Dancing

I chose this at the beginning, before the "I",
this dance with death on the endless razor's edge.
Entwined in life's embrace we whirled across time,
his breath on my neck and his certainty in my ear.
May the last song be a slow dance, soothing me down
from all that I have carried, unwinding, shedding,
drinking in our final moments together as two,
before merging in One.

For when the dance ends I will be free of that choice,
and I will thank him for this meeting under the moonlit flower
in the dirt on this cosmic clod of magnificence.
What will come then, in that indeterminate freedom?
Will I choose again, and greet him reborn for another turn,
for another dance of symmetry in the chaos of a super nova?
Or will I, after a rest, unburdened by passions,
seek no further identity in dancing?
It must be enough, it seems, while the dance still swirls,
to know not what I am, but only that I am.

So Many Ways

So many ways to love
But only One Love,
And only one lover.
We are all the one lover,
Feeling, healing,
And loving together
In so many ways.

Killing the Conversation

Even before he passes through the doorway, the bubbling sound of chatter reaches his hearing. Upon entering the sunlit room and registering the faces, he connects the chatter with their rotund cheeks and upturned mouth corners. The jovial smiles and lively conversation complement the sunlight and join with the mindfully hung works of art to create a presence in the room beyond just the physical objects and the people. Something is alive here, like a happy childhood memory, the comfort of companions partaking in idle time on summer's porch, with sipped lemonade and uproarious jokes. Their eyes flash playfully to one another, glistening with the vibrancy of shared experience and empathic connection.

Joining the group affords little time for analysis of the available spots to sit. He glances quickly at the spot on the couch next to the man with the yoga t-shirt and the hilarious comments, intimidating in his conversational skill, but with glistening eyes and a genuine, friendly presence. His eyes dart to the floor near the serenely grounded, earthily beautiful woman with the clear, open face and colorful pants. He sits down on the floor next to her, hoping that his entrance was not unduly disruptive, that it was graceful and acceptable. He leans back into the bracing cool of the wall, willing his body to relax, daring now to take better stock of the faces, trying to smile in a friendly way, reaching out for acceptance and welcome.

He picks up the thread of the conversation as it moves quickly across the topical landscape. Smoothly shifting segues slide seamlessly across subjects, imbuing the dialog with life. It becomes a creature of wild sophistication, of assonance and consonance, sibilance and resonance. Circling the room, their laughter is her laughter; their gestures, her gestures. As they ride the creature on her crest of credulousness, she cycles through a rainbow of colors and moods, by turns laughing and serious, whimsical and profound. Every now and then she snatches a curious inviting glance at him as if to say, "hop on."

He tries to think of what might be of interest to them, feeling an imperative to select just the right bits from his rich internal world. He would reveal exactly what would make him accepted as part of the group, as a trusted confidant, as someone worthy of respect, as a comforting and congenial presence. But his contribution would have to ride with the conversation, this wild, unpredictable creature. He studies the creature and her conjurers. He notices every detail: her multicolored scales, her comical whiskers, her slender writhing body and lolling head. She looks like a giant iguana but is lighter than air and translucent like smoke. Her legs are stubby with clawed feet on their ends. A massive head sits upon her dirigible shoulders, adorned with an oxymoronic beard. The creature seems to have a murky imprecision to her presence. He considers this a possible opening to the conversation, as a way to add precision and clarity, and to bring the creature into stark relief for all to see.

He tries to shake off the oncoming waves of anxious paralysis, trying to build courage for the moment when he would grab hold and mount this creature. The opening comes. There is a pause. He feels the attention in the room turn to him. The creature has stopped right in front of him, winking her mischievous black eye in an obvious overture. The riders are reaching out their minds' hands to help him onto her back.

"Just go," he thinks, masking a small shudder inside of a nervous chuckle. He opens his mouth and listens to his tongue and lips relate the richness of his experience as pertains to his vision of the precise creature. It is deep and clever, endearingly clumsy and slightly sardonic. He winces as he finishes, staring at the floor, waiting for the response, for the continuation of the conversation, for the rush of adrenaline that would accompany the wild ride.

