Woe to the Laborer

Woe to the "laborer" who pushes only paper and creates little value, save the ones and zeros that sustain his livelihood, pinched pennies usurped from the worth and decay of his fellows, keeping him harrowed, vacillating between life and death. Woe to the laborer who has no craft but, through intensive abandonment of self, has become the lynchman of freedom, the hatchetman of despotic will, the right hand of oligarchic tyranny, the sin-eater who absolves no one and commits himself to a terrestrial eternity of regrets and unfulfilled dreams. His life, a dribble. His imagination, wasted on false premises, bogus rules, faked power.

This has become the bankruptcy of the noble, artisanal man. A push-button for the machine that has become his heart. His pacemaker, the motor that keeps him trudging through a life without music, without poetry, without integrity, without soul. The treadmill of his existence tied up in a vault, pedometer, calorie counter, and a watch that calculates the milliseconds until his pacemaker goes kaput! His Samsara, the revolving door of dead-end jobs, of passionless ambitions, of false pretenses, of superficial relationships, of multiple credit cards, bank accounts, email addresses, identities, and sexual encounters. He dives through no wreck.* He ignores what damage has been done and the treasures that prevail.* His miserly existence befriended only by misery. His love of illusions, the warden of his cemented will. And so he dies with the regret that he was never free, never the artist of his own mystery.

*A tribute to Adrienne Rich and "Diving into the Wreck."

Nostalgia, a Love of Shadows

Nostalgia—sweet and meddlesome—announces

my love of shadows.

Moments of syncretic intimacies and chemical

knowledge imparted, a mind prostrated to the

Invisible, sovereign soul departed.

Prescient and clear, I no longer stand vigilant,

candle lit, weeping or wailing or worshipping

ghosts, a prisoner of mnemonic love, a

servant of consecrated bones.

My heart empties out, vacuous, an abyss.

Fate swirls mother of pearl in an abalone shell

borne from Necessity’s kiss.

She had tied me in a knot at birth, while

preparing a scythe to cut me loose.

She had sent an angel to keep me, while

bringing my singular rose to bloom…

February 7, 2013

Found Freedom

But maybe I grow on you and within you,
when you're not looking.

Maybe I slither up you like jasmine, yawning
across eons of stardust towards the heavens.

Maybe I embed myself in the deepest layers
of your being, because I don't have to--I'm already there.

Maybe not.

Maybe I find a way to
"no-need."

Maybe I let go just enough
to embrace "as is."

Maybe I die to my loneliness,
come out freed.

Found freedom, my only bliss.

Woman Without a Conscience

A femme fatale is not a woman you should marry. She seduces for her own power and pleasure. She is like the night—mysterious, solicitous. She promises life only through death, an intimacy that can’t be bargained with. What is raw and ravenous can only be sated when the mistress meets the bride, the holy virgin within. Until then, stay away from a woman without a conscience.

Hexagram 61 Meets the Vesica Piscis

Hexagram 61 - “Inner Truth” 

This represents the link between the I Ching: Book of Changes and Sacred Geometry, with the overlay of the Vesica Pisces and the Star of David (two interlocking triangles), which symbolize yin and yang. I drew this hexagram when asking for insight about a series of recurring dreams. On my journey to understand, I discovered a serendipitous and synchronistic connection between the Vesica Pisces and Hexagram 61.

In sacred geometry, the Vesica Pisces represents the formative principle, denoted by the square root of 3, and the first day of creation. The monad goes outside itself. In Genesis, the spirit of the creator floated over the face of the waters and said, “Let there be light.” God created light through the second sphere. When we “shed light” on a situation, we come into the know. This could simply be an inner knowing, without evidence or outer reality reflecting it. According to Robert Lawlor, the Christic principle entered into the manifest world of duality and form here. The materialization of spirit: the word becomes flesh. Through the center of the Vesica Pisces, Christ-consciousness enters the world, as does human consciousness. Schwaller de Lubicz says, “The number one is only definable through the number two: it is multiplicity which reveals unity[…]” (Lawlor).

