[Easter fireworks. Oaxaca, Mexico. Photo by Maria Cipriani. Click on the image to enlarge it]The universe is forever falling apart --
No need to push the button,
It collapses at a finger's touch:
Why, it barely hangs on the tail of a sparrow's eye.
The universe is so much eye secretion,
Hordes leap from the tips
Of your nostril hairs. Lift your right hand:
It's in your palm. There's room enough
On the sparrow's eyelash for the whole.
A paltry thing, the universe:
Here is all the strength, here the greatest strength.
You and the sparrow are one
And, should he wish, he can crush you.
The universe trembles before him.
- "Destruction" by Shinkichi Takahashi
Nothing can deviate from the fact of its own existence:
it is the perfect example of what it is. This is Suchness, and
Suchness is Empty.
- Lee Robertson
Remember when you're feeling very small and insecure, how amazingly unlikely is your birth...
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space, cos there's bugger all down here on Earth!
- Monty Python, from "The Meaning of Life" movie
I want to sing out a few crazy ideas for I am a man of strange tastes and find ideas to be actually beautiful, sometimes stunning like fireflies lighting a dark path, flashing, disappearing and flashing again. Ideas melt quickly from concept to story, from story to music. I want to leave the reader with a little music, a little utterly unreasonable hope.
- Michael Ortiz Hill
Dear Dance. Christmas Eve 2014.
Ohkeh Owingeh Reservation
Dear Penurious Pilgrim,
Ebb and flow...tides, moon...breathe...Trust, be in the daily minute with some joy and, if not joy, then with some good purpose to be present and just "drink a cup of tea"...Trungpa Rinpoche (Tibetan Buddhist teacher) and Sung San Sunim (Korean Zen master) used to say to their students when they lamented the slings and arrows of material existence (samsara) and of mind, "Can you just go drink tea?" My answer, silently in my head, is "Yes. With a shot of tequila on the side....grrrrrrr...." and then I chug-slug my shot of double espresso! Often. And life goes on...Things will change, are changing...we may have to rearrange ourselves in the universe which really does a "bang up job" out there and all around us, whole galaxies colliding with each other so who says it must be pretty cuz it ain't, not for the collisions and without insurance policies to cover all that. Witnessing this cosmic show we "oooohhh!" and "ahhhhhhh, gorsh dang, vur' pritty!" from our planetary perch we imagine is safe, secure and solid. HA! We, too, "but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!" (Jack Kerouac).
Thus, be present, praise, pray - "You are here to kneel where prayer has been valid" - T.S. Eliot - raise a little Cain, and push your way into places which may not easily yield...one has a birth right to push, one must in order to escape the womb and once escaped we push the harder still to escape the memory of womby places and people which keeps us forever immature, undeveloped, sucking addictively at one or many spiritual "teats" but these are "winter teats". These keep one frozen, arrested, forever pulling at withered dugs promising salvation, enlightenment and surcease or wealth, health, good looks and power, while said promissory teats refuse to be let go of - "Thou shalt not wean!" - demanding suck while the "soma" (narcotic) fluid flows into mutual infantile dependencies between the dug and the dug tuggers.
These we must flee at some point to drink much stronger stuff, Life-as-It-is, bitter, dark, perhaps with a pastel finish, a little sweetness on the tongue but, taste as taste is and can, we can become fortified eventually, without need of regressive libations...a hero's journey sure...there are days, though, when just drinking a cup tea is a heroic act, affirmative, not a denial of but an assent to apparent, lived contradictions as such tea is made and drunk while "watching the sunset and feeling the samsara (suffering) of the world (Trungpa Rinpoche)," and small "graceless moments" become lovely (enough) from good/right uses/intentions. No magic solutions but profound alterations of awareness may (no guarantee) emerge within the crush of polarity, hands empty, heart broken, mind empty or full, tea cup or stronger brew nearby perpetually filling and spilling.
One reaches. In reaching we are aspirant broken gods imaging and informing other broken gods perhaps to no avail but avail we must, we must respond, and in our response inform, answer the appeal of samsara within the gods and selves, within the very cells, imaging our worlds, galaxies, universes...dreams of constancy are the constant. We must make do with tea and trust, eyes wide open, reserving full rights as creatures to protest and preserve our nests of mind and mortality, our dreams of being more-than-mortal coil spinning, too, hoping to somehow outlast dirt and hurt.
Los Alamos, New Mexico Christmas 2014
You are a unique witness (literally, with-ness) to that-which-is unfolding , your eyes and consciousness give it meaning by your witness and response. No guarantee of an easy ride but while you are cogent, eyes wide and with feeling function operative, bear witness tear by tear, prayer by prayer, respond/avail/advance, be with, and push, ADVANCE, when and where you can, and go brew and drink your tea. Tell a joke or two with the wife, get out some night in the coming weeks and look at stars (those which are not shy and allow themselves to be seen)...say to your self, "It's rougher where they are." Hear the crickets, the bullfrogs, perhaps the sound of wind over waves, smell pines and leaves...realize you are one of the wealthiest men in the universe in that, and this, moment...yet, and yes, we blink and loose that wealth, then we yet again open our eyes and there it all is, disarray, misery, aurora borealis reminding us and the universe "to be gay," to shine on brightly bearing the aboriginal burden of wakefulness.
