The inner world colliding with the outer world
The tension between the two worlds creating life
The surface tension of the drop of water on a strand of hair
The hair woven together like galaxies

What we think of as beautiful is the movement between states of being?

It was beginning winter

It was beginning winter,
An in-between time,
The landscape still partly brown:
The bones of weeds kept swinging in the wind,
Above the blue snow.
It was beginning winter,
The light moved slowly over the frozen field,
Over the dry seed crowns,
The beautiful surviving bones
Swinging in the wind.
Light traveled over the wide field;
Stayed.
The weeds stopped swinging.
The mind moved, not alone,
Through the clear air, in the silence.
Was it light?
Was it light within?
Was it light within light?
Stillness becoming alive,
Yet still?
A lively understandable spirit
Once entertained you.
It will come again.
Be still.
Wait.

-Theodore Roethke

I have meandered to a place where I can see back on the course of my thoughts and feelings.

I am wondering if the spiritual/scientific split is again another attempt to divide the world into black and whites. And if that is necessarily good or bad.

Forward. The growth spiral. Words are not helping anymore.

cloudy is the stuff of stones

Cloudy Is the Stuff of Stones
Wisdom that fits in your pocket
by Anthony Doerr
Published in the March/April 2010 issue of Orion magazine



WHENEVER I’M OUTDOORS for more than ten minutes I start picking up rocks. In Patagonia, in Phoenix, in a Home Depot parking lot—my gaze is invariably sucked downward into the gravel. I weigh the merits of pebbles by some fickle and mutable aesthetic and either pitch them back or pocket them and stack them among hundreds of their brethren on the counter behind our kitchen sink like fortifications against an army of tiny invaders.

Pebbles from Canada, pebbles from Cleveland, pebbles from carriageways in Caledonia. Maybe the echoes of miners reverberate in my genes; maybe I share a That’s-Pretty-and-I-Want-It covetousness with thieves and princesses and bowerbirds. Maybe I hope someday I’ll finally overcome the fundamental truth of pebbles and find one that looks prettier dry than wet. Or maybe I’m just an introvert, a down-gazer, a bad conversationalist.

But every night as I wash another dish or fill another mug with water, my little hoard stares up at me with its thousand imperturbable faces.

Oh, him, the stones seem to whisper. He’ll be gone soon enough.

Take this nugget of quartz: milky, egg-shaped, the size of a breath mint. Quartz is hard, harder than all the common minerals, and on its journey from mountain to dust this pebble has reached the way station of my kitchen counter by passing through an almost unfathomable series of gauntlets. This little thing is a master of endurance: survivor, abider, traveler; inside it is folded a story of creation and time so large it threatens the imagination.

Born as a crystalline vein inside some huge extrusion of granite, it probably rode a thrust fault into the light a few hundred million years ago, helped bulldoze up a mountain range, got pulverized by a glacier. Over a few millennia ice, weight, and lichen weathered the vein into boulders, the boulders into stones. Maybe this pebble was driven by a cloudburst into a great fan of other pebbles; maybe it was—after another ten thousand rainstorms—sucked back underground where it was compressed into conglomerate by heat and pressure, until it rose again, smaller and rounder, to be polished for a few more centuries in a creek bed before the creek disappeared and the sand swallowed it, incubated it, and hatched it years later into the gulch below my house.

Until last Tuesday, when it traveled into the whimsy of my frail attention. Into my pocket, onto the pile behind the sink. It sits there now and dares me to outlast it.

Read the rest here

"No coffee?? I've got to have some coffee in here somewhere..."

"Oh here, the little package of flavored coffee I got as a gift."

"Hmmm...I don't like flavored coffee."

On another note, I still have some slight problems with my ears, after months. Strange.

sonic boom meets sun dog

Skip ahead about 1.5 minutes.

For some reason I started to consider the concept of the negative.

In photographic terms, it is simply the print in reverse.

It can mean something we consider bad. But I started to think about how a negative situation can be a positive for somebody else. There are many sides to each situation, each problem is a facet of the struggle.

Today I am just tired. I feel neglected, a little empty, hopeful, somewhat content. I feel let down.

There is a negative.

snow, oil, concrete, pine

To wake up the senses. Steering toward the world I know. Open heart, beginners mind.

megahole sunday

Good morning, monkey friends.

