The Shaman of Phenomenal Yosemite

I lost my hat once in Yosemite, on a trail around the village, after visiting the nearby waterfall. Yosemite Waterfall is three waterfalls in fact. As one becomes two becomes three becomes the ten thousand things,

I watched the water split apart like shards of crystal lightning. I was alone, leaning on a glacial boulder, somewhat away from all the people who were frolicking within its wonder.

My hat was turned around so that the visor wouldn't interfere with picture-taking, like the black-and-white zoom shot of the lip of Upper Falls kissing the void of the absolute unknown.

This was sometime after leaving Glacier Point where I'd become entranced by the shaman figure of Half Dome across the great abyss in its High Sierra shocking world of alabaster granite.

From that viewpoint it appears to be enshrouded in a sorcerer's cloak and Yosemite itself is its astonishing phenomenal creation. There's nothing one can do but tip your hat surrendering to its intent to silence—

and illuminate.

The Red Winged Perfection of Understanding

Spring happened in the Stop & Shop parking lot; after putting all the groceries away inside the trunk, I opened up the driver's door

and sat inside and slipped the key into ignition and as I was just about to close the door, I heard their trill, and realized it had been there

but I was busy being me and didn't hear the wonder of rebirth, the renaissance of northeast marshes, Michelangelo of bird call,

Zen of emptiness is form and form is wavelength of an ice-out on the Merrimack as red-winged blackbirds have returned from Tennessee

and self-awareness is arising from material phenomena in consciousness through evolutionary Intent like chevrons on their wings becoming red

as April will arrive in all its yang of spring, spring, spring beyond, spring altogether all beyond, O what a great awakening!

The Oracle of the Underground

Lost in thought, one advances toward the oracle. No red wings flutter in this land of winter. Swamps of passion sleep beneath the ice.

Volition is denial of the natural watercourse of love. Ten thousand concepts sparkle in the frozen wasteland of the mind. Which forgery should one select?

The prophet from the south realm answers none. Forget the dollars of the senses. Division is a fabrication of an elementary schooling. Concentrate on one.

The voice of orioles is immaterial but gold. A charm is plummeting into an unfathomable well. The splash is always in the spring of heart.

Satori in Canyon del Muerto

In the canyon, sitting on the desert ground by clear and rushing waters of a crystal stream that flows from mountains far beyond the high surrounding mesa, I look at Anasazi ruins built within a crack between the sun and moon.

A thousand years ago, people occupied this space and made their time like pottery and sacred images of Kokopelli breathing infinite designs of lightning on these sandstone walls created by a long-forgotten sea.

The water starts to talk to me. It is speaking in a language that I used to speak before this world was planted in a fertile consciousness. I could say it's timeless but it's more like time itself. It's as if the Big Bang is right now.

Those ancient Pueblo people walk past me. Dinosaurs are dying out. Purple darkness like the one original sea distills each and every drop of water in my blood. I drink its whirlwind we call being until it covers me in silence.

When the tour bus leaves, I climb aboard, unable to explain to her the scene I've seen, the sea I am. Instead, I speak of ruins in the stream. My lunch was good. I took a picture of my hiking boots. Two ravens soar above me in these thermal waves of turquoise sky.

The Enlightenment of Julius Caesar

The Ides of March arrive tomorrow. Don't be late. Nine days from now and forty-two years ago, my father died. In eleven days, my mother would be ninety-seven. And pi was just an hour ago.

Time is permeated with the absolute unknown and the Merrimack is still embraced by ice although in any minute water from the Whites will free itself when everything is seen as universal, causeless, empty, and impermanent.

But let me suffer as a person for this moment just to tell you I love watching situation comedies like 30 Rock and New Girl. Like napalm in the morning, they remind me of loving deconstruction.

Science really doesn't do it for me. "That I am" to "I am That" is all the evolutionary arc from Big Bang to Enlightenment you need to know. The rest is there for you to breathe. Et tu, ego?

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.