Saturday, November 29, 2008

Pacific Palace Aids

The ocean was as placid as I've ever seen this morning,
as calm as a dreaming baby,
as smooth as a seducer's spiel.
I rushed to the shore to join the sentinel line
of sleepy-eyed seagulls, watchers and holy ones.
I arrived before the surfing magicians
could conjure up their waves.
And sure enough, my mind floated out to sea,
leaving me thoughtlessly on the shore.

I realized my body needed to be kneaded
by those foamy fingers curling gently
as from a young mother's hand.
I wanted to be bread dough, to smell like yeast,
to be pulled and stretched and made supple again.
I wanted to be washed, to have the stain of my shame
worked out of me; I wanted to be clean again.
I wanted to be squeezed and squeegeed as the sky had been,
cloudless and bright; I wanted to be clear again.
I wanted what only the sea could give: new life.

A flock of shadows flew across my face,
and I turned my body for home,
letting my mind find its own way as it will.
Suddenly a butterfly flew around my head,
crowning me like the monarch it was!
I picked up a sand dollar, small change
when I was hoping for something larger?
No, for the priceless epiphanies of this morning
I would have paid much more...




Friday, November 28, 2008

Horizons

The Phoenix did not rise tonight,
but instead flew fiercely across the horizon
like a pelican streaking for home,
its belly lit by the fire of the setting sun,
its wing as outstretched as an angel's,
eventually trailing a rainbow streamer
across the length of the horizon.

There was no such spectacular promise
in the orderliness of the day.
The line of the horizon was razor sharp,
like Occam's, cutting sky from sea with clarity.
The waves wrinkled to shore like folds of skin
massaged by the wind's gentle hand.
And the clouds were combed and parted,
the silver strands of an aged gentleman waiting for a lady.
Tranquility reigned at last.
We needed to be soothed,
after two tumultuous days and nights of unpredictability.

Which lent surprise to the day's ultimatum:
The fire next time!, it proclaimed,
but not as a threat; more like a pledge.
And as Saturn and Venus took their places
in the cobalt sky, above the crimson band,
and we waited for the moon's sliver
to cut the night's curtain,
we knew we had something more to look forward to
than merely passing days upon the earth.

Thursday, November 27, 2008

Rainbow Splash

Arching from inland to ocean,
the storm dragging its tail,
it pours its essence out:
indigos and teals fill the water;
blues rise to the skies and spread themselves
in the mirrors of the shallows;
greens blend and reach out to each other
in the vegetation of land and water;
yellows and golds drape the cliffs
and fly away on the breasts of kestrels.
I look for reds, like blood at the scene of a crime,
and find them splashed on stones and shells
and pooled in the ominous tide.

How will we harvest the rainbow?
Will we wrap ourselves in it, like Joseph?
Or are we to remain in the pit,
never to be the dream-meaner
who saves his people-- and thus himself?

Anyone can see the colors.
Only a few can wear them.
Fewer still can let the light illuminate them.
And fewest of all become the prism
of their own luminescence.

Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Tracings

I walk the scalloped coastline
as if I am tracing the lace edge of your bodice,
my knuckles soft across your surface,
our hearts beating like waves chasing each other,
seeking to escape the gathering storm
by breaking, over and over again.
My arms spread wide to take it all in,
to take you all in.
I'm a supplicant to beauty!
Let the weight of the wide sky fall on me
like a downy comforter!
My eyes spring with surprise,
as if at a dolphin sighting.
The aperture of my body is as open as can be,
a wide angle lens bending, stretching to receive.
I am backlit as a wave at sunset,
crimson, transparent, on fire.
I am light, and glad to be, even
glad to have been, when the light goes out.
The waves of passion have scratched the shore,
leaving sand paintings for our healing.
There are parables in those parabolas.

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

A Day at the Beach

Sights, encounters, and reflections from a day at the beach:

Sights: I am a solitary figure among solitary figures. Many of the seabirds are loners at this time of year: a lone cormorant dips and dives not ten yards from shore; the occasional curlew is flockless; I walk around a single gull standing on one foot, in order to respect him, for this is his beach, not mine. Out on the water, a solitary surfer waits for one last wave as the darkening day joins the sky and the sea in gray. This is a good time to be alone on the beach, for I am not alone in being alone.

