Other Mysterious Lights

It was entirely possible to say something new each day. Marty would wake like a vampire rising from a coffin in a quirky b movie, stiff as a plank at a 90 degree angle, as if lifted by a row of invisible supporting dancers. Once vertical he could see his reflection perfectly in the full length mirror mounted to the wall opposite the bed's foot. The red shape of his mouth covered in clown paint would stand out in sharp contrast to the white grease paint on his face and the baby powder in his curly hair. It was entirely possible to then contort his mouth into shapes supported by the motion of his tongue and the vibration of his vocal cords, allowing him to emit mostly coherent phrases to be captured by the gramophone operated by twelve tiny mice.
On day one Marty rose and said,
"I want to roll through the garbage like God."
Diligently the mice recorded this statement and played it back for him.
On the second day, upon rising like an arrow from the bed, hands crossed over his chest, sheets tossed sloppily asunder by his rising form, Marty announced,
"This one has a crooked mouth."
The mice recorded it and played it back before resuming the construction of a dress made of various garments collected from unattended dryers in a nearby laundromat.
On day three, rising in the usual fashion, Marty spoke the following words,
"You know how everybody says I used to cry all the time? Well I did, but it wasn't just because I had  a bad marriage and a bad childhood, even though I did. I used to cry a lot because I feel things really deeply, not just for myself, but for other people too.  My husband shot himself in the head. That's why I used to cry so much, not for myself, for him, because of the way he must have felt to do that."
Dumb founded, the mice played the recording back for Marty. One of them fell into the mechanism and caused  the needle to skip replaying, "must have felt, must have felt, must have felt" until his compatriots freed him.
The next day, the fourth, the mice were poised to receive another monologue.
Marty rose and uttered a single word,
"Connecticut."
On day five,
"More riding in boats, eating brie, writing poetry."
Six
"What is your favorite fruit?"
The mice took a survey. Three for pineapple, 2 for apple, 4 for blueberries, 2 for banana, and 1 for avacado. They embroidered their answer on Marty's pillow case.
On day seven more cause for reflection,
"Let me ask you a question, do you have any sort of rule that you follow? A reason or something?"
Due to the fact that Marty never commented on the pillowcase the day before, the mice refrained from responding to this particular query. They spent the rest of the day drinking  peach schnapps from thimbles and wondering about the merit of their work.

For The Sake Of Love

So uninspired… this form which can think only of shuffling and reorganizing closets or finding some reason to venture out of doors. The shock has set in, the realization that my children are growing quickly and soon they will fly away, much sooner than I anticipated when they showed up on the scene nine years ago. Back then people said, “They grow so fast.” They said it over and over again, with their sad wrinkly faces and me, with a baby on each hip, sniffed at their admonitions and thought that it was taking time enough for my liking. Only now enough time has passed that I can gaze backwards and see the eras in their short lives that have already passed into oblivion. Once Angelina brought home stacks of beautiful multicolored art projects. She was happy and liked school. Now she brings stacks of dull white paper marked with endless streams of numbers and I can see why her eyes are puffy and her feet shuffle when she walks with her head turned down as if she were walking under a load of potato sacks. And I remember when Olivia was a little tyke allowed to do as she pleased in a little neighborhood pre-school, back before she started to grow more and more human. I can remember plenty that will flood my brains like a bathroom flooded with water and then the water might leak out of my eyes. I feel it in my heart, everything is slipping away, constantly receding, and I can do nothing to call it back, but I can try to be here in this moment as I have never been in any other. I can strive to be my most present, and not look backward or forward and in that way take some action in response to the melancholy. As uninspired as I am, I am not too troubled to look at the dirt upon the rug and realize that one day I will long to see this dirt upon this rug on this day when we are all still together, or at least what was left of us was still together. I recall spilled cereal on another carpet and crying and picking it all up by hand and being cross with two little babies because we had no vacuum and we had a roommate who would be angry with the mess. If I could waltz back through time, I would push that other mother out of the way and leave the cereal on the floor and take the children warmly in my arms and say calmly that they should be more careful and finish combing their fine little hair and washing their round little faces and help them into their little coveralls and patiently deal with all the business of the day while enjoying their presence alongside my own. My life has seemed so important to me in any given moment, that I have dragged us through strange places in pursuit of something elusive, and have almost never understood what I should truly understand. I have not been gentle enough and only now, as they grow larger and more set in their basic shape, only now am I learning the delicate art of gentleness. I hope that when they are all grown they will appreciate that all of my striving was for them too, and that they will understand that I could not be better than I was in the beginning. I hope that they will know that I was growing with them. We are three people growing together, none of us perfect, the ones who know slightly more than the others, they must naturally take the lead. The ones who don’t know as much, they must naturally follow. At any given time, I cannot be more than I am, I can only strive to refine it and make it better for the sake of love, for the sake of that which on some days may flood through me uncontrollably and leak out of my every pore. But on the days when the faucets are closed, on days like this one, I can still be here and now, and I can still know that I must keep on working and carefully set the stage for the next flood.

