Archive | August, 2013

floating out

31 Aug

falling_woman_blue_skirt

Today I think I can

float off

into the cold darkness

of space and enjoy the ride.

I’m not stuck to this quicksand world.

Have you heard of a Tinkerbella  – or a Fairy Fly?

The mass  that is subtracted as either one departs

is too small to even be detected.

Don’t listen as I whisper

that where your skin begins, mine no longer ends.

I won’t mention to you

that the minutes now bend and stretch.

Am I supposed to ignore

that the floor curves under my feet

and the window sill goes wonky?

Yep!

Keep walking and look the other way.

I can’t imagine you are interested

that my face distorts in a funhouse mirror.

I am this face but I am not this face.

When I am smaller than a freckle,

I could fall through

a portal in the center of my eye.

No, I did not just say that.

Anyone else flying off the planet into space, today?

Anyone else watching the show of this world while losing the body?

Will you hold hands with me so I can steady myself?

Can we whistle together out into the dark mystery?

I am outside telling HAL that he doesn’t need to open the pod doors.

Hey, is the monolith an Archonic construction?

Can we go beyond The Demiurge?  Don’t answer.

With thoughts as immaterial as space dust,

flying off can be a lazy river –

river, water, ground, sky, space –

girl –

let go of the grass growing on the bank of the river.

Just open your hands and let go;

it really is as easy as that.

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going it alone (with others)

26 Aug

budapest metro

 

Without enough alone,

my tongue forms senseless words,

my body moves without purpose.

Going deep is a solitary thing.

Aloneness is  guarded at my gate –

Hours of no thing

I sew into my pocket by hand.

I would gulp you silence in a chalice –

I would lick you from the floor.

Beyond the richter swings of my own voice

I know how to read an empty chart.

 

i bless this semester’s eyeballs that window soul to me

I smile at elbows that protract upon desks –

propping up sleepy heads.

This is my promise to myself and you – I

sit alone so that we can gather

and do the work

and the work beneath the work.

I will still so I can move

I will quiet so I can make noise.

I will open my eyes so I can listen –

and in between our meetings

I will drink my fill of emptiness

so I can be full for you.

 

 

“Until you learn to inhabit your aloneness, the lonely distraction and noise of society will seduce you into false belonging, with which you will only become empty and weary. When you face your aloneness, something begins to happen. Gradually, the sense of bleakness changes into a sense of true belonging. This is a slow and open-ended transition but it is utterly vital in order to come into rhythm with your own individuality. In a sense this is the endless task of finding your true home within your life. It is not narcissistic, for as soon as you rest in the house of your own heart, doors and windows begin to open outwards to the world. No longer on the run from your aloneness, your connections with others become real and creative. You no longer need to covertly scrape affirmation from others or from projects outside yourself. This is slow work; it takes years to bring your mind home.”
~ John O’Donohue

 

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lab results

23 Aug

FreeGreatPicture.com-16106-hd-planet-earth-and-the-universe

yet it seems to me today that:  Miracles are just part of the flow.    The experience on this planet in our little lives has a baseline of programmed events and happenings – Volcanos,  snowfalls, hot days, and dead fish, mosquito bites, fresh fruit, drought, manna,  the holy grail, a vomiting cat…IT is everything.  Today it seems the whole kitincaboodle is a miracle.  The virus is a miracle as is the healing.  The heartbreak and the windfall.

So here is my try at a succinct telling of my miracle yesterday:

I got an email.  My college had higher than expected enrollment, they had some classes above the quota of part-time and I was offered another section.

Not only do I get another class, but this puts me back into the higher pay scale and makes life a go as we meet our expenses for another semester.

I did not ask and they did not tell me how this is suddenly okay despite the new health care reform whatever.  What I do know if that my little family has more time to work out the creative money flow for day to day life.

Again, always again and again, I learn the miracle was also the cutback.  The miracle was also the process of working it out.  The miracle was the trust.  The miracle was the love of friends and family in support of my journey.  The miracle was the contraction and the expansion and everything in between.

in reality – we can zoom out past the small wave forms of our lives and the challenges there and see the wave forms of the seasons, the  yuga cycles, the expansion and contraction of the universe – the multiuniverses in a bubble pattern in a larger stream of expansion and contraction – any snapshot view a separate reality.  If I am going to call a “good” thing a miracle – I also have to see that the “bad” thing is too!  Zoom it all down and find the flickering wave patterns I can barely conceive of below the atoms, the electrons, the quarks and mysterious vibrations we have yet to understand.  Pinging in and out of this world is matter – a slowed down version of energy.  Our world  seems an expression of light and its inverse dark – and nothing is not included in the miracle of that.

