Category Archives: vibrational musings

Brightness Spectrum

The day seemed brighter than usual in the most uncanny of ways.

The creek could be heard flowing and the flies and bees buzz

was also heard more clearly than usual. But amidst all of these patterns,

there was something else fractured and marred beyond

any usual glimpse of what life could be or look like.

 

There was the stimulation of things unknown,

which is always there for the taking or playing with ~

but today it was more like the unknown of the unknown.

Unknowing squared. It’s not quite like a double negative.

Unknown and more unknown is just the unknown.

 

It may seem odd to ask, “what do we know

about the unknown?”–but it’s precisely that

kind of question that is needed at times.

 

The words tick on like seconds on a clock,

like bees returning to the hive,

like water flowing ever down, down, down.

 

The words themselves are sometimes the only clues

and today those clues are: brighter, fractured,

marred, stimulation, unknown, uncanny,

double negative, and even a few yet spoken.

 

If I could grind up these words to make a pigment

to paint with, these would be music more than color,

the music of thunder, the shudder of forces of nature

coming into contact and then departing or dispersing.

 

How could anything as broken as fractured stimulation

become the clue to some of the greatest mysteries of being?

How could something as uncanny as a double negative

serve a higher cause than the brightness of a day?

 

How fortunate to be inside the Rubik’s Cube of sound itself

such that even sound follows a brightness spectrum.

But there are days such as these.

 

Janice Sandeen ~ 26 March 2017

written while virtually “attending” the writing jam w/Daniel Ari

spoken at The Spoken Word Open Mic in Taos, NM @ SOMOS

Outlines

As I sit here it becomes clear

I need to create an outline

for a poem

that is ready to be written

 

Funny how a poem

can seem to need an outline,

to mark out everything

it could and would say

 

i) All That Is

ii) What now is becoming Known

iii) What is no longer necessary

iv) Reversals of figure/ground

 

Perhaps it is the space

between outline and poem

that I’m really interested in,

the visible reaches between

 

Wondering, will anyone else

see what I see there/here

as I map out the bridging

between seen and unseen?

 

Good thing I’m prepared for this step:

my new footwear is designed

for multidirectional levels of grounding

in body/mind/spirit and beyond

 

I have socks with holes in them,

but wait, these are black holes

and wormholes, as time disintegrates

& even temperature is refigured

 

Pants are no longer restrictive

nor all they were once worked up to be;

who wears the pants when domination

and control crumbles all around us?

 

Keep your shirt on (or not) but

find your colors amongst the

rainbow, as well as infrared

and ultra violet ~ all fluid light

 

Speaking of light, the naked eye

sees so much more than once upon a time,

marrying the inner eye & embarking

together, seeing expansion everywhere

 

The outline becomes omnidirectional

Just as time becomes No Time

Things are no longer what they seem

It is now easier than ever to Let Go

The Kitchen, the Friend, the Heart of the Question

The small ritual

placing things here

attending with water

adding cleansing agents

rinsing while ordering my world

anew with each breath

of this morning

setting things just so

 

I think of my friend

and how she doesn’t reach out

at least not that I know of

perhaps ordering her world

just so, attending with

what I can only guess at

but still ordering her world

whether it’s apparent or not

 

Which brings me to

the question, the heart of it

as I ask many questions,

each being a facet of the one,

what calls me to pause

in concern (is it concern?)

in a wish for her (what is my wish?)

to find the deepening element

 

That which has its own way

of upsetting the cart, which

carries it all: hers, mine,

yours, ours, and what is

not any of these

Another question filters in,

is it peripheral or the very heart,

as what can be carried is surely external

 

Returning to the kitchen

another cup of tea is poured

My friend perhaps wakes now

almost a thousand miles away

The question is a living vein of

vitality, ardor, nuance –a distillery

extracting the purity of the disturbed,

the trace minerals of this Ancient Now

Turning (my) World Inside Out

I am not a poet ~ the world, as I know it, is.

Everything everywhere.

 

I am not a woman ~ this world is a woman’s domain

and I am in it and of that.

 

Nature does not surround me ~ I am nature itself

and I live within  my own sphere.

 

I am not someone imagining what the world might become.

I am that becoming or that emergence in the making.

 

Hesitation ~ where and what are you? What is this task?

What are we creating as this conversation,

not much different than gestation, something earlier conceived.

 

Looking out is no more ~ it is not even looking within, it is the active principle

such as breath and breathing ~ continuous and life evolving,

does not need to be named to continue.

 

Approval ~ what are you ~ takes a unique set of circumstances

to make you relevant, to make your existence, to map the terrain

in which you stretch and wallow and bring forth your experience.

 

[There are many things we regularly turn inside out (socks, clothes), some even surprisingly, but when it comes to turning this world inside out ~ what of it? What not of it? When can I not do or see or perceive that is so when I receive that calling? Like birth, it comes of its own accord and in its own timing ~ such that we have evolved something we call death. Is that the world turned inside out, birth becomes something reversibly irreversible?]

