Saecula Saeculorum

Every word lets you know
Every word is a dream of change
And you are the whispered word
We are everyday thoughts touching
Today, through cold wind
Lonely afternoon
Early darkness

I don’t walk alone
I climb with a meadow inside


I walk and walk. Having embraced the longing
I fall upward, a burning star, through a doorway
into the kingdom of stars

Every breath
a beating of wings

Your heat lives in me
the boy, the infant, the old, the strong, young
I see all forms of buoyancy
The sky changes
The winter crawls into us
We stay awake for our souls

Last Thought of the Day for 2011

I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act.

~Buddha

Inside Myself

Sky’s humming glowing
lightshow grows god
in unknown stars
that don’t know me

With eyes shut
a door opens
to a galaxy
with no regrets

Thought for the Day

It is not the diamonds or the birds, the people or the potatoes; it is not any of the nouns. The miracle is the adverbs, the way things are done. It is the way love gets done despite every catastrophe.
— Daniel Handler’s Adverbs

Bright Now Moments

Bright Now Moments is like seeing some very sunny fire in your life and you smile over tea but you know you are entirely in the moments, very Bright Now Moments. Bright Now Moments is like tasting some music in one another’s mouths. And if you hear the river’s blue and recognize that you’ve heard it all your life and just ached on it so. Now when you hear it and you start healing, popping your feet and jumping up and down others get mad because you're enjoying yourself but those are Bright Now Moments that they can't share with you because poetry lets you in and out and let’s you roam freely within it. When you try to tell others about it they don't know a damn thing about what you’re talking about because the flesh and matter of it is that poetry is an electrical thought impulse. Bright Now Moments explain nothing. You need to have a big hurt before you understand Bright Now Moments. Bright Now Moments will burn your mind up.

Thought for the Day

I am not I
     I am this one
Walking beside me whom I do not see,
Whom at times I manage to visit,
and whom at other times I forget...

Juan Jimenez

Clues

Dreams, wild hallucinations of snow falling
through moonlight, empty meadows, an acheless sky,
forever inside us.

Say no to Time, let Mystery rise.

Mists of possibility not for sale.
Light spreading not for sale.
Imagination of clouds not for sale.
Blessed blood exchange not for sale.
Riddles of the sun not for sale.

Desire, delight, divine.
Not for sale.

Thought for the Day

"We are born for wonder, for joy, for hope, for love, to marvel at the mystery of existence, to be ravished by the beauty of the world, to seek truth and meaning, to acquire wisdom, and by our treatment of others to brighten the corner where we are."

- Dean Koontz
Life Expectancy

Holy Lived

ache of wonder
rare heron I loved
for his pure frontiers
flies the edges

brings to me
bouquets of light
of being, story
I’ve come to believe
is mine

any other
would not explain
the laws of a dream
how sunlight makes music
warming cold winter air

Thought for the Day

And we: always and everywhere spectators,
turned not toward the Open
but to the stuff of our lives.
It downs us. We set it in order.
It falls apart. We order it again
and fall apart ourselves.

Who has turned us around like this?
Whatever we do, we are in the posture
of one who is about to depart.
Like a person lingering
for a moment on the last hill
where he can see his whole valley—
that is how we live, forever
taking our leave.

-Rilke, from The Eighth Duino Elegy

Once Upon a Time of Angels

Stars are shining great possibilities
*Like knights in white satin never reaching the end

It’s only by touch we know the way of angels
Yes, like flowers, like summer

Fold me who has been unfolded into the great blue paradise
Which does not resemble just any old desolate expanse

No need to ask what it means
Think of a small bone and what might become of it

When you scale the mountain of wakefulness
You open a bright eye and never blink

This mess on paper is not only an appetite
Here is an echo from a marvelous world

What if the poem were to end like this:
A woman leaves a man with a certain melancholy
Everything was new to them the night they disappeared

*Knights In White Satin, Moody Blues

Thought for the Day

Love is the way messengers
from the mystery tell us things.


Love is the mother.
We are her children.


She shines inside us,
visible-invisible, as we trust
or lose trust, or feel it start to grow again.

