Yoga

Yoga is starting to open a door in my body and mind through which,
awareness shines.There is a moment of peace, which allows me "drop"
into my body. As if awareness was something Seeing briefly and worse,
knowing the trauma at the break between the two. I am learning not to
react, or flinch when I become more aware of the conflict or chaos
when I move without awareness. Although it looks at times that 99% of
my life was lived without this peaceful love of embodiment, order
within chaos.My natural grace is a function of awareness of intention.
Often without awareness, driven by my thoughts, I move, and work, and
live in a way that hurts me.The first response to this awareness is
anger. "I" feel angry because life, the world "god" however one speaks it, is telling me to grow up, because the result f life, is death.I
meant to say" "grow up"; to be happier and more alive" but either way, the result is death, and I can live and write these days, with love
and meaning and passion. Or disappointed, sad and miserable. The
choice at this point does lay in my hands, and i always have, and with
grace will.

Honestly choice has never been mine. Things happen one from another,
but often the forces that move and shape our lives are unseen, felt,
or understood quickly, if ever. Occasionally, I would term this peace,
or constantly (fear) we appear to have "a choice" but mostly it is
inconsequential, or not, it is clear from this advantage point to see
at the least the immediate harm or benefit in an action, or refraining
from it. In the long term, or greater pattern, such true opportunities
are both rare, and every moment, again, largely unseen or imagined, by
those with us, or those with the power or the daring to affect
positive change. Largely we unceasingly, act from small selfish
interests that bring transient pleasure: That ends with lasting heath
consequences. The distractions of greed and laziness and fear, the
scarcity response = violence. This inability of simple consciousness
allows us to remain mired in the endless cycle of aggression and
response; collectively we are both unable and unwilling to face the
demands as a species to mature. The unending chaotic swirl of and
economic, social and physical degradation is barley held back by the
distractions of a technological juggernaut of both development and
disaster that has us dancing at the edge of a global precipice.

These consequences are as relevant regardless of where they fall, and
upon whose shoulders. Whether directly, in the economic, physical, or
social health of the individual, community, or global impact, it is
one connected system and it is madness to continue to make political,
social or economic decisions without understanding that the economy is
far more illusionary that we know, and the positive economic, global
energy and food production issues are a product of our conditioning
and it is long past time for radical change in the framing of our
social, judicial, and global goals.

School, Suicide & Bullying

My earliest memories of school are bland, empty of much meaning or impact. I remember per-school with my sisters? No, they were too old, but perhaps I did get taken down the block by my slightly hung over father in a little red wagon to pre-school once or twice. I was certainly told the story often enough.

Bullying and abuse did not really cross my awareness until I was in 6th or 7th grade and when it did, there was and is only hurt confusion and pain. Somehow, I knew that it was not about me. That there was no way that I could be so important in these children's lives that they would act in such a way. What is clear, its that I understood, how and why we kill. How we ignore suffering and abuse, how we contribute to suffering every day, in millions of small ways and that it is truly the darkest shadow of humanity.

Why do we hurt each other, our friends and innocent bystanders? Those who are different, often prettier, smarter, or somehow slower, more vulnerable, those of us who cry easily. We are all targets. All you
have to be is a minority, it does not matter what kind. Bullies target
minorities, and in that I mean it statistically. It's like primate
behavior, and again, defenders of abusers, (for that is what bullies
are) are both sick and likely abused themselves. If something is seen
as normal, how can it be a problem? If verbal and physical violence is
portrayed and accepted and lauded in our society, in our foreign
policy, how do we then blame our children for taking up what we have
shown them on TV, video games and how we communicate within our
families and with our friends? We start to be abusive, sarcastic and
ironic to show intimacy, and even in our sickest moments, love.

 So how does this relate to a 12 year old boy holding a stolen gun
waiting for his bullies in the bushes in a small Oregon town in 1972?
I don't really know. I just remember being scared all the time. That
still I wonder how I make it through the world seeming so calm, when
it's all there inside me. The trauma, the violence, and worse; the
earnest hatred that was so calmly expressed, ahhh there indeed is the
root of my cynicism and nihilistic hatred of humanity and life itself,
for if this is life and human society, I realized I wanted nothing to
do with it.

 And sometimes reading the papers, I wonder, has anything changed at all?

Insomnia

Just not sleeping well. I often awake in from dark dreams,
into the dark, full of fear, not anxiety, not panic, just my old friend fear.
Fear of rejection, of loss, of love, of life and
lately, strangely, lately as i come to love life,
i find a new fear, that of death.

Feeling the reality of transience. That while life might be brief and fleeting, I have lived long enough in this short half of a century, too see this world de-forested, our native flora and fauna destroyed, our Oceans fished "out" and filled with garbage. Banally, without regard or thought. Purely for convenience and profit. Armageddon as a derivative consequence of greed and the choice of convenience over compassion.

I'm afraid I have too, have wasted this precious  life, planet, love affair called life. That I'm  guilty like anyone else alive today. That somehow i could have stopped this, and that when i die, it will all be made clear, where i went wrong, and missed the opportunity for our salvation.

I cry because I'm just sad and in pain; I cry tears of gratitude that these fleeting experiences are not "overwhelming" that I'm not medicating them,
that I can access resources of love, of wisdom, of perspective and
knowing that whatever happens, it is already ok.

