Crossing The Channel

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Q: What is the cause of the world?

A: Love.

Q: Why do men revolt?

A: To find beauty, either in life or in death.

Q:  What is for each of us inevitable?

A: Happiness.

Q: And what is the greatest marvel?

A: Each day, death strikes, and we live as though we were immortal. This is the greatest marvel.

The Mahabhrata




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My wife is the single greatest gift that the universe has bestowed upon me. Greater than eyesight, greater than intellect, greater than strength or longing or knowledge.

I cannot believe my good fortune.

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Not that the universe dropped her in my lap, exactly.

I have never fought for a thing harder.

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There were many times I thought, without exaggeration, that it would be the end of me to win her.

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And now, each day, I taste the fruit of my sweet victory. If there be a greater boon than spending each minute of my life with her, I cannot imagine it, nor would I trade what I have with her for it, though it be some golden wish-granting machine.

I have what I have always wanted.

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You think me a fool. You think that I overstate my case.

You could not be more wrong.

If I sin, it is only by not giving her her due.

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I used to believe that there was a magical world, just beyond this one.

Now I know that this is the magical realm after all.




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I have pledged myself to love.

I have no regrets.

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Namaste.

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Leaving Tulsa

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It can’t be helped.

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The dog is snoring in the livingroom, the wife is out thriftshopping, the rain has paused.

A certain stillness in the house.

A stillness in me.

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And still the art.

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What can you do?

You can’t do nothing.

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Namaste.

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The Butcher’s Dream

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We are a provisional creature.

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If you look for us in a million years, we’ll be long gone.

It will be like we were never here.

We will join Neanderthal, Homo Habilus, Homo Ergaster, and the rest.

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In a hundred years, everyone alive right now will be dead.

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In four billion years our Sun will expand into a giant and we’ll be swallowed up.

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After that, a few more billion years, comes the heat death of the universe.

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Make hay while the sun shines.

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It is the weekend and raining and there is going to be hot coffee, potatoes and eggs, fire in the fireplace, and art and art and art and art.

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Namaste.

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Fishers of Men

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Praise to those who are left behind.
Praise to those who tend to the bodies of the dead.
Praise to those who trouble deaf heaven with their bootless cries.
Praise to the women who bear it away.

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This is our prayer for today.

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Namaste.

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Our Lady of The Sweet Waters

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It grows late and I won’t sleep.

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I am burning.

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I cannot slake my thirst.

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I make art instead.

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It is as sweet as any water.

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Namaste.

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The Lake Where Things Are Lost

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Can you name one who is to be spared?

We are all for the bone yard.

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I feel blessed to be where I am, still drawing breath. I just went and stood on the front porch, in the sunlight and cold air. The sun is going down and it floods across the yard through the arbor, all golden, firing up the tulips and daffodils and the brick path and the green weeds, making no distinction among them, painting them all alike. The dog is asleep in a patch of sunlight, too, soaking up the warmth of it.

I got my small troubles, just like you do. I got my portion of blessings and then some. I work at opening my small and flinty heart. I throw myself at my many failures yet again. I love with abandon and don’t begrudge it.

Of late I have been astounded at the physical world and am learning to find in it all of the magic and wildness I once sought in religion or spirituality or god or magic or what have you. I see now that it was my paltry imagination that was to blame, for I could not apprehend the vast wild strangeness of my own visible world. I sought out some other thing, as if this world were drab and lifeless and boring, when there could not exist a thing more strange and wonderful and limitless and mysterious, unknowable.

I will go to my grave without understanding much more than I do right now, but that’s okay. I won’t stop trying.

I am glad for this life.

I am glad for it all.

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Namaste.

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Waiting for The Hangman

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You are always the last one called to step forward.

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When Hare heard of Death, he started for his lodge & arrived there crying, shrieking, My uncles & my aunts must not die! And then the thought assailed him: To all things death will come! He cast his thoughts upon the precipices & they began to fall & crumble. Upon the rocks he cast his thoughts & they became shattered. Under the earth he cast his thoughts & all the things living there stopped moving & their limbs stiffened in death. Up above, towards the skies, he cast his thoughts & the birds flying there suddenly fell to the earth & were dead.

