I don't know why I was pulled back there again after all thsi time.
I guess I know it's a stretch of time that in this life I will always feel attached to. The Dalai Lama has given me a lot to think about in the last couple days and in just 38 pages so it gives me cause to reflect. About attachment, about detachment and their various relationship with love and compassion. At any rate, this one is comes to me especially strong:
Waking up it was about 9 or 10 in the morning, we had been up late, making love,
cuddling, crying, comforting one another, swearing what we could and would do for one another... I felt like the Chief in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest...everything in disarray and suddenly face-to-face with destiny. Seeing that open window to leave and the other metaphorical window to stay. She looked it me with her big hazel eyes, and smiled wanly. She knew that time was up. All those letters up until that point reminding me that our time together was short. I'd fight back tears, that primal urge to rip my clothes and beat me breast as they did in old times. Going to God and begging, begging, saying if it be your will, whatever you would have me do. But I'm not Christ and this was not me dying for everyone else's sins. This was just me, human and all too earthly, deciding where my heart really wanted to be. Where my heart decides to be. Today, now, yeaterday, in a month, in a year... This was about making a decision. And my friends told me, the ones who I consider true friends saying, Even though you make a decision, there is always a decision after that. Nothing is final. Nothing has to be forever. If you decide you have made a mistake, try to correct it at once.
I stood in her living room and I was dumbstruck. I knew I loved her, she told me she loved me often times too. And I was leaving. It seemed like it would be forever that I would be gone. The tears started falling from my cheeks, I hugged her harder than I ever hugged anyone. My heart began tearing up, the burning. I looked her in the eyes and I couldn't help but say this: I'll come back, I'll be back... how could I say that? Why would I say something like that? I was preparing for only the second longest drive I had ever taken in my life...

Dalai Lama's
I N S T R U C T I O N S F O R L I F E -

1. Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk.

2. When you lose, don't lose the lesson.

3. Follow the three Rs:
Respect for self
Respect for others and
Responsibility for all your actions.

4. Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.

5. Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.

6. Don't let a little dispute injure a great friendship.

7. When you realise you've made a mistake, take immediate steps to correct it.

8. Spend some time alone every day.

9. Open your arms to change, but don't let go of your values.

10. Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer.

11. Live a good, honourable life. Then when you get older and think back, you'll be able to enjoy it a second time.

12. A loving atmosphere in your home is the foundation for your life.

13. In disagreements with loved ones, deal only with the current situation. Don't bring up the past.

14. Share your knowledge. It's a way to achieve immortality.

15. Be gentle with the earth.

16. Once a year, go someplace you've never been before.

17. Remember that the best relationship is one in which your love for each other exceeds your need for each other.

18. Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it.

19. Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon.

I found myself wondering what it was that I liked about Omar throughout the series but by the end it was undeniable for me... he was not necessarily a good person... just a vigilante in my mind... the guy who took the law into his own hands and there is some valour in that. Obviously, this was his last stand at getting to Marlo Chris & Snoop and he over extended himself... every time I saw him limping around the streets like he was, I kept thinking he's out in broad daylight for anyone to see. He wasn't being none to smart but that was part of his character, the sort of raw pride of a gunslinger who thinks and knows he's above the law... The best was when he robbed the card game that Marlo was at, and he put his gun into Marlo's face and said "You musta mistook me for someone who listens"
I like how they built his character off his relationships with Jimmy and Bunk, how a guy like Omar sort of took care of some business they couldn't do themselves by being on the streets all the time.
Fact is, I think most people wanted Omar to get Marlo and Chris before the cops did. But that's likely not real life... Omar's legacy is that he's a fictitious Robin Hood of the streets and he did his part to buck the status quo from within ... and believe me, I let out a pretty loud "Ohh no way!!" when that kid--- I kept thinking maybe he won't die from it... but in a show shooting for a slice of reality, only Superman can dodge bullets... In a lot of ways, he does epitomize what is left of the American Dream, fighting to stay alive amid the wastelands of moral vagrancy.

I'm grateful for :

nature walks
Reese's pieces
watching Jake awkwardly through the mud, no leash
sunshine
blue sky with whisps of clouds smeared across it
when you know that someone else gets you
stone memorial markers
vistas of the great plain

First Day of Spring?

Not very likely, since it is still a month away but it was the first sign of spring... Brooke and I took Jake to the park and walked through on the path. At first, we walked through a slushier area, still walking on thoroughly snowy stretches of the path. Brooke laughed at how the ice sort of bubbled upward when you applied pressure to it. And that was how it was, the water seeming to flood certain areas since this winter's precipitation seems to be trapped in the frozen areas of ground. Most plant life is still in the winter mode, dead and dormant, and probably will be still for at least the next four to five weeks. But it's hopeful to see some of the snow melting around the grassy areas and the grass underneath is beginning to show color. No doubt the moisture will be crucial in providing ground upon which a healthy foliage will grow. I couldn't help but want to slow down if even just a little bit, to simply examine the ground and long enough to take in the scents of the ground, the freshness of the reeds that grow along the Chalco pond. You learn to enjoy days like that to the best of your ability, to try to shed off the troubles that you might be having, real or fancied within your own mind, and just live in the moment, that ultimately it must be a spirited moment, and if you can't bring the spirit to the moment, then search for the spirituality that might have been intended by it.
I went out a little later on, knowing that later in the week we be once again enshrouded in cold. I walked up into the Tiburon neighborhood with the half-million dollar houses, lining around the golf course , but mostly I was looking for the same sorts of signs from nature that spring might be on its way. Hard to truly see when snow still lies in the hedgerows of the cornfields. One thing about living out here in southwest Omaha is that you are really surrounded by miles and miles of earth.
I remember living on Turner Blvd closer into the city and longing just to out where I was raised where you could take a walk in more desolate areas where there was a LOT less concrete. In that sense, I love it out here. It makes me wish I could buy a slat of land, and till it, work long hours in the fields with nothing but my tractor and my back. Only if I had the strong back to live with that kind of work. I guess even Wendell Berry would shame me for saying that, I suppose it would never be too late to sell everything and buy some farmland. At any rate, no matter whether its my land or someone else's, it is always good for me to be close to the earth, to let it have its natural effect on me.

Every so often it's good to get out the wheelbarrow and shovel and dig up the old questions we may often have about poetry. I can thak Brooke for this and do so whole-heartedly, especially since she got me to go back to the Healing Arts Center again to go see the poets, dramatists and accolade collectors. More than anything, it re-raises the question about what constitutes a poetical piece and what is just ...a horse of a different color. (What a great name for a racehorse by the way, Horse of a Different Color, sure beats ShortLongShort or Half a Furlong) I don't walk around thinking about the answers to that question. In fact, I don't know if it really crosses my mind. My usual stance on the issue where my OWN writing is concerned is, am I expressing myself how I want to express myself... which is not to say clearly. You don't get that guarantee. Not with poetry, I don't think. Not if you're reading John Ashbery, John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop, EE Cummings, Old Man Frost, hell, Sylvia Plath, and the list goes on and on... Shakespeare was not crystal clear, even to his contemporaries, who one would assume spoke the same language that he did... quite the contrary, it would seem. Wouldn't they too, struggle with meanings, or as we discover, double meanings of many of his verses and phrases... Readers, to an extent, have to begin to ask themselves, would the delight in the craft of the language if we didn't have to work at it in any way? If we knew exactly what was being said, if we knew what the writer was conveying at once, wouldn't that simply be an article or a treatise. And if it didn't contain some conceits of language, wouldn't it fall under the category of essay or a philosophical tract? Even worse, imagine a poet setting out to find his own form of expression, only to find himself instead writing line after line of literary criticism, something likened to legal writing and philosophical drudgery. Yet for so many, it seems to pay the bills as they rest in the ivory towers of scholarship, never to breathe another honest thought or even let down their golden hair. You could wind up writing blogs for the remainder of your days too, ever since their advent about five years ago or so, anybody can get their poems publish. (Or so I am told by a friend recently, "You, too, can publish your poetry if you decide to spend $50 on poetry.com in order to have your old gold-leaf copy of your own writing.)
My point I think is simple. That it's not the artifice that matters, poetry generally looks the same throughout. If you open a book or a leaflet and you see the words arranged in the conventional fashion, you will not mistake it for anything else. Poets like Robert Hass, Yusef Komunyakaa, even Donald Hayden and Allen Ginsberg liked to test the boundaries of poetic form. Shake it up a little, make it look like something else. Otherwise, you, the reader are going to be able to determine when verse is verse and when narrative (fictional or non-) is just narrative... but the content is what will distinguish it's greatness. There is no true formula and everyone, including the most rakish of hacks know that. But the fact of the matter, I have discovered undoubtedly, is that the reader will be drawn to what they are drawn to.
If I consider myself fairly appreciative of poetry, then I have to recognize that other other appreciative readers do not share the same taste that I do. They may look at someone like Michael Palmer and think ...what is this guy doing? this is absolute rubbish hieroglyphics to me, and I may thoroughly enjoy his pendantry as something both comical and innovative. Likewise, I may like AR Ammons (and do!) while other readers might find him boorish and awkward. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But if you want to get closer to the work, and see if it is appreciation-worthy, you should start by trying to get at the mechanisms by which the artists keeps his artifice. How is he laying down the tracks of his tears?
And yet there seems the other dimension of the reader's experience of poetry where the artifice matters very little. This experience that you have where you read the words, the reader-reponse approach to criticism, where you are not paying attention to mechanics at all, but are winding around and through the picture, situation, experience created by the words.

