My home

What pride I feel to be surrounded by bicycles across Hawthorne.
Lulled to sleep with memories of kind smiles from strangers.
Local coffeeshops filled to the brim
Like foaming chais or steaming americanos.
Breathtaking Tabor leaves me with chills no matter how many shoes I wear out circling her.
Sun, rain, fog, wind, heat, cool, mist, dark gray, evergreen-somehow nouns move to adjectives when describing the weather here
Like this mist has become a color I associate with home.
The Welsh "hiraeth," resonates with me. I feel such longing just thinking about leaving.
I wonder if I ever will.

hmm

contentment flows through me
but it's a quick fix
like placebo decaf
hot and black
coffee scents
like cold, frozen, mocha ice
splash across my hot tongue
tasting the ground up grains
of the earth
my frothy life races by
juices pick me up with a crazy beat
i can only hope to keep up
as the bands blast their truth across the sky
of this ampitheater life

enjoying the roses

it's just a little pin-prick sensation
that tells me i'm alive
a little itch to wake me up
maybe a little too much
and here i am--wainting for rains to fall away with the dawn
and roses to rise up and fill my nostrils with a sweet sensation of truth
their choler pricks me
and here i am
awake with it all
watching it all
turn ever so beautifully
before my eyes

life

Life is about the journey; a race, a long forest run, a friend-filled jaunt, a stride through the grass, a trip to be remembered.

This makes me want to buy a newspaper

Interesting video Patrick showed me years ago. Still relevant today.

http://mccd.udc.es/orihuela/epic/

awakening

i feel like i've awoken
after a long sleep
i'm looking at myself in the mirror but don't recognize what i see
it feels like the first time even though i know it's not
this outline seems unfamiliar, fuzzy
this person i'm seeing has so many nascent ideas and opinions
where have they been all this time?
these new thoughts catch me off guard
surprise me-delight me-make me anxious, sometimes make my heart beat faster
so many bright and vibrant sensations

today i caught the sight of fire

bikeriding home from the library
with my pocket full of words
i caught sight of a perfect moment
a rainbowed tabor in the distance
fall leaves exploding against the sky
damp salmon street lined with a row of slow burning fire
hope overcame me
as it sometimes does
it seemed to me during that moment
every dream could be realized
if only for a sunflecked moment

Lines from the Zanzibar Chest

The tableau was more sublime to me than the cityscapes of Florence, or Paris, or Manhattan. I’d hear the muezzin pipe up from a dozen mosques for asr, afternoon prayers, caressing the broken lines of the city with Kufic arabesques of sound. The amplified cries to God, impact explosions, sea breeze, softening light, and my heartbeat wove together.

Farther on down the path in the emerald filtered light of the banana grove, I dropped my trousers and squatted. My heart pounded. I stared up through the jungle into the sky. “What if there is only this?” As if in reply, my bowels loosened. How was it that I came to be stuck inside this strange, involuntary body? It seemed to me that there was no heaven or hell, right or wrong. There was only this.

And I remembered how Carlos had once said, “in the midst of carnage, you will see the utter evil and the supreme good, side by side.” Carlos spoke for all of us who long for such clarity. We will rarely find it in the so-called normal life. I know that the privilege of witnessing the extremes stretches something inside the heart or the soul or the mind, so that there is a void we cannot ever hope to fill again in ourselves. In all my pained imaginings of how Carlos had come to his final moment, only one thing really matters. Carlos was on the story, looking for the utter evil and the supreme good.

It rained and hordes of cracked feet churned the ground into a quagmire. “It’s Woodstock without the music,” said one nurse I talked to. Only a handful of foreigners were there to help at the start but they quickly crowded in. Every humanitarian disaster is a golden fund-raising opportunity for the charities.

Lizzie and I arrived in the polluted heat of a London summer. We stood frozen at street corners as a blur of pedestrians burst out of subways and spilled like ants down pavements. The crowded bars, the expensive shops, the fashionable clothes-to me it all seemed a population rushing about to no avail. In an art gallery I saw a tank of formaldehyde in which was suspended a shark. In another was half a pig. I thought of the soap gorilla at Kigali airport. Waiting for the Underground train, I stared at a huge poster of a woman in her underwear staring down at her own breasts. Hello boys, she said. At the movies we witnessed sickening violence, except that this time we held tubs of popcorn between our legs and the gunfire and screams were broadcast in digital Dolby. We had escaped a place where evil stared right at you from the sockets of a child’s skull on a battlefield, only to arrive in London, where office workers led lives of such tedium and plenty that they had to entertain themselves with all the fucking and killing on the big screen. So, here then was the prosperous, democratic, and civilized Western world. A place of washing machines, reality TV, Armani, frequent-flier miles, mortgages. And this is what the Africans are supposed to hope for, if they’re lucky.

