle; water, sun and soil are its threads.

Though my knife could end a creature’s life to continue mine, I have chosen a gentler line.

The heart on its hinge swings in the wind; bangs open, bangs closed, welcomes you in.

I eat with silence as though silence were my kin.

Together, or alone, a meal weaves Miracle; water, sun and soil the moment’s thread.

Panch Ratan “Five Jewels” Dal A home-made dal is food for a king, or queen (and you are worthy of the crown)

The Standing Desk [β] - Day 40

Sun, 03 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The inhabitants of the Fertile Crescent liked the number forty. There are a couple of dozen references to 40, measuring days or years, in those ancient teaching scripts and histories that we’ve collected into the Judeo-Christian Bible. Forty days of rain, forty years in the wilderness, forty days on the mountain; forty years old, forty sons, forty cubits, forty baths, forty days’ fast.

Other than the numeric connotation (and the fact that everything is related to everything else), there was nothing biblical about the “Alpha” trial period for my standing desk. There was a flash of insight in the form of a worrisome news article, and a half-hour’s work shifting my office from the window that overlooked the garden and the apple tree at its center; the rest was riding out the alpha wave, waiting for a sign that would tell me to: a) land my standing desk in a more permanent place, b) take it apart plank by plank, or c) keep on waiting.

Earth to earth

Mon, 28 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Some of the hardest physical work in recent memory is 72 hours on the Improv dance floor.

Also, the most rewarding. I haven’t built a house, or surveyed for a map, or planted a garden. But by listening listening listening I’ve followed the sprite of movement, and on her scent traced the outline of home; through repetition memorized (in the body’s threads and cords) the navigation lines I might follow to get there; and inadvertently collected in these outstretched arms so many wild foods along the way – fruit of this adventure – that I am fed.

Wildlife News

Sat, 19 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

- ONE -

An hour ago as the day was leaning west, I was pulling east, bringing the laundry in ahead of the dew. It smelled of light and fresh air and flowers: I can’t wait to sleep on today’s mountain air made linen. Deciding I needed a little music, and finding no other singers around the house – a problem that needs work, yes – I took my guitar in hand, headed back out to the deck, tuned up, and settled into some familiar songs.

The Lights Go Down in the Forest

Mon, 14 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

There was only one thing made a sound like that, and it was death. This wasn’t a mouse-death, nor a chipmunk-death (with two hunting cats around, there is plenty of that small pleading going on, day in, day out): it was a bigger animal; whatever was going down was doing so just over the lip of the hill, beneath my deck; and only one cat was indoors.

In the time it took you to read the first four words of that paragraph, I was already out the sliding door, leaning over the deck, wondering if my male hunter was no longer predator, but prey. What a terrible shrieking, sound of struggle.

The Standing Desk [α] – Day 14

Fri, 11 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Physically, I feel good getting up to work in the morning. I think it’s because I don’t get up just to sit down again. My body feels energized most of the morning, mind alert, and my frame moves around while I type up the morning’s correspondence. Two weeks in, I remain happy with the switch to a standing desk, and am considering when to build my “Beta” version, levitating my old sitting desk one-half-person into the air on a hand-designed scaffold.

The Standing Desk [α] - Day 7

Sat, 05 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

There is a certain volume of accumulated human knowledge — a kind of Encyclopaedia of Safety — that is based on the trial-and-error successes of generations. One entry in that tome might be as quaint as “don’t shit in your bed” (Any argument…?) Our Australian friends have several: “Don’t introduce species into an ecology with no known predators.” (oops), or “Don’t irrigate your desert with a limited aquifer.” (oops)

There are others:

The Book of Love

Thu, 03 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

- Thought 1 -

Spring has come as a surprise, as winter was a surprise, and the rains of the past few days have cured the branches of their buds, the leaves unfurling themselves, gladly, green skin to the warm sun that followed when the clouds fled.

Leaves whispers to me: the garden is late. I could turn the soil… but then, it would be an empty bed. With you, it would be a harvest plan. I could sow seeds… but then, only plants would come up. If you were here, there’d be fruit instead.

fireside stories

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

- 1 -

Look at that moon! And over there, Venus is a diamond. While this campfire warms my feet, the breeze nods itself to sleep, and the river (whose unceasing flow is an unremarked inspiration) hushes along on its gentle, downhill slide…

There is much to be said of city life — but the less said, the better.

We can make smaller circles in the trees, just out of sight of those agitated centers. Here where embraces are slower and quieter, where we do more to nourish ourselves and our neighbors, and less to stoke a Machine whose engines carry others to others’ destinations.

a dance in the dark

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

Except in my imagination, I don’t pretend to understand the permanent blackness of those who have lost their sight. Even less, those who were born without that faculty, and so have no access to even the memory of color: to sense red, they must feel red on their skin, the subtle variation in frequency from one hue to the next.

In the landscape of the never-sighted, I imagine certain words lose their texture, deprived as they are of connotation. When I say “red”, I see flowers; I see blood; I smell the perfume of a rose, or feel my pulse quicken with desire, or deflate in despair; I see a red balloon, recall a single frame from a French film; I smell the stink of post-War fear, I hear the ruffle of Chinese banners over some Premier’s visit to Harvard Square; I see her body where it blushes with life, and from that color, her scent.

Choro Bandido

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

What was the greatest gift I received, through my years living in Brazil? Was it perspective on our own nation, and my place in it? Was it the sights and sounds and flavors of the Other, of another portion of our planet, one physically quite as large as the continental United States? Was it the friendships, the loves, my children born there (as if to two mothers), the great efforts, the greater successes, the greatness of the failures?

Windows - 9 (Dusk)

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Staring at the form for an hour, it seemed (had it been an hour already? her mind had wandered so), and still no decision. She lifted her pen and it wavered over the space for her signature; it did not make mark. She set the pen down again and her hand, free of indecision, cradled her forehead and covered her eyes.

It was yesterday…

… the cherry tree was loaded with fruit, was tall as the sun, and her mother had lifted her so she might sit on a low limb, within reach of the clusters, her flight contained in those arms and in that smile; cherry juice stained her blouse without shame; perfect mother perfect day

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.

Wings

Sat, 10 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

“I don’t see it…!”

“Shh. Just wait.”

The trail they were walking had opened onto a field, out from under heavy-scented pine boughs that dimmed the daylight and hushed the world, from depths to shallows like a river flows into a lake. The change had been so sudden that for a moment the sun had blinded them and, while their eyes were turned down, she saw it. He hadn’t.

She was taller, and years had trained her eyes to look for hidden things. He was four, with much still hidden from him and waiting to be found. She leaned down behind him until her cheek rested against his head, her lips brushing his ear. She nestled her arm against his shoulder, and pointed so that his sight might follow her finger.

Parupu Pura Shaadam

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Another fine recipe from Julie Sahni (Classic Indian Vegetarian and Grain Cooking, the title a mouthful in itself), this rice preparation from southern India is a delicious complement, hot or room temperature, to South Indian Sambar (skipping the idli). Like many vegetarian Indian meals, the dish is high in protein, combining roasted ground gram beans and basmati rice, a healthy dose of traditional southern Indian spices, and your call on how much blast-furnace red pepper heat to include.

Rest

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

home is where I rest (where I rest is home) at times my house at times my town this region where the hills like waves go up and down sometimes the seas’ rhythmic dances drown desire that wants to martyr me

"This is a chair" (original orientation), by Gordon McBride @ DeviantArt.com

sometimes home’s not found so I wander round and round touching every body every room as if to ask if I might rest as if they had to pass a test as if my feet weren’t on the ground as if I couldn’t just sit down

meditation on morning

Sat, 25 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

every tree branch sings what wind teaches

these limbs become the world’s tongue

the morning strums our body’s strings

the wind learns what love teaches

"In The Wind" by Michal Kochanek @ DeviantArt.com

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.

Ocean's Edge

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Ocean’s Edge - Mark Schultz

The city spread below me jeweled by the night its soft stars lit-a-million among the sleeping and awake coursed on broadening avenues like a watershed of light that pulsed and pooled and called all divers in

I descended from the western hills leaning as I traveled toward that ocean’s edge then waded into the huddled multitude dry from my mountain-far retreat

What would I find? Not wind - not silence of the mind but a certain spinning revelry a dance of hopes and veiled unveiled desire

Marry

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Will you tie me in your arms and before the ocean hold me? We may be shelter for the other.

The photograph: colored sheets flying, fieldstone and fruit trees, a house on the bay.

The music: one gull, I whistle, I shout, I sing songs, I would speak no more of the storm.

So tie me to this place, let our roots go down to water and us rise up, leaves, shade, flower, child!

"Tree" by Kühn Martin @ DeviantArt.com

Windows - 8 (Avenues)

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

‎"… and if you lead one, or another, through those pathways to your heart – turning this way and that as they do, confusing as they are, ending sometimes in blind alleys and brief frustrations – will he (or she) find generous rooms, warm with art and soft with cushions, and a table laden for a feast?

“You are the one to guide them: you hold the light. You must meet them on the public avenue with your invitation, you step forward maybe shy maybe hesitant to meet them, ‘Welcome friend! Welcome in…’, and perhaps in your extended hand there is a place to rest and be comforted, or passage to a country they have never seen, or generosity unbidden, to make that strange walk worth taking.

Windows - 7 (Love's Labour Lost)

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

As he wrapped his fingers round the haft and tightened their grasp, his forearm muscle’s strands united, bound themselves to bone and were, by that movement, married to intention. His fingers felt the weight, and the fiber of the arm responded, hand to wrist to elbow, the arc of his strength raising the sledge again.

The same arm curled around his woman’s waist as they moved together. The same arm caught up his infant daughter, held her warm against his chest. The same arm opened a door; the same arm closed it.

The Line of the Tide

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Isabela has always been early.

At our favorite Italian restaurant, on the main road between Menino Deus and Cidade Baixo – the former, a lower-middle-class neighborhood where we had first lived when we arrived in the city; the latter, an area of town which was like urban foothills to the buzzing downtown peaks – Júlia and I had conspired to have a Last Dinner, a little planned celebration before the next morning’s planned arrival, via c-section, of our daughter.

roused by silence

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The mountain was covered with a veneer of snow

while I slept, while I didn’t sleep, the silver light of the moon filtered through leafless branches and lit the earth, shadow-spirits walking. Each time I woke, it was brighter outside, and the light spilled through a different window.

I was roused first by the silence after sound

as though something that had teetered on a shelf was undone by a mote of dust, had lost its balance and fallen with a single clatter into my dreams – and I startled as though someone called my name – so that apparently, without cause, there was effect. A ghost is nothing more than accumulated, unnoticed events; if you pay close attention to your life, there’s no such thing as a ghost. If you’re asleep, if your eyes are closed while they are open, you are constantly alarmed by everything you could not expect.

fronteira

Sun, 01 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Entre eu e eu há fronteiras que apenas o tempo cruza

e tu lado de lá esperando alguém.

Te vejo banhada na nudez da manhã escondida por fumaça por desejo revelada teu botão querendo desabrochar sem terra.

Entre tu e tu a fronteira que se cruza por abraçar a dor:

assim banhado pelo sal das lágrimas o raís abre vão na terra fecunda penetra o escuro úmido para acabar com sede.

Human rights in the mist

Sun, 25 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

On the NDAA:

I watch the world’s movements. It turns with the same steady footstep as always, but the humans aboard become frightened, startle at shadows and, collectively doing the best they are able (which is not always particularly good), make decisions tainted by their imagined or promoted fears.

You and I decide to speak, decide to support or protest, as individuals. We take the stage against the backdrop of historical forces. Those forces are greater than any law or political position: with or without a provision in some statute in some book in some library of some Congress, citizens will be hauled away if the power elite feel sufficiently threatened. When times are really bad, it doesn’t take much.

bed of coals

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

‎"I’m still awake," she sighed.

She stretched so her right foot, at a diagonal and off the bed, reached for the door, while her right arm clutched her pillow tightly to her head. All week long, whispers and pictures reminding her she was not “enough” had been sifting down on her like gray snow, burying her in breathless drifts:

… that man’s leer took her skin and discarded her life; … that magazine’s style soiled her clothes, they could never come clean; … those friends said… those friends and their serial disappointments … media’s mirror “what you’re not… what you’re not…”

Windows - 6 (A return of sorts)

Sat, 10 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I love the land, and I love it best when I am sharing it.

The approach to the property, as the highway leaves Wilton and leans into a slow ascent, as it curves to follow the hill’s hips, as it dips into the warm valleys, then feels its way toward the North Pack by narrower and narrower ways, calls up so many memories: of the White Mountains (if not in altitude, then in presence); of the Southwest (if not in aridity, then in silence); or of the Boundary Waters in Minnesota (if not in liquidity, then in spirit)…

My Mother Believes in Me

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

My mother believes in me so the odds bow more to my favor. She guards a heart she carries through life like a basket filling with flowers she doesn’t know are hers.

Love also believes in me. She holds the opening key to my houses and turns in at my door and sits on my bed and waits for my fear to grow tired. If I touched her like an heirloom glass… or as I lift bread from the oven… or as rain covers the ocean… but I have cursed my hands with the ten doubts of the Christians and often they are coarse as sand or still as basalt. Though when she sees me, she smiles.

Keep Your Heart Clean

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

If there is the sound of a bell ringing in a church
	two neighborhoods distant
even if the god of that church does not smile
	upon you
even if the bell is tolling the slow breath of a life
	being rung away
take that one pure draught into yourself
	like a sweet liquor
and keep your heart clean; the truth of bells
	will not be argued
and even the air hanging heavy with soot
	should never harm your love
nor the blankness between buildings, or stories
	of dangerous youth
or wars fought and bled dry sometime
	before your birth
what are those to draw a bleak line
	through your health?
Keep your hearts clean, so no words
	may drown them
keep them clean, almost white, bend
	in fierce weather, fly before a gale
wear the wings of angels if you need to
	stand among the clouds if you need to
let everywhere hear the sound, however small
	of your life’s ringing
	Keep Your Heart Clean - Mark Schultz

sparrow's flight

Sat, 12 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

She lay like fallen leaves. As if a breeze brushed them, her wings fluttered odd angles; and I watched them reach for my breath, through the glass she thought was air.

The sound of her impact had stopped my work. Odd sound: where had I heard it before…?

…?

Oh… ? Oh… oh, no: the unexpected crush of accident, as the sound of two cars colliding at some distance, muffled by the safe walls and windows of your home. Muffled by the fog of trauma, an uneasiness slowly rises in the heart; it becomes urgent as the memory becomes clear.

a snowflake

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000


a snowflake fell through light as light as breath depends on this our sky our night	light as the sound as a breath is caught suspended by a thread from the vault of our sky	the world waited as I waited as I watched watched as the light crystal descended from the end of our night	and the world shook! as the flake as slight as thought alit lit up vanished into heat in the light in the palm of my hand

A Snowflake - Mark Schultz

life is simple

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I would have told the secrets of my life long ago but there were none: life is simple like a house of four walls and only one door through which you enter and leave. That house braced against erosion that house weighing its foundation a long way from the sea; the house that wishes to be dismantled wishes to burn down in the night or find blood on the floor; wishes a man would enter and sleep and another man, quite different, wake and depart.

Sabzi Korma & Bengali Masur Dal

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Ok, that is actually two memorable dishes rolled into one splendid meal. Probably against my “rules”… but I make ’em, I break ’em.

I often write out the recipes in these posts, so I can look back and find them easily, and share them with friends. Usually I have touched up an original from somewhere or other, or the dish is my own invention; or, if I have taken it from somewhere or another, credit and a link is provided. In this case, however, there is nothing for it but to buy Julie Sahni’s impeccably good taste and kitchen sense, bound in a single volume as Classic Indian Vegetarian Cooking. I wouldn’t dare touch one of her recipes: everything I have tried has come out perfectly. Wow.

"An Intimate Dance"

Sun, 18 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

For me, Contact Improvisation as a dance form isn’t concerned with how it looks to move – en pointe, arabesque, step step turn! – but how it feels to move. It is not about the surfaces of the body in movement, but the spirit that moves the body, as though under the skin and behind the ribs you could watch the heart beating toward and away, opening and closing, rising and falling to the earth, while the limbs and the torso follow that sprite where its delight might take it.

