Overturning the Bushel

Lux. Corpus lux! A folly of a translation, in service to the idea of we are but bodies of light. Or is it homines lumine, humans of light? Our bodies become an amalgam of stardust and intentions. Language itself becomes light. The gravity of Latin is ancient, its pull irresistible in the search for essence. These words! How far back must we travel to grip the soul of light? The gap between the experience of light and its description may never be closed. Words weep under duress of inadequacy, but they must make do. I can only blink my eyes and gape in wonder when it fills the around me, the sky above me, the heart within me.

Light all around. What was it like before humankind learned to paint it as it is known to modern man? Before electric light? As a teenager I camped one night under an unsullied canopy of stars. It was was enough to still my voice. My head filled with awe, dumbstruck by this highway of diamonds I never knew existed. A faint film of jealousy occluded my heart to know that long ago humans had experience of light never tainted by clever inventions. Jealousy because I wanted to know that, too. Such desire awakens to know these disappearing night skies because the universe turns fittingly. It is not due to artificial impositions of creatures who do not fully understand what they do.

Light reflected by water into sky. I laugh to myself. My fellow patrons in the coffee shop where I write don't notice my humor, or are polite enough to not stare. Do they know I dream here in the window? While I cannot see the water nearby, directly, it is visible in tiny slices if one looks carefully through the windows of the market cross the street. Some days there is no certainty if what can be seen is real, or just a figment. My mirth arises because I take comfort from the water in reality and in imagination. Water presents the light in an ever-changing familiarity of mien that we have never seen before but will always recognize.

Light. Where is this light we seek? How does it find us as it leaks through the slats, shines in the spaces between the leaves, illuminates our skin as we stand gaping under a sky so blue it makes the heart swell? This light, lovelies. This light that arrives and vanishes without warning. It fills the dreams and wakes us from the same, only to leave us confused and bereft but with comfort and hope. It will be back. Our light is fickle as we constantly hide it from ourselves. The soul can be a basket or a candlestick. To know in our lives the difference is a universal struggle. We are our own bushels, struggling to be overturned, that we may bring about the sharing of light.

Punchout

Kerchunk. With that sound my belly dropped to my feet. A few years gone, just like that. A new hole in the identity of my life.

The clerk drops the hole punch on the scruffy laminate counter between us. It lands with a bang, making us both jump. Louder than seemed possible, overheard over the PA system announcements and background chatter of the crowded licensing service area. She apologizes, chuckling nervously as she arranges my paperwork. I assure her it is no big deal, happens sometimes, right?

What I don't say is that maybe now I don't mind the most recent chapter of my life going out with a bang. Much better than a whimper. Certainly a tenfold improvement on the chunking sound the punch made as it bullied its way through my old license.

She hands over to me a thin sheaf of paperwork. On top of the sheaf is the license. There is a hole, oval-shaped, near the top of the dull plastic card. The hole is off center. Fitting, it seems. Not that the hole in the license is of consequence. Not now. Not ever, unless I was dumb enough to use it again for any purpose where it would be scrutinized. So never. I am many things. Dumb is not one of them.

The clerk tells me in a voice unexpectedly cheerful for the DMV that I am all set. Everything proper, signed off, good to go. She points out the temporary license. My very own register receipt verifying my fitness to drive in my new state. I can expect the official validation of my existence to arrive in the mail in about ten business days. Wonderful. "How ever will I survive ten days of marginal personhood?" the snarky question asked in my head.

"Easy answer," says the shadow in the back of my head, "in the manner you survived months of marginality before pulling the reverse Oregon Trail maneuver that brought you here. Numb patience and the art of non-thinking."

No comfort to be found in that pronouncement. I step through the doorway of  out into the bright, hot, muggy day. The humidity makes me breathe harder its so thick. I walk slow back to the car. The old license is in my left hand. I flip it back and forth between my fingers, a clumsy card shark maneuver. The license seems heavier. I have no idea what I will do with it. Unusable, unnecessary, undesired. Descriptions not lost on my weary soul and battered ego.

Bruisingly hot air spills out of the car upon opening the door. A veritable pizza oven on wheels. I wait momentarily to let the hot rush subside. No hurry. No place to go that requires my presence. Not yet, anyway. Standing in the searing light I'm staring at the empty car. No one in it except a passenger seat full of memories. The rest hot and empty.

