June 6th, 2008 02:34pm
Stephen T. Berg
There’s someone swaying by your
side, lips that say Mashallah
Mashalla wonderful, god inside
attraction, a spring no one knew
of wells up on the valley floor,
lights inside a tent lovers move
toward. The refuse of Damascus
gets turned over in the sun; be
like that yourself. Say mercy,
mercy to the one who guides your
soul, who keeps time. Move, make
a mistake, look up. Checkmate. -Rumi
I fear. I fear upsetting people, making people wait, frustrating people, disrupting people. I fear being thought inept, silly, irrelevant, stupid, tedious. I fear being found guilty. I fear shame. I fear having my life work defined by a mistake. I fear a loss of reputation; I fear not having one. I fear being disgraced. I fear losing all confidence. I fear being forgotten. I fear exiting in disgrace. And I fear staying in ignominy.
What all of this is, of course, is refuse. It’s the wet, uncomposted litter lying at the bottom of my soul. It’s the stuff that needs to be turned over in the sun. It needs to be moved, stirred up. And yes, in the process there is risk. Mistakes will be made…
…but what the hell, is there not mercy enough? If the refuse is left, nothing grows. No chance. No possible valley floor with surprising springs. No love, no light in the tent, no swaying, no lips whispering divinity in your ear.
Damn fine of Rumi to point all this out don’t you think?
(Mashallah: may the Divine stir and grow and keep you.)
June 3rd, 2008 08:37am
Stephen T. Berg
I know little of morphic fields, and have long since given up morphia. And so I seek inspiration from what surrounds me. For instance, this morning’s absence of broken glass in the alley: a hopeful thing. And so I walked, waking, with each step. My ichabod-crane-body leaving a slight wake in the still air. I am, I thought, a passing guest. And sometimes I’m so fine with it.
I arrive at my table and before first thoughts at coffee I hear the ring of a twelve-string guitar. Like the one I bought with the money from a season of custom harvesting. The only money I had left after smashing into my boss’s pick-up with a loaded grain truck. I was driving blind in a wide open field, the sunset deep, way past my eyes, deep in my head, colouring the back of my skull. And then a stop so sudden… That sunset cost me everything except a twelve-string guitar. I didn’t think twice, it was alright and I sailed the hull of that Yamaki to the coast where I continued a lazy apprenticeship in noticing.
Noticing a precise moment, as delicate as the scent of jasmine on a sleepy breeze. Its contents is a large brown purse slung over a shoulder and a DATS bus that is apparently on time. It picks up a slight body wearing a red coat cinched with a four inch belt, shoulder straps and large black buttons. She sports painted black hair and damned-if-I-care rouge. Ready to engage this raggedy world once more.
Her day is one more page in an epic. I pray it will be worthy of a bookmark. Personally I’ve known too many blank pages (dog-eared days). Sometimes a train of days will go unnoticed.
But sometimes in the full blush of a moment, one must drive blindly into a sunset–or stall that train. Hope for train robbers on horseback to catch us, steal the gold, tie up the engineer, and send us hurtling down the track without any knowledge of what is around the bend…a Holstein cow perhaps…a guy taking a crap, or a holystone on the rail that sends the train down the embankment. Because who knows what the valley holds?
June 1st, 2008 11:18am
Stephen T. Berg
Beauty prefers and perfects subtlety. Like this first morning of June, never to hold me again. Or like the almost imperceptible red blush just now showing through the Castilleja. Or the quartz-flecked sandstone dusted by a predawn dew. Or the admiral butterfly I found, who, fearing no dictates of fashion, rested easily on tartan. Or a white, red trimmed, ‘63 convertible Ford Galaxy. Or the thousand moons of Vesper, known only to the sunset.
Beauty, a veiled bride, is joy’s shelter, and joy, beauty’s gift.
There are gifts, of course, that these eyes will never see. An almost unbearable thought, but is it an excuse to shut my sad eyes? It should be incentive. Because waiting for God’s veil to be moved aside by a slow breeze is not only for sturdy hearts trained in beauty. It is also for gazing neophytes like me, who have seen only surfaces, felt lack, and have been guided only by anticipation.
The anticipation within beauty is a grace. Like the quiet poise of an African princess whose people wait enveloped in her serene tension.
Beauty always holds more than I know and it’s directness always escapes my fingers. Knowing possession would be lethal, it is still the impossibility I crave. But that is my own sickness.
Beauty is elusive, that is its mercy. I wait at its feet like a small dog anticipating nothing in particular. I wait to be thrown a detail.