Motorcycle & I

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

There are advantages to learning to clutch with your left hand, and shift with your left foot. You might have the opportunity of riding down a gravel scree near the sacred beach in central Java, girlfriend on the back, wondering if at the bottom it would be a gradual recovery, or an abrupt conclusion; or you might be able to escape the teeming lost/party scene in Goa, to dodge cattle and wild pigs and dogs, to wiggle your head greeting to the locals, and to look out over bicentennial portuguese ruins at the Indian ocean… ah, where you might go, if you could ride a motorcycle…

What is Native is Not Mistaken

Fri, 02 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

The shell boy hides his eyes in shallow sleep: if she falls into her sadness like the wakened who wanders a secret night he hopes to follow

gather medicine for anguish as he travels so together they might soften what has been: he should tear his hands collecting blades of corn

or find the root of a plant he’s never seen or steal the tune a meadowlark has sung and could these wash the silence from her rooms?

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.

evening prayer

Tue, 26 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Some years ago – after the months in Indonesia, after working with the small publishing house, after co-managing the restaurant; before Brazil, before children, before hi-tech consulting – I helped start a small organic vegetable farm in Glencoe, Minnesota. It was the most trying and most wonderful experience. Hours of labor in the prairie sun that at once broke my body and built it up, found me falling into bed as though stunned, waking refreshed as though called out by the fields and the birds. Distant from neighbors and from community, close to life and spirit.

Longe das planícies

Thu, 02 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Longe das planícies fúnebres onde contra o inverno cultivam grãos suas raízes ténues e fúteis frente ao frio iminente e a foice nas mãos tragei o ar inspirador do mar de tudo nascente.

Foi longe das planícies inmensuráveis as léguas ou as horas, os desejos… entre aquele passado e este presente quantas guerras quantas mortes acompanhando tréguas quantos enterros e flores de caixão quantas orações de despedida batizando vidas desviadas ou vias novas a chamar.

Follow the Leader

Wed, 01 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

The following re-post is a piece I wrote for our intentional community’s web journal. With a few years of painstaking research and trial-and-error, we assembled egalitarian tools for decision-making, legal forms for sharing land as partners instead of landlords, and some open-hearted yet strong ways of maintaining harmony within our Circle – even with a variety of personalities bumping into one another as we worked to sort this all out.

Instead, there was a trail led out of town

Sun, 29 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000

It may be that, in the beginning, there was intimation of the end: certainly one point connected to another, even by the crooked line of time, share an intimacy as close as any two lovers, perhaps closer. It may be that, when I started out, I had a plan, and that plan imagined an associated arrival.

But while there are some – maybe there are many? – who consciously describe a future in their minds, to then steadfastly walk in its direction, tinkering with the facts as they stray (until, with a flashing grin of satisfaction, and the pride of the accomplished, they arrive where they revisedly said they were going, often at a distance of years and miles from their intended target), I am not one of them. I arrive as errantly as any other, but rarely hold intention consciously, either trusting the currents of the world to sweep what is valuable in my path, or mistrusting my own dim vision to light up enough of that forward way, to set a heading far into it.

echo

Sun, 15 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000

“Switch it off!”

“What?” (Not ‘what do I switch off’; rather: ‘what are you talking about’.)

“Shhh!” All five fingers of the right hand spread wide, the first touching the lips, the hand a stop sign, the fingers stretched rigid, the hand surprised, the fingers an echo of surprise. Meanwhile, with the left, she reached over and unplugged the radio.

“What th…”

“SH!”

As there was no wind, there was no sound. It was night. The stovetop light from the kitchen was a warm glow that filtered onto the porch, where they sat side by side, on the top step. She was looking for something in the darkness, but couldn’t see. She was listening: her face said “What?”

Coconut Chutney

Sat, 07 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This mild, sweet/spicy chutney is delicious! And using dry organic coconut, available in most grocery’s organics section, it goes together in a matter of minutes. I usually have the ingredients on hand, and finish this off while the papadam oil is heating. The flavors combine well with rice and gram bean idli.

Ingredients: coconut, kuri leaf, black mustard, masoor dal

Soak for 10 min in warm water, drain excess	1c	Grated, organic coconut

heat oil on medium-high til hot, add spices and fry briefly, until chilis darken	2 T 1 t 1 T 2 6-8	Oil Black mustard seeds Masoor dal (orange lentil) Dry chilis Fresh kuri leaves (opt, sliced)

add drained rehydrated coconut, then use garlic press to crush in ginger; stir for a few minutes to heat through, add salt, and serve !	1"	Fresh ginger, peeled & pressed Salt, to taste

Yum!

ghost-prints

Mon, 02 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000

With the moon still under the Atlantic, there were stars, and neighboring houses whose lone lights flickered between the trees, to light the way. The world was more shadow than path, and the shadows were filled with cricket sounds and other, more furtive, nighttime feet. He squinted from the warmth of the doorway, but could make out nothing. “Better…” he thought, and took the small flash that hung beside the door, to make his way across the field.

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…”

Fog

Sun, 20 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

He guessed, when he had fully wakened, and the dream’s scenery had begun to melt into the familiar features of his bedroom, that while she had been a major figure in the story, still it was a story, and it was only his.

The impulse was to tell it, of course, as though it had been shared: there are stories where two lay their heads to sleep in separate houses, on separate pillows, but dream as though the pillow were only one, connected by an ethereal thread of sameness or desire. There are stories as well, where two lay their bodies in a single bed, heads on a single pillow, but their spirits are so scattered to opposing winds that, even searching, even calling, they could not hear a whisper of one another. Story or fact.

Burning snow

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

As I stood under the shower’s spray this evening, allowing the warm water to wash away the day’s dust and travel, I found that as the dirt left me, so did peace and security.

I looked at my hands, and as I passed them along my arms, I suddenly felt an urgency, emergency, imagined I was rushing to remove an invisible poison – radioactive decay – that had collected on my skin and sifted through my clothing, as I sat cowering inside my home, whose chinks and gaps would never be airtight, whose doors and windows were designed to breathe as a human breathes, to move air in and around me so that I might have fresh oxygen to light my blood and to quicken my pulse.

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.

Orpheus

Sat, 05 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

That’s why I sang these songs: the art of writing down my name might call up hers or, reaching the true cause of me (a reason? a meaning?), might find a home, or build one that is why I sang

In evening when light fades you feel it, or in the night where nothing shines but stars that gleam from the far end of the thinnest thread: those strands that catch the corner of your eye and rouse your sounds, widen your smile so song is woven on the melody of her curve, harmony in the curl and moisture of her lips; that is where I sang; and where our voices met we settled in, the sunlight came so every seed we planted surged and opened leaves in sweet upswelling fountain-spilling flowers, fruit, future as though I sang them into life

first-light

Fri, 25 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000

They leaned into each other as the warming first-light leaned against their window, leaned into their room, over the bed, let its weight drape gently on their limbs, whispering Good Things that neither would remember when they woke.

But maybe it touched them dreaming: they stretched, and stretching took deep draughts of air into their lungs, as though Good Things had just begun.

“I forgot just now that winter…” “I was running in fields with ribbons in my hair…” “So good to fall asleep beside you…” “So good to wake beside you…”

Outside In

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Outside the wind has risen, and here away from town, and near the sea, it seems to have risen with no uncertain fury, so the joints and timbers of the old converted barn that I call home creak and crack (again) like a frail ship on a muscular sea. Was it the louder-than-howling air as it raked the corners of my home… ? Or was it the bold report of an old nail, as it lost its hold and ceded ground in the invisible current’s grip, that shook me and took me out of my dreams? The first assault just brushed the fog of sleep; the second rush illuminated it, a shock of lightning, or the flash of a harbor-light; while the last, most recent, burned it quite away, and left me standing, slightly muddled, softly cursing, wrapping cloth around to warm me at the very deepest bottom of the night.

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.

Visitors

Mon, 10 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

[visitor-maps]

the days that passed him

Sun, 09 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

He thought that what he made would decorate his days; instead (a rule of thumb) it was who he had become.

He thought: “The house I build will garner summer’s rays, and I’ll be warm when summer-comfort wanes”; instead, it was the one who shared his bed, how long she stayed.

He thought and thought. But what the days that passed him taught was far from his imagination, caught in the fingers of his outstretched heart.

To Bring You Home

Sat, 08 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Then there was a little light, burned away what remained of the night colored the fields - the clarity of air - my world, unveiled then there was a sound, I turned around, there was someone coming my way…

there was, there was there was, there was

Then there was a name came so lightly to the tongue then there was a face couldn’t be erased when the day was done then there was a touch - it doesn’t take much to bring you home

my reflection in the photograph

Mon, 03 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Several years ago I was “improving” my photo collection, which had become a wobbling tower of Kodachrome, balanced precariously and in no particular order in a hidden corner of my closet. Every time I saw it, I felt a vague intolerance; and each time I saw it, I felt that intolerance grow, until finally the intolerance was itself intolerable, and I furiously shoveled the concealing junk out of the way, and hooked those boxes and stacks out into the middle of my bedroom floor.

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”.

Our Sound

Sat, 25 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

It’s not who she is that begs the lyric; not what he wants that’s the melody’s thread. Instead: when something stirs and merges one and one; makes failing math, is short two by a half; when boundaries gently blur; when bodies move without one saying stay, one saying go…

There is Music’s spring, if not the spring of everything.

Or, what I mean: it’s where the spirits meet that fuels the fire; it’s where they part that puts it out.

columns

Sat, 20 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

One pillar was just within reach. Stretching her hand, the tips of her fingers ran over the smooth and the rough of the mosaic surface, each square inch of glazed ceramic a work of art in itself, each line of mortar its frame. – If I stood here a month I might see them all, she thought. As though walking the Louvre without walking.

She glanced down the long chamber. The sun was falling, and the far end of the hall was already dark, in the expanse the other columns were like trees, somehow solemn (was that her feeling, written into the dusk?), lifting a painted canopy overhead, lifting history overhead, roots buried in centuries of shuffling feet, branches hidden in an incense haze.

Rue

Wed, 10 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I turned to face the evening she was there her arms a circle cool November: mist the light, a fallen curtain and her hair a silken flicker turned to mask her face

all given, all received in evening’s arms we fell, we turned the shawl November’s mist to circled warmth the lightest curtain furled

til darkness fell on everything, and gave November back to us returned our names

a circle cannot end November can

Rue - Mark Schultz

Windows - 5 (interiors)

Sat, 06 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

… at the brow of the hill was a stone wall, a dun crown, and at its heel, a trail; from heel to brow the wander walked, pacing the arc the sun traced in the sky

… at noon, the world stands at height; as if light were a special calling, a luminous gravity pulling heaven- not earth- toward, where all laid low by night’s endeavors are plucked up, tugged on strings and streamers, to momentary magnificence; I… I AM! the shout of every Thing come noon, arises in its native tongue

Metaphor of the Trees

Mon, 25 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I was thinking this weekend of the metaphor of the trees: those that cover the lower peaks of the White Mountains, their roots knitted together like fingers knotted in prayer, interwoven with matted grasses and weeds, and held in place by the understory of bushes and brambles. All of that green life exposed to the winds of winter and summer’s storms, in little more than a foot of soil: beneath that veneer, granite ledge.

Sambamaré

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

O coração baía aberto ao maré as águas vêm as águas vão prá onde eu não sei

Chegam de tempestade ao suspiro elas vão escrevem nomes na areia que as ondas apagarão

… instrumental

Correnteza agridoce pôs tesouros à beira-mar que beleza me traz sorriso despedida me faz chorar

Correnteza agridoce faz tesouros aterrisar que beleza ao alcance dos olhos mas nas mãos é que nem luar

Beleza ao alcance dos olhos desagua das mãos que nem luar

Thich Nhat Hahn and the Energy of Anger

Sat, 23 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

In 1995, one of America’s respected spiritual leaders, Ram Dass, interviewed Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh about anger, about violence, and about the simple ways (not easy, but simple) in which each of us may live better, supporting a peaceful home, peaceful neighborhood, and peaceful nation. While it lasts, the interview from YouTube is linked below. I have transcribed the text, which can be found after the video.

RD You spoke the other day about holding anger, and emotions like that, in a tender way. Could you speak a little bit more about that?

wealth of tears

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

She covered her face with her hands as though to stop the tears that flowed, as though to hide her love from the world, as though to keep it from pouring out.

There (she thinks): the equation’s made: a drop of water squeezed from the heart has the same weight as a drop of love.

It’s the physics of desire. It’s the energy of drawing close, it’s the heat of attachment, the matter of bodies and births, the motion of collision and embrace, of merging and deflecting. Watch the ghost-trace particles: bodies find each other and spin away. Yet their energy is conserved: nothing disappears (she thinks): the hum of what is given and received, becomes a song, a sigh, a cry.

lição das horas

Sun, 10 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Com idade se ama mais

Sojourn: India

Sun, 03 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Flash-Fried Thai Basil Tempeh

Sat, 02 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Thai basil is key, though fresh picked salsa pepper & blackened dry chili add the depth needed, ginger some breadth, to make this dry-fried dish so tasty. Added zucchini gives the plate moisture. I couldn’t take my face out of the bowl!

Collected ingredients:

a dried chili, blackened in fry oil
scallions (whites first, add greens later)
ginger
salsa pepper (medium heat)
tempeh, deep-fried to bring out nutty flavor
cooked garbanzos (adds a little fullness to each bite)
shitake mushrooms
zucchini
thai basil and scallion greens
salt to taste

It’s fried in the “right” order, above: infuse the oil with seared flavors, add main protein to coat and season, then mushrooms and softer veggies to retain their “spring” and freshness. Make it sizzle, but not darken, and sift some salt from your fingers until it’s just right!

Windows - 4

Wed, 29 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

At the sliding glass door she stood, looking at the night. Through her own reflection she could see, in order of diminishing certainty, the branches of a pine, the outline of flowers along the walk (in shades of gray), lawn that faded into the darkness of what she knew to be a road. When she breathed in there was a faint whistling through her nostrils; when she breathed out, her breath fogged the glass in an oval that grew outward, then shrunk on itself, as though its shape were being drawn back into her lungs. The hall tiles were cold. She looked down at her feet.

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.

Windows - 3

Mon, 13 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Lonny was the product of big energy and tiny town, where the limitations imposed by three square blocks of homes – an Alcatraz adrift on an ocean of unswimmable wheat – fueled the kind of incendiary pressure that could only come out wrong. Even back then, when I was eight and Lonny was nine, his combustion resulted in trouble; so years later, when I heard that he was in the pen for grand theft auto and some litany of other offenses, it was disappointingly no surprise: the wide world never succeeded in changing Lonny’s first impressions, nor would he be able to see it as anything but an endless, confining small town. A twitch in his heart was too large for his skin, a cruel itch, an irritation for which he found no balm. Maybe he didn’t look hard enough. Maybe he took off in the wrong direction, followed the wrong leader, and never got righted.

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.

Inuksuit

Wed, 08 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

The inuksuit born of the weight in our hands as stone after stone they choose to stand their lives take form in the foundry of the heart they rise and arise on the bank of the fjord to wait in the wind for the one who returns they speak without speaking but when? but when? lighthouse without light that shines on the bay poem without words unwritten by hand sentinel to a moment that refuses death the spirit of the stone leans toward the south the spirit of my stone will not close its eyes as some leave their hearts and new stones arise our village of inuksuit grows and subsides they reach toward the sun and they bow to the tide.	Inuksuit sont nés du poids dans les mains pierre en pierre ils choisissent de se lever leurs vies en formant dans la fonderie d’un coeur ils se lèvent et se réveillent à la rive du fjord à attendre dans le vent pour lequel qui revient ils parlent sans parler -- mais lorsque? -- lorsque? un phare sans lumière que illumine la baie poème sans mots pas écrit à main sentinelle d’un moment que refuse de mourrir l’esprit de la pierre penche vers le sur l’esprit de ma pierre ne ferme pas ses yeux comme quelque-uns lèguent ses coeurs et pierres nouvelles se lèvent notre village de inuksuit s’agrande et diminue ils atteignent au soleil et s’inclinent aux marées.

Some inuksuit were used by those hunting caribous, when the caribous were coming the young ones were fed milk not to make noise. The land without trees was called The Place for Feeding by the elders.

Many inuksuit together are called nalluni. We placed nalluni where we would want the caribous to swim before they reach the end of the lake or reach the other side.

Almost all the land had inuksuit; all of them were useful. Some inuksuit were on the way where caribou herds were walking, beside lakes or at the end of big lakes.

When they start to swim, we will go to them by kayak. Before they reach the shore, they will be hunted with harpoon (kapuutinut) This was the way to get many caribous. In the summer the skin and the fur were good and used for clothes. The meat was buried underground, that way it would be the food for the winter, it was like that in the past.