Empty. Null. Void.

I glance at the license again. The punchout is a sharp relief shadow against my palm. Lao Tzu whispers in my ear sweet nothings about nothing. 

"Moulding clay into a vessel, we find utility in its hollowness." 

Sweat rolls down my face, stinging my eyes. Or so I tell myself. Maybe it is the pain in my heart causing the eyes to water.

"Cutting doors and windows for a house, we find the utility in its empty space."

My heart is a shell, but it exists. Like the clay vessel, it is hollow. As with that vessel, it is the void within that will ultimately grant fullness.

"Therefore the being of things is profitable, the non-being of things is serviceable."

Actinic light on a cerulean day illuminates the chunk of sky collapsing on my head. Words of a dead Chinese philosopher advise me to look deep within the emptiness of my heart to find a way back to life. 

License as talisman. The hole in this plastic locket a reminder to embrace the void within, and without. I get in the car and drive off to home, relief flooding my system. "It is useful. My heart is useful. It will be filled." The words are loud in the cabin of the car.

The license rests serene in my shirt pocket. My heart is serene inside my chest. Patience, and it will be filled.

---

Quotes in italics are from Lao-Tzu's Tao Te Ching, Commercial Press Edition, Shanghai, 1929.

We Are Light Made Solid (Sunday Meditation #36)

Day began for my house with a glow in a dim corner of a early morning kitchen. Cobalt glass lit from within by an opalescent white mist. I was hurrying through the room in haze of mental distractions and hunger pangs, I forget what I was on my way to do. But that blue glow arrested my progress, breath catching, and the ghost of my brother lit a candle in my heart.

Look carefully, look consciously, to find the light. It exists everywhere and nowhere, which sometimes causes it to fade from consciousness. Like air. Breathing is so fundamental to the course of life that distracted minds lose the ability to do it properly. Not unlike growing our souls without light. We forget to see it as did this morning.

The blueness in the corner radiated from a humble salt jar, silver cap on rich cobalt-hued glass. The glow was unearthly but I quickly determined its provenance. My kitchen is adjacent to a dining room by a wall containing an opening. The kitchen itself has no windows directly to the outside but borrows light from the dining room, which has three windows. The windows face south and west.

The light came through the dining room, illuminating the salt jar just in time to pull my out of my anxious head. Light communicates, it speaks in its own way. A brief rush of time as the spirit of my brother, and my family, was there for me in that blue light. The continuum of life in the corner of an ordinary kitchen.

A humble cobalt-colored jar, filled with the only rock, in its pure form, that we eat. These are not the materials of grand revelations, fiery visions, speaking in tongues. They are, like ourselves, of the earth seen. By light, I am privileged to view the earth unseen, and the spirits which inhabit it. Salt and glass, light and shadow, by these materials I am made whole, I am made human.

Discovering Light in the Flint Hills, with Ghosts (Sunday Meditation #29)

"What do you know of love?" whispered the voice in my head, ricocheting off the warp and weft of my mind to burst forth through my eyes and shatter on the back of my sunglasses. I was turning off the road, much to my relief. The arched gate of the cemetery beckoned, the orangey-tan dirt track leading me on. Beyond lay a sparse grove of monuments, blushed with moss and gleaming dull white in the soft sunlight of a Kansas spring. In a final burst of crunching gravel the car rolled to a stop. I briefly leaned my head on the steering wheel. I answered to no one present.

"I don't know."

I opened the door. The cool air of the Flint Hills rolled in to caress my face with feathery hands smelling faintly of stone, sod and ghosts. It was quiet out there, broken only by the subtle hissing of wind through the grass and a whirr of sparse traffic along the distant road. I stood up while taking a deep breath. My hand gripped the door frame. Thinking of love, or of what I did not know of it, made me dizzy.

Love slipped away from me again, a salmon evading the paws of a starving bear haunch deep in the stream. I thought I knew love but somewhere on this short road trip it came to me that it may be impossible to truly know something so much bigger than myself. So much more mysterious, arcane. Why this happened to me in broad daylight I cannot tell you. Perhaps the birds calling from the nearby trees knew the answer.

I asked them, nicely, and not too loud so as to avoid seeming rude. There was a burst of musical chatter, but nothing I could decipher. They gave me no counsel. The sun had moved a degree of arc, reminding of why I stopped here in the first place. I pulled my camera gear from the car and set off into the cemetery.

