fire

"Three moves equals one fire."
- my uncle today, quoting his father, on the inevitable shedding of possessions (by choice and/or by necessity) in the nomadic life/journey

A FIRE, A FIRE
YOU CAN ONLY TAKE WHAT YOU CAN CARRY
- Snow Patrol, "If There's A Rocket Tie Me To It"
(incredible song on the aftermath of a relationship)


This is not fire season now
even desert rests a while
in turquoise air and frozen dream
time yet for the tentative green
to give in to summer's assertion
that fire over earth carries life here

This is not a time to burn
though mind still ever seeks new fuels
skin grows back as charred wounds cool
soul staggers out with what precious salvage it can bear

If three moves equals a fire
then I have traded home for desire
and burned my own house down
five times in ten years' journey

my house now has no fire place
no bright incendiary space
only clean air, water, solid floors
I burn too hot and bright
to stay for long
indoors

dreamgroup?

I still miss my dreamgroup. In Portland we had an excellent circle of people - open, adventurous, empathetic - that met once a week on a livingroom floor for about 9 months straight. Well, in the absence of time and space yet to convene another here, I'm going to call a virtual circle in this space. Anybody reading this want to talk dreams? (Anybody reading this?) Can I share mine, and welcome your feedback? Want to share one of your own? The only "rules" are very simple: egalitarian communication, careful objectivity, respect for the sacredness of the other's experience. We would try to never say "I think your dream is about this", but rather "If this were MY dream, I'd perceive it this way..." We would leave plenty of space for the story's mystery, leave our interpretations and investigations open to further possibility. We tried to make our dreamtimes more awake, and our waking lives more dreamlike. So much magic to tap into there.

So here's a recent one that I want to send out into the world. For wherever it may want to travel. I was cleaning out my house, and found an item that seemed almost worthless: an old, beat-up portable radio. It had a tape player but no CD. I almost threw it out, and then remembered that it might have significance to one certain person, if I could find her. She was a woman I didn't know - had never met - but I had heard of her, and that she sometimes took things in trade. I made the trip to her house, apparently seated right behind her on a bus (or maybe even in her own car), but didn't try to speak to her until we both got out at her door. Then I approached carefully, so as not to startle her with my maybe-unwelcome intrusion. She accepted my sudden appearance, and invited me in. She was blonde, a bit chubby, nice clothes, quite mainstream-like. She carried a baby girl on one arm, that never made a sound and seemed very calm.

Her home was a very typical middle-class subdivision kinda house, brick outside, carpet and heavy wood furniture inside, fireplace in the living room. Like many houses where I deliver pizza. The only unusual thing about the room was that it was full of kittens. There were probably 6 or 7 of them bouncing around, playing with things, and in fact they had made kind of a mess of things across the floor. The woman seemed apologetic about this, and invited me into another room. On the way out, I noticed several other electronic devices scattered around the space - stereos, phones, things I couldn't identify. The radios were all much nicer than mine, and I thought maybe I should take my shabby offering home and bring back a nicer stereo that I could probably just as well do without. Then I might get something better in trade. But for now this was what I had.

We went into a smaller room, and the woman pulled out two items I had never seen before, but that in the dream I recognized as musical instruments. I called them "lutes" in my mind, although they weren't like any lutes I've seen in waking life, or any instruments for that matter. They were curved, bowed wood frames, a little like sled runners, 2-3 feet long. Various wires and pieces of metal were stretched across their middle spaces, some of which looked razor-sharp. (Actually, they looked a bit like Klingon swords, for you fellow geeks out there...) I could tell they were fine workmanship, worth a great deal, and was surprised she was offering them to me for my beat-up old radio. But she was, so I considered carefully. And told her I'd have to give it the thought it deserved, and would return soon.

Maybe this one's more open to interpretation than I thought. More and more the objects in dreams, and the odd props the consciousness uses to interpret ideas, are what interest me...and there's always some aspect comes to light, in a dreamgroup, that I would've never come to on my own...

my grandmother

I have to talk about my grandmother. I've been immersed in two and a half days alone with her, as companion and caregiver, and there is no other world right now. She's 87, strong of will and and voice with a mind in flight - yes like a songbird - that alights on a precarious perch precisely between vivacious, enthusiastic youth and weary indifferent age...between flawless decades of memory and instant, invincible forgetting... She's surprisingly healthy, considering. She's an unconditional, loving constant, and a constant, exhausting surprise. My sister's her full-time caregiver, and has been for 2 1/2 years. My grandmother's only visiting here for the week. And I happened to be the only family able to spend Christmas with her. As well as her birthday, which was Christmas Eve.

