#tbt Last Man Out of Parker Wildlife Refuge 1984

They say the island hermit is just afraid
to be outgoing, still living there, some nerve,
upon a ragged sandbar, domain of deer
and waterfowl, a government preserve.
He'd rather live alone, like a renegade.
But Lew, if asked, would gladly volunteer
a different point of view, remembering when
the island was a neighborhood, a place
for names and faces, not a forsaken den
for migratory birds, or solitaire.
The lilac bushes are all that fill the space
familiar with that far-off yesterday.
It's not that Lew has left the human race.
It's just that everyone has moved away.

2002

footnotes to autobiography ii

1. What do you call it when you're pro-life and pro-choice? I am that.

2. My culture has no rite of passage but for parenthood—and parenthood scares the bejesus into children—so that was my passage.

3. The golden rule—spread your leaves but remember your roots.

4. My great grandfather calls it breathing fire.

5. Believing there are others is the god of all conditioning. The knowledge that I am is in the knowing I'm unknown. Evolution is mutation but compassion is remembering my story. It takes the Tao to name it but there are no words for Tao.

The Ballad of My Autobiography II Blues

Believing there are others is the god of all conditioning.
The void of pure awareness, being consciousness
and the mirror of the mind
in the name of the parent, child, and spiritual projection.
All poetry is translating revelation into words—
the trick is knowing when and where to leave the silence be.

I like my body like I like my car—
blood red, efficient, and it's got a moon roof.
The knowledge that I am is in the knowing I'm unknown.
Awareness being self-aware. Like a mother and child reunion.
My number one daughter doesn't mean the world to me.
She's not of the world; she is love.

My mother would have been one-hundred in eight days.
See, she's always in my dream—self-awareness
is spontaneous and so it feels like
what I’ve always known—
evolution is mutation
but compassion is remembering my story.

There's a golden thread
that ties my childhood
to my parenthood
to now—it's not
completely nameless.
It takes the Tao to name it.

My Autobiography I

Beware of science in sheep's clothing. Koan is a subset of myth, sometimes called the anti-story. Dreams are light years and deep space beyond the world.

The primary interpretation of one's dreaming every night is to awaken to the little lower actuality that one is dreaming there's a day. So simply said, the world appears to be a paradox because it's actually a dream.

After deconstructing day, the universe turns lucid. Shakespeare writes a play. Basho pens haiku. Cold Mountain.* Old folks move to Florida to live with alligators. Old souls stay in Maine.

Theology is the language of all old religions. Science is the language of the new religion. Myth is still the spoken silence of the known unknown. Love is the heart, and imagination the matter, of lucidity.

Parenting is a practice. First comes unconditional love. Then comes seeing through new conditioning to that unconditional love. And now I’m like grandfather sun enjoying what the moon is doing to the earth.

Profound revelation: Gurdjieff's infamous image of the moon feeding on the earth is not so much horrific as sacrificial. Like mother and child. In other words, change your point of view! A koan.

But not a horror story. The classic fairy tale. Original nirvana. Pure awareness is projection. Projection is pure awareness. Between awareness and projection is this dream.



* A Cold Mountain Transcreation

When someone sees Cold Mountain
all declare he’s wild and crazy—
his face isn’t much to look at,
his body is wrapped in rags and fur,
they don’t understand his words
and he doesn’t speak their words.
His reply to all these passersby:
come and gaze on Cold Mountain.

A Myth to Live By

In duality, there's two beliefs: one and the other. Right and wrong is one belief and wrong and right, the other.

No belief is right or wrong but thought is caught in worshipping itself. And all devotion is beyond belief or judgment.

Devotion to devotion is direct path. Thought worshiping devotion, or love of being,

is the myth that deconstructs the old belief, so chopping wood can truly be just chopping wood.

There's a reason why Zen is Zen Buddhism. No matter how absolute or zenlike it is, every devotion loves a myth to live by.

Myth of Mind

The mind is a precious ring
forged in evolutionary
fires of fourteen billion years
with a singular intent:
The Apocalypse of Self-awareness.

But thought becomes enamored of itself
in shadow worships called belief,
abandoning its unborn birthright
for its greatest concept and conjecture:
death!

Yet in secret places,
well knowing it is lost,
thought worships being
instead of thought,
creating myths of Krishna,
Christ and Consciousness,
returning to this That I am—
pure awareness being self-aware.

footnotes to illuminating myth

1. although it preaches proof and experience, western scientific materialism is all about theories and assumptions.

2. being is the only known but the unknown is absolute.

3. intuition is to space-time as process is to spirit and intent.

4. neither naturalism, eternalism, existentialism nor nihilism, but spontaneous, open, unified, and absent. footnote: baizhang via ferguson. longchenpa via dowman.

5. the simple act of turning on a light is in itself a story of the gods and the lighting of a candle.

Illuminating Myth

To believe my myth is sacrilege. To envision it is sacred art. A myth believed is like religion; a myth assumed is like a paradigm.

But a myth illuminated is like lucid dreaming or the way of self-awareness, that is—being the unknown.

The mind is reading tea leaves. Energy and evolution. The power of three and seven. Pure awareness is spontaneously self-aware.

Yes, no mind is no belief, but no, no myth is not no view on views. Being natural, eternal, dreamlike, and empty is not a divided view.

Do red-winged blackbirds in bare trees bring back the spring or do falling leaves? Myth is mindfulness.

Being Myth and Not Belief

Unlike the mind, awareness is not passive. For the way of awareness is intending self-awareness.

But the mind just sits there like a razor's edge dividing all that passes through it.

Don't get me wrong, the mind will get unstuck. The mind is nothing but that long slow turn in awareness being self-aware.

It's like that point between sutra and tantra, history and myth, karmic conditioning and unconditional imagination.

Like a stuck mind is a believing mind, but a mind becoming unstuck is a mind in disbelief. No-mind is not no-thought but only no-belief.

For before belief was thought and after belief is imagination. As politics is the world of samsara and Jesus is the dream of nirvana,

love is the common language.

A Few Words from Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu) Ch-2a

How can the Way be so concealed there’s any question of factual and fake? How can words be so unintelligible there’s any question of right and wrong?

How can the Way be somewhere else and not be here? How can words endure and not be genuine?

The Way is simply hidden in sudden insight and words are merely lost in wordplay. Thus there is debate between the Left and Right about what's right and wrong.

Each denies the other’s affirmations and affirms the other’s deep denials. But to right such wrongs and wrong such rights, nothing compares to seeing through it all with clarity, lucidity, illumination.


Look, there’s nothing that isn’t an object and there’s no one that isn’t the subject. But one never knows anyone from the point of view of that object.

One only knows everything from the point of view of this subject. Therefore I say that depends upon this, and this depends upon that.

In other words, subject and object give birth to each other. And birth leads to death and death leads to birth. Each affirmation is a refutation of something else, and vice versa.

So where there’s right for someone, there’s wrong for someone else, and vice versa. Thus, the wise one never takes a side but sees all in the light of Heaven.


Sure, she knows her this, but she also knows her this is that from another point of view, and thus her that is also this. Therefore, she knows that contains both right and wrong; and this contains both right and wrong.

So is there really any this and that or right and wrong? Or is there not a this and that at all?

The state in which both this and that are no longer known as opposites is called the Heart of the Way. And from the stillness of such a pivot point, all movement and opposition is seen in their immeasurable transformations.

Therefore, right is boundless and wrong is boundless. Again, nothing compares to clarity, lucidity, illumination.


~Zhuangzi (tr-Son Rivers)