Tune Up

Last night I practiced the relaxation technique I learned this past weekend. In combination with deep breathing and particular postures, I came out of my forty minute reverie feeling like a million bucks.
    I hope to add this to my daily routine as a slow lead in to physical activity and spiritual practise. It is well situated between both.
    For many years I have hoped to learn techniques that would enable me to harness the energy I've glimpsed stirring in the palms of my hands. I am committed now to finish at least three weeks of daily meditative practise. I am unconcerned if the lengths of my daily text pieces decrease. I am unconcerned if my daily drawing habit skips a beat. I will still upload a text and a drawing daily knowing that my health takes precedent over these other concerns.
    I have proved to myself that writing is beneficial and that I am able to maintain some sort of discipline. Much clarity has ensued.
    The bunnies come and go with quality and I am ok with that.
    The meditation has been needing to start for far longer than I care to admit to myself.
    I am curious to see how it will affect the rest of my life.
    Stay tuned as I tune myself up for a future full of present days.

Slow Walking Thanks

To walk streets slowly is a gift. Every step intentional, every sidewalk crack another line in a vast sprawling poem that each new walk reveals another stanza of. The houses, the homes, the buildings themselves creak with character. The hockey stick garden posts, the porch furniture sagging, the paint jobs and the rusting banisters, bicycles teamed up like herds, chained to each other. The chalk drawings on walls and in alleys, on sidewalks are all blessings. The children are safe and they can scribble, they can add to and better the ill thought out sprayings of their elders. They can write games, inviting slow walkers to take note, reminding fast walkers to slow down. Where are you rushing off to ? Yoga ? Coffee ? Don't rush to where you can slow down. Slow down all the way there.
    The trees are waking up. The blossoms cascade over lawns. There are book boxes, sharing spaces, places that reaffirm our humanity. There are so many things to give thanks for every step on the long way roundabout  towards home. Gratitude comes with breathe, with slow and careful steps. Thank you.

Starting Right Now

Do I have the time to show up at the office and churn out a short paragraph about my thoughts and feelings ? Do I have the time to moisturize my face after working outside with sun beating down and pallets of earth moved across alleyways? Do I have the time to worry about Antarctica and the ice sheets and the people and Hydro Quebec and radical skepticism and ill informed rationalism and people who think way too much ? Do I have the time to consider and reconsider and reconsider still my contribution to what seems like a confused and collapsing civilization? Do I have the time to make a comic book and dream of a career in the arts instead of selling everything I have and moving to a small cabin in the countryside?

    Ask me what I would do if I had five years to live and I wouldn't answer 'what I'm doing now' so why am I doing what I'm doing now instead of what I'd do if I had only five years to live ?
    Tell me about it. Tell me about my choices and my decisions and my set backs and cop outs and excuses and fears and paralysis and devil you know. Devil you know will strangle every last breath out of you, five years or no. And by you I mean me.

    Here we are accumulating garbage for the big parade. Accumulating garbage to tuck into the loose corners of our coffins. And coffins ! What an extravagance. We'd be so lucky to get a nice lacquered wooden box to rot in. Some folks never get the option. They sink into the field where they are struck down, maybe thrown into the ravine with the others.

    Sure, go back to school to get a masters degree, join the post docs in line for food and clean water. Wait for the corporate overlords to have their ghost of Christmas past moment, wait for Dick Cheney to shudder at his reflection and take it all back, take it all back, restore the droned children to life, restore the forest to it's majesty, restore the women to their humanity.

    Let's work a tad harder, let's do a little spring cleaning all year round, let's whip it out and get it on, let's high five until the sun rises, let's sort the recycling, reuse the reusables, take out the trash, forgive our shitty neighbours, rejoice with our cousins and see where that takes us.

    This is a moment of missives, this is the time for all times, we've made so many children, let's scrub the sidewalks for them so we don't have to pick glass shards out of their kneecaps. Let's turn off the power so they can breathe. Let's stop with the filth so they can eat some decent food and make their teenage parties something not tinged with ragged desperation born of hopelessness.

    We'll turn around in circles until we straighten out this mess. We'll pull the plug and wear extra sweaters in the winter. We'll collect family members to live with us. We'll turn this boat around, I swear, and plant gardens in every cop car.

    Starting now, starting right exactly now.

