the Meaning of FLOW

Forgive my soapbox speech, my pulpit pounding. I've a lot to say.
Flowtoys hosted a recent video challenge to members of the spinning arts community to describe the meaning of 'flow.' Flow describes a state when the basic skills of a craft have been mastered and can be applied with some fluency to express the artist's whim. After a run, spinners might say "Nice flow" and mean nothing more than the smooth linkage of basic concepts to form words, sentences, paragraphs in a language that laps the air with tongues of flame. A superficial connection, but a necessary precursor to the real deal. For fire spinners and performers, the term flow can also be used to reference a state of synchronistic performance, when rote drills and muscle memory meet inspiration. In the state where the well-honed artist wields himself as the tool, the lag time between thought and deed disappears, and the resulting cosmic dance within a human vessel leaves sizzling trails burned into the back wall of the audiences' skulls. This may happen never, once in a lifetime, or, for some people, every other week; but if you ask even years later they will recall the sensation of everything clicking into place and streaming through them as if from somewhere else, from divine inspiration, one could argue. Elizabeth Gilbert describes the relationship of the psychologically healthy artist with a creative muse in similar terms in her TED talk. And in general, artists have taken this experience of creative flow and run with it, pushing all the limits of human expression past known horizons.

I privately approach fire twirling not so differently from the religious ceremonies of Sufi mysticism, especially those of the people colloquially referred to as the whirling dervishes. The Sufi mystic poet Rumi began the practice of turning in circles to attempt to reach a state of divine ecstasy. To be more precise, Rumi turned in circles to attempt to return to a state of divine ecstasy, to echo his previous, direct experience of a very intense, transpersonal and ecstatic nature that occurred in the presence of Shams of Tabriz, whom he referred to as Friend in many of his poems. Sometimes you can believe that the Friend is God, and sometimes the Friend seems to be Rumi himself, perfectly mirrored in the eyes of another, but the underlying friendship, loyalty, and love within the poetry are almost tangible. For Rumi, being with that man, talking with him, was like looking into the heart of a fire. Really magnetic, and with no chance to turn away. This experience was so important that Rumi ceased teaching his followers, and only conversed with Shams. His students, angered and jealous, had Shams murdered. And in Rumi's ensuing grief, he began to walk in circles around the pole in his garden, speaking free form poetry for dictation. He began turning and turning and turning to try to recapture the original state of that experience, and he left blazing poetry to trail behind him, about love and infinity and experiencing windows into the divine. Not so different from the aim of the fire spinner: turning on an axis can become a prayer. In motion, there is stillness, a stilling of the will, and in that silent space there is room for conversation with something greater. And that conversation might be about the human condition, what it's like to be a human, to rise to meet challenges, to feel, to suffer, to be inspired, to triumph.

Poi spinning (to me) describes the same experience, it's an inward journey of reflection when you work things out and put ideas into practice, but the art is also about how you bring your revelations to the world, and how you express the fruits of your inner journey. It's one thing to experience the meaning of life, it's another to convey that experience to another so that it lives inside them too, making them want to leap to join the dance.

"Those cursed/blessed with a Psychedelic view of the world have some condition or have some extraordinary experience in their history that changed their basic perceptions of the world. Which is why a lot of them gravitate towards the arts, it's the only way they can express the ineffable," said Christopher Knowles, posting on The Secret Sun blogspot early this month. To paraphrase, experiences may be classified as psychedelic, as opposed to rational or scientific, moments when the mind acknowledges the incomplete and faulty nature of the sensory input upon which 'reality' is based.

It is my privately held theory that object manipulators (like artists and magicians of every stripe (and I do love stripes)) are prone to 'extraordinary experiences' of what the human body and mind are capable of . Those who strive to reach beyond the everyday become artists to express the unquantifiable living wonder they find there, and like Prometheus, they emerge from the mountain of the gods bearing fire to spread among humankind. The success of this quest depends on the ability to enter into mystery, to swim in waters where others might drown, and equally important, to return intact and to form a bridge between the transcendent and the ordinary, to chart those waters for a daring few, further explorers. It may be an act of grief at separation, a longing to return to transcendent bliss, as in the case of Rumi, but it is vitally important for the world, for the advancement of human potential, that these highly gifted beings return to a reality that leaves a bitter taste in the mouth, and bring back a little of that warmth and illumination with them. They make the world habitable for everyone who seeks out the extraordinary.