May 29th, 2008 09:02pm
Stephen T. Berg
In his yet to be released book (What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception), McClellan, once a staunch defender of the war, comes to a stark conclusion, writing, “What I do know is that war should only be waged when necessary, and the Iraq war was not necessary.”
Beam yourself up Scotty! The former Press Secretary, a close confidant and fellow Texan, will need to keep his head down. You don’t criticize the Administrator and Administration and walk free. The salvos are heading in.
The only question I have is: if you knew this five years ago, why did you wait so long to make the revelation? Is it about your conscience or is it about the book?
May 28th, 2008 02:32pm
Stephen T. Berg
Empathy and consideration for the life of another person is hard to keep in possession. The daily pull into myself and the world-of-my-life can only be balanced by a daily encounter with another human face.
And so this morning when I stopped to talk I made myself conscious of the accumulation of your joys and sorrows that were soft-sculpted into your face. I saw both the nuances and the patencies of your history. All those experiences etched in.
You were half a block away. When I crossed the street and stepped up on the curb I saw the inevitability of your approach. You walked toward me, your self-consciousness a forgotten thing, and one of the reasons you looked out of joint with time and place.
Your face, that unfinished painting through which you look at me and the world, revealed some dark passages. I often mask my own face–and we all have our veneers–but yours was far more vulnerable. Yours, a far thinner veneer.
Your story, the details of which are all unique and varied, beg some tragic questions. Asked, you told me how they look to you now. You drifted here from a northern reserve, a reserve you say is dying, hopeless. You said there was nothing for you there…but I understood that this was not nothing in the way I told my friends a half-generation ago when I left my own town, saying, “there is nothing for me here.” Your nothing is on a scale I can’t grasp.
Your drama, your paths, have to do with deep and complex breakage’s. I offer you so little, except a bit of time and spare change; you awaken a piece of humanity within me.
You know, of course, why you’re resented by many. And sometimes by me. You arouse emotions within me that I would sooner put aside. You are a constant reminder of a reality I want to forget. I don’t like being forced to notice the base poverty of my response to you. And so I ultimately blame you for my lack of compassion for you.
May 25th, 2008 03:42pm
Stephen T. Berg
We meet gems in life, people who by their own dint take paths other than the deep-rutted ones. Grow Mercy cheers, salutes and encourages you.
This is meant to encourage you: for you have chosen to lead your lives in the messy intersections of human community. This is to salute you: for you have taken the more difficult path of willingly entering that jumble-of-souls with your presuppositions and preconceptions in check–a reflex of humility.
This is to honour you for preferring to learn through listening, to discover through personal engagement, and for being receptive to the present. To you who’s experience has taught you the peerless value of honouring people in their rich and odd paths, to you who refuse to pave over human distinctiveness and peculiarities, we raise our cups.
You, who risk being okay with chaos, letting it have its say; you, who are patient with with loose ends, who understand that chaos and loose ends finally reveal their own solutions and work their own balm…you are our social beacons. You, who seek consensus through a simple coming together are our cultures unheralded leaders. You, who do not miss the faces for the crowd are our agents of grace.
This post is meant to encourage you, and salute you, because in our mercantile world you are misunderstood. This is meant to give you space, because in places where zero-sum is the convening article, where vertical organizational charts are capitulated to, you will be marginalized, even ostracized.
Your allegiance to interconnections, your respect for the organism is a threat to the “bottom line,” the so called “tight ship.” But this allegiance is your candle and our illumination, and it must be protected. And so sometimes you must leave our “tight ships” to their tightness. Perhaps then, when constant constriction cuts off all lubrication and the “lean machine” cracks apart, there may yet be hope. At this point the lesson of liberality and karmic abundance may yet be learned. It is at this point that those who control through diversion and concealment and scapegoating may transcend their fears.
We can hope all this because of pearls like you.
May 22nd, 2008 08:17am
Stephen T. Berg
When the rain falls and the temp dips and you inexplicably slip into 1973, the first thing you’ll want to do is robe yourself with a button-up horse blanket. After all, you deserve comfort, and comfort comes in bolts of pucker-free, wrinkle-free, and fray-free fifty-weight nylon-satin-poly blend, yardered together using packing needles and worsted yarn.
Mind you, there’s a reason why none of our models are sitting down (well, almost, the one wearing the brush-fire has been rammed into position). A small oversight in the comfort department–Sears promises that the 74 model will include flex-tube at the places where people bend.
In the mean time, should you desire to lounge, just get someone to push you over; then, while your lying down, you’ll be able to surreptitiously observe everyone in the room without them knowing…because they’ll think you’re the couch.
