A dancer understands that time is a product of space. Time is ungraspable. Carpe Diem
Will You Dance with Me?
In a chartreuse centrifuge of wholeness
we spin with silken integrity ~
a green chili greening into fullness.
Two alarm fire of boldness.
Will you, will you dance with me
in a chartreuse centrifuge of wholeness?
Tangos unveil a budding newness.
Away from center, we defy gravity ~
a green chili greening into fullness.
You know, that lush velvet twinning to oneness.
We swelter in salty humidity
a chartreuse centrifuge of wholeness.
Tend and trust the waltz of opposites
coupled in concrete fragility ~
a green chili greening into fullness
This biting salsa resists all dominance
through a supercilious depth of spontaneity
and a chartreuse centrifuge of wholeness
we dance a green chili greening into fullness.
Saturday, August 29, 2009
Time as a tide
Defined by the moon, we paddle against or drift along with, thinking that by falling back or springing forward we can be aligned with nature or even control time.
Daylight Savings
What are we saving?
forcing this spring
three weeks earlier
like a hot-house experiment
while another mother dies
like winter, still
a young father, too
barely thirty-two
and yet
the air is thick
with hyacinth
suburban sidewalks
team with scooters
and bicycles
and walkers
and all ages
of activity
the man next door
and his invisible companion
re-seed the lawn
from dawn until
afternoon,
a 3x3 patch
of golf course grass
he aerates and oh so tenderly
brushes over the new seed
like covering an aging father’s bald spot
Daylight Savings
What are we saving?
forcing this spring
three weeks earlier
like a hot-house experiment
while another mother dies
like winter, still
a young father, too
barely thirty-two
and yet
the air is thick
with hyacinth
suburban sidewalks
team with scooters
and bicycles
and walkers
and all ages
of activity
the man next door
and his invisible companion
re-seed the lawn
from dawn until
afternoon,
a 3x3 patch
of golf course grass
he aerates and oh so tenderly
brushes over the new seed
like covering an aging father’s bald spot
Friday, August 28, 2009
To Rumi & Beyond
My spiritual journey began seriously in 2003 when I met my anam cara, loving spirit friend, and we exchanged daily poems, scriptures, gospel and conversation. Like Rumi had Shams of Tabriz, I had my friend and we were immersed in the seeking, the questioning, the defining what cannot be defined. In 2005, we engaged in a month long study of Rumi poems. I was familiar with Rumi as a love poet, and not even knowing that his companion was a man, I relished in the daring sensuality of his words. Through that study, I came to realize that Rumi’s love of Shams was the human manifestation of his love for God and God’s love for all of us. His poems were love letters to God. I finally found my way in to the Bible and a framing for my relationship with God.
About that same time, I started studying with Marcus and Marianne Borg at the Center for Spiritual Development in Portland (http://www.center-for-spiritual-development.org/). The Borg’s lead an annual pilgrimage to Turkey to follow the journey of the Apostle Paul. Rumi was from Turkey and something clicked with me that this was a pilgrimage I needed to join. For four years I was either on the waiting list, didn’t have the money, or the trip was cancelled. Finally, I am on the list to go this next May (my 50th birthday) and even though I don’t have the money, I’m going. In preparation for this trip I’m re-reading as many Rumi and Shams poems as I can. I begin, of course, with The Essential Rumi with translations by Coleman Barks. Rumi suggests that the journey to God and self begins in the taverns (even though the drunkenness of spirit begins in “God’s Tavern”).
"All day I think about it, then at night I say it.
Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing?
I have no idea.
My soul is from elsewhere, I'm sure of that,
and I intend to end up there.
This drunkenness began in some other tavern.
When I get back around to that place,
I'll be completely sober. Meanwhile,
I'm like a bird from another continent, sitting in this aviary.
The day is coming when I fly off,
but who is it now in my ear, who hears my voice?
Who says words with my mouth?
Who looks out with my eyes? What is soul?
I cannot stop asking.
If I could taste one sip of an answer,
I could break out of this prison for drunks.
I didn't come here of my own accord, and I can't leave that way.
Whoever brought me here will have to take me home!
This poetry. I never know what I’m going to say.
I don’t plan it.
When I’m outside the saying of it,
I get very quiet and rarely speak at all."
--Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi translated by Coleman Barks
I have had my time in the bars, I have had my time in the dark scream of depression, I have had my time uninhibited and numb, I have asked the questions there, in the narrow darkness and now I ask, “Why do you stay in prison/when the door is so wide open?/Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking. /Live in silence./Flow down and down in always/widening rings of being.”
