Tag: Love

Obituary

Will it only be a list of information, a collection of the external?

Born in so-and-so, to these parents of this descent, lived here and then here, and then here.  Worked as a nurse, a cook, an accountant, managed a dry cleaning business, taught fifth graders or at the university, produced movies.  (Your name here) loved dogs/cats, was notorious for having ice cream for dinner.

Or maybe include a little something more.  How you used colorful expressions – I need a  little alcohol in my radiator.  I’d rather see the devil come.  He’s dumb as a fencepost.  

How you instilled in others a sense of curiosity, wonder.  What your passion was, what made you feel most alive, what sustained you in difficult times?  What drove your courage, your work, your will?  What was the nature of your heart, your spirit?

In lieu of flowers, please make a charitable donation to the preservation of nature or the arts.

 

 

Refugees Welcome

There are the small crystals you left as blessings, tucked just beneath the earth.

There is the love you have for everyone you feel separated from.

And there are the invisible arrows that keep you on the path, your path, all your life, so that when other people try to yoke you with their doubts and question what you’re doing, you know enough not to listen.

The learning seems to come geologically slow, but you do eventually learn when to forget them and pay attention to the voice emanating from your center.  Through deep listening, through the acknowledgement of that voice, you come to know your center, and you come to hold it.  And the things you expect from yourself begin to change.

There are the great vertical stones you have glimpsed in dreams, and also the smaller, more rounded ones along the shore.

There are the bells on the necks of all the ponies, the raindrops, fall as they may.  There are the trees, connected – like all of us – in unseen ways by unseen roots.  There is the road, the path, your shoes, yellow rice, steam rising from a bowl of soup.

All the prayers you hold inside are on display in the world around you, before you.  You don’t need anyone’s advice to learn how to see.  You only need the courage and will it takes to look – that which you already possess, but do not always choose.  Its only requirement is that you choose it above all else.

There are places to rest along the miles of all your days, if you will only sit.  There are ferries to take you across all the rivers, if you will only board them.

There are ways to remember you are not your body, if you will only forget about your clothes and your appearance.

Allow yourself to sleep.  When you wake it will still be there: this yearning to bring all knowledge inward, this thirst to move on, out, through, up, into, from all the trials you’ve undergone.

Take your time, that’s what it’s there for.

Love returns to your heart as you walk to the ends of the earth.

Now, choose something to burn.  What will it be?

 

There Is So Much I Want To Tell You (Part Two)

There is so much I want to tell you about the middle way, about evenness, neither embracing nor rejecting.  This idea that everything just shape-shifts, and nothing is ever really gained or lost in the sense of how we define gain and loss, out of our profound longing for the security that absolutes appear to give us.  It turns out security is an illusion, so we might as well begin making choices aligned with our inner voice and dare to discover the truth of who we really are.

The world never stops sending us messages, if we might only find the courage and clear sight to receive them.

There is so much I want to tell you about wild horses, bows and arrows, primordial warriors, the retracting claws of mountain lions, about locks and pulleys, windmills, Tasmania, the alphabet, Maoris, archaeological discoveries, lost cities beneath overgrown jungles, the jaguar (he who kills with one leap) moving through the world alone except to mate.

It doesn’t matter what the song is, or if it’s even playing at all: it’s always there inside you, dormant yet vibrantly alive with the vastness you contain, the spaciousness around your heart that you often forget is there but then notice again, reminded when you sit quietly and take a long, slow breath.

I want to tell you about the marches of ants and the fiestas of rats, though you already know.  The unseen houses of cottontail rabbits born naked and blind, the smoky jungle frog and the violet orchid, the harpy eagle waiting high up in a ceiba tree for eleven hours to snatch his prey, like some avian samurai of the rainforest.  The love I have for so many people, and the brokenness I feel at having lost so many.  The visions I have of roads that wind through the countryside.  I see a rucksack, a hat, a walking stick.

Strange, how there’s no money in bending spoons, walking through walls, eating fire, poetry.

 

 

What is Possible

That moment when all the world is before you, vast, undiscovered.  When nothing about you has been decided, identified or known yet, by you or anyone else.  When your capabilities simply tear through the atmosphere, uncontainable, an afterburner of possibility.  When you may as well have been the one who first discovered fire. 

That moment when you come up over the horizon and ride the edge between this realm of forms and the realms of the formless, shedding the cloak of duality to receive the light of Oneness, transcendent of the sphere of human thought.  The energy of your cells burning – individually and collectively – like meteors across the cosmos of you, on a journey toward decomposition, only to be structured again by rebirth, transformed by incineration, alchemized by the whole cycle.        