Rumi

Bodies That Are Skies

It would be easy to be lost here
Falling in and out of dream
Twisting into something more
Purple-black than night

In blind transformation
Healing begins in the words
That give birth to the voice
Never too late for a blessing

It’s why we’re alive
To feel the weightless way
Of the heart stretching into
The blue expanse where
Everything’s forever within reach

"…And we pray, not for new
earth or heaven, but to be quiet
in heart, and in eye clear.
What we need is here.”

― Wendell Berry"

Anywhere, Wherever, Now

Spirit is our house
Crux of so many of our matters

Hands spread open, palms up toward gate of sky
Prayers composed of little bones

Large blue-gray bird emerges from between the clouds
Beating out with wings a hymn of clarity above the wind

Cradle of words within protects us everywhere we go
Holy names written in Colorado snow

Vows of blossoming inside an open door

The Gate of Heaven is Everywhere

Thought for the Day

That which passes into everything is one thing.

Jack Kerouac

Loved World

A redemption dream comes into its own.
Winter birds sing and inherit the earth.
We are saved in shadows at the edge of letting go
and inherit the real light just in time.

Bright mountain day. Heap of words.
Pecking crows break ice to drink, freeze-blue sky,
a cloud drifts alone, flow in all directions.
Rapture at hand, source almost visible.

Thought for the Day

The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all these things into symbols, into music, into something which can last in man’s memory. That is our duty. If we don’t fulfill it, we feel unhappy. A writer or any artist has the sometimes joyful duty to transform all that into symbols. These symbols could be colors, forms or sounds. For a poet, the symbols are sounds and also words, fables, stories, poetry. The work of a poet never ends. It has nothing to do with working hours. Your are continuously receiving things from the external world. These must be transformed, and eventually will be transformed. This revelation can appear anytime. A poet never rests. He’s always working, even when he dreams. Besides, the life of a writer, is a lonely one. You think you are alone, and as the years go by, if the stars are on your side, you may discover that you are at the center of a vast circle of invisible friends whom you will never get to know but who love you. And that is an immense reward.

Jorge Luis Borges 1899-1986

The Endless Under Us

And maybe you're wondering, day after day, about transformative phrases like the "blood at our feet" and the "tears of the heart", maybe the blood and the tears have already cost us so much, but one thing can be clear, the cold time awakens spring inside. Snow fields melt before the winter. Everything is going somewhere good. Everything is heading where it should.

Thoughts for the Day

The paper I write on or you
write on, every word we write,
every cross and twirl of the
pen, and the curious way we
write what we think, yet very
faintly . . .
In them realities for you and
me -- in them poems for you
and me . . .
In them themes, hints, provokers.

- Walt Whitman


The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don't go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don't go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don't go back to sleep.

- Jalaluddin Rumi

A Thought Becomes A Whisper

When my dream turns
to the sky
a surrender of knowing appears
in the orange torch of sun.
At the edge of the eye
an illumination of the ordinary now
burns through the distance.
A wild sign gleams
as fire takes hold and serotonin replenishes
brain and being.
Mystery creates new enigmas.
Angels with scorched wings wake up
and meaning keeps moving.

Thought for the Day

The little river twittering in the twilight,
The wan, wondering look of the pale sky,
This is almost bliss.


And everything shut up and gone to sleep,
All the troubles and anxieties and pain
Gone under the twilight.


Only the twilight now, and the soft "Sh!" of the river
That will last forever.


And at last I know my love for you is here;
I can see it all, it is whole like the twilight,
It is large, so large, I could not see it before,
Because of the little lights and flickers and interruptions,
Troubles, anxieties and pains.


You are the call and I am the answer,
You are the wish, and I the fullfilment,
You are the night, and I the day.
What else - it is perfect enough.
It is perfectly complete,
You and I,
What more--?


Strange, how we suffer in spite of this.








~ DH Lawrence
from Look! We Have Come Through!

When The Weight Is Lifted

Your infinity meeting majesty
Your milky faith in the present
Your thankful immense possibility

All the strange angels knowing what we don’t

Liquid luminous landscapes
Fireworks of meteors
A spell of light

Freer than ever

Thought for the Day

We are yet the bastard sons and daughters of an evolution not yet done with us, caught always between the fragments of yesterday and the unions of tomorrow, unions apparently destined to carry us far beyond anything we can possibly recognize today, and unions that, like all such births, are exquisitely painful and unbearably ecstatic. And with yet just the slightest look--once again, within--new marriages unfold, and the drama carries on.