First, we have “universal consciousness,” or “unity.” The journey outside the first sphere introduces “empirical consciousness.” Man is in the center of the two, the “balancing consciousness.” Man “partakes of both unchanging and changing principles—eternal and ephemeral; human consciousness functions as the mediator[…]unity  projects itself outward in a perfect reflection of itself[…]”  In the I Ching, man is also the mediator in Hexagram 61, which is represented by the two middle lines, and while the top two lines represent heaven and the bottom, earth. Above and below trigrams correspond to Sun (The Gentle, Wind) and Tui, (The Joyous, Lake). The first sentence in the text of Hexagram 61 is, “The wind blows over the lake and stirs the surface of the water.” Sounds eerily like Genesis. The second sentence is, “Thus visible effects of the invisible manifest themselves” (Wilhelm|Baynes, 235).

This reminds me of the eureka moment, the moment of realization, that causes an irrevocable change in the structure: a birth or rebirth, a transformation or transmutation, a shift from me to we, when the unconscious becomes conscious (what we didn’t know we didn’t know). A new world comes into being with this insight. A break-through of sorts. The Vesica Pisces represents this reality symbolically and points to the macro-level. But what about the micro? What about moments in our own lives when we come to consciousness? “As above, so below.” It also reminds me of two hearts reflecting each other perfectly. It seems like a cosmic love or twin souls. Thus, Hexagram 61 and the Vesica Pisces symbolize the most perfect form of love, where there is no disconnect. A language of light. Not to mention all that we could associate with “inner truth.” Check out http://www.onlineclarity.co.uk/learn/gua/hexagrams/hexagram61.php and http://www.crystalinks.com/vesicapisces.html

Telescopes

My life is like a telescope coming in and out of focus. Soothed by the distant star. Unaffected by the futility of passing thoughts. Yet realizing the inherent power of each. My heart, a still ocean. How did I end up approaching everything with new eyes, holding fast to a warm familiarity, while greeting the unfamiliar as if I've known every single one of them before? Each moment brings the possibility of renewal or to stay stuck. But, the stuck can't hold on forever. Momentum forces us, though kicking and screaming, to an end. Whatever end. Our power is through grace. To finesse each moment as if we are courting the desired, or charming our beloved. We can love life like this. We can be gentle with it, with our moments, with our process. And in doing so, it reveals our secret. This is how we respect life. Our lives become like telescopes coming in and out of focus. We see and don't see. Everything changes. We can't keep up. Only, we don't have to. It comes anyway.

Mysterious We

I search the sky for a sign,

but all I find are stars

built like a shrine to

the thumbnail moon.

A sailor in need of her North

Star, I want to go home.

My little boat voyages the distance,

led only by the hum of Polaris and

the light of that moon.

We have abundance,

for in between us stretches

an eternity in numbered years,

and we give no words to it,

because we have no words to give--

because none will do.

It's an infinite space I send my prayers to.

I hold you like a rosary. I keep you like a prayer--

the finesse of moving lips, never to be captured,

every letter sent.

I beseech the Unknown and wait for Her to answer.

I ask Infinite Mystery to reveal Mysterious Me and Mysterious You.

But Mystery separates nothing.

Tricky Mystery, I won't argue.

In our world, Mystery conceals in order to reveal.

We give nothing away at once.

And we are discovered piece by piece.

Mystery can have its oneness.

I want the shards.

I want to know you as yourself,

an entity separate from me.

I want nothing at once.

I want creation deconstructed.

I want the "we-ness" of us.

I want the terrestrial you (and the quintessential me).

Mystery can keep its knowledge of everything.

I want obliviousness.

I want to work towards coming to consciousness.

I want to ride the arrow of time right into your heart.

I want to taste the finite in your kiss.

I want to capture the fleeting, while making memories

and giving each of our moments meaning.

In this place of demon impermanence, change comes

as a gift: little opportunities for the near-miss--

but, instead, we hit the target.

It's through impermanence that we find the indestructible within.

We seek to escape the known world for the one we

feel lies just beyond, but the known world offers 

us the eternity we seek.

Eternity sacrifices its oneness for you and me. Together.