Where is the lesson in this?

Honesty.

I acted wrongly and perpetuated bastard energies. Time has asked me to stop yet now the mess is mercury hot, it begs to be removed from the nearness of the sun.

Run away tiny coyote! How many more forest friends will you consume before you belch the bones of your rancid ways?

Rain dance tonight! Ancient practice revives to cleanse the pollution of clumsy creations!

You say I’m so stubborn and cruel. Well then, I am so pleased to be yours and to have mine, let’s make more things to carry this crooked ship down the depths of uselessness.

But alas! A pirate with a pen, ravaging with words, a sentence he sharpens from the blade forged by many prophesying men: ‘death to things that make us feel weak, small and tired: that keep us on our feet! When what we require is a deep enough sleep, to drum a clear beat so the people can step dangerously in time with the ticking of the tides riding high on the moon’s backside and be free!’

Okay, I’m here. I am here! What spirit has called my attention at this place and at this hour and what must I do to appease your formless brew?

Listen you say, but instead I translate it as a condition of my diminishing physique; I nourish my bones with sweet and saucy, I lick my fingers when I should be licking the soles of Buddha’s feet; “don’t bother me! Pull the reigns of your fiery chariot and pierce your own heart; the arrow draws a string with which to pull the muscle from its nest, leave mine alone!.”

“Shut up and be still, this is why you were called, not for a culinary thrill, silly human.”

‘Okay!’ what now?!?!’ distractions arise from illusive shadows and thoughts generate to flush the intelligence of five senses: I ponder something besides my knowing of this realm. But the channel has been allowed by bundles of sage and narrow icicles of wax that beg for a chance to chase darkness away in a blaze.

Dear Journey,

Don’t write with confusion; write with clarity! Even poetry demands clarity, not in words and how they are presented, but poetry requires clarity of origin: this means not right nor wrong, but that the author is clear in representing confusion, sadness; what does this mean exactly? It means to be fully aware of yourself in the moment you grant for reflection and honesty (don’t worry, no one is watching) and be true to the experience as it is, raw and organic from your center, whatever it may be in the present moment. Be certain of the source and let the words form around them and align naturally in a march of syntax and prose; this is personal poetry, this is your gift, this is what you offer the world and it is beautiful because you made the space for it and it is authentically you.

Once the words are before you, these precious gems of absolute insight and depth, after you read them, separate from them: do not own them. You mustn’t feel responsible for their impact; disassociate from the words and they will inspire you in whatever way they do; your past self intended them as a guide, maybe for you, perhaps for another. The words are not yours; they belong to a greater source when they are born from clarity and consciousness. This way you can witness their power to unite and to change, phenomena which happens when and only when they are released.

You see, words are only sounds, particles, elements: they begin as a thought that forms from ingredients that interact in our minds, we send outward this energy in waves upon which we place words linearly, one word after the other, like our understanding of time, in a sequence like we see our own lives; but round is the actual order of things, infinity is the essence of higher planes of existence; our part is finite so we experience the beginning and the end of form and function, as we ourselves have a birth and death; but circularity is truth though ambiguous within the shallow measure of our immediate awareness.

To travel distances, to be said or written and heard and read, words must hitch a ride upon waves of energy that are continuous and infinite, floating and colliding and stemming from and branching off and bumping into other waves, like cellular waves, microwaves, brain waves, ocean waves, wind waves, emotional waves, static waves: with intention we send outwards our words like a message in a bottle atop a wave of energy that we have harnessed for the moment, attracted to us by the energies we have magnetically pulled and borrowed from this dimension (in conjunction with other dimensions?). The slower the wave the more direct from source, the more rapid the frequency the more momentum and force; these are the ones that require that the borrower use caution; they can cut and slice, they can tear and infiltrate and pass and influence, hurt and harm and devastate and destroy, much like ugly words with claws in waves whispered from the mouth of a conniving magician.

