Winter Solstice 2011

It is the Long Night, the heart of Winter, and the remoteness of the sun allows the shadows to rest more heavily on our minds. The shadows that whisper things like “hope is lost,” or, “life sucks,” or simply blur our sight to show the obvious flaws of our friends and loved ones. For countless centuries our ancestors have honored this Long Night with candles, and song, and the dogged love of green things, to remind us that, even when the Dark seems thick enough to pet, there is Light. There are children to be loved and tousled; there is music to be voiced; there is the memory and the anticipation and the presence of Warmth. In this Long Night it occurs to me that, if we can do nothing else, we can always breathe a Thank You: to Love, to Night, and to the forgiving Earth as She slowly swings around the corner and trudges once more toward Spring.

Do you Feel It?

I’ve stopped asking people if they believe in God. I realized, after many awkward negatives, and after even more detached dialogues about the dogmas of tradition, that the question is irrelevant. Or, maybe not irrelevant—it’s just the wrong question. (As we all should know by now, there is some special life-navigational magic in knowing the right questions to ask.). Therefore, the right question is: Do you feel it? It’s really much simpler. It’s perfectly clear to those have, and yet it’s vague enough to set a very different tone on the conversation with those who haven’t—or, at least, those who don’t realize they have. Asking someone what they “believe” in is a lot like asking them what football team they root for, or their favorite musician. At some point, people choose to establish a cognitive framework in their minds as to how the world works, what they like and don’t like about certain systems and songs and cities with football teams. They establish that framework, make it a part of their identity, so that, depending on the elasticity of their personalities, they might feel competition or animosity toward someone with a different team (or band). Belief, though it may be inspired by profound experiences of touching the numinous, is still a mental construct, a philosophy that requires thought and reason and varying degrees of logic. (That is, we all have reasons for believing something, however buried or irrational those reasons might be.) But the profound experience of touching the numinous has nothing to do with mental constructs. It is a feeling. A reality. A truth. Do you believe in trees? Do you believe in mosquitoes? Do you believe in life? For those who have felt that touch, that call, those who have brushed that otherworldly Presence, being asked if they believe in God is like being asked do you believe in trees, or mosquitoes, or life. If, even once, you’ve sat on the rim of a canyon watching the sun set and felt utterly connected to the forces around you, embraced by the sky and rooted in the earth, spoken to by the rest of life teeming around you, there is no Belief that can contain it. If, even once, you’ve felt an overwhelming love and awe at the beauty of a child, or a lover, or the world, no philosophy can adequately describe that. And, truly, when we try to, when we attach too many descriptions or ideas or rules or beliefs to those paradigmatic events in our lives, we have forced them out of their native domain of Spirit and into the rigid realm of the Mind where they cannot live. There is a reason the ancient Jews prohibited speaking the name of God. When we focus on names, or doctrines, or beliefs, we lose the rhythm, lose the thread; we start thinking and stop feeling. And, in the end, God is verb, not a noun; an action, a connection, a feeling. Do you feel it?

Thickening Morning

It is the thickening morning of my life, the heat of the gathering noon
Rippling around my still-smooth shoulders.
Some answers have come, though they always seem to take the form
Of a question, and thank the Mystery for that, for I’ve begun to think there are no answers, only the delicious flavor of the Question, and the journey is the pondering.
A koan in a monastery.
A path without destination.
But in the thickening summer heat, as my years near forty and high noon approaches,
It is the question of power that most preoccupies me.
Not dominion, but the unfolding coursing of life through the veins
And the deepening light of consciousness understanding itself.
The power we find to help others lift themselves out of the darkness
Of imagined powerlessness—this is the thread and the skein that weaves
The great web of life.
And it is life that we most fear.
Often it is the gentle securing line that enables us to believe that
We are safe, that life is safe.
The same nurturing cord of a parent that anchors us prevents us from
Embracing the stormy sea of life and thus robs us of our victory over fear.
For are they not one and the same: truly living and conquering fear?
It is the thickening morning of my conscious journey on this Earth.
My path unwinds before me, my very steps etching a course through a trackless
Terrain, which radiates out around me. It is a path I can measure
only by where I have been, and direction finds itself without meaning.
There is only here. And there are questions to be asked.