That year by William Stafford

The last year I was your friend, they fell for days “headlong flaming down”-the leaves, I mean.
Aspens heard the news.
On the deck the birdseed sprouted-blue and brown and rose: two evening grosbeaks came, trim and ordered, quiet colored, like marines.
We stood each alone: the grass had found a tide but we felt none.
When they hurt enough, we let them out-the words, I mean-and let them trigger our tongues till they lugered a million times, like a drum, till the world reversed and leaped, after its good name.
But sunset frisked us for anything dry or warm, and that year we stood alone: the grass had found a tide but we felt none.
That year when I was your friend-in words, I mean-I was afraid.
Despite our care we heard the news.
It was more than words.
Persuaded like the grass, we felt the tide
at last: we knew before we were told, and we shook as the aspens did, from a storm inside the world.

My favorite poem by William Stafford

Words from Lao Tzu

Men knowing the way of life
Do without acting,
Effect without enforcing,
Taste without consuming;
‘Through the many they find the few,
Through the humble the great;
They respect their foes,
They face the simple fact before it becomes involved.
Solve the small problem before it becomes big.
The most involved fact in the world
Could have been faced when it was simple,
The biggest problem in the world
Could have been solved when it was small.
The simple fact that he finds no problem big
Is the sane man’s prime achievement.
If you say yes too quickly
You may have to say no,
If you think things are done too easily
You may find them hard to do:
If you face trouble sanely
It cannot trouble you

Lines from "The Dharma Bums" by Jack Kerouac

“We went on, and I was immensely pleased with the way the trail had a kind of immortal look to it, in the early afternoon now, the way the side of the grassy hill seemed to be clouded with ancient gold dust and the bugs flipped over rocks and the wind sighed in the shimmering dances over the hot rocks, and the way the trail would suddenly come into a cool shady part with big trees overhead, and held the light deeper. And the way the lake below us soon became a toy lake with those black well holes perfectly visit still, and the giant cloud shadows on the lake, and the tragic little road winding away where poor Morley was walking back.”

“Smith you don’t realize it’s a privilege to practice giving presents to others.’ The way he did it was charming; there was nothing glittery and Christmasy about it, but almost sad, and sometimes his gifts were old beat-up things but they had the charm and usefulness and sadness of his giving “Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn’t really want anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars, at least new fancy cars, certain hair oils and deodorants and general junk you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyway, all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume, I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad.”

“There just isn’t any kind of night’s sleep you get in the desert winter night, providing you’re good and warm in a duck-down bag. The silence is so intense that you can hear your own blood roar in your ears but louder than that by far is the mysterious roar which I always identify with the roaring of the diamond of wisdom, the mysterious roar of silence itself, which is a great Shhhh reminding you of something you’ve seemed to have forgotten in the stress of your days since birth. I wished I could explain it to those I loved, to my mother, to Japhy, but there just weren’t any words to describe the nothingness and purity of it. ‘Is there a certain and definite teaching to be given to all living creatures?’ was the question probably asked to beetlebrowed snowy Dipankara, and his answer was the roaring silence of the diamond.”

“In all this welter of women I still hadn’t got one for myself, not that I was trying too hard, but sometimes I felt lonely to see everybody paired off and having a good time and all I did was curl up in my sleeping bag in the rosebushes and sigh and say bah.”

“I still had peanuts and raisins left over from our last hike together. Japhy had said, ‘I won’t be needing those peanuts and raisins on that freighter.’ I recalled with a twinge of sadness how Japhy was always so dead serious about food, and I wished the whole world was dead serious about food instead of silly rockets and machines and explosives using everybody’s food money to blow their heads off anyway.”

mangrove

we tangle ourselves in a web of emotion
only to unwrap our souls in the end
can these connections we create bind us or can they be unfastened easily?
i find each person leaves their mark on my soul
affecting my actions and entering my thoughts
growing now more numerous with the days
stamping their breaths and words onto my memory
remembering their scent in the grocery store or the way they laugh before the punchline
cycling madly toward home backpacks filled with fruit and soy cream
dancing wildly after midnight
beer in hand
lips stretched out to smile
each person a branch extending from my trunk
down they reach toward the life force below
adding another sustaining vessel to my soul

coming off a high is like

slamming the brakes and blinking twice
waving at friends who never recognize your face
slipping on a muddy ledge, then catching yourself before sprinting on
sweating through a nightmare
then waking to the blaring beep of an alarm clock
feeling emotions click then calm, rush then hush
making a conscience effort to remember
then fading off to sleep
not knowing when these sentiments will awake again

winter

i happened upon some reddened leaves
imagine, on a dark January day
all around me foggy windy rain pelting in from each direction
at this moment i could feel the warmth of summer

Thoughts

“What is time but a broad expanse of interwoven experience?”