After he entered his lodge he took his blanket &, wrapping it around him, lay down crying. Not the whole earth will suffice for all those who will die. Oh there will not be enough earth for them in many places! 

There he lay in his corner wrapped up in his blanket, silent.

(Winnebago Indian)
Technicians of The Sacred
pg. 85

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This is our prayer for today.

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Namaste.

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Waiting For The Future To Go Away

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Let me see, what was Snake saying?

Ok, I will tell you.

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1

Ogun kills on the right & destroys on the right
Ogun kills on the left & destroys on the left
Ogun kills suddenly in the house & suddenly in the field
Ogun kills the child with the iron with which it plays
Ogun kills in silence
Ogun kills the thief & the owner of the stolen goods
Ogun kills the owner of the slave–
& the slave runs away
Ogun kills the owner of the house
& paints the hearth with his blood
Ogun is the death who pursues a child
until it runs into the bush
Ogun is the needle that pricks at both ends
Ogun has water but he washes in blood

2

Ogun sacrifices an elephant to his head
Master of iron, head of warriors
Ogun, great chief of robbers
Ogun wears a bloody cap
Ogun has four hundred wives
& one thousand four hundred children
Ogun the fire that sweeps the forest
Ogun’s laughter is no joke
Ogun eats two hundred earth worms & does not vomit

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Ogun has many gowns, he gives them all to the beggars
He gives one to the woodcock–
the woodcock dyes it indigo
He gives one to the coucal–
the coucal dyes it in camwood
He gives one to the cattle egret–
the cattle egret leaves it white

Ogun is not like something you can throw into your cap
Do you think you can put on your cap
& walk away with him?

Ogun scatters his enemies
When the butterflies arrive at the place
where the cheetah shits
they scatter in all directions.

The light shining on Ogun’s face is not easy to behold
Ogun, let me not see the red of your eye

(Yoruba)
                                                                            
Technicians of the Sacred
pgs 164-165

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That is our prayer for today.

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Namaste.

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Stealing Beauty

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The living feed on the dead. It is the way of the world.

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I cannot extricate myself from the vast web of interconnectedness all things share. As alone as I want to be, I have the company of billions of parasites and bacterium on me and inside me at all times. I am spinning with the earth in the deep void of space, bathed in the light and warmth that is thrown off from the thermonuclear core of our Sun, inhaling the oxygen given off by the photosynthesis of all the plants that fill each nook and corner of the planet we have not scraped clear of them, eating the bodies of dead animals and plants to nourish the heat factory at my core. The atoms in my body don’t see any division at all between inside me and outside me. Infinitely vast on the scale of atoms, I am vanishingly small on a planetary scale and invisible on any scale greater than that. On the scale of time my life and all it contains is but a breath, the falling of a wave on the shore, instantly erased by the next wave in a never-ending process.

It seems silly to persist in the notion of a self at all, yet I do.

I remain stubbornly convinced of it.

I am.

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The whole endeavor captivates me.

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“No matter how far you have gone down the wrong path, turn back”


Turkish proverb

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Namaste.

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Bitter As A Blue Ruin

One thing you can see on the palms and forearms and fingers of some murder victims is slashes and knife wounds known as defensive wounds. Your killer is coming at you with a knife or a machete and you hold up your hands in front of your face so that is what takes the brunt of the initial assault.

But then he gets to your throat or your heart or into your brain through your eyes and when you are laid out on the slab we will note those defensive wounds, you can be sure.

We know to look for them.

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For the first 3.5 billion years of life on earth, it was just a bunch of single-cells floating around.

Prokaryotes.

You couldn’t even see them with the naked eye, they were so small.

The whole planet lousy with them, but if you landed on it, you’d never know there was life at all.

It wasn’t on the right scale for us to apprehend.

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We are limited by our own scale of size and temporality, so that everything that falls outside of our scale, which is 99.9 percent of the Universe, is beyond our ken.

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It is little wonder we’re so inept.

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God bless us, every one.

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