Filling Teacups While I Wait

Dormancy fulfills existence aided by what must be so. Yet, I'm to make nothing of the slow build – the crescendoing sun, the mounting gush below the ice. Have you ever noticed that it is impossible for snowflakes to miss the beat? Winter's coat hangs next to April's umbrella and the purgatory makes no comment. This is beside the point. This is all just beside the point. Lately, words evolve in an infinite combination for everybody else, but all I can do is wait. I wait In recognition. I wait in wonder. I wait in a sort of implied monasticism that won't be un-muted. Other poets soothe and scream while I hold up the wall with my back. A new rhythm is not unhappiness, though. So the guru speaks.

In sleep, hints of the sea. My best translation is a picture in the sand, washed away by the watery score. Pillow barricades. Untraceable sun. These days are only days.

And so what if I cry? Never being alone means that my tears collect in teacups at the ever crowded banquet table - seating for all.

Best Take it Down

Don't arrange the flowers in some grandiose display. They are a pile of death. One or two will do, a reminder of the beauty that we see for but a moment. What is lovely cannot be seen with outside eyes and it is past time (always past time) to correct. I hear Baba Tony laughing his morning greeting to me, “Mama Leksi, you have left your laundry to sleep with the moon again.” A certain laziness, sure. But also a hypnotic billowing and sway of a thinning veil, filtering the sun's rise on top of the world. Yet such delight comes with a price. A storm or uncouth Colobus or perching swallow or candied fingers could undo all the work – a delay of back breaking proportions. Best take it down. Sooner rather than later.

In the past, when nearing a spiritual chord of understanding, dissonance intensifies. Though the winter-scape keeps adding blankets of sleep, a restless banging of tin cans and broken wind chimes hinders the recognition of melody.

I am a slow and cautious traveler. And I am also the path. Yet I grow fat with inertia. “Mama Leksi, you are eating too well. Perhaps, reduce.”

Okay, world of my own world: I relent.

Now let there be peace . . .

But For Love

Over-worn pajamas and an unmade bed; I'm so tired now. Winter helps to discard what I am not. At least there is some sort of tangible purge towards something lighter. Or maybe I'm just the nothing I pretended to be. Either way, all kinds of identity is now falling with the snow. The day's terrain rises and falls in forms that I'm learning to surf – a loose, wet texture that never seems to behave as expected. If one manages a mindless seeing, observations can pass through. Winter can lose its teeth. Names can begin to empty into the ineffable. Even Jessica.

One witnesses snowflakes building upon each other all day in dull duty – that is, until the light arrives. With a crack in the gray ceiling, the sky's yolky genesis opens another dimension of brilliance too elusive for capture by word or brushstroke or shutter. Somehow this primordial freedom is always there, in the heartbeat of life.

Gray to glorious.

Pining to paid.

Bitter to benevolent.

Watching the birds at play just out of reach, I am reminded to forget all I ever thought I knew. But for Love. That shall remain.

A Wintered Annointing

Some times one can see the months coming, exchanging old outfits for the new. January to February stays dedicated to winter's cloak without a hint of anything different. These weeks stretch beyond countable days and I find myself imagining the still distant cries of red-winged blackbirds. Feeling phantom rays of the closer sun does not, however, lead to t-shirts and bare feet. I still shiver my request for heat and light. To love me is build fires today, even though tomorrow's wood dwindles. Woodsmoke on the downdraft is to winter like hamburgers on the grill in the late setting sun are of summer. The truly grateful appreciate the context before them; Yet I think on garden cilantro and fireflies and night-swimming while the tomb of winter lies still. There is work to be done here. How I long for happily, happily.

Light and life must not quarrel. Behavior must match belief. Bridge metaphors catch my breath because as usual, my interior life does not just belong to me. We must arrive at the other side because the unbearable pull of the safer shore is splicing the wholeness I am beginning to remember.

He is busy today yet pokes at the fire to wish me warm and draw me closer. Love does not triangulate; we do. Instead, love bends all of life's tensions into a circular oneness - never losing sight of what always was.

I am so loved. Yet I am also bending, curving towards the very nature that saves us all.  The delay is excruciating and so one must ask, again: how?  How does one surrender unto that which refuses understanding? I pour these questions at your feet, offering my hair to dry our tears.  For I know you have always cried with me.

Yet A Slave

Some kind of mental dust collects and settles over whatever clarity I've tried to maintain. Another dark dawn leads to an unalloyed gray. As a prayer for more light, I clean the living room windows with slow and measured intention. One can't keep waiting for the sun; the memory of its pleasure only brings pain. Teacher tells me to want what I have and care not for what I don't. It seems I am yet a slave to more than one master.

what flows between

banks of pleasure and pain -

love's clear expression of

I AM

Lately twenty sentences seem too many, especially when stumbling clear of confusion. Who doesn't read reveals an abeyance I am unable to reconcile. The compass spins. My heart protests. What remains unformed swirls around my spiraled heart cage like the melted wax of holy candles. I watch the flame drown in the pool of its own making and despite the effort to keep quietly alert to the real nature of Self, it is very hard to breath these days. Peace is a promise that must be kept.

At the window again, I watch the softer cardinal share the rhododendron with gray juncos. The jay bullies his presence onto the scene, scattering the trance and reminding me of the day's calling. Birds seem to reveal a presence of the undivided heart, singing songs void of restless meanderings and renouncing all that disturbs what is. I need them longer than I expected. Perhaps I am not ready for home.

letting go

yet frozen fog clings to branches

early declarations

Zen and Vodka

The cardinal climbs heavy pine branches, not quite settling in one place for more than a moment or two. I hear her higher song and listen for her mate. A white world covers the notes of what was once alive cauterizing the spaciousness of my heart. Snow hangs in sheets over the pergola, unable to stir in dawn's movement. My god, how I long to trust the simplicity of love! On hands and knees washing floorboards I hear the Bible-study ladies' admonishments rising with every filthy wring: Do everything as if unto the Lord. Pretend you are cleaning for Jesus! I asked them what it was like making love to God; maybe that had something to do with their reluctance to commission us to Africa. In the end, I scrubbed floors for Jesus in Kenya, her red dirt turning my water to blood.

More days than not now, life is sterile. Everything righteously put in order. Yet what tends towards chaos creates a perception of lack. Still. I am eating from the plate of everything I ordered.

Studying the zen voices brings relief. Though in the same way vodka abates, the tenor of their smooth answers allow a temporary distraction, followed closely by the surround-sound of my heartbeat ripping itself from the comfortable cage.

So it seems that one must surrender to the idea that winter remains choice-less.

So it seems that this theology on the rocks is deemed sufficient.

So it seems that my designated meal is satisfactory without dessert.

What a liar love has made.