Some inuksuit were there for people not to get lost when they were moving around; for example, inuksuit were followed to go to a lake or anywhere.

On lakes where there are fish, there are rocks who point to the lake. The two rocks are on top of the flat rock point to the fishing whole. We should try to fish where it is pointing. But we don’t even notice it because we don’t know what our ancestors did. Back then they built these pointers to a lake where there is fish. We never worry about them, we just hunt when we are camping.

All the big places have an inuksuit. We use them to recognize where we are. Even to this day, they are used. Inuksuit building was taken seriously by our ancestors, they were built to be used. If there were no inuksuit, many people would get lost, especially in the blizzard. When we see an inuksuit we are thankful and we feel more confident.

Candi Prambanan

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

If there is a lesson in travel – and I make the gentle distinction here between Travel, where you open yourself to change, and Tourism, where the scenes and faces pass in front of you in cinematic splendor – if there is a lesson in travel, it is that time is much longer than your pockets-full of days, and earth much larger than the bag of bones and sinew you temporarily call home.

Idli, or How to Steam A Breakfast Batter

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I would be hard pressed to say if that delicious south-Indian dal sambar was an accompaniment for these idli, or if it’s the other way around. Maybe they are meal partners: the sambar is a delicious medley of spices and vegetables and cooked pulses, while the idli provide a pillow-like staple of ground gram beans and creamed rice (laced with kuri leaf) that give the soup some staying power.

Well, whomever accompanies whom, this morning meal is one of my favorite memories of our trip through Tamil Nadu and surrounds, a close second to those spectacularly delicious tiffin meals of the same region.

curve

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

“The curve of the river is where the breeze comes freshest. You can hear the leaves find voice before each gust arrives, like an invisible wave reaching upstream, downstream. On this bank is the small shore, because the arm of water hooks around us here, an embrace. The far bank is the long shore: from here you can see it’s slow progress.

“I come to think. Sometimes I come here not to think. The place seems not to mind the face I put on, at any rate whatever face I brought is put away soon enough. So long as you’re quiet, the small sounds work their way into you and fill you up, so the burden you decided to drag along with you that day is rained-on, then water-logged, then sinks into the slowness of the current.

Jazz

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Recently someone asked me about the form of dance I practice – the form I aspire to, really; and like all good forms it is small enough for me to wrap my arms around, large enough to contain my curiosity, lean enough that an evening costs a few dollars and yields a fortune, full enough that I think I will never find the end of it.

I talked about the improvisational “jam”, the coalescence of a couple of dozen movement artists, with no talking, no music, only the sound of sliding or shuffling, running or slowing feet, deep breath… sometimes spontaneous laughter, sometimes spontaneous stillness, deeper because it is shared. My friend tried to imagine that space for a moment, as much as one can really imagine it, foreign as it is, and asked “How can you dance without music?”

South Indian Sambar (for Idli)

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

This is one of my favorite dishes from Tamil Nadu - a simple stew, really, but with these delightfully unplaceable flavors from the combination of spices and leaves. Serve it as a soup if you wish; however, the classic accompaniments would be rice and gram bean idli in the morning, or dosa in the evening. The idli dough is fermenting tonight, so it will be just a bowl of this great fresh soup and a few papad with lemon pickle. Ah, and a glass of wine, to celebrate a memorable meal.

Chai

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

We ate little at Ramana Maharshi’s ashram: certainly little compared to the standard American Diet. Steamed, fermented rice cake (which I grew to adore and now make at home); a splash of some pulse - a lentil or a dal; a dusting of some spice, poured over a plate of sewn leaves. That was breakfast, that was lunch. I think it was dinner, too, or something similar.

It was wonderful. I have never been overweight, and yet the weight of all those calories flowing through me was palpable in its sudden absence. My mind was lighter (yes, India and jet-lag had something to do with that; but the affects continued for a month at least), and my physical frame was lighter.

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.

Soliloquoys

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I. Our Daily Dance

The waning moon has this hour turned above the crowns of trees, and spilled its liquid light into the yard. So this evening is accompanied by a shadow of sun’s heat. The same moon that years and years ago was torn from earth’s belly, born from her and borne away on some celestial tide: once blazing with the fire that gave us life, now its patient ashes spy upon our daily dance, at times shy and out of sight, at times winking at our plight, or otherwise full-faced and offering its white-washed world for these our fine somnambulisms.
With no one’s arms to hold you from these sights, the dimensions fall one into another, you join the ranks of every color-blinded creature as it flies or crawls or navigates the night, employing sharper, duller vision. A leaf-rattle makes the paw pause mid-step, a stick snap shakes the courage of the smallest, while above the sudden flush of air or nearly-silent slant of wing makes cowering the act of statues, whose hearts race from one moment alive to the next, still alive, alive yet still, praying to not be prey, hoping for no tooth nor talon’s spike to rake the nerves.

Some of us are larger: suffer less.

But suffer even so, adventure when better ventures aren’t reached by opening fingers, opened hearts. A footstep starts the body where the spirit would prefer to stop. Still. A stick snap stops the world around the boots of men: who goes there? What would a man be wanting of the night, if not a hunt of one sort or another?

The moon will not stand still; her mother moves below her, always at arms-distance, always departing. The child spins as if to turn away; the weight of their connection means she’s always falling toward her elder. A pure, white face: smiling as she rises her hello, sad as she departs. A desert of desire, whose fires went out so long ago, depends on stars’ impressions to light her further face.
Who wouldn’t see a spark up there? Some ember that was better than its gray surround, some flickered flash of life that kindled past to second sunrise, companion star, golden guide to keep us honest and awake and in each other’s arms, to banish sleep in favor of a man or woman’s favored sleep companion.

II. Gift of Sight and of Delight

One can speak more plainly. An apple, for example: there was nothing woman ever gave a man that would be his unmaking. Genesis requires rethinking, since its metaphor is cactus-garden, is painful to embrace. If (for example) Eve opened Adam’s eyes, it was to preciousness of life. I suppose that might be blinding, but hardly expulsion from the Divine; invitation, rather.

There is some bland assumption by the readers of those ancient runes: a paradise was lost, to be regained at last when body’s been betrayed as temporary residence, reminiscent of a slum-lord’s tenement, reminiscent of a child who’s given no delight or - more likely - never found its gratitude.

I do not sign that lease.

Paradise is every moment, but skill in seeing clouded by emotions or events. The paradise of creation is in company of men and of women, building walls or raking them down, raising pillars of life or whirling in the great river of each other’s dancing, scratching at the earth or forging teams to push back need, or needing the sweet waters of ourselves to wash upon that labor, to loose the earth of us and make us one.

No, an apple, or a pomegranate, maybe have been a gift of fruit, of sustenance, of sight or of delight. The days that followed, simply striving to maintain that paradise. If missed, at times, or if (at times) we fail to be delighted, still there’s no mistaking it exists.

The Way West

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Flying out of the east in splendor the silver beauty of the wings, oh beauty poised and driving like twin knives, and all those migratory lives depending, as it happened, on the magic of rivets and steel webs and pilots immune to fear – so be it, he travelled west, before the sun could dog and trouble him, falling headlong into a desert ground, seeded with aloes and yucca and dryland sage: if the least of these seeded also a desire to dive, to dig and bury his winged feet, to cover his travel with a delicate frost and keep his eyes from leaning further west: to say I will decide contentment as one decides the right soap for the wash, or chooses the ingredient for a meal – so be it, may the peaks there overtower him, reminder of his measure and short life, let the wind lift every morning with common scents, and expected small delights, his name be humbled and diminished for lack of yearning: Ah, yes, a clever man, but where his passion went–? Continued on, unmindful of the desert, the terrible, bleak terrain of it, and perished in a gully, dried to a fine chili-dust that mixed with the sand and disappeared for all its fire and redness. That may be a kindness: to cull from his ambitions a circle smaller than his shadow, an innocent hedge-row with a few slow flowers; not to ache so for so many colors; that is why he travelled west, dismissing Eden, perfect in its past, to praise and kiss his partners for their human dress and dreams; to balance the rolling rock with the slanted path, the day’s graces with the night’s small death; oh, let the rest depend on silver wings and say enough, as final as it seems.

© Information

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

It must be said… because so much thought and time and, yes, love has gone into shaping these journal entries, it would be an unkindness to have passages or complete entries removed and presented as the work of someone else.

Well, maybe some of the obtuse entries.

But then you get into this legal harangue, was this obtuse, was that obtuse? No, it’s all too subjective. So in the interest of respect and clarity:

certas canções

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Certas canções - Milton Nascimento

Certas canções que ouço cabem tão dentro de mim que perguntar carece como não fui eu que fiz?

Certa emoção me alcança corta-me a alma sem dor certas canções me chegam como se fosse o amor

Contos da água e do fogo cacos de vidas no chão cartas do sonho do povo é o coração do cantor

Vida e mais vida oferida chuva, outono, ou mar carvão e giz, abrigo gesto molhado no olhar

Until the sound of waves alone

Sat, 31 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Nick Van Alstine, 1982-2010

There’s a shout from the water:
a man is struggling with the current,
his mouth fills as he goes under.

He clears the surface, spits out salt,
finds clean air, gasps it in,
shouts again.

He is drowning.

He knows it.

His voice leans out in all directions,
asks assistance from everything that hears.
Everything that hears measures compassion
and the weight of that current.

The Lovers (Notes on a Zen Tarot)

Sat, 24 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

As metaphor (if you will) in the ancient system of Indian chakras, we humans wander through our days - some due east or due west, others in a sinuous trail to all the compass points - with a multiplicity of selves, meeting each event with मूलाधार survival instinct, स्वाधिष्ठान creative drive, मणिपूर reaching willpower, अनाहत passion and love, विशुद्ध communication and connection, आज्ञा wisdom, and सहस्रार relationship to the divine.

belo horizonte

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

uma palavra balançou
na ponta da língua
falada, calada, falada, calada
batuque rítmo de coração

será que este por do sol
seja à medida do seu nascer?
o menino enraizado só
(arvore-gurí, criança-flor)
se sente o peso diferente
nas almas dos seus pés;
de cima, entretanto
sol é sol

até o día em que sangue dispara
com tamanho desejo, o corpo canal
com gritos do mar e da morte
falado, calado, falado, calado
uma gota de sal como vinho
da ponta da língua traçada
doçura na linha ereta
boca garganta ventre

Windows - 2

Sat, 17 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Leaning back into the sofa, the leather cushions gave themselves to her head and neck, like two hands receiving, gently laying her down. She drew a full breath, exhaled part of the day, and her limbs relaxed. When I close my eyes, this parade, she thinks. Parade or surrealist painting.

That beautiful girl in my arms, five hours old. Light as impossibility; heavy as my hands rose to meet her. Small as my hands’ cradle; large as my heart’s opening. She crawled inside me and slept there for days and days.

plum

Sat, 10 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Plum was heaven Plum was stem Until the season’s turn And early rain’s intention Until the bud’s desire Until the blossom-burst Until bee pollen-scattering And Sun’s divine attention The fruit imagination Until its flesh uncovered Until its curve encountered The touch of tongue and teeth Until the sweet surrender Its sugar-water tendered Washed us stem to heaven Bud-desire, blossom-burst Victoria-by-the-Sea, PE

Windows - 1

Thu, 01 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

The warung was four walls and a roof, twelve tables and a door, twenty-four slight and elegant locals,
one pallid westerner, and me.

The walls weren’t really walls, as we would imagine them in Europe or the States: what would they keep out? Woven bamboo that allowed light to escape and the afternoon breeze to enter, allowed the quiet river of Indonesian conversation to course in an out, to mingle with melati blossoms and diesel… and the fire of equatorial sun, and the overripe stench of durian… and the pulsing twitter of the bird market…

what is and has been

Sat, 26 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Maybe it was - seems long ago - I danced on a flickering flame
so my feet would burn if I stood my ground
and another tongue, insistent, called my name
I’d lean into tomorrow as though I were bound to the wind

Where does an echo lead? I heard a sound, I turned; again;
the globe as it spun was the head of a pin
whose angels (lost souls, too) so crowded in
they jostled one another, profane, divine, profane, divine

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.

Cio da Terra

Sun, 11 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Spring has arrived with its signature flourish. I enjoy the recognition. It began years ago with delight

The snow’s crust hardened then softened, then became lace through which the roadside stream could be seen, happily (did my happiness make that water happy?) spilling and tumbling downhill past our home. A small stick in a small hand makes the hole wider, tests the depth and speed of water, light infiltrates, the sparkle falls into and back out of the little river. Raise your eyes: follow the stream through its tunnel as it gathers contributions and finally bursts through the ice and crystallizing snow, spreads into the street. Follow your sight, stand and look downstream, then follow it… you must, you must… uninsulated boots, waterproof except for the pinhole in the right toe, through which the cold drips in, spring, spring. Walk downhill where the river leads. Where will it lead? Beyond your small horizon, certainly. The trees arch overhead. They are elms, you later learn. Somewhere sun has found leaf loam and heated it until its fertile fragrance is all around you, then whispered away with a breeze. The trickle becomes a stream and flows into the field where the skating rink has dissolved into slush; stream slows, soaks into the marsh, into reeds, into trees, away toward the lake. Where has curiosity carried you?

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.

Very good, Sir

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

the eyes are a chamber of the heart
and the lips and tongue, a chamber of the heart
the fingertips and skin are a chamber of the heart
the sense of smell is a chamber of the heart
and the ears are a chamber of the heart

so near enough to see you
to taste you and to kiss you
to touch you and to feel your warmth
near enough to catch your scent
to hear “I love you”

offering

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

we decorate our lives: with loves contrived of scent and sweat and secrecy and grateful dancing, toward and away; the rocking cradle of the heart beats and buoys the body’s arc that ripens, rises, tires and moves on

its flower opens and opens when the water pulsing through its vein urges the petals wide to welcome sun

we decorate with silks and bangles scents and sweat and filigree: when spirit first flicks into form until it forms the canvas given you and me each day desires paint and every touch the painter’s brush might blush a smile upon the skin that all who witness can breathe in

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.

strings

Sat, 15 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

When you bring a guitar into tune, there is a sound beneath the sound that rises as each string begins to play its neighbor; as the combined harmonics of low and high notes begin to ring together and sustain each other; until the joined voices have filled the body of the instrument, and the whole is in vibration, in chorus.

If what fills me fills the guitar, then that harmony must be joy.

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.

Gravity

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Because the stone is washed by the riverspray, and pine needles litter its surface, the girl walks carefully. As the root-stained water boils through the canyon, its incessant stirring cutting cauldrons in the bedrock, as pebbles are spun around and around and around, the voice of the current is a roar that doesn’t pause for breath, is almost a magnetic force, and the girl inches forward to look over the lip into the froth. Inches forward, as the stone itself slopes down into the water, polished and pulled by rising and lowering volume, it’s as if (the mother feels, without putting thoughts to the feeling) as if a hand were reaching up to draw her daughter down and in. It is true (the mother knows, without putting feelings to the thoughts) that there are meters of stone before girl and water meet; some is dry; the girl is careful and agile; today is not her day to depart… But knowing is one room of the self; and from another room, decorated by generations of mothers and their losses, a cry rises up of avenging, protecting angels and shouts the girl back from the edge. Her voice is small against the water’s fall, it seems a wisp, a whispered plea, a fleck of sound, a seed in a stronger wind.

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.

your son out there

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I offered to be part of our community “Solstice Sing”* when it was a small offering among ourselves and local musicians… nice venue to sing a little song, among friends.

Then more folks got wind of it, and suddenly there were top-notch professional performers and singers and sound healers surfing in! It made for a fine event… and left me shy of my often-ragged voice (raggeder than I would like, if I am unable to avoid comparisons). Whenever the rain in my brain got too heavy, I took deep breaths, and got down off my need to achieve, remembering I was just offering what I had to whomever came to hear it. And hey, no one was getting paid for this: easier to find humility when everything is free.

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.

gust of wind

Mon, 18 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

“Don’t.”

Behind the counter, a seventeen-year-old is washing glasses and setting them to dry on a cloth by the mirror. Her back is to the room, but from as she washes, dries, sets a glass upside down, and them repeats, her eyes go up and to the left and follow guests as they enter and leave. Her friend is waiting tables. It is mid-morning, and it is July, when the trees have set their fruit, but haven’t yet added blush to the apples, or sweet to the grapes.

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…

two true stories

Fri, 15 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Somewhere in between acquaintance and friend I asked why?, and she answered: I survived cancer.