Ken Wilber

Unfailing

Metamorphosis

I woke
to see
my wonder
had been
restored
by you
I turned
and you
were gone

The embedded
light
I retained
The lovetale
altered
my soul
to overflow
ten thousand
walls

I long
I crave
all things
to be
sharp ecstasies
real enough
you are
fulfilled
in sun
behind them
again

Nothing
touches
save
the light
bringing
the soul
an endless
promise

Thought for the Day

“Soon the child’s clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions, preconceptions, and abstractions. Simple free being becomes encrusted with the burdensome armor of the ego. Not until years later does an instinct come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn. The sun glints through the pines and the heart is pierced in a moment of beauty and strange pain, like a memory of paradise. After that day, we become seekers.”

—Pete Matthiessen r Muryo

The Sky Cries for It

Snow-covered Japanese Quince blossoms

For the bridge, yes, there is always poetry.
Or the adore principle. Finding meaning by instinct
alone. Needing wonder. Not needing to know.
You imagine falling upwards. Lanes of blue.
That you deserve it. Even awakening. Even as you
fill with wounds of bliss, you do not ask what this means.
Like a shattered path, but traveling toward your desired point.
You are the name that’s being written but unfamiliar with
that which is writing it. Let it.

Thought for the Day

"You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book… or you take a trip… and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death. Some never awaken."
—

Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

The Eventual Outcome

come into the center of my sweet

I’ll count however long I need to count the crow hours and days—

I like

the clarities that roll through the mountain nights—that beat of wings I bless

or

that flows through

the beauty we love—I see through the body

more

than not--come draw near me, long and deeply, carry us off

where

beyond breath we can call it

a gift

Thought for the Day

“At our age the imagination
across the sorry facts
lifts us
to make roses
stand before thorns.
Sure
love is cruel
and selfish
and totally obtuse—
at least, blinded by the light,
young love is.
But we are older,
I to love
and you to be loved,
we have,
no matter how,
by our wills survived
to keep
the jeweled prize
always
at our finger tips.
We will it so
and so it is
past all accident.”

― William Carlos Williams

A Room Inside

In her buried skyness she crawls through the night
moonlight in her mouth, celebrating her soul

she slides into a vast room, full of mountains and stars
and translates blue-heron mysteries into her tears.

Thought for the Day

I start out on this road, call it
love or emptiness. I only know what's

not here: resentment seeds, back-
scratching greed, worrying about out-

come, fear of people. When a bird gets
free, it doesn't go back for remnants

left on the bottom of the cage! Close
by, I'm rain. Far off, a cloud of fire.

I seem restless, but I am deeply at ease.
Branches tremble; the roots are still.

I am a universe in a handful of dirt,
whole when totally demolished. Talk

about choices does not apply to me.
While intelligence considers options,

I am somewhere lost in the wind.
- Jelaluddin Rumi

Out of Shadows

Unfurled in full clouds
In the glisten of endless space
The daring blue heron
Delightful, Zen-like spectacle
Seeking to be found
Jubilates alone

Why not
Using your soft, lost wings
At the mystical edge of your dreams
In one, hot-blooded flash
Ascend into the sky of his heaven

Song of the Day

Thought for the Day

Again and again, however we know the landscape of love
and the little churchyard there, with its sorrowing names,
and the frighteningly silent abyss into which the others
fall: again and again the two of us walk out together
under the ancient trees, lie down again and again
among the flowers, face to face with the sky.





~ Rainer Maria Rilke 

Outside the Seasons

open the door & let
the sun soften you
& bathe in the gladness
of enhanced consciousness

inside the jewel of dreams
desire swells
& overwhelms
the sleeper

a body without
air & inner prayer
cannot live or thrive
nor can the sky

of time
rearrange the hours
each person gains
in pain of evolution

a simmering, brilliant spasm
inside the sparkling blue

Thought for the Day

Cowardice breaks off on its path.
Anguish breaks off on its path.
The vulture breaks off in its flight.

The eager light runs into the open,
even the ghosts take a drink.

And our paintings see the air,
red beasts of the ice-age studios.

Everything starts to look around.
We go out in the sun by hundreds.

Every person is a half-open door
leading to a room for everyone.