In a dream I was told that direction is irrelevant (forward/ inward; up/down).
I know a woman who insists that she never moves backwards,
As if retracing her steps were a hateful admission of error.
But how many of us turn back, if only to look for something
We might have dropped, and instead find something far more precious
we would otherwise have missed?
Life is too mysterious for absolutes, for always and never—which are dogmas
In the end, directions which must change with the forces of Wind and Terrain and
Guidance. And our paths stretch not only ahead, but behind, above, below.
The ultimate power is Attention, up-facing, down-turned.
The direction, of course, is irrelevant.

Where the Sun brushes Earth, Sea and Sky

In Tokyo, the long shadow from the world's tallest tower, still under construction and apparently impervious to Earth's impatient stirrings, falls across Sensoji's pagoda. The ancient tower to the Enlightened One's placid and grounded teachings dwarfed by the modern hasty need to touch the sky. The streets quiver with the heat of July's damp weight and the rising sun's inexorable advance. The sea writhes with the labor of cleansing Fukushima's irradiated semen and humanity's insatiable appetites.

But the city breathes deeply, even through occasional white masks, and the beauty of an elder race cannot be wholly dimmed by the paint and glimmer of a postmodern lacquer. Tradition bows to the young day not in submission, but in habitual respect, and a deep Shinto connection to the Earth Okaa-san surrounds the lumbering cities like the hands of a parent waiting to catch the toddling child.

And I too am that child, even as I find myself peering blearily through the eyes of the parent. My own steps, though sore from too-small slippers, have shortened their stride in compensation, and the clarity that I came here to seek is parting clouds of smoke and mist. Humility fits more comfortably than ever, and walking through this land with my daughter (the blossoming lotus) I've begun to shed the dizziness of such a longitudinal stretch and can feel the pulse of earth beneath us. Even a half-kilometer of conccrete, steel and railway tunnels cannot separate us, and from the West, the misty hills of Koya-san are beckoning, the Medicine Wheel of Gotama's path wooden, smooth and warm.

There is Place here. There are tones that feel familiar, like echoes of Navajo chants before the desert called them up the ladder; cedar roots that stretch even under the Pacific's unimaginable expanse to Oregon. The life-force of this world pulses through infinite veins and ley-lines and the signals are growing clearer. And to them I can say with growing ease, I am indebted: "Onegaishimas."

How to Love Again

And here I am falling in love again. Falling, when I’d rather stand—even run
Like Hell—anything but let my heart sneak out of my body yet again.
And yet here I am, without the luxury of recklessness
That a younger man could afford, and so that stray cat
Thought “maybe this time…” comes slinking through the open door
With hungry eyes.
But when has the heart ever heeded the mind?
When I hear you laugh it’s my heart that sings while my mind
Shrinks back in horror, solving syllogisms this feels like that
That ended badly and therefore and therefore and therefore…
And wherefore art thou Juliet? Or art thou not Ophelia
Seeing too keenly behind my best defenses?

But here’s the bottom line: Love is my domain, my home turf
I can’t not walk there, trip there, grasp and lose my grip there.
So how to walk the streets and bare my chest and call the arrows
Down upon my open heart again? And again?
How to love like a ship on a storm-tossed sea,
Stretching out my hand to hail the tempting cove,
But no longer casting lines to moor like
expectations on another Lover’s soul?
How to love you and her and him and them and always
Always fill my sails with Me, and let the currents of my life
Still steer a Me whose open heart can bear the rain,
Whose sea legs do not wobble, do not buckle, do not fall?
Why do we have to fall in love, like a muddy puddle?
Why not lean back into love which rises up like grace
To hold us up? Why not BE in love with ourselves and
Open arms enough to share that love with those who
Know how to hold a frame and dance with us?
Care to dance?
Maybe this time…

unfinished

At each of seven gates I pause to shed
Another, yet another of my layers.
And all my prayers amount to heaps of dead
Discarded misconceptions on the stairs.

Erishkegal awaits, her hook, her gaze of fury
Fueled to fell the youthful fool who brought me here
And I alone among my inner juries
May embrace destruction without fear.

And what remains, when all pretensions, shields and masks
Have fallen to the blade of broken love?
When lust has fled before the epic task
Of powerfully becoming all the Me I’ve spoken of?

I remain—that naked drop of endless Sea embodied in a man
And I am you and her and we have living in our hands.