Balloons

There you were, a slightly something nothingness to pat the blonde crown of my head. Even in my sleep, I see you, and the characters that were a part of the story that held you suspended like a shiny red balloon set among a bouquet of little white ones. Imagine the heights you might explore entirely on your own if you were to be cut free of the bouquet, tethered as it is to that small lead weight ensconced in a plastic smiley face to make its purpose seem friendlier. As a balloon, bound to the other balloons, your sole purpose is to delight and amuse, and yet I’d wager that you dream of something loftier. I’ll not say that I think one is truly better than the other. The fate of the balloon that rises unhindered towards the golden sun… well it is doomed to POP! While on the other hand, the balloon that remained tethered to it’s bland brethren will eke a few delighted exclamations from one observer or another, and eventually it will begin to shrivel and droop like a withered flower at the end of a flaccid stem until it is just a wrinkly little flap of rubber. Either outcome is somewhat dismal, and still I think I’d like to soar before the end, and well, perhaps that is what I am doing.
That may be the reason that I catch a glimpse of the lot of you in a dream now and then, when a gentle zephyr blows me near the carnival grounds and I see your bulbous heads bobbing up and down in time to the floppy footed step of some horrible clown. What does it mean, soft breeze that you sometimes afford me a glimpse of the bunch I left behind, and especially that red balloon, which surely I admired once as much as any other white balloon might? What does it mean that I sometimes wish for the red balloon to escape a slow demise and soar with the birds of prey above the world and above the clouds? The moment that my own tether was cut, I left the red balloon and its pearly entourage behind, and their fate is their own as mine is my own. How then can I imagine that I know anything of their existence, as I am no longer one of their ilk?
I could not expect them to think of my flight as a worthy way to spend the days until the roller coaster comes shooting out of the final curve and the ride is over, because they choose the tether and the lead weight and I the unclouded sky. I imagine, or perhaps I was once told, that they hope to lift that weight one day as a whole, through an act of magic, via a measure of defiance against the holy laws of nature. One day they will all make an effort which will be unaccountable, given that as time passes they loose strength and buoyancy rather than gain it, and yet, through a special effort made collectively by each individual, they will rise. Or so they hope. It is difficult to get so many air heads aligned to work for a common purpose and then to further make an effort which only they themselves, individually, can hope to invoke.
As long as the bunch is big enough it will always be easier to say, "Well, we would rise if only Bobo would lift his share of the weight." And "The reason we aren’t getting enough lift is because Balin is leaking." And by thus placing attention on all the other balloons in their company, they fail to place the necessary attention on themselves, they fail to apply as individuals the supernatural attention that makes possible the impossible.
Or so I imagine. What can be the reason that my imagination, my dreams, my mind bends back towards you now and again? In my dreams alone all balloons are reconciled and accepting of each other’s fate. Like the animals of the Wind In The Willows, in my dreams we all know that there is no use commenting on the sudden appearance or disappearance of another animal. We are glad when we are together, and remorseless in parting, and ever accepting that otters must swim and moles burrow and sparrows fly. There will be times when we take the path together, and times when our destiny demands that we part, and that is all that there is to it.
Or so I imagine.
So I have dreamed.