In the spirit of the movie, “Julie & Julia” I am blogging myself through Rumi again with my own poetic responses. Your responses are also appreciated. This poem follows the Rumi form of a quatrain (four line stanza)
Look,
I am looking for one
who can endure me...
Sadly, I must acknowledge
you are not the one.
I am looking for one
who will step out
from dark bars
and drunken passions
where grapes split
and ooze and merge
with other similar grapes
settled in sealed vats.
I am looking for one
who will cross thresholds,
squint in light and seek
alongside but not in me ~
one who knows union,
comm-union without
fear. One who will
hold in a gaze of silence
until dusk and truth
emerge like cognac
passed bitter and burning
between our lips.
I am looking for ilm~
divine, luminous, wisdom,
an ocean expansion
with “widening rings of being.”
About that same time, I started studying with Marcus and Marianne Borg at the Center for Spiritual Development in Portland (http://www.center-for-spiritual-development.org/). The Borg’s lead an annual pilgrimage to Turkey to follow the journey of the Apostle Paul. Rumi was from Turkey and something clicked with me that this was a pilgrimage I needed to join. For four years I was either on the waiting list, didn’t have the money, or the trip was cancelled. Finally, I am on the list to go this next May (my 50th birthday) and even though I don’t have the money, I’m going. In preparation for this trip I’m re-reading as many Rumi and Shams poems as I can. I begin, of course, with The Essential Rumi with translations by Coleman Barks. Rumi suggests that the journey to God and self begins in the taverns (even though the drunkenness of spirit begins in “God’s Tavern”).
"All day I think about it, then at night I say it.
Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing?
I have no idea.
My soul is from elsewhere, I'm sure of that,
and I intend to end up there.
This drunkenness began in some other tavern.
When I get back around to that place,
I'll be completely sober. Meanwhile,
I'm like a bird from another continent, sitting in this aviary.
The day is coming when I fly off,
but who is it now in my ear, who hears my voice?
Who says words with my mouth?
Who looks out with my eyes? What is soul?
I cannot stop asking.
If I could taste one sip of an answer,
I could break out of this prison for drunks.
I didn't come here of my own accord, and I can't leave that way.
Whoever brought me here will have to take me home!
This poetry. I never know what I’m going to say.
I don’t plan it.
When I’m outside the saying of it,
I get very quiet and rarely speak at all."
--Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi translated by Coleman Barks
I have had my time in the bars, I have had my time in the dark scream of depression, I have had my time uninhibited and numb, I have asked the questions there, in the narrow darkness and now I ask, “Why do you stay in prison/when the door is so wide open?/Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking. /Live in silence./Flow down and down in always/widening rings of being.”
In the spirit of the movie, “Julie & Julia” I am blogging myself through Rumi again with my own poetic responses. Your responses are also appreciated. This poem follows the Rumi form of a quatrain (four line stanza)
Look,
I am looking for one
who can endure me...
Sadly, I must acknowledge
you are not the one.
I am looking for one
who will step out
from dark bars
and drunken passions
where grapes split
and ooze and merge
with other similar grapes
settled in sealed vats.
I am looking for one
who will cross thresholds,
squint in light and seek
alongside but not in me ~
one who knows union,
comm-union without
fear. One who will
hold in a gaze of silence
until dusk and truth
emerge like cognac
passed bitter and burning
between our lips.
I am looking for ilm~
divine, luminous, wisdom,
an ocean expansion
with “widening rings of being.”
Saturday, August 22, 2009
Time
I've been reading Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman. Beginning with time as a circle, repeating over and over through infinity on to time as river flowing over sticks and stones to the ocean, God, infinity. Then there is linear, one dimensional, flat time, parallel and 2D time, or 3D perpendicular time offering possibility and choice. Time without choice, pendular, a metronome of predetermined monotony. Or time amorphous, moving in fits and starts, reactive only to basic need fulfillment. I read on, sparked to note in my journal all the manifestations of time, one paragraph ahead of the author, every time.
I have my own theory of time as a double helix, which I'll write about later, but I was compelled to blog after reading this section, "It [time] is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity. It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning, each touch has no past or no future, each kiss is a kiss of immediacy."
Do not fear it
Do not mark
nor mar that evanescent moment
Suspended
between all the hours of living,
the hours of purpose.
That moment
had nothing to do with anything ~
not your life nor mine.
Do not carry that kiss with you,
Nor calm
the fervent phantom touch.