These high pitched waves are coming in at frequencies beyond which we can measure with our primary sense; we can neither see them nor predict them, therefore we can only cancel them by committing to impeccability; whole truths upon which we place words of a positive nature, honest and of the deepest blue; if you don’t make magic then magic is made upon you: saying love once invalidates the perpetuation of historic hatred and restores crystals to beauty and balance. Love yourself, love your energies, love the words as they are sent outwards and beyond the scope of control, let them surf the waves and purify the atmosphere of nonsense, chaos and confusion.

Be honest, source words from source, bow before your own energies, respect divine human potential; this is service of the highest self. Tentacles-waves are like wind; it carries dust that falls onto the lashes dropping center in a tear cried from the eyes of a weeping camel: it will find the earth and one day be carried again to grace the sky with its presence: every thing which is IS something which will connect to something else: nothing is ever truly free from belonging in the sense that it will inevitably serve as an influence or impression in this stage of reality. Even dust has a history, as do we, and so as wind drives sand so must we drive our words in a caravan towards LOVE.

Chico

Too many words

I only need a few;

modesty is a dress

I wear

on the night of

this bruised moon

Silence I wear

like the weight in my eyes

Drag the color brown;

drag it into this bruised night

My mind says to end

but with words I can pretend

that forever is fancy

and fortune is free

and love is the last mile

crossing

the distant breeze

So with fewer words

and fewer words still,

say back to me

once more, my rosy thrill

You brought me here

I am strong for it I fear;

but ride further with you still?

(The outline of this bruised moon

is where old blood rests upon window sills)

Too many words

I only need a few

I’ll say only ‘yes’

Simply and

before old blood

demands regress

So with fewer words

and fewer words until

I relax into the morning;

it asks to be still

I was on an early morning run heading west in pursuit of the edge of our east bay landscape, the Oakland waterfront. It was dark when I reached the docks, and I paused but never stopped breathing as I stood upon a wooden mound where I gently began to embrace the vacant space. I opened my heart with deliberate movements, siding with the ways of the world for once instead of posing a challenge. With my eyes I traced the  vertical line of my arm extending towards the blinking lights of hovering planes, and in the stillness I watched a few seagulls become a hundred singing songbirds in the sky. I watched them manipulate the urban seascape, crouching in spaces that weren’t meant for their inhabitance: they had made a home there anyways. I turned my back to the sea and saw a row of tall trees, palm trees I think, though their manicured appearance obscured their actual identity.

It was early and no one was watching; sinking into the stereotype that has haunted me since I declared my intentions to grow long my leg hair I did what any hippie would do: I hugged one of those ‘palm’ trees. Both my arms were wrapped only slightly around its waist, and I waited for some shock or sequence of tremors that would signify an energy exchange, but all I experienced was myself hugging a tree, a tree that occupied the tiny cell it had been given, a prisoner anchored in tainted soil surrounded by pavement and mocked by all the tassels and frills of the Waterfront hotel. Looking around I saw that most of the urban setting resembled a prison, only, of course, from the perspective of everything non-human. The trees seemed forlorn and sad standing as though they’re energy had been arrested and publicly displayed for people’s twisted pleasures.

There is an undeniable element of control in our macro-world: we destroy nature and build in its place a space where we pick and choose what goes here or there, making orphans of earth’s offspring and adopting them as our pets, our accessories, our pleasure things.

And in becoming the stereotype I began to cry, my arms were now scratching the surface of mystery tree and I didn’t care if anyone was watching. And then it came, those precious words whose arrival I eagerly await usually while sitting with eyes closed in front of a candlelit Buddha were now caressing the icy moisture on my face. Maybe it was the tree, maybe it was the rain, maybe it was the lingering high from the toxic residues I inhaled working night shift behind the counter of a bleach-soaked café; whatever the inspiration, my mind was held by pure knowing and I was content.