(It took little time to find a vantage point worth considering. There was a serendipitous line of sight threading through a cross, more markers, the cemetery gate, up a hill across the road and ending in a silo. I was surprised and delighted.)

The memorials were a curious mix from antique to new. Pillars, crosses, and slabs of marble and granite. In their own way all testaments to love. At least, I hoped it was love. I was seized by the notion that it would be tragic to carve all that stone for the sake of appearances.

I wondered, then, who would love me when I was gone. Who would care enough to erect a stele, provide a plaque and urn in honor of my memory. Staring past the large marble cross up to the silo on the far hill, a wan smile crept over my face. It did not quite reach my eyes. I wondered if pity made me feel this way.

(I set up the tripod with the pinhole camera secured to the top. My first go at it. This day would be full of accidents and revelations, I smiled to think.)

No, it was not pity. It was acknowledgement of a fact of my existence. Someone would almost certainly provide stones to ballast my remains, maybe even a cross. A Celtic one, I hope, or perhaps a megalith of bluestone with my name inscribed in Ogham runes.

"Do you think so, sir? Do you really believe that?" whispers again in my head. I looked up into the sky. I shook my head. "Yes." My voice sounded odd in the boneyard air. The funny thing was, I really did believe it. Perhaps for the first time in my life, certainly as an adult, I did.

(Advance the film. Check the level. Adjust the sighting. Open the shutter. Seven seconds. Good.)

Over a thousand miles and 47 years removed from the soil of my birth, I found myself standing in this alien graveyard with other old souls celebrating the knowledge that I would live as long as there were those who still remembered me. If I had thought to bring a flask, I would have raised a toast to our bones, mine clothed in flesh and those embraced by the sod around me.

(Advance the film. Check the level. Adjust the sighting after having nudged the tripod by accident, startled as I was by screech of what may have been a crow behind me. A lone truck downshifts over on the road, low growl bringing back memories of a long-ago road trip where I see the silhouette of my maternal grandmother against the side window. I wipe sudden moisture from the corner of my eye, and press the shutter release. Click like bones. Nine seconds. Click.)

Standing there waiting for the time to be up on the exposure, I decided that I did know something of love. Imperfect and incomplete, perhaps, but mine own knowledge. I know that I am loved. But the true test for me, the gauge and bellwether to guide me, is not so much the love I receive as it is the love I can give. This exhilarated and frightened me.

"How much can you give?" The voice, disguised as the murmur of wind-blown grass mixed with the songs of birds, asked me.

I let go of the shutter release. Images irreversibly burned into the film, to be taken on faith and unearthed later. The opening of that which seems tightly closed, to let in the light which provides form and depth to the shapeless darkness we far too often hold to close. We open, we illuminate, we develop.

We become, in the presence of light. We are formed, in light...in love.

"How much can I give?" I whispered to the bones and the prairie earth. A score of heartbeats passed. There was no answer, it seemed. I gathered my equipment and headed back to the car. The clunk of the door shutting nearly made me miss the reply when it came.

"More than you believe possible. Open your heart."

I gasped. That was it. I will open my heart, letting in others, forming myself in love. By such poetic measures we all become light. We all become love.

Hunter and the God

November 20th, 10:34 PM. My bed awaits.

Tonight, I came home from a dinner outing and errands, and found myself standing in the driveway holding a pie in my hands. The air was cool and crisp. I stood stock still, wondering.

Not about the pie, mind you. Apple, if you are curious, and about the size of a large hubcap. A slice will be breakfast tomorrow, perhaps with a slice of cheese.

What had me still was the sight to behold in the sky: Orion rising over the trees, facing Taurus the bull, which appeared to have Jupiter stuck in its horns. I was transfixed, wondering.

God on the horns, beset by the hunter. A metaphor writ celestial, just for me. My maternal grandmother, my G-maw, whispered in my heart. The voice of my brother lanced through my brain and I contracted around a spasm of loss, the point sharpened by the wrinkled  faces of my departed children glowing in the dim light of my mind.

Jupiter, Aldebaran and Rigel wavered briefly, little spikes of light coruscating out from them as I closed my weary eyes. The breath whooshed softly from my lungs. Two heartbeats later I opened my eyes to look back up in the sky. The stars and planet were still there shining down on me and my languid heart.