I show this video in my Composition class each semester:

This was made way back in 1996.  There are exciting areas to explore both grand and minute in size way beyond this quaint view – yet – still the scale of it all for me needs to be remembered again and again.  I can feel like this little marga life and whether or not she has a house, food, money to provide is all that exists in the infinite multiverses of matter and all its expressions.  A healthy dose of scale is always in order.

madeleine L'Engle

I love the Story I once heard Madeliene L’Engle tell  about her family.  I cannot find it – I’ve been searching, but to the best of my memory she said that when her children were fighting and all their problems seemed so big at home, she would pack them up in the station wagon with blankets late at night and drive to a dark mountain, and they would lay out under the stars.  Their problems would shrink in the beauty and tangible demonstration of the scale of everything.

It is such a wonderful paradox how we can shrink to an insignificant piece while at the same time expand into it all.  We gain it all by shifting the dial on the telescope/microscope –  with a simple little twirl on the perspective dial.

So a miracle in my little world in the form of an extra class to teach – a miracle in the fact that we are made up of the tiniest of vibrations that we don’t even understand – and a miracle in the expansion of universe beyond what we can perceive.  Humbled and Expanded Joy.

This is the short version:)

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sketching out life in pencil

18 Aug

drawing ourselves

My life is an experiment.

In the past two years, i walked away from the life i had known – and began sketching the life out anew.  Making such a previously unthinkable step accelerated my journey home.

My life has been a study on the flow of money, as it is for us all, right?  I’ve lived comfortably by the world’s standards.   But now the things that were a given for most of my life are no longer available.   This is closer to how the rest of the world lives day to day, but no where near the precarious existence the majority of humans content with.   But learning in this immediate world, I see Uncertainty is my teacher, and i have found that she is always up for a cup of tea once I got to know her.

Here is the scenario in this present day unfolding:  I walked in to get my classes for the fall to find that the new health care bill has changed my arrangements quite a bit.  The college has had to cut back adjunct’s classes and pay…

In short, the money issue will need to be figured out.

The experiment:  how to flow into whatever this pay cut means without attachment while creating a life that is sustainable, thriving, and beautiful.  What can I create in this situation?

An earlier manifestation of self would have jumped into panic and reached for anything in desperation…an unsuitable job,  a hasty move, I’m not sure;  I’m not that person anymore – haven’t been for a while.  I do sometimes wake in the night and realize in my rhinoceros mind is charging into heart thumping destruction scenarios.  That animal can charge on through – that is allowed – but mostly – there is an awareness of a net below the tightrope – i trust and step – and even if i misstep – i know i will land in the same substance that surrounds and flows within – or maybe better still I am actually a bird standing on the wire…I have wings:

birdon a wire

This is what I am getting at:  the magic of the human it seems to me is to not be a victim of our circumstances but to be a creator.  If I can imagine in metaphor all that i am and all that everything is, I draw the truth.   I am the rhinoceros – powerfully charging through – I am the high wire walker – I am the bird –  I am a growing tree that breaks through the atmosphere of heaven – my root ball, the earth – I am the artist – and my life is my masterpiece – not in a worldly viewed way – but in true eyes – a masterpiece of living this life out as presently and instructively as this sketched-out girl can do!

So in the dance of money – which some have spoken of as a spell which has been cast over the human race – how can I dance with these new circumstances?

What can I envision my life to be?  What now has room to arrive by this new opening?

I am calm, centered,  experimenting with doing the next thing as always with great trust.  I am a big earthen pot draining out self –  still and waiting to be filled with a knowing of what I need to know when I need to know it 🙂

“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart.
…live in the question.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Maturity, one discovers, has everything to do with the acceptance of ‘not knowing.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

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viscosity of words

16 Aug

Oil_Spill_by_antonij

It seems there is

a precious balance

to pouring motor oil

without a funnel.

Hurry,

and the pour swings out

in thick liquid swills –

missing the hole and

running down

the outside of the engine.

Go slow,

and you find

the same spilling sway;

the error to either side burns off in engine heat.

There is a balance in the middle.

It takes

my entire coordination

to adjust the tilt and

speed of the pour.

