The nations are in an uproar; the kingdoms totter; the earth melts. – Psalm 46

and may we recall: the earth has no political party, the winds have no government, the oceans have no left or right, the tectonic plates have no allegiance to kingdoms, the planet’s mantle has no thought of empire;

the nations are echoes in smoke, the great cities are incinerating their names, the silver statues and gilded plaques in palatial plazas and oxygenated patios are sinking in ash;

life is not bought—there are no stocks that uplift the spirit, no bonds that enhance the soul, no banks that augment the heart—no security in celebrity;

once, well, occasionally, we made movies about the fleeting gleam of diamonds, the hidden treasure of charity, the morning dew of truth, the kiss of justice and peace in the garden of community;

today, our outsized liars are leaders; and our bets are on the greed of plutocrats and a supporting cast of jesters, fawning senators, and limp diplomats;

today, our money’s on the amygdalas of Superheroes—the religion of revenge with its benediction of battling to end;

Where’s Daddy, Lavender, and The Gospel, are actual names for AI algorithms—field-tested and bundled for resale—to assist in the elimination of a people and their past;

and now it’s midnight, and the only dawn left to us, should we find the vision for it, is humility—the superpower to change one’s mind: teshuvah, come to our senses—become poor-in-spirit, become mourners, and comforters, and rain-bringers.

 

 

New Year’s day is only one important day among 365 important days.

Understandably, the first half of life is spent anchoring ourselves; imperatively, the second half is spent unmooring ourselves.

The heart is a spotted pear — there’s no getting through without some bruising.

The mind is a sea star — moving its brilliant purple rays in multidirectional ways, and clinging, so often, to the same facade.

The soul at peace is paradise.

Beneath the surface of an ordinary day lies an infinite wellspring of meaning—this untold depth is what we may call God.

It’s been said you can’t get blood from stone; but today, the fallen heaps of rubble won’t stop bleeding—and they will not stop accusing.

Tempting, in this climate, to trade the callus-building requirements of reality for the passive comfort of hoping.

Tend well your Brown-eyed Susan, it is the only flower that symbolizes justice.

To laugh at yourself is to deinstitutionalize your ego.

The individual is a phantom — in wonder and blunder we receive our selves through the eyes of others. Meaning, dear reader, my personal fulfillment is in your flourishing.

Should you want to find God, which is to say, should you desire meaning, learn a way (not unlike the cruciform path of Jesus) to love the earth and her array of inhabitants.

Our favoured assumptions should routinely be set on fire to see what rises from the ash.

A tincture of cynicism is emancipating, but a full-meal is constipating.

The crushed grapes of relinquishment can sometimes be Beaujolais for the soul.

If you press your face against a keyboard, canvas, soapstone, it sometimes opens a door.

Art enlarges our being and bearing, which is why despots of commerce de-fund it.

What seemed unthinkable is now obvious—both science and religion are converging on the essential fire. It’s time they had a heart-to-heart.

Every birdcall beckons, “Unveil your hearts!” “All creation cries for love!” is every cricket’s song.

Of course we are falling, let us pray for companionship in the descent.

Death and dying — hard, hard, hard — and any kind of bromide, unfitting.

To counsel hope can sometimes be malpractice.

To discount hope is human dereliction and spiritual delinquency.

The twin sister of praise is grief.

Aging changes chores into privileges and anxieties into prayers.

Don’t vomit outright; some poisons need to pass through so you’ll know what to hate, what to tolerate.

Despite the crazed magnificence of our vanities, our true longing is to be each other’s joy.

The Big Bang is God’s dancing body. The shimmering fallout is yours.

The Second Coming, if we have the eyes for it, is us, in our unfolding inclusiveness.

Regarding global warming: time, now, we let the spruce and salmon vote.

There are over 25 flowers that symbolize peace, this coming year, pick one and join any nonviolent earth-affirming, life-liberating, protest march.

Put your love where there is no love and you will find love—the only religion worth practicing.

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Wishing you a beautiful New Year of unfolding love and renewed purpose.

