Divinity

 

Maybe we are here to grow pieces of god 

Torn off from the bottomless, star-studded loaf. 

Holding Hands with God

My eyes are thirsty 

And my soul is desiccated

Because I have forgotten the feel of your fingers, 

God,

On my palms. 

I never did learn to fully trust you 

And you have flown from the cage in my heart.

But when I remember to look up, 

You greet me from the fence posts,

The song of red winged black bird

And mourning dove, 

And you whisper in the back of my hollow throat. 

I abandon the pretense of walking on the road

Cut across the vacant lot of town
Defy the fences built by own nervous mind

And hold my hands, 

Palms out,

To the phantom of you. 

Wide Eyes and a Tender Heart

Idealistic little college student:
Some days are good,
Others are like black holes of time and energy,
All the world hard and jagged,
No desire to interact with other human-persuaded beings.

Pause, redirect-

Now is not the time to dwell on that half of life,
We are happy, and
we mean to speak about the days
that go better than ever expected;
Filled with inspiration,
We feel like God, themself, is leading us by the heart and hand
And all of the world is deserving of our love
and reverence.
On these days, the world is moment-by-moment created for us...
And we understand;
Are somehow understood by all people.
These are the days we meet extraordinary souls,
sometimes only into hour-long-deep conversation mates
and sometimes those extraordinary souls grow into
Life long friends.

This day of Facebook allows you to
Hold onto the strings of possibility,
Whether or not if they hold fast and strong;
More time for them to mature;
the potential to braid our lives together extended.
More often than not, they dissolve,
and we are left with the memory of ties.

We suppose friendship is more than one person pursuing another,
but both running to meet somewhere in the middle.
How does it work?- We found ourselves asking, waiting, watching
All last year.
Still no answers, but butterfly-bright flashes of inspiration all the time.
Still no answers, still waiting and watching,
Eyes wide open and a tender heart.

How can a person only know another person for a week, and feel like they've known them for years?
What is the probability of this happening more than once?
Probably more probable than you might think...

Science and Wonderment

We ridicule the ancient ones for
bestowing the names and titles of "God" and "Goddess"
on the spaces between the things they thought they knew
and the things they didn't even wonder at yet.
But I believe we will find
that "modern man" is the one
who is truly mistaken.
Snuffing out magic and wonder
when "science" could be so much more
than a cardboard box
neatly stacked on the shelf
of things we "know"...

Ohm

Look to center, feel 

The core. Balance of all, 

Threading me to you. 

No Need to Wait

I am alive, I 

Remembered this grey twilight. 

I don't have to ask. 

Bagger Vance

Reading The Legend of Bagger Vance is not what I expected it to be. I am filled with a vague but persistent yearning, much like the yearning of two or three years ago.
Who knew golf could be so intimately entwined with the divine and metaphysical? And it fits so perfectly, it doesn't come off as stilted or silly. The story is just bit cheesy in places, but not so much as to be off-putting.
I learned things from I never expected to learn in the context of golf, and somehow, the sports lingo peppered all through the book aren't difficult to read at all. I know nothing about golf, and I still know next to nothing, but I didn't have to skim through the game descriptions, they were so poetic and fluid.
I'm probably not going to become passionate about the game of golf, but it's taken on a new meaning and color in my mind, and The Legend of Bagger Vance is probably going to be one of those books I carry in my heart forever, the reading of which has defined a pivotal point in my life and growth. 

Psalm To Life Prayer

Longboard lover, 

Swaying, like a fish through dry desert air, 

I hope I don't take anything for granted in what I mean to say:

I am in love, rapture, with god and all of the world.

Love is everywhere, longing forever lit, 

If you look closely, I wear a dark visage of yearning beneath this pale skin and clear gaze.

Life is not the pursuit of happiness, either you are happy, 

Or you aren't, 

Don't waste life in seeking what is already present, 

Or beckoning so close. 

I am in touch with my forbidden fruit, though I have not yet tasted it. 

A shrug of shoulders, and we find that innocence is never lost, 

But expanded, 

Growth is not innocence destroyed or covered, but innocence maturing, 

Childhood is never lost, 

But instead, made encompassing, knowledgable, and gifted further wisdom as age wears on. 

Three SUNbeams

"A primary cause of suffering is delusion: our inability... to see things the way they truly are.... The world is in face a seamless and dynamic unity: a single living organism that is constantly undergoing change. Our minds, however, chop it up into separate, static bits and pieces, which we then try mentally and physically to manipulate. One of the mind's most dear creations is the idea of the person and, closest to home, of a very special person which each of us calls "I": a separate, enduring ego or self. In a moment, then, the seamless universe is cut in two. There is "I"--- and then there is all the rest."
John Snelling
(The substantially small, and infinitely huge. No wonder when we are separate do we feel so tiny and insignificant.) 