Here in frigid Minnesota we're all drinking beer and eating nachos in homage to the coming battle between the forces of good and evil.

But I am not. I am intent on doing some maintenance and visiting today. A productive conductive day. I have even brewed a full press of coffee, and am now sipping some French roast in a French original ceramic mug. The Frenchman is here, man.

If you are supping on gallons of mead and mutton in anticipation of the barbaric display of pointless distraction better known as Megahole Sunday, then my hats off to you. You keep the world spinning, my friends.

reposted

This is something I wrote on Myspace in 2006.

Wednesday, September 13, 2006

This is the end
Does anybody read this? The only reason I started a Myspace blog was because Sunshine was on here and I wanted to communicate with her. Now I find it somewhat interesting to check out her friends and Beth's blog now and again, but I don't know if it's worth it. I have another blog that is my primary one, so I probably won't write here anymore very often. I would like to communicate with some people but I think Myspace is weird and it's owned by the evil Rupert Murdoch, the supreme dictator of Fox, which we all know is a neo-conservative bastion of the media. So there.

Maybe a few words here about my last month or so.

I turned 28 on the 28th of August. Old man. I gave up on some long-held idealistic dreams, I gave up smoking, I quit my job, and I'm re-evaluting my life and how I've lived it up until now. I know a major change is needed, I know I've overlooked some major parts of who I am. I love my girlfriend and I want a family at some point, but before that I want to be doing meaningful work, I want to be able to provide for them and myself. I have been too irresponsible.

Life is a dream. But even in a dream we can be hurt, be sad, eat, make love, fly. We must consider everything we do as transitory, like a stream. I realize I was all dammed up, by emotional and physical situations. Now I need to flow. A stream knows where it must go, it follows the lay of the land and gravity. I need to follow my dreams, down into the ocean of nirvana.

When the beautiful and wonderful Sunshine killed herself, I realized that I am alive. I realized that each second of my mortality was slowly ticking away while I watched as if I was a bystander. For years I have been this way, and now I am approaching 30. Thoughts begin to convalesce, and the fractured figments of my imagination begin to melt together into a giant mirror. I stared into my own eyes and saw nothing.

When I die and go deep into that great night, I will have accomplished nothing.

I felt sad about this. But I also felt happy about some of the memories I have with friends and loved ones. I realized that my life, any sentient beings existence, is nothing if not defined by our relationships, our webs, our networks of connection. All life is dependent on all life. There is no individual existence in this morass of relationships that isn't defined by it's dependency on an infinitude of individuals. In other words, the mirror that reflected me exploded into trillions of shards of mirror that exploded into trillions of shards of mirrors, and I dissolved.

But losing my ego only strengthened my spirit.

If there is one thing that Sunshine would want me or you to do in our lives, it would be to be happy, to be free, and to fulfill our dreams. I don't think many of us know how to start fulfilling our dreams, or ourselves. We mistake our egos many desires for real peace or happiness, but in the end it is the ego that causes us the real pain and sadness. Without the ego to boss us around, we can see what is real and what is not. From the moment we are born, we are trained to feed the ego. When the ego sees your spirit soar free it becomes jealous and begins to make demands and create lists for you. Fuck the ego, is what I say.

In any case, I will spend the seconds I have left living with the spark of life in my guts learning to breathe and searching for my path. In practical terms, I may have to take an unpleasant job or go back to school to find my path. I may have to leave everything I know and disappear into the woods, or join a monastery. I may have to learn a vocation, and have a family. I don't know. But now I know why so many religions talk about faith. Without faith, it is hard to continue on sometimes. Maybe Sunshine lost all her faith in the future, and maybe that is why she decided to stop trudging forward. I know damn well how she felt. We were in the same boat; no college degree, in crappy service jobs, trapped in a town. She gave up. It is tempting to people like us. We have no prospects in this society. And yet she would always remind me that she thought I could do anything.

"I hope that you know that you are amazing to me. I talk about you a lot because you are oozing with talent, and I truely believe that you could be anything, do anything, but you choose to be you and that I respect more than anything else," She wrote in her last email to me.

Can I do anything? I ask myself this constantly. Can I be what I want to be, can I be what Sunshine thought I could be, can I be what my girlfriend thinks I should be, or my parents, or you? The questions rip through my heart until I realize I am what I am, but what do I want to do?

