Don't Know

I don’t know yet and I probably never will.
Everything is better that way. Not knowing anything for certain, so certain so certain so certain. Let it be a mystery.
Whatever it is let it touch you, kiss your mind open your face with mouth yawning wide in response to a curious sensation. Want to chop it up, box it label it, display it? Such a pathetic response to the real deal.

The real deal, ha! No real way, no way. Something comes out and we say, “don’t let it stop!” Just one moment after the next, never knowing, like a snow bird, robin was it?
Cardinal poised on the branch, little red riding hood. Nobody knows, nobody knows. The trouble I’ve seen? It didn’t trouble me at all when I went all jiggly like jelly melting over hot cake.
What the hell. No mind. Don’t nobody mind what’s going down here.
Didn’t I sing to the walls last night? Waking them up to the starlight and moonbeams and the little exploding lights in the sky.

I am so far from home, a weary traveler.
There is no such thing as home after all. We’ll always be moving if we want to remain alive, some part must always be in motion. If it isn’t the outside that lacks the charms of home then it’s the inside rearranging, that sensation of loosing my mind.
Loosing it is so different from letting it go. Loosing implies the grasping, the desperate urge to contain, while letting is a form of adoration.

What is more important than love?
Such a stupid word for a thing that stands outside of the kingdom of syllabic moaning and groaning. In human bodies, out of human bodies.
What is it, this thing we call life, now, love?
I don’t know and why strive to know through entrapment and dissection. Let it flow freely through whatever I am, wherever I am, whenever I can. Ride this pale horse this strange fleshy creature, a mighty big dog,
Oh death the eternal dark place from which we emerge and to which we return like a bright and shining eye eclipsed by a lid, in with a blink.
Flash one life, flash two life, flash three…The blink of an I . I am this, I am that, I am that I am, say on sayer. Whatever you wish is my command.

 I can change my mode, mode, mode, mode. Cause I’m a billion different people from one day to the next. A slippery sliding whatever it is.
I already told you I don’t know. I don’t know and you don’t know because it can’t be held without dying, like butterflies or opals or those dripping stalagmites beneath the earth.
You can’t hold life, liberty, love in your hand or even in the intestinal coils of the brain. God, it’s stuffed with packing peanuts.

The main point is not what I think with words, the main thing is conductivity. We just need to let it flow right through, and knowing most definitely obstructs the flow because when we know we no longer seek, we hold the crumpled dead thing in our hand and say this is a butterfly.
But this is not a butterfly. This is a crushed dead thing. Butterflies fly and extend long black tongues into flowers to extract nectar from bright blooms, all things that cannot happen when they are held in your hand.
In that moment that you reach out and grab it, it ceases to be what it was, because we are motion.
That is all. We are not what we think. We are what we do. You only exist when in motion.

You are nothing when you are speculating, thinking, waiting. Of course I can’t be certain about this or any of the things that can be said.
They will wiggle away, change into something new, and leave me holding their jackets, looking shocked. I can only let it roll out, rush through a thing in motion, something that I call love or life or liberty.
What I call it and what it is. Two separate animals. An arbitrarily designated connection.
Everything is better this way, not knowing anything for certain, letting whatever it is unfold unimpeded.
Go go little butterfly, dragonfly shape shifter. Questions are so much more useful than answers.

Sixteen Below

He tells me of the first time he met Allen Ginsberg. He was a young man, an independent reporter from New York come to Boulder Co. to interview Ginsberg about a planned act of civil disobedience. There was a factory there where the triggers for the Atom bomb were being manufactured. Ginsberg planned to sit on the railroad tracks thus preventing the train from reaching the factory.

My friend follows Ginsberg into a house, his mind racing with thoughts about the other man's homosexuality, asking himself if he could really say no if Ginsberg wanted to have sex. The first thing he sees upon entering the house is a woman giving a man a blow job.
Ginsberg is oblivious. It takes him a moment to realize that something is going on. When he does, he merely says, “Oh, lets go upstairs.”
Upstairs my friend sits on Ginsberg's bed beside him. His heart is pounding. In addition to concerns over sexuality, his mind is embroiled in the matter of the first question and what his peers at the radio station back in New York will think.

“Mr. Ginsberg,” my friend begins.
“Call me Allen.”
“How do you reject nuclear madness?” my friend blurts the question out spasmodically.
“I don’t reject anything.” Ginsberg tells him. “I’ve come here to make love to plutonium, to sit on the railroad tracks and be connected to it, to be connected to everything.”
Ginsberg suggest that they do some free associative poetry spinning. Gazing out the window at an empty curbside he lays the moment on my friend. All of this, along with the rest of the conversation, changes my friend's life.

He tells me this, and he tells me that he has never told the story in quite this way to anyone before. He has mentioned interviewing Ginsberg, he has mentioned having the recording in a box somewhere.
He has never had this moment before. This moment is new, unique to us, we two who are reflections of one another, who create with words our identities from the fabric of fear, the fear of being.
We sit in silence and look into one another's eyes, dissolving for a moment our creation, our creation of the world and the other to inhabit it, the other to speak to, the other to wonder at, the other to fear and to love.