Grateful that in this moment, this morning, that what is asked of me to endure is so much less than my fellow humans without any hope or opportunity for self redemption,
but there speaks hubris. Many of my brothers and sisters
are far wiser and know love and peace better than I.

I'm grateful that it's so easy to get up and cry, and write, that "I" have toilet paper to blow my constantly congested nose in. Grateful that I want connection, intimacy, love and peace. As opposed to power, money, control, excess materialism, or worst of all,
the deadly security of belief.

Finally breathing deeply, comforted, that  here, in this karma that it may come to an end. That I might find some rest and compassion somehow, in this life. That I may stop running scared. That I might find myself loving in the dawn, accepting all
that I has been love &  feared, in this wild journey,
a movement towards gratitude, called life.

Manifesto and prayer

Powerlessness: means knowing peace and not finding it.
unmanageability is not being able to deal with reality.
Insanity is anxiety, looped trauma, the primal  memory.  
Sanity is the journey of gently releasing of that trauma & story,
Through prayer, friends, art, lovers, family,
and whatever god I embrace in body and soul.
Home in accepting awareness.

Dark Matter

There is some field of energy that we are missing in our studies of the physical sciences of the exchange of energy form and meaning. What if the only consistent measuring device is awareness itself? And if there is no fixed moral perspective then what is measured? Than merely a symptomatic lack of lack of response to the apocalypse. It's like Joe Strummer said, if Hitler flew in today, they'd send him a limousine anyway.

 

I'm trying to be grateful for my own economic meltdown that it has taken so long, and may even have some minor reprieves, but undoubtedly, the loss has been going on for years. Every year I grow a little closer to poverty, to reality. To that which is the backdrop of most of life on the planet. Maybe I can learn to look back at the beauty and appreciate it now. That's the very best I can hope for. It's a way of enjoying the present while embracing the experience of coherent story of grace in the Fall.

 

All the while not pretending, that all that is happening in the world, is not. I have never been in denial of the situation, only to ready to question meaning, values and ends. . .  That all those visits to the ocean, trying to vacation, I was fully aware of the vanishing ecosystems. . . collapsing as I watched, frolicking with the wild dolphins in Palau on my fortieth birthday, trying too hard to grasp what is always just out of reach in our world, in our souls.

 

The horror and the beauty simultaneously interacting, destroying if not creating each other, but how not ? In some time and space. For here now: in Afghanistan, the Congo, the middle east, our brothers, Fathers and children hate kill and suffer rape while we consume, medicate and dither as the world burns and we pretend to care?

 

Is every shallow tea party conservative actually right when they say ( insert stupid comment) dismissing the true horror: That Violence is a deeply gratifying in perverse semi sexual satisfaction mutilation and torture that is so endemic in the male global psyche. It is men and the masculine alone? who/which addictively and obsessively repeats this self traumatizing pattern?

 

Destroying the feminine and repeating the fall from heaven as well as the experience of birth, individuation, awakening to the horror of the human condition, and for some, a loving gesture in the face of it, in whatever way we briefly rage against the machine, we do live, and challenge the apparently entropic decay of humanity until the last days.

 

Eventually we all find the last breath, the last tree, and the last sunrise in each of our lives. What we leave behind, and who we touch, we will never truly guess, for so much of perception is lost in this mess. And yet the lucky and the lost of us in the end, find rest.

 

 

Moral compass

 

What judged then, judges now

nothing  changes, always the same hate

is death something to be feared or embraced ?

 

something inside me died today as I watched the men collapse

and fall to their faces prostrated before they were shot from behind

 

bodies jumping in the dirt in some repulsive squirt

away from the earth now lying still

no movement again I read about the world

and I want to kill "stop loss"

drilling in the waste: Tritium  in Vermont

 

again today the world has touched my psyche

why does it feel like rape? Just reading the news

sooner or later I'm infected with hate, and I start to die.

I wana get high before I turn into the enemy and believe

that I know what is right. And  which ones first to sacrifice

to the elders & the spirits of the earth the spirits of all the children gone to waste

weve hung, on a bullet or a brain or a needle stuck in a vein

 

greed or another sick idea into the heart that it's ok to prosper while another dies

that this is not all one life and that heaven hell is not later, but here; now.

and I refuse to believe that's its really ok, that this is from another perspective

its all just a big game. While the bodies rot and the oil burns I so love to gavotte

 

Because then I'd have no excuse but to enjoy it all right now

forgetting whose right or wrong just loving this time and place

the occasion of my mothers birth, her mothers disdain,

no longer resonates in my heart.  to clean up a mess

that she did not see her own part in.

 

.

Practice

I feel better when I write. To communicate something, even an expression of pain, as the world both lives and dies laughs and cries as the sun dances so quickly across the sky we forget that we are spinning always around a center we cannot see, something holding us here, together in life and death as the two become one and the horror and the beauty merge into something so much grander than I have ever imagined or dared to believe, even these brief glimpses seem to leave me no better than before; I cannot say what progress is about, because I only seem to know what looks like failure. Except in the grace that holds my life, and somehow I see and appreciate, the beauty that is here, and if wanting more is the cause of pain, then I see how I pay the price in wanting every day, some other kiss, a different caress than this one I receive every day, from what can only be god.