Just like them. Yes, just like them.

Light Switch

What flame will you seek?
When you can't push back the dark,
step outside and own the shadows
when the light is gone

What if those switches disappeared?
The streets cloaked in turbid black
and the curbs become enemies
in your panic-stricken stumbles

Will starlight fill your eyes?
Will it be your blanket
while you mewl into your fist
and dream of electricity?

Incandescence tags the civilized
But our eyes grow weak,
our spines begin to soften
when we forsake the night

Magpie Tales 132: Winter Wakes the Dreamer

Big Room, 1948, by Andrew Wyeth via Magpie Tales

Lord Jim's toes scratched the oak

wood grain muffled by prickly wool

standing alone in the sepia morning

House and body alone shared the tick-tock

counterpoint to the impatient crow in the yard

whose runic tracks arced upon the snow

Stubble in one hand, glass in the other,

Jim pours another finger of wintertide light

Sipping slowly in the sun warmth and echoes

Unfolding of clocks, a padding on the stairs

He sets down the glass, turns and smiles at her

Winter fades and spring bursts upon his heart 

The Truth About the Shutter

August 22, 2012. 8:29 PM. An afternoon in the sun has left me with a headache, photos and questions. Overall, not bad.

The questions started almost immediately upon arising this morning. Well, maybe not questions exactly, so much as whispers. What do I need to do? What am I going to do? Perhaps critically, what do I want to do?

Those questions were not to be answered in the morning, not with a shower to be taken and breakfast to be made and eaten. It is that initial rush of activity that I have so much trouble initiating yet paradoxically it makes me feel so much calmer to get them done. It is a quirk of mine that I usually feel a free-floating anxiousness until I shower. The day just does not seem to get off the ground until that happens. Consequently, the later in the morning that I take a shower, the longer I feel antsy.

I really should put that aside.

But it was done. Then it was a few minor life management activities interlaced with a wee bit much of web-surfing. The drawback to that crow mind I have. Next thing I knew it was lunch time. Crept up on me again, damn it.

Even lunch could not remove that vague disquiet I felt. I ate alone, chewing and thinking, trying to put my finger on that thing that seemed to be gnawing at me. No dice. I took a short nap, thinking I was just fatigued. While I was refreshed, I still felt like I was missing something.

The cameras decided for me. Two in a bag on the floor, one sitting on the shelf nearby, two rolls of film and a blank memory card. I stared at the bags for a few minutes, restlessly shifting my feet while chewing my bottom lip. The sun tracked across the floor.

That was it. I needed to be outside, looking through the lens or the viewfinder, chasing the light, diving into shadow. I scooped up the bags and headed out to my car. While driving into the city I felt my gut unwinding. The stiffness left my shoulders. I parked at the River Market and geared up.

Man, it felt good. A nearby trail takes me across the railroad tracks and down along the Missouri. The light was good, big blue bowl of sky with just the right amount of clouds. Hot day, but breezy. The air was humming with the sound of trains and birds. All I had to do was look, point and snap.

The truth was clear. The shutter gives me a raison d'etre, if I may be so indulgent as to say. Well, one of many raisons, this fascination with light and shadow and the capturing thereof. Like writing, the pursuit of truth as I see it through the lens is vital and necessary to my general well-being. 

I may never achieve artistic or commercial success by fulfilling this need of mine. But that is not the point my gut was trying to make. It was telling me to get out there and catch myself in the light and shadows. This is the truth of the shutter.

Silver Light So Pretty

Selene smiles on me, her silver radiance coruscating through the leaves of an oak tree near to the yard. The quiet of the night only broken by the muffled laughter and talk from another backyard over yonder. The sky is not quite dark, a darkening blue on its way to indigo and velvet. Selene is a jewel, she is, one I wish I could wear on a chain around my neck.

It is comforting, is it not, this liquid silver light that bathes us all at one time or another? It is reflected fire, containing mystery without the overarching presence of the daytime sun. I left the house this morning in hopes of catching the sun at the right time, down by bridges, trains and the river. Alas, my ignorance of local roadways combined with a special event conspired against me reaching the destination I sought. I spent time driving around in the morning sun, but not walking in it. Not enough, anyway. So I returned home and frittered away a good portion of the day ruminating on dinnertime and what I would eat.

