Astrolabe… contemplating Rumi
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Twine of Earth and Sky ~ Beholden
if I could open all the mysteries that daunt
would there not yet be another mystery lain
at yet another level or circuit of my being?
what of this earth and sky that is not seen
but felt in the bones and in the electrical pulses
throughout this finely tuned cutting, this scion
what am I cut from and what does carry me
in these ways that have many names, one
of which might be apocrypha or rubric lost
we have come upon things inexplicable, yet
somehow we are not at peace nor openly greet
that which is beholden to vastness and fire
we have looked upon our own center, that void
where the eye cannot see nor rightly focus
something of what we are, a purity in depth
and simplicity simultaneously defies convention
all things gathering and also falling around
this shockwave that has no compass or steer
perhaps that is the mystery, somehow we are
free of place and time yet conjure it still as
everything we do and say, playing at substantiation
we catch ourselves again and again in the folly
of needing to know how to come and go
when in coming there is the going ~ no distance
Twine of Earth and Sky ~ Bless of Being
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
Does that suggest that this light, the glint
from within, is false or imagined somehow?
Heartily no! This shine is even brighter yet
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
Praise to Thickets Amongst Us
Thicket along the watercourse; San Cristobal, NM
Down by the thickets of willows making their place where waters sometimes run (as a trickle or more.) This wayside is where the heart has its home, the air naturally cooling in this weave on a very hot day.
I’ve been here “on the property” for a little over two weeks but clearly haven’t arrived until now. This is my first day here in the grasses, on their way to tall, the filtered light in nuances more than I can count, the old bowing willow branches remind me of the ever present inspiration to the eye of an artist, perhaps the other way around. To draw this place or just to be and see and be touched by this wild order? The kind of beauty that can go so easily unnoticed, much less the amazing feat of interspecies communing, even those without voices, but textures, color, integrity take me over. The air is not the only element that is renewed here.
I want to say “on the other hand…” as I contemplate the contrast of the places that have been denuded (a stone’s throw from here) or stripped of their natural dignity by the use or appropriation for something we call “living our lives.” What I love about this wilder place by the draw behind the house is that life is already living here fully and I simply join in. This grand beingness of it all!
It’s not that this place is any better than someplace else, it’s just that it is THIS place and can be no other place! And how so very different it feels here than just fifty or a hundred yards away. What a gift this place speaks of my own nature, which sometimes seems much less human than just Being alive, sentience itself, able to be touched, penetrated by the exquisite weave of interpenetrating life, of consciousness. The magpies have their squawk and the mourning doves their cooing calls. The breeze, now at my back, stirs the green life alive into motion and sound. Is it the motion of things that we hear or is it something just a bit more illusive than that?
This up close visitation to the green of the thicket next to the seeping wallow brings me right to the taste of my own heart. They are not like the wider vistas of mountains in the distance with fields of sagebrush laying out before them, not like the open, open skies with all matter of clouds and blue in their ever-changing atmosphere-scape. Here things crowd in without any feeling of density or overbearingness. Here is intimacy, did I say that already, of brush and bower, of grass and twig, of every kind of insect and butterfly with the light ever shifting amongst it all. I become part of a nourishment cycle; bathing in spirit of thicket and this very place.
Life Being Life 