This morning brought the bears.
Paw after paw, twelve in total
each gripping the mossy skin
of boulders and befallen trees.
They descended from the East,
towing the Sun
with paintbrushes freshly
dipped in morning palette.
This was the hour of Aurora.
She combed her hair to the timbre
of their weight on earth.
Their hearts sang.
I spied a glimpse of them
from the small of my window.
The bears.
A mother and two babes
For a moment
I knew the power of simplicity.
That is, of three bears
afoot in the morn.
There's this thing that happens when you're graced
by the presence of someone who's walked these streets for a century.
One hundred years.
Chapters chronicling the exponentially exploding velocity of history.
Herstory.
There's this thing, you see.
Maybe it's magic, the bittersweet variety.
Or simply tragic that this soul in this vessel will soon cease to sing stories.
Stories that slip by most of us, with our fast cars and Crackberries and all.
Stories we wear on our skin like condensation,
as we dart like arrows cutting through the thickness of fog.
You would never guess her to be one hundred years old.
She wears her wrinkles well, as if an expert tailor gracefully
draped her sagging skin over that fiery spirit slung deep within her bones.
Her memory spans ten decades.
She remembers her sanguine anticipation of the 1915 World's Fair,
and how she can still gets lost in the neo-classical fantasy of the Palace of Fine Arts.
She remembers when homes had milk shoots,
and everyone knew their local milkman, their local rope man, their local bag man.
She remembers how neighbors argued over the horse shit in the streets,
each scurrying to the steaming mounds to shovel heaps into bags.
Heaps of shit that would fertilize gardens and nourish families.
She remembers the Spanish influenza,
her neighbors dying and how she and her mother volunteered without
a thought of themselves.
I don't know how, but we didn't catch it, my mother and I.
She remembers hand cranked dryers, hand sterilized bottles, hand washed diapers,
and the smell of her mother's hand baked bread.
She throws a sideways glance, and you see a glint of her fire.
You know, I married a much older man. Quite the scandal in those days.
He was high society.
She was simply unconventional for her time
They eloped.
When she laughs, it's as if soul-waves swim about a pool of gravel collecting at the base of her throat.
Her head falls back, and oh the belly laughs.
But her eyes read differently, and you know
this marriage, this memory, this story wasn't the stuff of fantasies.
And this is when you feel that thing that happens,
that tragic magic.
If you can bear it.
I recently joined a local writing group, which is turning out to be a pretty awesome experience. This free-write is inspired by "A Ritual to Read to Each Other" by William Stafford, which another group member was kind enough to share. The line the darkness around us is deep is borrowed from this poem, and the free-write was created from there.
Waiting for a Supernova
The darkness around us is deep.
We slumber restlessly in cocoons spun of indigo tears
by melancholic silkworms.
In the darkness of nothing and everything
we hibernate, a collective tranced by the psychosis of it all.
For what is done is done.
The darkness around us is deep,
thick cosmic plasma where we float like vagabonds.
For without wings we succumb to inertia.
With bony fingers we peel back our eyes, like orange rinds.
Watery baby eyes struggling to behold
the baubles between black and white.
The darkness around us is deep,
here in space where unreality unfurls.
Where we wait for a supernova.
It’s late or early, depending on how you look at it.
I’m tired, too tired to utter brilliant nothings.
Too tired to write of witty observations
or conjure calculated conjectures.
It’s late or early, depending on how you look at it.
Twilight sings crescendos and decrescendos
to stitch the dusk to dawn.
The moon sits ripe in indigo,
crisp and lucid.
Enamored spectors
reach with worn fingers
to pluck her from her cosmic perch,
as one might a tempting persimmon.
It’s late or early, as it always has been.
Still, the moon sits ripe in indigo.
There are days.
Days when the daily grind seems fruitless. Days when the routine, the responsibilities, the paperwork, the bills, the deadlines, and even “the work” as a novice therapist - yes, the work that one hopes will be sustaining and fears will be all-consuming - just don’t seem to pan out, make sense, fit together.
On these days, I find it difficult to make sense of purpose and meaning. I stumble over wondering about how and how come and why and why bother. I ask myself how civilization evolved into a pile a junk mail and money owed notices. How consciousness and spirit co-exist with VISA, Target, Exxon, the Consumer Way, and the timely death of the American Dream.
On these days, sometimes I’m on it enough to turn towards meditation, to call for my guides and ancestors. On these days, I ask for Guidance.
Perhaps this is akin to reciting the Lords Prayer…of laying in bed on silent nights murmuring those lines long memorized, while fears and hopes traipse about the living room of one’s soul seeking a sturdy, comfy recliner to rest upon.
Maybe my practice of calling upon guides and ancestors is really a call for my own Guidance, the intuition and wisdom that’s inherent within me regardless of external factors.
