New home

I am moving to
http://bloomlate.wordpress.com

I will still post some poetry and thoughts here, but more chronological and contextual information and pictures of my surroundings and my work, will go on the new blog.
I have also moved to the Grand Canyon.
See you in the world!

A cat--whose only signs of aging are a deep chest cough and balding eyebrows--insists on sitting on top of my arm. Life is quiet, by which I mean I am quiet. The seven of pentacles, three of wands, and the Hermit. I am coming up all waiting cards, dreaming of the return of the perversions of hope.

Diogenes follows me through a prolonged literary ramble, from an anecdote in a self-help book to a slick reference in Neil Gaiman's short stories, and now this. He is carrying the hermit's lantern, always lit in his search for an honest man. This light here has just gone out, a blown fuse I expect, and it's hard to replace.

I made no choice when I wrote down that my purpose is to create masterpieces of time and evolution, and I cannot take credit for this bit of spun silk and dreamstuff, though since the age of twelve, I've been very concerned with the puzzle of my destiny and the scope of a human life. In the Mastery of Love, Don Miguel Ruiz simply states "A dream master creates a masterpiece of life." Making a leap here, the purpose of my life is to live it, and the life of a human is itself a masterpiece of time and evolution. FORTUNE COOKIE: BE THE SYMPHONY. It is hard to loose my grasp on the idea of production, of forcing my life into some vessel of lasting worthiness.

I have reached the point in the Two Towers where I no longer want to rush ahead. This is where Tolkein splits the action into two books, the first accounting for the adventures of Merry and Pippin, Legolas, Aragorn and Gimli, and their dealings with the Ents and the Riders of Rohan and with the affairs of wizards. My favorite of all the books, I think because my motto is "Follow the wizard". And the second half, my least favorite, in which Sam and Frodo take a cold hard slog over marshes and dusty lands into Mordor, with the treacherous Gollum in tow. No magic or gallantry there. The transition from companionship, cheer and daring deeds, to a present and growing horror leaves me shocked every time.

Creature of memory, she- never, unless Einstein- Aliens have landed-lived, loved

The enormity of small events colliding:
the feeling built slowly
all day
pearls sliding one by one onto a string
sending tremors back and forward
along the whole strand.
Every moment felt as if it had already been lived
already carefully examined and savored.
It felt too familiar,
like snapshots of life pinned
where the wandering eye would memorize every detail,
a school or an office, memories pinned above a desk,
the everyday bustle meaningless, and only those
celluloid squares framing life, the real story
the one happening just now, filling every corner
with the sensation of seen-this-before.
Not only, lived-this-before.
Stepping from one image to the next, walking through walls
like the paper filling of a plot, one sheet at a time,
flipping, flipping
and no one, (or is there?) to tell the heroine,
turn the page, he's right behind you,
open that letter from your uncle,
grab an umbrella.
Creature of memory, she
had always been. But this day
made an ocean of her sunny fishbowl.
Now in the depths of it, in the reaches,
she remembered things she had not yet dreamed.
Two women with the eyes of fishes, eyes of the dead
one looking forward, the other looking behind,
sisters never seeing the eyes of each other.
Speaking truths that pass like ships
One knowing what was, one knowing what will be
one who is, coming for counsel.
A merchant or a thief (it's one and the same)
holding a green glass bauble before a boy.
He is slippery, untrustworthy, but he means no harm.
That image, there, the dish on the stove
this girlish sashay through the kitchen,
breathtaking sprinkle of stars in the heavens,
A small step for man,
the steps of a careful dance around piles
and boxes in a crowded flat.
She has lived it all, so attentively, before.
This time she is careless, bored,
overwhelmed, and paranoid by turns.
No one writes you back, she observes.
You can never write anyone back. You don't know
what it meant to such an author at the time, or what it still means
no experience is truly shared
if our lives are moving targets.
You can only write forwards, write for the moving targets of the future
those who can never, unless Einstein,
unless traveling against that flow,
those who can never write back,
only forwards for them too, trapped in the flow,
no reciprocation, equal and counterpart, action-reaction.
Yes, your cipher worked.
Well done. I am here. Aliens have landed.
it will not say, the message you can never get.
I have heard you. I am here too.
because they have shared what you
once were, a sloughed skin
your futures will be their pasts,
or is it their futures your pasts,
and you will look past each other
at the screens of each other's experience
encrypted
and they will always long for who you were
when you, in past, in passing, left tracks.
Beads, pearls, colliding on a string
separately resonant, but when you
string the last bead and fasten the clasp,
will it slip gently around your neck?
Are those pearls cool on your skin,
or warm, holding a trace of body heat?
Were they a gift to your past or future self?
Two-way mirrors set at right angles.
If the affair is remembered before it can be lived, loved,
she is always haunted by the shadows of what comes next.

All of my letters are unfinished
So when they say the writing's on the wall
No secret of mine can be read
My hopes mostly left un-wished
In this ragtag collection I scrawl
on the inside of seashells I thread
into strings of un-pearls,
these dreams float
not on currents but inside my head.

Making my way through a book of poetry and a bowl of palatable oatmeal, and it keeps occurring to me, one flash of insight hard on the heels of the previous one, that I am quick to read the book of someone else's existence. Quick to witness someone else's dash into the unknown with a torch. I courageously brave only the night, my reading lamp my only torch, illuminating no other path but the one laid out for a strong female lead.
I remember a man, once an uncle, who built his career on making structures outlive their inhabitants, preserved past the content of living memory. So keen in detecting structural flaws, he left his own house til too late, the moldings crumbling til my aunt brought the roof down around his ears. He made life safe for ages of long-dead residents, and she outgrew his living for someone else.
Fortune cookie says: Stay, and be unremarkable, leave and break hearts.

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.

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.