Life doesn't give you time to catch your breathe. We exist as a complex network of love and pain and suffering and joy. We eat or are eaten. We run and fall and run again. We lose ones we love and we can't even tell them about the pain it caused us. We can't even tell anyone, because no one can really know what it's like inside our heads. But everyone lives inside their heads, we all are alone inside ourselves but are connected to eachother by that very fact.

Thank you for your support and please contact me if you feel the need to talk or take a walk or anything. I'll be around.

shout

Up, down, all around.

What we put out there is what is out there for all of us to share. There is no shame in pain or joy. Why do we hide these things like something to avoid? We may be rich or poor in many ways, but we are here, alive, and that is all we have. And we should give it all away in some way before we end our journey here in this place. Care of the planet, care of people, fair share. Good enough wisdom for my journey.

My personal pain is a stone thrown into the lake. I reverberate outward.

I want to remain present, to remain silent until I must shout for joy or pain. And in that shout I want to dissolve into the infinite, until silence comes once again to comfort me. Maybe that's all we are, a shout in the infinite.

Oh, the loneliness.

Lighten up.

liquid chopsticks

I had a great lunch with my friends JB and K on Thursday at St. Martin's Table. Not a huge selection of food, but what we had was delicious and I think nourishing for all of us. I was hungry throughout the day for some reason, and then later in the evening I had dinner with my best friend in this world at Tanpopo noodle shop over in St. Paul, which never disappoints. We had sushi, dumplings, miso soup, and soba noodle soup with mushroom and egg, all very tasty. This morning I had the remains of the soup as my breakfast, and I mulled over how efficient chopsticks are, and how they allow you to be more involved with the process of eating. I am beginning to understand that limiting your choices is a good step toward being involved in the process, of eating or living.

Time sneaks by in the morning, but soon I must work; at my job, at my life, at my art, at my relationships. I was reading a passage from a Shunryu Suzuki book, and I came upon the concept of a flexible, fluid heart. In order to be happy, our hearts need to flow, be able to bend when the wind blows, in order to be in a natural state of being. What I see in myself and others is this tendency to maintain rigidity in the face of the unknown. I can't help my muscles from tensing up, but I can mindfully relax them when I become aware. Oh, but it is so easy to lash out at this crazy world.

"How can our smile be the source of joy and not just a diplomatic maneuver? When we smile to ourselves, that smile is not diplomacy; it is the proof that we are ourselves, that we have full sovereignty over ourselves. Can we write a poem on stopping, aimlessness, or just being? Can we paint something about it? Everything we do is an act of poetry or a painting if we do it with mindfulness. Growing lettuce is poetry. Walking to the supermarket can be a painting."

Thich Nhat Hanh, "Peace Is Every Step"

within we go

My very good friend and spiritual brother JB is in the hospital today for open-heart surgery. For those who don't know, he has stage IV melanoma that he has been living with for the last two years. His cancer has spread from his skin to his brain, heart, and lungs. He has had treatments to treat his brain and lung tumors, namely lasers that zapped his brain and immune strengthening treatments that were incredibly hard on his body, and left him recovering for weeks at a time. He has been on a modified Gerson diet this whole time, which is basically a really healthy way to eat; cutting out meat, cheese, salt, sugar, fats, and alcohol, and subsisting mainly on vegetables and fruits. There are a lot of juices drunk during the day, and some enemas to deal with. I don't know his current subscription to the diet, but I know he has maintained a high level of health over the last two years, which has had a major impact on his ability to live well through this cancer experience.

Just recently he has had major lung problems over the holidays, and dangerous tumorous growth in his lung has necessitated part of this surgery, which entails removing part of his lung. Another part of this surgery today is removing a tumor on his heart that MRI scans found when he went in for a check-up. This tumor has to be removed, and he may need a pacemaker to function well after the surgery.

Another part of the surgery that has been postponed until perhaps next week is removing a large tumor from his arm which is threatening use of his arm.

Here we have a beautiful man suffering from so many cancer related problems, and yet he is also living a good full life. Today is sort of a major wake-up call for me, in that it definitely has the implications that things will not be the same afterwards. In a way this is pessimistic, but it also seems more realistic. I have been struggling with this question in other parts of my life as well: How long and strong do you hold onto hope for something you want in life, and when do you let it drift away and just find the next piece of joy or peace that you can in this life? So this is what heartbreak is...letting go.

