Pooh: Little Gem

Bridge over Dutch Creek: Photography by Noelle

Bridge over Dutch Creek: Photography by Noelle

“Sometimes, if you stand on the bottom rail of a bridge and lean over to watch the river slipping slowly away beneath you, you will suddenly know everything there is to be known.” Winnie the Pooh

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

Angel Math

Over the Rockies: Photography

Over the Rockies: Photography by Noelle

If an angel were to tell us something of his/her philosophies, I do believe some of the propositions would sound like 2 X 2 = 13. -Georg Christop Lichtenberg

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.

Then Nothing

Reblogged from Ed Strachar: posted from Totemical: Bruce Cuse artist

Reblogged from Ed Strachar Healer/  Bruce Cuse artist

The woodpecker strikes the metal roof vent
It rattles persistently in the early dawn
Then nothing
I listen more closely
I extend my hearing into the nothing
The silence is noisy
There is a whirring of the Universe ever present
A dove coos, distantly
Then nothing
My thoughts move the same way
Bills to pay
Then nothing
Work project memo to send
Then nothing
My thoughts are their own eco-system
The woodpecker strikes
So deep now, the rattle doesn’t register
Then nothing
I push my hearing even farther
I am listening for the pin drop
on a whale’s back
Off the coast of Nova Scotia
Then nothing
There is a whirring of the Universe ever present
If I allow it
It will lull me into peace

Luna

Super Moon taken July 23rd by Leilani May in Denver, CO. Thank you for letting me share, Leilani!

Super Moon taken July 23rd by Leilani May in Denver, CO. Thank you for letting me share, Leilani!

If you meditate and have not checked out the Insight Timer App you should. It is certainly a fine timer to use while meditating but that isn’t what makes it awesome. It’s the connection to people meditating world wide and the various meditation groups you can join. Great way to build a habit of meditation and connect with people in a beautiful global sangha.

Most recently, Juan Crocco of Santiago, Chile sponsored a meditation event around the Super Moon at Summer Solstice. It was an extraordinary event where individuals from Tasmania to Nova Scotia shared pictures of the moon and spiritual community. The following poem I wrote for the event. The beautiful, super moon photo was taken by my fellow Insight Timer friend and wonderful colleague Leilani May.

Luna, Luna, Luna
You call to my lupine heart
And pump my blood, an immense ocean
With powerful tide
Divinely rolling into shore

Luna, Luna, Luna
I sing to your celestial body
Awash in the love of your heavens
And enchanted by the world you
Reveal to my lover’s eyes

Luna, Luna, Luna
At once, I become the hunting owl in the elm
And the mouse scouting for seed
The deer moving softly within the briar
And hare whose ear twitches
To fox’s stealthy approach

Luna, Luna, Luna
You awaken my sense of Mother Earth
Her thrumming, steady beat
Which taps my palm, little more than a moth’s wing
As my hand grazes the long grass stalks
That glisten silvery green in your moonlight

Luna, Luna, Luna
I sleep no more in this dream world
My vision has become as sharp as a nighthawk
I feel a mystery moving within me
Only to realize you have
In this dark night
Lit up the luminous nature of my spirit
For me to see I am the mystery

Luna, Luna, Luna
I sway in your pearly glow
A dancer alive in the field
I am a living galaxy twirling in your wake
My body a night shadow
As mystical as monks moving
By candlelight to whisper their
Midnight vespers

Luna, Luna, Luna
Feel my spirit reflect your brilliance
For I, too
Am a celestial being rising into the heavens
To light a comet’s trail for all to see

Luna, Luna, Luna
You call to my lupine heart
And pump my blood, an immense ocean
With powerful tide
Divinely you send me back out to sea

Luna, Luna, Luna