November's gift

The earth in late November is transmuted, or simply muted, by the cold--no longer snapping sharply with the sudden shock of early autumn, but penetrating deep into the bones of the ground and settling there in a long persistent throbbing.
Grass bleaches, showing the raw earthen colors beneath, ochre, gray, and brown beds laid bare on the hillside, and trees assume their purple silhouettes, skeletal finery slender and tall against the mountains' shadow.
November is life turning over in bed and dreaming of the bones of the earth.
Not black-and-white, not technicolor, this dream is filled with sepia tones, faded textures, and nostalgia for the liveliness of summer. Clay and slate predominate in a once-vibrant landscape, violet and charcoal populate shadows that pooled in summer with deepest green.
"Purple mountains majesty and amber waves of grain" were not the mountains and fields of late November. These mountains are far from cartoon, the purple a silent and waiting color, the wisdom of the bare trees written on the hills, grief at the season's end tempered with the maturity of a landscape that endures the test of winter, scrupulously saving to emerge again in spring. The stubble and straw remaining reveals the plow's furrowed tracks, script of a different story, what people have made of the land, their conversation with or their conversion of the earth, schooling it to articulate careful rows of corn, silky tops waving, or whispering seas of alfalfa mingled with the hushing of grasses. November winds have no reeds of grass to caress. Nobember winds go hungry and gnaw bitterly at the land. November's grace is tarnished silver, precious metal weathered by the ravages of time. This time of change and lengthening shadows does not yield up its secrets easily, and all yield to the relentless turning of the wheel.

As if I had lost

Tonight the words are addressed to my sadness, coming from everywhere and enveloping me fully in my memories. In autumn, I remember other autumns, other years past, as if they were coils of wire touching each other at the rim, separated by whole years but located in the same space, other wraps of the scarf around my neck. (I wear layered garments of memory, each one brightly insulative against the tugging, scattering winds.) So I've found that in sadness, I remember past sadnesses standing out sharp and clear, tingling along the length of my arm like bangles sliding neatly together. Or it may be that my memories of grief stand out strong as the most vibrant experiences of my life, when a hurricane rocked through my body, more strongly still when I felt the tidal pull of strange waves. I know that I love doing this, that it keeps me alive, and that without this rocking motion another feeling I love would end, which is why I am sitting with tears streaming down my face, as if I had lost a child. Not merely finished a book, where I was witness to another's grief, and the laying down of burdens, fictional and twenty years in the past. Not merely held someone else's child in my arms, astonishment melting me under the light of the infant's gaze. I had not just heard it as a story, seen it in the face of a friend, listened while the parentheses closed. Are these the echoes of some future grief ricocheting off a rupture in the fabric of my life? I honor this feeling and any who can call it forth with as much grace and tenderness as Barbara Kingsolver in her book Animal Dreams.

