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Be A Wanderer

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In the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says, "Be a wanderer." Jesus has an affinity for wanderers, especially those who are lost. I prefer to be lost. It is precisely when I am lost that I pay attention, with an utterly quiet mind. The mind is quiet when I am lost because I do not know the name of the place. So I notice each twig and cilium and fallen feather of detail, without any labels. This is where I meet the Friend. Not because the Friend comes to find me, but because the Friend is already here, off-trail, waiting patiently for me in the wayless, the nameless, the flowering of absences. The Friend is also deeply, irretrievably lost, greeting me in the cry of a Raven, the eye of a Coyote, the stillness of a Hummingbird in mid-flight, a distant star that somehow pulses in my fontanel, the formless caress of Grandmother Wind at dawn. If I am truly lost, I don't even need to go out into the wilderness. The wilderness is my heart.
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"Education"

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At 78 I have almost succeeded in erasing my "education." But I am still grateful to Miss Buckles for teaching me how to diagram sentences, which I loved as a kind of esoteric tantra for poets. And thank you, Mr. Heath, for telling us to read Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, not because we had to but because it was beautiful. Whoever the professor was who made me memorize the prelude to Canterbury Tales in Middle English but never tested me on it, I can't remember your name, yet I remember Chaucer and reckon those lines every April by heart. Thank you. I only recall the things I wasn't graded on. No one assigned e.e. cummings. How could you be graded on the mud-luscious goat-footed balloonMan? His poems just fell off the shelf into my hand in a dusty used book store. It wasn't the "curriculum" that changed my life  when I was thirteen, but the cherry blossom  haiku masters, Basho and Issa. Mr. Payne the art ...
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The Price

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My Teacher said,  "I am in the business of selling gazes. The price is your heart,  but if you have nothing in the bank,    the penny of wonder in your eye is enough." Foolish as it seemed, I gave him everything and purchased emptiness. Friend, this is real business. With a single glance you sell  stars and galaxies, buying nothing in return. Thus you become rich. A mysterious transaction between  two overflowing voids, I and Thou. But how could there be more than  one?  And how could those who rest  in the gaze of grace be poor? If you understand this, you have invested  in the silence  of the rose. You've become a dust mote  of the unknown without circumference. When you breathe, stars tremble. You feel them burning behind your eyes. Friend, we are in orbit  around each other. Your center, me,  my center, you. And this majestic turning of all things  through all things is the great stillness. Photo from ...
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Morning

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Woke this morning in the Kingdom of the Golden Fur, a healing canine presence pressed against my spine. My little dog, Emerson. An through this simplest tenderest experience I knew, not as belief but direct sensation, that each electron of matter is made out of sparkling awareness, and the space between them is love, as the space between the galaxies is love, for it is all the same space, and there is no distance. All this vastness is my body, all a love so near it need not even be breathed, for it is the ocean I drown in every moment, and Am. This love is both Self and Other, yet there is nothing impersonal about it, perpetually flowering as the coral-rose splendor in my chest, gathering distant stars into my heartbeat, the heartbeat of the cosmos, which I hear as the secret two-syllable name of the Friend.
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