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

30 March 2012

 the friday song.

26 March 2012


 Letters from the Outside, #55


The crazy sound of starlings in a stand of trees along the high road down to the lake.
The welcome, persistent reduction of fear, making space for active optimism and intuition.
The Orchid buds continue to split, alien o'keefe hatches, and the pink Geranium produces its
lovely cone manifolds.  I wrestle the poor hobbled Monstera away from the window, 
hoping to exercise its green bones toward the light.
Even the Hoya begins to bloom again, surely a sign that we turn toward Equinox.


  
And again the miraculous little birds, the feathers so well set they seem made of some 
smooth thing, not a billion barbed filaments.  Everything is the Universe writ small.
The finches begin to fill with gold at the throats.  Late february day stolen from early may
and the next a firm reminder of winter.  We move into march, south wind
roaring up the valley and the changing light hitting a harder note on the tall grass
and branches.  Someone moved into the hobby farm, open-faced and a friendly hand raised.
Two off-beat but entirely anonymous vehicles and a chunky wooden lakehouse replica
porch ornament of the american flag.
 
 The black dog stands on point as we come up the rise toward the 
widows chestnut trees, and i think about the Great Ladies i aspire to serve and
how each rules an element, Air of unscathed liberation, Fire of joyful incarnation,
Water of compassionate service, and the dark, silent Earth 
from which all Mystery springs.  
The seeds are ordered, and the germinating stand pulled out from under 
a winters worth of rubble.  Regaining balance, "as an attribute of intiation,"
is the theme this month, incorporating into the refuge of Inter-Being.
As tom wolfe said, "I had gotten it backward all along.
Not 'seeing is believing,' you ninny, but 'believing is seeing.'


Spring is rising, the Divine Energy driving the green shoot from the ground also calls
from me the offering of my authenticity; the Universe in cahoots for evolution.
And everywhere signs of resistance to the juggernaut of soul-death and exploitation.
Myself, im seeing the Equinox as some kind of Beginning, prefaced by 
the rainy Virgo moon.  Good things are happening, 
drove south to see a man in a floppy brown hat sweat through his vest
and play a battered black guitar with duct tape over the sound hole
sing the ragged anthems of my happy heart.


Started seeds, tomatoes and peppers, crucifers, lettuce and Marigolds,
Zinnia, Mugwort, Parsley, onion, Calendula.
Birdsong in the early morning and the delay-loop Peeper chorus bead clear, gentle nights.
Venus and Jupiter in rare conjunction, Strawberry Alarm-Clock sunrises and
rainbow afternoons, the Pleiades.
Taking inventory around the grounds, i see that, out of the three Lilac i planted 
two years ago, the big black dog watered one successfully to death,
and anothers been browsed clean of buds by the deer, who have
also helped themselves to the lower branches of the Apple trees.
The Wolfsbane is a happy mound of broad green leaves,
and it looks to be a good year for the Foxglove.


Squill and Daffodils sending good vibes up from the ground to indigo and lemon chrysalides
while my beloved Dicentra makes its humble entrance, pale, unremarkable,
pointed thumbs like some overfed, light-deprived asparagus.
The early mornings still as starry as the late nights, and the dew and chill
give way to this glorious heat that strums our atoms like the strings of light they are.
Lilac leafs-out and Forsythia bloom in their great golden transfixing thickets. 
Wee fragrant patches of Violet on the lawn.  
The Bergamot will prove a formidable swath by the looks of it, and
i fear the Bramble has its sights on my rich expanse of fertile, freshly-turned earth.


 Jupiter shines over a lovely taurus cheshire moon.
Cold enough today to start a fire in the hearth, and the seedlings havent seen sunlight
for days, but thriving nonetheless, especially the tomatoes, who require longer light during
this time in their growing cycle.  It looks to be cold for at least a little while,
cold and rainy as it should be here and now.


 Great and gentle change in my life in the direction I suppose some
strong and long-unattended part of myself orchestrated in conjuction with 
Love and Source and Fate, whatever one would call it.
Knowing i have to grow deeper down into the Gentle Path, 
accept and acknowledge myself, and return from past travails wiser and ready to 
take on the work ahead of me.  
So much around us needs healing, needs to recognize itself as an integral part of this
miraculous whole.  No sentient being is insignificant, no living thing expendable.
  

 As horror stacks upon horror in this sad, distracted culture, it is literally
vital to remain a being of Peace.  
And thats what ive dedicated myself to in this time of great change and Becoming;
integrating dualities by dissolving false boundaries.

I dont know if these letters have afforded you some small veil of forgetfulness, 
stepping stones across a creek with no bridge of suspended disbelief,
but they have led me, after a lifetime of ink, to the realization that it is time 
i craft a life worth the having lived it.  
i dont yet know where im going, but i know im getting there.


 So thank you. 

"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)