Where is your sense of adventure, of possibility?  Why do you fear the things you fear?  Civilization is a blip on the radar of timeless eternity, humanity will rise and fall, and every condition existing within it will come and go, but what are we supposed to do with this information?  It borders on the unfathomable.  A meteorite collided with the Earth and formed this crater 60 million years ago.  Okay, well, let’s have dinner and go to bed, I have to get up early and go to work.    

So what might be a worthy use of your energy and focus during the flash of your sweeping microcosm of an arc of a few little decades here?  Do you endeavor to blow the doors off your life, throw open the windows of the heart?  Or do you turn away, forgetting that – beneath the clothing of your identity – you are the Earth, you are an expression of Eternity, you are one with the transcendent.

The challenges of working with fear, what is possible, and the ever-changing shapes of things masquerading as truth, never fail to astound, astonish.  For the love of all things holy, work on it now, because later you will be tired and clarity will not burn so bright.  

 

When Gravity Comes Up To Meet You

Strange though it may seem, when gravity comes up to meet you there is a floating sensation.  There’s a buoyancy in the way one’s bones sink into the support of the ground, floor, earth.  A buoyancy not unlike the one found in water with a high concentration of salt.  There is lightness contained in heaviness.

As in nature’s sanctuary, when gravity comes up to meet you, you return to your center and your actions take root there.  The microcosm of You comes more fully into alignment with the macrocosm of the Cosmic Mystery.

When gravity comes up to meet you, you locate yourself as if by compass.  Where does the needle point?  Which way is true north?  What might it mean to take a particular path in a particular direction? 

You hear the universal orchestra tuning up to play a symphony of eternity, spaciousness, presence, love – always improvised, never rehearsed.

How gently down the stream one might row one’s boat, if allowed to wander.

No Fixed Course

So there is the dog, the cat, the table and chair, books, photographs, keepsakes.  The peel of an onion and a bit of parsley on a wooden cutting board.  There is the hedgehog-like orange studded with cloves, the calendar on the wall, each week’s same seven days named after the planets of our milky galaxy.  There is each day, this day, the only day, ever always and once again setting this task before you: break open your heart.  Do your work, and let it be a work in progress.  Let there be no fixed course.  

There are the organs working their magic inside of you, the longed-for renunciation of all your desires.  There is the routine each day, to some the subject of fervent dedication.  And yet the routine exists within the construct of an erratic life whose days are lived out in a world ruled by impermanence. 

There is Nature, the greatest teacher.  Here are the qualities that show us how to live in this world.  Here is the music to be revered, the architecture to be contemplated.  Let it be softly observed, gently noticed.  Not studied wildly like some mad scientist yearning for discovery.

The Only Number I Still Remember

873-8480 you were an awful lot of eights on a rotary phone.  873-8480 I recite you over and over as if you were a chant, a mantra, a line from the movie Rain Man.

873-8480 I dialed you my whole boyhood to talk to Grandma Ruth.  I loved to talk to Grandma Ruth.  873-8480 restore my heart, deliver me, heal me, save me.

873-8480 you are the only number I still remember in this strange new world of the mind handing over information to technology.  If the global server crashed tomorrow, would we know who we are anymore?  Would our minds begin to strengthen again?  Photo albums, cameras, address books – sales would skyrocket.

873-8480 you lived on the truck route corner, the clatter and grind of jake-brakes vibrating the roof of the double-wide trailer home, moving the blades of the Dutch windmill pumphouse half a degree clockwise.  

873-8480 the covered porch where she taught me how to shoot pool, played the old 45’s, had a martini and talked about Paul Newman.  873-8480 the carport with her little yellow Porsche near her garden with the climbing string beans, the crystal bowl with peanut M and M’s beneath the lid, the little animal figurines along a ledge near the front-room ceiling: duck, whale, llama.  “Isn’t he the darndest thing?”

873-8480 the carved wood shapes of naked girls set into cupboard doors in the bathroom, made for her by a retired Army man, an ex-boyfriend who lived in an RV, Carl I think his name was.

873-8480 do you remember how she always kept Neapolitan ice cream in the freezer?  It explains her way of being in the world, how she lived: “a little bit of everything, kiddo”.    

873-8480 she called the couch a Davenport.  She called bratwurst Oktoberfest Sausage.  She read me Dr. Seuss.  She loved braunschweiger sandwiches with mustard and sliced raw red onion.  She called Richard Dawson the kissing bandit, wished bankruptcy on Wheel of Fortune contestants when they got greedy, went skydiving at age 72, called me on my birthday to tell me she had decided to commit assisted suicide through the Death With Dignity Act.

873-8480 hand me that box of tissue I can’t take it I’m vulnerable my heart might give out.  You’re a seven-number combination key on the lock-box in my memory bank.