Encounters: Yesterday, a boy runs up behind me and yells, "DAD!" at the top of his lungs. He is shouting to his father, I'm sure, but I hear him as if I am he, when he startles me out of my reverie. Down the beach I meet "Flat Stanley," a doll sent by her great granddaughter to the great grandmother who is now photographing Flat Stanley's oceanside adventures for the great granddaughter to share with her class. Travel by proxy, like a garden gnome. Flat Stanley speaks to me: one of us is going places, he says. Two boys break away and run screaming at a group of seagulls minding their own business. A classic case of boy meets gull-- and as is usually true on such occasions, the gulls simply grumble and move along.

Reflections: I am wondering what our hearts are made of. I carved my name into her heart of stone, hoping to leave a lasting impression. But her heart turned out to be made of sand instead, and whatever impression I might have made was gone with the tide. Above the cliffs flies a POW/MIA flag. Some impressions are more permanent: in the battlefield of love, some of us are Missing in Action, others, Prisoners of War-- but lost forever to "take no prisoners" romance.

Monday, November 24, 2008

Insane Dependence

I remember when our most benighted of Presidents told us, in a State of the Union Address no less, that we were a country "addicted" to oil. When even he recognized our economy, indeed our culture, had an irrational dependence on a substance, well then, surely it must be true. Then we got globally warmed to a point that our relationship with fossil fuels became ambivalent at best. And finally we followed the inconvenient truth far enough to believe that there might actually be alternatives to our crude addiction. We are now in love with "hybrids." Hmmm...

The other day, on NPR, two reports laid bare the dilemma of our alternatives. In one, the limitations of battery-powered personal transportation vehicles was examined. Thomas Edison himself had promised Henry Ford that he would make a battery-powered car for Ford's wife within their lifetimes. He didn't of course-- and cars were a lot lighter then! Now battery powered car technology turns on basically one option: lithium-ion. Alternatives to that option are not being sought-- except by the lead acid folks who've made our car's batteries for a long time.

OK, so what's so dangerous about lithium-ion? Don't they power our cell phones and cameras? Well, yes... And if that isn't fair warning, then maybe we ought to pay attention to where the "stuff" to make such batteries comes from. That "stuff" is cobalt and another element I don't remember (this was radio I heard this on). Turns out, most of cobalt is found in the Congo-- not a very stable place to be mining our futures-- and in "southern China, near Tibet," which is also where most of that "other element" is found. Hmmmmm...

So if our present is about dependence of foreign oil primarily from the middle east, could our future be about dependence on foreign cobalt from China? And haven't we already mortgaged our future to China who owns most of the paper of our national debt anyway? Hmmmmm...

Suddenly, all of Obama's brave pronouncements to the contrary, I was a lot less sanguine about our futures...

But the future is not really mine to see. What struck me more was the insight of a possible analogy: As it is in our fiscal economies, could it be in our emotional economies? That is, is it the case that, no matter how hard we try or how many alternative choices we feel we may have, that each of us finds ourselves perpetually dependent on obtaining something we need from those who are foreign or alien or even hostile to us?

You see, I'm puzzling about my own insane behavior, and looking to rationalize over the wider spread of the human condition...

As anyone in recovery knows, the definition of "insanity" is "doing the same thing over and over again but expecting a different result." Being in recovery from a recent romantic relationship that could only be described as "insane" on exactly the same terms, I have become a student of my own irrational, self-destructive repetitive behaviors. I'm looking at myself asking, why did I continue to do that?

Well, the answer, my friends, may lie in the stars-- and there would be a certain relief if I could point to "destiny" to exculpate myself. But more likely Shakespeare was right, and it lies in "ourselves"-- and I get some comfort from thinking I may be an idiot but my behavior was not idiosyncratic! In other words, I am not alone in my penchant for insanity.