On Yearning

Some songs make me yearn for something heavy. Nothing in particular, just solid, deep yearning. Some songs just punch you in the heart and open this place where longing and bittersweet pain mingle and confound you.
    Longing is something I've long associated with. I reckoned it as a major force in my life early on. I would yearn and long and weep and swell my heart. I would imagine how incalculably awesome it would be to merge with old mossy walls, to enter the landscape. No, it wasn't imagination. It was imageless. It was pure emotion. My kisses turned to bites. I needed union with X. No matter how far away, I reached out my heart strings, those auric ropes that when severed make you grind your teeth and rend your clothing. I would reach out those tendrils and they would wrap themselves around the object of my longing.
    Often it was a girl, someone who I fixated upon, someone who would complete me. Of course, it's now that I see it was the yearning itself I wanted. I loved the state, so romantic to need something distant, other, removed, transcendent, spectacular. Craving, relishing future morsels, ordering a second burger half way through the first. Not necessarily living in the present, caught somewhere between past and future, skipping over what was directly in front of me. Preferring some moment yet to come, maybe never to come.
    Some songs make every pore in me quiver, gasping for air. Every pore puckering, gulping as much love as they can. Arid stretches where I simply walk weakened with thirst, giddy from hunger, light headed because some something greater than I hovers near but still just slightly out of reach. Curves to dwell on, trees that make you ache, skies pounding out cloud after cloud of intangible handfuls.
    Some songs make me wail, make me mourn, make me shudder sobs, make me cry, simply put, make me cry. Open wounds, cracked scabs oiled over and peeled away, heart, heavy, hope, words like that. Vastness of feeling, reaching, failing, gasping. All that.
    Very few songs do all this. Songs I can't tell you which ones. Songs I don't know right now. Music I can't play, can't understand. Some soul, some blues, some folk, some dirge dragging every widow from grave to grave, baskets of flowers, dumb struck children following closely, staggered greys all around, threat of spring, threat of summer, threat of full life ripening, forever always.

Guess What ?

Certainty is a crutch. Knowledge is false comfort. Being informed is one of the biggest wastes of energy one can participate in. Go ahead, read the news, see if I care. Oh damn it, I do care. I care about our collective search for meaning, I care that you think keeping up on the press releases from our owners is a good and important pursuit. I care because I have compassion. The news junkie is akin to the Moonie, hanging on the every last word from his master. Of course, I'm not in the deprogramming business, so every man for himself.
    I've been in a cult already. I know that sweet flavour of group mind. It's real. It's also short lasting and in the long run no one can say if the pros outweigh the cons. Having done my short tour of duty in a group project, a group intent on worshiping the elementals and celebrating feast day after feast day, I am better equipped to realize that I partake of belief systems. I know that I just may believe certain things. Knowledge of what my faith may be, mind you, is false comfort. It is also widely inaccurate in that everything constantly shifts. Some pet opinion of mine is dashed to bits with a new article read. Just like changing shirts as some old bastard said of belief. Switch it up.
    The sorriest fools I've encountered are the one's with faith unrecognized. They puff and preen regarding the latest finding, doled out to them from sanctioned sources of course. Sceptical about any questionable thing except their own news sources. This happens time and again. If you are going to be sceptical, go for the whole thing, old friend. Question everything, not only the straw men your favourite podcasts have already selected. Question what and who you are, why you eat what you eat, why you feel how you feel, always and often. Question your brand loyalty, even if their reputation is based on quality and low low prices both. There is a catch somewhere.
    How is it that one can recoil from pundits and authors and honoured guests of Oprah yet swallow whole lines fed by governmental agencies. The mind boggles.
    It's not that I side with the legendary Hashishin and the wry motto hijacked by video-gamed slaves, 'nothing is true, everything is permitted'. No, not so. Lots of things are true. Even some contradictory things. Permissiveness I leave to the society at hand, without having any inclination to agree. We are, to a one, searching for meaning in our lives. Even the cynics and the materialists, even the ones who dismiss meaning and it's search as wastes of time. Even them. They too search. They may search for it in endless fouled up relationships, in extended grudges with best selling authors, in the collecting of immaterial details surrounding television serials. You do it, you think it, you feel it, chalk it up to your humanity. No one can shake that search. Cold grave or waving dead relatives welcoming you into the light, same thing. God, no god, moot point, same thing. Paradox all, paradox always. There is no escape. The thing is the thing. We are one, we are splintered fragments. There is no difference. Pull out all the logic stops, draw charts proving my words empty and I'll laugh if I have the time to honour how you have wasted yours.
    What do I believe ? Who's asking ? And why would you care ? Follow me around and gauge my deeds. Crunch the numbers and conduct severe meta-analysis. There is a creature out there who tricks. There are liars and there are storytellers. There are magicians and wizards. There are cobblers who hoard diamonds under the floorboards, still others who heal the poor souls who come to get some shoes repaired. The cosmos is made of a warp and woof, a black and white tiled checkerboard floor like the stodgy Masons dance on. This fabric wobbles and careens. Upon, within and through it exist all manner of realities, enjoying all grades of existence. That there monster is only sixty-four percent real, that table closer to ninety-eight. Of course, it all depends on where you are standing and who you really are. Stop it, my head hurts. Now, it's yours, is it ? We'll see about that.
    The trickster lives in a place between places. The world axis may determine the land that is ours but others still creep about the borderland. Two is not the biggest number around. Who among you relish ambiguity ? Come then, we'll sit at the same table and tell jokes at the expense of those who think they know what's going on.

