Grandfather

I don't remember much about my grandfather. He smoked a pipe. He rapped his knuckles on a table in percussive and sequential ways which seemed magical to me. He pulled a quarter from behind my ear.

He had a little garden with a shed. I remember radishes and cucumbers. One time I saw him weaving his way home from drinking at a local bar and falling to the pavement. One year later, he had a stroke and died.

Behind his house in the woods flowed the Spicket River. I was sure a band of Indians encamped there on their way from the White Mountains to the sea. Later I was told he had an Indian guide which talked to him in spells.

I've hiked the high words of India and all their nonduality of That. I've even asked some questions of the I Ching lately. The fruit of light is always hanging from the tree. The wilderness of wisdom talked to him. It also talks to me.

That Space of Clarity

A bird just flew into the picture window. Is that the inspiration for the words I was waiting on while looking out at bare trees in the bright March sun?

Imagine its surprise when it crashed into hard clarity. It was a flash of revelation surrounded by the spraying feathers of confusion.

It registered within its birdbrain though. Correcting course without much hesitation, it flew away in opposite direction.

That's the way of nature, like the mountain stream that slams the boulder and in reversal forms the temporary whitewater.

What's missing from this picture is that bird and stream will both continue in their way around the objects of obstruction in a slightly rearranged intensity.

Although, in longer view of things, the boulder will be worn away and this building with its window razed and trucked away.

The only fact remaining is that space of clarity.

Noise Will Be Noise

And then there was lightning before there was then.

To be followed by thunder which then came to be.

Being aspires to know why it's being.

Nothing in thunder can answer—it's nothing.

Sound and the fury of this thunderous world is only the sound and the fury.

Appearances only, it's only appearances.

Noise is but noise.

Lightning is lightning.

Silence, silence.

Superstar

I dream that I am something, superstar of screen and space. On Earth, I walk the stage with dinosaurs and woolly mammoths. Comets write my name in lights.

I played a monkey once. Reviews were raving all about me in the darkest caves of France. I swam the English Channel and continue swimming seven oceans every single day.

Trees talk to me because I am a tree, oak-strong and aspen gold. I wear a beard and stroke it like the Milky Way. My womb gives birth to constellations which I name from heart.

Rivers are my bridges from the mountains to the sea. Bodies are my bridges from the sky to bone.

Love is just a bridge from eye of you to eye of me. Dreaming is the bridge from X to I, unknown.

The Apocalypse of Unknowing the Known

We are a suddenness away from the end of evolution.

We've become something in order to see we're not this.

One never knows the unknowable. So one unknows the known...to know the unknown.

I, the unknowable, in order to know myself, intend the knowable, and through the evolutionary unknowing of this known, know my unknown  self

Ultimately, detachment means unknowing the known, and not some mere renunciation of some thing or action. Not egoic. Heroic!

But not non-existent, nor non-intelligent, nor non-energetic. Satcitananda!

If it's not silence, it's revelation

Revelation filtered in descending order: apocalypse, prophecy, poetry, sometimes a great notion.

After the flash of this apocalypse is the next manifestation whether you unknow it or not.

Like thunder appearing after lightning, your world is a manifestation of spontaneous understanding, i.e. revelation. See through it. Next!

The true hero is neither warrior nor suicide; but one that unknows it all and lives to tell one all about it, aka Bodhisattva.

Neither Ahab nor Bartleby but Ishmael.

The fear and loathing of paranoia is like hearing thunder without realizing there is lightning, like thinking without being.

Like methinks and not i am.

Be aware of the maze of unknowing.

As long as you're still here, there's always further.

And if I'm anywhere in speaking distance, I'm still here.

Evolution is the current story of I-am; always remember one is unknowing.

Belief Story

When I was in the middle of this life, those early thirties in the years encircling 1984, I tried to re-believe in God. I'm talking of a personal relationship with that almighty and omnipresent creator god, a superstar of biblical proportions.

One night while sitting upstairs writing, praying, I felt a drumming in my ears and took it as a sign that God was telling me of his existence. If he existed, then, of course, it was my undertaking here on earth to worship him.