In any case, in my lifetime I’ve finally and thankfully learned to ask for assistance, and whatever the mechanism may be (i.e. something totally cosmic or absolutely sans cosmos) I’m finding that usually I become privy to some sort of tip or clue. As if a flashlight temporarily illuminated a fragment of the dark side of the moon.
This is how I’m coping right now during this precarious and explosive era of human experience - and certainly not how I would have chosen to cope five years ago. Five years ago, I was reticent to surrender to faith. Five years ago, I rejected the idea of religion, dogma, and trust in the Divine. Five years ago, I believed in the paranormal and synchronicity, but stopped short of attributing these phenomena to anything remotely reduced to declarations of human certainty.
Today, some of this still holds true. I do not blindly trust and I am wary of the fogginess of blind faith. I understand there to be such a thing as spiritual bypass, which can be a tempting road to follow. I’m observant of the different flavors in which humans relate to religious systems and structures.
What is different is that I somehow found for myself that delicate balance of trust vs. mis-trust and faith vs. discernment. I don’t pretend to know the secrets of the Universe, nor do I feel a pressure to. That said, I also don’t need to sequester myself from attuning to a particular spiritual tradition for fear of colluding with the certainties of an Ultimate Dogma. It just doesn’t have to be this extreme.
What I can do is hold both; that is, to open myself up to the support and enrichment that a spiritual system can offer without ascribing to it the ego-fed notion that it must be the only Way, the end-all-be-all of Universal Truths.
Sometimes the sarcastic remarks and dry humor spill into a ephemeral expression of anger. Anger towards the Church, the nuns, the priests, the repression, the guilt. Every once in a blue moon for a very, very brief moment, the displacement of anger crumbles into ruins, from which arises the grief of an 8 year-old boy who tragically lost his father in the Fall of 1960. An 8 year-old boy who asked his grandfather why is young father had to die.
“Because God wanted your Daddy with him.”
To which my father defiantly replied, “But we need him here!”
My father shared this memory with me on one of those rare days when we connect over the pieces of his life story he’s willing to leave with me, his daughter. My father shared this memory, and suddenly his frustration and general rejection of dogma and religious authorities translated into an incredibly painful test of faith. I’m sure my great-grandfather meant to comfort his grandson and likely leaned on his own words during this dark time. My great-grandfather’s words, dredged from the silty shore of his own hard-wired belief system, were intended to console the inconsolable, explain the unexplainable, frame the unthinkable.
Instead, my father heard this rendering of the message: God selfishly betrayed you.
I write about this, because time is passing. Time is passing and one of these days we will confront loss. Time is passing and my father’s life is over the half-way mark. He speaks of death as the end-all-be-all.
“Someday I’ll die and be six feet under. That’s that.”
It disturbs me to hear this, though I accept his views – for all I know, he could be absolutely right. Perhaps there is nothing else beyond this one lifetime. I can bear that, and still I wonder how his outlook towards death, the Divine, and one’s place in the world might’ve unfolded had his early years panned out differently. How is it that one child might lean into religious explanations of loss whereas another’s trust is forever fragmented.
Like my father, I have difficulty devoting my faith to an all-powerful being whose attributes are ascribed by people afflicted by the human condition. This co-exists with the primal wish that indeed some omniscient being is out there, somewhere, looking out for me. The desire to assuage the existential human dilemma of isolation (via an externalized representation of the ever-present, omniscient Father or Mother) runs side-by-side with the existential givens of freedom and responsibility (I desire freedom, but with freedom comes responsibility and agency – which again lead to a fundamental isolation).
In reading and investigating spiritual traditions, I find myself repeatedly running into this question of a spiritual path that may or may not be bound in religion. One could practice meditation or magic without an attachment to an ultimate Creator. One could also engage with such practices through an attunement to God(s)/Goddess(es). One could interpret a God or Goddess in a literal sense – a Divine puppet master, a very real being with whom one can commune with. Or the God or Goddess can be interpreted as symbolic representations of Universal energy…or as projections of the human psyche.
I’m at a standstill right now, as I’m not sure exactly where I fall. For now, I sit, reflect, self-educate, and remain open.
I offer this first tale of a neophyte's search for spiritual (re)discovery, derived from the bowels of the Peripherally Engaged Armchairist's psyche. By "peripherally engaged," I mean holding a curious though somewhat passive or tentative interaction with, say, spiritual inquiry. Per Wikipedia, the term "armchair" can refer to "a person who experiences something vicariously rather than first hand, or to a causal critic who lacks practical experience, such as armchair revolutionary, armchair general, armchair architect and so on." Add to the list armchair magician, armchair witch, armchair shaman, armchair Buddhist, etc. Tack on an "ist" and - voila! - a person who embodies the armchair stance.Not that I don’t meditate or create or perform ritual or consider my astrological influences. I do, and when I do there’s this feeling of “Ahhh, now I remember.” My breathing and voice tend to deepen, my senses intensify, and I somehow become vividly aware of the energy flowing throughout my soma.