Oh God, Not This Again

At around fifteen I got serious about deconstructing Christianity. My upbringing related religion more to cultural identity than anything else. My immigrant parents instilled in me the relationship of Hellenism to Eastern Orthodoxy. Icons in the house, church at holidays and an annual communion. Christ was infantalized as Christouli, a smaller, cuddlier Jesus. The Virgin Mary in turn was made diminutive. Bite sized for children with the appropriate down-sizing suffix. In Greek, any word can be made diminutive via suffix, even God.
    Since religion wasn't forced down my throat I was able to indulge my interest in it. I would read the bible, a copy of King James with red letters and a zipper that I thrifted. I collected iconography, enjoying the kitsch value of some and the majesty of others. Of course I read Siddhartha by Herman Hesse and explored a cursory overview of the great world religions. I read on the history of the Christian church, it's borrowing of pagan symbols from older religions. I enjoyed and employed symbolism in my art and in my life. I also viciously criticized the Church as a teenager and young adult.
    By my mid twenties I knew it was too easy of a target and I developed a more nuanced critical approach. I didn't believe in the God of the Old Testament, not being able to really get past Exodus. What a total manipulative jerk that guy was. Who can buy into this stuff ? Of course, the Song Of Songs spells things out a little different, romance and sufic flavouring. And Jesus was always ok. I never have confused the religion with it's followers. People are so incredibly disappointing at times, aren't they ?
    I was intrigued with the mystical branches of the big three, Cabala, Sufism and Gnosticism. I knew more about this stuff than my religion bashing friends. Know your enemy and all that, I say. Though I don't buy into Big Daddy, here are some things that I may buy into. A conscious universe, local gods being consciousness on an elemental, planetary, solar, galactic scale, nature being intelligent as a whole. I forget what this kind of thinking is classed as. I couldn't give two shits about any science saying otherwise. Science measures what can be measured. What can't be measured is the province of wonder. I wonder aloud and I feel it's completely allowed to do so. Besides, science is never the problem with these things. The problem rests squarely with those that have convinced themselves that they can speak for science, though science itself can never and will never rest.
    I'm still astounded by atheists my age who are still grinding axes and who have an elementary understanding of theology and mythology. Tell it to the judge. Echo chambers aren't places to hang out in. I'm more than comfortable entertaining notions such as local deities masquerading as creator gods to enslave populations, hierarchies of angelic intelligences popping by once in a while to see how the monkeys are doing, currents fed by long term focus and prayer creating structures that eventually behave like gods, a cosmos that is just doing what it's going irregardless of my opinions concerning it let alone yours.
    Recently I was asked what I believe spiritually. My first written response was a nightmare of complicated somersaults. I put it aside and returned to the text months later. I started over. I don't know what I consciously believe. There must be belief working behind the scenes, under cover. Things I take for granted, an ideology I harbour that informs my take on things. Consciously though, the closest I can come to belief is entertaining the notion that everything is alive. Now this is crazy talk, of course, simply because 'alive' is offset with 'dead'. Maybe another way of putting it is that I believe that consciousness is the ground of all being. That life is everywhere and in shapes we would hardly recognize. That there are invisible worlds that overlap and intersect our own, worlds that are populated. What this stuff has to do with god per se is still unresolved.
    Now religion ain't nothing if it ain't lived and living. A set of dogmatic rules simply won't cut it for me. A living, active spirituality is one that employs a concerted effort, a practice, ritual movement, constant re-engagement with belief, constant updating of opinion, relational interfacing with the wider world. If one lives a certain way, in keeping with the idea that the cosmos is conscious, one renders the cosmos conscious. And again, it doesn't matter what anyone else says because they may be doing the exact same thing but with their cute set of parameters. My story is mine with truth and falsehood both moot.
    It's not that the jury is out, the jury was never in. We are far flung in vastness, vastness of a scale that is incomprehensibly multi-directional. Big Bigness. Small Smallness. In-Between In-Betweenness.
    This person will wonder, speculate, worship nature, write poetry, fall in love, cry for no reason and mistrust anyone who says emphatically that they know the answer, via lab coats or prayer beads. My god comes in fractal expression, often goes plural and only demands occasional ecstatic union with all of creation. Simple stuff but bound to change.