I look at him and see a great friend and teacher who is suffering through a situation I can only imagine, and I search for a metaphor, but I can't find one. I just see a friend.

I am sending all my love to JB and Jason today: internally I am sending JB and Jason good healing energy, wishes for more life to live together, love for my loved ones, respect for my friends, and appreciation for the very life sparks that warms me. Externally I dedicate this day to peace with my friends, family, and coworkers, all those I encounter on today's journey, and peace within myself most especially.

Native American Code of Ethics

1. Each morning upon rising, and each evening before sleeping, give thanks for the life within you and for all life, for the good things the Creator has given you and for the opportunity to grow a little more each day. Consider your thoughts and actions of the past day and seek for the courage and strength to be a better person. Seek for the things that will benefit others (everyone).

2. Respect. Respect means "To feel or show honor or esteem for someone or something; to consider the well being of, or to treat someone or somethin with deference or courtesy". Showing respect is a basic law of life.

a. Treat every person from the tiniest child to the oldest elder with respect at all times.

b. Special respect should be given to Elders, Parents, Teachers, and Community Leaders.

c. No person should be made to feel "put down" by you; avoid hurting other hearts as you would avoid a deadly poison.

d. Touch nothing that belongs to someone else (especially Sacred Objects) without permission, or an understanding between you.

e. Respect the privacy of every person, never intrude on a person's quiet moment or personal space.

f. Never walk between people that are conversing.

g. Never interrupt people who are conversing.

h. Speak in a soft voice, especially when you are in the presence of Elders, strangers or others to whom special respect is due.

i. Do not speak unless invited to do so at gatherings where Elders are present (except to ask what is expected of you, should you be in doubt).

j. Never speak about others in a negative way, whether they are present or not.

k. Treat the earth and all of her aspects as your mother. Show deep respect for the mineral world, the plant world, and the animal world. Do nothing to pollute our Mother, rise up with wisdom to defend her.

l. Show deep respect for the beliefs and religion of others.

m. Listen with courtesy to what others say, even if you feel that what they are saying is worthless. Listen with your heart.

n. Respect the wisdom of the people in council. Once you give an idea to a council meeting it no longer belongs to you. It belongs to the people. Respect demands that you listen intently to the ideas of others in council and that you do not insist that your idea prevail. Indeed you should freely support the ideas of others if they are true and good, even if those ideas ideas are quite different from the ones you have contributed. The clash of ideas brings forth the Spark of Truth.

3. Once a council has decided something in unity, respect demands that no one speak secretly against what has been decided. If the council has made an error, that error will become apparent to everyone in its own time.

4. Be truthful at all times, and under all conditions.

5. Always treat your guests with honor and consideration. Give of your best food, your best blankets, the best part of your house, and your best service to your guests.

6. The hurt of one is the hurt of all, the honor of one is the honor of all.

7. Receive strangers and outsiders with a loving heart and as members of the human family.

8. All the races and tribes in the world are like the different colored flowers of one meadow. All are beautiful. As children of the Creator they must all be respected.

9. To serve others, to be of some use to family, community, nation, and the world is one of the main purposes for which human beings have been created. Do not fill yourself with your own affairs and forget your most important talks. True happiness comes only to those who dedicate their lives to the service of others.

10. Observe moderation and balance in all things.

11. Know those things that lead to your well-being, and those things that lead to your destruction.

12. Listen to and follow the guidance given to your heart. Expect guidance to come in many forms; in prayer, in dreams, in times of quiet solitude, and in the words and deeds of wise Elders and friends.

home again

streets full of people
with trinkets to share
offering them up for folks in despair
yandi and crystals and oils for growth
of spirit and body and mind as we go

emphasis placed on the body and mind
the heart is often somewhere behind
strange

tiny little bones of the innocent child
lookin up to me with the saddest of eyes
is her innocence in tact?
or has it been stained?
has the creature that feeds her taken it away
strange
so sad it's strange

I recognize my health
things I have been dealt
places that I have roamed
feelings I've had
things that I know

home, my home
home, my home
home, I'm home

running through the bush
and all of the trees
moving in time with my capable speed
skippy ants claw
at the edge of the bowl
of the shell of an egg
of bird long since gone
maybe it rose up
to spread it's new wings
or maybe it nourished
a stronger sibling
strange

places we roam
and people we meet
some connections are strong
and some of them are weak
1 or 2 or 3 or 4
or maybe 5 or 6 or more
strong as the roots
of a big old gum tree
and we'll carry them through
to the next life we see
strange
so beautifully strange

I recognize my health
things that I have been dealt
places that I have roamed
feelings I've had
things that I know

home, my home
home, my home
home, I'm home

-Xavier Rudd, "Home"

I made an intensely flavorful omelet this morning. Wild rice, goat feta, roasted chicken, roasted potato, browned garlic. Yummy. Drinking some good coffee as well.