It was some years ago, she said, a decade now without another challenge. I counted back: how young! And the thought dissolved - as some thoughts do - becoming a gentle interior rain, washing down to common ground, what is was lost, is loosing its grip, will be taken away. I was trying to remember where that exact feeling, or a feeling closely akin, had touched me before: it is aligned with beauty. It might have been the first curl and browning edge of a rose petal. It might be a spot on the stem. If there were no beauty, the sense would not be the same…

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.

the mirror is broken, so it reflects

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

After the movie ended, I sat for a moment. I imagined a moon rising behind the clouds, so that the weather’s back was lit all silver, while below the rain fell easily down. Nothing easier than letting go, from a great height, and being received, at sea level. That was not what I thought. That is what I was.

What I thought took place in the mind, while everything important was going by. The mind felt alone, even lonely (of course): that is how a mind lives. The body, it simply touches or does not touch, feels rain or does not get wet, stays long in the sun and turns red or does not turn red. The mind, meanwhile, reaches out with no fingers, speaks with no voice, feels the beautiful curve of no lips, recalls the graceful arch of the body, the arrow loosed, the heartbreaking arrival (you cry, because beauty breaks the heart, whereas horror merely hardens it); the mind reaches out with fingers fragile and tenacious as a spider’s web, tries to catch the breeze, the dew, maybe time.

news from this end of the road

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Finally.

This morning, March 31st, marks the beginning of an eight-month daily practice of yoga asana, meditation and spiritual study, in preparation for an even more intensive certification program to attain teacher status. I have walked along any number of similar roads, most often to some form of completion, as they led on to bigger ways or to smaller, more arcane ways… in all cases the next way. It have been a wonderful, challenging, art-filled life. I am excited about the next challenge.

joía

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

entre lágrima e sal
seca sal, sol que seca
entre chuva e a mão
horas, memórias que dá

a lágrima como chuva cai
cámera lenta, amor
ví o rosto de espelho
na sua joía líquida

descendo como raío
doa sal, olho que olha
de luz de dor de benção
que faz fechar as mãos

there was music so loud you could not sleep if you wanted to - but of course you did not want to sleep. the river of rhythm carried your body, unlike the river lethe, instead the river life. maybe it was better yet a river i had not witnessed, that my youth did not spoil its beauty in familiarity, rather deepened its shout and the shine of the lights upon its surface. the faces saw but did not acknowledge me: they were my face, and i was theirs. one body moved with the beat of a thousand hearts. and a thousand minds let go and became a single thought, held by the drums and the dance and the dream.

Hug a tree

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Why did you reflexively contract when you read that title? Does it go back to the conservative’s 70s sound-bite, “tree huggers”, a term used (as usual) not to increase knowledge and understanding, but to ridicule and demean, the fear-response of a bullying child? Were you tainted by the bully’s threat?

Or does it touch on a sense of propriety which tragically - I have to use the word tragically here, because I imagine you as a child, reaching as a child does into a world of wonder and delight, opening all of the flavors and colors and textures and sounds and smells it offers - tragically, was some bleak “sense” of propriety laid over your heart, like a “black curtain over the windows of your soul”, that the brief and agreeable experiment in hugging a tree causes the heart to contract, and inhibition and embarrassment to crowd your mind?

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.

the revolution of darkness

Sun, 22 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

– What if…

She opened a drawer in the kitchen, the one beneath the silver that held everything and nothing, like a purse, and dug about for a moment. She was sure it was there, just the sort of thing she would never throw out, and would never use. Half-empty blocks of twist-ties, a few clothes pins, the dull pair of scissors whose blades were loose, two corks, cheesecloth, three batteries as many years old (she took these in her hand). Her fingers reached deeper than the drawer would open, and aha! found the sticky-soft edge of a candle-stub lined up against the back wall, where the tide of shifting objects had rolled it and left it. She lifted it out, and closed the drawer.

i awaken, with a thought

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

hold it gently in my hand, that my attention not disturb it the mind is a dry riverbed; it drinks the sound of water a dream is dispelled by a voice; a sudden flash of bedroom lights causes the lovers to pull apart, ashamed of their beauty a flower that is plucked can be shared, but no longer lives a friend asked me to consider her work: instead I consider myself her work asked me to consider World: inclusive, I consider Self to be complete, the spark must touch the wood and to be completed, the wood will be consumed so love will have a purpose and a consequence and action will find meaning out of love I draw out filaments of thought as a spider draws out gossamer from himself and hangs a thread in the middle of the air first he catches dew, then food ~ in the moment of surrender the lovers can create - the universe and Universal meet the fingertip of created will be touched by the fingertip’s Creator through this embrace life races the truest love is not for self, but Self and drawn like gossamer from the body is written like a shining Word mid-air the child of this union holds the world so love takes form in action in whispers, touches, lingered glances slow, then faster, then wilder dances where thought becomes no thinking spark touches wood and the fire chases electric Spirit licks the bodies’ fibers and burns them into ash in the void some new thing takes shape ~ our little human actions will be empty unless they are conceived in this embrace unless my call to effort comes of love it will not convince for every being is a gossamer thread and written from the same stuff as the sun knows when it greets the morning or when it faces night in every action ask your Self: does it reflect my love? my love, my love… the one pure act you have is giving birth to something that is greater than yourself

Fill My Eyes

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

When you travel to a tourist destination, you see what you pay for, and what those who are selling rest wish you to see: in the case of Gulf coast Florida, there are miles of sand, comfortable and maintenance-free accommodations, food at the end of a short walk and at the sliding edge of your credit card, and night clubs or golf courses or day spas or ships or shops… That’s why they are here, so you can be here, too. It is a perfectly Disney establishment, where the name is here employed as an adjective. The world is peaceful, there are no cares, and all that is asked of you (for these few days) is that you… descontrair (couldn’t find a better word than the Portuguese, meaning to “un-contract”).

Matisse's table

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

It doesn’t matter the palette, where colors live, the brush can explore; where the brush explores, the canvas blooms; where paint dries, the globe is tasted, interpreted, and offered to whomever would receive it.

So, tonight we are in the southern States, in easy reach of some of the tastier kitchen paints. Tonight’s menu:

Caribbean black beans, cooked with garlic slices, rock salt and rough-ground pepper; accented with spicy Italian sausage, the flavor “lightened” with sliced sour oranges (a variety of kumquat) which I picked this evening from the tree out back, and “greened” with fresh cilantro, in the soup and as a garnish. Long-grain rice cooked with peppercorn and bay. As side dishes, fresh sliced yellow bell pepper; a fruit plate of papaya, banana pieces and bosc pear sprinkled with fresh lemon juice; and an accent plate of half-ripened green mango (sweet-tart, not soupy). A small glass of yesterday’s Beaujolais, and grapefruit juice mixed with Perrier.

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.

let go

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

a river doesn’t practice how to flow it lets go

from the instant it was born and falls into the arms of its bed

its being wells up against what you or I would call an obstacle and melts around it

if you think you are dammed up, well ask your breath for a word of advice

a lover passes easy hours on the simple tasks of living but cannot bear a second of her beloved’s voice outside the door her dam is burst and river runs to meet the ocean

WHAT!?

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Someone knocked. It’s 4:30 AM. The entire local Earth is muffled by a foot of snow so even cars (should they pass by) hush by. Every creature sleeps or is silent, winged predation, or a predator’s intent. One of my cats is a small sandbag across my ankle, the nocturnal knocked out of him. The furnace hums, that’s all: almost inaudible, slightly super-liminal drone. Nothing moves, and nearly-nothing makes nearly-no-sound.

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.

simple blossoming

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

Was there not a flower found its sun
through simple blossoming? I thought that’s how it’s done
ignore the driven wooden root, ignore the thorn’s intent
instead, invest in feminine receipt
and open petals, welcome summer’s heat.

Was there a flower couldn’t find the sun
through simple blossoming? Its wooden nail
is buried in the soil; still all its vigor’s spent
to cripple stone and guzzle draughts of earth
and bloom: that’s what its living meant.

Music Master

Mon, 16 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

This weekend, 60 people gathered to celebrate the art of love - as expressed in the gentle and sweet music of Enid Ames, modern musician and composer of southern New Hampshire, and in the words of Jelalludin Rumi, b 1207 in what was then the eastern margin of the Persian Empire, and what is now the mountains and deserts of Afghanistan.

Enid’s sets were interspersed with a spoken verse; asked to read a favorite, I opened Coleman Barks Essential Rumi to Chapter 8: Being a Lover ~ The Sunrise Ruby, and found a poem I had not read before.

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.

Clouds in the Mirror

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

The light from the sun is everything - no reason to doubt the cultures who held it as Deity, or one of a pantheon of gods whose hand in our lives was blindingly evident.

Tonight the sun filled the sky, received by the full face of its consort moon, reflected with an anthropomorphic smile through the winter branches and from the winter snow, touching what was deepest darkness two weeks past, to brightest blue-washed avenues and fields, long vistas, shadows of night creatures sharp along the paths, and our steps revisited the moment we laid them, cups of snowcap, milky way, yesterday’s echo.

Matins

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

Eight inches of the whitest snow changed the landscape overnight. For those of us who revel in the New, winter is a wonderful season in New England, with a Wyeth palette and frequent face-lifts to keep the mind moving and the heart – like a child’s, still a child’s – smiling at the constant Christmas arrival of gifts.

I suppose you have to see them as gifts to feel them as gifts. I exercised before breakfast by clearing a path from door to drive, for myself and my cabin-fever cats. As I worked, the blurry wake-up thoughts began to drift (like morning mist under the influence of sun and breeze, I think), and what remained came into focus as though, with shovel in hand, I had rubbed my eyes and looked around: cool breeze throwing spinnets of flakes from the rooftop behind me, a murder of crows shouting something from the other end of the cornfield, two cats watching my work from two windows, sweat beginning in the warmer parts of my body, a small opening being cut from the white, in squares, like cake, like ice-cream, like quilt battening, like ash.

Vignette

Sat, 10 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

She shifted her weight imperceptibly right to left, so the sand beneath her sifted, with what she imagined was an audible rasp, then locked again, the earth reassembled beneath her. Just ahead were ripples in the beach the wind had carved, waves in a dry mere that capped and broke and crashed with such slow dignity that only the most patient eye could follow their motion, day on day. If she practiced the smallest fraction of that patience, and held her eye on one hands-breadth of beach, the grains of that small wave could be appreciated; but if she wandered, if her interest drew her further from the moment where she stood (right then: right there), the detail blurred and merged, the grains became a texture then a whiteness in the sun, while the waves resembled ridges resembled ripples resembled an empty canvas where anything could be drawn.

The lens of a book

Thu, 25 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday I received a book as a gift.

It measured 8 1/2 by 6 1/2 inches, and contained 256 printed pages (including index), with another five in introduction and eight more in bookplate, title, copyright, dedication, contents, and trailer pages, in all about an inch and a half of paper between the hard covers. The covers themselves were a silvery-gray matte, embossed with a marble texture that allowed patches of sheen to show through washes of barely-felted cloth; the slipcover provided decoration: a smiling Brother Victor-Antoine d’Avila-Latourrette seated before the gate inside his garden, holding a hand-turned wooden bowl of ripe peaches, surrounded by his season’s harvest. Sweet peppers and mallows and basil and greens, dark beets and eggplant, mid-season red potatoes and green beans and the ripest red tomatoes.

Enceladus, one of many

Tue, 23 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

When I was close to my daughter’s age, I would often stop in at the school library at lunch time, to take out books. There were a few favorites. One was Red Planet, by Robert A. Heinlein: the story of a boy (very close to my age, so I imagined) living in the colonies on Mars, with his pet, unlike any pet found on Earth. It was an adventure that could have, but did not, take place on Earth, and I was able to read and reread that tale without losing either my sense of wonder or my ability to live the story as I sat comfortably on our living room couch. If you were to find the card from the back of that book (we filled out our names and checkout date on cards, no computers in libraries back then), you would see my name scratched in ever improving cursive, over and over again, with few readers able to get their moniker in edgewise.

Larissa takes the stage

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Certain roles warrant mention, and those that play them, however often in the wings, deserve to step forward and take a bow. Once upon a time there was a little girl… not the first girl nor the first time, but let us say the first this time ‘round. The first First Tooth, the first one following; the first one loose, the first one falling. And what does that mean? Is a fallen tooth like a fallen leaf? Is it a hole that lets a whistle through? A space for a straw (for now)?

tangle

Sat, 20 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Tangle - Mark Schultz

If you could sing the wind, your voice should wear a sighing sound, as if from distant sources you had flown, and half-way through your flight your wings were weary but not yet done. Or a whistling of time through the sieve: divided into strands that strain then stream in parallel until they tangle, intertwine, and fuse together once again. What else would it seem? Is it winter round the windows moaning ancient love’s lament, a loss remembered making sadness modern, soon to be spent? Is it wind that carries moonlight lightly on its back, depositing in drops of dew the dawn that trees and flowers rush to drink?

Burial and baptism

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Two months since I last set word to the page. Life is not lived in words, but on the path where words are collected; where, if we speak of what we have seen, the story is written either in the heart and mind of the listener, or in the eye and inner sense of the reader. Sometimes I miss my time with the page, as the story is unfolding. There is a quietness you find in a record, as though counting and recounting your steps you are affirming “Yes, I have wandered here; I have wandered there.” In the telling there is acceptance of all that had gone before, the decisions made wise and unwise, the responses given well-considered or misspoken; whatever had been done was done with the best attempt that could be made at it. And the results…? We humans cast a hopeful eye to health that never ends, but historical forces and our own flagging powers teach us better. Today’s success must stand for everything: tomorrow’s challenge will face a new self, amen.

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.

Happiness and the Art of Being

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Michael James, on the practice of Sri Ramana Maharshi. From the Introduction to Happiness and the Art of Being.

Happiness lies deep within us, in the very core of our being. Happiness does not exist in any external object, but only in us, who are the consciousness that experiences happiness. Though we seem to derive happiness from external objects or experiences, the happiness that we thus enjoy in fact arises from within us.

Whatever turmoil our mind may be in, in the centre of our being there always exists a state of perfect peace and joy, like the calm in the eye of a storm. Desire and fear agitate our mind, and obscure from its vision the happiness that always exists within it. When a desire is satisfied, or the cause of a fear is removed, the surface agitation of our mind subsides, and in that temporary calm our mind enjoys a taste of its own innate happiness.

Happiness is thus a state of being – a state in which our mind’s habitual agitation is calmed. The activity of our mind disturbs it from its calm state of just being, and causes it to lose sight of its own innermost happiness. To enjoy happiness, therefore, all our mind need do is to cease all activity, returning calmly to its natural state of inactive being, as it does daily in deep sleep.

Therefore to master the art of being happy, we must master the art and science of just being. We must discover what the innermost core of our being is, and we must learn to abide consciously and constantly in that state of pure being, which underlies and supports (but nevertheless remains unaffected by) all the superficial activities of our mind: thinking, feeling and perceiving, remembering and forgetting, and so on.

The art of just being, remaining fully conscious but without any activity of the mind, is not only an art – a practical skill that can be cultivated and applied to produce an experience of inexpressible beauty and joy – but also a science – an attempt to acquire true knowledge by keen observation and rigorous experiment. And this art and science of being is not only the art and science of happiness, but also the art and science of consciousness, and the art and science of self-knowledge.

The science of being is incredibly simple and clear. To the human mind, however, it may appear to be complex and abstruse, not because it is in any way complex in itself, but because the mind which tries to comprehend it is such a complex bundle of thoughts and emotions – desires, fears, anxieties, attachments, long-cherished beliefs and preconceived ideas – that it tends to cloud the pure simplicity and clarity of being, making what is obvious appear to be obscure.

The End of Summer

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

From “cannot imagine” to “will not accept”; from “will not surrender” to “can never forget”. The layers and levels we uncover in meeting this life challenge our small comforts. If we meet the surface, and draw it aside like a curtain that veils our senses, we reveal richer colors to our sight, intensify the sensation our exploring fingers find, satisfy the brightest/broadest savoring, remind us of a scent that drew us outward and upward, and make the dullest word with renewed connotation charge the mind.

In Flanders Fields

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

The back of the Canadian $10 note bears the motto “In Service of Peace”, and below it, a poem.

Although Lieut. Col. John McRae had been a doctor for years, and had served in the South African War, he could never dull himself to the suffering, the screams, and the blood, and had seen and heard enough in his dressing station to last a lifetime. As a surgeon attached to the 1st Field Artillery Brigade, he spent seventeen days treating injured men – Canadians, British, Indians, French, and Germans – in the Ypres salient, one of the more horrific battlefields of WW I.

