I am the space in which i move –
not the other way around.
Motion happens in this shift, oh and stillness, too.
I am watching out from eyes i can not place!
Oh, who am i? kidding.
Cleaning house(a joyful chore!)
now that I am
so much larger
than i perceived
whom is watching
me to BE.
_ /’\_ X I\I
Joy arrives in the smallest corners
without a script to find it.
Think a bird tilting its head to you in curiosity,
a cat curled up in your pine straw, allowing you close,
a deer pausing mid-munch to size you up
before bounding its fluff tail bum deeper into the woods.
Agenda toward joy can look alright to start with
but it soon becomes a grocery store cake in the mouth,
leaving you wondering how to spit it out with grace.
Grasping at joy is revolting, a fake laugh, an insinuation,
a glomping on – vicarious to the actual fleeting glimpses
we are gifted without neediness.
Don’t grab the kitty by the tail,
try not to join in when you haven’t heard the joke,
allow your own joy to arrive outside the attainment of others,
without needing to announce it to the imagined view of the world.
The original intention that you came here with
is still flickering – and it will not go out until you are gone,
even if you are in jail, or cast out, or inebriated
on the most common drugs of: figuring things out,
escaping your pain, making yourself important,
making yourself small, just
getting through the day, busy, busy, busy…
you know them all.
Even here, joy still visits, and fans your fractal candle.
Thank God, it is one of those trick candles, so blow away,
test it out; it will be here as long as you – waiting to light you
from within – and your inferno will be all your own.
My bonfire on a distant hill
connects the dots toward yours,
making the view overhead of all these fires a truer map
of who is down here,
remembering joy,
no matter where.
Closing eyes while facing the setting sun,
over marsh and salty creeks,
provides a primitive script
on the inside of my pink-skinned lids.
i was the cave dweller who carved
notches for the ones I’ve been.
i run my cursor over the alligator skin
encoded with the story of all time,
left here for me –
thinking there is no way
she will miss it, this time.
i see the structure of my mundane thoughts
solid like walls built on each side – but i can
push them back with my
shadowy arms.
my house is
a cardboard house, with folding lines preset
to make it gone in a new york minute.
WOLF may huff and puff –
but i tell him,
put your predatory mind at rest:
i
give you my house
and my piggie flesh too
no need for a scene.
i
listen to the drone of rush hour traffic
while my feet touch the land of original settlers.
blood and sweat in the dirt and air,
they are for dinner, whole.
I am thinking again
and the mind conjures
up a rule that I am only pulled down
by that which i have not healed – what
does that mean?
do I/i remember my days as slave,
as master,
beast and bird?
when i move in the world,
i have become
a piece of the sky
in a sports bra.
there is room for every
crazy thing that i can imagine.
the I has forgotten,
but now i remember
the very next person/animal/plant/or insect that i cross
has chosen to cross my path for a holy encounter.
There is only now to
pray as i enter the post office –
talk to my sliver of chocolate –
and study the morse code of the dishwashers whirring
moving my hips to the swoosh:
no need to escape to the cave
any more.
The cave moves within me
as dark and silent
as can be –
a black hole
in motion –
swallowing
time behind her curving path.
I have yet to sleep a night on the boat myself, but there were years that I traversed the sea and land, shifting between land legs and sea legs daily.
Now I just go on the boat, switch out the sheets, clean her tiny berths and heads, and make my way to land again. But even just these short, almost daily traipses onto this water platform give me the shifting feeling everyday. I’ve always had a bit of an unsteady inner ear. When I sit still to type this, cozy at my land home kitchen table, the world is still swaying with the rocking of the waves. I feel movement for hours and days after being on a boat. What a gift, moment by moment, to be reminded, though on solid land, that nothing is steady or still. Nothing is permement. I can remember to hold on to my hat. I am sure that kansas is a state of mind and that I create a wake on land from the sway of my perceptions.
Our planet is most certainly a spaceship, perhaps moving in a whirling hole behind the sun who is in a hurry to go somewhere. When I look at stars, I feel like we are allowed on deck of the ship of earth to watch our travels as we hurtle through space. What an amazing vessel is she, designed so that we do not have to wear seat belts or wait for the captain’s light to move about.
I am not a scientist. I do not know if this model is right, but I like the way it makes my mind open to the sway of possibilities. I like to zoom out past my seat and look on us from a new angle. I like to be a bit unsteady, for then I am prompted to be on my toes, ready for anything.
There seems to be spontaneous, helpful guidance that comes from goodness knows where to show us again and again that there is a way to view this world and the things that happen in it as nothing but spiritual encounters.
Sometimes, when I am checking out from a store, I look around and instead of shoppers, all I see are beings – all the souls who agreed to meet me here. When I fly on an airplane, I can feel like I am measuring the volume of soul weight all around my seat. Even if I am home alone, I feel like I have a preordained date to meet some other part of me.
Early to class one day, I was starting the computer, going over the lesson, getting ready; I was in a get up, drive to school, get to work mode; I was not in a spiritual mindset. I was just going to teach a lesson to people in seats. I stopped getting ready with all the stuff of 3D life and looked around.
As I focused on each empty desk, I could see the student in his or her usual appearance who usually sat there, and I nodded to him or her in my mind, one by one, recognizing the agreement we had, to meet here in this classroom, to learn a particular subject, yes, but more than that, I could see that we had a larger interaction.
