Eye Passing, Life Catching

The Precious Moments of Life are Slipping By
It is noon, it is midnight, it is an Orange color moving through the Sky
Pets are fed, Rumi is Dead, mother has baked another Perfect Apple Pie
The Dogs on the Sled, the nuns in the Bed: all perform effortlessly as they
look in my Eye … And Life keeps Passing relentlessly by.

The Precious Moments of Life are Moving On
The Trains, Planes and Cargoes are catapulted through the Orange Colors of Dawn
Mystery Speaks; Ghosts in the Closet Squeak; Neighbors on acid Freak …
and Dead Poets, Live Lemmings, Drunk Singers and Retarded Swingers
all Dance in Synchrony, as they look in my Eye
… And Life keeps Passing Relentlessly by.

The Sad & Happy Moments of Life are Departing
Like a Drunken Missionary, embarrassed by his own Farting
They Walk out the Door, They look relaxed and Sore,
They claim to all Know the Score (of Hockey Games to Come)
In God’s Kingdom On The Run; in Buttered Club Med in the Sun
… As Life gazes Lovingly in my Eye and relentlessly passes on By.

The Family Tree is Bearing the Fruit of Ecstasy
Relatives living and dead, lost uncles buried in my head
Aunt Jemima’s bejeweled vagina and Cousin Leroy’s recurring Angina
And the long sullen list of Februaries missed and Octobers’ Toenails Kissed
We’re all waiting in the Shooting Gallery of Love,
for the Silent Soldier with the Pearly Glove
to pull that Trigger – we figure – that will lift us all Above.
… And the tears roll out from the Elephant’s eye
as Rivers flow on … and Life Passes by.

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The Art of Eternal Childhood

An email from an old friend. He’s in the throes of raising an 11-year old daughter – amazed by the pure and vital energy of childhood – and asks, “why have we lost this as adults…?”

My answer would be, we haven’t lost this, but we’ve left this. We’ve left this for a set of distractions, protections & consequences that effectively annihilate our chances of returning to the place of innocence, possibility and magic that we knew as children.

As a child, I always knew there was something suspicious, inauthentic and dangerous about the adult character in general. We all know a lot as children, and have access to an amazing range of “emotional intelligence” – intuitive, perceptive and creative capabilities. We sense and live in the spontaneous and ongoing beauty of childhood; we don’t understand or comprehend the “hardening” that has masked and throttled the authority figures around us.

As we grow older, we silently, agreeably adopt and adapt – internalizing all the subtle toxicities and poisons that are handed to us on silver platters: ego, emotional suppression, material obsession, power acquisition & manipulation, playing the proper game and saying the proper words at the proper time – in the proper tone of voice. We learn to obey the Kings of the Adult Architecture: bosses, families, spouses, preachers, pundits and obligations … all at the cost of our own soul.

My own personal journey into Adulthood was interrupted by a “side-trip” into the Land of Self-Knowledge. A side-trip which became the Journey of Life Itself. All the other “main trips” eventually panned out as distractions and misadventures; the subtle and frail voice that pulled me into the heart of Knowing Self, became the most powerful, beautiful, joyful and insightful voice in my being.

Part of the process of Knowing Self seemed to be the reconnection and resurrection of the lost inner child, that – it turns out – is really “me”, after all. The “sweet part” of us, it turns out, is still very much alive, and simply waits like a long lost seed, in the deepest cavern of our hearts, for springtime to return.

But, yes, life presents the challenge of feeling somewhat unique and alone in your “child-craft”; your innocence, beauty and magic seek others to play with – others to share the innate beauty of life with – but, alas, such companions are few and far-between. Most so-called “adults” are busy with the concern of the “adult world” – politics, money, relationship frustrations, sarcasm, jadedness and various mixes of toxic distraction and approved anesthetics.

It does make you value what you do have: access to your own inner song. It makes you value the few companions in life who can indeed share your hearts’ journeys. It makes those moments of play, delight, rainbow-watching, flower-sniffing …. all that much more precious, fragile, fragrant and delicious. And, last but not least: it makes you savor your True Companion, the inner friend you’ve known all along, the one who has been and will be with you every step of the way.

So, the celebration of Eternal Childhood seems to be where it’s at for me.

Sorry, other stuff bores me.

I just don’t have the time be be “grown up” anymore.

The field of life awaits, and it’s brilliant with a million colored flowers.

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Perky The Pidgeon

I chose parenting later in life.

My first-born is a pidgeon. He resides on my balcony.

He actually has 2 ‘real’ parents, but they don’t spend much time here anymore. Perhaps – given that the tedious days of egg-sitting are over – they’ve gone south to Vegas to party and forget for a while.

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Standing at the Threshold

Child in doorway
A few years ago I found myself standing in my closet, madly searching for clean clothes in a last minute attempt to pack before yet another business trip, when I noticed my 4-year old son standing at the entrance. In one hand, he held a small blue wand, in the other — a plastic bottle of soapy water. “Dada,” he said, looking up at me, his eyes wide open, “do you have time to catch my bubbles?”

Time? It stopped. And so did I. At that moment, it suddenly made no difference whether or not I caught my plane — I could barely catch my breath. The only thing that existed was him and that soulful look of longing in his eyes.

For the next ten minutes, all we did was play — him blowing bubbles and laughing. Me catching and laughing, too. His need was completely satisfied. His need for connection. His need for love. His need for knowing, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that absolutely everything was perfect just the way it was.

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Off the Coast of Love

blissMy wife tells me I should pay more attention to details —
the house, the car, the lawn —
there’s a thousand things, by sunset, that need to be done.
She’s right, of course.
It’s true.

*

If only I wasn’t floating three feet off the ground today,
caught in the updraft
of a single gaze from you,
spinning like a thousand cyclones
off the coast of love.

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The Book I Wanted to Buy For My Mother

For many years I wanted to buy a book for my mother — a book that would explain everything: what I hadn’t or couldn’t explain since I had been old enough to notice my mother wasn’t all that happy and, Lord knows, I wanted my mother to be happy and if not “happy” per se, then at least aware of what it was that made me, her son, happy — the “thing” that for so many years she thought was a phase I was going through and, even worse, some kind of heartless rejection of her and her way of life.

book of heartsYes, I wanted to buy my mother a book that would explain it all — the whole “New Age thing,” the whole “Guru thing,” the whole “it’s OK that I don’t eat your veal parmigiana any more because I’m a vegetarian thing.” Somebody must have written it. Somebody must have noticed the market niche of “mothers over 60 who worry why their high performing sons have gone “spiritual”.

And so, I went looking for this book. Like some people look for God. And though I never found it, I did find some reasonable facsimiles. Cleverly titled books displayed by the check out counter, conceived by marketing geniuses who somehow knew my need — the need a son has to make his mother smile and nod her head approvingly. The book that would keep my mother company during those long nights when her husband was working late and her children were asleep and there was nothing good on TV. The ultimate self-help book that would remove her worries, her doubts, and her exponentially growing fears of thinking her son had gone off the deep end for “receiving Knowledge” from that young boy from India.

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