Today I am grateful for:

Tears as a reducing of stress
Having parents that listen /hear me out
Having a girlfriend that will listen to me when I am choosing to be unreasonable
fresh fruit
indoor heating & air /wool socks

Does it say enough? Or is enough said? A quick quote to quench your querulous quest. Poetry and what is, what it does? What is it constituted of? I don't know that I have the answer but I have had cause to speculate on occasion. Just know that you can grapple all your life with the forms and whether something flows for you, as far as you are concerned, but are you saying something? Why I always preferred the essay. More thoughts about How to Get Back To Teaching... which is a projec, an ongoing process it seems of just thinking about the various skills, ideas which students are faced with and your own personal crusade to just be a mentor, a guide, the beacon upon the hill. If anyone needs it, you are there. If anyone looks beyond the obviousness of it , and sees that you are set in that role of being beacon, a light-bearer... Maybe we're still just a little idealistic. Maybe it's just you love it when you know what you are talking about and suddenly have someone there trying to figure it out and you will help them if you can because you know you must.

I had an unpleasant memory from my past as an avid concert-goer. Being at the Cog Factory downtown wearing a flannel shirt and sweating profusely and smoking at the same time. It was very common for me to smoke while I was at concerts, so much so that I remember trying to sneak some into a Widespread show at the Pershing Auditorium in Lincoln. The place was pretty fierce about allowing tobacco products in whatsoever and they were doing full-body pat-downs. There I was right outside the gate and beginning to sweat. I thought, I'll put them down in my socks, because they'll never find them there. I was thinking/ hoping/praying that the feat would work for me. So concerned I was with getting to have something I could smoke with me that I was risking being pushed away from the door of a concert I had spent thirty dollars to get in the door. Nevermind that I was risking my health on a daily basis.
NOW, look--- I'm not on an anti-smoking campaign because having a fear or downright contempt of the institution as a whole is neither fruitful nor productive in terms of wanting to continue a long period of abstinence. I did that the first time I quit back when I was 19 or 20 (yes, I WAS attempting to QUIT at that age) I started to go the militant route on it, decrying anyone who made the conscious decision to smoke at all.. needless to say within and before two months I found myself smoking again just as much as ever before and had to eat a lot of crow from the big stink I made. So I'm doing my best not to be a hypocrite but I will say that I am not missing it now... The actual thought I had was of how many articles of clothing ended up with burn holes in them, and a countless number of times I was actual burned by other people's scalding ash. In the middle of a concert (God how did they justify tearing down the ashtray shrine that was the Ranch Bowl, the nexus of most rock n roll shows in the Omaha area) it was the most startling experience to feel a hot cinder burning its way into your skin, only to turn around and see some grease monkey with long curly scraggily hair and virtually no face standing there in concert pose one leg out with knee bent, head swaying to the music and cigarette in their mouth.... OK, see now even THAT is a bit of a stereotype because God only knows: you have to be trash to smoke. Not entirely true as I found in my suburban experience. There was a time when it seemed like everyone smoked. Conversely, there can a time when everybody was seeming to quit. I'm glad I made it out alive, at least for now. Without dying from an aneurysm while banging my head to the Poster Children at the Cog, or moshing to Fugazi at the Ag Center in Lincoln.

I know that now I can pretty much enjoy a concert as a chance to loosen up, exercise, get pumped up and let my blood flow freely. It's a little more freaky than it used to be, because I feel somewhat out of place, no drink, no smokes. I'm not sure what sold me to the idea that I needed those as props to get through the whole experience, one of the more profound among all human experiences, seeing another person shredding a guitar on stage and a whole group of them making unearthly noises that pierce the skin and wrestle their way to our insides. Music has saved me time and time again, just like Mike D. said on the Check Your Head album. I realize this is like preaching to the choir, especially when the choir preaches back, but it was an amazing realization that I was stifling an expereince myself; that experience being the one of being humbled before a man or woman channelling a great wave of creative energy through his or her being...

Self- discovery and awareness in the middle of January. I have struggled to like January a great deal, and luckily it is almost over. You aren't entirely aware of it how it is the pole in the middle of the road given the whole year. The next thing you have to look forward to in the way of holidays is Valentine's Day, which presuming you are in love with someone, can only be truly enjoyed on condition. I guess an argument could be made that Christmas can only be celebrated on condition as well, that condition meaning that you are Judeo-Christian in heritage but the other holiday which follows from VAlentine's Day is of course, St. Patrick's Day... presumably you don't have to be Irish to really enjoy it, but I've never found that to be entirely the case...I mostly want to be safe and away from bar-crawlers. Truly, I like those moments where you find cause to celbrate regardless of the fact that there is no holiday surrounding it... celebrating life, celebrating again that you figured out that you are in love with the person you live with again, celebrate the fact that you have legs and can walk upright. Celebrate the fact that you have blood punding through your heart. Celebrate trust.

Today we talked about the dues and fees for membership. The fee for coming into a room, telling complete strangers about where you're at. where you're trying to go, how you feel and that it somehow pulls your life together into a narrative which suddenly makes sense a little more than it used to. The fee being the thousands of dollars you pour down the drain, the relationships, the brain cells, etc. You didn't notice paying them and didn't , couldn't predict where it was going to wind you up. And you didn't believe that it was going to amount to much. What you would come to endure. How you would manage to survive yourself. How you begin to bask in laughter. That you would begin to create laughter. That you would begin to find joy again, even on days when the wind whips hard because suddenly you have discovered that people affect you in a profound way, sometimes by their intimacy, sometimes by their aloofness, their objectivity, but they can pentrate your being and you learn to live again. You know long have the strings of a puppet, it's just coming to you naturally, as if you knew it all along, someone just needed to start the fire, to light the spark.

I remember driving a long distance between here and somewhere else and thinking about the course my life could take, what I could legitimately be DOing with myself. I looked at being behind a computer desk for the next however many years, knowing that my true role was to consult. To put down the fence of a human trying to get through the next forty hours of submission to the will of his company. And realized that God gave me brains to use for a reason. He didn't care how I used them, just so long as I applied them toward the good, and just so long as I didn't fully expect to keep various talents to myself, that was how it was supposed to go down... I still like to think about this because I think I might still have yet to find the exact groove into which I can fit myself in terms of vocation... the fact that I like to consult, to teach, to help others question... something along those lines, exploiting my own knowledge that I love to get people to talk about themselves, to identify that they know what they think they know... an admitted Platonist I guess. So I have to imagine that i will need to continue to explore that love, that comfort.

http://aaomaha.org/WWOct06.pdf

Went on Friday to see a pdocuction of My Name is Rachel Corrie at the Unitarian Church in Omaha. The city is coming a long way since the days when it was a stir when Malcolm X came out in theaters. I guess I didn't quite know what to expect from the production as it was a bit vague how you would be able to take scraps of a girl's journals and box them into a play. I have always loved the art form of theater though as an outlet of tremendous emotion and with the ability to allow layers of meaning to stand there like fat strips of bacon for the curious mind to ponder. I feel a bit embarrassed to say my biggest criticism was that it ran too long, but having made that disclaimer, I will say, and Brooke and Kyle both agreed that the play was rather long. Maybe it was the cramped space of the Unitarian pews but even so, you almost have to understnad that the play was in its most unabridged form, and certainly why not? If you've captured the audience long enough to get them to go see a play of curious proportions might as well drive home the nails of discourse. Enough said about that, because what really strikes me about this girl's character is how she was ultimately human. Full of life, full of dreams, hopes, aspirations. She was driven, driven by whatever came to her. She was on the firing line of life. And knowing that that was where she found herself, they sort of bring into play this Christ-like human being... Christ-like in childish wonder, Christ-like in her ability to think outside the box, but still analytical, still working hard to see the bigger picture. That allusion of course is imposed by me only, and actually I would even debate its accuracy. It's just that as time has gone on I see the human struggle as the one in which we are faced with now in the twenty-first century. We have spent long years and centuries tying ourselves to history, religion race, creed, country. Now, in the twenty-first century it seems the fight is to uphold the sanctity of being human and somehow, it seems that that is somehow tied with our continuing quest to understand our relation to the divine. But humans are scared because of their place on this earth, among the animals, the plants and trees. We are special because we survive, because we exist... we have the right to be here in the midst of other human beings. Together, undivided, but individual. I don't know why the image of the farmer tilling his land seems to stick out so drastically, but it's there. A man and his land. A man walking the earth as if simply that he moves over it must be evidence of his worth in being there.