Earth-You-Sky

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Fri-Sun., Aug. 22-24 Journey as Destination Earth-You-Sky (B3B) Bring yoga and awareness practices out of the studio and into the woods for a third-eye-opening weekend in the Whites. Crawford Notch car-camp promises great food, good company, and intermediate hikes to surrounding peaks; higher altitudes mean good phys. cond. is important. Cost of $55 includes 2 nights, dinn & bfst. Info about JAD series or to reg. contact L Mark Schultz.

Day

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

An echinacea blossom sits in a vase on the kitchen table, slightly to the left of center, bowing in my direction. Some of these wildflowers are sturdier than most, and even cut retain their bearing, their color and form, for many days. There are people like that as well, keep blooming when the root is severed, because water is enough.

This particular beauty has nineteen split-end petals, in a variety of shades of pink, lateral veins and ridges changing saturation and hue and they reach out toward the tip. Nineteen petals, if a lover counted, arrives at “She loves me”: an advantage when plucking, to seek out odd-petaled plants.

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.

Gauze of Midnight

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

Under the gauze of midnight, where the mirrored starlight wanes
boughs of the aging branches range in the city’s floodlit lanes
like the arms of assembled sentinels, who saluted you as you came
then recruited the shadows in your wake to softly repeat your name

Softly they hold your name, my love, as a breeze will hold the song
two smiling, gently sighing lips released to the game of alone
like falling stars, the words reduce the dark, if not for long
but a flash of light is enough for a sight of the ground and the path to home

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?”

yes, and yes

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I picture a circle of relatives, drawn together by circumstance, from distances and activities that kept the majority mere echoes to one another, voices from the past, children’s faces, simple times. There is a circle of relatives standing around a hole cut into the earth, gestures turned to ashes, words turned to dust.

And in that gathering of grief, as though each had swallowed a stone, the weight of gravity drawing them down, as if to join the departed one.

plucked

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

“No; no, please; no more.” Art stretches on the canvas, the sun fallen half-way round the sky, having sweated its way to zenith, now drying and diminishing toward the end of its day, the end.

“But why? I thought the work was just beginning? I thought: a little more color, how it changes from morning to noon (when the light is really too terribly flattening, don’t you agree?), and now again from noon to night, when it picks up a… poignancy… that almost causes fruit to ripen…”

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.

Frame and Flow

Wed, 14 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

One of the great strengths of the human psyche is its ability to create structures where there appears to be chaos, to build shelter in a storm of metaphorical proportion, and raise walls in the perceived world which are duplicated in physical form around us. The walls of our houses go up, and we count on them to protect us. Lines are inscribed around social circles - a church, an activity group, friendships - and we rest in the circle of their arms. We discover what works within the flow of work and daily living, and by repetition create patterns of behavior that demand less and less of our attention, that we lean on as we lean against a tree or feel solid ground beneath a footstep. Rote is rest, allowing us to give energy and strength to the challenges of the day.

I would not change it

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000

"
Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile,
Hath not old custom made this life more sweet
Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods
More free from peril than the envious court?
Here feel we but the penalty of Adam,
The seasons’ difference; as, the icy fang
And churlish chiding of the winter’s wind,
Which, when it bites and blows upon my body,
Even till I shrink with cold, I smile and say
‘This is no flattery: these are counselors
That feelingly persuade me what I am.’
Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;
And this our life exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.
I would not change it.

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?

1 Begun

Sat, 05 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Circle of Golden Sunlight

Fri, 04 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Circle of golden sunlight
and at its margin, shadow;
obscuring body of midnight
and of its limbs, meadow

if I walk from one place I find
the road leads to the other

I loved the easy glance of youth
and tried all ways to keep it:

circle of golden sunlight
we’re dancing with our shadows;
robes of velvet midnight
around our limbs is gathered

1 - 2 - 3 - 4
the names of numbers spoken
learned in the rote of the daily
while nightly the rote is stolen

Raise Your Voice and Your Spirit Rises With It

Sun, 02 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000

When, despite the gales and throes of the day, there is a spark of beauty…

There is a kind of strength which cannot be culled, when you are able to lift your voice in a song. Tonight there were a few old standards of mine, which I revisited in a few free minutes; the heart softened more than ever by life found new corners to fill and dark spaces to illuminate. And as a chord progression changed, and the dynamics of a certain passage smoothed out – the voice, in a line made more poignant by recent events, filled with more humanity, and the fingers on the strings followed that lead – so that the song once rich was somehow richer, the melody somehow deeper.

Rooms

Sun, 24 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

My daughter called this evening; in fact, she called several times today. I miss you, Daddy, her words said. I am sad, said her voice. And that textured, tangible pain somewhere deeper within her rose up and troubled her mind, and she began to speak of things that aren’t, and imagined things that never were.

She is not alone in that practice, just as she is not alone in her passage, whether her trajectory is from one day to the next, or one self to the next. This morning she came from the house when I asked, fed the rabbit and gave it water, gathered her things to go to her mother’s house. She waited in the driveway as I finished shovelling away last night’s snow. You’re so good, my words said. She seemed surprised: I am? her words said. You just turned off the computer and got ready and came out, you took care of your pet; your teachers know how good you are, and your coach, and probably your friends. You are loved and your are enough, my voice said. She stood in the driveway, arms hugging her clothing and her books, and smiled.

The Bloodless Revolution

Mon, 11 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Robin Chase, Founder of ZipCar and MIT-trained scientist, on transportation and communication networks.

It is a far greater challenge to have and to be without, to open the hands, than it is to live without and be without. The river of life sees scarcity, and through those eyes, the hands that claim a prize reluctantly release. The fingers must be pried apart. Spiritually it is the greater challenge. “It is harder for a wealthy man to enter the kingdom of heaven…”.

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.

11:11

Sat, 12 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Beautiful in its glory, the mask as thin as gossamer
as fragile as the mist rolls in, as vagueness is its glory;
the child leaves the hospital without a mark upon her
but the cipher of her living is the mark she carries in her
and she staggers as though broken, she’s the standing-stone forever:
so their quicksilver and cameras could find no trace of dying
while they wonder’d as they wander’d through the mirrors of her hallway
on the mask as thin as gossamer, the mist that we call beauty

white on white

Sun, 06 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000

“… hope she is feeling better. Have a good night yourself.”

The ember of the day fading, so the small electric sparks that lead from corner to corner all the way home are now apparent, where before their minor lights were lost in the grander, warmer rays of the sun. A friend departs. The engine stumbles back to life. The CD that had paused picks up where it left off

The Fallen

Sat, 15 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000

A walk through the Boston Common in the fall of 2005. Our nation was still numbed and dumbed into the facile acceptance of a war that was not a war; a police action where no one managed the police; an act of mercy where there was no mercy.

The only way to follow such a course of action is to dehumanize, and in doing so, you remove the humanity not only of government, but of the people as well. You cannot kill without denying the Other is a mother like you, a father like you will be, a child that you would have then lose. You cannot kill without simplifying a people and a language, a religion and a region. On the Common green there were heaps of shoes of all sizes and shapes, women’s shoes and children’s, men’s and grandfathers’; mounds of shoes without number, because the faceless cannot be counted.

Liquid Planet

Thu, 06 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000

… and so all follows water’s path, from cloud to peak, from heights to valleys, from valleys to the sea; follows through channels that life itself creates, in currents at times quickened at times slowed by degrees of its descent. The selfsame wave that rises, falls; the selfsame lightning separating droplet from the whole, sees droplet join the torrent, follow current with the urging of this gravity-constant hand until, to end a sinuous trackless trail, again it joins the whole.

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).

Passages

Thu, 22 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Our habit of looking backward is only matched by our desire to grow, keep growing forever, perhaps; or to look forward at the vast horizon and never see it rush toward us, not feel the edge and the bright light or the pure darkness beyond. Amazing how an event from childhood can reach into the heart and into the cells of the body, certainly into the convolutions of the mind and the echoing halls of memory, steering the feet and the desires toward or away from today’s choices. Amazing how our efforts can disregard time, as though today’s choices were all that existed and all that mattered: as though time itself, a current that began at some unremembered flash (if it began at all) and runs on to an out-of-reach terminus (if terminus there is), would carry these bodies and their endeavors on without faltering, and would never let us… fall.

since feeling is first

Mon, 12 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a far better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry
--the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids’ flutter which says

we are for eachother: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life’s not a paragraph

i carry your heart with me

Sat, 10 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000

i carry your heart with me (i carry it in
my heart) i am never without it (anywhere
i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
not fate (for you are my fate,my sweet) i want
no world (for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

i thank You God for most this amazing

Thu, 08 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000

i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any-lifted from the no
of all nothing-human merely being
doubt unimaginably You?

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.

Invisible

Sat, 03 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000

By heaven and the night star! And what shall teach thee which is the night star? The piercing star. Over every soul there is a watcher…

We find ourselves through an effort of discovery. That we are all born into this life, with years of uncovering to follow, is simple, and fact. The events in which we play part or which come upon us are the mirror, and our senses and our eyes, through the effort of discovery, open to all that is being reflected. Until we find the strength to open and see the good and the bad, until we look and see our failures and our graces, the glass is blank; the name is unwritten; and the night star, your night star, is for you invisible.

What you cannot touch touches you

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000

As though an apple fell
on my head I stopped
what I was doing
looked up

Oh - it’s you

Sometimes a prayer is answered
before the words are said;
but since you were not listening
you say them anyway

The apple falls
when the earth calls
for its seed

Oh, it is you

And when your prayer
is met with silence
you curse
the miser god
who gave you everything

Wane

Sat, 27 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Before the last full moon of Autumn rises behind the hill. The last full moon of Autumn.

Last night it left behind a silver sand, on every blade a crystal strand that morning light made sparkle, turn to tears, then fall remembered winter to the earth. And all the leaves have fallen - summer’s skirt - scattered in reckless tatters round the yard. The bare-limbed beauties naked move inward, their progress slows, their whispering of May flowers blurs to snows, and voices once as light as Light sound deeper in the throat, so deep I scarcely hear them, or scarcely wish to know. The house entire is like a ship at sea, night-ship lighted bravely against the vast and empty waves. Or not so brave: the huddling heart lifts a guttering candle against the void, but the strongest blow it out, take heed of senses that most would only doubt, say I am I and step into their night.

1984

Wed, 24 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Nineteen eighty-four.

What was at one time a distant dream, the darkness of a book, an election year, a future, became the present. We didn’t have to do anything; we didn’t lift a finger, but gradually the date overtook us and passed us by, leaving us stationary at the roadside, the dusty wind of its passage playing and tugging at our hair and our clothes, the sun baking the asphalt underfoot and burning our faces to leather.

Visible Enough

Mon, 08 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I was recently asked to step into a new space in the blogosphere. This journal was originally created to track the progress of me and my friend Manny along our third-eye-opening trek through India; when we returned, there was enough literary momentum – and plenty of lessons being offered by the world right here close to home – to continue setting down thoughts every few days. The meditation and awareness classes we co-teach would fill pages each day, had I virtual ink enough to pen them.

White Sugar

Wed, 26 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Of course, the reason all those beverages and treats are such a hit (in terms of popularity) is that they are really are a hit (in terms of physiology). So the veins and the various systems of the body open their mouths wide to suck it in, the charge is lit, the buzz is immediate… and like any such rush, the fall is equally precipitous, the crash as hard as the flight was high, the ugly feeling and the desire not to live with it trigger a search for a quick fix, and back we are again with the promised, instant high.

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.

Seasons - II

Sat, 22 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

… and it is not as though there weren’t months and years ahead. The difficult events of our lives are like stones dropped into a bed-sheet, the whole of its white expanse falls, by weight and momentum, and gathers together into a knot of cloth. That night cloth is gathered together in our clenched fist, wound into knots that were not in its nature, tied in a twist of fabric until day breaks… or fingers loosen… or heart at least unwinds.

Seasons

Wed, 19 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Love
my last and greatest companion
this heaviness will pass…
just a salt wind from the ocean
stale air before the storm
that seems can never break
will break

I thought once that the source of our creativity was the height of our joy – but then I found it difficult to write about joys without writing also of sorrows. I found it difficult to kiss without also feeling the tears, or dance without feeling the pull gravity somewhere in my heart. It slows, you know, the heart slows in its beating, as though it were in less and less of a hurry, has less somewhere to be, or less desire to be there. I found it difficult to smile without remembering…

Becoming Human - II

Tue, 18 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

… and then there are the moments where, surprised, you find that the fingers loosen of their own accord; you no longer struggle to make something happen, nor struggle against struggling, but allow the events of your life to be the agent of release.

Tonight, I passed some time with Tevye, the village milkman: Tevye, whose fundamental beliefs are challenged at every turn, and at every turn helets go, further and further. A daughter marries against his judgment, a daughter marries without his consent, a daughter marries without his knowledge… and with a smile and a shrug he bows to the will of the God of change, bows to the god of gravity, the god of aging, the god of humanity, asking of the same spirit: Why…? Didn’t your teachings say, follow this path, it will keep you and your family safe, it will grant you peace and propserity, give you enough?

Becoming Human

Wed, 12 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s the script: from an early age your interest in intimately knowing what my daughter would call the Greater Spirit (I like that) drew you to science, to the arts, to T’ai chi and yoga, to cooking and foods, to learn, to learn, to learn.

And along that wild and sinuous path, you do learn - or at least, you make some decisions: these things I hold true, for now, until further learning modifies or disproves them. I have written poetry for some years, well, since I was a boy, so now it is lots of years. And it dawned on me (that’s a nice turn of phrase, if you think about it) it dawned on me that a poet’s poetry rests on the fact that everything is in everything else, that all the things around us and far away from us are made from the same stuff of Being, and so being, has at their core a common thread. When a poet opens her mind or his mind to that broad ocean, metaphor isn’t only obvious, it is inescapable.

The Earth Says Much

Mon, 10 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

The land around my house – “my” land – would say much about the hand that keeps it: overgrown, a feral lawn, become host for a multitude of insects and insects that prey on insects, for weeds with flowers and weeds with leaves and grasses with heavy heads full of seed. The tamed range is filled with Cawdor wood, and every glance outside is a reminder of my failure as a suburban land steward.

An Armful of Glads

Sun, 09 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Such colors of an August afternoon. First, the shades of wedded green, from the backlit leaves and their lapped and shadowed neighbors, to the heavy hip-high grass, to the mosses of the rock garden; the ruffled ears of rhubarb and dense and barbed raspberry thickets; the high architecture of island elms and the near-black interiors of the shrouded pines. As if in backdrop to all the rest: for when you turn your eyes away from the boundless seas of growing, grown greens, there are these highlights, flags and banners above the surging day: red in the bowl of just-picked berries, sunlight filling the shards of brilliant glass mosaic in a living-room window, a far sail on the deepest green of the sea, and an armful of gladiolas, released upon the table with a flourish, waiting to be arranged in a vase.

Teacher's Back

Wed, 05 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Under the cover of darkness, or in the blaze of mid-day, there are the brief encounters with the teacher: the real teacher. When we are young or when we are misinformed, the lessons are ignored or avoided. As though that final test could be dismissed, no thank you, I prefer not. It cannot be dismissed. Under the cover of darkness, when we are most exposed, or in the blaze of mid-day, when we least expect it, we are offered these little practice sessions. Just listen! It is Guará come back not to haunt, and neither to taunt, but to instruct.

Things of Value

Mon, 13 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +0000

In 1985, I spent several months living on the island of Java, in Yogyakarta, having traveled there with a partner in the evening of our intimacy. I sat out nights with our mutual friend Muller, a Sumatran who was studying at the University, on the grass mats of Jalan Malioboro, smoking Kretek cigarettes and drinking sugary tea, and spooning up repeat servings of gudeg, a simple local dish perhaps, but with friendship and smoke and inconsequential conversations – I can’t recall even how much was spoken in Indonesian, or English, or not spoken at all – the long evenings were excellent.

through which it sings

Sun, 12 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +0000

It is nine in the morning.