But there’s something to that moment of hesitation, that funny, paradoxical pause that precedes a course of action. On one hand, there is an expansive, spirited, quixotic element, which lends me to assume a gung-ho posture to finding It. It - that system of ideas to which I would undoubtedly respond to with a resounding “Yes, sign me up!” My eyes glint with the shine of possibilities, of doors yet to be open. I heave with the fantasy bordering on delusion of what could be - if only I found It.
Then there’s the space within that pause that’s steeped with reticence. Reticent to move from head to heart to spirit. Reticent to trust in gurus, dogma, and belief systems created by others. Reticent to trust in my ability to be supported by my own inner guidance.
The overwhelm of frenetic searching settles in. The resistance emerges. The distraction commences, thinly veiled by the External Gaze that fuels the obsessive search out there in books, on websites, in café’s, in metaphysical stores.
It’s not so extreme as this. For the sake of story, I exaggerate the polarities to communicate an experience, my experience, which is this. There is a Universe out there, within, and all around. The art is in weaving together the threads, threads that flow in lovely shades of gray to counterbalance the harsh contrast of black and white.
This blog, this exploration and direct engagement with my own thoughts, feelings and intuitions, is but just one part of the mechanism that transforms a point into a shift point.
Below is a teaser/prologue to a short story I'm working on - something that I'd love to challenge myself to complete.
Their first encounter did not manifest in the physical realm. Not in the sarcophagus of the tollbooth where she mid-wifed sojourners through the last stretches of Jersey pavement, crowning into the gaping mouth of the Holland Tunnel. Not between the flesh and blood of palms outstretched, palms that make offerings of inked dollar bills with worn corners for passage to the other side.
It, the Change to Come, was foreshadowed not in the physical, but in the liminal space where obscurity unfurls into lucidity. Their first encounter – the Catalyst – was of simple design. That is, she dreamt of a bird.
- The stroke of synchonicity. That moment where a shift occurs, one’s eyes open to a new possibility. This story is not interested in exactly how change will manifest for its characters; rather, the story seeks to hone in on those brilliant moments where 2 people intermingle for a spell, setting the stage for what is to come. The narrative should evoke a sense of expansiveness, mystery, and of how it feels to be affirmed that one is indeed on their path (in light of misfortunate circumstances that have resulted in the ostracization of the Self). A melancholy moodscape that begins to discern a halo of hope.
- The journey into a bond the builds at an unlikely place captured during very brief albeit powerful moments
- The idea of being connected at the soul level; an element of mysticism, cosmic forces (all at the New Jersey Turnpike/Holland Tunnel of all places)
- 2 characters...1) a female tollbooth worker symbolic of a closet Mystic or Wounded Healer - underlying her suffering is great potential & 2) a female driver symbolic of the messenger, as if divine intervention were driving her actions to put her contact with toll booth worker...embodies the Liberator or Teacher archetype.
- Communication between the two main characters is non-verbal; not a word uttered. Dialog is exchanged through a note passed between the two characters during their brief encounters at the tollbooth. Body language also powerful.
- Impermanence as captured in the brevity of the relationship
- Mood: melancholy, with hope.
- Almost a fantastical scenario set in an ordinary, undesirable place.
I don’t know why
Tides resurrect
Or Echoes
Sing their Truth
I don’t know why
About most things
Still I speak in
Rhyme and jingle
I flounder in heady
Concoctions so that the
Trickster has you fooled
That I know why
Why He collapses, falls,
Disintegrates into a
Millions pieces of
Her
Why she builds forts out of words
Her mouth spilling a
Stream of steel-capped
Soldiers
I pretend to know
I pretend to see
I pretend to play
Make believe
To calm your wails
Cure the ails
That your mother’s tan hand
Was unable to balm
I don’t know why
God has forsaken you
Or what ills you performed
Three lifetimes ago
I don’t have the answers
The tonic for you
Wounded one
Mother
I know that I don't know
This is a cold case
Please stop asking
And come sit here with me
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Recent Comments
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Charmagne Coe said:
[this is good]intriguing post about a lot of things i contemplate myself these days. for me, it (fundamentalism, christian idea of god)... read more
on Tracing the Fatherline -
Lorri said:
[this is good]Excellent piece. I so love the colouring and contrast of the orange running down the side :) read more
on I Stand Vulnerable -
smith said:
Really good ideas about happiness. Thanks for great information. read more
on 52 Tips for Happiness and Productivity
the kids i work with saved the life of a baby hummingbird that fell from her nest last friday. read more
on silent frequencies and fleeting moments