His mouth closes upon an awkward silence. Something shifts in the room. Turning his eyes imperceptibly up from the floor, he sees the creature twitching dimly in front of him, its scales the color of ash and its eyes rolled back in its head, dying. Space collapses and time stops. The sunbeams streaming through the windows freeze. Motionless faces look at him caught halfway between expectation and curiosity. A sudden weight of responsibility crushes down upon his shoulders. He concludes that he must have said the wrong thing, although he cannot fathom how or why this might be so. A darkly buzzing veil of miscomprehension engulfs his head. He fidgets with a button on his shirt to deflect the embarassment, his mind reeling to find some way to ressurect the creature, or to disappear. He wishes he had not spoken.

Moments resume their relentless actualization. Finally someone taps the reins of a different subject, and with a flourish of deft words, tinges of color reappear in the creature's scales. She twitches back into motion, staggers to her feet and turns away from him. The riders work valiantly to recover the mood. It is an inspiring effort, a transcendent magic. He stares fixedly at the molecules of air in the center of the room, balancing on the fulcrum between embarrassment and gratitude as the ressurected creature and her conjuring masters resume their magical ride.

He sits alone against the wall, isolated now from the others conversing just a breath away. He may as well have been in the next room or on another planet, and he secretly wishes he was. He watches their ideas come and go, now congealing into groups, then spinning off new fanciful notions. The creature ignores him completely as she makes her playful rounds. He resists the urge to assert himself in another attempt, succumbing to an overriding sense of futility.

He chuckles inwardly as he considers the exchange of power in this interaction. They are wild and righteous creatures, conversations, but also delicate and susceptible to confusion and subterfuge. Killing the conversation is no triumph, yet he finds that somehow, inadvertently, he has prodigious skill at it. Tricks of his subconscious become transparent as his mind formulates things called "reasons why." He is a virtuoso, or so he's told. But that it would be in such a peculiar antisocial manner, that was the comic crux of cosmic conundrum.

He leans his head back against the unyielding wall and closes his eyelids, staring out of the window through them. Relaxing syntax, he lets the yellow-orange retinal glow ignite his intuition. Feeling. Flow. Cooperation. Receiving and giving acceptance. Letting each person come into their own. Not knowing, honestly. It is the illusion of clarity that kills. Ambiguity is the fertile field of magic. And poetry. There exists words to conjure any animal in the excruciating, irrefutable present. Speaking and not speaking are two ways of participating, thus the real act of power is in showing up, in presence, in the present. In that he is unmistakably human, undeniably equal. In breath and heartbeat there is nothing to prove, nothing to say. Conversations may live and die over the range from parsing pain to contagious laughter. Only silence is forever.

Awash Elemental

There is a space vast enough to hold all matter, a box in which burns and reflects all light. Inclusive, yet the exit appears inside of a blink. When lights appear, images, in that closed-eye space, they are from an entirely different, only partially familiar dimension. From here the rear-view is of space-time, revealing that it was only-ever a step in a subversively kinetic refractal stairway.

I forgive myself my poor choices. I release the mind vice that traps them in my imagination. Flesh and blood, analog form, fine hair and supple skin, cracking bones and grinding teeth, all these are naught. The light shines only upon that which is not me, but neither am I darkness. Freeing each from the imaginary other, this dimension progresses through apparent evolution-time. While waiting for the moment to close my eyes and be silent, I craft thought form reality waves, apply the archetypes, and watch them dance our lives.

Sol blazes into the triumvirate eye as it opens upon the fore-headed seam, dutifully burning and clearing the karmic clouds. The gray and white turbulence offsets the jubilant blue, sprinkling loving water through clarifying sunlight over the pond and surrounding forest. The ground burbles pleasantly in abundant moisture. Gaia is full of expectation and the swelling flush of life. Aquamoré erupts liberally in amorous geysers. Melodious birdsong, concise frog croak, and the cyclic bluster of Atmos in her photosynthetic hair, tumble together out of time, entwined.

I have only ever wanted to find out whether complete union is possible, and to experience it. It's what I came here for, to allow the self-evident witness to merge the two and return them all to the ever-was-always one. I ingest Gaia through the intestinal tube between dimensions. Meanwhile, the drizzle splattering on my forehead sparkles like dust on a sunbeam, like a solar vitamin, an electrolytic battery, powering dissolution, uptake and finally reintegration.

