Lost Colors, Dying Leaves
The color of changing leaves
is a sign of the symphony we hear.
We arrange the colors of life carefully,
folded underwear in new-fallen snow,
patterns, networks, dominoes,
sand-castles
The color of changing leaves
is the voice that we hear;
that enters our nostril and leaves by our ear:
informs us of sanity between birth and death,
a place were we rest, celebrate, sip
surrender
The Call of the World
The World has many voices.
We listen to them all.
We believe many of them.
We are pulled, pushed, nudged, awakened, sedated, seduced, mystified, bewildered and entertained by these voices.
We rarely question.
Read MoreBig difference
That which is for you a poem for me is not,
that which is a poem for me for you is not,
that which is for you a truth for me is not,
that which is a truth for me for you is not,
that which is for you a peace for me is not
that which is for me a peace for you is not,
that which is for you love, for me is not,
that which is for me love for you is not,
Read MoreBad people and me in life, death, and rebirth.
You work and prod and pull and full, you say ho! But then the sails for which your rails were meant to fill, now fall with no frill and you say, oh.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.
Yes, 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.
Read MoreLife, and More Life…
today, I went to a funeral.
they’re now called memorials, or celebrations of life, rites of passage.
there are some mile-markers in life, in the monumental history of man, that never change, despite the changes in terminology and ornamentation that we apply on the outside.
this was the father of a good friend, a gentle and handsome man. a man truly wearing visible sweetness of the soul in his everyday demeanor.