Philosophy

Praésperō

She was sitting on the couch,
dying.

Well, not really dying, per se.

She was staring out the window
at the darkness fallen across the land.

“I hate winter.”

She shivered, even with the blanket.

The dog wandered over,
hopped up,
sat down next to her.
Opened its jaws, grinning.

{Hey.}
“What.”
{Know what I like about winter?}
“What’s that.”
{Spring’s just around the corner.}
She sighed.
“I suppose.”
She stared out the window again.

{Hey.}
“Yeah?”
{Let’s go run around and eat snow.}

She raised her eyebrow.
The dog raised one back.
{Please?}

“OK. Come on.”

{Cool. I’ll wait for you at the door.}

She grabbed her coat.

{Oh. My. God.}
“What now?”
{A small piece of bacon on the floor.
See! Like I told you
when I woke you this morning!
Best day ever!}

Fídō

Have you seen the mud
streaked across 
the hardwood floor?

Or, wait-

Did you watch the cat 
sleeping in the barn?

I see.

Surely, then, 
you’ve been tucked in
by the night sky?
You’ve seen the thunderheads 
crying and spitting lightning
so they could wash the face of the earth?

Well, maybe you’ve met
the white-haired woman
I spoke with in the shop-
who told me of classrooms
and busses full of protesters,
and of her husband, long-gone,
she who outlived 
her mother, father, brothers, sisters?

The one who looked at me, smiling,
who stared then out the window
with a face like a child’s,
and said,

“I swear,
life
is just…
amazing!”

?

Alright, then.

(He waves the pamphlet in the air. 
The world is ending.
“Do you believe?!?”

“I do,” I say,
“yesterday I took my dog to the park,
and stared into the eyes of God,
and was licked by the Buddha’s tongue.”)

The Most Convenient Definitions

“Battling your demons,”
they call it.
Fighting the monsters.
Taming the beast.
Or, perhaps,
rebuking the Devil.

You must cleanse yourself.
You must take this pill.
You must do yoga.
You must read this book.

You must.

I suppose I can’t lie;
shedding the past is good.

However…

do you remember?
Think back.

Before you were told what to fear.
Before you were told what to hate.
Before you were told what was wrong with you.
Before you were told who to be.

I’ll tell you true,
cross my heart, hope to die-

’cause I seem to recall a boy,

whose demons brought him food,
whose monsters came out from under the bed 
and gathered ’round for story time,
whose beasts ran with him
past the high school lockers,
and who walked the prairies and woods
with Lucifer and Jesus both;

we shared Canadian whiskey,
Dominican cigars,

and harmed not ourselves 
nor any soul,

traipsing the beat
in the heart of creation.

Audacity Beyond 2017: A Love Letter to the Human Race

Hope. Change. Love. Transformation. Luck. Finally.

Did these words bounce around in your mind as the clock rolled over to the new year?

I don’t blame you. Not one bit.

Our new culture is saturated with keys, triggers, signs; easy nuggets of hope that in turn saturate our subconscious, leaving us salivating for beautiful fruits that may never bear.

It’s ok, folks. I’m telling you, right here, right now, it’s ok.

I have walked with the hopeful, with the dreamers, with the expectant mothers and purposed fathers, with the wish-makers and wayfinders. I have also walked with the hopeless, with the downtrodden, the abused, the reckless and disillusioned, the cast-off chaff of this new world who’ve all but given up their faith in humanity.

Still, I say: it’s ok.

Are you calling me out on my BS yet? Please do. 

Bring me your broken dreams. Bring me your deaths. Bring me your fear. Bring me your burdens of blackness, your wreckage that writhes and grins at you in the night.

Do you truly believe, in your deep-heart, that an arbitrary number has anything to do with the timing of the universe, with the random dance of molecules or economies?

I don’t think you do. But it’s nice to believe, isn’t it?

That’s my point. Right there. I don’t care what you believe in. Just believe. The fact the you WANT to believe tells me your heart isn’t dead.

Don’t get me wrong. I understand the symbolism. “New year, new you.” Fair enough. But I need you to do me a favor.

Accept that a new year, in and of itself, won’t change a damn thing.

Trust me. Knock it off. Don’t set yourself up for disappointment.

Set goals, yes. Retain hope in the future, yes. But you’ve just been handed an empty box.

Much like a new relationship, a new year comes with an empty box. What you get out is what you put in. It doesn’t come with anything. And this empty space is what’s important. 

We place value on the structure, but the space is what we use.

So what will you fill yours with?

I can’t stress how vitally important it is to define this concept. “Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst”? When did we become so lost in our hearts? It’s not wrong to hope, nor to have a back-up plan, but I’ll challenge you right here and now to “hope for what you want, but prepare for what you need”.

You hate this already. I can tell. You don’t need death. You don’t need disease. You don’t need loss. You don’t need breakups, financial hardship, hatred, betrayal, anxiety.

What you need is the hope of the undying.

Allow me to set you up for the pain of the coming year right now.

Ready?

Some of you, this year, will lose something. Your car will get stolen. You’ll get divorced. Someone will die. You’ll experience betrayal. You’ll get diagnosed with something. You won’t get the job.

