Category Archives: spiritual thoughts

Expansion

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Re-post from Hippie Peace Freaks Facebook page

Re-post from Hippie Peace Freaks Facebook page

Large and wide as the Indian Ocean. Breaching this now moment with the grandness of orchids wild along the road to Bangkok from Phuket. Growing in vision that trips over the expected and launches the blind traveler on paths forgotten, but laden with the smell of spice lands and dark forest loam. Fuller still with promises of sparkly bangles and tea cakes and rich dark coffee. Exploding on the senses with a lover’s kiss and the freshness of new snow. A wilderness of the heart that leaps from a backyard to the Russian Steps flowing in winter wheat and endless horizons. Unstable with its possibilities of more and more and more. Chemical interactions that leave you spinning in a world of spiritual alchemy. Expansion. The hunger of the human spirit and the seed that births Universes.

KBCO: Flash Non-Fiction, Episode 1

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Re-posted from Meditation Masters Facebook page

Re-posted from Meditation Masters Facebook page

KBCO
I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about the music. I didn’t tell the others either. I like music, right? It was easy to capitulate to endless KBCO. I’d make it okay because there is no music I won’t listen to, but here we are. You looking at me and me looking at you across the therapist couch and all I can say is I’m sorry. I’m leaving you, not because of the music, but in a way it is about that, isn’t it? I’d be pissed, too that there wasn’t a chance to show me you could do Lavay Smith and the Red Hot Skillet Lickers. Except we both know you couldn’t. I’ve got that bad habit of picking men that only do their thing – and I follow. It’s not their fault as it isn’t yours. You didn’t tell me to be putty picking up your patterns. I just did it. I should’ve made you listen to Buckwheat Zydeco and Willie Nelson or told you folk music sort of sucks when I’m happy. I want KC and the Sunshine band or maybe some Barry White. Or forget all that 70’s shit and let’s just fire up the Awolnation or Atlas Genius. But that look would come over your face and you’d wander off to a bookstore or coffee shop or down to the basement. So I never turned it on. Stupid really, you were gone anyway. Don’t you see? You were never there. I was afraid you’d leave. You wouldn’t love me, so we stayed with endless REM and Fleetwood Mac until I was ready to chew off my own self-imposed chains. It wasn’t intentional that I had no faith in your ability to hear my tunes. It just became obvious that whenever I sang my own song, it seemed to be a tune you didn’t want to hear.

Work in progress from the Front Range Writer’s Group, Marj Hahne host

Dead Beauty

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Dead Leaf Beauty: Photo by Noelle

Dead Leaf Beauty: Photo by Noelle

Crumbled, even moldy
Long dead
Yet delicately beautiful
As an old woman’s hands
Rubbing a rosary
At morning mass

Dry with crackles
At the grace of a finger
No more than paper
Of Earth stories
Telling now of last season

Take to hand
And it vanishes into
Pieces caught on the wind
And gone
Springs robust leaf
Now Winter’s palsied hand

Yet the scent of leaf lingers
Fecundity remembered
And growth to come
All born of this life’s passing

Doors open, green
Then to another closing, dark
The sprout and the
Discarded shell at once
Infuse a molasses mulch

Fertile is the soil of my life
And my passing
Is neither ending
Nor beginning
Just the leaf transforming
On a winter’s wind
Calling the land to Spring

For Juan

Posted on by Standard 3

Melt II: Photo by Noelle

Melt II: Photo by Noelle

Melt: Photo by Noelle

Melt: Photo by Noelle

Did you know that when you take a photograph you can be in no other moment than ‘Now’. I learned this from my friend Juan. Our conversation began in a very dark time of grief. I could not find a haven from my sorrow and anger and I certainly could not stop my mind racing in an endless search for answers. He suggested I take pictures with my cell phone as I hiked the foothills near the Rockies. That it would help settle my heart and mind, if only for a moment. I did not own a camera, had not taken a photo in more than twenty years and had, in fact, jettisoned most of my personal photos in the previous year. But I had no where else to go. My rage was so great I couldn’t engage in much of the art that had filled my spirit until then.

So I began to take photos of grass and summer flowers. Most of it not very good. He’d coach me and give me ideas and my work grew. Yesterday, as I looked at these two pictures on my iPad and saw the moment caught so perfectly in this “Now”, I thought of my friend. Stay in the now and you will heal, he said. And I did.

Those drops floating in mid air, Juan, are you.

Tantrum

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Free Bing Photos

Free Bing Photos

Dear Master

I have a bone to pick, but it sticks in my throat an old fish bone I keep eating with no hope of digesting. There’s no point to the rant I offer you. That’s what makes me wring my hands with an emotional wash that still smells of fumes and fish. I know the answers you’ll give me to every question I could ask. So why ask?

Knowledge is a devil if there ever was one. Gives you comfort while it steals your security in endless mind games you can’t stop tricking yourself with. How could you fill my head with all this knowledge of who I am? Light and gold. Miracles and love. I look down at my costume and want to rip it till I’m naked. I can’t escape my frightened thoughts that burn me in a lava flow, erupting in my brain and filling my mouth with an eager malice. I used to know myself, but now I can’t seem to rid myself of a woman with a lunatics thoughts. You could have told me in the beginning that ignorance was not only bliss, but a quaalude cocktail that would’ve left me sleeping; a contented mongrel in a sewer heap that knows no better. Now a youthful, hungry anger boils in my belly and it’s more bitter than death no matter how many times I swallow it down. But there be the rub, lassie. Poison is best drawn from a wound and all wounds must be opened to cleanse them of their infection. And so, my mind is rent until the ugliness that hides there oozes forth for me to see. No blinking.

For love you say, as I yank at my own chain. My choice you announce and I could beat you within an inch of my own life if I weren’t plagued by the truth in it. It eats at my brain until I’m smashing the bed, the couch and tearing up my brakes in the car. Screw the red pill, Neo. Gulp down the blue pill and relish the beauty of being blind.

You should’ve told me to leave when I came through the door, Master. You should have said the price for awakening is your sanity.

Namaste,
Your currently, wretched student

Myth Makers

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Image re-posted from Art For Ever's Facebook page

Image re-posted from Art For Ever’s Facebook page

The Greeks told myths because it was easier than telling hard lessons to blind men. Stories capture our attention as whispers in a church. They break our boundaries and lull us into understanding because they speak in common images we see every day. They elevate the mundane to magic and in that transformation understanding is imparted to even the dullest of minds. We succumb because we make the mistake of believing a story isn’t real. Yet everything about a story, a myth, a metaphor is in a sense real. Because it’s not about the story, in the end. It’s about the information it delivers to the attentive ear. That little bit of knowing in tight corners is always real.

Translating life is a kind of storyteller’s trick, though it seems complicated. Death is a big ball of fire when looked at from a lover’s heart, but for the storyteller it is a page turning moment. The spot where the hero finds a boat and steps in for destinies unknown. Daydreamers are life’s minstrels. They spin a world we can understand when faced with endless events in our “real” world that make no sense at all.

Blessed are the myth makers. They breath a rich life into a chaotic world.

This is a work in progress from The Writer’s Church workshop, Boulder, CO. Hosted by Marj Hahne

A Life Your Own

Posted on by Standard 5
Image re-posted from For Ever Art Facebook page

Image re-posted from For Ever Art Facebook page

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.

Steve Jobs