A Momentary Taste of Being

Human and Humane Sometimes in the face of such evil the only human response is apology, is listening to the stories you do not want to hear or believe and accepting them as part of the world you do not know and then making amends--truly setting things to rights, truly liberating the captive who has been so long languishing through a sin-- not commission, not truly omission, but complete inattention, indifference. It is indifference that robs us of any trace of humanity-- the willingness to allow things to be, so long as they don't affect me or mine. Indifference tamps down the cobbles with which hate paves the pathway to hell for all of us. Indifference is an invitation to inhumanity.

Oh you splendid light that shines from within all things, do not hide from us who look, perhaps only time to time. It is true we spend more time looking at our own feet, listening to the dog or cat fight, running away and laughing like children who have just lit a paper bag on your porch. it is good for us that you are a song, the sun in the morning, a rainbow, a pair of Sandhill cranes and their young, the scent of jasmine, magnolia, vanilla, the ocean. In all things and being all things, you fly to us at the slightest nod at the smallest gesture you invite us to feast. And even when we pay no attention, You shine out of all things and sing the song of longing presence.

Don't look at me, there's nothing here to see-- look at Who loves me.

Today is a day for hearing. though I've set myself under the huge iron bell of the carillon on a festival day, still its clamor cannot drown out the whisper of Your love. No matter how I flee it, it rings in my head and my body takes Your sound and transforms it into light that though I try to trap it escapes me and blinds the world into new sight.

There are times, indeed most times, when I feel like a fake, an impostor, not entitled to the gifts you send, to the caresses you extend in return for my playing in the mud. I am a liar, a cheat, a false lover, a pretender--oh, I am every falseness all in one, from Trojan horse to human skeleton on the moon. And mysteriously, you seem to love me all the more for it, and throw out snares that draw me in again and again, and though I rip and turn away from your gossamer nets, still I long for their soft touch and come again to be ensnared. Stop playing! Take me because I cannot give myself.

It crossed my mind to buy yet another book until I stopped to count the ones I have. **** Have you thought how you litter Earth with poems like leaves from shaky fall trees **** I fall into these words time and time again **** In falling I fall in walking I walk. **** Options are very limited--so be who you are. **** Did you ask me because you wanted to know or because you needed to fill the empty air **** Your wounds are already healed if you would just stop re- opening them. **** Just listen with your other ear to what you say and hear it for the poison it is. **** Patience, kindness compassion, humility, I seem to run out of everything but words.

I tore it open and started to stuff it full of stories and string and whatever came to hand as I was casting about for yet more to fill its sucking unsoothable emptiness-- tales tragic and trivial, endless facts and recipes for foods no one would ever eat, murders and weddings and the vast silence the underlay the thunder of the pounding surf. And still there was no help for it-- each thing I stuffed in only made it emptier. Who knew that emptiness could grow bigger could consume everything? And yet the more I stuffed inside the less it contained worthy of note. Should I cease and sew it up? Should I cast it into the sea to see if it should be swallowed or more likely swallow the bitter salty sea and still be craving in its emptiness.

All the people that cannot be, but admire give pleasure to being me. 

You judge the oyster ugly and so do not discover the pearl within.

So long as I insist upon my own way everything is broken But then evening comes

We should start by understanding that this is impossible. We cannot create a sacred space because all spaces are already sacred. In their being they reflect their making and their maker. So now we understand our goal is different, what should we say? Living our sacred space. We choose to see that everything around us is a gift. Every person we meet is a gift, is a hammer to knock off the harsh corners, the uneven contours, to shape us to our mission. There is no such thing as an intrusion, as an obstruction. Every person is a lesson, is a challenge, is present to strengthen our ability to love, to transform us from potential to kinetic. Until we see this, we miss some of the sacred brought to us each day. In our hurry to accomplish we push aside possibility to pursue our own ephemeral agenda. Did cutting that person off in traffic really save that much time? Did letting the door slam behind us in the face of another really get us to where we were going fast...

Silence the clatter of judgment in your own head. Judgment is the noise you make at night to scare away the burglar who is downstairs before you go down to find that everything is all right. Judgment is our own self-doubt crying out, saying, "Make sure I'm still important. Make sure I still matter. " By judging we claim control, power, certainty. But what we get when we judge is a certain fixity of viewpoint, a certain hardening of the lines of who and what we are, a certain diminishment of joy. Because when we judge and exclude harmless and beautiful things, we close off access to the treasures they contain. Treasures countless others have tasted and known, but which we find "beneath us." When we judge a person, we set up a barrier, a line neither can fully communicate across. We gaze into a mirror and exaggerate and demonize what we do not like about ourselves. So what instead? Instead, let us, each one accept what comes to us...

Yesterday, the last of April, and my mother's birthday, a race on the beach.  Ten K up and down the sand, with the clouds of sunrise reflecting, first gray, before the sun has a chance with them, and then the broad strokes of pink and yellow and orange and purple and gray.  And people gathering there on the hard flat surface of the beach near the ocean.  Watching the wind whip up the waves and drive the crest fast upwind.  Race time and more people and rain and the possibility that Space X will launch something from nearby Cape Canaveral, so the first two miles or more during rests, turning around and glancing back over my shoulder to see if it happened.  And it doesn't, so I watch the people on the beach with their phones and cameras aimed toward the cape and if I see someone point or lift their camera or stand up and look, I'll turn around, but I don't.  And I'm running so hard and the wind is blowing back at me that I am surprised when I turn around and ...

As through some distorting lens my eye cannot see what is there but only what sits heavy in my chest--dark pluton of ancient choices, thoughts formed in the furnace and through time warped and bent and changed and turned and now looking new--but so so old--the ore of the idol that called Moses down from Sinai to cast the new law to the ground. If only I could open up to devour this excess--like earth consumed Aaron's handiwork. That this core of mine would vanish, resolve, change itself-- the crooked lines made straight and my darkness light.

He spreads  his hands to any who will take him  and his face is  wreathed in smiles at the slightest provocation. Slight paraphase of a description by Louise (Taft's mother)of WHT as a baby-- quoted in Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit)

Not the days, not the nights, not the ocean, not the waves not the sky, not the clouds in it

You haunt me--you fill my head with snapshots of you I should not see--they boil and seethe within the limitless confused  molten furnace. You say things that cannot be unheard and like obscene petroglyphs they litter the landscape on either side of the molten frenzy that is the core of who I am--its banks and curves unknown and too dangerous to explore on my own-- and there you stand, naked and grinning and poised for the dive into oblivion I am powerless to stop--you haunt me. (4/27/15)

Sorry bud but what you got is a dude older than he thought he'd ever live to be who doesn't wear a raincoat because in Florida's tropical downpour raincoat paper bag about the same thing, and if he did would never consider cleaning it because hell didn't the rainwater just do that who walks into a bookstore sees your name on the cover and plunks down an obscene amount of cash to be able to open the book with his morning coffee. Sorry man, better luck next time. My writing   Poetry   Drafts

You treat love like a rare earth element infinitely precious, Incredibly valuable, in so many ways powerful, and rare, to be dolloped out in micro- and nanograms, to be used only here and there to coordinate functions and link however temporarily things that are apart. What will it take to convince you that love is like the atmosphere– infinitely precious and in the universe–rare enough. But oh my it’s everywhere–in and on and around all living things It is our home and our life and without it–a barren rock is all there’d be. Just try to hoard the atmosphere, stuff it in a bag, dollop it out in nanograms it goes where it goes and it stays there despite all you can do to drive it out.

Suffering is contagious in a way that joy is not--we are ENGULFED by the passion but the transfiguration trundles by ignored.