"The hunger of the spirit for eternity-- as fierce as a starving man's for bread-- is much less a craving to Go on living than a craving for redemption. Oh, and a protest against absurdity."
Storm Jameson 

"If logic tells you that life is a meaningless accident, don't give up on life. Give up on logic." 
Shots Milgrom 


From the "> 278th issue

There was also a fantastic essay in this issue that I loved very much, sadly, though, there isn't a link or anything online as far as I can tell.

Every-day Meditations

I
Bread dough--
rough polish on my nails

--Sometimes I forget every-day meditations
for the ethereal allure of cocooned spiritual practice
and living

--But the idealistic future
lives no where--
except the present,

if you'll let it


II
My heart is made of galaxies
but it's also grown over,
twisted through
winding ropes of knuckle-kneaded
bread dough-
and my prayers, my meditations
are grounded in

The hugs of little children
"Goodmorning!" sung from a friend across the valley
Sunrises
Kisses
Simple poetry
Incense lit on my dresser
My native landscape
and
You

Cultivate a life of your own, little one, and lead me on

What is my voice like to you?
What does this place feel like to you? Is it the same as how it feels to me?

I am so sloppy lately, I don't care to edit or try to edit or try to write well. I don't care. But still I write and some sort of beauty emerges, disfigured and fractured as it is, its voice slack, its posture bent and twisted and stooped.
I wrote a poem Wednesday that was that and more, but a couple of days later, it seemed endearing and maybe just a little bit courageous. It had built a life of its own independent from the lackluster breath i'd blown into it.

I'm feeling like multimedia today, nothing new, but now I've decided to act on it and see what rainbow tapestry of broken strings and hazy figures I can weave with no direction dictated by me consciously. And then maybe I can take that crazy-blanket from the loom and drape it around my shoulders and it will afford me a little comfort and courage.

I'm on a bit of a sentimental bent today, and I still have a streak of disgust for such things. I don't know why. Maybe because I've been such a dramatist and romantic all my life, and I never regarded it as very constructive. It tends to be blinding, sentimentality. I'm terribly sentimental, though, and I don't necessarily want to squash it from my spongy self entirely, but I seek a balance with it and whatever else there is, you know, there's a great many ways to see life. 

I don't like indulging in sentimentality, I guess. Seems very self-serving and not much else. It can have it's place on my shoulder with everything else, but heaven forbid it should ever become my matrix again. 

I imagine I've been reading a bit too much JD Salinger in the past few days, but I fully intend to read a deal more before this week is up. 

All the same, damn his lofty-earthy ideals. I don't want to be integrated into society, I don't want to continue cleaning the kitchen every day, I don't want to see God in every horrible person on the street or over the internet, and I repeat, I don't want to clean the kitchen. I'd like to sit in the clouds, no needs at all, perfectly free to live in my own head or observe the lives of others. But whatever, that's entirely unrealistic, and probably would be boring to boot, I, who would be everyone but myself sometimes. 

Still, I'd rather live in a monastery than whatever it is I think I'm going to have to bring myself to do in the next couple of years, college or career or whatever. Not so much career, though as some sort of way to support myself in between stepping stones in life. 

Shall I try out a new personality now? 

Yes, there is spiritual beauty in the small things in life. Serving others, taking care of oneself, paying homage to small miracles in home, the workplace, and public spaces. 

You want to know of a book that sustained me and my sanity this summer? "How to cook your life: From the Zen Kitchen to Enlightenment". 

It spoke of simple service and the beauty in it, and I needed that so bad, especially while taking care of my mother and most of the cooking for a few weeks while she was on bed rest. 

Over time, gradually, I've learned that every act of kindness, every small work is a sort of prayer, a hope that things will get better, and a way to show how much I do care for my family and friends. That is no bad life, not remarkable, but how much do I really want remark-ability? I remember when I decided to cultivate talents and abilities unrecognized by the majority of this society, and half of that choosing was because I figured I wouldn't have anything or anyone else to compete against in my forum of choosing. I'm actually highly competitive, but I'm also highly understanding, and I know that there's always someone or something better if you think in that way, and therefore, can never ever win. So I chose a place in which I figured there was no winning or losing. No better nor worse, just a pathway, a few sages of my choosing, and my own strength and will. (Which isn't much, love.)  