Do we live again? I think it's irrelevant, almost not even worth the thought because if we do not live in this now, do we eever have a cahcnce of living truly living. Silly statement. Look, here it goes. I have moments of terrible doubt about what I'm doing here. About whether my desire to get cable television to stir the fruits of thought a little are ultimately childish because walking around the grocery store, placing various items into my shopping cart with Brooke, I realize that there are many many people who don't have a pot to piss in. So you go back to getting grateful, about starting with the simple roof over your head, looking at the food on your plate, whether you are able to pay your bills and if so, maybe because you have a job to go to and a car that gets you there, hell, even if I rode the bus I might want to look at the fact that I live on a bis line. Start with the simpler things like the people around you, whether you're related to them or not. Hopefully they treat you how you should be treated how anyone would like to be treated and you've got something to be happy about. Not everybody can live in Coeur d;Alene or a Swiss chalet, Boca Raton or the Virigin Islands, and you;d take it for granted or get resentful if you did. Maybe. Not a lot of people with a pot to piss in, but life must go on. If you stay persistent in that, you will be amazed... without doubt.

Getting grateful. Dan H used to tell the people drying out down in rehab that
they might have to get grateful. It seems like a band-aid for a hemorrage seemingly
but it works slowly, surely, through the mire and the fire... gratitude. I heard
someone say recently that serenity could be found by looking at what is while fear is always found from looking at what is not... all these bits of advice at times throughout my life have seemed too simple... Hallmark hullaballoo... but truer words have never found. You make a list of the things you are grateful for: you start with the fact that you believe in God. Whether or not you actually think he's an
intervener or not, he's There. He's doing something. Though most people can't seem
to figure out what, or why or how... He's a strange deity. But even so you start with him and then you say friends, family, a place to live, a car to drive,
food on your table, a job, a way to support yourself. A bed to sleep in, clothes to wear, clean water, clean air. Your grateful for moments with friends, moments with family. Your grateful for your health, that you don't look like that guy from Motorhead. That you have some intelligence, that you got an education... that you made it through treatment, that you have information which will help you live a better life. That there is music that makes you joyful, that there is a music that makes you cry, that you can feel emotions again. In other words, you start from the beginning and work your way out from birth... that you are still alive, with a chance everyday to be human.
It seems like Brooke and I come back to that alot-- to being human. It's one of the fundamental properties for us as individuals, as people who are having this experience. Andrea always talked about the fact that we were spiritual beings having a human experience... that it's debatable whether anyone really lives any better than the other...

I know most days recently I walk around like I've got life figured out, and most days recently, I feel like I do. The simple side of it, keeping it simple. Trying to squeeze things down into managable portions. This I was taught. This comes directly from another group of people with whom I am acquainted. That and that only. Only sometimes I fall short of my own ideals. Maybe this is human nature. I brought home two oversized suitcase, I'd say packed to the gills but I get points for humility only in that sense because for a few seconds I thought of the baggage handlers who would have to load the suitcases on my outgoing plane, off the same plane and then reload it onto my connecting plane. So now I have two gigantic suitcases which take up a good portion of room and which are packed heavily with items that seem overbearing to our apartment. This is a fact of which I am suddenly not entirely proud. I mostly wanted to get them out of the hair of my parents, who maybe didn't understand if I was going through some kind of giving up of possessions. And indeed it did feel like a surrender of sorts, but it was a much stronger surrender than just giving up a few clothes... it was a surrender involving giving up of specific beliefs that I had about how things ought and need to be in order to continue with life as I know it... I see it as a facing of the self, and maybe it seems lately as if I were whining to get some of the security I had behind me before the decision to say screw it all, I'm doing it my way. I've seen it at work, the place where it seems I clamor the most for pardon, constantly desiring more recognition because over time I feel like I should deserve it... but where I have a lot to offer my employer in the way of brains and creativity, I also lack in terms of common sense, follow through , attitude, and general disposition. I still think they're foolish for not giving me more responsibility and blame my faults on their reluctance to relinquish the keys, figuratively speaking. Truth is, I feel like I'd be better off moving on to something different, and only I can hope that it might be better. This is still about the American dream, if one can believe it but I think it's more--- the human dream of self-fulfillment. Maybe I'd feel a calling to be a travel agent, and find the love which comes from serving others more fully if I had travelled the world often myself, so that I might have some more experiential knowledge to give... but that hasn't quite happened yet. And the reality is instead working at a cubicled desk, behind a computer screen without any real inspiration behind it, just the knowledge that one can gain from a book or the repetition of information gathered from rote memory. So the time for escalation would conceivably be now. And yet that will need to be done progressively, over time, because that's just the way it seems to work for me. Maybe I could pull together some kind of lightning quick means to be back up to speed, but likely I would have to struggle through the first phase... it is likely, without much experience behind my back. I have faith that all these things will work themselves out if I work toward them. The fact if the matter is that I am tired of taking the easiest path and doing the most formidable thing. It had not served me very much in previosu years and I have reason to belive that it will help now... but I am the catalyst in my own domain, the wheels of the bus go round and round if I let them...

No Direction Home

As long as there is a direction,
There can always be a direction home
Twisting through a bend between Illinois and Alpha Centauri
the galaxies shifted and upon a black river
where the fog rose up, my black magic was spun.
I can’t say it’s been easy being me
for very long or over the miles
But I hung in there like an anchor
off a freightliner plodding the sea,
edging toward heaven or Tangiers, or
I was like the neck of a Morroccan asp
dodging the hawk and the mongoose.
Having sunk down so low, bunkered
in the briar so I might once again return
to my nest, hunch down in the bush
under dark weeds so no man nor
animal nor fear can find my weakness.
But it was more than survival
which kept my colors cloaked and
my brain on fevered alert, the fiery kernel
within my mind ablaze and shielded–
there in the bogs and mist-covered forests
which reflected nothing but the calm dark
that patiently awaits for a stunned prey.
There was love, indeed which burned
deep within my chest, a love fair white
and snow, pristine which twinkled
like the stars before my eyes, that soft
fire, so small and pulsing in the midnight sky
amid the deep azure pool of yesterday
and now in this ether– that love, a compass,
pointing north and I would see her face,
her radiance and my heart would be dragged
back in that direction. and my direction
was found and yet but stumbled upon
as if I were the tendriled catfish, dwindling
through the river; my eyes dull and visionless,
like my cousin the bat, blind & weak,
dumbsensed and mundane, looking for
sensual food in the brackish waters so foreign
but with my craving needing to be appeased,
instead I became martyred by her sinkline,
yanked and pulled until reality stang that life
as once lived would no longer be.
This love, this hungry love where you are
reeled by the song from your heart,
released upon the sea or creek or stream
but does the fish ever seek to be caught
once again by his captor, does he long
to be sucked back into the smooth fingers
of something which suddenly has his rapture.
Directions are our states of fever, they are
imagined and they are determined, which
course will run us back upstream, knock us
two farmhouses and light years from where
we want to be– if our hearts burn and our
hands remain steady, the direction will cease
to have power, our course becomes steady.
Our hearts at last filled with the glory of our human blood.

These hills worth dying for.

You throw your bones upon grassy knolls, and feel the dirt under your skin, the enemy has inched too close, even if only still measured by feet, not a plain intrusion no but close enough to feel its thunder, close enough that you cannot sleep, your whole gentry set to the yards, covering the fence, all betrayals will be met with swift punishment, all the men being told they will not be
allowed to go under, they cannot relent, station to station the next 24 hours, the greedy watch, taking up the grandest energies for the fortifying. And now your bones, your nerves are a jangle, a jumbled mess of powerless wires, But you're leaning upon a great pack of pride, along with the provisions you've stored for battle after battle in this war of degrees. You've already exchanged pleasantries, which you are convinced have fallen to the fray: so this is get even time, line in the sand time, tooth and nail time. This is the hill you've chosen now worth dying for-- its matter does not consume you, you say, but this is where you've told all your friends you will be, where the calls are being forwarded to. Amigo, you hear the hooves of the horses, the boots of the warriors, you've waged your war, now bend your knee to the sod, grab the clay until your nails are caked by it. This is your last grit of tour de force, the testament to the world that no ground is ever ill-gotten.

