From "can not imagine" to "will not accept"; from "will not surrender" to "can never forget". The layers and levels we uncover in meeting this our life challenge our small comforts. If we meet the surface, and draw it aside like a curtain that veils our senses, we reveal richer colors to our sight, intensify the sensation our exploring fingers find, satisfy the brightest/broadest savoring, remind us of a scent that drew us outward and upward, and make the dullest word with renewed connotation charge the mind.

It only seems an exercise of the mind, because it is written in words. The theory of your life is in these coded lines, lines you began to learn when you were very young: trained by those who had been trained, led by those who had been led. Therefore, if you ever say "Now that I know..." you may be living dead. Theory, like language, is alive, is touched by a wave, reached with a sound, and moved from this presumably fixed position to another. Language, like theory, is an exploration, it grows and changes with the time of day or night, the curve of the world or the whorl of a thigh, with loss or with welcoming, with a generation on the rise or a generation gone by.

Therefore, if you say "Now that is done..." you may be dead alive. It is only that your mind has become stuck, or the eyelid fallen over your eye. There is always another layer to the lie, another level to the sky that moves from tangible here to inconceivable there: to where the stars ride, then behind their orbits, below them, inside of them where something of us resides.

The Professor
Possibly the most disappointing lecture I ever attended took place on the East Campus of the University of Minnesota, in a modest lecture hall, circa 1983. The subject was early American literature, the topic Nathaniel Hawthorne, a novel we had been reading. Between its lines were passages of harrowing beauty and fear, a depth of darkness among the roots and trees of a new continent; a language and a context which was familiar and yet uncomfortably inaccessible, the reading of which left my mind muddied -- muddied like colonial boots, like sweat and labored harvest, like a storm-clouded new-world sermon. It troubled me a whole week. Or longer, I must admit with a wry smile, as I am thinking about it still, and find in the hurried architecture of my sentences some hesitation of the breath and... slight contortion of the spirit... a quarter-century later.

The professor walked to the board and drew a vertical line near its center, his chalk making a sharp turn and completing the line away to his right. He then slashed the chalk from upper left to lower right, and slashing again, drew another from lower left to upper right, forming an X  between a pair of axes. A puff of chalkdust fell away from his writing: a current of air pulled it outward, then gravity pulled it downward. Where it came in contact with the light, its simple form took on a swirling, complex life that you watched, amazed, then wondered: if you breathed that dust, what would happen to your lungs when you did? Dust on the board, dust in the air. Dust.

Along the X axis, the professor wrote numbers, beginning with one, and rising step by step to enumerate the chapters of Mr. Hawthorne's text. He hesitated, then declined to identify the units of the vertical measure. Then he turned to face the class. "This," he said, gesturing to the graph with his left hand, holding the chalk like an extra finger, "is Hawthorne's work."

Many people call darkness light. We all do, in fact. The wandering text above is my attempt to find a bit of light, though darkness prevails. Your attempt to drink this water, drawn from a rather deep well, shows your desire for light. My professor taught me absolutely nothing about Hawthorne, but a great deal about light and its absence.

The Laboratory
Between there and here, unceasing water runs. And if your Self has this interest - to know Yourself in this incarnation, as completely as It or You may - then every veil is already understood to be a veil, and beneath it some knowledge that is broader, understanding greater, and ability to love that is deeper. No matter that today you did not smile, or that tomorrow you will not live that love (because today you did not practice your smile): there is always a layer beneath what has just been, or what is coming into being, and beneath the layer, more light.

Walk in the woods: you are involved in your walking. The trail is a path of your making and remaking. Every moment you reinvent "Trail", and place yourself upon it. And every moment, after the first thrill of newness, the Trail becomes more and more a trail, this step the same as the last, until at the end of the day, you stop, look around, and admire how the sun has sped without your notice, your feet are tired, some passage made.

What if...

You walk along the trail and suddenly, without premeditation, stop in your tracks. Look: what do you see? In that moment our mind records a litany of images already catalogued and distinguished in your personal history. Look again. A movement, an insect, a trickle of sweat, the quickened breath, a scent of... what? Light through the canopy of leaves; stillness. Look again. A motion of one leaf against the next and the sound they make, the return of woodland noises your passage chased to silence, the desire to kiss someone, water over stones far away, the solid presence of one and then another and another until uncounted trees. Look again.

