Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances.”

05 April 2010



"A bit of magical thinking now can take you farther than you think."

its too dense to shift, a box too full of books.  stand there and consider it, squat occasionally to rest my forehead against its solid inertia.  a beautiful day spent indoors. a life lived alone.  wrong turns on an eight lane, exit into some litterhostile town everybody in their cars, fuming.  the feelings make a windy hollow sound between your eyes and theres nothing to say. 


"Someone suggested to Joyce that he could avoid legal trouble by publishing an expurgated version of his novel Ulysses, doing away with the passages deemed offensive. Joyce turned to him and replied: " My book has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Which would you like to cut off?"

todays card, the Ace of Cups.  the Grail, the moon and sun and the Cycle of Transformation.  living through the five senses, pouring oneself into the Universal Ocean of Consciousness, where the lotus rise from the dark and the mud up through the water and bloom into the light.  "dont trust anyone who says they have no invisible means of support."  Grace at work in the world.  Yod falls from the cup, Yod, the open hand, the Possibility that initiates all Being, the "primal vibration of the universe," the Creatrix, of which there are infinite incarnations, endlessly flowing from the cup, the Grail, Grace.  Ace of Cups, the Great Mystery (at least one of them).  the work of Love in the world.  we are fed, first and last, by Love. 


happy birthday, Algernon


“From too much love of living, From hope and fear set free, We thank with brief thanksgiving Whatever gods may be That no life lives for ever; That dead men rise up never; That even the weariest river Winds somewhere safe to sea”



"Judge John Woolsey wrote the famous decision, in which he said that with "respect of the recurrent emergence of the theme of sex in the minds of [Joyce's] characters, it must always be remembered that his locale was Celtic and his season spring."


i remove my armor, rivet by rivet, while you dig deeper down for cover and loss.  i pray, smile into your eyes, hold your hand.  what else can i do?  this is your work.  i know theres another side, beyond this threshold, and i wait for you to know the strength to go there.   i wait, the satisfying clatter of falling armor ringing an alarm to fear and resignation.   with no defenses, i will be invincible.  an now might be really hard but now is always changing, and the rubble and the storm will soon reveal good ground and peaceful water.  and i believe in the good ground and the peaceful water.


but now.  the cards.  The High Priestess.  Queen of Wands.  The Magus.  i am grateful for my angels, for the devas that watchover.  flanked by Powers, shown the way in imperatives encoded, dreamlike, i dont worry.  right now my path is crumbly and slick, i chose this road and need to walk it.  blindfolded, backwards, whatever it takes.  this dimness makes some things incredibly clear, and shapes rise in the shadows to ask questions, clarify my quest.  all this is necessary.  unpleasant, disheartening, but to me seems absolutely vital.  this work needs doing.  and i have no investment in one outcome or another.  i just ask to know what needs knowing, so that i may keep becoming.  what seems madness is truth and beauty in their forms unveiled.  angels, devas before me as this path climbs.  let go.  rise.  stay open until one morning the red thread between my fingers suddenly no longer there.  and i begin again.

breathe



"…I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes." 

painfully satisfying


"The most strongly enforced of all known taboos, is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego."

                                                                             -Alan Watts

whats the word for that little scrap of rainbow you see sometimes in the late afternoon, just hangin there in the sky all by itself, one prayerflag liberated, unstrung, riding a thermal?  whatever the word is for that, id be that word.

another for the Reading List



(4/2) happy birthday to Mr. Zola who said,
"If you ask me what I came into this life to do, I will tell you: I came to live out loud."

for cowboy:
notes from the highway:   hypnotic pylons, no shoulder.  muscular shrug of peterbilts, rodeo queen kenworths, the mano a mano of brothers fought out in reflectors and chrome.  window down, songs whipping out invisible prayer flags untethered traveling everywhere at the speed of sound.  this weekend i got a little sun, as they say.  im living between worlds, which seems the easiest for me, to fly the wings must move, pushing away the stillness and the descent.  still wandering after all, still standing at the edge of the wood, wondering at how people can do the things they do.  i see now that the ribbon, the red thread, is far from coming to some frenchknot end.  it spools into the future, dissolves into the horizon of any possible event.  everything written in sand.  our lives are such mandalas, cones of color, working alone to make the whole together and in the end at the bottom of the river, they start one up again.  great lessons.  just phenomenal soulwork, this.  for better or worse im counting the cost less and less.  im letting go.  three inches from the ground it occurs to me.  never too late, just next time. 
 

todays random wordticket poem:

feral
autumn
hidden
deeper and deeper

precipice
made of sand

1 comment:

  1. hey, now this sounds like you again! absolutely beautiful baby. your poetry is back, new doorway. the rabbit lives again, follow, never lost, just confused for a month or so once. (old free trapper expression). ya ta hey, teacher

    ReplyDelete

Blessed Be.

"And if the question were asked: What is more real, the mundane or the sublime? most would hesitate before they gave an answer. On the one side, details: say, the aftermath of a breakfast, dirty chipped plates in the sink, their rims encrusted with egg yolk. Against this, the unnameable: small aching heart with boasts, what can you know? Outside the cage of everything we ever heard or saw, beyond, outside, above, there lies the real, hiding as long as we shall live, there stretch and trail the millions of names of God burning across the eons. When all through this our end will come before we even know the names of us.

For many the egg yolk prevails." -L.M.

"Love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is done well."
-V.V.G.

"The perfection of the Absolute where all Becoming stops and pure Being, immutable, timeless, unchanging, hangs forever like a ripe peach upon the bough." -E.A.

"...and the whole incident was incredibly frazzling and angst-rod and filled almost a whole mead notebook and is here recounted in only its barest psycho-skeletal outline." -D.F.W.

"At the top of the mountain, we are all snow leopards." -H.S.T.

"Only when we are no longer afraid do we begin to live." -D.T.
"Cometh a voice: My children, hear; From the crowded street and the close-packed mart I call you back with my message clear, back to my lap and my loving heart. Long have ye left me, journeying on by range and river and grassy plain, to the teeming towns where the rest have gone - come back, come back to my arms again. So shall ye lose the foolish needs that gnaw your souls; and my touch shall serve to heal the fretted nerve. Treading the turf that ye once loved well, instead of the stones of the city's street, ye shall hear nor din nor drunken yell, but the wind that croons in the ripening wheat. I that am old have seen long since ruin of palaces made with hands for the soldier-king and the priest and prince whose cities crumble in desert sands. But still the furrow in many a clime yields softly under the ploughman's feet; still there is seeding and harvest time, and the wind still croons in the ripening wheat. The works of man are but little worth; for a time they stand, for a space endure; but turn once more to your mother - Earth, my gifts are gracious, my works are sure. Instead of the strife and pain I give you peace, with its blessing sweet. Come back, come back to my arms again, for the wind still croons in the ripening wheat."
-John Sandes, The Earth-Mother (excerpt, 1918)