A vision came where I saw myself growing outside my boundaries with each student, one at a time. We expanded out; we were so large that our heads were meeting above the atmosphere of earth. There we were, large Sumo babies, beyond words, exchanging our agreement together in the mystery of space.
This strange exercise took me out of the planning mind and into an awareness of my spiritual agreement to each student. As I can see that we meet here person to person in the classroom, I am also helped to recognize each student’s larger being which helps me to see innate value in each one. We have agreed together to do work that may resemble an English course, but in reality, we are doing spiritual work together.
This ongoing vision or space travel helps me also to see our equality. We are students and a teacher playing roles, but I can see that we are, each one of us, student and teacher both, on equal footing, overall, tourists together on this planet, signing on for experiences.
Now, when I get lost in the minutia of lessons or caught in the frustration of inattention, I try to jump to the vision of who we really are; sometimes I can shift my perspective to the stratosphere and return again with a new, spiritual lens prescription.
Yes, you have a comma splice here, but wow, just look what a powerful being you are; look at what potential lies within you; try using a semicolon and breathing in some space dust.
I am in love with being chosen by this cat.
Perhaps it could be any cat.
His lowness in the world fills me not with disgust
but pity and soft opening for his escape.
What makes the breath of one man reek,
and another fill your heart with care?
Come purr on my chest when I haven’t the time;
will I grow tired of thee? Will you come to be a stink, a chore?
Do I know how to love; are you here to show me?
The story goes a bit like this: convulsing fear, survival strength, ache, rage, numbness,
rote doing, and then one morning we start imagining ~ maybe.
Our mind/s broadcasting into the void, virtual machines of creation.
A snake, a turtle, a rat may have answered, but here is this homeboy, ESE.
You, little man, radiate the joy of 2nd chances.
You mirror tougher days which make me the humble seer.
Basking in the soft luxury of my bed,
I worship the roof , the lights, the water, the pantry…
There may be hope for me yet.
“I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul.” ~ Jean Cocteau
“All of the animals except for man know that the principle business of life is to enjoy it.” Samuel Butler
You allow, you invite the lesson, you sit in silence as life takes its course, you give up the illusion of control, you do the next thing that arises. You stop pointing fingers, you think, you look within………….and yet nothing gives.
Some things seemed created for the purpose of being intensely worrisome, yet they are not deadly enough to put you out of here.
Some problems push the buttons of hopeless feelings; they leave you staring up at a impassable cliff while you physically feel yourself sinking into quicksand.
Don’t we all have problems like this? The kind for which you cannot find the key to unlock to save your life.
These challenges seem the very things that force us to step into a conversation with the mystery. There is no where else to go.
Remembering that every problem is spiritual in nature, always, all ways, is not always what I want to hear, but until I remember this, I am stuck.
Excerpted from Depak Chopra’s book Spiritual Solutions: Answers to Life’s Greatest Challenges
“Spirituality begins with a decisive answer… It says that life isn’t random. There is pattern and purpose inside every existence. The reason that challenges arise is simple: to make you more aware of your inner purpose.
Problems are mirrors: some are showing me where I’ve forgotten you and me are the same. My student who drove me up the wall, in the end, was an expression of me. We finished our dance, and she taught me where I still saw us as two. Firmness or softness in reaction to her became a non-issue, laughing or soothing, feeding or withholding, all these dualities and everything in between all flowing clearly without seeing difference in the end, because in that one tiny mirror, I see what is what. She is me.
The answer to my health, the answer to my relationships, the answer to my work, my house, my flow: one. I am one with my body, all other people, all objects, all nature, my space, my moments, my unfolding life – all me.
I think it is not just love your neighbor as yourself, but love your neighbor – she is you. Love every thing; everything is me. (Am I one upping Jesus? God, how ridiculous am I?:)
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.
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:)
There is strength, I know, in allowing life to strip me. I am getting more comfortable with the process.
Our world thinks it is game board full of squares. In this dreaming: whoever gets to the farthest square of gain is winning. The one – as in ME 🙂 – who starts on square one everyday – who forgets her gender, her age, her family, her status, every night at bedtime, and reconstructs herself in the shower enough to begin again at square one – is blessed!
The board is changing itself daily too – so square one is never the same square.
Putting on the outfit of identity everyday helps me remember that I can chose something different and new at each moment. Life is a continual Groundhog Day. I am an acerbic jerk one day, and an accomplished lover of all that is the next. I love the jerk because she was trying her best, doing all she knew, and she offers a great yardstick measure of change and possibility.
And now I find I am tired of all my words and posturing. What is true is that I feel disoriented often to find myself in a super consistent dream of life in this single identity. I love the activities that make me forget who I am – such relief. Whoosh, back into a body, surprise. Alice down the rabbit hole.
I once had a neighbor who was getting close to 70 years old, a funny, unguarded story-teller who would stop to chat and spin her tales without a glance at her watch. She told me that she often forgot her age and when she saw the young mothers on the playground, she felt she was a peer and had to stop herself from entering the gate – “I feel the very same as I have my whole life; I’m surprised when I remember I’m a grandma.” She is closer to what I am trying to say. We think we are a fixed thing – but our life shows us the nature of change and the ride is just a smallish experience – a short trip in a conglomeration of journeys, and sometimes the world goes wonky when you sense that deep in your bones. Have a biscuit and a bit of tea and settle yourself, girl. You forget. You remember. You live a life in the flash of a lightning strike – and you sit numb and frozen in place for the strangeness that is never acknowledged while we talk about all the rain.
Life as Improv 