frozen tracks

Write what you know, people say, as if they know what they mean. I'm waiting, nothing under my bathrobe, I'm waiting to write, barefoot in the chill of a winter morning, until I know something worth writing. I clip my toenails as I wait, in the pale diffuse light reflected in snow from an overcast sky, blankets of white covering the world. Instead of trudging the well-tracked margins, I'm waiting for some urgent mission to send me plowing my own track across the pages, ledger lines drawn out for me like corn-stubble marching through a snowy field. I'm waiting to be hit with sudden inspiration, before I take my morning shower. Waiting for the call of life to grip me as a hand grips a pen, waiting for life to make me its instrument. Indifference or merely indecision will dissipate, going the way of the cloud cover as a beam of sun, a clarion call, comes to galvanize me into aciton. I'll sit, then, alert, bare feet barely feeling the chill, and I'll swim through the meltwater from the thaw that was my fear bound in blocks of ice, shocked by the cold and by the pouring torrent of life rushing all at once to fill and flood the unused corners that lately were settling fields for my imagination. I'm waiting to write until I am struck forcefully on the temples by something worth writing. With all the expectancy and hush of winter, I am waiting to live until I find a reason worth stepping oug my front door, so I can knowingly take that risk and go about the dangerous business of living with the eagerness of a beloved. I'm waiting, sweating under my bathrobe, with ice cold, purpling feet and stubbly unshaven legs, my blood racing with sweet expectation that can only be the ice block's lusty dream of running fast across a plain, in love with the flowering of spring.

Hello folks. I'm on the open road, discovering a sense of possibility and questing for a personal direction or a sense of purpose beyond the general save-the-world thing. Really I believe this means I'm looking for a place to belong to, a grounded central space to put down roots, to move and have my being. It's fitting that the tarot card I'm working on at the moment (as part of a new and exciting art project!) is the Ace of Pentacles, which embodies exactly such potential, the energy of the seed and keeping things safely in hand for another season of growth. For now each day is full and the uncertainty is a welcome expectation of change. I thank several artists for my new outlook: Ben Karis-Nix for his excellent album We Are Giants Now, a beautiful artistic rendering of the state of flow that I've been trying to cultivate. I play it when spinning poi and lately while driving. And Big Sam's Funky Nation, the New Orleans funk band that I heard live. Big Sam plays the trombone, wears sunglasses in a dimly lit bar, and dances fit to beat all in his very shiny shoes. He even smiled at me. I doubt I will ever buy a funk album because I don't see how it could duplicate the extraordinary experience that occurred in that bar. The guitar twanged away, the brass reverberated and suddenly the whole audience was swimming, as if in a fishbowl, moving through water, not air, and Big Sam performed spectacularly. He told everybody to shake it, pointing with his trombone, and they did. I swam through the best hour of my life completely sober yet in a deep experiential state of wonder, and I drove home with complete confidence, yet the familiar storefronts I passed looked new to me, like I was driving through someone else's hometown. This has stuck with me in my travels, but it began in the place that for so long I called home. Not the meaning of life, but the experience of being alive, someone told me, that's what you are searching for, what we are all searching for. An interesting idea, like a trail of incense smoke dissipating over a crowded street. Nostrils flared, I'm ready to follow it to its source.

thoughts from wildFire

A good performance makes me want things that I didn't know I wanted. Or more properly, a good performance reminds me of my desire to reach beyond myself into limitless possibility, there to become a conduit and to shine as incandescently as the soul I see before me, with gestures burning at the edges of memory and imagination, shining new light on some very old part of human understanding. Inspiration has wings born painfully from the destruction of my restrictive self, the critic that keeps me on the sidelines. I am rocked by sharp pangs that accompany the razor-bright illumination of my feathers unfurling. The crumbling of the inner life that once bound me now brings me both a sense of loss and a sense of release from the safety and limitations of my incubation. A good performance shatters the smooth eggshell calm of my unfulfilled potential.

... and it's raining

Who doesn't need a personal laminator?

It seems appropriate that today, given inclement meteorological phenomena, my task should be waterproofing pieces of paper.  Much more practical than writing poetry about how the slippery ooze reflects my inner state.

once upon a time

There was no way to describe what happened next. Neither of them had any idea before that moment, and it would have been hard to pinpoint the exact spot where the world rearranged itself and sat there waiting for them to wake up into it. All that can be said is that something wonderful happened, and when it was done being surprising it left them with sparkly, new and pleasantly upside-down stomachs, and the morning gradually crept up on them as the change did, so by the time they heard the birdsong and saw each other again in the half-light, they were completely and utterly swept away, breathless, swimming and not missing the air.

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.

The beauty of a piece of fruit--
It's keen, awkward taste-angles,
Sauciness, round and rolling with juice.
The quirky mirth of mother earth.

Awkward tusks and the tear-shaped moon

'The time has come,' the walrus said
but all the cuckoo clocks had fled.
'Never a moment's rest' cried he
and chased them all upon the sea.
'Time must behave' the walrus croons
under the sympathetic moon.
She solemnly reflects his tears
and listens to his deepest fears.
Her smiles as she looks with glee
at clocks cavorting in the sea
are no less mild than the glance
upon his tusked countenance
as, gently herding clocks, she led
the saddest walrus back to bed.

Keep your eyes on the hat with the feather

I am trying on selves, the image I have is of the costume box adventure, parading in front of the mirror in as many different guises as I can conceive of. What am I practicing for?

Rest

"I haven't slept in ages" said the giant
as he lay down in the valley
a mountain for his pillow
and pulled the treeline snug around his chin.

What do you call Inuits who are really annoying?

Peskimos!