And so I did. And studied fundamentalist compendiums about the Father and the Son and saw salvation in the fact of my belief alone. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, I knew such faith was king. 

One night I had a dream. And in that dream, this God of newfound faith was visiting me and asked me if his deep and mind-encompassing voice was really God. It really shook me.

It further asked did I believe because I wanted to believe in something which would answer all my existential doubt or was this voice beyond belief. The words were like electric shock and led me to a nervous breakdown doubting everything I took for granted. 

Little did I know that such a deconstruction of my social conditioning is the actual beginning of the way to truth and in the subsequent confusion float the momentary cinders of destruction

flying in a disappearing face before the clarity of being that original unknown—this energy, intelligence and experienced existence without a thought of any personal belief or clouding images of god or world or me.

Overlooking Awareness

One always tries to solve the x of me, but I am always undefined.
One day the me is sorrowful and tries to understand just why.
One day the me is happy and desires to know exactly how to stay that way.
After years of swinging to and fro, the me forgets stability of what it is,
entrapped within the back-and-forth, recapturing some pleasure or avoiding pain.
In time, this bipolarity appears to be the ordinary state of its existence.
Monkeys see and monkeys do. The jaguar has escaped from its own view.

Wisdom

Wisdom is always talking to itself.
It's the voice in the wilderness
that needs no audience—
knowing there is no other.

The known that knows
it is the unknown,
it's being is loving
and otherwise compassionate.

There's really nothing to it

There's a general misconception that in time no aspect of the universe will be unknown. That is to say 

that everything is knowable despite the boundless nature of this cosmic pie and what a microcosmic slice of it we taste. 

But that is not the half of it. First, experience is certainly subjective. Without the benefit of consciousness, there's nothing.

Furthermore, it's consciousness itself we sense or monitor. In fact, the deeper we investigate the closer we attain

the probability that what I see is what I want to see. It's kind of like the feedback loop of being.

Then there's that beyond the scope of consciousness. There's really nothing to it, literally.

Imagine what you're knowing in deep sleep. That is the great unknown, unthinkable, which only means it's what I am when I'm not thinking.

A Childlike Shaman Powwow

We were five or six years old when our Great Aunt Izzie came to visit. She was sitting in the rocking chair and I was playing with my cousin on the floor with Lincoln Logs and Tinkertoys. The world we were creating was a cross between a science-fiction matinee and Gunsmoke.

My mother took Aunt Izzie’s empty teacup and started walking to the kitchen when it happened. First, the sound was just a whispering. My mother turned around and dropped the teacup to the carpet, as if she knew too well the melody and where it came from.

It seemed like nothing much to me. The teacup crashing into shards appeared more curious. I wondered how we could include their fragmentary shapes into our formless burgeoning contraption. Everything is just a game for our amusement at that age.

But the noise was turning into whoops. Aunt Izzie’s hand was drumming on her lips. She was turning Indian before our very eyes. My mother ran into the bathroom fast as I remember ever seeing her in action, slammed the door, and left my cousin and myself to witness Izzie’s transformation.

She must have been past eighty then and always seemed to be collapsing as if her bones were just unable to support the weight of years. But now she straightened proudly with the posture of a warrior and started dancing slowly on the edge as if the space our toys created was a camp fire burning in a cold Algonquian night.

Her shouts were getting louder and they moved her body up and down like popcorn as she continued circling there around our world as if she were the light of all the prehistoric summers that existed here before their death had been invented by the forked tongue words of white men.

She stopped to look at each of us and shined. We nestled in a world of toys and listened Fort Apache style to every secret word she said. She spoke of black holes in another constellation. She showed us light emerging from its winter cave. She tapped into a maple tree and fed us with its lovely harmonies of sweet intoxication.

In a quiet burning voice, she speaks to me alone and tells me what I am and asks me to forget each sound she makes to heal my heart, predicting every year that follows from this moment is a slow remembrance of exactly what I know right now—and what a cosmic trip it is from our first pow to each succeeding wow.