 

The world is not me, I am the world emerging and forthcoming

~ only perception forms and forms and forms again.

 

Sometimes it takes listening to these things loudly, not quietly as some might suggest.

Turn the volume inside out and there is the advantage, the preeminent seeing of what is.

 

Turning the world inside out, I turn myself out into a world that has

not once yet rejected me or scorned me or humiliated me, but

has me at its very crystalline heart beat, pulsing as aliveness and ardor.

 

The world as poet opens her domain to the wide spread arms

of welcoming ~ laughing itself awake to itself, hesitatingly unhesitant.

 

Living questions 

image

morning footstream with wild plums

20 May 2016 ~ My walk this morning was a natural inquiry, one that happened gently on its own. Sometimes contemplations are like that, as they gently arise from the font of one’s inner life. I find that as I set my body into motion as I walk with my dog this morning, that there is another stream there, an inner world that has its own unique ecology and resilience. Continue reading

So…

beyond comprehension

This radical

life

is so

simple that

it’s beyond a

comprehension

anchored in work-a-day

To be jobless is radical beyond

comprehension. We say in Perma-

culture that everything farms or works

And isn’t that precisely so such that how

can we use ‘work’ and ‘job’ synonymously

We are blind within What Is by filters of

our own making –own our making

our own making

How many

layers

deep?

What kind

of forest floor

is under your feet?

Will you lay yourself down

On that floor as a radical act

Of awakening to What Is

However prickly of a

bed that is seem-

ingly bereft of

the very

nutrients

(we are that)

that each of us

so thrive on: space

grace listening subtleties

Of being  Being of What Is

Did you ever notice that things

simply grow on their own and thrive?

So what’s this business we conjure up

each and every other moment of

the day today that is simply

the magnificence of life

unfolding as we are?

Comprehend.

You dig?

Let it

Be

Life

Itself

Beyond.

 

Thank you Shareable. This poem is partly inspired by this interview on jobless living:
[This poem is #2 in a series dedicated to revisiting poems that were written by me as part of my participation in a collaborative and experimental poetry blog: IMUNURI.blogspot.com. So… was written and first published 3 July 2013.]

Astrolabe… contemplating Rumi

Rumi Hawk Ocean sky copy

oscillation of sight

 

 

this is what I ponder

considering what it is

what I co-author*

sometimes without even

realizing the very footing

I take as my own

 
image

I look and I look out

looking out, might I

bar that very pristine

ground of being,

which I emanate as,

simply unknowingly?

 
image

when I look

and in the looking

I dissolves

that I mistaken

once as anything

other than pristine

 
image

and existence reveals

itself again and again

oscillating almost

imperceptibly between

and in that between

there I am

 

not necessary to

catch it (!) no

as it is casually &

(seemingly) furtively

carrying on carrying on carrying on

birthing / rebirthing

 

gently, as if

I am gazing

upon a newborn fawn

breathing in the delicacy

and knowing it

as myself

 

the pristine I am

the pristine we are

emerges as visible

spectrum out of

hum and spin

oscillation of sight

 

 

* to choose either the co-authoring of misery & unworthiness or co-authoring of joy and worthiness ~ I have Mario Martinez and his seminal book, The MINDBODY Code (Sounds True, 2014) to thank for these profound insights and deep experiential touching into this “healing field”

 

Keeping Still

You, you hold a mirror

watch the slight presence

–breath on the surface

Movement occurs again

and again within stillness

 

I, I see the dance

the dancing partners

I, I – you, you – we, we

leaning in, giving way

leaning in, holding

 

Movement, motion is

–no disturbance

while All arises

stillness dancing

of surface and within
image

Mountain, mountain reflects

Instead of twisting

and spinning in circles

trying to grasp

your self, keep still*

 

*quote from Hilary Barrett ~ I’Ching Hexagram 52, Stilling

Veiling/Un-veiling

What will it take

this journey that is already fulfilled –complete –honored

what will it take to begin this journey

as if there is no end

 

And what will it take

to live within each step

as if the placing of these feet

on hard or soft or bogged or bright ground

 

somehow will right me –restore me –save me

from what I am and am not

as if there is a confusion there

carried through these eons of loss and gravitation

 

There is None No-one who says

what can be done or not done

There is no one marking the way

not as yet as I can see

 

And yet there is an encounter

something real and palpable

and perhaps mistaken for real

–the light can cast in myriad of ways

 

In the mists veiling my own Silence

words curl around the nooks

of my bones and flesh –lighting down

making a landing, offering solace

 

These words here now –parched –dry

picked up as breadcrumbs

but it is simply unknown who or what

left them here –was it me? –was it You?

 

This quandary calls out the insight

the timeless continuity of All That Is

what comes before when there is no beginning

and in no end –what conclusions might arise?

 

Taking it off –taking it on

covering and uncovering

placing and wait as grace returns

Emanating Silence –this brilliance like no other