“Time is a curse on all of us, but perhaps the greatest teacher of all.”

“The void of loneliness finds itself filled for the sake of being full.”

wanting...needing?

i want total connection
instant rapport
sensual expression
to sense time without urgency
until clocks stop their eternal ticking
can i express these needs?
i’m attempting
perhaps that is the first step

conformity

people live like rain on a window pane
momentarily, they live as unique and single drops
beautiful in shape and size
reflecting light like a prism
eventually forced together through wind and time
falling unknowingly together
they meet the earth in a uniform splash
just like the others.

UP

growing up strikes me like a match
it explodes
then recedes
wood sucked into a charred expanse of time
wax waiting to be molded with memory.

Quote from Gunnar Skirbekk

from “The idea of a welfare state in a future scenario of great scarcity”

“Every human being should have the right to live and should have some minimal economic support. Those who do not have such support should get it, they should get it from the community to which they belong…each person has dignity, not only physiological needs. Therefore, the aid that is needed should not be given in a humiliating way. Such aid is not charity, but communal sharing through a general welfare arrangement.”

-Gunnar Skirbekk

fate?

the world is moving all around me now
like a rush it comes
soaking me through
i stand, watching and waiting for a move but frozen with my own deliberation
i find the beauteous joy in letting it come
the moments have no owner beyond the wind
so i let them fly away into the sky
beyond anyone’s control
and shutter with the power of fate

being away

I have gone away for a time
left the familiar schedules of last year and thrown myself into a new race
the pace here moves differently
the miles flow with a new current
i conquer the mountains of a new landscape
painting sweat upon the streets as at home
feeling even more alive than i did before i left

home

yesterday i arrived in a new city
so far away from my familiar oregon
the waterfalls rushed past toward a new and unfamiliar ocean
red barnyards beckoned to me-promising words from a much older tale
i saw them, knowing all the time that life grows differently here
the country road wound round to the base of the last mountaintop and we cascaded freely down
upon norway’s historic capital town the crowded city streets bustling with busy buyers
all of it reminding me of home
the colorful markets, quiet parks, small places for a treat
these were all familiar in the street
it is now, that i have traveled this far distance away that i can hear the similarity in our humanity
the faces look different, yet hold the same expressions
people laugh, talk, sing-all the same
connecting to each other and learning each other by name
hearts beating together with the eternal tick of time
it is here, thousands of miles away, that i feel most closely connected to my homeland

born on the cusp

like a storm, the cusps can brew, as deep as the ocean
enveloping a personality with layer upon layer untileven the layers are at odds
stubborn and grounded taurus weighs on flighty gemini
pushing against the pull and pulling against the push
like a wave upon the sand every rock emerges upon the coastal shore
every month must face a change
what a beautiful thought that one can be two, or that two could be three
they say mutts make the best companions
so it goes inside of us
the waves brewing, the crashing, the pelting from the inside out
i’m waiting for that lull between the storms

Skyline

years ago, before i walked the earth
there was a silence
a calm
the cars of today were elements buried deep within the earth
french fried potatoes didn’t exist then and the skyline was a misty impressionistic green
silence held it altogether
in the black and white photographs of yesterday no one smiled
they told no lies
those huge golden arches across the skyline today suck away all the green and leave me alone to wonder?
everyone smiles in photographs
but i know they stand in confusion of our consumer-driven world
i’m left without any answers
just a lingering for the past

with me

when you’re with me me
the world moves slower
the cars appear fewer
those evergreens sigh more sweetly
a beacon rock view more breathtaking
chocolate and wine means a quiet night in your arms
newspapers are sunday morning and candles a weeknight dinner
after work and before sleep
emotions move between us
tears-laughs-sighs-connections
i see hope
in our eyes

Quote from Will Durant [historian]

“Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting, and doing the things historians usually record; while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry, and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks. Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks for the river.”

Will Durant, historian

A quote from William Stafford [poet]

“I believe that the so-called ‘writing block’ is a product of some kind of disproportion between your standards and your performance…one should lower his standards until there is no felt threshold to go over in writing. It’s easy to write. You just shouldn’t have standards that inhibit you from writing…I can imagine a person beginning to feel he’s not able to write up to that standard he imagines the world has set for him. But to me that’s surrealistic. The only standard I can rationally have is the standard I’m meeting right now…You should be more willing to forgive yourself. It doesn’t make any difference if you are good or bad today. The assessment of the product is something that happens after you’ve done it."

William Stafford, poet