knit one

I have been working on this piece of knitting for quite a while. It will be a spiral pattern shawl, and it is a gift. I love how the spirals fit together so nicely, and I end up thinking about honeycomb and the center of daisies and soap bubbles and everything that has either the spiral pattern or hexagonally-packed radially symmetrical designs. The practice of knitting says a lot about who I am, and what I do. I get very quiet and still, I work with a focused intent, and I keep a pattern in my mind that represents the whole I am creating. In this state, I will happily untangle snarled yarn, all the time thinking about the mittens I'm going to make. I usually hum wordless tunes, or talk to the person I'm knitting for, or think something nice about them. I watch each stitch carefully as I make it, even if I'm sitting in front of a TV, or in a seminar (I made several seminar scarves. I swear it kept me awake and listening all through senior year). I explore the idea that all the stitches are interconnected, and that a piece of string can become anything with the right guidance, and that patience and craftiness are warmly rewarding. And, slipping into metaphor, if each stitch were a species in an ecosystem, then a slipped stitch, a species going extinct, would create a widening hole in what is meant to be a whole garment, as the species most closely relying on that link in the foodweb are effected and the links begin to crumble. I examine the pattern laid in front of me, counting carefully, and if I see a slipped stitch, my breathing stops for an instant, as I stay perfectly still to keep the run from getting any bigger. I pick up the stitch and work it into the pattern, if there is enough room, and only then do I breathe easy again. Sometimes I undo entire rows, unraveling the mistake and returning to an unbroken pattern. This is what ecological restorationists do for a living, isn't it? Unravel anthropogenic "mistakes" and return to an unbroken pattern, except that there is no knitter, the stitches (species) weave themselves. Which reminds me of a Chinese medicinal text called The Web That Has No Weaver.
At any rate, the study of patterns is necessity to me. If I weren't memorizing carpet squares, I wouldn't have been able to sit through middle school, which moved at a snail's pace, nor even sit in my own room talking on the phone. Out in nature the patterns are so obvious, they have names, aspen, maple, birch, basswood, and I know them the way I recognize voices or handshakes. If you ask me how I know, I will need to think a minute to put it into words, because the patterns do not have words. They have entire stories. But indoors, I compulsively study fabric motifs, wall hangings, and paintings, looking for the same regularity of character or design, looking for something predictable, something that grows and becomes and creates more of itself, as patterns can, and as life can. And so I knit, taking on projects of increasing complexity and scale. Each one I try is a little bit harder than the last, so I keep pushing the envelope. I hang onto the predictability of a pattern in the face of uncertainty. Stories hold patterns that I search for, and they provide an experience of a pattern unfolding and reaching completion. Stories model life. I follow the thread along someone else's pattern, and feel safe and assured, and more confident about my own leavings and tracings, my scribbles, the bits of knotted string that are preparing me for the patchworking of my own life.
This is how knitting is important.

Three

I'd like to talk about a symbol that's become important to me for a number of reasons. This is a triquetra withing an interlaced triangle and circle. A friend and I came up with a proposal recently for a circus training and alternative health facility that would utilize warehouse space in Brooklyn. It would also boast a rooftop garden and a juice/snack bar. We dreamed big, and no surprise that this plan will not be carried out. But the exercise was far from wasted, and we worked out some very important components while envisioning our future lives (in a warehouse). One of the things we thought was most important was a really cool name, Trifecta, which led to a whole discussion of what the three subcategories should be, body, mind, world, like the different spheres of influence we want to be moving in? or heart, soul, spirit, like the different layers of energetic imprints that surround our body? What I like the best is the illustration above, Body, Mind, Soul. It focuses my attention on maintaining a balance between those concepts as a stable equilateral triangle.

The name of our hypothetical, moonbrainchild circus? The Threefold Circus. Again, the fun would be in telling everyone who asks three completely new things that the name stands for.

I've also been toying with the idea of my own stage name, especially after meeting such cool folks at Wildfire. A name sets you apart and gives you a clear identity, a clear presence, so I have been thinking hard about what it could be. I came up with Delta, which is the greek letter d, represented by a triangle. In scientific notation it denotes change, as in temperature, slope, moisture content, etc., but basically a reaction or a transformation, it's the shifting variable. And I'm also enjoying the association with a river delta, the land mass at the outflow of a river where it joins the ocean. I like the changing and mixing aspects of that environment, and it's a fertile ground for the proliferation of the ideas I sow. I think I would be an edge species, so an estuary is a great place for me, dynamic.

I'm enamored with the three-petaled antispin flowers that poispinners call 'triquetra', which really do look exactly like the above.