The endless field under us.

Water glitters between the trees.

The lake is a window into the earth.



~ Tomas Transtromer
from Half-Finished Heaven
translated by robert bly

The Yes Particle

Jerry Uelsmann


What about an undressed wound of the heart
When it comes slamming at you like a little death
Entangling you into the holy place
Into the divine, a sincere sky tucked away inside

Open the doors
It's coming through you, too

Thought for the Day

“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances without own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”

Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

So Angels Can Come

I have a big sky
for a gift
I’m sending it to you
now
across Memory Lake
as an end in itself
aren’t we all moments
of immense contradiction?
I could speak
as proof

the earth is on
crow time
don’t forget
we’ll soon
be mingled
with dust


you bless me
I bow
I bow so you can
bless me
I bless me you bow
you bow
blessingly

Thought for the Day

We learned the whole of love,
The alphabet, the words,
A chapter, then the mighty book--
Then revelation closed.

But in each other's eyes
An ignorance beheld
Diviner than the childhood's,
And each to each a child.

Attempted to expound
What neither understood.
Alas, that wisdom is so large
And truth so manifold!




~ Emily Dickinson

Grace Inside

drawing by Rodin

I dissolved into breath
to be drawn into you.

Now that I’m here
there is no other world.

All I can feel
is the flesh I’m adhered to,

what an elegant prism
looking out from inside of you.

You told me it was
a blue mantra of the moment,

and it is — keeper you are of
secret words of the sky.

Thought for the Day

The things we really need come to us only as gifts,
and in order to receive them as gifts,
we have to be open.

In order to be open we have to renounce ourselves,
in a sense we have to die to our image of ourselves,
our autonomy, our fixation upon our self-willed destiny.

We have to be able to relax the psychic
and spiritual cramp which knots us in the painful,
vulnerable, helpless “I” that is all we know of ourselves



~ Thomas Merton

It

It will be the soft solace of hands.
It will be right here. It will be jazz.
It will be looking at each other.
It will be a whole day and night of

poetry. It will be lovely weather
for a picnic. It will look like sunflowers
on fire. It will look like
the golden sun behind clouds-

the universe expanding. It will follow us
everywhere. It will awaken the light.
We won't have a name for it.
It will be full of passion.

Thought for the Day

"This then is life.
Here is what has come to the surface after so many throes and convulsions.
How Curious! How real!
Underfoot the divine soil, overhead the sun."
- Walt Whitman

Of My Nature

Dawn dawning on olive skin
I am a marvel
Empty yet feasting
Open and shelterless here
Morning rises as if from my own hands
Like a prayer

Thought for the Day

Perhaps you have never experienced that state of mind 
in which there is total abandonment of everything, 
a complete letting go. 

And you cannot abandon everything without deep passion, can you? 
You cannot abandon everything intellectually or emotionally. 
There is total abandonment, surely, only when there is intense passion. 

Don't be alarmed by that word because a man who is not passionate, 
who is not intense, 
can never understand or feel the quality of beauty. 

The mind that holds something in reserve,
the mind that has a vested interest, the mind that clings to position,
power, prestige, the mind that is respectable, which is a horror;
such a mind can never abandon itself.





J. Krishnamurti
from  The Book of Life

Like Space

The mind is
the heart is
wonder and
the light of
blessedness,
hidden jewels,
in and out,
throughout each other,
and her,
an angel,
shining away
in the skyblue
awe of me,
my luminous paradise,
fragrant grass in winter sun,
the heart is
the mind is
manifesting immortal
essence.

Thought for the Day

"First you hear the words
and they are like all other words,

ordinary, breathing out of lips,
moving toward you in a straight line.

Later they shatter
and rearrange themselves. They spell

something else hidden in the muscles
of the face, something the throat wanted to say."
—  Ruth Stone, from “The Wound”

Return

Black bitter night
Hate to feel it
Frozen high
Northwest wind
No one ever came
Cold legs
Away crooked dream
Like a fading angel
For heaven's sake.

Thought for the Day

the weight,
the weight we carry
is love.