A guy I once knew named Doyle used to say something similar to this about recovery, except using the analogy of a large and elegant banquet. He said too many people just get the salad bar and settle for that but completely ignore the rest of the buffet. And it's as if that is the very thing which is missing. To think of the spiritual food, and how the only way we are short changed is by simply not taking advantage of all this life truly has to offer us. By turning to material things, which will always be limited and leave us wanting.

"I was raised to believe that the quality of a man's life would greatly increas, not with the gain of status or success, not by his heart's knowing romance or by prosperity in industry or academia, but by his nearness to God...God bestows three blessings on man: to feed him like birds, to dress him like flowers, and befriend him as a confidant. Too many take the first two and neglect the last. Sooner or later you figure out life is constructed specifically and brilliantly to squeeze a man into association with the Owner of heaven. It is a struggle, with labor pains and thorny landscape, bloody hands and a sweaty brow, head in hands, moments of severe loneliness and questioning, moments of ache and desire. All this leads us to God, I think... Life is a dance toward God... And the dance is not so graceful as we might want. While we glide and swing our practiced sway, God crowds our feet, bumps our toes, and scuffs our shoes. So we learn to dance with the One who made us. And it is a difficult dance to learn, because its steps are foreign...And I think to myself, There is nothing I am missing. I have everything I was supposed to have to experience the magnitude of this story, to dance with God." --Domald Miller, Through Painted Deserts: Light God and Beauty on the Open Road.

"There is a serenity in life, after all, and once a withdrawal is felt at having left the lies behind, a soul begins to feel at home in its own skin."
-Donald Miller, Through Painted Deserts.

“If one advances confidently in the direction of one's dreams, and endeavors to live the life which one has imagined, one will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”

“You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.”

“There is no remedy for love but to love more.”

“Do not lose hold of your dreams or asprirations. For if you do, you may still exist but you have ceased to live.”

-Henry David Thoreau

The nature of friendship for me throughout the years has been flimsy at best.
I believe in an open door policy; that much I know.
I can always push people out the door if I choose and lock it throw away the key.
But historically, I've seldom done that, because you never know when you're going to be on the other side of the fence.
But even more than that it's because my most formidable enemies have proven to be my strongest friends.
Guys who I thought were the biggest asses turned out to be some of my greatest teachers. Unfortunately, some of them turned out proving to be assholes nonetheless.
At least, in my book, as far as the running tally goes.
But believe me, the door isn't closed , not in the least,
and maybe I feel like I've got some growing up to do outside of those
individuals.
Like I really just need that time away and likely vice versa.
It has been a crooked road though, not well-paved, and difficult to understand.
My greatest weakness seems to be that I don't keep in touch very well.
I let the lines dangle sometimes.
The list of names are seemingly endless, and yet, I don't remember where the cause of the break ceased being that I had nothing left to offer or that I screwed people over.
I think where that is concerned, the percentages just slowly decreased.
The nature of friendship stopped being about who was the coolest and wildest to hang out with... who knew the most arcane and far gone places to visit.

Somewhere along the line, it stopped being an outward thing. I could care less
today as to what kind of clothes a person wears or what kind of music they listen
to or whether they even pay attention to their own taste. Taste will always be
just that: taste. Opinions are like assholes, and there are a lot of them in
the world. I mean sure, there is this lingering attention I have to aesthetics
but as time goes on, I find myself fascinated by the people who have different
tastes in aesthetics, or who just allow themselves to stray because it keeps
everything fresh. You never used to see me wear yellow or green or even orange
at one time. But now I'm drawn to that. Or maybe I've started feeding myself a
different dialogue. Or maybe I want to belive a different dialogue so I just try
new things and hope I can learn to like something just for its newness.
There is something to be said for friends in this same fashion. In order to have
a friend anywhere, you have to be a friend. And I've found that to be the most
successful route. And now there are people whose company I crave and I start to
read them and see what would appeal to them, how to best approach them with the
kindness they seem to want. That sounds sort of like people pleasing, doesn't
it? Hmmm... is there a way around that? Is there a way around simple flattery?
I;ll bet there is a study somewhere-- and I'll look for it soem other time if I
feel I have more time to burn.--that would actually prove the value of flattery
in trying to make friends. Most people-- and this is something my mother always
pointed out to me when I bewailed my sorry state as limited in the friendship
category-- like it when you ask questions about them, to get them talking about
themselves. I've found that to be amply true in a lot of different
circumstances, especially when I've had that golden bit of information about a
person that allows me to get them to open up completely. That incredible moment
when you've just struck the note taht gives them free reign to talk about the
very thing that they love to talk about. Personally, I love talking about
baseball, literature or music and food. I feel like these are categories that
were I to thoroughly trust the other individual to not cut me short or stray from
the given topic, I would likely find myself going on and on all day with that
person except if one of us had another pressing engagement. Movies as well. I
love that linbe in True Romance when Christian Slater says that he always goes to
see a movie on his birthday because I identify with that kind of ritualistic
mentality.

Certainly, I would have easily connected with a guy like Clarence Worley if we
were to meet at some random location like a video store or in line at a movie
theater. My friend Jason and I sit outside the cafes downtown drinking coffee
and go through list after list of movies we have enjoyed over the years... It's
all about scenework, what was hilarious, grotesque, incredible about something
one character did to another. My girlfriend Brooke and I quote lines together, I
often find myself remembering that I've heard the line somewhere but cannot
remember where I've heard it. She calmly reminds me of not only the line itself
but the context in which it was uttered. To us, it seems movies are kind of like
offshoot occurrences of reality.

My friend John and I regardless of the month or season of the year continue to
discuss both news and issues as they relate to the world of baseball... it is a
disjointed conversation at times because he likes to rattle off interesting
information about the Cubs while I am myself a Yankee fan. But the strength of
our friendship has been our ability to poke fun at each other's teams misfortunes
and our ability to watch out for the sucess of the other's teams. I pay
attention to what Chicago is doing and think of how it affects him. My ears perk
up for news about the goings on in Chicago. Likewise, he listen in when he
hears news about New York, We see each other every Tuesday night and compare
notes. My father has been the same way for years now. He still reads the World
Herald and checks out high school football scores. I went to Prep, my sister to
Millard North and he knows how each team's football program did this year much
more than I ever did. He checks out all the scores and highlights and gives me
updates every time I talk to him. If there's one thing I've missed for years,
it's been the little post-it notes of Yankee scores he left me on the kitchen
counter in the morning. He did that for so many years it still amazes me, his
little vigil to me, even in times when I didn't have my shit together. Now I'm
pretty much on top of it, and we can have an ongoing dialogue about "the other
night" or "that game against Toronto". I love that. It allows me to feel
closer and closer to him every year. It's prolonged evidence that the burning
bush doesn't always come down in the form of a burning bush.
Friends are a blessing and maybe it was sometime after I realized that people
people our life for particular reasons that I began to really pay attention to
the people around me. To really listen to what they were saying even if it was
moaning and groaning. If you're going to care about someone, then there has to
be some kind of commitment to whatever need they have. At least that's what
I'm finding out. Slowly. That friendship isn't all about grabbing the
coattails and hanging on to the good times. Sometimes there has to be a certain
amount of descending into the darkness even if just for a little while. Going
into those dark places with people that they have found, that are evidence of
themselves. Not all of us are strong as oak trees with backs that will never
split. Some of us can be disappointed in one another. We bruise easily. I say
all of this as an appropiated victim. A victim of my own insecurities and
quirkiness and reluctance to change, to offer anything other than what I have
learned how to give. Sometimes I'm guilty of holding back. It's not what I
want in the future. Hell, it's not what I want today, but sometimes it's just
where I'm positioned, it's how it all comes out despite my best efforts.
Sometimes I'm half-assed. My friends know that about me, and friends that want
to get to me better usually have to learn and be surprised by my seeming
buffoonry. I don't aim at eloquence. I don't aim at greatness, if I even embody
these traits for stolen moments in any given day I imagine it's something short
of a miracle. But I can only hope it's not because I'm not trying. It's
because I have skin, teeth, blood, a brain, wired funny, mixed wrong, like a
salad with all the wrong dressing, a meal mismatched with the wine. I'm still
trying things out, still finding stuff that doesn't work, still mistakenly
throwing away stuff that does. I wonder sometimes, how much time is it going to
take to learn? Will my time run out? Et cetera. Unfortunately, as good as
friends are, sometimes it's only something bigger that will give me any
serenity, any lasting peace on these matters... it's up to Him to decide.