Surfaces
Once I read a text on loving, on making love, that described practices handed down through the ages. The authors drew on kama-sutric variations, and tantric ways to weave two bodies. I remember other such titles I was ashamed to pick up as a youth: the G-Spot, Your Erogenous Zones, and a multitude of other technical manuals whose goals I discovered were, generally speaking, to teach the mechanics of  physical pleasure and (sometimes) how to use the physical to embrace the heart as well. (There are some quite notable exceptions, such as The Art of Conscious Loving, by Charles and Carolyn Muir).

And how does my swirling thought arrive at this earthy, if not tawdry, destination?

Well, exactly. You want to rest on a thought, on a combination of words. Don't. What if there is a way to offer more pleasure to a lover, or to instruct greater pleasure for yourself? Excellent, and look again. What if a simple physical practice could be a pathway into the woods, a way to surrender more deeply to one another? Beautiful, and look again. What if your connecting and touching is larger than your two bodies, or your two desires, or your joined love? Look again. What if the deepest part of your partner, there where you are subtly, gently reaching, is the Spark of Life - if you are opening and offering your Spark to be lit and relit by that Spark? Look past the graph, and past the words, and past the light through the leaves, and past the emotional waves and misspoken words, and past the faces, past the five senses, look again, and again, and again, and again and again and again and again.

Until you feel your eyes open.

A bit wider.
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The back of the Canadian $10 note bears the motto "In Service of Peace", and below it, a poem.

Although Lieut. Col. John McRae had been a doctor for years, and had served in the South African War, he could never dull himself to the suffering, the screams, and the blood, and had seen and heard enough in his dressing station to last a lifetime. As a surgeon attached to the 1st Field Artillery Brigade, he spent seventeen days treating injured men -- Canadians, British, Indians, French, and Germans -- in the Ypres salient, one of the more horrific battlefields of WW I.

"I wish I could embody on paper some of the varied sensations of that seventeen days... Seventeen days of Hades! At the end of the first day if anyone had told us we had to spend seventeen days there, we would have folded our hands and said it could not have been done."

A young friend and former student, Lieut. Alexis Helmer of Ottawa, was killed by a shell burst on 2 May 1915. Lieutenant Helmer was buried later that day in the little cemetery outside McCrae's dressing station, and McCrae had performed the funeral ceremony in the absence of the chaplain. The next day, sitting on the back of an ambulance just a few hundred yards north of Ypres, McCrae vented his anguish by composing a poem.

Doctor McRae died in the year 1918 at the age of 46.

How does an Eagle holding arrows compare to a human lament?  Do we trust in God, yet trust far more in ourselves? What if the vision of our country were to be in Service of Peace, as one imagines the Tibetan population led by the Dalai Lama must be... what if our Vision were strong enough to hold back our fear?


In Flanders Fields

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
between the crosses, row on row,
that mark our place;
                                            and in the sky
the larks, still bravely singing, fly
scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead.
                                      Short days ago
we lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
loved and were loved, and now we lie
in Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
to you from failing hands we throw
the torch;
                       be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
we shall not sleep, though poppies grow
in Flanders fields.
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Fri-Sun., Aug. 22-24 Journey as Destination Earth-You-Sky (B3B) Bring yoga and awareness practices out of the studio and into the woods for a third-eye-opening weekend in the Whites. Crawford Notch car-camp promises great food, good company, and intermediate hikes to surrounding peaks; higher altitudes mean good phys. cond. is important. Cost of $55 includes 2 nights, dinn & bfst. Info about JAD series or to reg. contact L Mark Schultz.

You needn't go anywhere to find your center; you might travel around the world -- that's 24,900 miles -- and arrive at the same You who left, some 53 million footsteps later, a tad weathered perhaps, certainly wearing your second or third or fourth generation of shoes.

Ramana Maharshi, the silent saint, spent most of the years of his life within the physical confines of Arunachala, the Red Mountain, while exploring the limitless space of his Self, connected to all selves and all things. Sometimes, diminishing the number and complexity of the world's external expression, makes it easier to cultivate the stillness and peace required to go in and in. We can use a stillness practice to examine our physical self, moving into the body, that we might release it; as well as to examine and tame our mental self, moving into the workings of  the mind, that we might distinguish our Self from it, and release it .

Yet sometimes the path doesn't lead in, but out. The tantrikas know there is value in Shakti, the manifested world. If we learn to polish its mirror, if we are not fixed in our perception of Tree, Rock, Other, but instead see in the interplay of energies reflections of ourselves, see facets of the universal, then the world becomes a beautiful classroom whose lessons, simple and difficult, teach us what it means to be alive. When the complexities of interpersonal relationships become overwhelming, the empty fullness of the forest is a colorful and lively balm. The pure physical experience of the trail, with its hours of simple decision and consistent direction, clears the body of its knots and tensions, and eases the mind through its singular focus.