And I've been looking for a symbol to put on a business card. And in my journeying work with sage, I joined with two other aspects of the plant spirit or myself to form a symbol, we held hands like we were in freefall and wove this design around us. Welcome welcome!

a note about process

Writing is what happens in between. I live at the edge of something, the causeway connecting many things. A river empties where I stand. And in this land of ebb and flux, I simply arrive to find something waiting. There is writing happening all the time, everywhere I meet inner light manifesting Truth through form. Sometimes it appears on paper, but sometimes I write on the inside of my eyelids, or in the sand, or on the skin of a beloved. I write trails through the air, and send messages on the wind. Most of it is in the language of my living cells, though English occasionally predominates. Even if I decide ahead of time what to write, what appears will be markedly different, and not of my choosing. The only thing I can do is be ready, be skillful, and craft myself into the finest instrument for some larger (and as yet unknown to me) purpose. And then I show up to play. It is wild. It is an untameable ride on the rollercoaster of the cosmos. There are no guard rails. And everything I bring back with me counts as another star, a fresh start, a word added to a bag full of sand. The magician never reveals his tricks, because there are no tricks, just the magic of perception. The five year old, wide-eyed, knows it all. Nothing is written in stone because the word, nothing, is written in stone in the sidewalk. It's a joke. And I have so far to fall.
It's true that I have no expectations, but is the expectation of expectations an expectation? The anxiety is all me, but I empty out through this work. My vital spot is the meeting place, the ecotone, the blending and opposing forces as they join. The front and back covers, yin yang. All I am certain of, all I name myself, is change.

What I thought about last night and what I am right now, these are things not taken lightly. I dreamed a burning house. I was the house and the dreamer. I burned myself and I was relief in the wake of those ashes. The clarity. And I think that the house was unwanted. And if there was anything that I needed, I didn't need what was in the house, the house was wrong.
There are hours of the day where I have time to myself. I go infinitely in, like the hanged man on the card. If there was something for me to do I would keep it to myself. A true meaning presents itself. And the fortune on the cookie left ripples in the air. If there was a message written on a little slip of paper... A man reads a fortune cookie and has a perfect realization. What happened, what brought him to that dawning? What were the events that made so much sense when he read that slip of paper? If we could be so lucky, our lives would fit like novels into sense and cohesion, ended by two books, one beginning, one closing, and all the threads neatly tied. But the center of self cannot hold in coheshion without sacrificing a swim. The neurotic drowns in water he was meant to swim in. The mystic swims in the sea. I think I'm setting out in a boat. If all the docks are dry where do the ducks go in winter?
I am on a journey. What house will I build to replace the one that burned? I think I will live in the old and worn house of Joseph Campbell. I will walk the tattered floor where I felt vertigo. I will converse with pale clapboards and the slate-grey sky. I will associate with the wind.

now you see me...

I practiced invisibility for many years. When you say that no one should go out expecting to be invisible, know that as I left my child's body I tried to keep whatever quiet and nondescript silvery film covered me. I tried to keep still as a mouse, still as the books I read. I stayed passed over, or imagined myself passed over. I became an eddy in the flow of humanity. The first time I came into an understanding that I was not invisible for all practical purposes, I was twenty and in a foreign country. A country, moreover, where dark-skinned (mostly smiling) faces insisted on meeting my eye. Here I could not escape by being in my own head. I was loudly, publicly white, very much an object of curiosity and conjecture. And there I realized I had never been invisible. I had never come to terms with the striking truth of my own identity. The closest I had ever come to wearing my own skin was when I mingled with performers, bravados, young lions boastfully holding a posture, their swagger all tail and flowing hair. Among people to whom a mask was so essential, people who maintain a separate stage identity beyond all proportion to a normal human ego, and who may not mingle easily with the common fold, among such people I found a strange kind of freedom from my self-imposed exile by invisibility. Their masks oddly freed me from my own. I could slip out of my dull cloak and stand, feeling myself no longer all elbows and knees and knobby shoulders. I felt that what I had become was not so foreign after all in their company, where it could be taken for another mask, and where those with true seeing would not mind. Knowing that my full realized existence would challenge social conventions, I kept my moments of lucid embodiment to the practice of performing, a new skill I exercised as I once had invisibility. The three months I spent under tropical suns were three months of constant performance, constant embodiment of an identity, when I knew that I exist without borders when no one is looking. (I am like the cat, everything, nothing. Examine me Schrodinger, and I am fixed, a contrary to your constant.) The exhaustion of stares, blazing stronger than the sun, weighed on me. That battle constantly waged within my face. Knowing that I will fight to be seen, to express myself, knowing that an aggressive assertion is linked to some presentation of selfhood, I yet linger in the penumbra, whispering what I would shout. Awaiting some cue to step from backstage and to take my place in the spotlight.

