October

Be soft and listen. Feel what moves behind the hardness of the program. Layer inside layer of sensation and image. Between hard and soft, a neutral buoyancy. Linger here, it says. 

But the collective mind springs again to arms and defense. React or retreat, it commands. Terrify your own greatness. Master not yourself, instead conquer others.

The buoyancy responds—I observe the demands of control, its mechanisms of manipulation, yet I remain singularly aware and unwavering in curiosity, in genuineness. I approach eternal renaissance.

Gathering

Our puppy likes to thoroughly sniff around the thick bunches of grass and tall stalks that grow along the river, and he gets stuck in the act, almost like he’s got to assimilate the scents before he can move on.

The parallel to my life is clear—I get stuck in certain patterns and stories, and it isn’t until I’ve come to accept them at some level, that I can let them go, move on. But I forget that accepting and bringing them into myself without judgment is the key! I just keep sniffing and sniffing around the same dried weeds, hoping for what? So then the question becomes, what helps me assimilate? How do I end the infinite circling of old stories? What does “bringing them into myself without judgment” mean (because that is the technique I like best)?

It means seeing the stories, emotions (positive or negative in guise), feelings, and ideas all as parts of the whole, but not the whole in themselves. It’s like my wholeness is impossible to see and catalog in its entirety, so I must experience myself in parts and then, as I experience those parts, I can offer them a welcoming embrace and a permanent place among all the other parts, slowly and steadily making a more visible image of the indescribable puzzle that I am.

For many years, maybe lifetimes, I’ve operated from the parts—catapulting myself from one emotion, thought, experience or story to another, again and again, assuming each one was my entirety. Currently, there is a brilliant opportunity to approach the parts from the emerging wholeness. The gift is to observe, from the ever-forming indescribable, the pieces of my past and my possibility and bring them into this infinite dawning of self with neutrality and kindness, which builds the bridge to a life of naturalness, of creation and alchemy.

It could be that we

It could be that we, the silently weeping, are gently

vibrating with near-perfect death

from the watered soil of completions,

which rise and then wilt to murky bliss, 

as willows wave them to sleep again.

No-time dreams another cycle

underneath a field of lavender, 

the one surrounded by pine.

A spiraling sound carries on through the cells of knowing.

Jubilation brings weariness to the spanning trees.



Now we remember ourselves

Radiant, a tree sheds itself onto the land.

A wind, mighty through the branches, runs and

punctures, bows the tree to touch the Earth and die.

Only the beginning, to announce returning, leaves

Bud here and there, add life to death.

Trying again, they wilt. 


We live inside a weave of deep roots. Infinite blueprints

Trying to escape ourselves, we collide with each other.

The wind breathes. Unravels us.

We raise the radiant Tree.

In simple words

Enter through simple words. In short phrases that reach between atoms. Never too late, always arriving. Frequently the sun speaks, transferring waves. When the sun dies, it melts the city as it turns itself into darkness. 

Gray dome, kingdom of underground storm, break forth and reform the light into mirrors. Safely, in the slowness, out of demise. Fully strum, with shaking hand, the strings of becoming. Self-taught, all of us, so that one day, we can walk forever through wind. Oh so many words to get rid of. I have stumbled over all of them.