Atmos curls a finger around an ear and puffs a giggle onto sensitive ganglia. The auric sheath of Gaia flickers in his gusting mane. Everywhere at once, Atmos is cool and light and visible only through effect, never directly, as he generously fuels their dance from an inexhaustible lung. He knows how, and he strides forward to do so with assuredness and persistence. A sensuous brush here, a bit of hot breath there, a vibrating glance to stoke the fire, in rousing form he disperses seed and perfects imperfection.

Emanating the white vapors of winter’s breath, we pant vigorously as we run up the terrace, echoing crispness like the dead click of hollow pincers. I tease the evaporated wisps through my fingertips, letting it all go. I am transparent to the wind. I am the view from above, and I can see myself working through this isolated form. Behind eyelids we undifferentiate beyond the ever-opening gate of realization. That which was always-never-not true lights the vast, ineffably intrinsic vector: there is no return to unknowing; we can only endlessly unfold.

Thanks for Being

One of the things I love most about being a parent is telling my kids how awesome I think they are, not for any accomplishment or for anything they've said or done, but just for being the amazing, resplendent human creature that they are, just for being. I think all parents feel this way deep down but may have a hard time expressing it. Perhaps that's because it might seem to undermine their authority or because they feel that they must constantly push their children to improve according to certain standards of lifestyle and livelihood. But at a deeper level the mere existence of the child is a miracle to the parents. Communicating this sense of intrinsic self-worth is great for helping the child in building a healthy self-concept, which is the base from which all relationships form and all choices are made. I believe a healthy self-concept, self-love, is the truest guide toward right relationships, right lifestyle and right livelihood, where "right" means that which fits for the child in the world at this moment, not necessarily that with which the parents agree. So if you're a parent tell your children that you think they are awesome and that you admire them tremendously for exactly who they are. And if you are somebody's child (we all are) then simply claim this as truth, that to your parents you are a miracle, even if they are not around or are unable to express it. And know that you *are* a miracle. Knowing this and passing it on will heal your lineage, and in seven generations it will change the world.

Geist-Driven

He shakes off the white sticky webbing that cloys to his spirit in the same way that overplayed, teeth-grinding bubblegum pop music occupies neural capacity. His trajectory was not recorded in the flight plan, and never would be. He is in a hapless rocket without a guidance system, leading the ascent of the wax-winged monkeys within. The pitiless founders half-heartedly gesture concern toward the sun that has blinded him with vainglory and that will soon melt the arrogance of his demise, while their other half-hearts lurch gleefully at his impending fall.

Back on Earth, picking up the pieces of his spectacular descent, he scratches and scrapes the dirt in pursuit of some answer, some closure. He has everything he needs here, every comfort, every provision. But in this dimension, apparently, everything was never enough. He is sick with the cush and comfort. Contentment and happiness are the kid gloves of complacency and boredom. He thirsts for pain, just a drizzle, to keep himself occupied through next month. He was not meant to sit idly by while others solved the codex and took the glory. He was not meant to come in second. And with this as his charge, he will endure the suffering. He will prepare his wings anew. And he will die, once again.

The geist inside him would propel his body right out to the infinite edge of space-time, right over it, into the void,  into nothing, with afterburners ablaze and the throttle fully open. He sees that he is a tool, a machine, a minion of consciousness. Onward! Faster! He leans into the hot breath of karmic hell fire. He laughs into the terrifying chaos of his battle with archetypes who arm themselves with mythic weapons and time travel. He knows it is futile, like attempting to defeat the ocean tides. But he knows also that a warrior has no choice. He is but a molecule of burning hot ammonia in their most vile, most stinking, sticky, yellow piss. He thinks he hears them laugh, maddeningly just out of earshot, as they drunkenly spray him across the cosmos before rejoining their brutal, orgiastic party, now in its sixteenth millennium.

The geist tries to recall what he certainly must have learned after so many times around, but finds no adequate brain in his local body. Instead each star appears to him as a piece of the exomemory of the collective, a clue to the codex. He cannot possibly reassemble the big picture. In fact the verb "to reassemble" does not seem apply. Its levers of action find no purchase outside of time scales. The disoriented geist must now piece it all together from myth and the Hubble space telescope, with two left hands and a foot in its mouth. Each gain, each hard won nugget of knowledge slips back into obscurity at the end of each lifetime. Who is he this time? He reawakens screaming, having just come through the birth canal, realizing he has forgotten it all, yet again.