I spoke of mixed-media before. It's something that's growing in attraction to me, and right now I would give almost anything to write in my own handwriting on this thing, or leave my finger prints and doodles in thick paint all over the margins. Maybe that's part of my sloppiness lately, not caring whether or not if the mark I leave is "perfect", but instead looking for the beauty in everything in its wholeness, not just spliced and framed and edited by the ruler in me that was put there and dictated by other people. I'm not really particularly interested in that lately. But to fit under the wings of others, you must pare yourself down to their colors and specifications, and I guess I don't feel like my own wings are strong enough to hold and shelter me on their own. Still, I seem to pare myself down only to my own specifications. 

Hey, did you know that a small part of yourself is revealed only after you've loved another and been loved in return? It is, in a way, fascinating, and of course, remarkable beautiful.  Can you just imagine all the things we miss, though? Can you imagine all of the things all around and within us that we miss from being so frightened and blind? I read a short story today, the last in "Nine Stories", and, honestly, my favorite. Can you believe that crazy book begins and ends with a death, though? Geeze. 

As it was, the short story contained a beautiful little scene that sort of goes with what I'm speaking of, missing things that go on without your presence or observation. Also a concept that came up when I was watching the sunrise last Tuesday. Mmmmm. 

"He suddenly thrust his whole head out of the 

porthole, kept it there a few seconds, then brought it in just long enough to report, 

"Someone just dumped a whole garbage can of orange peels out the window."....

Teddy took in most of his head. "They float very nicely," he said without turning 

around. "That's interesting." 

   "Teddy. For the last time. I'm going to count three, and then I'm-" 

   "I don't mean it's interesting that they float," Teddy said. "It's interesting that I know 

about them being there. If I hadn't seen them, then I wouldn't know they were there, 

and if I didn't know they were there, I wouldn't be able to say that they even exist. 

That's a very nice, perfect example of the way--" 

   "Teddy," Mrs. McArdle interrupted, without visibly stirring under her top sheet. "Go 

find Booper for me. Where is she? I don't want her lolling around in that sun again 

today, with that bum." 

   "She's adequately covered. I made her wear her dungarees," Teddy said. "Some of 

them are starting to sink now. In a few minutes, the only place they'll still be floating 

will be inside my mind. That's quite interesting, because if you look at it a certain way, 

that's where they started floating in the first place. If I'd never been standing here at all, or if somebody'd come along and sort of chopped my head off right while I was--" ....

 Teddy lingered for a moment at the door, reflectively experimenting with the door 

handle, turning it slowly left and right. "After I go out this door, I may only exist in the 

minds of all my acquaintances," he said. "I may be an orange peel." "

(From "Teddy" in "Nine Stories" by JD Salinger)

Anyway, the last bit doesn't doesn't relate to what I've been thinking of so much, but that doesn't matter and it's an interesting lead off. 

I'm crazy, sorry. I guess part of the crazy is what's lending such appeal to multi-media. Yeah. Just slapping whatever's in my head and heart all over whatever blank space presents itself at the time. I don't really care though, I explore myself just as thoroughly as anything around me. And I suppose part of that exploration is testing some of whatever's inside on the outside, seeing if any of it can hold its weight and color with so much all around it. 

I think, with this post, I'm trying to see how far I can wander off the beginning course of things without losing anyone everyone who reads it, including myself. I'm still curious as whether or not if I can lead myself back to where I began and sew everything up tight and neatly. 

What do you think? 

What did it all feel like?

Ah, but that is an ending of no substance at all. It floats away, and that can be pretty, but I think it would be better if the ending buried itself deep in the ground rather than drifting off to ether. After all, that is what I'm attempting to do right here, whether I realized it at first or not; I am attempting to ground myself-- tie myself all over to life like a hot air balloon roped and bolted, straining from the ground.

Expansion

Cut me open and pour me out
onto the ground,
I will flow into Earth's veins,
and become a single note in a blackbird's song,
a single drop in a misty rainstorm,
a single hair on a new baby's head,
and a single cell in a dog's eye.

Namaste y mae govannen to every and all

• Beauty in everyday life, spontaneous and immediate. If you wait, it will always come, heartbreaking and eye-opening. I am always a little bit less blind than I was before. 
• Yo, my best friend and love.
• My lovely, still growing family.
• Every single one of my siblings, adopted, blood, and soul-relatives.
• All of my friends, which usually translates into siblings.
• Fantastic food and teamwork.
• Snow.
• Music, musicians, and musical instruments. Also, the music of the natural world in all senses.
• Memory. 
• Writing.
• Doctor Who, in all of it's complexity and simplicity, intertwined duality. Funny, beautiful, heartbreaking.
• Enlightenment and transcendence, the unattainable, ever-won quest and weave. 
• Emotion and expression, creativity and god.
• Skin.
• The space between the ears, all at once infinite and perfectly encapsulated. 
• Life, always

Spiral Galaxy

Supernova without purpose,
     empty energy expelled into further emptiness.
In the midst;
Ecstasy.
Afterwards, nothing (             )

Casting off the shell,
 underneath raw and electric--
biological meta-crisis, to thieve from another's mouth.