We arrived at the Salvation Army only to see fire trucks at the entrance.
Immediately, I saw this as an intrusion upon my day, my day, finally getting a
ten year medallion, Brooke was coming with me, she would see what the meetings are
like, even if just to catch a glimpse, I would see Tom and Cindy and at last, I
would have recognition and validation for this last year, for the last 3650 days which no
one really counts but me. The deus ex machina, out of the sky to give me and
all of us a bigger picture, if we wanted to see it or not. This facility houses
several families mostly women who have brought their children to that home to
escape whatever it is that's been hounding them indefinitely for the grater part
of their lives... So there we were and it couldn't have been much more than 35
degrees and we're all having to wait outside before the meeting, gathered in the
cold, and the firemen tell us it would be best for us if we were to back away
from the building, so now we have to move away from the shelter and heat of the
building which had prior to that protected us... and then, Tom and Cindy began
to notice that there were small children, babies, with their mothers. Wrapped up
in blankets and swaddling clothes, tiny babies in the 35 degree weather where you
could see your breath...and we watched while mothers turned on their cars and the
heaters in the cars for warmth... something to keep their children warm with and
Thomas notes that there are no doubt some among this group who would have no
place to live if it weren't for that place... the plot thickens, awareness
grows stronger, more intense in the there and the now... and you begin to see
again that there is more to all this than what we are looking at... we don't have
enough eyes in our head...but he sprung into the desire for more action, thinking
maybe I'll bring MY car around here and turn it on because then we could fit more
into our car and then there would be more warm children...This is how I'm just beginning to think but I'm not entirely there. I've been
trained pretty well, trained mostly just to think and perceive beyond the two
feet in front of me. Instead, to try to read the text that surrounds me.
Sometimes, because my mind has warped areas, I misinterpret the text, the
telling clues. I can't help that, simply that my perception is awkwardly fouled
up at times, and often times. Sometimes, I'm dead on but where there concerns
other people and what they are thinking or their emotions, I seem to jump to
faulty conclusions at times. But maybe I'm getting better at it now only for the
simple fact that I am not letting a few hasty judgements get me down. I mean
what it is it besides a judgement... so you're wrong, big deal, just keep at it
like archery. You may not nail the bullseye but the attempt and aim make the
sport worthwhile after all.Tom reminded me of the spiritual experiences of the burning bush/white light kind
which I believe I personally had a result of meditation. They were undeniable
experience but there is a prideful side to these experiences that can be
extremely misleading. Namely, there is a limit, I believe to their frequency as
they are revealed to any one particular person and as a result, the intensity
with which a person is allowed to experience them decreases, as does the
frequency. So you are left with the residue which understandably the divine
power which grants such experiences intends for you to carry around with you for
sometimes prolonged, extended periods of time... in other words, I may never
experience a spiritual experience like that with power and grace like that
conceivably for the rest of my life. I happen to think that that is doubtful
but that exact assuredness might be the very facet of my character which will not
allow me to replicate a similar experience...who's to say that God will continue
to bless any one person with intense powers of emotion and the ability to
distinguish beauty in nature only on the sole basis that that person tries
heartily to do his work well, tries to live well... it isn't a guarantee at all,
not in the slightest, but a greater blessing I don't think has ever been offered
me... Would you indeed have to be subject to some of the most acute moments of
humiliation before you could expect to have the utmost gratitude and humility in
life? I think perhaps that is true. A man we know talks about the importance of
desperation in the role of cultivating the needed gratitude to transform one;s
life. Desperation being a key ingredient for the willing. Without it, one never
really can amount to much humility. And the same could be said of their
willingness... Cindy said something about the importance of giving up control,
in the effort to teach yourself the difference between the happiness which is
wrought from pursuing happiness over rightness. The significance of not needing
to be right today... just to settle on that's right. I see your point. You
know you have an interesting way of looking at that. I had neevr thought of it
that way before. One of the older guys I know, a guy whose been around the
solution for much longer than me was referring to the hills we will die on.
Nobody needs to die today. You just sit down and rest on the hill, all the
others climbing so hard upon it can just have their day in the sun. You rest
and feel the sunlight of a spirit wash all over you... let others beat you to the
top. It's the journey anyway, right?I thought of the image of me walking through the forest and enjoying it but
getting caught up on so many side treks....distract by so much in the foliage and
just so quickly, I find myself lost in hideous woods... As a result, my newest
goal is to try to stay on the path as much as possible, just hang in there with
the path, let my mind wander but not react, just stay on the path for now, as
it were and see where it leads. I haven't been lead to far astray, and have met
many wonderful teachers along the way who have made it easier to do this kind of
thing... who make the time go by so much more wonderfully, smoothly... Like Brooke likes to tell me I have a roof over my head, there is food in our
fridge, we have a warm bed to sleep at night, we have more than we need, more
than we need. Jake, the dog sleeping on the floor in his blanket, books on
the shelf to inspire us, movies to watch to remind us of where we've been, where
we are where we might like to go to... music to make us laugh, cry, shake our
asses if we like... we have more than we need, plenty of what we need.

Giving thanks.
I'm grateful I sat around a table today filled with gracious food, and everything was delcious and I enjoyed the company, and I didn't feel like I had to be the center of attention, it never once occurred to me...that there were smiling faces around the table and noone disliked anyone else. The discussion was steady but not heavy, and it wasn't strained. We ate and were merry, we laughed at each other lovingly. I am not entirely a stranger to others' generosity, I take it in stride because there's no guarantee in life.. . I am grateful that while I've had my struggles I have never slept in a mission on Thanksgiving. I think of those horror stories about families that are missing their brother, sister, mother, father, son, daughter and don't know where they are because of some tragedy. I am sorry that those tragedies ever occur on or around the holidays, forever fixing a date in someone's mind that this date will ever be one of sadness. That people would have to mull around forever with that weight on their conscience. And maybe have to hold back, or feel like they have to hold back explaining to people why maybe they just can't do it this year. Or maybe it's not going to be the way it was in years past because it's just not really going to be the same for them. You get the idea. I know it's out there, and part of me wonders how many people go through this Let them have peace somehow... let them find each other. Or some power that will get them through it.

"With God, we get power, we get free... let us shout that from the rooftops so that more of us can hear that" -Anonymous.

This is from what I consider a very spiritual document taken from Thomas Mails'
interviews about Fools Crow , Wisdom and Power... Thomas let me borrow this something
like nine years ago. Reading it again brought that same eerie feeling I got the
first time I read it...

http://www.geocities.com/native_america2001/Hollow_Bones.html

Two Poems, Written Separately, Composed and Dedicated to Brooke on This, Her Birthday, the Number of Which I Will Not Now Disclose out of Virtuous Respect for Her Privacy But Which
Should She Grant Permission I Will Offer Out of Desire to Grant the Truth, May She Know that
Today Is Truly Happy, In Commemoration of Her Birth into this World of Martyrs and Fools.

I.

You broke my heart in Memphis,
those lonely hours in the night of that motel room,
with champagne & soaps & feathers all around,
but nowehere, nowhere would you walk out
in your evening goan, lean against the wall,
you couldn't tell me you loved me there
in that space with the train whistle in the distance
and the lonely sound of the radiator, reminding
me how I would sleep without you near me,
that that train knew nothing about us, nor the smokestack
and the cold, cold rails in the night, they couldn't
lead me back to the sound of your laughter,
not in Memphis, not that night, and all I did was cry.


And you broke my heart in Birmingham,
that Sunday afternoon when you
called me crying and I was on the move,
and the tears and the wheels were rolling,
and I was staring at a sign with three arrows
that were sending me down three highways
that didn't lead me anywhere I knew
that didn't lead me back to the heart
of the hearth with the warmth & the depth of you.


And you broke my heart in Jasper,
where the rocks & the rills & placid streams,
where the junipers wave & the elmwood trees,
where I was leaning back north & fighting
all the winds in every direction and I could feel
my heart was giving out & beating slow & long
and love was screaming off the reins, telling
me to slow down my heavy pace and fly
like a nighthawk with long, elegant wings
back to the straits, the wellspring, back to loving you.