I put aside the notion of light for a few hours, thinking instead of ingredients and menus, entrees and sides. I pored over books on food looking for certain recipes and other ideas. The sun did its thing outside the windows, while the birds frolicked in the grass. Blue jay and starling, robin and sparrow, they all have a fascination for the grass outside the window near my desk. I watched them, I constructed a plan for my culinary adventures, then set out to forage for my eats.

The sun at that point was just background, just another factor in deciding to put on sunglasses or turn on the air conditioning. I was paying very little attention to it as I made the rounds amongst market and store. It grew somewhat warm here today, just enough to crank up the fan and tilt the blinds. The sun and the light slipped from my mind.

Slipped, that is, until I stepped outside this evening, as the sky grew dark and the air began to cool. It was then I saw the moon, or perhaps it saw me. The flash of light through the leaves seemed like a signal, a flare, designed to get my attention. I looked up quickly and a small sound escaped my throat. I drew in a breath. A gentle breeze ruffled my hair as I stood transfixed by the moonlight. It held me still for a few minutes. I lost track of time, my sense of place. I have been so busy lately dealing with change I have had almost no time for contemplation, so this was an old feeling become new.

The silver light, from the crown of Selene, is truly an unearthly beauty. It slowed me down to remind me that it shines on us all. So our hearts are not alone, although miles sometimes separate us. The human beings that we are, woven together by silver light so pretty.

Sunday Meditation #16: Patapsco Whorl

The shell was a thing of beauty, held in the hand of my beautiful daughter.  She found it at the base of a tree, after stopping next to this big sycamore and insisting I take her picture in the silver-white light of a mild winter Saturday afternoon.  The shell surprised and delighted us, as it made up for the lack of river glass and freshwater clam shells we had set out to collect. 

The sandbar I had hoped to mine for glass bits and clam shells was no longer to be found. The river was running a little higher than the day I had first seen it.  Perhaps the recent storms had even washed it completely away.  My daughter was disappointed.  In the morning, she had been talking about collecting river glass after breakfast and through lunch. So we trekked on, looking for other natural delights.

Then there was the shell in the picture. She 'oohed' and 'ahhed' over her discovery. I took joy in seeing hers. She bubbled with excitement as she brought the shell over to share.  I had never seen such a thing on all my walks along the river.  This was something new and fascinating. It helped make a good walk better. She happily wanted to carry it in her pocket, beaming as she told me she couldn't wait to show it to her mother.

On the return leg of our walk, we stopped at one of the small tunnels under the railroad tracks, through which rushed a brisk, cold stream.  It makes it way through the tunnel and spills out into a little pool before running into the river.  There were stones and moss.  Her whim dictated that we spend some time lobbing small rocks into the water, listening to the splashes and plunks.  She seemed particularly amused by the wet plop of stones into the thick beds of underwater moss or algae.

She found a rock she wanted to keep. It sparkled.  I mentioned it probably contained mica. She wanted to know what mica meant.  This led to a discussion of rocks and minerals, and the difference between a geologist and a mycologist.  It was she who gravely informed me that the latter was someone who studies mushrooms and fungi.  I was amused and proud that she even knew what the word meant.

We walked back to the car, in that way peculiar to kids which combines an amble and an eddy.  She wrote her name in the dirt with the rock. I contemplated the beauty of my legacy, and the shell in her dainty hand. The sun, the river, my lovely daughter enchanted me.  In a nacreous whorl the size of a cherry, I saw my place in this universe: to breathe, to be content, to know love.

Afternoon, On The Road

Feet treading brown leaves
Traveler smiles, not alone:
Shadow and hawk's cry

Sitting Beside The Tracks, Waiting. The Crickets Hum.

I'm here.  Not doing much, but I'm here.  Good thing I brought a hat.  The November sun hits low in the cool air, but it can still burn me.  I am waiting beside the tracks for the train whose number I do not know.  I suppose I'll sit here a spell and wait for the shadows to lengthen over the hill.  A tunnel bores through the hill like a wide-open vein.

---

Metaphorically, you understand.  The reality is that I am sitting on my couch.  Sundown was three hours ago.  the quiet in the house is just what I need.  I'm a little confused that it is warm enough that I have some windows open to catch the breeze.  Post-holiday fatigue has set in, it is a shade lonely here at Casa Del Gumbo.

But I am waiting.  That is no metaphor.

