Another Pleasant Valley Sunday

I am the leafless river. 

I am the fountain on the brink. 

And when the wind is breathless 

and night has dropped the day 

and all its industry and play, 

I am the eagle eye reflecting 

deepness of the quiet moon. 

Awaken to this revelation! 

See its prophecy alight 

the water into soundless flames. 

Feel its photovoltaic inspiration 

wash against a thoughtless shore. 

And love the intuition of the trees 

dancing in the breeze of being 

all and nevermore.

School Time Images

I was shy at school and during recess stood alone, standing up against a chain link fence, while I watched the schoolyard buzzing with its games of tag or jumping rope or shouting, chanting, laughing, crying, talking. Inside I knew I didn’t have to be that way.

One day, weeks after classroom pictures had been taken, we received a captivating envelope. Inside, besides our five-by-sevens, eight-by-tens, and wallet sized individuals, there shone a wondrous sheet with all the separate photos of my classmates smiling through.

My mother cut the universal glossy into personal existent images and I played with them while sitting on the floor, pretending we were in that busy schoolyard and I was nothing but the center of attention, playing childhood games and being infinitely happy.

Although, there were those times just two of us, me and Joanne Kerry, secreted ourselves away and climbed the coffee table, hand-in-hand, or rather edge-to-edge, and rested by a plastic apple in an emerald crystal bowl, whispering chromatics of our love for love.

In that moment, I would disappear, both physically and descriptively. What remained is now transmitting clouded memories some fifty-four years later—as if I never aged. In truth I see that consciousness was never born, and life is just this lesson trying to be learned.

Resting in Haiku

see through thought

let That do

yeah! yeah! yeah!

An Open Sonnet to the Perfect Future

The polar vortex visited last week. 

It downed three winter lagers while discussing 

consciousness with a Chinese atheist 

who worshipped at the feet of a perfect future. 

She shall have disbelieved her universe! 

Channeling deep sleep, the Weather Channel 

had woken us up to a constellation far 

below our tender surface. Her fame is unknown. 

I will have changed my name if I were her. 

All were grateful that Thanksgiving passes 

once a year. To see that science rests 

within the omnipotence of being is 

distressing to the system. Everything 

beclouded will have been always open sky.

Nisargadatta on Words

Questioner: As I listen to you I find that it is useless to ask you questions. Whatever the question, you invariably turn it upon itself and bring me to the basic fact that I am living in an illusion of my own making and that reality is inexpressible in words. Words merely add to the confusion and the only wise course is the silent search within.

Maharaj: After all, it is the mind that creates illusion and it is the mind that gets free of it. Words may aggravate illusion, words may also help dispel it. There is nothing wrong in repeating the same truth again and again until it becomes reality. Mother's work is not over with the birth of the child. She feeds it day after day, year after year until it needs her no longer. People need hearing words, until facts speak to them louder than words.

Q: So we are children to be fed on words?

M: As long as you give importance to words, you are children.

Q: All right, then be our mother.

M: Where was the child before it was born? Was it not with the mother? Because it was already with the mother it could be born.

Q: Surely, the mother did not carry the child when she was a child herself.

M: Potentially, she was the mother. Go beyond the illusion of time.

Q: Your answer is always the same. A kind of clockwork which strikes the same hours again and again.

M: It can not be helped. Just like the one sun is reflected in a billion dew drops, so is the timeless endlessly repeated. When l repeat: 'I am, I am', I merely assert and reassert an ever-present fact. You get tired of my words because you do not see the living truth behind them. Contact it and you will find the full meaning of words and of silence—both.

Turning to Be

The forms awareness deems to take 

appear to me in space and time 

but that’s a prevalent mistake, 

ridiculous, when my sublime 

nature is seen as here and now 

and all of me I disavow 

as immaterial to one 

spontaneous intent to know 

myself. It is as if the sun 

shone down upon itself to grow 

an oak which turns a leaf to see 

inside the sun it is to be.

Air

division is the air

the world inhales—

violence is the air

the world exhales—

the wisdom of love is the air

that leaves the world

breathless

Baptism of Love

We weren’t religious.

But drinking downstairs all alone one Friday night,

I started thinking who am I to not baptize our daughter,

sleeping upstairs, two years old,

dreaming new identities she could be like Lego characters

assembled thought by thought until

the ever-present inimitable magic of one’s being is covered up

by something old and borrowed.

Every beer was turning me more blue.

And so I tip-toed up the staircase,

passing prints of Andrew Wyeth’s artless landscapes

opening around an empty house,

until I stood above her sleeping peaceful form,

and felt the consciousness we shared as breathtaking love.

Then I touched my finger to my tongue

and prayed she’d always know she is that light of being

that had come into our disillusioned lives

to teach us what we always are.

I placed that finger on her forehead

feeling fourteen billion years as building to this second.

Suffering Through

The world is like an incubator 

growing wisdom in its fervor 

slowly. Some will never see 

through confines of that world because—

there’s not an object to that final 

preposition. There’s no objective 

in the world at all. Such is 

its insight being seen outright. 

There’s only the absolute subjective.

Christine: an Appreciation

She drove that orange Volkswagen like freedom itself. No one would ever know where to find her. That didn’t mean she wasn’t quite striking when around, but only that she could disappear before you knew it.

And her style, beneath it all, was traditional. She had no misgivings about the American Dream other than it should exclude no one, especially women. So it was inevitable that we would slowly drift apart. She veered toward that dream, driven, and I was always swerving away from it, searching.

The only reason we lasted as long as we did was the initial nuclear fusion-like strength of our love those first years. In time, it took the form of our beautiful daughter, to whom she sacrificed much to be a loving mother. Not too long ago, I told her ours was an epic history. She questioned that, and I countered maybe it was more mythological: the marriage of Sea and Sky and the birth of Venus.

Chris passed away on Friday. Imagine the loss of an ocean. And the depth of its absence.