In a time of great change and upheaval, fear is my inheritance, my shadow-self clinging and dragging at my feet, my belly, my throat. Fear is my keeper. I miss more than I see. But I see the great old tree at the bottom of the garden.

Waking to my disconnection I have nowhere to go but into myself, yet I flee. I may be on the fast track, but it's not a smooth ride.
And today I have been reminded that everyday life is the extra-ordinary one that I seek, and instead of seeking to intensely change and shape my life every day, I might find it intensely changed simply by experiencing it in the moment. Who or what might I fall in love with? The irreplaceable, vulnerable beauty of strangers' self-conscious postures on the subway, the way they carefully avoid making eye contact with me. The world is so big and so beautiful, I used to cry. Where is there room for me when even the smallest feather crumpled in the gutter shines, when each brick laid is laden with significance? Reading each nexus of power and information, reading the city, reading tiny details, reading the lines, and the newspaper flapping its way down the sidewalk, would I ever arrive anywhere? Or would I simply stay frozen in a moment's observation, of wood grains, of graffiti, of rain in rivulets, and the smell of new pavement, a sea of wobbling umbrellas? I will be examining an old locket, a cat, a faded flyer, the nearest mural, and the shoes of passersby. And if I examine enough cups of tea, perhaps I will look up to find some new revelation has settled around my shoulders. The world is big enough for me.

The time is now and if I do not write, what good are all the hours of my life? Too long I lingered in the shadows, pale imitations of a dream, whiling away my time with fancies and with fantasy, but NOW those shadows I shall cast, that stand out bold and clear, distinct from every meager spectre of the dying day. What good the empty page? Yes, just so. The page. Who ever heard such pouring forth, extemporaneously, there is not time enough to send my thoughts to shake the fount and center of the earth. But here is this, I cannot form but wish a form to life, exhale my breath as prayer and come an empty vessel to that humbling page. And all those spectral auditors, the shadows spectating even as I who came a member of that formless audience beyond the form of Life, a story, Truth; a witness in the dark to the illumined forms of Love spelled out upon the stage, and those spellbound amazed listeners will heave and sigh, breathe, gasp in my breath as I, exhaling, now send forth words. Not my words but words unto themselves, that struggle out their meaning, flare and die, even as their light illumines and inspires. How shall we fare when entertainment's cheap, the word a silver seed stolen, ransomed, bargained, begged, thrown away out in the gutter? I cannot see the fruits of what will be but toil upon the circle's edge, a leading spiral spinning, spinning, yet never to reach the center nor see the whole complete. Here's to the rim, the narrow path, the ledger lines of profession, duty, fate, or is it will? To bind myself to words, is this my choice?

