arc of light

Inform, tell, and remind yourself: March is around the corner. The temperature tide will turn. The trajectory projects warmth. More light. It is given. The arc of light shall not be denied. This polar grip will loosen. Believe it.

icicles

eaves’ teeth
stalactites
clenched at midnight
melting at noon
mocking eternity
and July
growing longer
pointedly
all the way
down
to
the
last
drop

shaking the snow globe

In "The Trip Treatment" by Michael Pollan in The New Yorker, the author cites neuroscientist Robin Carhart-Harris, saying, "It is striking that a single psychedelic experience -- an intervention that Carhart-Harris calls 'shaking the snow globe' -- should have the power to alter these patterns in a lasting way."

Shaking the snow globe.

Has your snow globe ever been shaken? What would shake it, freeing the crystalline flakes of ineffable beauty such that nothing in the globe of consciousness were ever quite the same again?

Shaking the snow globe.

Spiritual cataclysm, sobriety, submission, complete defeat, spiritual rebirth, surrender, love, mysticism, pharmaceutical redemption, satori, enlightenment, dharma, meditation, mercy, metanoia.

memory

I've taken to reading Marcel Proust again. Not every day, and not for long. Why? Because Proust reminds me of the subjective skew of recollection. He said, she said, I said, they said. Two individuals can share individual cups of coffee, or view a sunset, or walk a walk. Naturally (and organically, for that matter), their recollections of the shared experience are radically different. Infinitely different. We like to think otherwise, especially when being sentimental, but memory and recollection -- and thinking, if you will -- occupy idiosyncratic spheres that do not ever correspond or overlap perfectly. When you think of it (or feel of it), that's what literature purports to do: to re-create the event, the experience, the wonder, the immediacy, the "it." But it always falls short.

hopeless romantic

You hear and see the term "hopeless romantic." Why hopeless and not hopeful? Does the former choice anticipate rejection, adding to the unrequited-love pose? Does the latter choice make it all sound too easy? Is being romantic a hopeless proposition, given the clash of romance and gauzy fantasy vs. the pebble-in-the-shoe or sand-in-your-tea challenges of so-called reality?

assignations

The mind has a thought. You assign meaning to it. The meaning may be so-called positive or so-called negative. You attach significance to a cluster of electrons passing through your brain and central nervous system. love. hatred. loss. gain. joy. anger. pain. comfort. the list is endless, not infinite but innumerable, beyond the known words in any given language or all languages. You assign and attach meaning in this way, and you let it determine your happiness or unhappiness (again, mere notions, mere words) at any given moment. Reading this, you figure, gee, that's kind of crazy to surrender such power to "thoughts," pulsations in the brain, the nervous system, the emotional-cognitive network.

the dancer and the dance

William Butler Yeats asked it, as did Leonard Cohen, and the novelist Andrew Holleran, each in his own way. As have many others. How can we tell the dancer from the dance? And naturally, when immersed in the doing, the experience, the act, the being, the living, we cannot distinguish the one from the other. (Obviously, this extends well beyond dancing to Anything.) The dancer and the dance are one, serving as a model of zen purity, mindful living, and oneness. Yes.

wrong exit

The signs were not there. Or I did not see them. Well, actually the signs were there. I misread them. I expected more overt, more blatant exit warnings. (Are they "warnings"? More like proclamations, declarations. Not so much Good News, as News. Do with the information what you will.) So I kept going. But it began to feel not quite right. Sure enough, at the rest stop I consulted a map on the wall. I had overshot the exit. I exceeded my expectation. I now had to make the wrong exit the right exit. I took a bridge, of majestic beauty, even as my anxiety rose like the bluish spires holding up the cables. I headed north. I backtracked. I found my way, even though it was not the way. I met my party. It was all relative ("all relative," an oxymoron if there ever was one). So I guess wrong was righted.

'read deleted'

So, is "read" in the imperative mode, commanding the reader? Maybe it is past tense, pronounced to rhyme with "red" or "bed" or "dead" and so on. If the former, is one being commanded to read something deleted, or something with that title? If the latter, it implies: "I read [past tense] your message and have subsequently deleted it from my in box." Some may substitute "consequently" for "subsequently," replacing causality for chronology.  Does such causality smart? No, it evokes a chuckle, as in, "Whoa! That's it? Gone? Erased?" Even so, I may be erroneous. The perpetrator of "read deleted" may be super-efficient and reserving the right to reply. But I doubt it. And why should it matter to you?

in the stillness

is the answer
or the question
either or both
the scream
versus
the pebble
rippling
in the veins
pulsing
now
here