On the roof I sat and watched the sun step aside for the night, the cooling air nestling against my body. My limited view of the world before me. My care stretched beyond the expression of my gathered thoughts. Much further did the rays carry me than words could ever admit. My fingers soared higher, laced to my heart, exposing me to the light. I braced my life for the impact of a tomorrow I couldn’t fathom and held tight to every ripple my chambers emitted. I sang the melody of a boy turned man, through the shades slowly turning on day, leaning into the dark of nightfall. Then I closed my eyes and held the image of the sun inside of the womb of my soul. And held, and held, and held.

When I returned, I had not moved, not an inch. In my stillness, I felt the pulse of the world below. Its quiet hum calling me into attendance. With the approaching dark I watched humans bring light to their homes. I smiled and reached out my heart to their locked doors and knocked. Silently I entered every household and listened to life at the dinner table. I whispered their prayers in a universal echo, muttered their dreams and sorrows like they were my own, then slipped out of their proof of life, leaving their display untouched, yet profoundly witnessed.

I am not them. And yet in ways curious to myself, I love them. I embrace their fleeting mark on earth. Here sun meets seed, warms the soil, and beckons life to summon the minerals needed to extend toward the light. As I sit and watch: seeds sprout, seeds die. I am a sentinel on a roof, in a time, heartbeats gathered in my chest, simply watching the sunset.

We are lonely at times. In streaks of color and fading fabric we devote our selves to stillness. We run our innermost along the smooth spine of ribbons, hanging over doorways. They beckon us to enter. In slip our souls, deep into forgotten passages like roots dwelling in dark spaces, where we commemorate our ancestors, and where only the heart affords light.

I fall off a leaf.

On and on – rowan and walnut – I lift the heavy blanket from my shoulders and lay it across the table – cherry. There loneliness meets light, finds rest, finds recognition, stumbles towards a young child’s pointed finger; „look“. Then, evaporates: all seen is freed. Unmasked and spilled into the embracing forest. Of seed rises tree, and branch, and leaf…mother, father, brother, sister. Their roots run in my veins. What love, what source of life entwined inside of me. I am at peace.

In aging, my body dwindles and with promising certainty parts from lessons painstakingly learned. My efforts to conserve the body  surrender to the imminent decay, always present and in equal measure denied, in its plain form acknowledeged, later accepted. I pain in swollen knees. An aching back sends shivers through my arm. Every mention consumes energy ruthlessly and senselessly. I am learning to pay attention to my dissolving form, to discover I cannot avoid. I am beginning to think that transcending the body is an idea to escape this life experience. I find treating my pains and not creating more is a feasible stance to take. Age weiterlesen →

Macademia nuts have a real bite to them, not a clear cut from teeth biting through nutty flesh, more so a distinct, yet quick and intentional scraping and halving the nut. Wise is my observation of snacking on said nut. Just as meaningful as dragging my mattress in to the open to lay flat on my back and observe the stars. In no way more or less filled with meaning than finalizing a 100 million dollar transaction or standing at the man-made border on the lookout for smugglers. Meaningful is an interpretation in everyone’s own right.

I sat on a wall far too long, staring into open space, trying to make sense, when I would have rather dipped my hand into my pocket to retrive the fruit of the tree and taste it fully. Attaching meaning became my thought-hobby, an obsession so very boring I grew real good at it. I preached and promised myself into isolation, so I could think and think some more. I was pushing thoughts around in imaginery circles, fooling myself into believing they had gained any more depth or clarity or meaning, when they had not. Nothing new comes from folding clutter into more clutter, like carrying sand to sand, unwilling to sit and rest and play. Not the scripted, practiced play, this dismal display on thought out stages. No – childs play without a prescribed outcome to gauge and evaluate. Just play. Lost in time and action, contrary to the constant rowing through mucky thoughts.

So here was a deciding point, to sink teeth pleasurably into the macademia nut or to ponder and weigh the decision in my mind for the upteenth time. In a break of habit, scream for release, I threw the ores over board and sunk the ship, swam on my back and kicked the water up high, exhaulting rapid cries of joy. Was I alive or what?

A wise man sits and pulls on a strand of grass, not forceful, not in desperation, and not at night, because he knows they rest inside their quiet selves and slip into an unknown space. The light they cannot see grows within them. A page everyday turns. An upward motion underneath their skin, a slow bend, inaudible and correct. Life easing intentionally into itself, reaching up to man with urgency in meeting his heart.

