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

22 October 2013


the winter coat emerges, instantly comforting and familiar.  i inventory the pocket contents:  a large, dark stone with what appears to be an H etched into it, two buttons, one depicting an anchor, a pod of clear resin encasing the word Blessings, a wee flake of hay from last-years town-over christmas creche, a white quartz worry stone ive carried with me almost twenty years now, a lighter with the word LIGHTER written in punch tape along the side, a stone i found at the edge of the Ocean, an acorn, and seventy-two cents in change. 


i drank a bottle of champagne with a shrewd and beautiful woman at my favorite brasserie. vanilla savon and a dark, polished rose.  fell through the giggling wormhole of long-dead love fleetingly resuscitated, familiar and pontificate,its exhumed skeleton amid the sirens and against the streetlight, dancing up through inside jokes and shibboleths, marveling all the while at the tenacity of such invisible filaments.  found the good woodstove going at Sister Mothers house, and a perfect, tiny basket containing an inexhaustible amount of love.


bare branches and dead, pendant leaves hone the edge of the wind, molecularly compact density of air, that cold creekwater feeling foretelling, with its signature scent, the soon-approaching snow. 



the Dark tenders its tithe from Day and comes to collect more quickly as axial gears dance our northern antipode oblique to the elliptical, casting runeshadows on the shaggy rolling green over which cry the Crows and the other day a skyful of sound like the Earth cracked open releasing the sum total Cri de Coeur since Time began.  the Wild Geese follow the Great Magnet south toward renewed warmth and plenty.


you tell me, little by little, what it means to you and i will tell you, little by little, what it means to me.  by those stars shall our journey be charted.


theres a scarf to knit and a leaf to catch, and music.  i try to fill my quota for sleep and tea and laughter, for noticing the rose pink crushed velvet chaise on fire sunrise and the steady presence of the stars.  in my dream there were horses coming up from summer pastures, and the White Horse with the Red Forelock, whos name the Old Man asked me.


Love is the only thing i have to give.
 

"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)