We come from the Dark
and are born into Light

The comfort of the darkness
seduces us to close our eyes
and ears and noses
and soon enough
the Dark invites us back in.

What is the fear that keeps me from
living while I am alive?
What is this deeply abused word called love
in a world of commerce and barter?

It might be, to sleep like a baby
and wake up just before dawn
and smell the wood fires burning
in a million human habitations
where, dreaming that life will be forever
people dream their lives away.

To smell the breakfast cooking
as the dawn begins to break

rough house with the dog
and pet the furry beast
who is always glad to see us

take a moment to see the black widow
weave her web of death in the corner
of the porch where the wood is stacked

and never speak words of love to those
nearest us, showing them instead
by wiping the counter clean
sweeping the bathroom floor
and touching with the tenderest touch
as if we just watched our mother breathe her last

and one can never tell for sure
if the Dawn will ever come
or we will set our mattresses on fire
before we ever open our eyes to
love ourselves, the trees and bugs and beetles
and each other, the hardest task of all.

So much longing in this human realm
so simple a solution that we rush past
every day, forgetting to feel the inner
breath
whooshing
by.

I used to wonder and wait for the Dawn
but I just don't know anymore
there's too much work to do
to sit and ponder the state of the world.

Everything is light.
I'm living in a dream.
The dream is me.
I think there is a you.
I want to have more.
There's no more to have.
There's nothing to have.

Everything is light.
Then why is it so dark down here?
Why does the Bridge to Ascension
seem like an endless curving children's slide
that ends down in Hades?

Hades, decorated with fluffy clouds, New Age harpists and channelers,
all proclaiming the great Change is Here!
Amen, no more growth needed,
grace will tap you on the head, and your heart will burst open
and all hell will break loose.

No need to plant the sugar snap peas this year, they will
burst from the ground when your fifth dimensional consciousness
brushes ligthly over the clay soil.
No need to touch your lover with the gentlest of touches, and rouse her with a shared sense of ecstasy,
we are barely in our bodies anymore anyway.
Who needs this recycled bags of bones, and this soul that's been here
ten thousand times before?

Down the street at the motorcycle shop, the enlightened ones
are chatting about the new bike that roars down the road so fast
your head is spinning and the ego is left
behind in a puddle of tears.

It's all good, the teenagers say, it's all good they text to each other
and laugh at the charade that the adults take so seriously.
We might have built that golden tower one day,
we might have healed the earth.
We were too busy watching Oprah today,
listening to Suze Orman tell us how to handle our precious money,
and Wayne Dyer like a tent religion revivalist lets us know
that we are made of stardust, and the physicists tell us we don't know who we are until we look at ourselves.


As if we can ever know.
Stopping the endless ancient violence of the
Real and the Ideal.

Some moments the speed of life is like a movie

and I eating popcorn in the back row
absorbed, yet I know

it's just a movie.

what is the soul?
There is the running commentary,
perhaps that is what they call the ego
There is the yearning that exists below
That seems the spirit, wanting to lift off,
transcend the limitations of this personality.
Then, the soul…
what's left, not words, and not the urgent yearning spirit,
but the darkness and depths, eons of human striving
human loving, human dreaming, and human endeavor.

The spirit wants to build something new and grand
the soul wants to wind down the ways of Orpheus
and find out where this all went so wrong
and as we stand before the ruins of society
that has poisoned the air and water and left human beings
to suffer and starve,
while we worry about the next tank of gas
and slap each other's shoulders, congratulating each
other on the shoulders for the great Golden Age
that somehow despite all the madness, is surely
right around the corner.

I believed that once. Now I believe nothing,
but the rainbow, brilliant in it's detail, standing
with shameless color against the rainy mountains,
is a reminder that belief is not necessary.
No matter how we tell the story, close to the final destruction
or poised on a Golden Age of love and light,
the rainbow pierces the veil of conceptual fantasy
and kills the story  of past
and the hopes of the future.

Who really knows? What is the soul?

what is honesty? When I tell you the truth, do I do so because I want you to know the truth? Or do I tell you the truth because I want to affirm my correctness and my righteousness? There is also timing and context. If you are a parent and something doesn't go well with your parenting, it is not appropriate for me to tell you the "truth" in that moment. Maybe another time. And the truth I tell you, my intimate partner, is different from the truth I tell a stranger. The truth I tell a child is different than the truth I tell someone on their death bed. Knowing my self, I can speak the truth, and speak compassionately as well.

Many of them, especially the unknown ones that drive my behavior unconsciously. There seem to be some useful beliefs, like, "the sun is coming up tomorrow". But even with that one, what if i lived as if I weren't sure if it would come up tomorrow? How do I live today when all my beliefs are surrendered, and I live contemplating what is real. As Buddha said, "Let reality be your teacher."

No beliefs. No dogmas. Is the world one? or many? is love real? or is the selfishness that seems prevalent the reality? All beliefs prevent me from being truly alive today. Is Obama fulfilling his promise? What do I believe his promise was? Contemplation and comprehension of what is, just as it is.

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”

-TS Eliot

Oneness exists whether i am aware of it or not.

We embark on our voyage.

Over there, the Buddhists are getting into their rowboat.

Over here, the Sufis paddling a canoe.

"Look at the pretty sails of the New Age schooner!"

And when we arrive Home, we scuttle the boat.