And you broke my heart in Atlanta,
Under a Georgia-heavy sky where the peach blossoms
filled my lungs with their scent, sweet and soft,
and all I could do was cry; I wasn't quite sure
why you told me you were a peach, but on that day
I could smell you all over, and in my memory,
and your hair was with me, your skin, your smile,
the lingering scent of a hundred mornings of
how I'd been with you and a hundred more
I might never know and in the light of the Georgia
sunshine, I couldn't hide, & I just couldn't help but cry.



And my heart was broken before I left Georgia,
I left that boy I was when I met you
somewhere down there, deep under the southern clay,
I left that boy with the Alabama moonshine,
with the dust of the Oxford moors, the mist of the Tupelo
ferries, and the fog and the crickets and the Mississippi
bullfrogs and the Choctaw moccasins, and baby,
I just couldn't really bring myself to care,
I caught the first train back to Cape Girardeau,
the steamboats just west of Cairo, that boy you knew
was not on the freightliner heading south into Arkansas,
that boy you knew, you thought you loved, he was
already halfway through Missouri, he'd left Tennessee
in a hurry, the mud already washed off his boots
by the Kentucky rain and the Illinois showers,
he was back in your arms before you could sigh,
before you finished any last letters goodbye.



You broke my heart and you'll break it again,
I love you, baby, my northern light, you'll never
stop shining, I hope you don't, I hope, I hope
I'll never see New Hope again, New Harmony
or New England, & if I do you'll be with me,
or following close behind, you've taught me to break,
to break, to break my heart over & over again,
and fill your arms with my blood, my love,
and with tears of joy and tears of passions,
& with tears of love on my cheek, I just can't help but cry.

II.

"Let the lover be disgraceful, crazy,
absentminded. Someone sober
will worry about events going badly.
Let the lover be." -Rumi.


We can find each other under swathes of nightshade
We can bathe in the salt waters of the tempest that
sometimes threatens to cover us completely
but we rise above the surface of the waves
and sleep in the shadow of the light of the moon
until at last, I can swim you back to shore on my back,
and even if I flounder, you breathe into me new resolve;
the promise is not of a smooth passage, only a safe landing
and the sand on our feet : this is the gift of the holy to us.



We have yet to convince this world that we are not
as reckless as we know ourselves to be
when we have caught fire in one another's arms,
that this kind of love is not unfettered as it is true,
when convincing ourselves has been the proven wizardry,
a matter of striking flint repeatedly in the dark,
the patient but sometimes frantic desire to keep
the blaze alive, when it rages on behind this veneer
we keep in front of our eyes : I've seen it on cold nights
when you throw your love upon me, when you ache
and beg me to let you keep me warm again tonight.


I've wandered into the corridors of your past, down crooked
paths, through magical forests, straits & narrows
putting photographs together to rebuild your worlds,
imagined and assumed, while you delve down streets
and alleyways where I once tried to lose myself forever,
but could find nothing but sleep and an itch
to throw myself again headlong onto avenues of mystery,
broken homes & broken lives, to see how unlike they were to mine.
I am even sure that you will allow me to see all the rivers,
valleys, mansions, and moors that you've known in younger times,


I am sure that we will sail upon the sea, your hair flickering
across your face, branches of brown in the wind;
that there will be an island and a road through this island,
there will be thousands and millions of grains of sand,
that our hearts & lungs will be filled with the sea,
that we will eat from the fishes of the water and
you and I will be lovely, if we want these things,
if what we tell each other in the night and in the late
autumn afternoon when the sun gets low, and you come
to my arms, silently, for sleep, for rest, and I love you then
as I love you now; you are always with me, even
when in the evening moon, I cannot be with you.



I hear you, I smell you, telling me how like the sun,
the moon, the stars I seem to be, this is my gift
to you, that I want to remain these things, as long
as I can write these things, as long I can love you & say these things.

XOXOXOOXXO.

Out of principle I had to add this one

http://www.infiltec.com/j-chick2.htm

How Many Roads...
Northern Alabama

Eastern Alabama/ close to the Georgia border
Western Georgia

Lake St. Louis, Missouri

Southwestern Missouri


Southwestern Missouri

The NY Times on-line - I'm going to town blogging this stuff, I think absinthe is fascinating... hehe- vicarious pleasures...
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/12/arts/12conn.html

Norman Mailer, Towering Writer With Matching Ego, Dies at 84 ,New York Times Arts section.
by Charles McGrath
"Mailer was a prodigious drinker and drug taker, a womanizer, a devoted family man, a would-be politician who ran for mayor of New York, a hipster existentialist, an antiwar protester, an opponent of women’s liberation and an all-purpose feuder and short-fused brawler, who with the slightest provocation would happily engage in head-butting, arm-wrestling and random punch-throwing. Boxing obsessed him and inspired some of his best writing. Any time he met a critic or a reviewer, even a friendly one, he would put up his fists and drop into a crouch. "

Gore Vidal, with whom he frequently wrangled, once wrote: “Mailer is forever shouting at us that he is about to tell us something we must know or has just told us something revelatory and we failed to hear him or that he will, God grant his poor abused brain and body just one more chance, get through to us so that we will know. Each time he speaks he must become more bold, more loud, put on brighter motley and shake more foolish bells. Yet of all my contemporaries I retain the greatest affection for Norman as a force and as an artist. He is a man whose faults, though many, add to rather than subtract from the sum of his natural achievements.”

Ten years ago today bathed in a fevered sweat. Ten years ago today my nerves, questionable.

Today I sit next to a girl who epitomizes my supreme self-absorption ten years ago. Maybe that's entirely judgmental. I'm guilty of that on occasion as well. But the difference is that maybe she can get away with it longer than I did. I have just come to see that kind of self-absorption as a lonely place. Kind of like Plato's friends who sit watching the shadows on the wall... Depite what anyone can say about me, anyone who's spent a great deal of time with me over the last ten years knows I am not the same person I was then. The theory about the electrons changing, the cells migrating. Those details are amenable to science. I don't know if I know more than I knew back then. Maybe I do in that I know that I know less than I think I do. Thank you, Confucius.

The goal is to be more humble. Less me. The goal the last five years have been to be less me. Less the type of person that lingers which perhaps need not. It's not the Body Artist. This is not a tale of asceticism. Maybe that works for the Jains or the Opus Dei but not for this cat. I have a low threshold for pain. Ten years of reality, except for dreams. Life is but a dream when you're clean. At least, it can be I've found. I remember waking up one Sunday morning, as I have for a couple years as far back as I can remember and going to a meeting club and there were all my friends sitting in their chairs, some beaming, some reflective, some sleepy-eyed. But they surrounded me.

There was a man I'll never forget as long as I live named Richard Watkins who went to the Sacred Heart Church in North Omaha who gave me a post-it note with the inscription "Isaiah 43:4" on it. Nothing else, no real explanation. But it was there, and why I remember that above all else, I can only explain by my experience over the last ten years in light of that one phrase, "Since thou hast been precious in my sight, and honourable, and I have loved thee; therefore will I give men for thee, and peoples for thy life." I remembered that around 3 years or so. I would have been 24-years old and it would have been six years since the day that Richard gave me that slip of paper. It took my breath away to think of that. Waking up from a dream only to find that my life was but a dream.

I think I've tapped out most of the nay-saying people from my life who would judge me for who I am. I wondered recently if that didn't mean that I was a better judge of character. That the people surrounding me for the purpose of having a weaker person latching on to a stronger one, the old threadbare idea of having someone around that's lower than you, all that seems to be gone now. And never need return. That awful ache in the heart of low men... that sad loneliness becoming a rocketing into the fourth dimension of existence.

While reading the book Kaddish by Leon Weltseltier about both the history and origins of "The Mourner's Kaddish" I came across the prayer, which I had never heard nor seen before, but found a copy of obviously built from the ground up from Hebrew. Apparently, it was originally composed in Aramaic both for Rabbinical and for those who wish to exhalt God for the purpose of protecting loved ones after their time of death... It seems a beautiful prayer and though I do not know the Hebrew, I was still touched by Mr. Weltseltier's meticulous study of this prayer, according to him, was to attempt to connect, understand and have a new relationship with this prayer.

Exalted and sanctified is God's great name.
in the world which He has created according to His will
and may He establish His kingdom
may his salvation blossom and his anointed near.
in your lifetime and your days
and in the lifetimes of all the House of Israel
speedily and soon; and say, Amen.

May His great name be blessed
forever and to all eternity.
Blessed and praised, glorified and exalted,
extolled and honored, elevated and lauded
be the Name of the Holy One, blessed be He
beyond (far beyond) all the blessings
and hymns, praises and consolations
that are spoken in the world; and say, Amen.