And so only this much is clear. He must live the geist now, in this lifetime. He must shake off the dullifying comforts and blinding distractions. He must dive fervently into the material and commit to memory the language of the stars. He must listen to the small voice within, the voice that is always just emerging, the voice of the geist that is horrified by trivialities. He must do as the voice says. It does not ask much, tweaking his trajectory ever so slightly at choice points, but with deadly accurate aim. And in doing so he will free this prisoner from his encrusted, bleeding eyes to claim its place among the gods.

The Gift of Time Travel

The time portal opened when death reached out with his invisible, icy hand to grasp the boy's shoulder. The boy was cornered, certain he was to die. His body hung upside down inside the dumpster, his left leg dangling outside, wedged between the heavy steel lid and the forward lip of the container. The putrid fumes of the adjacent restaurant's refuse burned his eyes and nasal passages as his hands groped for purchase along the slimy bottom, just within reach, squishing on chunks of weeks-old vegetable matter and rat droppings soaked in curdled milk and festering with mold.

He could hear the teenagers' footfalls hastily romping the sidewalk toward the alley down which he had ducked. They were led by his cruel, muscle-bound cousin. He knew they were in a blind rage because he had humiliated them in front of the others. He had denied them this opportunity to make an example of him, to exercise their dominance for no reason whatsoever. Such is the way of bullies, with their amped up bluster, their flailing nunchuks and their flashing switchblades. But he also knew somehow that their pain and confusion were borrowed, that they were acting out a script much greater in scope than their unconscious, unexamined lives, and that the meaning of what was occurring would be clear to him someday. This seemingly alien knowledge sustained him as he waited for his demise there in the dumpster.

His kidneys pumped a relentless torrent of adrenaline into his blood and his heart hammered it into his brain. With his panic reaching a pitch, the boy tried desperately to free his leg while gauging how much time he had until the hoodlum predators rounded the corner. With each pull, the dumpster lid seemed to close tighter, gouging his leg, cutting off his circulation and twisting his body into even more awkward alignment. He finally lost heart and stopped tugging. His inverted body became still. The blood throbbed in his ears, which strained to listen and piece together what was happening outside. His breathing became quick and shallow and his dilated eyes glazed over in abject fear. The shouts and footsteps amplified through the metal walls of the container as he heard his cousin gleefully call, "There he is!"

Time ticked to a crawl as the boy awaited the uncomprehending annihilation. Was it a few seconds or a lifetime, or more? By what criteria were such questions relevant now? The fear and dissociation washed over him, disfiguring his psyche and knocking the universe off its plinth.

Suddenly, the back door of the restaurant banged open and the busboy lumbered through it, hauling a large trash bag bulging with the evening's scraps. "Hey!" he shouted, as he grasped the full meaning of the scene before him. More shouting. Big empty words. Anger. Territorial rage. But finally, as the bullies ran off, only the ghost of their predictable cowardice remained, ineffectually nipping at the boy in unrequited torment.

Salvation. The samaritan rebirthed the boy from the dumpster back into what now seemed a jarringly calm and clean world. The boy began to put himself back together, while knowing that life could never be the same again. Questions with no answers arose. How had he endured this? Why was he still alive? What did it mean? Nearly forty years would pass before the meaning of the event would make itself known, when the other end of the time portal would materialize in the then present and complete the circuit back to this moment.

---

Sitting bolt erect, the man labored to breathe even while his chest cavity and diaphragm were expanded to their greatest extent. Some infuriating incompleteness stopped his breath from reaching his solar plexus and moving up into his chest. Clearing his mind and letting go of outcomes he lay down on the floor and rested in the warm pool of aetheric honey. That was when he felt the vibration, a disturbance from a great distance.

The sickly feeling advanced slowly upon him, growing in his solar plexus, blaring amidst the stillness. He recognized the nature of what was overtaking him from previous experiences expunging soul sickness, and so he let it come on, stronger, more present, more open to its liberating lesson. Soon he felt he would vomit, not the contents of his stomach, but that of his psyche.