With those first words, I have given you the freshness, the low rays of the sun, the clear skies of so many mornings. It is Saturday: I have given you some stillness and freedom from Purpose. There is the faintest breeze, in fact, which plays around the drying field grasses and late-summer flowers, and an untainted blue sky. My daughter is whistling in the living room. Outside, the crickets – who love the fact that I haven’t mowed the upper field in weeks – have set up a cadence, a syncopated cricket-waltz, three to a second; or perhaps their syncopation is a studied lack of rhythm, dancers who don’t know the steps, and so hes…itatethenstep then hes…itate and another until Schubert or Brahms would measure them incompetent, or brilliant, failed student or master…

A large eye to the Field of Light

Wed, 01 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +0000

tech • nol • o • gy | tek’näl?j? |

noun (pl. -gies)

ORIGIN early 17th cent.: from Greek tekhnologia ‘systematic treatment,’ from tekhn? ‘art, craft’ + -logia ‘knowledge’, originally in reference to grammar. In the mid-1800s applied to industry and industrial works. Finally, circa 1964, ‘High Technology’ was coined for the overtures of the digital age.

Like most words, its meaning has followed the pursuits of those who use it, mirrored the world in which it is uttered, and dissolved its connotations from one web of meaning into another, gently pulling its associations along with it.

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.

My Story Yours

Sat, 21 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0000

“I was born in a suburb outside of Pittsburgh, two blocks off the rail line - before it was abandoned, and then reclaimed for pedestrians and bicycles - so that the 7:45 and the 8:30 made audible bookends to my bedtime, first calling ahead, then calling behind, and finally the stuttered step of the cars over the crossing. We lived there five years, so I know that is one of my own memories, not just a story my mother…”

língua do vento

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Ai, que dificuldade.

Sabe, gente, que só nos terrenos brasileiros é possível viver como brasileiro. Não importa a vontade, não importa a ídioma empregada, não importa o abraço, não importa a comida… se torna brasileiro quem pisa na terra brasileira. Abra a porta carioca, deite na cama paulista, seja tocado pelo vento porto-alegrense… aí gente, o coração cai e quebra, e nos espaços assim criados se insinua o pulso do sul…

Or is it Memorex?

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0000

The crickets are loud outside my window, because outside my window, the grass is high. Life, in fact, in terms both general and specific, has got a lead on me, and the kind of maintenance my neighbors would like to see in my yard and which they cannot see and would not see within my home have dropped into the category “Only if it’s urgent”. Owning a large home and a relatively sizable parcel of land is plenty of work for a small squad of attendants, while a man alone turns in the eye of change touching what needs a touch, and leaving alone what is well enough – or as well as can be – alone.

Pain as Teacher

Mon, 09 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Many Buddhist traditions share a specific practice for opening the eyes, opening the eyes of the heart.

If you follow the path of enlightenment that Gautama Buddha walked, one who wishes to be free of entangling thoughts and desires – desire for the next and better car, the other better house, a different and better partner – makes an active attempt to embrace impermanence. Meaning: one does everything in his or her power to realize that this life passes with the snap of the fingers, that much of our effort comes to no result, and that in our hurry we often miss opportunities for seeing what truly has value.

Questions of Travel

Mon, 09 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0000

There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams
hurry too rapidly down to the sea,
and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops
makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion,
turning to waterfalls under our very eyes.
-- For if those streaks, those mile-long, shiny, tearstains
aren’t waterfalls yet,
in a quick age or so, as ages go here,
they probably will be.
But if the streams and clouds keep travelling, travelling,
the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships,
slime-hung and barnacled.

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.

Merlin's Map

Tue, 26 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000

If you are familiar with the Tarot – not the arcane, mystifying deck of cards employed by lesser guides, but the cards whose images represent archetypal moments and movements in life – you will recognize its patterns and elements in places and phases of your own life. They were, after all, the result of many years of inner science in the western world, a system of symbols similar to the Chinese I Ching, that could be used to shake up your habits of thought, and let you see deeper into a situation than you normally would.

The Children are Clued In

Tue, 19 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000

In an introduction to his poem “Technology”, my son, during his eighth-grade graduation speech, wondered aloud if our technical advances were the hallmark of a New Age, or in fact its death-knell. His words rang with youthful and categorical vigor which is harder to come by in middle age, and so strident that they are easy to dismiss… until one picks up the newspaper.

This morning, for example, the New York Times published one of those articles which have recently come back into vogue: real data concerning the state of the planet. Apparently considered to be adverse to sales, and certainly politically unpopular during the current administration’s puerile governance, stories which whispered wisdom and spoke of the road not taken were rare, and support for anything but the paradigm of War seemed beyond our national conscience.

the white box

Sat, 09 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000

The human spirit and the human body seek to be refreshed. Seek to find: the human body feels movement in the cells, a one-way current of life through life, source to sea. The human spirit opens wider and wider as waves of experience crash against its sand and stone; we are carved into bays and bars by the tide.

We seek, at a conscious or subconscious level, to be refreshed, and apparent refreshment appears at our reaching fingertips. We scarcely need to make an effort. A student of mine brings a passage from a book she had been reading… on her telephone. A man or a woman walks down the street, slim wire running from ear-buds to hip, while at the hip a small white box contains hours or days of favorite music, presented in the order or disorder desired, at the highest fidelity.

You are called, Arjuna

Fri, 01 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000

There are some writings to which you are close enough, in historical moment and the nuance of language, that each word falls like a spark on your skin, an electric current to the wire of your life.

Others are foreign even in translation, even after the attempt to make them current or accessible to a modern sensibility. Those are the words that might make a difference, that will stretch you skyward and allow you to see out from the box you have comfortably called home for so long.

A Word on the Wind

Thu, 24 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Tonight I was sitting in a pile of wood shavings, they fell like heavy flakes of snow as I carved away layers of beech, until I was adrift. A seated Buddha is concealed within what was originally a modest 6" block of roughcut. The Buddha’s always within… I know that… you just need the patience and the skill to find it.

Meanwhile, I almost lopped off the Buddha’s nose last week, having angled my gouge slightly too deeply along the grain, with the pressure of my desire to find Buddha, the fibers released all at once, and a large wedge of wood pulled up right at the middle way where his face might have been. Justin, a master carver and this group’s guide, said “Well… maybe the Buddha in there is smaller than you thought…”

Les heureux

Mon, 21 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

The cobbles of the roadway wind from the heights down to the Saint Lawrence, through the old Centre Ville, where the money of past generations found their comforts, and the history of a nation come and gone remains on the tongue, in the food, in the grey and red blocks of granite in the walls.

The ephemeral lives in the walls as well, but more slowly. The ephemeral lives in the flower-box geraniums, and the leaves gone brown. Out of the sky, that grey-matte day, huge flakes like goosedown floated in front of the shopwindows, making them stand out dark against the speckled daylight. It was cool and wet, the humidity like a finger of ice running along the cheek, up the spine. The dark-haired waitresses and the vendors from their counters looked back out on the scene, and the falling winter, and on the people in the street who shared their eyes.

Stillpoint

Sun, 20 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

What we repeat becomes our center, that’s sure. So when the wind is kicking up spray – when the movement of the air is really howling round you – we return to what we have repeated, what has become our rote. If it is made of wood, you will likely float; if it is a stone it will sink you.

Lately, the home that I thought was brick turned out to be sticks, and the sticks turned out to be straw, so that with a lick of the wind, with a flick of a match, all of the concrete that protected me from storm turned tinder, and took flight or caught flame. Work which together lifted me and a company as we grew together arrived at a natural and logical completion, so employment will change. A partnership which saw two continents, two children, two farms and two languages has followed the same living arc from a birth to a death, and all the twos have become ones. The home which housed a family now surrounds silence, both delightful and hollow.

To each music its refrain

Sat, 19 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Was the phrase “to harp on” really coined by Shakespeare – Still harping on, my daughter? – or did he conveniently lift it from earlier works, freshen it up, add a dash of dash, and re-release it to a marveling public?

Perhaps every artist should work this way. A rather recent invention of the overweaned ego, the Artist as Creator of All Things has got to go. The real artist is a channel for sunlight, not the sun itself: she drinks in the world through her senses, a true tantrika whose openness to life is unlimited (and not limited to sexual connection, as some small spirits would consider the Tantra, a Reader’s Digest version of the Kama Sutra), and being filled to overflowing with sight and sound and touch and taste and scent – as well as that subtle combination of what we do not outwardly sense – allows that water to pour out in whatever form it may take.

Wind

Sun, 06 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Invisible, the wind came off the high mountain peaks, cold and crisp as water from the glacier, and poured down the divide and over the foothills in torrents, mingling as it went with the desert air east of the range, stirring up dust devils and clouds, raising the earth from the earth and carrying it a few miles east, only to set it down again.

Wet over the prairies, drying; dry over the fields, moistening. The wheat fields of North Dakota stretch forever, from one horizon to another, but still the sea of air is larger, and its waves impress themselves upon the green stalks, green currents through the evening grain which you can follow with your eye, trace with your finger, and draw to your lips like a drop of scented water, to slake your thirst for beauty. Then the wind passes on – it leaves you behind. There you stand, your heart racing with youth, creating a memory, a record of the moment here and now in your early years, a record of the invisible that moves a over the face of the earth. The wind sighs away to the east, and in the sense of being filled and being emptied, nascent understanding that every moment and every scent and every touch reels out the lineage of your own story, prose and poetic as it is, true and retouched as it is.

The conversation of touch

Thu, 03 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

In our naturally egocentric way, we consider our senses channels of information that bring the world to us. We scan the horizon to identify threat or opportunity, we read; we listen to what is hidden or to what is spoken, what is sung; we are drawn to scents and repelled from odors, and we delight in the flavor of what is pleasing, disgorging what is foul; we feel heat and cold, abrasion and softness.

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.

Gota de luz

Thu, 26 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Some words seem to be born of an inner and shared light…

For me they may arrive after the stillness of meditation; but just as often the softest and most human words are accompanied or are led by a melody. All creation is frequency, is a movement of waves, from the highest vibrations of quasars or atomic particles to the lowest throbbing of stars in their orbits.

Or, in our daily rounds, from the bluest light to the reddest, those frequencies of creation which our eyes perceive; from the whistle of a kettle or the hum of a bee to the drone of a bowed bass or the rumble of thunder, in frequencies which our ears perceive; to the cycles of ocean waves, whose interstices we hear as they crash to the sands, while their slow pulse, like the breath of the planet, moves through our bodies noticed, unnoticed; to the celestial hum of the earth spinning on its poles; to the year-long wave of a planet around its sun; to the millennial arc of a sun around our galaxy’s core, a music so slow that only the Spirit can listen, leaving ourselves to intuit from our cruder senses.

The Language of Touch

Sun, 22 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

The effort it takes to communicate with words…

A single picture is worth a thousand of them; and a single touch is worth a thousand pictures. If we have practiced all with good attention, then words become the lowest form of communication, they are heart and mind thrown at a distance to perhaps be caught, perhaps be dropped: certainly they paint only one-thousandth of a picture, or one millionth of a touch.

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.

Season

Wed, 04 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

With even a few years, the act of creation begins to blend itself with the feeling of loss, as the cycle of seasons turns round and round. Some traditions have seen the wheel as pain, where what is given is taken away, and what is made crumbles. It is perhaps the habit of all living creatures to associate the pain of loss with failure, and a single tear in the eye washes beauty away.

Sunreturn

Sun, 01 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I can feel nothing but joy with the gentle return of Spring weather, and today the breezes are away, the clouds hesitant, so the sun embraces you, unveiled and unrestrained.

If you stand for a moment – and we rarely stand for even one moment – the whole of the reawakening world flows around and into you. The heat on closed eyelids and lips warms the skin, and somehow penetrates more deeply, as though the frequencies of light soothed and charged the cells of the body equally, from the outside in and from the inside out.

A circle begins where it ends

Fri, 30 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday we finished another 8-week series in our Moving Into Balance awareness program. It is such a blessing to be able to offer small words, and have the hungry heart make of them great meals. Look at these amazing people: you toss out a few lentils, a few peppercorns, and with the human ability to create art from clay, at the end of a few weeks play, those lentils are the finest fare, the most satisfying, the most delicately flavored…

Small choices large

Tue, 27 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

It is common to be pushed from one course to another by discomfort, or pulled out of place by desire. Some traditions would have you separate yourself from those energies, holding to the center and less involved in those tides. By creating a distance between ourselves and the objects of pleasure and displeasure, we are able to recognize our habitual reactions, and by recognizing, remain balanced.

Through this practice, we humans reduce the anguish of living, and support a measured and compassionate response to others and to the world around us.

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.

Why sing?

Sat, 17 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

There is one line you cannot trace with your finger, and which you cannot follow with your eye. A melody, with words, describes the heart. And as the thread of notes is drawn out from the lips, drawn out like the finest line of silk, it is taken by the wind, it coils around a finger, it settles into residence in other lives, it is colored by sunlight and hidden by nightfall, it is raised up with a baby’s cry and deflated by lament for the departed…

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.

Distance, Health and the Life Virtual

Tue, 06 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Three nights later, and I still have not returned to an east coastal sleep pattern. While it is “only” five time zones away, the body and the mind take in so much information in such travel that the consequences are deeper and broader than the meager mind would care to admit.

Some years ago I spent six months on the island of Java, in Indonesia. The island rests on the equator. My home town away from home was Yogyakarta, in the central Java, a city of some 600,000 at the time, snuggled at the feet of Mount Merapi, an active volcano. Every once in a while the ground shook, and my Midwestern mind reeled as it tried to assimilate moving earth vs twisting skies. On the equator, the sun rose and fell with complete regularity, weighed heavily at noon, was broken by a thundershower at 2pm, and set peacefully accompanied by an soft offshore breeze. Everyone was a foot shorter than I was.

My House in the Sun

Tue, 06 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I built my house with the sun
there were four walls against snakes
empty windows to admit the breeze
no roof so the stars would visit me

The sky grew cloudy and rains came
one night I slept in water
then reluctant raised a roof
this is how I lost the stars

The winds descended from the North
I slept one night in ice
then reluctant glazed the windows
this is how I lost the breeze

A prayer

Mon, 05 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

In simple faith the kingdom is won. What money buys is bread alone. What money buys are the works of women and the works of men; with a simpler faith you win the spirit’s coin.

One teacher said, the heart can see the kingdom on earth, if the guise of maturity is stripped away. If the fears and angers we don like dust-filled clothing is cast away, we will be as naked of mistrust as young children. Then our actions are pure; then the whole world is ahead of us, and every beauty will have its day.

Spirit where spirit is sought

Tue, 27 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000

The mind’s eye is easily occluded, as simply and as naturally as clouds form and veil the face of the Sun. Or the eye’s perception may be overwhelmed by the colors and the kaleidoscopic movement of the world. If that eye is clouded, we experience the surfaces of things; beautiful, plentiful, absorbing. But in all places the eye of the mind can seek further, see deeper, and finally deliver greater satisfaction as one becomes part of the environment, and the environment becomes part of you.

Window on the Unseen

Mon, 26 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Like a curtain being pulled back, revealing landscape which has not been previously witnessed, stepping from a boat into the waters above a reef and turning your eyes toward the ocean’s bottom opens a window on a world which could not have been imagined had it not been seen.

Had it not been seen, the language of the sea would continue to be the language of wind and waves, and weather that sweeps in on predictable currents, and the traffic of human hulls from one dry landing to another. Here, however, the life which moved undetected beneath our domain… one glimpse adds new words and new harmonies to the music of the planet, making one both smaller and larger at the same time.

The Face of the Moon

Sun, 25 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Above the slopes of the eastern mountain, the moon rises; it is nearing its seven-day size, waxing to half light, half darkness. The light of the sun as it sets strikes the dusty surface and, without atmosphere to impede, reflects back to our earth, in a delicate choreography which changes each minute and each day.

Today we drive to the height of Haleakala, as it rises 20,000 feet from the ocean floor, then 10,000 feet above the level of the sea into the tropical sky. Measured from its roots to its peak,it is the highest mountain mass on the planet. We climbed from tropical warmth into subtropical slopes, where cattle and plantations sprawled; through eucalyptus groves whose leaves perfumed the air and shaded the car; into sparse grasslands dotted with gorse and scrub; into the clouds…

Harmony

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

The heart is torn by wind. When the heart-wind rises, true words are taken and replaced with falsehoods. That is the way of the wind. It is harder for the one afflicted, even, than it is for those he or she accosts: the heart is torn by wind, and the words and deeds which proceed from that turbulence further nothing.