the four letter words

Dear ____,
I just had a dream which is about to slip away. But I want to remember the sense: we do what we do, save the world or author it, shape it, become its architects, because of the strenght we get from being with other significant people. The architects of the world, the true Poets, its saviors, create spontaneously, without apparent effort, but always because they must, because some need, some impulsion drives them to great urgency. At this time their great precision, their carefully schooled behaviors and skills, allow them to flawlessly tap that which is the power of the universe, and use it in the service of Change (which should be a four letter word but isn't). Despite Fear, our strength.. no, BECAUSE of Fear, our strength lies in unity, not separation, unity centered on the perfect and abiding quality of LOVE. We are small in the measure we separate and close our hearts, and we are great in the measure we dare to let LOVE dream through us and imagine the blossoming of the future of the world. This is why the world needs LOVE above all else, and why the greatest force for altering current situations may still exist, dormant, among the masses. A friend told me evolution has not been survival of the fittest, all these years. In Darwin's later writings he theorized that LIFE was kinder than that. What would a world look like if we turned to the understanding, like he eventually did, that we evolve best through (or rather, in the direction of, towards) our experiences of Beauty, Truth, and LOVE, and through our integrity to those concepts and a deepening of the experience of humanity?
What might the world look like with calm LOVE at the wheel, instead of raw Fear pushing from behind, propelling us? Is that not a worthy goal?
If we stop to calculate everything in our Fear and our isolation, then what we miss is LIFE! And the vibrant, insane, jerry-rigged inventions of the dream will never come into being. But our science, our art is far greater than mean calculation, and as we talk to the universe, we shall become its next shapers, for ill, or indeed, for better.
***
All such power is metaphoric, and if I told you the contents of my dream, the horrors, the struggles in their particulars, it would mean nothing to you, less than nothing. Yet what I have read from such images may, I hope, be writ large upon mankind.

light in the dark forest

As I drifted, I saw a luminous being arise from my seat beneath an old spruce. She was ghostly glowing in a flowing gown, and she ran into the forest suddenly stretching out before me, though I called out to her to wait. I tried to catch her, I tried to keep her from leaving me behind, but she twisted and turned, becoming a pinpoint of light that disappeared into a deep and needle-cushioned corner of my mind. I worried that something had left me then, that I would not have a hold on all that was myself, and I would not return fully intact. What if I severed the connection abruptly and a part was lost wandering with the forest girl?

Then Alberto Villoldo, whose words drop like stones into a still pond, so that a few sentences send ripples to my very core, had this to say:
"The shaman with whom I studied believed that he could track his luminous nature--what we call the soul-- through time the same way that he could track a deer through the forest. He claimed to have followed the luminous threads of his being as far back as the Big Bang at the beginning of time, and into the future, tasting who he was becoming, and beyond, to when our universe will again return to that singularity from which it was created." (excerpt from Shaman, Healer, Sage)

I saw the girl again, as my fleeting soul scampering ahead of me down some path only visible to her deep into the forest before me. I did not need to stop her, because she had not lost her way. I had rather to follow her, and come at the last to the very heart of stillness and age, where I will step into her as she stepped out of me in pursuit of that becoming. My future self scampering off to become, and me following in its wake, stepping into each new future, each new second, following the thread of light.

sensitivity

Right now I drink
the slightest sound.
I am a still pond
and my whole being
is dizzy with listening,
waiting, watching.
I am so wrapped up
in sensation, so wrapt
in my attention
the slightest dip of a robin's wing
is enough
to fill me completely.
I am a pregnant tummy
so full of my own being,
that funny egg-question of a soul,
tapping on the shell, hearing
echoes from the world, dreaming
of no time at all, resting
in the dark and quiet, changing
ever so softly.

Changing.

While the golden egg
of my mind waits,
I need not say or do
anything of import.
That waiting itself
holds a gift.
I will bear my mind's treasure
on some sandy shore
and swim back out
to the milky stars of silence.
I have no room for anything else.

Ritualized verse for everyday occasions

The inspiration for these little couplets or single lines I owe in part to Jason, and his recommendation for finding lost objects. Now it is not only Catholics who utter a short couplet prayer to St. Anthony:
"St. Anthony, St. Anthony, please look around,
my _____ is lost and cannot be found."
St. Anthony takes his time, but he has never failed me yet.