May 20th, 2008 11:28pm
Stephen T. Berg
Memories lead their own lives and invest their own peculiar currency. My two earliest memories have to do with a tricycle. The first is an almost a pastoral scene. I am on my tricycle, in the natural depression between the house and the barn, watching the older kids–my brothers and sister and our cousins–play hide-and-seek. It’s early evening. the farm has settled down, the cows are out in the pasture and the red barn and the hayloft and the surrounding stretch of grassy ground has elevated itself into a source of intrigue and adventure. It’s a foreign land full of secrets. Arms folded, resting on the handlebars, I watch bodies creep and the stalk, and see the slow then sudden movements of human silhouettes in a growing twilight.
The second memory is seeing my tricycle roll slowly into the dugout, and me chasing after it. I had left it on its own for just a few moments and it betrayed me. I see its red frame and white-spoked wheels submerged and sinking and just before I head in after it my brother pulls me back to safety. I have a parallel memory to this one that has an older brother nudge it down the fine gravel slope to its watery decent. I have no idea why I have this memory. But this second memory lines up with another memory of my brothers teasing me by holding me over the well beside the dugout. But I’m not sure how accurate this memory is. It’s possible that a jest, a teasing threat (I do know that my brothers would do me no harm) has transformed itself into the vividness of an actuality. Which means of course, that threats of harm can be as effectual as an actual misdeed.
But of course I wasn’t dropped into the dark column of water and I was stopped from slipping under the surface of the dugout and my tricycle was fished out before it sank to an irretrievable depth. Had these things not happened my fears would no doubt be compounded, more complex than a simple fear of water–a fear I now manage with relative ease.
Thing is, memories possess an elasticity. They aren’t so much in the past as they are ahead of us, divining our paths and directing our actions. For years I had a powerful desire to become a detective. Perhaps the intrigues I saw while sitting on my tricycle in the farm yard was the seed for this urge. This is a light and somewhat amusing example. On the other end, memories can at times protect us from a reality and at other times compel us to move in and deal with reality. In other words, memories can be unwelcome gifts.
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May 17th, 2008 08:35am
Stephen T. Berg
There is something translucent and innocent in the way light from a new-day sun flows down the brassy sides of the high buildings of the city. I’ve lived here for three years (still believing in the goodness of the city) while occupying and honouring this life-season and its change. Change will come again, perhaps a lasting call from the skunk, or the weasel, but for now the towering windows made wavy by light and warmth are my reality, and at moments they are, as well, my enchantment. 
It’s late spring and folks are waking earlier. The early energy that pushes leaves from sheaths and green shoots from hard-pack is moving toward its first apex, and as it does it spills over and moves into our cells and opens passages long closed from dry cold. And this is the energy I tap to visualize the release of pain for my own daughter who reluctantly sends me lines of poetry I’ve asked for, knowing that in them I’ll see a dark-tinged mind, a shadowed soul, and all the blueness brought on by pain. That “…cold of deepening blue [that] closes around [her] thoughts,” is what she hopes to hide from her company. To protect them, this mastitised knot of pain she keeps secret.
But because dark and shadowy is precisely what she is not, I meditate for her. I visualize the dark-red recesses and as I go deep within I plant small prayer-balms, like seeds, smaller than sweet-clover. And then I see their growth and how they reopen channels…and you might just now think of an episode of “House” where the camera apparently races through arteries and capillaries to an oily-black clot…the clot’s deliquescence the resolution–but this scene is inadequate. The energy I envision is different. It’s fillagreed energy, delicate and inviolable. You may call it God’s own poem, the lines of which wash down the calcified sides of hurt and find a way through the crusts of pain.
–
On those early mornings, when the hours are still dark and I’m half-mad with scenarios, I meditate and visualize–a friend calls it beseeching the universe– first for my own, and then, for calm and peace and mercy for the many. Because, as my daughter has taught me (especially through the months she was caring for a painfully incapacitated woman) you can’t empathize globally until you embrace the particular. (And here’s your particular embrace.)
May 15th, 2008 11:24pm
Stephen T. Berg
As someone who’s family has been profoundly helped by naturopathic medicine and herbology and the practitioners involved, Bill C-51 is not merely an affront, it’s more like an attack.
If you’re concerned, not only by reasonable access to natural products, but by an unconstitutional move that puts more and more control in the hands of fewer people, please read Connie Howard’s excellent article (link here) and write a letter…sign a petition…make a noise. This is one piece of legislation that deserves little mercy.
And thank you Connie Howard for articulately, passionately and insightfully turning over this rock.
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The Veranda collapsed under the weight of a winter snow, so I built a Front Porch.