We don’t know why this is possible, this silence between us. It allows my friend to tell me his story in this particular way for the first time and the only time.
We could try to recreate it, but it will never be the same. We will never be the same two people on the same day in the same place, daring to press against the veil of fear. Daring to speak and be heard. Daring to listen and accept everything.

Leaf

Every time I catch sight of a falling leaf I feel that I have witnessed an awesome event.
Why is that?
For a moment I consider that it’s like when a baby loses a tooth, but then I realize, no, it’s more rare to witness any given tree dropping a leaf than a child loosing their tooth. You know how many teeth your child will loose as they mature, you will be there for many of them, and those extractions you don’t witness, you’ll be informed about, in most cases you’ll hold the tooth in your hand, you might sneak it out from under a pillow and leave a silver dollar in its place.
That leaf that you see falling from a tree is more like one of innumerable hairs falling from a head, which when you think of it that way, at first, it seems like no occasion for awe. People shed hair all the time, and so must trees shed their leaves, even when it’s unseasonable.
Why then the awe?
Because it’s an intimate moment shared with this random tree. I may never see it loose another leaf. The next time I pass, it may be a still bit of scenery, either naked, or covered in orange or green foliage. It will give an impression of being static, as if it has always stood thus. My attention will be attracted to the moving objects in the environment, humans, birds, cars, cats. If I take note of the tree, it will be of the whole tree, or the entire canopy of leaves shimmering with sunlight, but not of that moment of separation, that instant when a small part of the entirety falls.
I suppose that is where the awe originates.
To see a leaf fall is like witnessing a birth, the moment when something that was a part of one thing emerges suddenly distinct and isolated. Behold the brave leaf twirling gracefully towards the earth, a solitary thing, dancing on the wind, lost eventually to the mulch. It’s a lifetime that lapses before my eye for a duration of time that I call 3 seconds.
Likewise, I am still twirling in free fall, no longer what I was, not yet what I will be, a thing in motion, excited, confused, thrilled, frightened, streaking through a duration of time with definite limits. Transience, mortality, in the falling of a leaf. The mirror of my own existence.
Every time I catch sight of a falling leaf I have witnessed my own transgression.

Light Benders

Possible lives, possible moments, possible lies. Possibly the biggest lie I ever told was, “Fine, thank you.”
Sitting in the Boulevard Cafe, watching the traffic, watching the trees grow a millimeter a month, listening to the conversations of others, the music from bygone eras washing down over my lipstick stained disappointment. No cherry pie, but six choices of coffee. No cherry pie. The noise of life swallowed down with hot decaf tea. The noise of a kitchen, which is the noise of life, the stuff that fuels these fleshy forms coming out on large round white plates.

Fleshy forms, such a deceptive word, “fleshy.” We imagine something very solid when we hear that word, something definite and unchanging, something akin to stone or oak, but it is more mutable than that. It is changing constantly, cells being replaced nightly, a tiny imperceptible operation that leaves you with an entirely new body in seven year cycles. Like watching trees grow. You don’t see it, but its happening, its there, an invisible process of transformation. We have been deceived into thinking that we are stable, of an unchangeable essence, we are who we are and no other. We are one static personality, a good person, a strong person, or perhaps a bad person, a weak person, a smart person, a talented person, a tenacious person, an affable person, or we are a person composed of a combination of two or three of these choices but no more.

We think that we are inherently something,, but anyone who has ever turned their attention inward has faced the terrible truth: we are inherently nothing, we are only something in particular depending on who is looking. We are different things to different people, and when we are the only one looking in at our self, then we are just the one who is looking and the other we thought that we were is a farce. They start us in the beginning, making us choose the words to define ourselves; naughty , nice, fireman, ballerina, president, veterinarian. Just as they were started off. If we look far enough back we remember choosing certain things as if it were a game: my favorite color is green, I like rock music, I read paperback horror stories, I hate musicals and fish.

Well, anyway, I remember making those choices. Perhaps I am the only one. Or perhaps I am the only one being honest. Because the truth is terrifying, a free fall of no cherry pie ever. You don’t see it, but it’s there, an invisible process of transformation catalyzed when nothing notices itself. Our outward forms shift and change and our emotional states vary and our thoughts obey certain patters, certain habitual tracks upon which to run their train. But who is the passenger? A pure and shining void. A frightful bit of nothing caught in a little temporal whirlwind. We call it life, self, mind and body.

And if you see this, if you look at someone beside you and perceive them as a fleshy dirt devil, a living process for transforming light, a sort of perpetual motion machine circulating raw nothingness, and you know that you are not supposed to see it, because you already agreed early on to play the game and not see such things, then you know you are not what is defined in the game rules as “fine.”  You know that if you tell them what you are seeing they will do what they can to stop you from seeing it because it ruins the game. 