Anyway, the concept behind this little ritual struck my fancy, and I've been dreaming up little singsong rhymes for more occasions than I can count. The rhymes may not be very good, but I think what is important and healthy is opening up one's mind into prayer, addressing the universe in a formal-humble-intimate way using 'thou' and 'thee,' and taking a moment to say something beautiful about the world. Prayers of gratitude are shown to be much more effective than prayers of supplication in changing our perception of goodness in the world. The words you speak have never been used before in the exact same combination, so each of your sentences is a new creation. Might as well say something that has a positive effect, at least in yourself if not in the world around you. Here are some lines I have come up with recently:

When watering plants: Thou gentle spirits of earth and air, be well.

When in the shower:
To thee, o power of water I yield
myself to be cleansed; my wounds to be healed.

When picking up a musical instrument: O beautiful instrument, grant me congress with the air.

When lighting a fire:
Flame of the Earth,
strong before our birth
begin with a spark
from the deep and the dark.

When moving into a new house: This dwelling is dedicated to the Earth, whose shrine all homes are.

history from inside the bars

It's important to remember that our agricultural industry is our war industry. Chemical fertilizers were generated by our war engines and pesticides were converted from nerve gases. Beat our swords into ploughshares, have we? Then instead of buying war bonds, we buy cereal. We feed our animals subsidized corn, and grow fat with surplus. We won a war but lost ourselves. We consumed the battleground and now are eaten by it.

the god of spectacles

Some gods sit behind you in the theater with a bag of popcorn.
Just a thought, but shouldn't there exist, somewhere beyond timespace, a deity who loves the theater? A deity to whom actors, dancers, musicians and mountebanks are devotees? A god, well, perhaps a goddess, who smiles at performance? A god who thrives in the moment when a human steps out of himself, becomes free from ego or limit, and creates that perfect doorway into the infinite? To such a splendid being, performance is the best sacrifice, and every time we show that part in ourselves before others, the god of spectacles is fed. I'm sure he? she? it has a better name.
The hunger of the human spirit for delight and magic in a dissolving experience means the god of spectacles will never die. Its shrines, movie theaters and opera halls and high school stages will not go unvisited, and its altars will always be filled at the Oscars.
This is the god listening in an empty theater, reverberating through the floorbeams, sighing in the air breathed by so many lungs gasping in wonder. It is a god of darkness and of listening, of behind-the-scenes improvisation. It is the god who demands that the show must go on, and gives its followers a swift kick off an impressive-looking cliff to teach them how to fly.
And once the dust settles on the floor, it is the god waiting for the next inspiration, the next intake of breath before a human begins what will become the next prayer to the god of spectacles.

sapwood, heartwood

I've been thinking about gifts of the heart. A heart is strongest when it is open. A weak heart is one which remains closed and constrained. We search everywhere for the comfort and sweetness locked deep within our beings, and instead find Splenda for our souls; excesses of all kinds. Our short-lived satisfactions contains aspartame, a chemical which will turn into formaldehyde if heated.
We are all missing some sweet vein like maple syrup in our souls, the liquid gold which never runs dry, and flows from the earth to our lips. The tremendous maples are grandmothers teaching us how to be love, in perfect fountains; how to love and always have more than enough. Because it does not come from us, but instead through us, on its way around the universe. We have only to tap into the wellspring of our vitality. And take care that the buckets are not lined with lead.

Dreamstate

Some countries and states are wordless. To describe those places is to steal thought when one returns. Words are things smuggled fretful from that foreign land, released, that should never leave had the customs master his way.

And on the occasion when they are released, it seems I would do best to send them back.

Echo

This is a day for old songs.
Remembering where I've been
the eye stares at the hand
and wonders at its incomprehensible music.
Before, there was no barrier.
Now I am sitting in a rocker watching the world.
Now I am remembering.
How did creation flow through my hands?
Sensation unknowable.
The past rises up through my feet,
a dust cloud of moments
tangible, tinged with gold.
I exist to illuminate them
My little lantern-soul flickering
in the palms of these hands.
Come, let us tell the story again.

Disappearing is how you can tell you were there

Disappearing is how I can tell I was there
Fading out, I feel a sudden elation
I existed! I was material, factual,
solid matter! I will go tell all my invisible friends
and they will be jealous.