Some words that helped me tonight…

“Being in harmony does not mean that we do not disagree or make mistakes and miss opportunities to understand one another. It means that we are doing our best and there is no division or split within the Sangha. We are sincerely practicing the way of liberation and peace for ourselves and for each other. We never forget our commitment to each other, our commitment to ourselves to practice mindfulness night and day, dwelling happily in the present moment. That is the teaching of the Sutra on Knowing the Better Way to Live Alone. Harmony is our daily practice; it is our most essential practice.”

~ Thich Nhat Hanh, Joyfully Together

The other world

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

I took some time to gear myself up a bit, and swam out to the lava point at White Rock Beach. I had been practicing snorkeling in the shallows – never having been a water person, further and deeper can bring me closer to the edge of comfort, and unfamiliarity with the techniques and the gear kept me diving, rising, being pushed in by the waves, and drawn back out by the wave-return.

Earth

Mon, 19 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Some two thousand five hundred miles from the coast of California, a “hot spot” in the floor of the Pacific ocean has jetted matter from the heart of earth toward the sky. It passes through cooling waters, and becomes a cone that, over the millennia, breaks the waves and rises thousands of feet above the surface. Unstable, it erupts, explodes, sloughs new earth down the slopes to consolidate, hissing in the sea.

Whalesong

Mon, 19 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000

“I’ve never considered myself a spiritual person, but the first time I stopped the boat above a singing male, and dropped the hydrophone in the water…”

Then there is a pause for words, which are not available. This is the well from which the poets draw water, the place beyond words, where words alone are required but will never be adequate. The guest at my cousin’s party spoke of arriving here a few years ago, and beginning a water tour company with her husband. Maui, as it happens, is something of a sacred site for the whales – what else but a sacred site when such large populations congregate here, as compared to other Hawaiian islands?

A Recollection

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

There was a time when I was young, I must have been 3 or 4 years old, when my parents would take us to the inland sea.

We lived in Michigan, on the Upper Peninsula, a short detour north, as it happened, in the long run of our lives; we lived in a rambler whose color I can’t recall, with a field out back that was huge to young eyes, and a cherry tree that bloomed in the Spring and gave fruit in the summer. The snow was deeper than I was tall. The drifts of snow collected by the trucks were small mountains which tried their best to hold out til the next winter season – like snails caught on the flats between tides – and some times they thought they would succeed, and sometimes we did, too. The entire world smelled of pine, or a certain kind of grass, or a temperature of air. And my parents, who were struggling to raise four children, to keep a house in the high north, and be part of a community whose first language was Finnish – they went in search of a vista, of wind from elsewhere, of open space.

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.

The Best of Intentions

Mon, 12 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000

A word from the wind at the window pane the winter’s come to stay awhile the heart longs for heaven the heart looks for sun but this song is sung alone

That’s all right there’s a sad kind of sweetness in a song or a sweet kind of sadness that carries you along from the best of intentions that gently go wrong to saying sorry as though they owed you something

Choosing Light

Sat, 10 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I appreciate all the more how cultivating the habit of choosing Light instead of confusion changes not only my inner world, but paints the external as well. Early morning yoga feels to me as though I myself, infinitesimal against the backdrop of planets and galaxies, and infinite tracts of empty space, am the agent of sunrise: I lift my arms to praise the morning, and we move into the light of the sun.

Distante mas não longe

Sat, 10 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Além do tecido da noite, meus queridos, brilha a luz. Sei, pois a noite está furada que nem com agulha, e as faíscas azuladas que vejo… ah será que são únicos estes Sols, desconectados um do outro?

Que nada, atrás daquele tecido escuro persiste a verdadeira Luz… bem como, atrás dos corpos e as mentes que nós vestimos (para ter algo tangível que podemos tocar, com orgulho ou com vergonha, dizendo: Ô! Oi! Olhe só: Eu!…), atrás destes véus superficias, sim, há algo tão grande, maior até do que podemos permitir existir… ou minimizar, meu colega, ou expandir, explodir como um sol.

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.

Good results with alternative technologies

Sat, 03 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Been writing over in the Odonata sphere tonight. I continue in this web journal, a journey of personal inquiry and spirituality, carrying an undying (if vain) hope that Señor Manuel will be back to join me some time… Eh, Mañuel, puedese hablar español también, amigo!

While the words here reflect an individual path, I have also begun to keep a day-book, with other members of the Odonata Ecovillage project, to track communal growth and inquiry, and to detail how that amazing, challenging, and already rewarding work is progressing.

Practice

Wed, 31 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

The earth turns toward the sun, the wake-up alarm rings; the cats begin to mill about the bed, waiting for their food; traffic begins to burn its way toward places of employ; a day begins.

The first moments of one’s day are the moments before the universe was created: all of life is waiting to be defined. In sixty seconds, or one hundred seconds, you are with the Creator, and invite the day to become what it will be.

Hope as a product

Mon, 29 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

The companion piece Your Son Out There is a song written a year ago (or so), when yet another wave of military and civilian deaths spread across the Iraqi sands. Sand is thirsty for any kind of liquid, sand receives water from the sky or from the air itself, with gratitude and with greed. But blood? Blood falls on the sand and does not vanish. Blood never vanishes, how could any leader ever imagine it might?

A short hiatus

Sun, 28 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

A lot of good energy was directed to other pursuits for a few days. Our intentional Community, Odonata, offered it’s first evening in the Sacred Music Series, concerts with musicians whose art is devoted to the spirit through music. Sitartist David Pontbriand and tabla player Amos Libby entertained some sixty people at the Yoga Center of Newburyport, an inspired evening which took all in and sent them home with good grace.

Another cat story

Sun, 28 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

The real significance of a pet staying out of doors much longer than anticipated – a cat or a teen, let’s say – is in remembering that the whole of this one short life is taken in through five (or more) senses and played out inside of our own being. It is the interplay of electrical and chemical energy in the cells of our bodies that is the magic of our existence, and a lost cat…

The Archer's Aim

Tue, 23 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

The archer strengthens the bow arm, grips the leather, nocks an arrow, and bends the sinew to the corner of the mouth. Breath enters as the bow is drawn, breath is stilled as the arrow is poised for flight, and all is released together. Release.

And the arrow, willed to its destination strikes home.

Meditation is the arrow on the string, and the fingers which hold it; it is the arrow in flight, and the fingers which let it go; and it is the arrow arriving at the heart of the archer.

Prayer flags on the winds of thought

Mon, 22 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I received a gift from a student, Brian, who recently concluded our Moving Into Balance health and awareness program. Every participant brings such gifts to the group – each brings the gift of him or her Self, all the challenges they face, and all the victories they achieve; but here was a special gift, a book about the Prayer Flags of Tibet.

One passage struck me, that I wished to share: with a gentle pen it draws the line between structure and freedom, where the flow of grace is all-important, while the form through which we are accustomed to meeting that grace is perhaps less so:

Sri Aurobindo: the Genius of India

Sun, 21 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

A beautiful (public?) video from the Aurobindo Press in Pondicherry. My gratitude and acknowledgement to Richard Pettinger (WriteSpirit.net) for finding this entry on YouTube, and sharing with us.

"[Ancient India] saw that the complexity of the Universe could not be explained in the present terms of Man, or seen by his superficial sight: that there were other powers behind; other powers within Man himself, of which he is normally unaware. That he is conscious only of a small part of himself; that the invisible always surrounds the visible; the suprasensible, the sensible; even as infinity always surrounds the finite. She saw, too, that Man has the power of exceeding himself…" ~ Sri Aurobindo, early 1900s

The brightest star on the coldest night

Fri, 19 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

The night is cold, and because it is cold, the air is clear; it is a northern night. With the car turned off, and no light yet in the house beyond, the stillness seems to descend, as though stillness were a thing of the heavens – is it not? – a tangible substance, instead of the lack of one. The ancients knew there was an Ether; we proved that their Knowledge could not stand side-by-side with our Fact, so the tangible stillness vanished, leaving behind only a trace of memory.

Good ideas

Thu, 18 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

While staying at the Verite Guest House, in Auroville, we were able to practice intentional small-footprint living. That “footprint” is more than where we physically step and leave a trace, but the cumulative and extended affect of our living, from food consumption and by implication food production and distribution, to energy consumption and its similar chain of delivery from source to our hands, to the consumption or acquisition of goods, whose origin is more likely than not an Asian city.

Violence

Wed, 17 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

There are many pleasant notions that present themselves, on one’s walk through any given day, present themselves like flowers holding their faces to the summer sun… should you choose to look at them, they are there.

To disemburden the heart requires practice, however, and patience, as well as a disciplined mind to keep cloud or eclipse away from those moments of ease. Cloud will come, of course, it always does – let it come, but in five minutes, I am busy with a flower – which makes it all the more important to remember sun, flower, embrace, release, and renewal, to remember that they exist, or risk ingratitude for the gift of life.

A Spoken Tour of India

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

For those of you who have been following Manny and my trajectory from Massachusetts to India and back again, and are not rooted somewhere half-way ‘round the world, I’d like to invite you to join us for an evening of pictures and stories.

This Saturday, January 20th, at 7:15pm at the Yoga Center of Newburyport, we will offer a warm cup of Masala chai accompanied by some good travel, laughter and stillness and smells and sights and sounds of another land… and perhaps a whiff of another way of being.

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.

Parables for Cats

Fri, 12 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

When diving under the bedcovers for a place to snuggle in warmth and security, be sure you don’t crawl through a tiny opening in the duvet slipcover instead. Think lobster trap.

When exploring, if you jump into a kitchen cabinet where the plates and cups are kept…

… should you jump into a kitchen cabinet – perhaps should is a better conditional here – at head height of an adult human, quiet as a cat, and the door to that cabinet should somewhat surprisingly close, don’t just sit there. Make a little noise. People are looking for you.

Mantra (as it should be) revisited

Sun, 07 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

A song was running through my head all day today, a thread of sound sewn from the inside out, arriving at the inner ear audibly enough that I began to sing along… and so the music, which had already been part of the world, returned to it. What we take into us, changes us. What we allow into ourselves physically alters us, affects the way in which we think, the ways we feel and automatically interpret events, and therefore the ways in which we respond. Every sound takes root in the inner ear, and every smell takes root at the base of that sense. Everything we see is imprinted upon the inner eye, and is remembered in that vast – infinitely vast – record which is our conscious and subconscious mind. Everything we touch is recorded in the memory of a nerve, in the flow along an energetic channel.

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.

The Language of Dance

Fri, 05 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

The trail which brought Manny and me to Auroville had continued west from Pondy to Mysore, to the Tibetan Settlements near Kushalnagar, over Karnataka’s Western Ghats, to fall (rather heavily) to earth on Goa’s southern beaches. Good relaxation, if a little empty after the heights of spiritual and community travel we had engaged in to that point. Palolem beach was beautiful, and completely built out for the tourist season, about to break on the beach like a tidal wave.

A Few Words Draw You Back

Wed, 03 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Manny and I received a kind note from Sonum, our hostess and guide during our stay at the Tibetan Settlements in Bylakuppe. At the time of our departure, we had spent much of several days in her company, given a walking tour of the monasteries and the farmlands in the area. We left a little money – the only thing we had to offer as a gift, a kindness for her kindnesses – and hoped that it was received in the spirit it was given.

Because you didn't ask

Sun, 31 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

The memories rise unbidden – they are always rising, bubbles of air surging from the depths to the surface of the sea; or stones borne skyward in similar offering, caught in the slow and seasonal currents of frost in farmer’s fields – as if by some anti-gravitational magic, the memories rise out of some ancient volume of a life and appear as a surprise, a bubble to burst, a stone weighing the open hands of the mind.

Your Son Out There

Fri, 29 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

The boys are taking numbers
to stand in line again
born with an open hand
which of them will be men today
and draw a card that wins?

They’re looking for a future
looking for their rising star
to shine above the fields
a voice shouts from the doorway
“C’mon in, boy, you’re hired.”

They say that in my country
when the market’s weak there’s war
and our coin is thin, my friend
dig a grave for the bravest ones
in endless waves of sand

A flower the color of silence

Thu, 28 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

The Indian master Osho spent most of his life seeking an unshakeable truth, in every conceivable branch and nationality of psychology or science of philosophy, following the traces of a Path walked and illuminated by spiritual teachers throughout history, following their practices with his own practice, taking their experiences and making his own experience. His methods were nonconforming at best and, following the tendencies of the 70s and 80s, subversive at worst, simultaneously earning him praise as an enlightened teacher and derision as a dangerous lunatic, the perspective depending to some extent on how dogmatically the person making the evaluation clung to ideas which he or she had never challenged.

The great silence

Thu, 28 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Silence is usually understood to be something negative, something empty, an absence of sound, of noises. This misunderstanding is prevalent because very few people have ever experienced silence.

All that they have experienced in the name of silence is noiselessness. But silence is a totally different phenomenon. It is utterly positive. It is existential, it is not empty. It is overflowing with a music that you have never heard before, with a fragrance that is unfamiliar to you, with a light that can only be seen by the inner eyes.

A flower the color of history

Tue, 26 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Every day should surrender a small jewel, something new and intriguing for the body or the mind. Every day does, unless you have been sleeping. I woke today to page 122 of the hardcover edition of Silk Road Cooking, by Najmieh Batmanglij:

Saffron
Long treasured as a medicine, perfume, dye, and seasoning,saffron consists of the golden stigmas of the autumn-flowering purple crocus, Crocus Sativus. It takes the stigmas of 75,000 blossoms – an acre of flowers – to produce one pound of the spice. These must be picked from the crocus by hand, making saffron, currently selling for about $55 an ounce, the most expensive spice in the world…

Water of Life

Sun, 24 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

The beauty of the subtropics – as I experienced them for years in Brazil, and on other journeys far and away…

… and now I understand that I was making a home of the Earth, not a home of

- Spencer, New York, where I was born at the foot of a minor tree-crowned mountain;
- or Ironwood, Michigan, where the winter snows drifted to the eaves of our house;
- or friendly Saint Paul, Minnesota, whose lakes were diamonds in the summer sun;
- or tiny Souris, North Dakota, an islet adrift in a sea of green;
- or jazzy Chicago, Illinois, its colors and its black and its white;
- or halus Yogayakarta, Java, its ancient gods and modern desires;
- or Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, where my adulthood was born;
- or Boston or Byfield, Massachusetts, where my affluence came and went;
- or Auroville, Tamil Nadu, whose galaxy of energies called as if by gravity…

A litany of grounds that received my footprint, but were places on a larger map, one with fewer constraints on patterns of thought, and which tries to cover a globe of human understanding, human reaching, and human almost-attaining…

Water of Sorrow

Sat, 23 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a song for the water of sorrow
and a song for the fire of pain
a song for the love that you’ll meet tomorrow
and one for the touch of skin
ah, life gives us songs to sing

Can you count how many times
you’ve held pleasure in your hands?
Open your fingers in the evening light
watch the water disappear in the sand

A breath is a wave you can drown in
it can whisper you out to sea
rock you up and down in its arms
like a mother sings her baby to sleep
ah, life is a song to sing

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.

Whether

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

At the risk of becoming a Byfield Weatherbug, I’d like to report that the day has begun with mountains again. To the East, a layer of clouds – which is so similar to yesterday’s formation that now I am thinking it must be ocean-bound fog – rests upon the Earth’s horizon like a ridge of Montana, which overnight had walked to the Atlantic, an augury which would make this Macbeth’s hair stand on end, if it weren’t already so stood, and if he had been visited by three crones in recent memory.

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.

Sunrise

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

The earth turned toward the sun at the same speed as always, but this morning the sun was veiled behind a curtain of cloud, which moved slowly west over the water toward our small patch of land.

So the eye of the day – in Bahasa Indonesia, the sun is mata hari, quite literally the eye of the day, a beautiful image made language, that the day looks down upon us with warm companionship – the eye of the day opened on the northeastern coast of Massachusetts a little later than usual, as though cresting a second horizon, a lovely late false sunrise above what appeared to be mountains, mountains which had appeared overnight.

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.

Trajectory

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

I met Manny last night – the first time we have really sat down together since our return to the States. After 30 days of intense travel, having shared the floor of the experience, as it were, as well as visited the sky, it was an easy hour which stretched to two, speaking about nothing much.

But the current which flows under words makes the words redundant, or perhaps they are a small harmony in a greater music, so what is shared and what was shared is finer than the inaccurate sounds we make around this topic or that topic. To share the experience of anything with anyone means that you each carry those days within you, a living memory which is reactivated when you meet, whenever you meet.

"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.