Rather,
let the lambent flush linger
like rainforest air ~
Wet, sultry wet.
Let it be,
in the ancient, waiting air.
Let it be that single moment
when you breathe a coral-pink rose
or hear the lonely locomotive cry
on the other side of the river.
Let it be that moment
when the northern lights catch
your breath and toss it to the night.
Let it be the chicory Cabernet
that sharpens your tongue ~
or the cool glass contrast.
That moment between,
the one that whispered down our spines,
Was no more than the brief pleasure
of silk skirts dancing round your thighs.
______________________
I have a friend who seems brilliantly able to live in the moment. She is an artist, and like most artists ~ like me, I believe, is comfortable enough in the chaos that is the irrational universe. She does not appear to need to console herself with creating order or contemplating rational, scientific reasons, explanations for why. Strikingly satisfied with what is... is, she teaches me.
I am an artist, delighting in the unknown, the chaos, the thin mountain air space of time, but I am also a scientist, curious, and a theologian, anguished by, "Why? How? What does it all MEAN?" My friend reaches into the immediacy and tosses moments at me, which I then take and muddle and muse over until I have found its place in the grand jigsaw of my life, or its place in a poem. If I offer my order back to her too orderly, she says I have made too much of the thing. If I give the thing its gossamer due, then neither of us have to fear losing ourselves to the other and there is ease.
_____________________
It is the quiet moments that matter:
the cat stalking my pen as I write this page,
the rattle then hum of my old refrigerator,
signifying home,
laundry folded,
freshly cut grass,
one single candle lit for a simple prayer,
God, keep her safe, please.
I cannot
in that moment, last night at the party,
that moment between our fingers,
yours and mine, as we pass the stemmed glass,
wine and water shared,
as we pass the glass back and forth,
crystal rim moistened
by both our lips, our lips
(only we know have touched),
but last night, under the stars,
in front of friends,
when our fingertips touch,
the details of living explode like snapdragons
between us.
_____________________
These two poems were written five years apart, mused by different lovers, but both reflecting an anachronistic love, one, that would not, could not fit into the 3D order of either of our lives. Held in time, attached to place and space and person, these poems became secrets and the love forbidden. But today, I wish to release them, like a meteor shower above all the tides of our August 22, 2009, Portland, Oregon living. Time is not their gatekeeper, their ruler. They are of kairos, not chronos. No one can touch them now, tarnish them, claim them; they are available for all as all Inspiration should be. These poems are now released to time as breathlessness and a heartbeat, sincere, true, no past/future attachments, lost and found in a crescendo of infinite One.
I have my own theory of time as a double helix, which I'll write about later, but I was compelled to blog after reading this section, "It [time] is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity. It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning, each touch has no past or no future, each kiss is a kiss of immediacy."
Do not fear it
Do not mark
nor mar that evanescent moment
Suspended
between all the hours of living,
the hours of purpose.
That moment
had nothing to do with anything ~
not your life nor mine.
Do not carry that kiss with you,
Nor calm
the fervent phantom touch.
Rather,
let the lambent flush linger
like rainforest air ~
Wet, sultry wet.
Let it be,
in the ancient, waiting air.
Let it be that single moment
when you breathe a coral-pink rose
or hear the lonely locomotive cry
on the other side of the river.
Let it be that moment
when the northern lights catch
your breath and toss it to the night.
Let it be the chicory Cabernet
that sharpens your tongue ~
or the cool glass contrast.
That moment between,
the one that whispered down our spines,
Was no more than the brief pleasure
of silk skirts dancing round your thighs.
______________________
I have a friend who seems brilliantly able to live in the moment. She is an artist, and like most artists ~ like me, I believe, is comfortable enough in the chaos that is the irrational universe. She does not appear to need to console herself with creating order or contemplating rational, scientific reasons, explanations for why. Strikingly satisfied with what is... is, she teaches me.
I am an artist, delighting in the unknown, the chaos, the thin mountain air space of time, but I am also a scientist, curious, and a theologian, anguished by, "Why? How? What does it all MEAN?" My friend reaches into the immediacy and tosses moments at me, which I then take and muddle and muse over until I have found its place in the grand jigsaw of my life, or its place in a poem. If I offer my order back to her too orderly, she says I have made too much of the thing. If I give the thing its gossamer due, then neither of us have to fear losing ourselves to the other and there is ease.
_____________________
It is the quiet moments that matter:
the cat stalking my pen as I write this page,
the rattle then hum of my old refrigerator,
signifying home,
laundry folded,
freshly cut grass,
one single candle lit for a simple prayer,
God, keep her safe, please.