Hm now, how now,
How much was the universe edited before
it came to be,
was released unbridled in all of its fury,
    chaos,
beauty and order?
Or was she, he, they,
    am edited at all?

Meaninglessly meaningful
 wonderings,
 all that seems human,
 sent out naked and barely born,
or cultivated with immense care,
 it makes no difference.
Who is it they're trying to reach?

Behind my words, no thing.

Objectivity,
       god,
       life.
Sputter and fizzle away into line and space

Voice

Man, nothing will come to me today. Can't seem to write anything well, neither poetry, essay, nor stream-of-consciousness. Nothing will really fit together, and I'm dissatisfied with all of my drafts and writing ideas at the moment. I want to write, but it doesn't come out very well, I'm still not complete or clear, I've got shallow-digging dis-ease (as our friend G would call it) and ADD in some form today. Don't know what to do, and what I want to do, I think I should do something else instead. At least I finally practiced guitar today -I want to learn; I want to learn how play guitar, drive, write, be with people, and just generally apply myself. I can be fierce and focussed, but I guess I don't fixate much. --Even that isn't true though, I like to think I'm not obsessive, but when I really look into and at myself, I am totally obsessed. I am so so so redundant, but, balance. It's hard to talk of balance, though, it's so easy to fall into duality and polar opposites and untruths. Juggling differently colored balls from hand to hand and back again. Why keep them moving though? Can't they just be? I'd like to think they're not even separate; the yin and yang symbol, though overused, is beautifully fitting; two things as inseparable, interconnected one. -That's pretty cool, and in some ways it simplifies things, and in others, complicates. But you know, this world is more than one dimension, and to look at any one thing differently, the whole web shifts. Nothing is just surface, or just depth; no one is only one thing. I dislike referring to people as occupations because it seems to dehumanize them. I'm not even a "writer", I'm Amoniel, but that doesn't quite cover it either, I'm this thing that takes form around, I'm this that changes shape constantly, that never fits into the world the same way for longer than right now. Yes, I fall into shallow-digging dis-ease every once in a while, but even that is not how I work always. --I want to dive deep deep into the world, life, the universe, -it sounds silly, and I don't always want that, but -everything. I love stained fingers and dirt and all of the marks life and time leaves on us, scars are beautiful; wrinkles, freckles, and moles, absolutely lovely. I love to get paint on my hands and graphite all over my fingertips and face. I love calluses and rough hands, tough feet. I don't want to be perfect, I want to be alive. I am life's canvas, my own canvas, the canvas and paper of others, mirror and imprint. When I get firewood with my family, I like to see the scratches on my arms from the hard work of loading and carrying and unloading, and I like to watch all of the marks fade away. All of these things that fix and flow us in time, now then tomorrow. I want to dig deep into my own soul and examine it intently, and I want to do the same with others. I'm looking looking finding the thread that ties and unwinds all things. Maybe it has a name, maybe it doesn't, but I seem to be able to find and talk with and about it just fine without a name, and even with an imperfect name. The imperfect name reminds me that it won't fit forever, I think; that I know it all and I know nothing, and everything fits perfectly. 

I said I couldn't write today, but perhaps I was trying too hard. And now I have found my flow, my track; my voice. 

Oh gods alive,

Oh gods alive,
the beauty and sadness of all...
The heady soup of my nature,
Earth and sky,
stone and ether,
made from each other,
The figure eight of eternity;
Don't you see?

Perfect imperfection,
I can feel it deep
deep swirling in my head,
my ribcage;
that universe of universes
and song-filled black hole
just the depth, the depth of it-
Counter-clockwise
as energy goes, a black hole,
But perhaps in name only,
could a black hole accept, create,
or give back rapture?

Heady head,
grounded heart,
deep gut.
Ha, I am matrix,
Woven weaving
Twined, my dear,
Nothing but something
sculpted around other things,
To see, you must confront
what seems like emptiness,
but never ever is.
God is empty space
which we try to put form and substance to,
Then missing the point entirely:
Masked and cloaked and idolized,
Perhaps we do the same to ourselves...

I worship
the all in,

everything:
I want to swallow, and have swallowed the sun,
And I have been swallowed in return

Heartsong

Curled tight over my guitar 

An ache in my wrist as our hearts sing to each other.