I –

a sommelier

for my car’s engine-

bent from the waist –

all points of my attention focused on the

delivery of the divine liquid

in the morning light

just to get to work

as a longhaired neighbor cat –

whom I call Esè –

gives full attention to

my movement.

He knows the delicate dance I learn, here in the pour.

This operation is silent

and serious,

and in this frame of mind,

I start to think that words are viscous

like this oil,

a delicate pour out of my mouth —

When I go too fast or too slow

they don’t land

and instead spill and burn off of you

in the heat of motion.

Let me

quiet – and

hear truth

beyond fast or slow,

beyond awkward hurry and

slow deliberation.

Beyond

hush and

yaddah yaddah

lies a language we’ve forgotten.

At the edge of our senses –

in peripheral shadow

floats a liquid language so free of weight it is

riding the breeze –

free from the illusion of a me

talking.

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a worm on cement in the sun

12 Aug

In november  when I started this blog experiment,  I was able to point through words to the pain that was playing out in my daughter’s heart.  I didn’t have solutions;  I didn’t know what was going to happen.  While we were trying to find experts and work with their solutions to such things, I also leaned heavily on whomever and whatever I could find that could point me to the deeper thread of this difficulty.

A word like difficulty doesn’t match what I am trying to say.   This raging time was messy, embarrassing, painful, relentless, hopeless in appearance.  Scenes of terror and rage played out in cars, parking lots, closets, mirrors, public places:  scenes of thrashing, smashing, ugly pain at top of the lung out of control hystaria.

My daughter had stepped beyond my reach.  I had never been one for Freudian theories, but truly, as the miraculous visit to a sane Psychiatrist revealed, a classic case of Transference.  Freud did know a few things.   🙂

Eden was unable to rage at her father because he could not listen nor understand her.  He also was not a safe person with whom to work things out.  He has a delusion of who he is, and in this insanity, he is unable to parent, especially in her crisis.  So she took the full weight of her rage and placed it solely on herself and me – the two  most critical  people who could help save her.  She took her rage to the brink of destruction over and over.  It felt like standing on the edge of the grand canyon, while she tied a rope around my waist and proceeded to jump and take me with her into the abyss.

We would resolve and come together but the relief would be short-lived when a word, a look, a call from her father would set it off all over again.

I  am putting words to this chapter, not to relive the past, but to recognize where we are today in contrast to the place we were  in November.  Now I can look it full in the face because we have moved into a new space.  I also visit from my now place on the path with assurance to the frightened me and to any  frightened souls of anywhere where the road gets tough.

Eden has rounded more corners than I can count without the aid of the pills they wanted to prescribe.  She has beat the diagnosis they wanted to pin on her, marched into her rage and out again.  She now relies on her own strength and the strength I am so willing to lend as needed.  This was not the only path through – it is the one that Eden chose.

I am grateful that I walk this earth to be here to see that hope can blossom out of hopelessness  in our little  story.

On our walk yesterday, she stopped to watch a worm making its way across the cement sidewalk in the noonday sun.  I asked if she was going to pick it up to help it not fry as so many worm corpses had done all around where we stooped.

She said no, i want to watch it, to see if it makes it.

And so we watched it make its way.  I was doubtful it would survive. I was wondering if we were just going to watch it die. But wiggle it did and eventually it slithered into the clean line of  grass on the other side, free from the relentless sun, free from the army of hungry ants,  finally burrowing into the cool dirt.

I expressed  dismay while she shared her knowing that it would make it all along.

Here now –  I express my dismay and knowing that exist side by side in me.  What we walk through!  How we help each other!

thank you. thank you. thank you.

Frying on the sidewalk or sinking into the earth, wiggling our worm bodies in joy – we make our way.

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zip a dee doo dah

10 Aug

this is just to say

that i woke up this morning with

dreams still as fresh as the bed and covers in the

day of what

i think of as life.

the dreams and new day swirled together in the morning light

in unexplainable ways.

i remember the

inexplicable dream that showed me in postage stamp

pictures the coming words of my friend

and I read them in my sleep.

the winks that overlap these days

are such a tender hug.  they say:

yes, you are connected to the flow of all.

yes, you have knowledge of whatever you would like.

and while that sounds grand –  for me it is subtle.

is it this way for you too?

a breeze, not a storm

a hug, not a thrashing.

it has always been here, this internal plug-in

and tuning back into it –

turning back into it –

is so familiar: it is pajamas, blankets,

tea with cream,

just a part that has always been there below the

crashy noise of life –

below the roar of  the maladjusted voice within the head

of worry, worthiness

fear.