* * * * * * * * * * *

{The half kaddish ends here.
Here the "complete kaddish" includes:}

* * * * * * * * * * *
Let them be accepted: the prayers and supplications
of the entire House of Israel
before their Father in Heaven; and say, Amen.

{Here the "kaddish of the rabbis" includes: }

Upon Israel and its rabbis and their students
and upon all their student's students
and upon all those who engage in the Torah
here and in all other places
may they and you have much peace
grace and kindness and mercy and long life
and plentiful nourishment and salvation
from before their Father in Heaven [and Earth];
and say, Amen.

{All variants but the half kaddish conclude:}

May there be much peace from Heaven,
[and] [good] life
and satiety, and salvation, and comfort, and saving
and healing and redemption and forgiveness and atonement
and relief and deliveranced
for us and for all His people Israel; and say, Amen.

He who makes peace in His heights
may He [in his mercy] make peace upon us
and upon all [his nation] Israel; and say, Amen.
in the world which will be renewed
and He will give life to the dead
and raise them to eternal life
and rebuild the city of Jerusalem
and establish his temple within
removing foreign worship from the earth
and the Heavenly service shall return
and the Holy One, blessed is He
in his kingship and splendour ...

I really don't know where I was when I took this picture. I have to guess that it had to have been somewhere in Alabama. The second day of my trip down south, which was a Sunday and Sunday is now my day of great spiritual banking. Find empty places and drinking in spiritual food there... I love the spiritual light of this picture, because it's the refracting of the sunlight through the marks on the windshield, but I was moved by the wide expanse of sky and road. You see the broad sweep of this stretch of highway and those spirits seeming to rise up from the erth, good, clean happy spirits.

There was an old photograph our family had of when this priest and nun from the parish we belonged to came to our house and ate Sunday dinner with us. There was an inexplicable mark that appeared on that picture. It vaguely resembled a dove-shape and my point in bringing up this is there is the proposition that the Spirit of the Universe is either everything or else it is nothing. Either the photograph captures the rapture and deep well-being I was feeling at the moment or it is a picture took from the road where the dirt and grime of the windshield has gathered. Either it IS a figment of the imagination, one that is fired, or else it is the cold soul of a being grounded in the mathematics of reality. Either you can calculate what is happening in the present moment and explain away all the magic of it, or you can let thoughts run wild in amazement of what is happening and what kinds of things it may be promising for the future.


This is some place between Memphis Tennessee and Oxford, Mississippi... I'm listening to blues music at this point, Muddy Waters, Bobby Bland, Howlin Wolf. Elmore James. And Muddy is really the only one from Mississppi but I'm feeling that deep mysticism that comes from being in that place. I think of Twain's Jim running for his life, trying to find his way up to free territory for black slaves, and that song "Hellhound on My Trail" by Robert Johnson running through my mind, that haunting line about "blues falling down like hail" and I see the sunrise, likely when most of the slaves along the railroad had to find a place to hide, deep with the evergreens so noone could find them... There was a hellhound on my trail and it was the fear I had of my self.... the fear that maybe I was running from my self again, that I was going farther and farther away from myself. Etheridge Knight had that line about how he almost kicked it with kinfolk, how he'd almost caught up with himself... I'll never know why the darkest of notions hit me the same way, they puzzle me the deepest. But this is a beautiful portrait of how God wakes up the world. Within a half-hour, I was overwhelmed by the light of day and I would hit pockets of road where I could almost not see anything at all, the rays of sunlight were so bright and penetrating.

I heard the bit on Bob Dylan again today and John Hiatt talked about "All Along the Watchtower" being a reflection of Dylan on the Book Of Isaiah. Now I have to go back and read the Book of Isaiah, because while they played that song, with some kind of spiritual overlay, suddenly that song takes on a whole new meaning for me. Then I see it as an attempt for a deeply troubled but determined man (Dylan) trying to grapple with the message of the divine.
And this guy trying to remain ever introspective on the meanings of texts written down for the purpose of mankind, and what these stories can ultimately teach us about ourselves, about our connection with this whole other dimension of reality, the dimension we sense strongly is there, but have little scientific proof of actually encountering.

I couldn't help myself, looking out at the world through windows moving 75 mph... sometimes the going was slower, amore plodding gait, other times, it sped up wildly, profusely. I must have been somewhere outside of Columbia Missouri because the shadows had begun to fall, it is a late afternoon photograph taken on October 21st... the trees and fields are still lush, green but you can see little flairs of color in there as well. It was the beginning into the descent of night, the darkest night of the soul, the unholy hour, or maybe it was just another afternoon in fall, where the heart beats differently because the going is neither rough nor tidy.

Oklahoma. The Weigh Station.



I'm not sure what kind of monster writes about his family. There's so many dynamics to it. You go into it thinking that you might be a monster or they will be moved, elated, flattered. You're never sure where to begin or how roughly you should trod. Whether it's not better to just carry the proverbial big stick. I do it now (I think) because I have admiration for my family. This is not a method to establish personal denouement. That's what therapy is for. Or Augusten Burroughs novels. No, this is to illuminate, glorify a family which was born best out of the threads which are woven into the flags of the American Dream. I begin with a photograph which sits on my desk. Easter it must have been. Somewhere around either 1982 or 1983. Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. Outside of Tulsa. A brown clay brick house in which we lived. (Street name?) My other to the left, in a white business-style blouse with a blue tied ribbon next to my grandmother wearing her signature white coat and her pink-rimmed glasses, smiling wide for the camera. Proud to be with her grandchildren, her daughter-in-law. I was still Master Greg Schoonmaker, still shorter than my sister and still blaringly blonde. My sister, her hair cut short but a white barrett on the side, a navy blue dress. One purple ribbon in the middle and white tights to cover her legs, white shoes. Navy blue was the fare of the day. It must have been Easter, would have been my guess. My grandmother's favorite holiday, and usually right around the time when she would have been able to come see us all.



Oklahoma was always barren, the grass on the front lawn, a parched brown, leading me to belive it could have also been Christmas... a logical guess but in Oklahoma, one never knows. My mother remembered there being dust stroms off in the distance that you could see from the back of the house. Oklahoma is naturally, a mystic place, not often given much creedence as a place to tour or visit, because of its sometimes gaping holes of sky and wide scopes of land. If you're looking for some place which will help you meditate contemplatively on the nature of oblivion, then you've gone to the right place in Oklahoma. I don't remember much of it, except for a time when a tornado watch was threatening. Me & the Ritter kids from down the street were playing and the wind picked up and just as quicky died down. The sky turned yellow, then green. Green. No lie at all and thick rolls of cloud had formed in the sky. Fishermen, farmers and weathermen like to refer to them as mackerel scales and are approproraitely named. It's worse when the sky is green because it's reminsicent of The Emerald City in Oz, where you go when the tornadoes come and pick you up and throw you from this earth.

Beginning. We were a flourish. A family who flourished. Mostly. Until the great becoming. That was my part. Everything else was not a mess. Not until a few years later. But by then things had cracked opened. For us. We were a flourishing family. Everyone except for me. I was so consumed by the fact that the veneer was about to lift. Parents have so many expectations. And siblings too, but not nearly as much. The veneer was about to lift one way or another. Even if I weasn't around to witness it. Especially if I didn't tell anyone where I was going. Or how I planned to arrive there. Or not arrive. There would have been no arrival. Only a passing. And the thin veil which covered us for so many years was not going be a bridal veil. That would come much, much later. I could tell that story but I try not dwell on current events. Not knowing their significance. That particular story is simply not allowed to be told yet.

As a family, we have always reserved the right to withhold information from outsiders. From each other. My father began many sentences, "I haven't told your mother yet---" but he certainly meant well. It was for protection. It was to reduce anxiety. He would be eating peanuts from a porcelain bowl. He chewed awkwardly, a result of dental work from years back. He had formed habits during that time, that he should be careful about the manner in which he ate certain foods. Peanuts were at the top of the list. As he chewed, carefully, he would begin to divulge the top secret information, classified until further notice. Usually, it entailed a business trip, upcoming. He withheld the information in order to be sensitive to my mother's fear of being alone. In an empty house. With large bay windows. Which overlooked a large pond where alligators could live. With only the knowledge of a floor plan. The garage door couldn't open fast enough. With a fear that crept when she watched suspenseful movies, television. Her television nightmares. Her striking my father in her sleep. Her dangerous dreams. So he told her nothing until it was too late. The flights were booked. The itineraries printed. They were in bold, like decrees. She would make clucking noises, she would pull back her lower lip. If that's how it had to be, what further could she protest. So he ate his peanuts. He watched sports. Espn. Mad Money on MSNBC, the thick-headed bald men with the power ties and New York facial tics. The swagger of men who loved to talk about the power of stocks, the movement of the ticker. The Kabbalah of monetary destiny.

