October 2021
This new situation. A location that is familiar in a small way, but unlived. Unfettered. Unexperienced and unwritten. To transplant a sixty five year old onto brand new earth exposes all the paths. All of the potential – and here is the first fear. There is a way around it though. Release expectations and just live. Forge no chains, tie no ropes. Consciously draw no borders or demands. Watch life form or dance in whatever places it may, allow all things to be possible. Let all possibilities become, if and whether they desire. Say no to nothing – say yes to less than that. Say roll over me and take me – say watch me push the ball and feel it pull me downhill gathering circumstance or possibility on the way. Push everything away to rest and then grab hold of any piece to feel its yard and anchor – just to feel the hold of it – to test its mettle and surprise it with your mathematical interest. Live some evolving flow with its naturally selected story unfolding surprised, unsated.
But – I worry, and then hope I haven’t finally deposited myself in a location where no one can find me.
July 2021
The fact that people still believe and practice these far-gone idiocies of bigotry, religious fervor, misogyny and the remainder of human sociopathic sickness makes me believe we never really had a chance. Our broken pieces are too broken and the good pieces haven’t enough reach to effectively balance it all out. Are we really still having these conversations? How did fear and ignorance become the default setting in human societal intercourse and discourse? Who is the architect of this disconnect? Is it evolution? God? Capitalism? Sectarian tension? Tribal isolationism?
So many stupidities. So much wasted time.
Or does it have to be this way? That in order for anything to exist all things must exist? And then no matter where you are your choices mark and shape the life you’ll live.
This seems to add up – when religion looks in a mirror it sees reality. In the mirror and in concert with despair life creates religion. Religion is a mirror reflection of our reality and all religion is the doppelgänger of chance and life – this impostor, this beggars desire and need – an inverted image of the accidental world we all inhabit.
Our insane commitment to the mirror-ghost keeps us from fixing the reality that could turn it all around.
Dreams.
The dream of shaking a mans hand. There are these dreams —they number in the multitudes —wherein there is something favorable happening to me either alone or in the company of others.
Last night I dreamed I was standing before someone familiar. We had spoken for a while or we had just decided to part (as in most dreams this isn’t apparent or even relevant) but I was shaking his hand. We were shaking hands and the act, the sensation was so full of joy that neither one of us wanted it to end. Both being aware of this made the event more joyful and then add the hilarity of that realization. There was just too much beauty and grace and fun in the whole thing and I was laughing both inside and out and so was my partner. It was pure bliss in a simple greeting.
In another dream I am talking face to face with one of my daughters and we are discussing something she finds fascinating and she begins to laugh and I am overcome with gratitude and love.
Some other dream has me alone but somewhere in nature and there are paths to walk through trees and there is morning sunlight and air and the scent of days I remember from being very young.
And after any one of these dreams the act of awakening and being moved from the dream into my reality, well, there is the issue. It is the difference between these two things that is alarming. The joy of one of these dreams held against the uncertainty of enthusiasm —its fragile mantle, indeed the bland uncertainty of reality; the work that must be done in order to experience a day that has any joy at all. That’s the difference right there.
This seems terrible, but it was simple detached observation;
There are three locomotives – train engines – standing abreast on a platform spanning a huge deck that stands out into the roadway from the rails their entire collective girth, like a ship of engines being hauled impossibly forward, and lengths of great stretched orbs – black oil cars and rusted boxcars tethered backward forever from the driving of it.
All of this mass and gravity inching up-slope tenuous and horrific – I can sense the impossibility. Its very existence is a warning; I feel that it’s possible my apprehension or disbelief could be a trigger and I try to think around it.
Surely, the whole thing slides and shifts and begins its backward ride into calamity – upended, side-thrust screaming – jack-knifed hell coming toward me – carriers and wheels thrown up and appearing above the tree line and the tops of distant trees whipping and splitting in the tornado of whole train pieces and then the bridge wide span of that engine-deck with its three-across dead-weight locomotives ass-on and unstoppable plowing earth and trees and wind directly at the locus of my vision and through both sides peripheral.
It’s a four engine train wreck and there is nowhere to run.