 

 

I’m entering a simplicity I didn’t anticipate,
this (blessed) aging is changing
chores into privileges:
to have dishes to wash,
a house to clean,
a path to keep clear,
a deck to stand on, at dawn, my God! a coffee in hand,
and praise on my lips,
at the first stirrings of a chinook.

Once I thought philosophy was paramount. Silly me!
and its cousin, theology, a ladder through the clouds. Ha!

I dismissed, or rather missed, here at ground level,
beneath my feet, all the flowering forms of love:
the humanitarianism of smiling,
the philanthropy of humming,
the charity of not winning a point,
the valour of refusing to fire back,
the cultivation of inner stillness
the compassion of moral anger
mutual dependency,
human equality,
community,
humility.

And I want to believe these flowering forms of love,
like a squadron of garden beds, are breaking up
the clay heart of our collective trauma.

I know there is evil in the world,
minute upon minute an injustice,
every hour, a new method of hatred,
every bloody day, a fresh mode of cowardice turned outward.

Dear Lord, help us to remain human, scald our complacency,
let it reach the edges of our anger,
until we shout, Stop! the bloodshed! Stop! the suffering!
Stop! using our money to make weapons!

I know there is sorrow in every city;
we’ve all been touched, if not today, then tomorrow.

In my own household, I’ve seen suffering
that all the theodicies in the world can’t touch.

And I’ve seen tenderness in the eyes of a nurse
that would shame the heavenly sum of pious sermons.

And I’ve watched the pain that medicine can’t reach,
lessened by a care-laden glance.

And still, I wonder at my luck, to live, and not worry
where the next missile will land. My luck at not being the father
cradling his child in yet another air strike,
           “Oh my little Jameelah, don’t tremble,
                     the bombs can’t see us in the dark.”

 

 

A prison cell, in which one waits, hopes…and is dependent on the fact that the door of freedom has to be opened from the outside, is not a bad picture of Advent. ~Dietrich Bonhoeffer

In a distant city I flirt with the street and the street responds. I frame my infatuation with experiencing various artificial states of consciousness, as freedom.

In this stretch of time I so dedicate myself to the singular apprenticeship of enhanced perception, that it becomes, as you might imagine, a personal road to dissolution.

I sit at midday under a black sky, involuntarily grinding my teeth, twisting in paranoia as though lynched in a gale. Sleep finally comes, and through the intimacy with a driftwood-strewn beach, some equilibrium.

All the while I carry a kind of mortification that finds me avoiding all contact.

One day, gathering my reserves, I walk to the post office. The terrazzo floor is hard-waxed and gleaming, the marble counters are buffed to a high gloss, and a coastal sun is bending through lancet windows.

Along a velvet rope, held between chrome stanchions, a line—the shuffling feet of polite impatience. In between shifting weight and weather-talk, people lick stamps, seal envelopes—faint glaze of glue at the back of throats.

I clutch my unemployment verification card and step to the end of the row. People inch away. I am stone-torn, salt-caked, smoke-rinsed, and tide-pool groomed.

And now I see her profile, her face, flowering toward the sunlit windows, soft creases at her neck, black hair straight, shining, falling past her shoulders, her left hand holding a postcard, and the quiet of her bearing softening all the hard glaring edges.

My eldest sister—radiant. Years fall away and I move toward her. Then stop. Some cloud. Some heavy shadow.

The air is a thick impassable wall. My errand forgotten, I turn and hurry away. Her image follows me. The scene incised forever.

My dark night of disconnection becomes darker; but the dark does not overcome the lingering light of my sister’s image.

I never knew if her postcard was intended for my last abandoned address or was destined back home to the prairies. It didn’t matter.

I only knew that if I could have shaken off my shame and approached her that day, there would have been no judgement—only joy in reunion.

That night, I again fall asleep to the sound of the Pacific, but my sorrow and shame is mixed with a kind of mad hope.

Everything seems lifted, freed a little, by the arrival of a joyful presence, in the form of my sister; a presence, I see now, that has never been too far.

There are moments in life that act like a hinge—a door, some deeper reality, some loving power, opens from the outside, and you step out, rub your eyes, and take a step.