Resonance; two songs into one. 

Life from my breath into your curved body,

Condensation underneath my lips.

Our song is not always perfect, 

But it is always beautiful. 

I did not shape you, 

But I am shaping you 

And it seems you are shaping me

We are complete on our own, but together we are more complete.

Cracks of Gold: right now

Where am I right now? I’m not writing about where I want to be, or where I’m headed, but where I am right now. So often I write about where I want to be, but instead of that helping me move forward, I just feel lost and helpless.

Right now, I am lost; right now I can see a tiny light, but I can’t seem to feel a pathway. I’m blindfolded; enough that everything is hazy and unsure, but not so I don’t know I am blindfolded. I am numb; finger and toe and heart-blind. I am deaf; hearing but snatches of sound and song. I am dumb; half-communicating with incomplete words and fluttering hand gestures. I am aware of so many perceived limitations, but I am also aware of what might be, beyond all of this veil and insulation.

All is but impression on me, and I have fractional confidence. I am an imperfect mirror, reflecting wobbly, watery images of others, and myself, but reflecting non-the-less.

I am in a chrysalis, but I can’t tell if I, butterfly, am emerging; or even if this, also, is nothing but a reflection of someone else.

I can sense patterns; but when you’re in the middle of a pattern, yourself, with other people, it is so hard to stick to that pattern sense, and to have confidence in it. It is so hard to sense that pattern truly, objectively, and not reason yourself out of what you do really understand. The pattern of my days lately seems to be the only pattern I can see without having to feel, without becoming lost in emotions and the avoidance thereof. Mornings are lost in melancholy and a certain sort of moping and ennui; afternoons are merely lost; evenings terrifying and stressful (seems like that’s mostly just when I try really hard to wrest back control, though.); and the night finally relaxes into pieces of the puzzle settling in and temporary comfort.

Today, this afternoon, is lost and wandering; raw, drained, and dry. I really don’t feel terrible though, because I finally shook off sentimentality for a time, albeit ennui is not entirely gone. Maybe I am sick in heart.

Still I manage to find puzzle pieces, and still I manage to stick them, if only temporarily, to their places in life.

Why all of this writing of where we’re going, or where we should be? Jonathon Livingston Seagull, how beautiful in its idealism and teaching, but I can hardly see myself there. Did Richard Bach ever reach the point his characters traveled? Did he even mean or strive to? Did he find any of what he was looking for, and did he learn to practice it?

I keep finding small pieces in small places; small answers in short books. We look for answers in other people and their works, but they don’t even seem to be where they say it is possible to go. Maybe all they mean to create is beautiful metaphor and nothing else. I have yet to actually meet anyone who truly loves or flies or heals with their bare hands. Only healing with herbs and heart, loving at all, and flying in mind and spirit. Isn’t any of that, imperfect as it seems to be, still miraculous?

Don’t we find something in the search, don’t we come to understanding as we share? I don’t believe in disregarding wisdom in a great person -or any person- because they’ve done something stupid or bad in their lives. Wisdom is wisdom, and we are all so complex and flawed, beautiful in our imperfection, beautiful in our strife and struggle. We can come to some sort of completion, some sort of wholeness, in sharing.

To finally answer my first question of where I am right now; Estoy pero aqui, curled up writing on my bed, wandering life and my own heart and mind. 

One way to write down my philosophies and beliefs

There is life to be lived; I am so cautious, though, and I'm looking and searching and hoping and praying and waiting and writing, because there is an answer in my bones, the air, my heart, the music I listen to, the books I read, and you.

This god I am learning, this god is everywhere, this creator is everything and creation itself. This god is me and you and our parents and siblings, this god is Zooey, her friend, and the people in my Ekklesia, this god is relationship and loneliness, the universe, my love, and every atom, as well as the space between atoms, and the spaces between spaces, and the spaces between those spaces.
I am looking within and without and all around for answers, every step I take. All is good and all is strange and all is impossible to put into words, but that is the only thing I can do, put all into words. That is the way for me to learn and communicate and shape. But all is feeling; so staggeringly abstract. So this is my struggle, to give form to the formless, and decide if it is worth it in this world of material goods and science and skepticism, this world in which man's purpose is to make money and he suffers, and he who does not follow this purpose, or he who tries to use the purpose to bring about the things of his heart also suffers.
The weaving, winding voice of contradiction in all things, my love, this is what fuels the ludicrous act of struggle in a web that doesn't actually exist, but we created it, so here it is.

All I can do is search blind and fingerless for myself and hold it out to you, inviting you to take of your own free will, and share whatever you desire with me, but nothing, my child, is required.

Nothing is required.