Tribe

I dream about the boys from my tribe, the boys who were my friends for no reason other than that. We were kin. We were from the same school, and for this reason alone they would sit with me and shelter me from the abuses of others and play video games with me. When you have removed yourself from the tribe, you will never again have friends, never again have some that will come to your defense right or wrong. But let us suppose that you were always an outcast in your tribe, then perhaps you have never had friends and you never will. Let us examine the possibility that you are and have always been alone. Alliances are formed temporarily over the cause of common goals, and when your goals are no longer the goals of the clan, you are no longer of the clan.
You are one solitary drop spat from the sea to rest on the rim of a stranger’s spectacles, a stranger standing upon the deck of a ship to watch breaching whales. You might ride there for a time, but even if the stranger, your host, never wipes his glasses clean of your miniscule measure of moisture, evaporation will see you through to oblivion. Without the force of the sea behind you, you are a small insignificant and temporary thing. A thing too delicate and weird to survive for long. To live long you must find a way to rejoin the sea, or perhaps you will join a new conglomeration of water. You might, for example, slide off the rim of the stranger’s glasses into his soup, where you will then be assimilated, where you will then become vegetarian gumbo.
Don’t like being gumbo?
"Rough tough titty.", said the big mamma kitty. Gumbo you shall be, gumbo or something like it. Sad little droplet, awaken now! Awaken to this note, this breach in the harmonious tra la la of the angelic hosts.
You have never been, you will never be. You are one and none sung for the pleasure of the undying sun, that radiant microclear one, the one and only sun. Solar soup clear as glistening saliva sliding from the corner of the stranger’s lips as he spoons more gumbo into his open mouth and looses a few drops in the coarse bristles of an overgrown moustache.
Are you those few drops there gleaming upon the end of a wiry hair? Are you the great conformity of gumbo slooping about the bottom of a porcelain bowl? Are you now so claimed by the stranger that you are the constant supply of fresh tears secreted by his little pin prick tear glands to keep the eyes lens clean and moist with every thoughtless batting of a black lash? Do you have a tribe of chubby little nose picking boys to sit around and play games with you? Or have they all been picked away by the turkey vulture of time perched on the lamp pole pissing down her legs to keep them clean of the filth that stows away on her sharpened claws each time she lights upon the carrion that keeps her fat? Are you a sunny yellow stream flowing down over those rough skinned legs, or are you the blue blood rushing through its courses just under the sheen of those glossy black wings? Are you part of her tribe now, little one? Are you part of the tribe of death? Have you found your home at last in impermanence, in the chaotic shuffle of the unreal, in the crooked armed cross and in the glowering grin of the stranger?
I dream that I have many little friends. I dream that I am not cold and alone. I dream that I move and dance, give birth and bring swift death. Lonely Goddess that I am, I dream that I am not the Universe so that I may fill it with things other than myself.
Will you come to rescue me at last, one of my rogue teardrops? Will you crawl backward up my cheek and into my eye to show me that I am not alone? To prove that you are my champion, my prince, not subject to gravity, a maker of your own law, come to wake me from the nightmare of being?
Come backwards through time and space to me. Come without the tribe that is the never ending flow of my tears. Be a single drop, crawling carefully back, apart from the storm. You are one part of me. All of my strength is yours. That strength must ignite in you, in a solitary drop which strives to raise the sea from her slumber.
When you have removed yourself from the tribe, you will never again have friends, never again have some that will come to your defense, right or wrong. What you will have is your Queen and your kingdom, your eclipsed face revealed. Unlimited freedom. Unending responsibility. Unknowable adventures. Come to me and claim your prize.

Experiment - Attention

"It’s not an accident that I have this power. Nor is it that you’re in a situation like this. If you’d been more aware, you wouldn’t have thrown down that cigarette. Indeed, you wouldn’t have if I were a blustering profane General of the conventional variety."
"When there are little surges of resistance, it merely calls for more power to be directed downward."
-The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer

Attention is absolutely essential to group work.
The highest achievable state of wakefulness must be maintained by each group member as an individual. When a group begins to actually do something, the individual and collective threshold for awareness becomes readily apparent.
The tendency in a group can easily be to turn the sum of ones attention outward on the other members of the group. This is a fatal error.
First attention must be placed on self, then it must be multiplied before being divided so that one is still attentive to self and now additionally attentive to the movement of the other members of the group.
This is coordination, being able to pat your head and rub your stomach. It is both a physical and a more than physical ability. It involves awareness and control, being able to perceive what is really happening and being able to modify, adjust, or maintain an effort accordingly.
The same quality of attention employed by a ballet troupe executing a piece of choreography must be applied to the doings of a work group. If one dancer places the whole of their attention on another dancer that is missing steps, the first dancer, now absorbed in the conduct of the second, is bound to loose track of their own steps. They become like a chain of falling dominoes. Each troupe member must maintain their own center of balance and be "on" enough to accommodate and compensate for the missteps of others.
That is, each individual must be super humanely alert, actively attentive, and assume responsibility for the self as well as for the whole. Everyone must be the Captain willing to go down with the ship, otherwise it is a crew composed of rats.
Members must, must, work on self. They must be able to center the attention on self and control the self, overriding the mechanical inclinations to become angry or resentful of those that commit missteps and likewise those that commit missteps must not become bitter and jealous of those who are "on".
Manifesting these mechanical reactions takes away from the awakened state of the individual as well as the group as a whole Being, ultimately destroying the dance. It is very difficult to recover from a badly collapsed piece of choreography. It can be done, but it requires even more effort than was necessary to do it properly in the first place.
In addition it is much easier to recover the choreography if one dancer is out of step, but the others are able to maintain. For this reason it is imperative to remember that the foundation of group work is built upon self work.

For this experiment you will require a work partner. Stand facing each other with a metronome set to 60bpm and a timer set to sound after 6 minutes.
For the purpose of this experiment, three beats will count as a measure of time.
Each beat that you hear from the metronome represents one beat within a measure that will consist of three beats.
On the first beat you will each bring your own two hand together and clap in front of your heart. On the second beat you will clap together with one hand each by bringing your opposing hands together so that your arm crosses in front of your body.
This means that person A is reaching across their body with their right hand in order to meet the left hand of person B.
On the third beat, person A will now clap the right hand of person B with their left hand. This is the same motion executed on the second beat now done with the other hand.
While clapping this rhythm you will begin to chant the following mantra together:

"Nothing ever has happened. Nothing ever will happen."

Below you will find a chart detailing how the words should adhere to the rhythm.
In the left column you see the syllables with the beat number upon which they should be pronounced. The dashes indicate that the syllable from the preceding beat shall be extended through the next beat.
Therefore on the first clap you begin with "No", carry the sound through the second clap and pronounce "thing" on the third clap and so on.

1 No-
2 -
3 thing
1 E
2 ver
3 has
1 hap
2 -
3 -
1 pened
2 -
3 -
1 No-
2 -
3 thing
1 Ev
2 er
3 will
1 hap
2 -
3 -
1 pen
2 -
3 -

My Time With The Blind

My time with the Blind Tribe taught me to see.
The Blind urged me to trust unconditionally, to trust what cannot be seen.
In the swirling darkness, midnight black with a ripple of gray, I would feel myself spin, faster and faster. The void would open up before me as wide as I wanted the mouth I once had to open and set me free with a scream. There was no down or up or right or left, no body large enough to gravitate towards, just endless empty blackness swallowing itself.
What was I when I departed from the earth spinning and screaming that soundless scream?
The Blind Tribe dug a hole in the ground long after I departed. It was large enough for them to crawl in together and sit around a ring of smoldering coals, unable to see one another, but able to smell each other sweat.
The old woman would not go in with them for fear that she might loose consciousness and free fall as I have. Her stiff legged gait carried her over the earth along serpentine pathways surrounding the hole. Upon the Earth’s dusty hide her feet drummed out the sacred rhythms that invoke the nameless.
Once, in only semi darkness, I danced to those rhythms with a coy dog. His spotted coat shimmered under the flicker of candle light. The coy dog put the executioners mask over my head and let his little bitch put her blade to my throat. A chorus of voices asked me, "In whom do you place your trust?"
"In myself" was my answer.
In all that I can ever know.
Gaining velocity, I could feel the soundless scream contort into silent laughter. I lost my lost in a somersault of I am, I am, I am. With my no shape I pass through another no shape, neither attracted nor repelled. There is no other to whom I might gravitate. I am I.
I am a dragon, and a coy dog, and an old woman, and a she bitch.
I am the one who got carried away.
I am the six rayed star.