Can hardly wait, right?

Are any of you thinking of what could go RIGHT, though?

Hear me now.

In fact, how could we appreciate all that is Good without the absence of it? How could we grow in mind, in body, in heart, in spirit, without being broken on the altar of life? Without being hammered on its anvil? Would you wish for an easy life, or for the strength to endure a difficult one?

Better still, would you wish to walk through the flames and STILL COME OUT shining your light to the world, to hold out your scarred hand to a beaten soul and say, “come with me, for there is still Life up ahead”?

Would you wish, instead of being broken and clinging to your brokenness, of staring at your brokenness with resentment, to allow the light within yourself to shine through the cracks?

Only by being broken can we transform. In being broken, in being dealt a bad hand, we are given a choice; perhaps the most important choice in our lives.

You can choose to say “I didn’t deserve to be broken. I won’t trust life any more. I will exact revenge where I can, so I can reclaim some of what was stolen from me”…

…or you can choose to say, “I didn’t want to be broken, but I’m grateful that I did. Life has threshed my wheat from my chaff, has hammered my impurities from my metal, and if I alone can be broken again and again and AGAIN and walk away laughing, to love and hope and offer an outstretched hand, then I am glad.”

Peace is not found in what you get. It’s found in what you do with what you’re given.

Right here, right now, witness that I renounce all claims to what I think I deserve. I am not special. But nor am I a coward for losing faith, for wanting to give up. I am given a calling and a priceless gift. If I get what I desire, I will be grateful. If I do not, I will also be grateful. 

I will be lifted up on wings, and dashed on the rocks. My soul will dance at the coming dawn, and I will weep in my pain as I am broken again. I am being hammered on the anvil. I am losing myself, and I am becoming myself.

I will use my tears to wash the dirt from another’s face.

The universe will deal me the absolute worst hand, and I’ll say “Here, take my money. It’s time to play chess instead.”

I was so sure blackjack was the answer. But perhaps chess is the better path.

I renounce and refute my human inclination to be hurt by loss, to curl inwards, away from the world. To die from the inside out.

If my house is destroyed, I will wonder what my next house will look like.

Because if I don’t, if I hold on to my innate ability as a human for pattern recognition, and I apply THAT to what happens to me… can you guess what comes next?

Let me tell you. Listen.

I will be the victim of my own self-fulfilling prophecy. 

“See? It didn’t happen. I knew it wouldn’t.”

Bull. Shit.

I’m not advocating a relentless, creepy happiness. I’m not saying “be positive”. Nothing so trite and meaningless. In fact, I’d encourage you to stay as far as possible from sources that promote blind positivity. Or blind negativity, for that matter.

There is a middle path. And you need to walk it.

Good and Bad are cyclical. Sometimes, one wins out more than the other. And there is NOTHING, no matter what, that can take away your hope and the love hidden in your deep-heart unless you allow it to.

There’s always a choice.

We are such beautiful and horrendous creatures. Pitiful and incredible, we sacrifice out of love and wreak atrocities on each other in the same day.

Living for such a brief speck of cosmic time, staring out at the universe, we wonder. Why? If you find an answer that works for you, and you can be truly satisfied in your soul, then I commend you. If you don’t, then let me tell you again: it’s ok.

You need merely ask the question. That, in and of itself, is the mystery and the answer all in one.

The fact that you can ask is beautiful, even without a clear answer. The closure you seek may never come. But the closure you need comes from forging a new path, and to keep asking regardless.

Animals are blameless and pure. The angels some believe in are that also.

So here we stand. Brilliant and flawed, halfway between the ape and the angel, staring up at the night sky in hope. Ready to love and ready to fight in the same breath.

So as you watch the stars in this new year, and for the rest of your life, you might say “I wish for my shooting star, but it never comes. Maybe it never will.”

And you are right.

But this is not cause for despair.

Your strength lies in the ability to unceasingly watch the night sky, time after time after time, marveling at its beauty, drowning in the mystery and audacity of hope so that you might learn to breathe again.

And when someone else comes along, saddened and beaten, wishing for a star that may never come, you can say:

“Look! My God, just look at the stars! Can you believe we get to watch them one more night?”

This, then, is my only resolution I offer you: become a beacon of hope to yourself, and to others. 

Unfurl your banners of Light and watch the armies of death break themselves on your shields.

————————-

“Some day, you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”

— C.S. Lewis

Midnight Exigent

Now on the keys of this machine
you rest your hand,
the blinking space of the first code-line
mocking your furrowed brow.
Children run past, brushing your knee.

Laughter.

The scent of rain and smoke invades,
and is lost.

A flash of hair wreathed in sunset,
a pickup truck,
a dog licks your palm.

You are in love.
You are alone.
You are watching your mother open her presents.
You are leaving on the 9:40 flight.

(Was it on a beach? Or a dirt road?
The waves… were they water? Or wheat?
Was it my father’s voice, or my daughter’s hand?
I can’t seem to– wait! Her kiss! Was it?
What did I want to… be? Who?)

