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.

Time and Manner

None of us may choose the time and manner of our passing, which is perhaps what terrifies us so much about Death. Not only the unknown, but the utter lack of control—an illusion our pushy Minds cling to like Dumbo’s magic feather. And, knowing that, all we can hope for is to Live such Lives and Love such Loves that our passing leaves traces of music to echo in the wind. And for all that, what is Death, after all? I like to think that our Consciousness transcends Time—that as our sense of Time dwindles and narrows, our Consciousness expands on an asymptotic rendezvous with Eternity. There is no afterlife, but rather, Everlife, or Never-Not-Life, or…whatever, for what can lie beyond Now, when we can shuffle off this mortal coil and wrap our souls around the vastness of the moment? What fear can endings hold for us when Time has lost its meaning, reduced to a deathly emaciated axis on a graph? What is more than Living such Lives and Loving such Loves that timeless Music murmurs warm refrains in the hearts of those we leave behind? I say, let your feather fall, Dumbo, and throw your ears wide to the waiting wind, if only to catch the warm refrains of those who’ve sung before us. If only to free your arms to throw them around the thriving living Moment.

Darren C. Reiley
September, 2010

Fragile Shoots in the Detritus

No matter how staunch my faith is that everything is happening exactly as it needs to, that the World knows what She's doing, the sheer magnitude of the crumbling is still heavy to bear. It’s getting ironic now, how I seem to need to write down my advice in order to remember it, to remind myself.

Ground. Find Stillness. Spend time Being.

I’m surrounded by enormous decay at the moment. Two family members dying slowly from cancer, a grandma and a grandpa slowly dying from old age. Relationships crashing like hailstones—even abstract brambles like the Stock Market and Mortgage Establishment choking in the smog of their own industry.

Ground. Find Stillness. Spend time Being.

‘Find solace in the love you share with others’ are the words that murmur in my inner ear.
‘There are always others. There are always children.’

More than ever I see the absolute necessity of nurturing the small things, like our young ones, our gardens and our wells. It’s in those things, smaller than our dogmas and egos, in those things that our wisdom grows, close to our Love.

And more than ever we need Wisdom. If for nothing else than to speak out against the thoughtless blows of despair’s short vision. To shine into the Darkness.

I say to YOU—whomever the Mystery guided to this page right now—please, nurture the small things. The wells. The gardens. The children.

There are fragile shoots sprouting in the detritus.

Teaching Peace like Herpes

So I have this crazy idea: I think that teaching young people how to take powerful responsibility for their own choices, learn how to communicate without blaming or dominating, listen deeply, and resolve their conflicts without using violence-- I think those are good things. Isn't that insane? Isn't it radical? If I were Socrates they might make me drink hemlock!

It always amazes me when I tell people that I teach peace and they get defensive; I've actually been accused of indoctrinating the youth. The underlying reason for this (it usually comes out in the ensuing conversation) is that many people automatically assume that "peace" is inherently "liberal," politically speaking, if not outright leftist. Allow me to clear my throat before I rant...

When, I ask you, did the notion of trying to avoid war and violence, if at all possible, become a defining political affiliation? And if it truly is one, what does that make the alternative political stance? Pro-War? The Death Party? I would think that the desire for peace (and consequently the effort to learn concrete skills in peacemaking and reasoned negotiation) would be universal. In fact, that's a question I often begin my classes with: "Who wants to walk through flying bullets and falling bombs on the way to school, raise your hand?" Am I missing something here? Shouldn't the effort to teach our young people tangible skills in managing conflict without the use of violent force transcend political lines? Am I naive in saying yes? Can we not rescue the word "peace" from the annals of tween-targeted commercialism and vacuous hippie-speak? (Nothing against the hippies, don't get me wrong, it's just another unfortunate stereotype that gets too often attached to the notion of peace.) Can we not make teaching peaceful negotiation as nonpartisan as teaching health or PE? After all, we teach teenagers how to avoid STI's in Health class, how to choose good nutrition and avoid unhealthy choices. Isn't War essentially a politically transmitted disease? How is teaching nonviolent conflict resolution any different? Anyone?