It's a mellow sidestep out of time, in her company. She didn't miss the Christmas with the fanfare, like I feared she would. Which was a big relief. For me, the holiday has quietly, acquiescently lost its hold and its hype, over the last few years. Right now, it's mostly a welcome day off work. A chance to be still. A blessed quieting of the consumptive energies, when the stores close and the traffic slows and the collective wishful thinking, for the majority if not all, is (at least) momentarily satisfied. I don't have to serve Christmas, like I did in younger life. No gifts, no obligations, no more traditions. I do think, this week, about the lonely, the imprisoned (in whatever sense), the estranged. I ponder a little the year's darkness receding, and the tide of days shifting toward light. I sit still, gratefully, and listen to the earth breathe, audible at last when the people quiet themselves. And that's how the two of us celebrated, this week. Sitting. Quiet. Grateful.

It's depleting, wondering, dreamlike to be around someone with mental unraveling in progress. You forgo expectations. You distill vocabulary, syntax down to the essential, the momentary, the shared. You exercise imagination, seeking a dozen creative answers to the same repeated question. And you fire up new brain cells, as wonderfully irrational exchanges set out on unexpected, sometimes poetic paths of their own. You experience deja vu a lot. You forget about outside commitments, goals, needs, agendas. You bank the fire and nurture only the hottest, most essential coals. You willingly lose track of time. You comment more often on the God in the details. You practice deep, time-less patience.

She always teaches me. She always stretches me to the limit, and then returns me to total acceptance. She steeps me in the lack of need for segues, rationales, justifications...

For example of that, here's my favorite remark from her this week: I built a fire in the evening, in the cold house where we were staying. As she started to feel its warmth she gratefully exclaimed: "God bless you! You AND America..."

insomnia (day 7)

stillness, no peace...waiting, to no end...mouth wax, muscles wood, stone bones...the noisiest silence imaginable...hours fall one leaky-faucet-drop by one...mind drags body on the chase of every wild goose in the forest...(psyche hangs, caught on every available metaphor and simile)...all the ghosts are present...all the pasts are now...all futures visible, only unreachable...endless tune plays, half its notes missing...the inner visionary-genius and dementia-victim meet, converse, collaborate, conspire...purgatory, not death nor life, denied both waking world and healing dreamtime...continued forgiveness plea finding no reprieve...another spiral layer to accumulation of alienation...frail leaky boat drifting further and further from anchoring shore...surfacing under light that mocks, absolves, entices once again...

herenow

just playing with words and sense of place...inspired in part by another quote from James Hillman, which appeared under the heading "The Guiding Anima":

"This is a one-way trip, and there is another direction to her movement...across her bridge roll fantasies, projections, emotions that make a person's consciousness unconscious and collective...making the known ever more unknown. She mystifies, produces sphinxlike riddles, prefers the cryptic and occult where she can remain hidden: she insists upon uncertainty. By leading whatever is known from off its solid footing, she carries every question into deeper waters, which is also a way of soul-making..."

you have come around again

hesitate here in the meantime's momentary kindness

landed for now from motion's trusted current

look long at all these roads

not yet not taken

inspire the air of other journeys

then release it, flowing outward

you will engage

and in it you'll re-member

let the blur of separation and would-be transcendence

slow into the clarity of specificity

solitude to solidarity

everywhere to everyday

you may stay

inhabit homesteads never yours

on shores of deeper waters

still reservoirs of every possibility

you will found what peace and place you can

(you hold your ground like many hold their liquor

intoxicated by a moment's presence,

heady but unsteady on your feet)

you must release

this is the only moment

for the time, being

not next stop but next move

be still in motion

be (still) here

quotes

"Separation comes first. It is a way of gaining distance...internal detachment...more interior space for movement and for placing events..

We are always in the embrace of an idea."

-James Hillman, in _A Blue Fire_

"Writing is a way of saying you and the world have a chance. All art is failure.

When you write you are momentarily telling the world and yourself that neither of you need any reason to be but the one you had all along."

-Richard Hugo, _The Triggering Town_