You are leaving on the 9:40 flight,
under the weight of such a wild and particular gift
from the universe.

And a clock is such a heavy thing
compared to lovers
in a dance entwined…
or to the boy.

Was there a boy? You’re almost sure of it-
in a bike helmet and a bedsheet cape,
thrusting a wooden sword,
crying in defiance welcome
against the spilled-out midnight sky,

Now drain your whiskey,
and admire the slow burn in your belly
as you say “Yep, coulda been…”,
only to hear the other old men fire back
“Aw,  bullshit!”;
because you know,
somewhere,
they’re pulling at the same strings–

as beside the same still waters,
thy cup runneth over.

Caesarean

And I was conceived.
That was the first time
I lost you.

I know, now.

I was rent from the pages
of the ether
from the universal fabric
as were you.

Torn? Oh yes.
Torn from the dark
torn from the valley
and the enervation
and the deepspace
beyond this visible incantation.

That was where I last held you.

And thus was I given this body;
these raiments of oxygenation.

So this is why
I am friends with Charon,
and why my two cents
count for something at least.

This is why
whenever I saw the evenstar
break upon the last light
of our sun,
I felt the wind
and breathed deeply;

and why I lost my mind
in sheaves of cotton
and plugged the cables
of adventure
direct into my brain;

and why
when my gaze was swallowed
in the arm of the Milky Way,
I missed you
far below my words.

Time is the mist
before me on this path,
and all I know is
when I held your eyes with mine

one thing out of all
made sense.

Bones

Then said Almitra,
“Speak to us of Love.”

were you born homesick?
why do you even have words
in this place?
it’s 2:37 AM inside you
here there is no clock
no slicing of time
there is no one here

to remember your first car
to call you Jezebel
to take down your blue ribbon
to pass you a plate of bitterness

that redwood
will not tie a weight around your heart
and make you thank him for it
the fog-blanket moving
will ask nothing of me
nor will it drain my self
and beat me for being empty

can you let yourself die?
you have known true nightmares
but… can you?

i don’t need that tree
for my self to live
i don’t need that fog
i don’t need your breath
inside me

but it would be nice

it would be nice to die / eventually
don’t you think?

i fear one day we may get lost
you and i
in the godhead of the wild
and uncover all the secrets
they’re afraid of.

credit: the author

Heirloom

This afternoon, I suggest
you both wander the antique shop,
instead of passing by,

and admire the woodwork
and what it may retain:

the bread that has been broken at this table,
the fears that have been projected onto this mirror,
the love that has been made in this bed,
the plate, cracked by the fist
born from the open palm of affection,

the dresser, once sitting by the threshold,
a father, recoiling at the sign above it, which says
“Bless this house”,

a mother, leaning on the armoire, saying
“Let this cup pass from me”,

a grandmother, holding a bowl,
staring at her hands in amazement,
saying “I am grown old”,

and a mural in stained glass-
a short blessing of sun in the shadow.

If you look closely,
you can see

the bones that have broken
constructing this life,
and the hands that have bled
building this house.

Communion

Summer’s final fruit clutches the bough;

her quill draws more ink

as ice dusts the window’s edge.

The candle’s wick burns,

and burns,

and burns…

the light of the eve deepens,

and for company:

scratch of the pen,

clink of the inkwell,

tick of the timepiece.

Supplication pours onto parchment,

added to the stack of prayers

growing beside the desk,

and steam lifts into the room

from a chipped china cup.

The spaces in between, punctuated

by the snap of burning logs

from the fire that takes in the air,

and sends up the smoke of dreams

that refuse to die.

There are ghosts here, you know.

They wander the acres outside,

and will often come sit by the mantle,

having forgotten themselves,

unaware of the lineage

hidden in the cracked, leather-bound Bible.

Even in an empty house,

a reliquary haven,

we carefully place our harvests of memory

in the rooms, and in the halls:

the grandfather clock,

the queen bed,

twin trunks in the attic-

one, empty;

the other, filled with sacraments.

This is a covenant, you know-

with the oak and the axe,

with the wheat and the chaff,

with the thread and the loom,

with the earth and the plow.

And as her pen moves in the twilight,

the ghosts watch through the window

as the apple falls,

and, crackling, hits the frosted grass below.

says the universe so staring back

my pride lies

scooped out and bleeding on the barbed wire;

and my palate, cut with bitter honey.

i am small in the ebon silence-

no sound save insects of the eve,

no medium a man might use

speaking of his devotions

each time to the air.

the cosmos is not greedy with its truths.

i raise eyes and see

the arm of galactic star-mist

spattered across the void…

this is the why of so many things-

the universe,

great eye (so imagined),

passes over “i”

and sees nothing.

great pillars of dust, my genesis;

and flowering grass, my revelation,

are more me than i.

so, am i to hurl my fragile mass upon the rock

and devoid my senses of this?

not to hear horses moving through the night-fields

or taste the heavy pine air

or suck in the damp earth’s scent?

“i am alone,” we say in small voices,

lost children staring into the black.

says the universe, “so?”, staring back.