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What We Leave Behind

It seems we don’t know what we leave behind until it is gone. It’s also true that our songwriters, authors, personal diarists, all (if not in a singular voice) tell us that. But we take no notice. Even when we say, yeah, yeah, true, true. The problem, it seems to me, is that we can only take note of the past, our history. From here, from now, from a future projection— is nothing. We don’t know what will fill our memories, fill the file box of wrongs, loss, despair, and joy. Or we may know an example: the dog I love today will leave me to grieve the same as the dogs who have gone before. But we don’t feel it, we don’t know those things inside-out. Our mind observes, undaunted by Truths, only the facts. And so we stumble on, leaving behind the things we will mourn, or forget. And we forget the most important thing that the notetakers don’t tell us to remember. When we leave the old for the new, we need to be sure it is replaced with something of worth.

abandChurch

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For Jakob Gator

Jake, the little green bastard. I’ve been missing him a great deal lately, and he died quite a few years ago. Isn’t it funny how the dead return in a soft splendor, and leave us with such longing. Jake was more like a little person than a parrot. It’s that personhood we miss. The companionship. And he pretty much had something to say about everything.

So, for you, little man…

I saw the wing of a bird
stretched open before me
a dark green shadowed by the forest
from where he came
and then I felt the beating heart
nestled into me
his head upon my lips

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Sometimes

(Only because it takes a while to dig yourself out)

When I think I can

I’ll transmute the poems in the air
the ones that haunt and suffocate
to paintings of English Gardens
or maybe a little stream where
silver fish glimmer and glimpse
the part of me that lingers there

When I think I can’t

I’ll slide the scale of dumbed down
notes to impossible depths of immortality
where the worn and sick climb
rocks of smooth and simple betrayal
not of human form but life
on songs that were not chiseled there

(And then sometimes you don’t quite make it)

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Post Mum’s Day

Slump. When the kid leaves there’s this big yapping hole that slips within my space. The Indestructible Energy has moved to become peaking and waning motions of energy here, fields that shake or shiver or are silent. That’s the thing, Silent. As silent as remorse or a sleeping cat. A constant connection that moves like sound waves. Water through a hose, making a fountain of captured rainbows. Doors opened and shut. Words written on the air. Calm. Breathing. Returning to remembered cottages, and rivers.

odmosswmsecgard

Old Moss Woman’s Secret Garden

 

 

Simple Things

Flowers & Prayers

Timeless

 

 

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Zen Suchness

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Ah, the zen of it. Wherein there seems to be a reflection on everything, if not an actual doing that works. If one applies it—the teaching, the spirit of it, the intention, and on into the practice. What we live, what we do with our intention—the meditating, the meta, and the works—all become our practice. And on with the flow of it. And, as is my own special way, the fall off the Path and the Practice. Distracted by life.

What needs be overcome? For me it is always Lazy. Lazy & lack of Discipline. Maybe they are the same? Finding this, the KAIZEN posted in Lion’s Roar struck a cord of harmony. This seems so easy to practice, how can I not? I like easy. So here we go:

Japanese Suchness—to overcome laziness & to cultivate discipline. Kaizen. One minute, same time everyday. Do same thing for one minute. Kai=change; zen=good.

That’s all, that’s it. One minute everyday. Pick the time and do something, even standing or sitting. Anything. It’s the discipline of same time, same thing. I for one am going to give it a try. I’ll stand for a minute every morning at the same time and watch my breath, in and out. Suchness.