RiverSpeak

Sitting by this river, my mind slows; spirit follows. Jaw unclenches; breath eases, deepens, and becomes full.

The rivers speak - the Kalamazoo, the Huron, the Rio Grande - waters moving through, pouring their wisdom of time and patience - their never-ending song, into me.

Quietly, my mind unwraps itself from around the every small thing it thought was important, crucial and urgent.

None of it was.

None was more important than this quiet peace and solitude I too easily give away.

Turning away from your screeching, screaming, self-important machinations of nothingness, I turn toward true Nothingness - the one that fills me with rushing river, scent of dry autumn and touch of warm breeze, carried here to me from somewhere more fully aligned with human soul; soul no one can define or describe, but that is felt rising above heaviness like the lotus rising above mud.

I am the mud. I am the lotus. I am the rising.

Those secrets the river spoke?

They are mine.

Now go - --

find yours.

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“Hushhh,” the river said,

“leave your fretful, worried mind

here among the reeds.”

Aniversario

Four Circles Around the Sun:

Four Haiku

First Year: YaY!

precious, precious life

no one will turn down the light!

not ever again!

><><

Second Year: Admission

autumn chill falls hard

memories flooding the ground

life never the same

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Third Year: Fighting

live strong, viejo

build the new man from within

your labor's not lost

><><><><

Fourth Year: Redefinition

write a new story

paint a color not seen

recreating 'here'

><><><><><

Estuary: A Haibun

Twenty-six hundred years ago, Old Lao Tsu passed the gatekeeper of northern China on his way to the desert to die. He was finished, sickened at heart over the ways of the world.

Before he passed through the gate, the keeper persuaded Old Lao Tsu to put down in writing all that he had learned in his long life. In very few words he left his instructions to his children, and his children’s children, and his children’s children’s children: how to live in prosperity or equally in misfortune; how to yield without fear or clamor of the soul; how to accept, without giving up; how to find peace in the heart.

All these many years later, that are only a blink of the Universal Eye, I ask you Old Lao Tsu, how long does it take for water tumbling over rock to turn boulders into fine grains of sand, traveling the river to the sea? Where is that Ocean Old Lao Tsu? Did you ever find its estuary? Does it exist, where the fresh water flows into the salty sea? Is there a beach born of boulders of our sorrows tumbled down into fine, sugary sand?

I hope you made it through those cold desert nights – and kept going till you found that shore, that restful place of peace.

We hear the distant lapping of waves and smell the salt of that Great Ocean on the breeze. It carries hopeful knowing deep into our souls, that all rivers flow to that peaceful shore where the hardened stone of our hearts breaks down into fine grains of sand - small, insignificant and common - sand on the shore.

hardened memories
softening as they are washed
turning stone to sand

Inspiration in Unexpected Places

There are folks who appear in life from out of nowhere unexpected. I came upon one the other day while shopping for a new computer. The last thing I expected was to be taught life lessons from an angel disguised as a computer salesman, but I'm grateful my ears were open enough to hear him. This one's for you Michael S. Thank you.




"How Light Shines Through Cracks"

My life is being devoured,
yet I remain whole.

I will not feed myself on scraps;
I am an invited guest to the banquet -
to the feast.

I who come
with fruits and flowers
songs and poems

I who come to the banquet
bringing you gifts,
I beg you --

Do not linger in the suffering.
Do not be reduced to scraps.

The Future

"We didn't come here to fear the future. We came here to shape it."

President Barak Obama - 9-9-09