Oneness exists. The natural state is not something I can achieve.

And whatever ship takes me across the seas of selfish madness,

doesn't so much matter.

Someday perhaps we'll all meet again at a oneness celebration.

"Hey, weren't you a Buddhist, sitting on your ...... all day?

I remember you, whirling your self into peace.

And you with the bleeding heart, isn't that where Christ stabbed you, and left you to dissolve into eternal love?"

Someday, sitting around a nondenominational campfire of love,

singing songs of merriment, of love, and songs of grief,

and trying our hardest to remember,

"What was that thing we used to call oneness?"

 

I've waited a long time. And i've looked into my soul and seen darkness.

Little failings that seem magnified, by the urgency of our Mission.

We only want to save the world. We only want to share love and bliss until

all identities dissolve in holy water.

The jackals of selfishness yap wildly all around us,

the angels soothe us with songs of heavenly peace.

One flower child dancing in a field of flowers, mesmerized and delighted by the sight of God's beauty.

Two, three, four flower children become a cult, a movement, a religion.

All human endeavors are imperfect. All groups become political.

We thought this would be easy, to return to the belly of the beast,

put our hands on wounded hearts and heads, and let the bliss rain down.

No one has a copyright on love, and on the depths of Being.

Yet in this world of commerce and politics, we pretend it's ours to sell.

The light of love shines outward from our hands, and inward into our hearts.

We can't run. Love is stalking our imaginary identities,

and will catch us in our lies, in our falseness, and our imagined spiritual magnificence.

Only when no identity is left, and no Movement is needed,

will the final explosion of love and bliss descend.

We are the walking wounded, those who have agreed to feel the depths of sorrow,

dragging the past along with us, unable to see the Dawn, sometimes getting lost in the darkness.

Especially when we build an edifice of Oneness prematurely out of our imagination,

and believe in our Dream of Love.

 

Oneness exists whether  or not i am aware...

or not.

Love exists whether i feel it...

or not.

 

We embark on our voyage.

We arrive Home, and know it for the first time.

 

Orpheus returning from Hades.

Orpheus comes to the end.

He has killed Eurydice with his glance.

He has encountered the underworld and now is surfacing again.

What now?

What shall he do?

Can he find in himself another song, and what shall that be?

A song of mourning, of grief?

A song of love? (He has destroyed the object of his love, he has killed his partner.)

A song of hope? (What hope is there?)

A song of the shadows? (He has left the shadows in Hades, been there, done that.)

 

Enough of the self introspection.

Enough whining, and navel gazing.

There is no bottom to the pool of sorrow, no end to the

vastness of Hades.

When we die, we will die forever, unfathomably dissolved into the darkness or the light, as you wish.

Either way completely gone.

 

I hear the voice of my father, the voice of my grandfathers, and they urge me to action.

Not the confused action of Orpheus before the descent.

Not the search for meaning and love somewhere else,

the desire to be saved.

 

Chop wood, carry water, let the heart and it’s mourning dissolve in the daily work.

Tears and laughter coming and going,

cleaning mirrors, washing floors, making food for my daughter.

The journey to the underworld is necessary.

It’s also necessary to return.

 

It’s necessary for the worm to become a chrysalid.

And of necessity, become a butterfly.

A few days of flying free, and then

the darkness will engulf me once again.

 

 

There’s no need to worry that i’ll forget how to die.

walking down some dirt path, with nowhere really to go
barefoot, kicking the dust, and watching the sunset
paint a little glory before the night falls.
What happened to the Grand Dream and the
Very Important Agenda???

Simply, walking, meeting a friend, drinking a cup of tea
or sharing a glass of wine
as the sun sets
on another completely
unique day


What is sadness and joy, but the colors of the rainbow?

This used to be a fox....or maybe it still is a fox, only in another manifestation.
I used to be a spiritual person.
I used to know who i was.
I used to consider myself a failure at times.
And sometimes a wonderful caring man.
And sometimes a pitiful neurotic basket case.
Brilliant, intelligent, far seeing and wise.
Short sighted, lost in momentary pleasure.
I’ve been it all.
And a lot of it i’m not proud of.
Some of what i have been proud of seems about as solid as this fox.
I’m disintegrating.
I’d like it to happen before, i return to the earth,
fur and bones.

(I have written on this topic several times recently in my blog. But definitions change as i change....)

Success.
The concept requires that i step out of this moment, and away from my current situation, and compare one picture of success with another.
This is the very slippery nature of this concept. And i can pretend to be spiritual and beyond notions of success...

But i am not. I still want success. So what is it that i want?
And what if my life so far is a failure? By whose standards is it a success, and by whose standards is it a failure?

For the cockroaches, success is measured one way.
For a stockbroker, success is measured by money.
For a farmer, harvesting healthy vegetables and fruits.
For a lover, a kiss.
For the paratrooper, jumping invisibly behind enemy lines, without getting snarled up in the lines.
For a singer, a song that lifts the soul.

The root of success is to leave all notions of success behind.
And when one of my personalities craves success, to kindly humor it.
Success is leaving this mad talk inside the brain, and surrendering to the love that manifests
as squash and computers and cleaning floors and spider webs.
Loving lovers, and being alert on the highway.
Forgetting success, and remembering who we are,
moment by moment,

success is a fantasy, and which of us can speak of success
when we are living in a dream?