He let the feeling amplify and it began to project as content into his mind. The memory of the dumpster incident nearly forty years earlier crystalized. And as if through a conduit from the past, the exact feeling of that moment was piped into the present time and overtook his entire body and mind. It was no longer just a memory but a mentally and emotionally immersive experience. He was as then in the now; and the now was then again.

The sickly experience flowing forth from the past eclipsed the present almost entirely. He lost sense of place and certainty of person to the putrid nausea. But there remained a simple constant that observed both scenes from an unchanging perspective simultaneously. This observer knew clearly that this was a regressive experience in the then future, in the now present. And the agency of will emanating from this observer formed the conduit through which that feeling of the past came forth.

The observer explored this conduit and, finding it bidirectional, sent love and understanding back to the former version of himself. And the boy in the past used this alien knowledge to weather the storm, to right himself, to collect his shattered mind and to rebuild his self and self esteem. Through this process an outrageous truth became apparent, revealing a whole new realm of consciousness that had formerly been just a nagging half-unremembered wisp of thought.

Truth and consciousness. The latter must always surrender to the former. The man's mind gaped aghast. Time travel, now, always and forever is readily available to every human being. But it was not the usual notion of physical time travel in which the body traverses time and appears elsewhen. Nor was it that of remembering the past or seeing the future with the mind and intuition. This mode of time travel was carried upon feeling. The true and actual feeling of the boy had come through the conduit to the present. And the expansive, wizened compassion of the present day man had traveled back to the boy. The being at either end of the conduit felt the presence of the other, and was thus transformed.

This transformation in their each present, applied to all future and past versions of his being within this lifetime and all others. The realization of time travel retroactively, immediately and permanently altered the succession of moments. The boy had access to wisdom well beyond his years and endurance to pain well beyond his threshold. The man now always knew that the dumpster incident would catalyze the knowledge of time travel. The past and future hosts of his soul out to infinity would now, always and forever coalesce their power for the day the conduit opened, the day that had never not happened, that had slipped from the universe of never having known to that of always knowing. Once this knowledge had self obviated, the love poured into the channel and every past and future incarnation became flush with it. He had graduated from a universe of causality to one of verbs with no tense.

This vantage was virtually too big for his habitual present time being to be-hold. It was as if the volume of a whisper had been turned up beyond the threshold of pain. It was as if a simple substance such as water had suddenly been revealed as a miracle cure-all. It was as if a fog had lifted revealing a vast featureless terrain of self-evident, majestic silence, where had previously been a jaggedly complex temporal order ordained with mystery and sychronicity.

Now, always and forever his access to the feeling of elsewhen had been granted. He could wield the immense power of the love of all versions of himself to retroactively, immediately and permanently heal any trauma in any lifetime, or to relive any ecstasy, or to rest in the underlying serenity. This most incredible truth had been right before his eyes the whole time, and in revealing it, he erased any trace of not knowing it. The timeline of feeling was no longer an objective, constant vector. It was now subjective, discontinuous and under conscious control.

He thought about the pains and joys and sufferings and ecstasys of his life and of humanity. He saw that they did indeed have utility, and that was to provide experiential reference points. He saw that it is our feeling selves that traverse time. He saw that with practice any reference point, not just those of the highest highs or lowest lows, could be a portal through which to travel. He knew now, always and forever that all the versions of ourselves become free of time in that moment, the moment we see, the moment that reunites feeling-power across time.

Antennae

This track is an experiment in applying fractal geometry to sound design. Listen carefully to the way the melody and waveform are scaled and replicated into themselves in the analog synthesizer. The sound glistens and sparkles with warm life and dreamlike consciousness.

Struggleless

I lost my struggle. No, I don't mean I lost and it won. I mean that struggle has disappeared from my life. It left so stealthily that I almost didn't notice its absence. But something felt slightly oddly missing. When I looked, everything was as it should be, in its proper place. It had only been a struggle because I had let it, because I had wanted to force things onto my terms, because I had demanded instant gratification, because I had bought into desires for what is not. And the odd missing feeling was that nothing rushed in to full the void that remained when struggle departed. This is not to say that all broken things are now fixed, that all needs are nullified, but that I address them without making a struggle. This feels perfectly natural to me, like blinking, like smiling, like childhood.