Perspective and orientation make us alternately kings and paupers. The human experience is this-as-such in the suchness which "is a fundamental, intrinsic, or characteristic quality or condition" within and upon which, as Zen Buddhism poetically/alleviatingly paints it, "the Bird's Path" which unfolds/reveals each life into it's unique variant expression and deviation liquidly in quiddity as we each are invited/enticed to cultivate the witness in "king state" of mind/seeing (fullness) and evenly/equally, too, in "pauper state" of mind/seeing (emptiness), paradoxically the richer for the poverty and all the poorer for voraciously stuffing "the universe into our eyes" (poet Shinkichi Takahashi)...but there is no judge really of either state though the animal we are reserves just rights to complain at empty bellies, encroached territories, crotch urgencies, skin withers, fur falls...brittle goes the bone, so small the gathered human corners, so great the necessary mercies. We must not dishonor the animal we are with "spiritual" instruments designed to cut off our tails insistently singing false praise to "holy" denials and "sanctifying" trials to better or annihilate the brute and brawn of of our spinal existence...and yet...and yet we humanly discern variegating and variant states of mind, each discernment a gateway in potentia...these lived contradictory states "just are"- no fault of our own but of our stars and scars - the way things are. Just is. These states flee into other formulations, spinning vortices continuing, worlds coming into existence, worlds going out of existence, and so go their local gods as ours, too, expire minute by minute winking all the way, pointing away from themselves saying, "Hey, don't blame us (wink wink)!"...meanwhile, someone or something somewhere may now be looking down on your life exclaiming, seeing beauty in the majestic conflagration of human beingness, "and everybody goes "Awww!"
Sketch in art class by Tien Yi Ho
THEREFORE, HENCE FORTH:
"Make a joyful noise!" - proclaims psalmist King David - which is a vocation I can get with.
All this suchness to sing though it may not fill your belly though perhaps the heart swells into sounding, therefore, therein is one's right to PUSH! One may kow tow, or just be cowed, but if the universe is a Thou then one may bullishly assert, NOW! and advocate, even fight for one's birth right - some bread, a bed, a patch beside a stream or a doll house street, sweat-and-blood won, proclaiming a personal kingdom. It's all meat for cosmic forces "running the show." Best to bare the tooth when needed eschewing tempting teats. Now harken! there's laughter of rivers, earthly and cosmic, Milky or Muddy Ways somewhere to be heard. Hard to hear but it's there in our jokes within apparent linear absurdities, i.e. the requirement of Some(No)thing Some(No)where for such suffering, such stunning loss which human and perhaps other one's have sacred duty to scoff at, a reminder of free will though we spill down worm holes devouring our own tails/tales, middle fingers proffered, battered lips praising still that we have witnessed, yes, cracked, all this. And thus with a mortal kiss Love in the crush and crank is sealed.
Another job I endorse - useless kisses toward "a bliss beyond the fiddle." (Poet Rainer Rilke)
"Make a joyful noise!" - proclaims psalmist King David - which is a vocation I can get with.
All this suchness to sing though it may not fill your belly though perhaps the heart swells into sounding, therefore, therein is one's right to PUSH! One may kow tow, or just be cowed, but if the universe is a Thou then one may bullishly assert, NOW! and advocate, even fight for one's birth right - some bread, a bed, a patch beside a stream or a doll house street, sweat-and-blood won, proclaiming a personal kingdom. It's all meat for cosmic forces "running the show." Best to bare the tooth when needed eschewing tempting teats. Now harken! there's laughter of rivers, earthly and cosmic, Milky or Muddy Ways somewhere to be heard. Hard to hear but it's there in our jokes within apparent linear absurdities, i.e. the requirement of Some(No)thing Some(No)where for such suffering, such stunning loss which human and perhaps other one's have sacred duty to scoff at, a reminder of free will though we spill down worm holes devouring our own tails/tales, middle fingers proffered, battered lips praising still that we have witnessed, yes, cracked, all this. And thus with a mortal kiss Love in the crush and crank is sealed.
Another job I endorse - useless kisses toward "a bliss beyond the fiddle." (Poet Rainer Rilke)
Meanwhile, endure. perdure, either orphan or, certainly,
Overture
or Ordure
does an orchard make from stone (peach),
tomatoes reborn stray between rows and roses
wilding in heaped woods yard-once'd,
plankt-ruins' old stead close beside a wagon trail
barely road/not road, availed centuries shovel-preserved,
rough-used;
blood rock, mud mortar,
aviled red seamed redundancy
over worked - bruised,
hoof, foot, wheel
splay where rose
thoughts' flowers
not stray—
remains a
feminine
pause,
a braid of
purple shade,
rough pines,
and poplar,
one fruit tree still daring.
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