This world is a glove

In the space between, it's easier to see an all.
That tree, that cat, those people.
Perhaps only as different from each other
as the pinky on my right hand
from my left thumb
from my ear.

What, in this world, is reincarnation?
What sense does it make to think of switching places,
When you lose the illusion of discretely separate lives?

The surface of this world is like a glove,
that life wears when it goes out.
What sense does it make to think of switching fingers?

keep waking

He told me of his dreams
Of how they're nightmares.
Of how he doesn't want to sleep.

I do not want to sleep,
Because I fear that I'll have dreams,
From which I do not want to wake.

What shall I do, but return to cultivating the space
between stimulus and response
in which a pilgrim soul may wander?

清明节

你知道吗？
我的外婆最喜欢的颜色青色。
她说过 是因为活的，生长的，青色
In which I am grateful for homemade qingtuan and tiny lights.

The time between

Somewhen in my imagined past

There is a girl still waiting
by the driveway
for her dad
to take her in his pickup truck to the dump, to the store, to the local racing club
knowing they'll to talk about science, about college, about people, about the future
real things, she knew.
She didn't know how she knew, but she knew, and she would save the memories for discussions.

neither the girl nor her father could know that for the next decade, he would leave each month without knowing how to say goodbye. And, she would get used to saying goodbye without knowing that he'd left.

She would spend the next few decades finding men who couldn't recognize her; who had a certain brand of humor and critical nature, and learning, painfully, by trial and error, to stop waiting and leave them instead.

"Just how lonely ARE you?" asked the Voice
The Heart stayed silent, knowing that the Voice speaks from the overflow


It is no wonder
that while Odysseus stole the stage at the time,
the character from the Odyssey I will always remember is the unnamed hound who,
on recognizing the disguised Master he lost when a puppy
wagged his heavy tail in joy, and finally died.


Filling the time between
there is a loneliness
The mission is to drain it until the empty space is just that and nothing more

no more salt,
no more water
just the space and time

The space between

Last year, the image was water
the kind that runs down a mountain, searching for a stream
the kind that reacts in perfect measure, no more, no less, to a dropped and sinking stone.
the kind that calmly accepts an obstacle and, in embracing it, flows unimpeded
the kind that is not ice

The image was water
and we made it down the mountain to a lake.

This year, I wondered whether there would be a new image
And there is.

It is the non-image. The emptiness, the void, the gap, the non-often-recognized-yet-structured space between.

In keeping with that theme, we ask ourselves what is not.

When I encounter a given situation with a given person
- what is not happening?
- who is not speaking?
- which voices am I not hearing?
- who is the other person not?
and at last,
- who am I not?

What at first seems inefficient becomes quickly clarifying.
In describing what is not the stone,
I finally see (and absorb) only the stone that falls
and nothing else

3/14/16

The pi day of the century, I spent it well

Would Einstein like Asahi?
We should have poured one out for him.

Crisscrossing streets through Shanghai,
An exercise in linguistic chemistry:
Adventures in Potentium,
An unexpected gedanken experiment
in the emergent alchemic triad

A steam-punk vat laden with purple possibility
a silver paint of reflective perception
the lightless black of non-negotiable that-which-simply-is
And the pack of Diogenic monks that herd these dreams into glowing vats or painted maps
in an allegorical territory following the physics of presocratic philosophy

all while warding off the maw that goes on consuming and is never consumed

There's a story
trying to tell itself
as we fumble for the images
And yet,
we find them.
Finding them, we test them and they hold.

The streetlamp flickered and went out. I witnessed receipt of the message before he left.

Have you ever realized that you're on the other side? An antipode of the very world that you once (and still do) walked?

"You can do it," I thought toward the darkened light, on behalf of a previous world.

The streetlamp hummed back to orange, then yellow-white before he returned.

I want to hear this story.