(But isn't that monotonous?  Monotony can never last: boredom is the product of a dulled mind, not of a dull exterior. To one practicing awareness, an hour of Nothing can be a life-changing swirl of Everything!)

So I take to the fields and the trails to be with all that is not Men and Women. The world is so large! When I leave the small-minded politics of human settlements, I remember -- thank goodness! -- how unlimited all of creation actually is. Me, this miraculous confluence of blood and breath, organic electric wiring, unlikely channel for thoughts larger than myself... this six-foot, moving cage of bones and organs, with a definite if undeclared date of expiration... will climb a mountain with my companion creatures, and in so doing, take some rest, and open wide.

Me, one more living channel connecting the tangible earth to the unbounded sky.
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An echinacea blossom sits in a vase on the kitchen table, slightly to the left of center, bowing in my direction. Some of these wildflowers are sturdier than most, and even cut retain their bearing, their color and form, for many days. There are people like that as well, keep blooming when the root is severed, because water is enough.

This particular beauty has nineteen split-end petals, in a variety of shades of pink, lateral veins and ridges changing saturation and hue and they reach out toward the tip. Nineteen petals, if a lover counted, arrives at "She loves me": an advantage when plucking, to seek out odd-petaled plants.

Then there is the flower's firework display at the seed head. Had I left it in the garden, a few hundred of possible tomorrows would have fallen to the ground, and next year there would have been more of the same. There is a deep orange red, almost black, at the center, with flashes of color radiating out, small tongues of fire. One of the petals has been partially eaten by an insect (She loves me not); another falls away toward the stem like a pink arm lowered in a curtsey (Why don't women curtsey anymore? And why don't men bow?).

One split stem of lilac shares the vase. With its frequent detours from cut to leaf, the angular stem reminds one of a Japanese drawing, the foliage lobed and pointed, large green "spades", their faces turned this way and that, denying the importance of the flower's fixed gaze, unpretentious, back-up vocals in the band, green beneath rose, brown brown-black of the wood.

All this takes place in still life, slight breeze from the window in, the breathy hum of the refrigerator is the song, I guess, the striped tablerunner their temporary land, the books and dishes digital devices belonging to the scene, the collecting clouds, the wind outside, the early-August birds and insects busily far away, while a few short words hope to contain them all, and let them go.
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My cats, of course, obey another set of spheres, and while I quiet into the solitude and the slightly muffled end of the day (even the blue TV glare has left the neighbor-houses, and the most convicted night birds have for the most part decided that sleep is good enough) as I write a few lines as exercise, or as a ladle dipped into the Well, my friendly, black, male cat, Shadow, has wandered into the influence of the front door, guttering a deep and slightly swallowed yowl, the one I have come to recognize, in the language of cats, as being a call to his mate (platonic though their mating is, no less Love, ranging to if not attaining the coital: embracing the familial, the time-worn, the touch-comforted and the understood), his call announcing Success in the Hunt, as evidenced by the flesh of a creature smaller and less offensively appointed than himself, and accustomed as a species to being prey, now prey again, a rabbit.

I heard the yowl and thought to myself, but perhaps not, and went to the door to let him in, if he were merely hungry, or uncommonly desiring to spend his night indoors. I opened the door a fraction and found the hunter looking up at me, a small rabbit draped in his jaws: he was like a miniature lion, with the body of a miniature man balanced in his maw, he was the Cat of Death and carrying his fated assignment for the night. The female, Minstrel, had of course heard the call -- it was a call to her, after all, and had nothing to do with me, but for my official function as doorman. I looked at her and said Well, he's out there waiting for you. I suppose you want to go... We speak and we are heard, if not in all the human particulars. Off she went.

I returned to my writing exercise -- my practice of stillness, an etude with neither review nor editing, nor direction but for whatever the moment presented. A few words written, and then that sound again: not the guttural sound of Shadow announcing his trophy, but one I have heard other times and in other places: the sound of a young, live rabbit having its life torn from it.

It is not a sound easily ignored.

Maybe it is like the scream of birth, but in place of rejoicing, the ultimate despair: my life is being torn from me.

One imagines that rabbits make no sound, and it is true they do not, except in at least this one, very specific occasion. Then the mistake is evident.

I had tried to separate the cat from his prey, when I first opened the door to find the Shadow of Death, but the creature was limp -- I assumed, already dead.