I accomplished a lot today.  I'll spare your the tedium of my Domestic God triumphs, let's just say a lot of ducks and a lot of rows now march behind me.  The two things I did NOT get done, however, weigh on my big noggin.  Here's what I did not get done:

1) Find a job.
2) Write something truly edifying.

It's funny, right now I cannot decide which pains me more.  I managed to get a resume out the door, but the 22 others behind it?  Nothing.  As to the writing, dear readers,  I'm in a pickle.  This is the longest drought I think I've ever had.  It has me worried.  It also makes me tired.

I have this recurring image in my head of popping a cork from a bottle to pour something, only nothing comes out.  Except a puff of air.  And the tang of desperation.  So, the glass remains empty in this most quiet of Novembers.

---

It's deep fall in the woods by the river.  I hear its murmurs, faint and silvery as they filter up through the barren trees.  The rail bed gravel is warm beneath my haunches, a welcome buffer against the slow cooling of the air.  The air itself is tinged with watery gold as the sun goes down.  The mineral tang of rock embraces the dusty grass aroma of the weeds on the embankment.  A soft, steady breath of cold air wafts from the mouth of the tunnel as I peer into the gathering darkness in the middle.  The rails, twin seams of polished silver leading to a mouth of gold at the far end of the tunnel.  I stare into the gold, eyes owlish with fatigue.

I place my hands on the burnished metal rail in front of me.  It trembles ever so faintly, but I cannot tell if a train is coming, or the earth is sighing.  I remove my hands, and wait.

Small Things 02: Fall and Light

October 15th, 2011, 4:45 PM.  Fall afternoon for the books.

Today, looking out my dining room window through which a gentle breeze was blowing, I was enraptured by the light.  Cerulean sky, white-gold light, and I gave my gratitude for witnessing both.

I know what beauty is, and I am grateful.

That Which We Told Ourselves Was True

Of all the things under the sun, worn seashells always made Paddy think of what it meant to live a good life.  Walking the strand in the morning, mug of coffee spiked with a little cognac, he always picked up shells no matter how full his pockets.  Morrigan, his grizzled and faithful Irish setter, had learned to spot them and often would bring him prizes she had found in the sand and seaweed along the tideline.  The rough textures and nacreous innards were yin and yang, Paddy thought. And who knows what they once held.

The wind was sharp this morning.  The sky was fading indigo tinged with a silver that dappled the breakers rolling in off the Atlantic.  Paddy ambled slowly along the scalloped edge of the wrack, Morrigan looping back and forth in front like a horizontal sine wave.  Or half-infinities, the man imagined and smiled at the thought.  Briefly he considered that his dog was tracing out runes and sigils like a four-legged shaman divining his fate.  If only he could decipher the symbols, maybe he would discover that path he seemed to have missed.  For a heartbeat or two, he considered asking the dog what she thought.  The absurdity made him laugh, the sound ringing in the salt air like iron bells after a long rest.

"What say ye, Morrigan?  Is this the way, lass?" he called out to the dog.

Morrigan lifted her snout from the small but intriguing pile of shells and bones through which she had been rooting.  She cocked her head at the sound of her master's voice.  Her deep brown eyes held his gaze, her nose twitching and she began to wag her tail.  The expression on her face seemed to say "I have no idea what you mean, but I'm happy to not have an idea!"  Paddy laughed at the sweet goofiness of it.  He grew quiet and turned to gaze out over the syrupy emerald sea.  On the horizon a freighter disappeared into the sky.

"I suppose your right, girl", Paddy said to himself, "Guess we'll keep looking."

Their shadows lean in the morning sun, dog and man reflecting each other, picking up shells as their footprints slowly melted into the sea.

Stars, Nodding Their Heads

In the gloaming, by the dogwood
they nod their heads, a zephyr's caress
like hands of a lover on beloveds cheek

Quiet paramours to the dusk,
fireflies' courtesans, or street mimes
There by the fence, bouquet on the breeze

In the garden, a pause of breath
for the night and for the lovers,
entwined hands and stolen kisses

On heaven and earth, they blossom,
throwing their souls to the wind
and their hearts into the dusk

In the gloaming, sun fades to mood indigo,
their bodies limned in pale silver,
Knowing life, petals savor the sweetness

Tiny Revelations

I found myself walking along the railroad tracks down by the river, Sunday evening.  How I arrived there was a bit of a mystery, because I couldn't pinpoint when it was I told myself to go there instead of going home.  Was it a conscious decision?  Not sure.  More likely it was some directive from the recesses of my mind, emerging from the deep dark like a whale surfacing in a channel between the floes.  Me, in my kayak, paddling fast to stay ahead of the bow shock and to stay upright.