So I say, “Fine, thank you.”  and continue watching our possible lives, possible moments, possible lies play out. Six different types of coffee but no cherry pie and the traffic flowing on the street outside.  A free fall. Watching the traffic, watching the trees grow a millimeter a month, listening to the conversations of  others, the music from bygone eras washing down over my lipstick stained disappointment. A frightful bit of nothing caught in a little temporal whirlwind I call myself.

In Between

Something stuck in between worlds is lurking in the halls of dream. Something shapeless that takes shape, whatever shape is handy. Something that has been waiting through the abysmal lurching of time, growing colder and lonelier, now reaches out a twisted hand to grasp at something other than itself. Something warm to cling to. Something warm to crawl through, to devour slowly from the inside. A new shape to take with the force of Princes and warriors and beasts of the wild, those things beyond morality, those
things which take what they need without asking, without hesitation or remorse. Something that glides between the waking and the dreaming moment, a silent thief, a beggar, a suitor, a seducer. It offers you the cold run of eternity in exchange for the hot fleeting passion of a moment. “Let me have your moment.”, it begs, “And I will give you forever.” The stillness, the quiet, the darkness of eternity, for a glaring flash of heat and movement, a wild cacophonous dance through the temporary. If you take that twisted hand, if you take your place as one of death’s concubines, one of those many shapes it penetrates for a moment and is then left as cold and wanting of heat as ever, you join in that torpid waiting, the waiting of the spider for the next wriggling thing that may pass your way. You, now the something in between. You, now the emptiness. You, now the loneliness, the cold. You waiting through the abysmal lurching of time, waiting for some hot live other to submit to your ravenous kiss. Longing to inhabit that ephemeral world of the dream which melts under your caress like vapors of steam blown away by a wind. When you touch it, it becomes as you are, real, emptiness, vast and cold. Still you cannot be without it, you, neither wholly of one state or another, are doomed to lurk in the mist, taking whatever shape is available at the time. Seeking heat, seeking movement, seeking that which you lack, wriggling your way slowly, one conquest after another, through the world of shape, color and form like a worm through an apple. You cannot touch the mists without changing them, you cannot be without that touching, that taking. An eater of dreams, an eater of life, a shape shifting something making its way desperately through the myriad of forms as the infant wriggles through the birth canal, or the soldier over the charred and blood soaked battlefield. You will take what you need. That is the only law. You will be whatever you have become. You will struggle to exist and you will change shapes as necessary. You will be forever longing, forever reaching, forever struggling.

Experiment: Turning Water Into Wine

To execute the following experiment you will require two translucent goblets of equal proportions; one empty and the other full of water, and a small bottle dropper.

Set aside a space and time in which you may conduct this experiment without interference of any kind. Be seated with the necessary implements laid out before you. Take the dropper in hand and begin to breath deeply and slowly. Allow your breathing to connect you to your physical presence.

When you feel sufficiently collected, summon the full power of your attention and place it on the water in the first goblet. Use the dropper to transfer the water from the full goblet to the empty goblet one drop at a time. Keep your attention on the water and its slow transposition.

Let each drop be the only important thing upon your mind; worry neither about the water that has already been moved nor the water that awaits relocation. Be present in the motion of taking the water, in the motion of moving to the next glass, and the motion of releasing a single drop. In every step be attentive to the moment and free of concern about the steps that precede and succeed the present.

Your mind will wander, do not resist and struggle with this natural occurrence. When you have become distracted, simply acknowledge the break in your contact with the moment and restore it. Do not hope for the experiment's conclusion.

Continue as if this is your eternal occupation; it will not end, it never began, it has always been and will always be so. Carry on thusly until all of the water has been transferred.

Every Little Thing

Every little thing will be swept away in the great storm. All of those things which seem big and important now, will become tinier and tinier as Father Time drives you onward towards the abyss.

Try to remember one thing, try to do one thing that was conceived of in your most passionate and inspired moment. If you manage to do even one thing, it will be a miracle.

The mind is like a dry erase board, a zoom room that reflects today’s special. Tomorrow the special will be different, and you will have no recollection of what it was that tickled your fancy yesterday.

All of those precious moments are being dragged like enchanted sea shells out to sea. If you dare to reach in for one, and hold a moment for too long, the tide will catch you as well. How gingerly you have hopped about to keep your toes dry, avoiding what will come eventually.

Those who do not risk holding the moment now will have had no practice when at last the red bull escorts them to sea.

What a whirlwind awaits us all. A greedy tempest that will snatch up all of your moments and toss them haphazardly, and you will find that you are those moments, that they are where you were meant to store your soul.

A moment is amorphous, regenerative. It is a point, a center from which you may begin a journey . Any moment will do. That maritime voyager, scuttling through the maelstrom will do much with a moment that has been made habitable.

All the Great Work that there is to be done is in tiny things. Put yourself in the details. They add up. One moment lived is a lifetime.