I cannot
in that moment, last night at the party,
that moment between our fingers,
yours and mine, as we pass the stemmed glass,
wine and water shared,
as we pass the glass back and forth,
crystal rim moistened
by both our lips, our lips
(only we know have touched),
but last night, under the stars,
in front of friends,
when our fingertips touch,
the details of living explode like snapdragons
between us.
_____________________
These two poems were written five years apart, mused by different lovers, but both reflecting an anachronistic love, one, that would not, could not fit into the 3D order of either of our lives. Held in time, attached to place and space and person, these poems became secrets and the love forbidden. But today, I wish to release them, like a meteor shower above all the tides of our August 22, 2009, Portland, Oregon living. Time is not their gatekeeper, their ruler. They are of kairos, not chronos. No one can touch them now, tarnish them, claim them; they are available for all as all Inspiration should be. These poems are now released to time as breathlessness and a heartbeat, sincere, true, no past/future attachments, lost and found in a crescendo of infinite One.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Power of Place
My One Particular Place:
is it the exact center
of a boulder in the exact
center of a glacial runoff
in the inexact center
of a field of purple lupine
and red paint brush
below an exacting August sun
suspended over Elk Meadows?
or, is it this seem-less longing
for nothing between us
but lavender, cotton sheets
and Abba lyrics:
“…the sun is still in the sky
…let me hear you sing once more
like you did before.
Sing a new song, chiquitita.”
My place is wherever gardens grow
or need to grow, impatiens
and luxurious gladiolas, crimson
with passion and summer ending.
My place is the space between:
preparing for my first dive and the kiss
of lake water on nubile fingertips.
My place is not where I grew up
except for the horse stables,
sassafras roots, and wooded
wandering deer trails
that led me to contemplation
under apple trees
in fields of Black Angus cows.
“You were always sure of yourself.”
then, but now, place
is pain, “a blown out candle”
between love and declaration
“Will you try again?”
Between “patch it up”
and let it go,
between the first glass of wine
in the bottle and the last.
Then and now, place
is in the darkened stairwell
of the Hopewell Methodist Church
where an icon painting of Jesus
and an aged copy of Desiderata
expand my skin and detonate
my soul into the place between,
the white space, the thin place.
My place is where “heartaches
come and they go and the scars
they’re leaving. You’ll be dancing
once again and the pain will end.
You will have no time for grieving.
Try once more, like you did before
Sing a new song, chiquitita…
There is no way you can deny it.”
is it the exact center
of a boulder in the exact
center of a glacial runoff
in the inexact center
of a field of purple lupine
and red paint brush
below an exacting August sun
suspended over Elk Meadows?
or, is it this seem-less longing
for nothing between us
but lavender, cotton sheets
and Abba lyrics:
“…the sun is still in the sky
…let me hear you sing once more
like you did before.
Sing a new song, chiquitita.”
My place is wherever gardens grow
or need to grow, impatiens
and luxurious gladiolas, crimson
with passion and summer ending.
My place is the space between:
preparing for my first dive and the kiss
of lake water on nubile fingertips.
My place is not where I grew up
except for the horse stables,
sassafras roots, and wooded
wandering deer trails
that led me to contemplation
under apple trees
in fields of Black Angus cows.
“You were always sure of yourself.”
then, but now, place
is pain, “a blown out candle”
between love and declaration
“Will you try again?”
Between “patch it up”
and let it go,
between the first glass of wine
in the bottle and the last.
Then and now, place
is in the darkened stairwell
of the Hopewell Methodist Church
where an icon painting of Jesus
and an aged copy of Desiderata
expand my skin and detonate
my soul into the place between,
the white space, the thin place.
My place is where “heartaches
come and they go and the scars
they’re leaving. You’ll be dancing
once again and the pain will end.
You will have no time for grieving.
Try once more, like you did before
Sing a new song, chiquitita…
There is no way you can deny it.”
Saturday, August 15, 2009
Tired, just plain tired
"This that is tormented and very tired,
tortured with restraints like a madman,
this heart.
Still you keep breaking the shell
to get the taste of its kernel!" ~ Rumi
This that is love.
This that is desire for companionship
under the moon.
Still I keep breaking open
with hope that it might be you.
tortured with restraints like a madman,
this heart.
Still you keep breaking the shell
to get the taste of its kernel!" ~ Rumi
This that is love.
This that is desire for companionship
under the moon.
Still I keep breaking open
with hope that it might be you.
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