According to the Mystic

Mon, 11 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

As there is a category of facts to which our senses are our best available but very imperfect guides, as there is a category of truths which we seek by the keen but still imperfect light of our reason, so according to the mystic, there is a category of more subtle truths, which surpass the reach both of the senses and the reason, but which can be ascertained by an inner direct knowledge and direct experience. These truths are supersensuous, but not the less real for that: they have immense results upon the consciousness changing its substance and movement, bringing especially deep peace and abiding joy, a great light of vision and knowledge, a possibility of overcoming the lower animal nature [within us], and vistas of a spiritual self-development which without them do not exist.

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.

Thank you India!

Tue, 05 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Manny Muros:

It is 4:30 am and I am at the Bangalore airport, tired, red-eyed, and feeling both completed and exhausted…. My heart is full of gratitude…. I had spent the previous night in a sleeper bus (12 hours) traveling from Goa to Bangalore….. I can feel my breath slow and calm, deep in my belly. There is very little energy/tension in my being.

There is a European woman sitting next to me holding a book from Sri Baba avatar. Her eyes remain close for quite some time as she listened to a CD. When she opened her eyes and made contact with me I asked her if she had been at Sri Baba’s ashram. She answered that she had just completed 13 days there and then asked, Who are you? …. She went on to tell me that as I walked over to sit down next to her, she felt my vibration engulf the room and she saw a vision of Shiva dancing as her eyes closed in contemplation… and then she asked again, Who are you?… What a gift to be acknowledged in such an unexpected manner!!!

All part of the same melody

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

I expect that, having passed my bedtime by several hours now, I am exempt from morning yoga. There are some things you really must not allow to be pushed, though – the least effort is spent maintaining a ritual, then the ritual helps maintain everything else (such as reasonable sleeping hours and subsequent mental and physical health…).

However, having played one of the songs written in Auroville for Aurelio and Charles, and having unfortunately missed doing the same for Bhavana, who really deserved to be in on the farewell recital, I promised to record it and send it along. So, in retrospect… what amounted to a fairly quick recording session, rocky start to weary finish, using Garage Band on the Mac, several takes, several tweaks and some technical wiggling got it all up on the web and mailed off to friends abroad.

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.

Stories by Vitthal bear retelling

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

Mrs. Rat

Mrs. Rat was a good business woman. She ran a successful vegetable stall by the roadside. It was called “Cosmic Vegetables”. Sometimes she would take the day off, and then hang up a somewhat curious sign which read:

Closed.

We have no mistakes today. This is due to the absence of mismanagement. If you must have mistakes, please go elsewhere. Here no mistakes or mishaps.

For the Cosmos – Amrita Rat.

Eating to Live

Wed, 29 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

The grace of going away is that your eyes are refreshed for when you return. What you see once in your daily, then see again and again, gains a transparency, loses its edges, so that after a time it is no longer visible at all. This is to be expected: our senses are used to protect us and to bring us to food, and stimuli which have been identified, processed and cataloged need no longer occupy the mind, and are let go. Background noise that needn’t be listened to.

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.

Creation

Fri, 24 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

The pattern for everything in life exists – within everything that exists. The strength of modern scientific process which seeks to name all things, giving them genus, order and phylum, or physical properties which can be described by the arc of an equation, carries its own limitations: by disconnecting one object from another, we gain control over it, we see ourselves acting upon a unique object – for the sake of argument, oil – while conveniently blinding ourselves to the fact that everything – everything! – is interconnected, socially, politically, and physically. Burning a gallon of oil here moves a dollar from my hand to the hands of another… and another and another. Those dollars transform the face of a desert, into a garden of wealth and into a cataclysm of civil war. A gallon of oil is a gallon’s worth of smoke, is a gallon’s worth of warming and greenhouse gases. A gallon of oil today is one gallon less oil tomorrow, and the day after and the day after, so the colorful streamers of automobiles heading home from work, rivers of aluminum and combustion in white and red, which repeat themselves in every city of the nation, in every city of the globe, from here to London to Moscow to Beijing to Kuala Lumpur to Solo to La Paz to Iringa… sooner or later the current of every single river on the planet ceases to move.

Fear of Cattle

Fri, 24 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

The weather having softened somewhat today, I fired up the R100 and took it out on the road to make sure my driving skills hadn’t deteriorated. I pulled out into the correct lane – that would be the right one this side of Her Majesty’s Commonwealth, I think. The shift from a 225cc buzzing insect to a 1 liter airplane also didn’t throw me.

The lack of horns was a little unnerving, however. How are you supposed to know where people are, if they are not constantly honking their location? After a few miles I realized that there were no other cars – or trucks or bicycles or motorcycles or mopeds or ox-carts or pedestrians or anything whatsoever on this excellently paved road – so I settled down into a pleasant late-season cruise.

Time for contemplation

Wed, 22 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Manny Muros:

I had been looking forward to my time alone but I’ve had quite a bit of apprehension about it. I have never spent this much time on my own. The four weeks journeying with Mark have been amazingly special. It was great to share the intensity of the travel and the constant humorous unknowns. We were always there to cover each other and a good complement for one another….. Now I have begun another more inner journey….

To Walk the Razor's Edge

Wed, 22 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I return from such a short time away, what might have been a short time away, to find that the leaves have all flown, and the slate skies of winter have taken their places at the edges of each branch and twig. This morning the wind rose up in the north, like a great wave coming ashore, and its voice spoke louder and louder in the woodlot behind the house. It’s word was cold.

From a Distance

Tue, 21 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

We are northwest of Shiraz and east of Abadan, flying high above impressive and desolate mountains. There is the long wall of a range to the west, separating this mountainous land from the plains and the deserts of what I believe to be either Saudi Arabia or Kuwait. Everything appears to be dry as dust, with only one or two minor roads plying their way among ridges – some capped with snow and presenting what seem to be small patches of scrub trees. We are above Pakistan, I think, and I can’t imagine it would be a welcoming place to travel, especially as an American.

Guru

Mon, 20 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

What word to use to describe travel in India…? Imprecise? Is it a process of approximation?

No, any word that scorns this travel is missing the heart of the matter, it is missing the syncopation that is dictated not by a metronome but by an emotional pulse that arrives precisely when it is supposed to, it is missing the winding currents made by the separate strings of the sitar, which may approximate the logic of Bach’s stolid instrumentals, but hits the movement of blood in the veins most accurately.

The Heart of Mantra

Mon, 20 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

A repeated word or phrase, spoken aloud or under one’s breath, is a mantra – the thought and sounds made again and again, until the sound itself empties of sound, and the sense becomes empty of sense. The boundaries of the word are broken, and the meaning of it, revealed deep within the sound and beneath your making of the sound, is infused into you.

Flowery words for saying, in the pragmatic language of Science, that through a repetition of sounds and thoughts, you create new neural pathways, create a physical memory in your nervous and endocrine systems, into which the body may relax: sanctuary.

Closing Circles

Sun, 19 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I guess if a circle doesn’t close, it is incomplete…? Does it lose strength? Does it deflate, or allow bad winds to invade its beautiful core?

Still, you run a finger in the sand, tracing the outline of the sun, or the outline of the moon, you begin with a point at the tip of your finger, then a short arc, a longer arc, a half-moon, three-quarters of the sun, and finally drag the fingertip back, back to where it approaches, touches, and completes the line; and you have made something that the eye can follow around and around without end.

The News of a Morning

Sat, 18 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Having finished my early yoga, I come from the room and enter the hotel courtyard, and the senses, which have fed me quietly throughout the night, fill with the picture of a Goan morning: crickets still sing in the cool temperatures, while a wide variety of birds welcome the day in conversation… saying what? All that chatter can’t be for nothing: Aaaah, it’s good to stretch my wings!, or Clouds overhead, maybe it will be cooler today…? and What’s for breakfast? Cricket?… at which point several crickets quickly silence their instruments and scurry deeper into the grasses which line the stone wall.

Widening Circles

Sat, 18 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday’s motorcycle tour of the closest beaches was such a success, I decided to hold onto the bike one more day, and take a morning trip further north, toward the ruins of the old Portuguese fort at Cabo-de-Rama, up past Agonda Beach. Manny had promised a phone call home at nine AM this morning, and as both traffic and the heat of the sun intensify as the day wakes up, we decided to split our paths today, to catch up later. I left Manny in the middle of morning yoga, and headed out into my map of the land, already extended by experience.

Bouquet of Beaches

Fri, 17 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Today we took to the roads of Goa; perhaps a risk to lives and limbs, except we promised ourselves to stick to the smaller roads. On “Main Street” – I had tongue-in-cheekily named it that after our first stroll among its multitude of vendors and restaurants, only to find that it is, in fact, called just that – we were able to rent a motorcycle for the day, starting at 200 rupees (about US$4.50) for something akin to a Vespa Scooter (49.9cc engine) and moving up as size and quality increases. I had decided that the extra power was worth a few rupees more, so we settled on a 150cc Beater Deluxe (not its true name), only to return it after wobbly riding one block out and somehow successfully navigating one block back on its damaged frame and under-inflated tires.

Travel "Yes"s

Fri, 17 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Some of the things we thought would work well actually did… and others we learned on the way. Here are a few thoughts we’d like to remember next time around. If any are useful to you, bravo! There’s some wisdom well won.

Nail scissors Useful for trimming all kinds of things besides your nails…
Flip-top toothpaste Small plastic jar fits neatly into most travel kits, no spill, no mess.
Leg-zip poly hiking pants Wash quickly, dry quickly, work as swim trunks, good for cool or hot weather… best buy all round.
Hand towel Works as a bath towel, packs light and small, and dries more quickly.
Yoga mat Yeah, well if I hadn’t had it, I wouldn’t have had a 30-day yoga retreat this trip. Feeling great.
BIC lighter(s) Local lighters suck. Incense or other combustibles. We did not buy other combustibles, but you might.
Pack umbrella When the monsoon hits, it is vital. Sturdy is better.
Useful Bags Bags are light, and a few different sizes to carry food or keep dirty-clothes are great.
Nylon/poly rope A few yards to use a clothesline in those frequent places without one.
Duffel bag Max is carry-on size (or tied-down to same). Folded in you backpack, use it to bring purchases home.
Qt. Nalgene Nice to be able to carry/mix drinks, like Vita-C drinks, etc.
Expandable Backpack Great to allow the backpack to grow as your belongings grow – or shrink when you swap stuff out to a duffel for travel home. If you can hide the shoulder straps, it makes it easier to get into (and out of) public bus luggage racks.
Skin Cream/Lotion or Stick Think sun protection, and skin repair… small bottle goes a long way. I’ve wanted sunblock a lot – it comes in a convenient stick applicator these days, too – and had to buy a cheaper brand for more money. Skin lotion I have wanted to use a few times, but didn’t buy any…
Lip Balm Great for the same reason, and I did bring that, gratefully.
Antifungal If you are susceptible… heat+sweat+reduced hygiene can bring a rash, and untreated those can get aggressive in the tropics. Better safe than walking funny (which is not at all funny).
Disposable Razor Two per month, depending on orneriness of your body hair…
Kleenex Pocket Packs I haven’t used mine, but could have a few times, when the Hand Method could have been supplemented by the Tissue Method. Some people suggest antiseptic Wipes as a better solution… but they are wet and heavy.
Bandana For light head cover, cleaning up, etc. Could take the place of a washcloth.
Pack umbrella If it is cool at home or on the airplane, a fleece has real value. Had we stopped in the mountains, I would have used it. Fleece can double as a pillow, too – useful and comfy, when wrapped in a cotton shirt or sari
Account numbers You can scramble them with a code… but have them along, so you can easily gain access to your accounts when you need to over the internet.
Small day-bag I had a sailor-duffle style bag, with a drawstring that cinches down, and a shoulder strap which pulls the opening together. Very handy, and I felt safer with it than with a plain bag – nothing a razor wouldn’t get into, of course, but it easily and comfortably slung under the arm and forward for good control.
Spiral notebook 5x8" is a good size, fits in a day bag easily, and a pen clips into the spiral for convenience. Names and addresses, notes… all want a good, collected place in which to follow you home.
Personal/Business Cards A friends gave me cards from the Odonata community – terribly handy, what? It made it easy to leave and take contact information.
USB cruzer This new USB technology allows you to load all of your favorite programs onto a handy memory stick. The size of a baby’s finger, these things give you 2Gb of memory – enough for all your work and to contain a huge number of pictures, which you can download from your camera and carry home with you (what I will do, when I leave my camera with Manny). I run a browser and email clients from this stick – meaning my personal information is never written to the local computers. Too cool. they only work well in the newer machines – but there is always a good Internet Cafe around with better equipment… and that is the only kind of place you want to use, anyway.

Palolem, released

Thu, 16 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Just before dawn only a few roosters have roused themselves – or never went to bed – and with most humans still in bed, I can hear the falling of the surf away here inland. Yoga is sweet and quiet, Manny still in bed; then a quiet seat in the restaurant gazebo and time to write. Sometimes day dawns with all the same elements as the day before, still something undefinable has changed, and today is feels as though loops of effort that were binding me to some way of being have dropped away. I walk to the beach, where the waves roll in at their same slow pace, one breaking every ten seconds, just about the length of a person’s deep breath. Almost no one is on the sand, the beach chairs empty, so I take up a seat and settle in for the morning meditation.

Travel "No"s

Thu, 16 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

A few thoughts on what has been less effective – in the practical sense – on this extended study tour to tropical climes, and which I would gladly let go on any return visit. While mostly personal preference, a little reality check for future travelers to India…

Water Filter/Iodine Bottled water is available almost everywhere, even in the nether reaches of the Tibetan Settlements, arguably the most remote space we were in this trip. If you are going to trek in the mountains, that might be another story… but I would think twice before carrying the weight.
Diarrhea pills Ok, you have to go prepared. But better preparation was to play it safe with foods, either who is selling or what you are eating. We stayed away from watered-down drinks and ices, and kept with good establishments and well-cooked meals. No problems yet… another prescription purchased but not employed.
Guide to India (complete) Lonely Planet makes guides for South India – I saw one, but not when I was buying, unfortunately – which is a third the size of the Tome of Tomes.
Bank of America All right, what the hell?? The single largest bank in America does not support Cirrus or other banking networks. Nice, good they are so important unto themselves that they don’t need anyone else (suond familiar, countryfolk?)… and I have been unable to withdraw funds from my account since Bangalore – where there was TWO banks (Citibank and HSBC) who would give me money. Ridiculous.
Solo travel on sleeper buses Who knows who I will have to sleep next to on my way back to Bangalore!
Skype headset Every Internet cafe with bandwidth enough for voice-over-IP telephony already has a better headset than what you are willing to buy and bring along. I wasted $10 at radio shack for something I haven’t and won’t use.

To be continued as our list grows.

More on clarity of mind

Wed, 15 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Just as you move into the body with awareness to free yourself from it – to no longer identify so completely with the physical body that your Self is veiled – just so with awareness you can lean into your thoughts, become intimate with the ways in which your mind works. Seeing your thoughts arise and pass away, you recognize how nebulous they are, how much a product of your own ego and your desires, and with a little practice you free yourself from them as well. The object of your attention becomes not the resolution of some perceived problem, nor planning some future which may not occur – you don’t give your attention to the results of some thought process – but watch the process of thinking itself.

Palolem, revised

Wed, 15 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

The waves amble onto the beach at a leisurely pace, one smallish wave every ten seconds, six waves per minute – as unhurried and undemanding as the restaurants or services here, a definition in action for the word languid. In some magical configuration of sea and sand, the waves which fall to earth are reflected back out to sea, like in some extensive classroom science fair: you can actually see the crest of the wave break, touch land, then turn and head back out to meet the next incoming swell. Quite hypnotic. Maybe this happens at all beaches in the world… but here the waves are so reticent to arrive, maybe the gap is great enough to allow one to see this slight-of-hand.

More on embodiment

Tue, 14 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

A common misperception of meditative practice is that its goal is one of disowning the body. That becoming pure consciousness – of finding this “I” which is beyond the body – is a renunciation of the physical and the sensory.

The deepest and broadest result of meditation is in fact the opposite. For the years you have been granted in this life, yours is a physical existence – you, like the metaphor of Jesus, are a child of god, are the Divine manifest in this miracle of a living, pulsing body. You, like the metaphor of Shiva and Shakti, are part of the Creator extended into this living miracle Creation. If you haven’t watched or (as a woman) been active in the birthing of a child, you might mistake life as something other than miraculous. You might get caught up in the quotidian, in the net of the daily, and forget… but grant the possibility that this dance of energy is not simply toil, and you’ll remember that stepping to the music is a joy not easily to be discarded.

Another Horizon