I am going out to Afton state park to forget about it all for a while, into the snow. Then back home to work on a couple things before some song writing time. I wish I had a fireplace.

Love, love, love. It ain't all about us humans.

washed out wizards

I had this idea that my journey would lead me somewhere amazing at a certain point in my life. Since then, I have realized that what I had thought was going to happen is not going to happen how I think it will, or when I want it to, and now I've realized that those desires grew out of a swampy fertile young imagination. I just have an overall sense that these dreams I had as a boy have sort of washed out to sea. I can see them slowly drifting out from the shore, falling apart gradually, sinking into the sunset.

These boy-dreams fall away from me, and I'm left with no dreams, or I dream of empty houses, lovers leaving, things falling apart. Looking at what I have accomplished on my journey, I realize I have only the slightest idea of where I was attempting to go. But that is sort of besides the point. The point is, where is this path that I am currently on taking me?

Maybe that's why the Wizard of Oz hits us straight in the gut. We all have experienced that tornado that whips us into an unknown land full of munchkins and witches. We're on that yellow brick road together, finding each other, hoping that the wizard will solve all our problems. But it turns out he is a fraud hiding behind a curtain. I think we all know that the ending of that movie is make-believe...

So the curtain has lifted, the eagle has landed, the sun has stopped revolving around the earth. My friends and family, you are what's important to me, not the boy-dreams. But it's funny, I managed to harvest some seeds from the flowers of those old dreams. My new guitar feels so good in my hands these days. Speaking and writing are coming more naturally to me. Some dream seeds have already taken root in the compost of my past. It's the way that life is I guess.

I find myself slowing down. I've started to enjoy baths. Perhaps my fear of drowning under this sea of life has lifted, in part because I found myself on the bottom of the ocean with the desire to go back up to the air and the will and power to do so. I'm getting back into my own groove. There is a part of me that wishes I had found my groove ten years ago, but I know that isn't how it works. You can't rush the accumulation of sediment. The Grand Canyon wasn't formed in a day. The layers in life exude beauty.

I've also seen that this path I am on isn't really separate from my feet. The path and I are the same thing. I am the path, and if I can see and feel that truthfully and honestly, I really can't go the wrong way.

Peace to you my loved ones.

outcroppings

"You know, the thing is, it's like...The bottom line here, all of the craziness and the tension between you and I, is based on illusion. You have to understand it. It's an illusion of seperateness, an illusion that there's a you and a me because it just, it ain't so, you know? I mean, we're like these mushrooms. These single individual outcroppings are all part of the whole. You know, there's no seperateness here. There's no other. It's the same with human beings, it's the same with us, you know what I mean? See the thing is, we're really, we're just one. We're part of the same big mushroom. The same big self. You see, what I'm trying to tell you is I never left you, okay, I'm always there."

-Joel Fleishman, Northern Exposure (while he is orating, Maggie is imagining him being strafed by bullets from a fighter plane)

I really enjoyed this scene from the episode "The Great Mushroom" of Northern Exposure. Here is the video clip.



This transports me back ten years when I started to become fascinated by mushrooms. The reality of what these organisms do for the the soil and planet still fascinates me. They are so integral to life as we know it.

They feed off of cellulose, both living and dead, and create organic matter in their own demise. Their mycellium are so fragile, yet they support entire ecosystems. They provide communication between different part of the forest. They are miraculous and deadly. The largest and smallest living beings on the planet.

But in the context of the quote, they provide an apt metaphor for us humans as well. Are we so removed from each other? Is separation and death of the body the end of our relationship with one another?

We are fascinated by the colorful and mesmerizing fruiting bodies that pop out of the earth, but underneath it all is a vast network of hairlike strands of life that support our fragile skin of dirt on this planet.

The way they live is the way that love lives.