War and Love: April 24, 1971

On this date exactly forty-four unabridged but evanescent years ago, I marched on Washington D.C. with something like one-half a million others to protest the war in Vietnam.

We ended up before the Capitol and Peter, Paul, and Mary sang out Blowing In the Wind to ask how many years. I know the answer now is just as long as there are years themselves

divided into moments like just why it takes so long to get my Triple Venti Half Sweet Non-Fat Caramel Macchiato when I ordered it before his Non-Fat Frappuccino with Whipped Cream and Chocolate Sauce.

And that's the order which is difficult to understand because it's not about the ignorance of others but the basic lie of what we think we are. Divided from the universal, we, the personal, are war itself.

I could make the argument the only reason why so many were protesting Vietnam was just the simple fact there was a partisan Selective Service System and we the commoners could end up within that horrid jungle.

On the other hand, Afghanistan continues softly on its fourteenth bloody year and everyone now knows Iraq was not invaded for the yellowcake. It wasn't war the protests had effected but who would have to fight them.

On the bus back home I met a girl who for a single short and holy season would become my first true love. I was of course so very young. Despite the Beatles' song we sang out loud while driving through New Jersey

on the way to Washington the night before, I didn't know it then but it’s not being in love, but being is love, and what we truly are. It doesn't take a single moment to discern it if I never think about it.

Love!

PETER, PAUL & MARY, WASHINGTON PEACE MARCH, 1971

Amourterre (The Land of Love in Consciousness)

In and of and by this naked consciousness I am, and in this consciousness I find I've made a land of love.

That this discovery of self was lost at first in common seas of objectivity is just the way it is.

It's in conditioning, both chemical and social, DNA and Gladys, Leo, years of public education, television, well, you name it,

that I came to see the world as something outside myself. My daffodils are laughing at such obvious forgetfulness of its own headlessness,

or stated otherwise: this land of love is my own headland. It's Cape Farewell, Lands End, and Diamond Head all rolled in one,

and every element of it is not at all objective. Science calls it quantum probability; I could name it now potentiality,

but for the sake of this romantic poem, the land of love shall do what it shall do, and that, my secondary character who may be listening,

is love. This poem is now your own creation. There's no end to it because there's no beginning. Otherwise, it's all imagination.

A Mystic Looking Back at Making Love

It's almost been two years since last I loved a woman. And there has to be some kind of irony divine that it occurred on Independence Day,

or night to be specific. There were fireworks despite the fact the two of us had done that kind of thing for thirteen years together.

If I knew it was the last time, that this could be the last time, maybe just the last time, I don't know.

I may have paid attention, maybe kept a journal, at the least I could have written all those movements in a poem.

True I do appreciate detachment from the personal and all its gossiping concern for politics in every damned relationship between a me and you.

Yet it’s not sex but touch of flesh on flesh and lips to lips and tongue with tongue and more the overarching warm embrace of two becoming one,

as if the apex of this evolutionary realizational intent was being played out in a bed of flowering delight,

a whirling dervish mystic union of all this with That, like every ardent color of the spectrum reuniting with its secret dark and bright.

Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes, here comes that void of night!

A Taoist Spring in Northeast Massachusetts

Spring is slow in blossoming this year. On a walk along the river Sunday, I saw a patch of dandelions,

seven pussy willows laced in light green catkins, and the early petals of forsythia in their attempt to turn the empty branches yellow.

The rest was barely in a state of bud. But yesterday it rained, at times in downpours, and last night I heard a line of thunder

echo down the river like a lonely highway in Nebraska. Fog was low this morning but I know the curtain soon will rise.

Transformation is the only thing on earth that's certain. Oh, I also saw a butterfly.

Death Be Not Metaphysical

This winter I saw death as if I once had married her and knew it wasn't true.

The ones we think have died are figments of a ripe imagination as is the one who thinks it has survived.

Above the birch and cedar is the fact of open sky. 

Like consciousness, its winds are ever-changing, and like pure awareness, it's unmoved

by even whirlwinds that have reached the size of Category 5 named hurricanes.

There comes a time when time itself will end, but that in which the space of time has risen,

like thought-sized bubbles in a pencil-drawn cartoon, is as the page that always is, beyond all acts of such erasing.

And moreover, I never turn.

That Is All

To be, and then to know I am, is not the question or the answer, but the final turn in realizational intent of That

to know I'm That. It all begins with light the noise has named Big Bang, creating space in which molecular existence takes the turn

and makes the time to know it is. It's culmination comes with me in seeing I'm not me, but being only this, without conceptual conceit, I am.

Reflecting at that point, without a vestige of volitional illusion, That completes the sudden and immeasurable intent to know

That's That.

The Sign of Peepers in the Wetlands

Spring is not so much a memory as the sudden going further. Like writing is the freeing of a moment caught in memory.

When does happening become significant? The mind occurs—to understand relationship and that is all.

You see what you intend to see. If not for mystery, it's nothing. I'm intending to communicate but don't know why.

At first, one learns the signs. This is how you know you’re talking to yourself. You haven't learned the art of marketing for nothing.

Don't become infatuated with a sign. It’s where the yin will meet the sun. Behind the sign arrives the message—or another interruption.

One already knows exactly what one’s selling. I need enough belief to keep it all together. That’s how the child will keep its faith—

while navigating through an untrue guru, false disciple, and all other fractal tricks of mind.

The Bhagavan in Canyonlands

In Canyonlands, on a mesa called The Island in the Sky, above the confluence of Colorado and Green Rivers,

I watch the sky return to earth. It had been a long and sorrowful separation.

The years had seen the rise and fall of empires and wars too numerous and murderous to count.

Division was the only mathematics practiced and the personal its single sad solution.

Now, within this southwest panorama, clouds are reaching to the ground in one united hydrologic passionate embrace.

I see the truth of Ramana Maharshi in the shape of rain. The wind is sighing there is nothing but one Self.

The red and white rock pinnacles named Needles reach their fingers upwards shouting hallelujah

and the Maze is opening its hidden inaccessible canyon heart to unconditioned love.

Within that perfect view seen through the rainbow sandstone rock of Mesa Arch, I disappear.

There's no reason but park rangers still are looking.

Siri, Why Does God Allow Human Suffering?

Consciousness is quite an impressionable child. The forms I have it take are myriad and diverse.

And when it takes the shape of what I call a human being with a central nervous system

that is capable of amplifying resonance to points of self-awareness never seen before, although not guaranteed,

yet always in the universal evolution of my realizational intent to know myself, unknowable as subject only,

it is indeed a most objective child. The forms it takes are subtle like a mother’s or a father’s thought

but harden quickly to procured belief, the most original among them being certain of its separation

from the wonderful holistic entity of itself as universal knowledge. And this division is the war one calls the world.

No need to ask a god about such suffering; just ask the child you are, and know that's why, beyond belief, I am.

Of Shakespeare, Muddy Waters, and St. John

Wisdom unaligned with love will vector to belief and end in some apocalypse

religious in its uniform and holy in its weaponry and absolutely nihilistic in relationship to others.

Love that's unaligned with wisdom stagnates in desire and ends in tragedy Shakespearean or blue.

But some escape such fate in substances to end in personal catastrophe while others choose a narcissistic wreck as substitute.

While none of this is true except the binary array of love and wisdom, its fictitious fact will make a billion stories, if not two.