-the soft kitten of me that is connected to larger me – connected to everything –

never left.

it does not throw a party, but rather smiles, scootches over on the couch

and accepts me in gentle return.

it doesn’t matter that i don’t know many things

because

i have access to everything i could ever want or need

from this place.

there are whole histories of lives –

whole cities of experiences – stored in a river

that i am a part of and dip into at will.

the trees and birds and light in the foothills of the appalachian mountains

offer me again a glimpse of a larger world than my flat-landed,  little corner.

i am beckoned into the woods here –

As I enter, without thoughts of I,

the life around me recognizes me as one of its own.

the wild is the same

as me.

bluebird

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talking to myself

7 Aug

recipe-box

I AM talking to myself – who else is there?

When the mind goes quiet, there is nothing to say.  often there is still a voice. Though

every time I log on here and write something – I AM someone different.

I stumbled upon notebook after notebook of my recipes – cut, copied, scribbled down with cryptic-to-me-now notations – instructions and ingredients for cooking.  I am no longer that person.  In fact, i have become a disinterested and perhaps even a bad cook.  I’ll say it, I AM a bad cook, now;  how is that even possible?

the hunger is for the thing which cannot be made. cannot be tasted.  that which we become.  oh no. that which we are.

i don’t feel any way about any of it. good or bad, it’s okay,  i am on the ride and not holding on.  This stance to life means every definition and behavior WILL slip away.  the “I am” ideas of me go, some quickly and some so gradually i never realized until they were gone.  cook, mother, daughter, sister, helper, lover, bill payer, teacher, actor, young, middle, old, spry, slow…

this lack of self-definition makes interaction in most places surreal.  when listening and watching without  “I am” statements to think or say,   i hear with new ears.  At back to school orientation – I pay the fees, smile, listen to the conversations that dead-end quickly for lack of connection – so many people giving reports of  summer activity which feel like listings of status – bragging hidden behind complaints – i see words as ribbons spinning in instead of out – i feel a pull of sadness for the masks and facades that people hardly hear themselves constructing.  I see the loneliness behind the wall.  and the ease in which they might suddenly let it all go.

what i see in stillness while still moving are the moments to help us all unwind the inward swirl through a laugh, through the eyes, a few words, a gift, acceptance.  presence helps us help each other to just be – together – in these moments.  I still myself to have this flow more and more —————>

In the night, when I realize that I have shifted from sleeping to some other state, where the mind is going through lists, dilemmas, scenarios, I am lost for a bit in the twirl of that and then just by listening as if I am someone else, what seemed urgent suddenly falls away into a dark room with the hint of first light coming.

Sometimes I hear myself saying an “I am” something, and I have to laugh.  I want to immediately say, I am, yes, but I am also not.  the use of words becomes a riddle – and i dance between the forrest and the town, a bit of a troll, a crone, a madwoman on the edge –

humming a happy tune.

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water

1 Aug

yesterday i write about silence and the watery feel of it –  and the sky decides to show me of water in abundance –

as  eden and i drive through such rains we have to pull over and  just listen to it pound on the roof.  But in this town, even pulling over isn’t much of an option; if the downpour coincides with high tide, the water can rise and suddenly, you are adrift  in your car.

this summer has been a deluge.  we have had water from the sky everyday, I think

for which I am thankful, even for the flooded streets I cannot pass –

kayaking on market street

and

I am also thankful for the water inside – perhaps not the sort these cheeky fellows are kayaking in but the kind that comes through the pipes.

water for laundry, water for cleaning, water to shower –

and also I am grateful for access to the pure water we consume.

I get the water we drink from the health food store  in 4 glass jugs that we refill every few days.

This pure water to drink can seem like a chore as I lug them about or a blessing.

When I fill those jugs at the store and drive them home, I see Sabina  in my mind whose life has been spent trekking everyday for water to meet the needs of her family.  The water she carries so far on her back is dirty.

Sabina’s grace and and beauty in such circumstances – what is there to say?  I bow.

It is my gut feeling that to be human is to have walked all paths – we all know at some level that we, too, are Sabina.

In our world, more and more it comes to be that we will see:

Water as time.  Water as education.  Water as freedom.  Water as me.  (Ik/me sees)

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