It is not the first time and certainly it will not be the last, that I am presented with the incredible tenacity of life, the will of the body refusing, absolutely refusing, to allow peaceful departure of the spirit; instead, the body, jealous of the Soul's capacity to travel, to pass through that doorway while the poor dust of living must be left behind, shouts and fights and curses and screams and ultimately fails... just as this rabbit I thought dead screamed again and again... until finally my cats its deliverers ended its struggle.

Do animals have souls?

They had better. If their body is taken from them, and there is nothing that remains, then, my friends, the same will be my allotted end, being a creature of this earth alike to any. If the strange coagulation of atoms that is a body will simply dissipate, be recycled like so many other bodies, and be gone, then all cells and all atoms will obey the same set of spheres.

But no: you see in the simplest creatures the most complex responses: love, certainly; loss, certainly; a Being dancing with the rest of creation. The soul as our expression and connection to the One, experiences this life through the confines of a physical form, cat or rabbit, woman or man. Let them be as alive, then, as I am, for now; as eternal and connected as I would hope to be.
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Under the gauze of midnight, where the mirrored starlight wanes
boughs of the aging branches range in the city's floodlit lanes
like the arms of assembled sentinels, who saluted you as you came
then recruited the shadows in your wake to softly hold your name

Softly they hold your name, my love, as a breeze will hold the song
two smiling, gently sighing lips released to the game of alone
like falling stars, the words reduce the dark, if not for long
but a flash of light is enough for a sight of the ground and the path to home
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"Pois, deus virou vida, assim mesmo: virou gramado, virou ar, foi respirado, e apenas então aprendeu perder..."

"Não diga." Meio-sorriso, rosto virado para que desconfiança seja oculta, perdida na sombra.

"Digo, sim, querida. Digo sim. As terras foram secas, os lagos apenas buracos no pele da planeta, ocávo, esperando..." Mas não quis saber. Oferecí água; não quis saber. "Deus tinha o meu rosto, e o teu. Olho para olho, alma a alma, e o deserto entre os dois. Aprendia perder, sim. Não acreditas?"

Acima, as nuvens se juntaram, como palmas aplaudindo. A palma se encontrou a outra, e uma faísca de luz, relâmpago, choque de voz, ruínas, perdidos, chover. Ela silenciosa, nada a responder. "Sabia -- olhando para cima, a noite se estende como papel para a pintora, só que é negra, e no espelho entre as estrelas, o mesmo poço que teus olhos, mesma profundidade franca que as pupilas. E desde estes poços vieram as águas do mundo, choro de deus, que eu também choro."

Olhando de nada para nada, ela me observa. Estou falando besteira, pintando a quadra negra, deixando as águas sem chão.

"Pois assim, deus virou vida, em tu, em mim, para que poderia sorrir e criar o sol de manhã, o chorar e molhar toda esta terra, esta tu, este eu."

"Bravo, amor. Bellísimo. Agora... vem para cama? Favor, não há nada no céu, que deverias procurar agora."


Words are thoughts become shapes. Sometimes they rise from the page from this tongue, sometimes that. The surface of the water moves with the slightest breeze; at the depths of it, silence.
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I picture a circle of relatives, drawn together by circumstance, from distances and activities that kept the majority mere echoes to one another, voices from the past, children's faces, simple times. There is a circle of relatives standing around a hole cut into the earth, gestures turned to ashes, words turned to dust.

And in that gathering of grief, as though each had swallowed a stone, the weight of gravity drwing them down, as if to join the departed one.

When a child is born, the world makes a sound, small cry to large shout, a note come into being, and every one who hears that note says yes. Now, in our sadness and in our fear - mostly in our fear - we see a life departing, and say no.

But the word is not allowed: it is an anti-word, or the lack of a sound. It denies existence, when in fact that is all there is. You cannot say "void" without it suddenly being filled to overflowing with stars. You cannot make silence without the Word coming in to fill it. When a loved one passes, your head says no, but if you will love, your heart must bear the truth of it, there is only one word, for birth and for death, and for everything in between, and that word is yes. A lover leaves you: you must say yes. A husband, a wife, cannot find the way to stay in a marriage: you must say yes. Humans heap horrors upon other humans: you must acknowledge first, say yes, then do what must be done.

If my dear aunt had said no to her husband's disease, she would not have been able to care for him. She would not have had the strength to lift that frail body, and to help his spirit free from that failing container. If she had said no, the poor man would have had to make his own passage, as his partner would have denied the road existed.

But she said it, she said yes, and helped her husband leave this place.

Now she and we are left to inhabit it, andto that task we turn our faces now, as we turn them to the rising sun, as the day burns empiness out, colors each color, and names every living thing.

Even if it is said with sadness, and with a sigh: yes.
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