A long walk in the park, my quiet place. I think to myself: my friends cushion my soul, when I long to be held. They walk alongside me for long or short. I don’t measure distance, gratitude knows no restraints. My friends distrust their impression of knowing me fully even in the maturing years of our friendship. They have not lost wonder in meeting me over and over, frequenting the nectar of our friendship, like a hummingbird dipping deep into the crevasse of a flower to still its thirst.

My friends listen to my voice and to the muscles in my face exposing my inner world. They listen for the sweeping sounds of rising waves my heart carries to the edge of my skin. They listen with me in their mind. Empty saucers draw in my every word, they then hold to their lips to taste and estimate my state of being. Their presence and regard caress my heart, so it too walks freely in the park of parks, trusting to be seen and heard by those, whose footsteps never wake the quiet place into distress. Their silent elephant soles knead the earth, which enwraps me, each step purposeful, considerate of the leaves and branches strewn on the ground. A mosaic-me they shine their light on with their presence in my life, always seeing, hearing, tasting the composition of color and light anew.

The far end of the world is only a distance, one my heart never ceases to resolve, when I think of a friend and they of me. Here nests my trust, that ever knowing-feeling of being held in timeless friendship. And sails that ship one day to new grounds, I rest in fond memory. And one day too, the horizon swallows our glowing sun as we transition, then still, I know I am loved.

I follow the white vastness with my gaze, in awe. We both smile. The flower in my palm. I love the flower’s kindness, touching its tenderness to the extended palm. I recognize the same vastness in a flower as in the floating ice. I grab a nearby chair from those cast under the protective shade of trees, and sit. I am a spectator with the world expanding before me. The continuous motion is a passage through time, scattering worn leaves along the way, hurrying my own life forward. Anticipating nothing, I rest for a moment with eyes open. The red chair on dry grass, a backdrop to life, is my resting place. I will die an observer, yet every act of mirroring the world plays out wholly in myself. Every irritation belongs to me, just as every marvel charging and mounting my heart is mine alone. Life is overflowing and I am not seperate, not from flowers, nor from shelves and crests of snow and ice, not from a single breath exposed and raw in frustration or pain or love. A faint or furious chime echos life, whispers to petals soft to my touch, breaks now on the ocean’s surface. The ocean is the palm that holds the flower up to the sky, where our eyes meet and smile.

My feet carried me through a dark alley and further into the night. I traced my hands along the narrow walls lining the alley. Cold and damp, that familiar smell of a cellar, where I breath in the past. It is an old breath that fills my nostrils and prodes my memories in to immediate action. There, down the stairs and round the corner it sits and awaits my coming.

From afar I hear your voice. It travels down the same straight stairs. Here word and ear meet of one grandmother and grandson. Today the meeting is free of any physical binds. I have forgotten the words. But I remember you standing in the kitchen. Apron around your waist, ladle or spoon at hand, something cooking on the stove. I wish I knew what you wore on your feet. Surely you weren’t barefoot! And your hands? Did you stick them into the pockets of your apron as you overlooked your doing? Or did they handle plates and cutlery as you set the table? I didn’t observe your fingers then. I do now. The hands weary, oh many ladles passed through their grip and release, and many soups and dishes they guided to hungry family and friend. Not that I truly remember. It’s a thought that passes as we touch the warmth of our hands together. I observe yours,  and rest my attention on your fingers and nails. I think to myself they are beautiful. Autumn swept your worn leaves away, your fingernails remain untouched. Youth in those nails. What contact they must have had as your hand reached out to connect to the world.

In dreams I fly. I lift off the ground effortlessly. I am unchallenged by doubt or any order of thought. I fly as I walk.  The ease and innate trust of letting go. The feeling rouses me, but only in writing, for in flight I am free. You see, I retain my human form and don’t flap my arms. In effect, I loose my physical boundary, which separates me from the world. I am air, though human mass, and materialize in  space free to move as I please. What strikes me, is the unquestioned progression of being across all dimension. Flight itself is insignificant, I thirst for the experience of being boundless. A moment of mindless recognition, of expansion, of touching the heart to the cheek of creation in a song of outmost peace, expressed solely by stepping beyond and aside, simply to allow. To allow the song to be flight and form in its very nature revealed. Then, it is not my flight or my doing, only at the verge of consciousness my wakeful being. Ever more.