Sunrise

Re-posted from Enchanted Nature's Facebook page

Photo Re-posted from Enchanted Nature’s Facebook page

At first the light is soft
More a grayish change from a deeper night
Then the gray takes shape, as light causes
The bark to darken to the west
I am steady as the trunk
Eyes, too, are soft upon the grain

We are objects in a photographic negative

Gray seems to move into the deepest purple
Red
Almost without my noticing
It is the great prelude
The rich, earthy drumming that heightens
The senses to the light
To come

Orange like fire streaks the trunk
And lifts the eastern bows up into
Arms praising the Sun God
Who has yet to grace the
Horizon
The purple red drifts into the color
Of shadow and now even the
Nightshade is no longer night

I breathe it all into my inner sanctum
Quiet in my meditation
The thunder of the rise a crescendo
Seen only at the pulse

Such be the morning drama of it all
And it would be
Too much
If I were not already weeping

Sacred Geometry: Photo Poem 10

Sacred Geometry: Photo collage by Noelle

Sacred Geometry: Photo collage by Noelle

What I love about this piece is its a cesspool. I’m sure the people who saw me crawl down to the sewer drain must have thought me mad, but I love the texture of this. Stone against cement, pouring out water that is so stagnant algae has grown upon the surface. Play with it and arrange the shapes and add color and you suddenly have a piece of sacred geometry that is erupting beautifully out of its history of waste, stagnation and eye sore. To me this is the power of photography and images. We can see beauty in what, at first glance was ugliness. Do this in your environment daily and you have developed a very powerful mindfulness practice. You are engaging in a form of meditation. You are freeing yourself from seeing only the rational world and opening yourself to the drive of creation and life itself. Namaste.

Glacial Flows: Photo Poem 8

Glacial Flow:  Iceland:  David Yarrow Photography/Getty Images

Glacial Flow: Iceland:
David Yarrow Photography/Getty Images

I first saw this pic on Bing, but didn’t catch the photographer. Later I saw it posted on a number of Facebook pages. It’s quite beautiful and worthy of admiration, both for the photographer, whoever they are and for nature. What a grand display she offers. If anyone knows who the photographer is I’d love to know and credit them.

Marbles

Tunnel River Marble: Photography by Noelle

Tunnel River Marble: Photography by Noelle

I feel the edges of my thoughts
A blind woman reading brail
Stretching them further
I feel the thinness
Emotions never go as far
As the first stone thought tossed

There’s no pulling back
Once thought escapes
Electric charges fire into a
Neuro net sky
Frankenstein’s monster lives
And like his maker
I, too, love and hate
What I create

I turn inward
Withdrawing the great sustenance
My attention
Each thought suddenly a marble
Rolling around on the floor
Agates
And crystals
Real blown glass

All colored to a feeling
A place or time assigned
Catalogs lay open on gray matter tables
A jeweler placing an order
Fiery anger
Melancholy blues
What is the hue of the day?

Demand: A Little Gem

Four Quarter Moon: Photographic collage by Noelle

Four Quarter Moon: Photographic collage by Noelle

“There is a very simple secret to being happy. Just let go of your demand on this moment. Any time you have a demand on the moment to give you something or remove something, there is suffering. Your demands keep you chained to the dream state of conditioned mind. The problem is that when there is a demand, you completely miss what is now. Letting go applies to the highest sacred demand, and even to the demand for love. If you demand in some subtle way to be loved, even if you get love, it is never enough. In the next moment, the demand reasserts itself, and you need to be loved again. But as soon as you let go, there is knowing in that instant that there is love here already. The mind is afraid to let go of its demand because the mind thinks that if it lets go, it is not going to get what it wants – as if demanding works. This is not the way things work. Stop chasing peace and stop chasing love, and your heart becomes full. Stop trying to be a better person, and you are a better person. Stop trying to forgive, and forgiveness happens. Stop and be still.”
~ Adyashanti