Who can deny?
In dreams
it touches
the body,
in thought
constructs
a miracle,

from Song, Allen Ginsberg

Serious Exuberance

Dear Jack,

O Holy Hero of All Desolate Expanses,

I want you to know I believe I understand you when
I look up at the lonely clouds blowing across the sky.
I know we’re living in milk and existing in lilies.
AINT to worry about No Thing as you would say.
It’s all the same Thing in the juicy, embraceable void;
Tender railyard angels appear in the freezing night,
Awake with a secret knowing and receive thy prodigal sons
Of the Road and the Path to the self-less Source original.
Everything forever coming back to itself.
Silly fools, one and all, pure dreams already over.
Rumble, dumble the bell tolls for each of us.
You were here, you remember the dream, the phantom,
The bubble, like a shadow, like a vanishing dew.
When she smiles I am the sky, too.

My moan is your moan in the endless roar of the golden eternity;
it's kept me alive above any wounds.

Thought for the Day

libraryland:

Because we lived our several lives
Caught up within the spells of love,
Because we always had to run
Through the enormous yards of day
To do all that we hoped to do,
We did not hear, beneath our lives,
The old walls falling out of true,
Foundations shifting in the dark.
When seedlings blossomed…

The House, Mary Oliver

Quite Soon Already Existing

The tender shape of How-Things-Are
against despair
and what really matters

inside the music
so I can imagine the new sky

We can’t delay the longing
I consider silence
Is there anything more restful?
I bless your brow


until love
is able to heal
us
who cannot be healed

Thought for the Day

i will not straighten the books or clean the fridge.
i will not mention what you have forgotten, nor will i think it.
i will not pick crumbs from your shirt.

your hair is messy. i shall kiss it.

i shall write this poem about your messy hair:

your messy hair
tells me
your essence is busy being

i will become so infected with this poem, with your essence of being, that i will forget to brush my hair.
we will keep birds in our hair, nests without cages,

and all day long we will fly and sing.

~ erin
in search of white space

An Appearance

hands

I pass through here
until you don’t see me any longer
tranced into pieces small as
grains of dust in all the universes

I exist everywhere

Can I lose you like that
can I

We exist side by side
in flush radiance

Thought for the Day

Out of my wounds they have made stars:
Each is an eye that looks on you.

-James K. Baxter, from Howrah Bridge

What Can I Say

Not by outside means
I am goofy with clarity.
Born with a flawless longing and
a break mind magic
in this history of light.
I expand my life.
What State of Brightness.
What not but spaceless sky,
everything and simplicity calling to you.
Winter morning lotus,
aureating itself.

Thought for the Day

This spreading radiance of a true human being has great importance ... Look carefully around you and recognize the luminosity of souls ... Sit beside those who draw you to that ...

Rumi

Video of the Day

Seconds Of Beauty - 1st round compilation from The Beauty Of A Second on Vimeo.

to Ruth Stone, so old and so new

 
I want to hear you more, mottled
prophet of wild eyes searching the air
 
I want to be one foot from your
stained folding chair, heavy worded
 
hands waving, begging, rubbing words
into your white hair and my ears
 
like a quiet wind blowing blue squall,
stomping up and down ancient stairs
 
upon which we crumble and climb
into blaring white sky and fall through
 
a hush of soft green needles
where your words play our grooves
 
like a record scratching love love love
and we swear that is what we are made for

Rachel Kellum, read more at www.wordweeds.com

Over the Glorious Sky

my soul to evolve
the luminous infinity of possibilities
in innocence and ease
I shall not want
that one heart abide in two.

Song of the Day-the poet game

Thought for the Day

The airy sky has taken its place leaning against the wall.
It is like a prayer to what is empty.
And what is empty turns its face to us
and whispers:
“I am not empty, I am open.”


~ Tomas Tranströmer
translation by Robert Bly
from The Winged Energy of Desire

In the Clear Stream of All of It

Did you make your way
to greater joy or
is the silence in the silence a reply?

Always questions
nothing but questions.

Unfolding is a golden ringing,
ride the ringing, ride the ringing

where the ringing is
what a bell does.

Ruth Stone, American Poet, 1915-2011

Ruth Stone from Neil Astley on Vimeo.

Thought for the Day

"In the end, writing is like a prison, an island from which you will never be released but which is a kind of paradise: the solitude, the thoughts, the incredible joy of putting into words the essence of what you for the moment understand and with your whole heart want to believe."
- James Salter