I decided that everyday should be a day of new birth, every season a respresentation of the cycle of life and death... here there is both living and dying.... being born into the world like new sprouts of leaves thirsty for the water and sunshine that showers upon this earth, and there is the withering away of the trees and the grass in fall to remind us that everything must perish... this universe it doesn't immaculately care... but there will always be the promise of a new beginning, a radiance unforseen when all seems to have been laid to waste. It's never too late to begin your life again. Sometimes you have laid a good foundation for it, but it begins in the morning when you get up and crawl out of bed like the Leo Kottke song. And just like Curly said in the Money Pit, if the foundation is good then everything else can be fixed. Good days and many blessings to all our fellow travellers out there, today's a good day to be human, that's the least we can expect and the greatest we could have hoped for.

The only true currency in this bankrupt world... is what you share with someone else when you're uncool. -Lester Bangs, Almost Famous

Just remember what old Jack Burton does when the earth quakes, the poison arrows fall from the sky, and the pillars of Heaven shake. Yeah, Jack Burton just looks that big old storm right in the eye and says, "Give me your best shot. I can take it." -Jack Burton, Big Trouble in Little China

I go back to this poem time & time again, one of the most beautiful prayers I've ever seen anyone write that didn't get canonized. People should make laminated bookmarks or frame pictures of it. Naturally number one stands out in my mind, and could pretty much stand alone by itself,
John Berryman:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=178869

We went to see Regina Spektor last night at Sokol and I would have to say the crowd was unruly. I joked with a girl in the audience about how I could very easily bulldoze my way to the front, since most of the crowd were females. Females with drunk boyfriends lurking toward the back near the bar. I don't think I really noticed any of this at first because I was really apprehensive about seeing her perform, but somewhere in the middle of probably her fourth or fifth song she asked the audience if they could keep it down, "I'm not lip syncing you know." I think she was right to ask that to some extent, as she is not the type of artist that you can just sort of listen to while you're catching up on Sports Center highlights... not in the least. Sokol always seems perfect for shows like hers because of the intimate vibe that comes from being in that old building, with its long history of elegant music acts. It was no different for her if people would have been able to get over themselves and their obvious self-absorption. The woman sits down and begins playing the piano as if she were just messing around in her parlor. She flitters out sweet melodies from the stage and bats her eyelashes, sometimes, as Brooke pointed out to me, having her eyes lightly shut as she plays each note and sings each lift and octave... I was familiar with a few of her songs but not all, so I could keep the objectivity I needed to truly appreciate that here was talent, here was a presence that pulled us all in. Just focusing on the lyrics, I'd here lines that rang with a graceful truth... then on a few songs, I'd find her telling kitschy (her own oft-used word) and sometimes gentle stories no doubt about personalities or situations she had known throughout her still short life. Graceful was how I would describe her if I had to use only a word. Full of gentle lightness and being, radiating out from that tender muscle that seems to beam from her ribcage is the closest sentence I could use to frame her essence...

I want to sing to you my love
My only love and happiness
Don't be so blue so blue my love
This too shall pass this too shall pass

But tell me, what have I done to deserve you?
Must have done something cause that's how it works
Must have been kind to kittens and birds,
In a previous life must have thought happy thoughts...

I found myself with tears of joy, leaping inside when she would work out a refrain, how she had found those phrases which it seems so many solid songwriters are able to bracket as the words they most want to be remembered by... word they long to fill the air with.

I couldn't help it, thinking that here is a new shining star, coming from somewhere East, I know that part of her descent is Russian/ Eastern European and that this woman has the power to influence another age if she chooses, endless troupes of lovestruck teenagers or twenty-somethings, idealists yearning for love or the capacity or the wherewithal to understand or care about love... for me, I watched my own lover's expressions intermittently throughout the show, watched as she perked up at certain songs, mumbled the words to others, expressed joy, sorrow, wonder, hope, love. The last of all being the greatest. The greatest of all being love.

And with that I leave you with some thoughts to share, courtesy of Miss Regina Spektor,

Samson came to my bed
Told me that my hair was red
Told me I was beautiful and
Came into my bed
Oh I cut his hair myself one night
A pair of dull scissors in the yellow light
And he told me that I'd done alright
And kissed me till the morning light
The morning light
And kissed me till the morning light.

Brooke tells me this song reminds her of me,  and ofttimes I haven't the foggiest
idea of what people are seeing.   More and more,  I'm focused on how I'm trying to
live my life to the best of my ability rather than how people see what I do.
But this idea of Samson strikes me this time, as I am a person trying to stand,
trying to be the rock,  and along comes this woman who is so wonderful and complete
and she's Delilah,  al she wants to do is cut my hair to expose the beauty within me,
and to see me pure, as I am,  but if she cuts my hair,  it renders me vulnerable.
I don't know.   Why doe sthe Bible keep coming back to me?  The Old Testament and its
stories.  Sometimes even the New Testamnt, stories about Jesus.  

Napping Father

I remember watching my father sleep
his mouth open, sometimes, during
what for me was apocalypse, great battles
in my mind, and he would flinch sometimes,
open his eyes, that moment of recognition,
then fade, surrender back into sleep again.

I would think this great man has lived
a hundred years through me, and has whittled
it all down to how or if you can sleep through anything,
despite all the tragedy or infirmity, that though
it be fitful, you must sleep, you must give that to yourself
in order to carry on with the rest of our nonsense.

But for me, I would be nerves on the outside of my skin,
and there is this pillar, the strength of all the world,
and if you asked him, he'd laugh, maybe roll his eyes,
which would tell you it wasn't really like that, that the sleep
was really something like exhaustion, it was about surrender
by default because you can't raise your fists to the world everyday.

when the real comfort is in knowing that
all things are in order for a man, no matter what this world
gives us, no matter where we're punched, that you live
with the choices you've make, and you protect them,
if only by trusting that someone you love can watch
you fall asleep and feel like the world isn't ending,
that it's okay to sleep in this place he's made for you.

"it's interesting how you sometimes have to leave home before you can ask difficult questions, how the questions never come up in the room you grew up in, in the town you were born. it's funny how you can't ask difficult questions in a familiar place, hiw you have tostand back a few feet and see things in a new way before you realize nothing that is happening to you is normal. it is rather odd, isn't it, our eyes in our heads, our hands with five fingers, the capacity to understand beauty, to feel love, to feel pain." -Donald Miller, from Through Painted Deserts


But Love makes us do things that defy reason, it can really set us through the wheel, it can make us want to do things we would have no account for in doing... why would you want to deprive yourself of the chance to be happy? Is because of the need to fight, regardless. Void of anything you ask or beg of anyone else, or whether your wishes are granted, there is still that need to fight. Because it's in your nature. Resisting the dying of the light. But the fight alone proves that we have not given up on our ideals. Fighting alone can prove the you still very much want to devour all that now occurs.

links for eliza griswold's poems whom I read and was struck by their direct relationship and voice and tone to present circumstances

http://www.hds.harvard.edu/news/bulletin_mag/articles/35-23_griswold.html
http://www.versedaily.org/wisdomteeth.shtml
http://www.smallspiralnotebook.com/bookreviews/2007/05/wideawake_field_by_eliza_grisw.shtml
http://www.poems.com/poem.php?date=13664

3 October. I began my day with fear. It is my lot. I think there are days when I am spared of that. I am sure I have had those mornings. But I have made much of the practice of talking to it. It's like the grumpy neighbor that you must deal with on the way to the car, on the way to work, before you can get back to the daily business. It is that unnamble thing that I must overcome each day when it elects to appear. Maybe all of us have it because it is our cross to bear in being human. Maybe you have palsy in your right leg, maybe you have a bum hip or a terrible pain in your back. I'm never sure, but knowing that fear is my enemy. A growly grouchy neighbor, growing weeds next door. Drinking beer at six am and talking to his wife at the top of the lungs through the screen. At any rate, I prayed that the fear be removed. I prayed long and hard that the fear be removed and it was. I stood at attention waiting for a power greater than me to grant me some kind of solace... some answer that would allow me to not be gripped by the fear. When I know the hand of that something other has intervened, I know it. I still think of the long windy arguments of Hume, the rebuttals of Russell... but I side with Heidegger, Nishida, Emerson...just less fiery, wanting to be placated by the power of Now.

http://www.poetseers.org/contemporary_poets/poet_laureates/robert_hass/robert_hass_poems/meditations_at_lagunitas/