So there I was walking and sweating in the heat, puzzling over what I do when I do stuff I don't quite fathom.  there were birds calling.  The river flowed liked a quiet conversation three stacks over in the library.  The gravel crunched satisfyingly under my shoes as I trudged down towards the river and then up the hill to my car.

Flash.  A moment of slow time when all was quiet.  The birds and the trees held their breath, as I held mine, and was flooded with the thought that I would rather know love for a lifetime than be a hero for a day.

Silence.  Heartbeats.  A letting go of ego...if I know love, then I will know life.  This is what was revealed to me.

Light Reading

A tribunal of candles sits atop the dresser, pale golden dancers washing the plaster walls with delicate light.  Their warmth, even in summer, a welcome addition and delight for the mind's palate.  Behind them to the left, tucked in the corner sits a small stack of books.  Journals, the handwritten relics excavated from a mind in search of its anchors.  The books glow in the light.

Shadows cling to the journals.  Profiles writ large on the wall behind them.  The pages themselves are orderly, but sport encrustations of tabs and sticky notes like bibliographic barnacles on bookish pilings.  The notes are but placeholders marking words, sentences, paragraphs that at some point in the past were deemed significant enough to warrant commemoration.  But in the now, they fringe of notes seems a reminder of thoughts unfinished, of tasks incomplete.  They have their own nostalgia.

The candle flames waver subtly in near undetectable currents in the close air of the room.  For a split-second it may have created the impression that ghosts walk in this room.  The notion does not seem so far-fetched.  After all, the journals tell true stories about bearing witness to spirits that were not for this world.  The tomes contain passages describing what it is like to have traveled out of the body and brought back sights and sounds and memories of love and pain from the other side of the astral glass.

The shadows dance gracefully around the journals.  They shimmy with a sensuality all their own.  Contemplating them thusly it is not outside of the realm of possibility that the shadows themselves are their own stories.  New tales from the heart whispered softly and with deep respect for the past from which they grew.  It is the candles that have brought out this quality, this idea of stories as entities existing in light.  The eye watches the flames move.  The mind considers the physics and optics involved.  The heart follows the shadows and calls out for a new epic of love, to be written in the edges between light and dark

A Stalk of Grace

I'm sorry, I know I have been ungrateful, frightfully so.  All that time inside my head, driven there by the cold and the weather and general disconnect between my body and my mind and them to the universe at large.

It makes me distracted, distracted I am a walking ball of distractedness.  Crow-mind amongst the glittery things that draw my attention, I let them draw my attention in a desperate bid to draw attention away from myself.  Because I'm tired of thinking about myself.  Look, a bird!

I said to me "I'll allot you five minutes to find some grace, and don't come back empty handed!" ending in a yell.  A quiet yell, but a yell nonetheless.

I took to the kitchen as I often do, because cooking good things to eat gives me focus and a way to slip out the back door and let go for a bit, focus, focus.  You know, like the Zen monks do when they chop wood, carry water.

Grace.  Grace?  Where in the world was I going to find grace?  I haven't had grace in the house since...well, it feels like just shy of forever.  Remain calm, no freaking out, just breathe, cut, stir, simmer, taste.  That's all I needed to do.  While leaning against the counter, in a lull between stirring and adding the next set of ingredients to the pot, I found grace.

It consisted of a stalk of celery, slathered with some peanut butter.  Just like my G-maw used to make for me when I was a kid, at her house for dinner.  It was simply good.

I hadn't thought of that particular taste treat in years, don't know what made me think of it then.  All I know is, standing there in the pearly north light coming through my kitchen windows, I felt warm and content, and I was thinking that, somewhere in this universe, someone wanted me to be happy.

Grace, stay with me.

Winter Poetry Slam: Patuxent River Meditation #7

I sigh, Luna smiles,
Ice mumbles among the rocks.
Laughter, awaiting dawn.

Winter Poetry Slam: Patuxent River Meditation #3

Rising Lucifer
shines the river silver-black.
I awake, in frost.