Tag Archives: release

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

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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

Home

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If pain, sorrow, regret, confusion or fear are appearing in your present experience right now, do not turn away, do not use the labels ‘dark’ or ‘negative’, do not assume any kind of cosmic deviation or ‘sin’. For these are sacred and intelligent life-movements, all, undivided from the vastness of creation, waves of the limitless ocean of Self. They are your beloved children, all, forgotten movements of yourself, longing for your warm presence – a moment of undivided attention. “Remember me!” they cry, one last time, and will you ignore them today? Or will you finally accept your birth right? Will you remember that everything you long for is already appearing, disguised as everything you reject?

Will you remember that you cannot be anywhere other than Home?” ~ Jeff Foster

Beginner’s Mind

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Image re-posted from The Mind Unleashed Facebook Page


Image re-posted from The Mind Unleashed Facebook Page

I thought I was at center. I felt as balanced as a ballerina in Swan Lake. At the place of nirvana where cherry blossoms float down and the world smells of nag champa. Where you aren’t wrestling snakes in the evangelic’s circus tent, but sipping honey from lily cups. One of those cool Zen-catching moments that Ram Dass and Kornfield talk about as casually as the goodness of roasted potatoes at Sunday supper. You know when the sky opens as to Moses and you’re blessed with eternal peace. Then the horns blared and I looked at the dashboard clock. Funny how certain we can be about things, until we’re not.

Time. The time to get from here to there. It haunts me like a wolf. If I can let the time go then I’m catching Phoenix feathers and dropping into downward facing dog, a hawk swooping Earth. Hourglass snatches me up, though, and she is a mean old, nanny demanding I learn my lessons. Feels like someone should have mentioned that time is a whip cracking in your head that’ll be your undoing if you aren’t careful. Instead we are offered lovely chimes to mark it.

I thought enlightenment was a place, like Intercourse, Pennsylvania where it was always funny to touch that spot on a map. That with the right amount of effort and time I’d be there, properly dressed and ready for congratulations. The fattest, blissed out cat, in full lotus that ever walked through the doors of the Ritz Carlton of the Tao Te Ching.

Oh, all of the thoughts you have thunk, little grasshopper.

A work in progress from The Writer’s Church in Boulder, CO. Hosted by Marj Hahne. Inspired by “Elegance” by Fleda Brown.

Sing

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A study in the formation of frost: Photo by Noelle

A study in the formation of frost: Photo by Noelle

Who should sing the song of goodness and well being into the world? The Buddha? Jesus? Mother Teresa? Why are we waiting for a great leader when we each have a song of love in our throat? We sing our life into being through our thoughts. Offer anger and the world is dark. Offer tenderness and the world is soft. We sing by thinking and we are always singing.

The world needs simple lullabys as children need them for soothing and sleep. And like a baby the Earth does not know its mother’s voice as stage worthy, nor if it be heard by one or thousands. The Earth simply knows our voice as the voice of love.

There are no small acts of love and no common voices. You are Mohammed or Rumi or Osho. So sing. Sing as though the world were your stage and your heart should burst with the love it has to give out. For in truth, that is how it is.

Silent Revolution

Posted on by Standard 3
Image and quote re-posted from Meditation Masters Facebook page

Image and quote re-posted from Meditation Masters Facebook page

“The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can’t be any large-scale revolution until there’s a personal revolution, on an individual level. It’s got to happen inside first.” ~ Jim Morrison