Posts

Start

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  Start with something small like breathing in the stars, holding trillions of them in your chest, to light up every atom in your body. Then breathe out, giving each a new name  and a deeper darkness, more space to polish with the beauty of fire. Let this exhalation caress the lake, the forest, the city, touching every heart, the heart of fur and feather as well as the human heart. Then move on to larger tasks,  like listening to a stranger  at the coffee shop, or smiling at a serious baby who rides backward in a grocery cart. Then get down  to the greatest work of all, healing the earth  with your naked toes.

I Voted

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I voted. I voted for the rainbow. I voted for the cry of a loon. I voted for my grandfather’s bones that feed beetles now. I voted for a singing brook that sparkles under a North Dakota bean field. I voted for salty air through which the whimbrel flies South along the shores of two continents. I voted for melting snow that returns to the wellspring of darkness, where the sky is born from the earth. I voted for daemonic mushrooms in the loam, and the old democracy of worms. I voted for the wordless treaty that cannot be broken by white men or brown, because it is made of star semen, thistle sap, hieroglyphs of the weevil in prairie oak. I voted to keep the edges of the vineyard ragged and ungleaned for the hungry stranger. I voted for the local, the small, the brim that does not spill over, the abolition of waste, the luxury of enough. I voted for a motherland where politics dissolves into folk music, story-telling, fermented cabbage, totem-carved hoes handed down fro...

I Called You

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  I called you my Lord, but this was not the whole truth. I called you my Self, but this was not the whole truth. I called you the Christ, but the Mystery was even deeper. Then I called you Friend, and this was enough. This was everything. Each moment, I am bathed in an ocean of love. Is this love personal or impersonal? It it an Other, or Myself? If I am truly immersed in oceanic love, these questions don't arise. The mind simply drowns in the heart, swept away by each wave of Otherness, each trough of Selfhood. Here is the portrait of "Christ at 33" by Hoffman. Please don't tell me this isn't how he really looks, because this is very much how he looks when he looks at me. How he looks at you is your business. Incidentally, for what it's worth, Paramhansa Yogananda said that this portrait of Jesus was the closest portrayal of his likeness ever made. How would he know? Who really knows? Nobody.  Your own heart reveals the countenance of the Friend according to...

Samhain

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  Midway between Equinox and Winter solstice. Tilted cauldron of Ceridwen. Pouring out the shadows. How many silences could there be? Liquid quietness murmuring Motherward. Ineffably One. The silence between breaths, the silence between stars, between thoughts, between electrons pulsing in the atoms of your blood, the silence in her eyes, where the ruined beauty of last summer's garden hollows into the kingdom of a solitary crow, whose call is neither sad nor joyful, but vigilant, awake, annunciation of descending darkness, mystery of the web of night, season of dancing bones. The veil between the worlds is thin. Bright to dark the seasons turn, Green Man's fire in Jack O'Lantern, Bright above now shines within. Come dance in the circle of Samhaim,* Buds of Beltane burnished in frost. Honor the Old Ones: nothing is lost. Whatever is offered is born again. *Pronounced "Sowin." Photo: Farrell's Marsh, at the heart of the little town I l...