Tag Archives: perception

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.

 

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.]

Aperture

[This poem is #1 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. Aperture was written and first published 31 December 2014.]

 

These that are things and not things both
They pepper the landscape
The landscape that is so and not so both
I walk amongst them
The I that is not an I after all, yet somehow is

It’s not that I wonder about this apparent conundrum
As in feeling troubled or some kind of loss
Rather it is there or with it that I belong
Nothing of this casts me aside
All things that I am and am not Rest here

Whose favor would I garner
To look upon this any differently
Seeing is a communion after all
That each and every one of us
Has within the very fabric of being

Ultimately there is no such thing as compromise
And yet how often is there a sensation
Of All of This somehow tangled
Around my ankles that I possess
The I that has no counterpart

As we see through this aperture
Closure is a function of clarity
Focus celebrating the visual spectrum
Saturating this field in the unseen
An exposé of brilliance and crystallization

Astrolabe… contemplating Rumi

Rumi Hawk Ocean sky copy

Book launch this week ~ 15 March 2016

I have special news this week to share with you all. Please join in my excitement as I announce that two works of my poetry, a visual poem and a collaborative poem, are included in One Way to Ask, an unusually delightful and innovative book of poetry and art by poet Daniel Ari and his 67 artist collaborators. (Norfolk Press, San Francisco 2016)

One Way To Ask book cover

The innovation in this book is many things, but a prominent and specific one is a new form of poetry created by Daniel called the queron. What is queron, you might ask?

Queron is a form that emerged from my poetry practice to match the way my creativity dances, curiously and deliberately, with my experience. Querons have seventeen lines grouped into three quintets and a final couplet. The rhyme scheme is ababa bcbca cdcdb dd. I prefer subtle rhyme.” ~ an excerpt on queron from the book

• • •

My collaborative poem (with Daniel Ari) is called “What Experiences” and the “artwork” that accompanies this penned collaboration is a visual poem in its own (w)right: “Where is the line drawn?” Daniel included these works as the end piece, as we delved into a unique level of collaboration, for this book, inspired by our years of writing together on a group blog of Daniel’s called IMUNURI. (I have posted/published many innovative poems on that blog, some of which I have linked to here on Contemplative Fire.)

Kudos, Daniel Ari!

And congrats to all the artists/illustrators included in this unique book of #poetry!

• MORE •

See a preview of the book or purchase a copy of this cool book for yourself, both on the Norfolk Press website.

Check out One Way to Ask on Facebook to see posts about the launch.

Check out Daniel Ari’s blog: Fights With Poems.

Or if you’d like a special author signed copy, let me know and I’ll put you in touch with Daniel.

• • •

“Reading Daniel Ari‘s poems, juxtaposed with artwork by an impressive roster of talented graphisticators, is like entering a cultural Whirlpool washer. Set to the final spin cycle. Everything comes out clean at the end, but your underwear and your socks may have switched identities.”  -Bill Griffith, creator of Zippy the Pinhead

 

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”

 

inter

-weaving
as we go
unseen character
infuses lesser known
gods of titration
and arbitration
snow crystal
monument
just under foot


Interweaving ground:sky

Falling Through and Between

The cracks have been opening up –here there and underneath

what used to be on top –like cracks in a hard crust of soil

once baked by light, deluged with raindrops, more light

 

These soils are a community of their own

sometimes thirsty sometimes paused in reflection

such that growing things are made temporarily mystified

 

Would it be that something elemental is missing

Or amongst all the bystanders perhaps readily available

like implicit memory waking up giving signals of many orders

 

The dance is moving so quickly, agile or not, positron wave

falling through and between perception in pure fluid motion

bridges created as life itself, timeless free fall, magnitude of silence

Twine of Earth and Sky ~ Bless of Being

 

IMG_20150717_201248623_HDR

The tides turn and turn, shifting

but still there is little to scour

 

Flotsam is not splayed about

upon the beach-like shores

 

Yet light glints off a found face

sparking brilliantly its presence

 

This seeing is by an eye observed within

of the heart cracked with a new interiority

 

What of this seeing  when it doesn’t match

any concentrated sense of what it is to exist

IMG_20150329_175716742

Does that suggest that this light, the glint

from within, is false or imagined somehow?

 

Heartily no! This shine is even brighter yetIMG_20150729_193458476

as it is seeing that has gained its illumination

 

We’ve somehow always known we see partially

whether we look closely or beg far-sightedness

 

What once remained mute in its invisibility

cascading like dark matter in vast space

 

Now is our epigenetic wonder and remaking

solace of grace and forthrightness of splendor

 

 

5 HAIKU poems

 

Twilight bestows light

Amongst the branches touching

Caterpillar crawls

 

Winter dark ocean

Another realm submerged there

Breathing nothing drowns

 •

 

Sit-upon stone cold

Newness of life awake, dancing

The dog returns home

 

Light in the wood cast

Falling and also rising

I am that I am

 

Cherishing like earth

I soak in the springtime rains

Instantaneously

 

25, 26 May 2015