To be precise, maybe there truly is something built into the human condition where we eventually discover that we actually do need for our own better functioning what another has within them. Like we do with middle eastern oil, or we might with Chinese cobalt. Maybe the world is so structured that we are become aware that each of us have the parts of the other's puzzle. And that to complete ourselves, we need each other. Maybe in the worst way...

Or maybe we are to find out how not to need each other in the worst way, but instead how to deal with this "the way things are" in a manner that does not bring about insanity, but something like vulnerability and cooperation.

The thing about the definition of insanity is not the repetition or the compulsion, but the expectation. Our expectations of ourselves and others is what is so screwy! Maybe we are to deal with this need for what the other has for us that we cannot supply to ourselves-- but change our expectations. Maybe it is our own expectations that drive us insane.

At least that is where I'm going in my own life, and in whatever future romantic relationships I might be blessed to have. But maybe we need to learn that geo-political economic lesson now as well. What we need, those who are foreign to us have. So why should we expect anything different?

I'm thinkin' about this... I'm workin' on it!

Thursday, November 20, 2008

More Passing Thoughts

I cannot help but think that, since we cannot help but attribute gender to our conceptions of a personal diety, and since the notion of "Mother-and-Father God" seems to have gained some relative currency among those who pray that way, perhaps there are times when we prefer one gender attribution to God over another.

Like, maybe we begin, early in life, in our infant and child ways, to feel pretty good about Mother God, taking care of us, providing, as classic mothers do, protection and provision.

And then there comes a time in our lives when the adventures of the world beckon, and mastery, and competence, and testing ourselves against the elements and each other becomes more important to us than the relative comforts of home. Maybe then Father God appeals: strengthening, encouraging, picking us up when we're knocked down and dusting us off without coddling or infantalizing us, and sending us back into the frey again. In Father God's world we have enemies, but we have Him at our side, or better at our backs... The Good Father, growing us into adults.

Ah, but then there comes a time, or times come more frequently as we age, in which we need tenderness again. Not like before, but wounds need to be bound, our frailty acknowledged, our fatigue forgiven. More than anything, we come again primarily to need to be held, to be understood, to be accepted-- to be loved as only a mother could love. In the latter years of life, perhaps Mother God returns, to invite us into Her comfort, to put to rest our misgivings and to quiet our fears, and eventually to invite us to the sleep of the angels, when once again, in spite of all we've been through, we get that look on our faces of contentment and peace, a look She hasn't seen since we were wee.

All in God's good time...

More Passing

Well, it has happened again. First there was Pogo. Then Calvin & Hobbes. And recently, I wrote about the passing of "For Better or Worse." Now "Opus" has "bit" the dust...

You know, if the comics are "poor man's entertainment," in this economy, more of us are going to need to be reading them, and it seems like the level of excellence is declining. No slight to those who remain, but even La Cucaracha reprises Boondocks! Thank goodness for Frazz and Doonesbury!

Anyway, Berkeley Breathed gave us Opus readers ample time to anticipate his passing-- told us the date, and even invited folks to suggest a "place" for Opus to go-- with a "first place" prize of Ten Grand! Talk about stimulating reader interest!

So when Sunday November 3 rolled around I wasn't surprised to see the last strip-- only at Breathed's choice. (I had thought to send Opus to Galapagus, to evolve and further the evolution of all species. Penquins rule!) But BB didn't put his choice in the paper. I had to go to a website to find where Opus had been put to bed...

Which is exactly what Breathed did: he ended the strip by putting Opus in bed next to the little bunny in the children's classic, Goodnight Moon! There's the momma bunny, across the darkened room, reading: Goodnight Opus, and goodnight air. Goodnight noises everywhere.

I loved it! Whimsical. Wonderful. And appealing.

I thought: when the time for my passing comes, lay me down with someone soft and sweet and bunny-like to cuddle me 'till my eyes close forever. And let me hear the Great Mother saying "goodnight" to me, and to all that I have held dear...

May we all go the way of Opus! The model is somewhere in the children's book of our choice.