Re-posted from Be Here Now an Insight Timer App community

Alphabet Soup

 Hidden River: Photography by Noelle

Hidden River: Photography by Noelle

After their all gone, I find I’m still here
Bound to earth a regular oak in the field
Captured in this moment a
Dog with her bone
Even the clock ticks slower than a
Frost’s melt
Goaded by the weight of
Hampered grief in my chest
I stand in the quiet, deciding?
Jump back in or dally
Kicking the cat
Love is at the center of all this, even as
Misery runs me down in
Narrow alleys that smell of
Old fish and over sweet
Poppies
Quit your begging at
Rama’s door, I say to the mirror
Salvation is in your
Tight belly – hungry for
Unity a
Volcanic sound blasting
With the power of
Excalibur
You are grace and beauty at the
Zenith of a transformation you command

This Abecedarian was created in the Front Range Writer’s Room hosted by Marj Hahne

Exiting

Lone Leaf Beached: photography by Noelle

Lone Leaf Beached: photography by Noelle

It felt good as done at the start. Bound, lost, no exit. Pressure to make a diamond lays on my mind. After all these years have I nothing? No smooth finish, but a stumbling out the door. Denial isn’t a river in Cairo, the old joke trails, but it is an immense watercourse in my mind. With Titan effort I withdraw and hibernate the winter. At first waiting for Godot. Then like driftwood, I surface upon a lone beach. No place to go. No direction suggests itself and after a bit, I can no longer sit. Crying. No warmth or comfort. I walk. Crying. Then walk with the most outrageous and worrisome yelling, before walking with no sound at all. First aimlessly, then with a longer stride. More determined, yet aware of what floats by me. Breath in, breath out. I no longer appear to be in any hurry. Anticipation taps at my heart. Single and free, alone on the beach. The expanse a welcome blanket and the endless sea it’s own serenade of the lover yet to come.

Inspired by The New York Times crossword puzzle: 3/11/2012. An exercise in creativity from Front Range Writers Room hosted by Marj Hahne

Spirit Water

Urban Flow: Photography

Urban Flow: Photography by Noelle

My spirit moves as water.
Fluid and full at a trickle as a gush.
Evaporating in the hot sun, yet frozen as the lake I stand on in muddied boots.
Permeable while demanding as a slap.
Softly infiltrating the skin and wearing my mind round as sea stones.
I pull nutrients from life as the salt water robs the drift wood white.
There is weight in my thoughts.
The settling of sediment of a thousand lifetimes on the reef of gray matter entrenched to the floor of my skull.
And still, I seep into the crevices of dams built long ago. Working steadily and freeing it all a duck feather swirling round in the eddy.
My spirit moves as water, influenced by a divine moon.

Above piece inspired from “New Organism” by Andrea Rexilius

City Walk

Photo collage: City Pavement

Photo collage: City Pavement: Photography by Noelle

I walk along the Hudson river in Manhattan near my brother’s home. Cicadas are singing in the trees. Sail boats are on the water and today there is a good summer breeze. A father speaks to his son in a language I don’t recognize and the boy squeals with laughter, a language we all know. Two women jog past, sweating and talking about stock trades while four girls ride pink and purple bikes ahead of me. There is a group of East Indian men speaking in excited voices about something in a soccer game on a park bench. A large and very loud, woman covered in tie-dye down to her sneakers offers me jewelry, as an elderly man taps his way up the stairs with his cane behind her. Two men kiss by the water’s edge and a boxer’s head suddenly protrudes from a bush looking for a stick.  I hear the cicadas again in the trees randomly vibrating their timbrel membranes which make those distinct vibrating sounds we all know in summer. It’s like a musical back drop to all these people moving in and out like the waves on the river. More peaceful than the band playing on the speedboat that bursts by, but louder and more strident than the homeless man who speaks ceaselessly in a whisper to no one in particular. I smell the lilies in the garden boxes and fresh cut grass. I stop. A tendril of hair moves along my cheek. All of us are living our lives from cicadas to the homeless man. Each life as dense with events, mundane or exotic, as each seeks out. Every single one unique. Nothing is the same. Not each living thing, not each second that unfolds. That butterfly has never moved or landed on that hibiscus, with the light coming off the water like it is doing right this moment before. That’s why it’s all about The Now. Every second is a snowflake. A divine finger print that is like no other.