This was the message received:

(in the voice of a tree; think ‘Treebeard’, Lord of the Rings):

“Though we may appear to be taken, though we have been brought here and cropped here, made to stand here and provide here, we are victims of nothing and prisoners of no one. What we have we share freely and that makes us free, free to stand where-so-ever our trunks are planted. Growth is not extending in the manner of the will; would I be any happier a tree if I existed in a forest? If instead of garbage and cement I saw wild things and living dirt? If I allowed such expectations to boil and coalesce then I would certainly be a bitter tree, for that is surely not my reality. But what is my freedom is my choice: I choose to be, to see growth as extending towards being, towards God, infinite and always: see you a roof limiting the height of my leaves? See you a bottom stunting the depth of my roots? See you anything but an open tree, available for you to experience, ever present and alive? My needs are supplied by factors unbounded by the human powers that have placed me here: rain will fall, air is all ways, and love is in the earth that feeds me. There is a beauty in every presence; I choose to show who I am; a happy tree, a tree that is free, a free form of beauty.”

“You, human child, are a tree. Some days you think of yourself a wilted stem in a broken pot, without proper water, suffocating and dry, hungry and dying. Other days your mind is aligned with the truth of your presence and you are as I, tall and free, the boundaries that once seemed to hold you dissolve in your own radiance and you are fearlessly love. Which do you choose to be, human child? Do you wish to grow outwards, expanding your selfish influences across shaky grounds, collecting and conserving for the benefit of your useless fears? Or will you choose to grow upwards and beyond what is shallow and immediately satiating, will you coil your roots down into the meaningful depths of understanding and will you reach your mind to occupy the space where thoughts are lit by the same force that awakened the stars? Will you cling to your greedy expectations or will you simply be? Life will not give you anything: what is meaningful are those lessons that awaken within you that which you already know. You are a tree as I am a human, the word is irrelevant and the form is no matter because the love is the same.”

And it was then that I accepted Tree as a profound teacher of historic wisdom, a living example of that which is known but forgotten and confused and complicated and overshadowed, that which has the power to restore and replenish our disconnect and our hurt: like a tree all we ever truly need to do in this world is breathe, and all we were ever truly meant for is being. There is no prison that can suppress higher potential that is outside the body of the bearer of destructive thought; change your mind and watch as the whole world becomes your best friend.

On my run home I saw nothing and everything and felt my heart and was alive in no need of anything but my own feet to run past the trees that stood like anointed professors in universal uniform presenting freely the greatest display of love.

It was later that day that I had two remarkable encounters with absolute strangers, or as I have come to understand the definition of stranger: brothers with whom I have only recently been reunited. One man guessed my birthday and guessed correctly, figuring that early morning was when I played in the waves of spiritual awareness. He also predicted that I am becoming a great Dancer: he spoke of these truths based purely on my energy.

The other thanked me for being so kind, for allowing him to see my spirit and for sharing with him a simple moment of softness.

I wasn’t trying to impress anyone; all I did was think of Tree that day, but the love was recognized, received, and reciprocated twice by two men who perhaps have themselves met Tree. In the hours to come I gratefully experienced a new channel of living; I changed my mind and discovered that life force flows when small things are done with great love, like, for instance, hugging a tree.

And for some these truths are too uncomfortable; they simmer in the back-lot of the mind and before they are able to guide sprouting thoughts to a probable solution something else wins the attention of the eye and all potential for consideration is snuffed.

But for most these truths come as an overwhelming antonym to the sugarcoated illusions we are so mercilessly fed. We know so little of the origins of the contents of our lives, assuming that because we pay fair price, there is little need for concern. Why should we challenge those who produce the source of our livelihoods? We are taught that harm comes to those who are ill-deserving: when we live decently and minimally, we assume that the fruits of our efforts are and can be trusted. We don’t question the reality within which we live because in it we are comfortable, complacent, settled, surviving to the best of our knowledge and wanting nothing beyond what is within the immediacy of our grasp.

But we are being harmed in the most disturbing of ways, back-stabbed by our fellows and misguided by those whom we have elected to lead. We eat what is sold, we drink what is poured, we buy what is discounted and rarely do we hesitate, do we meditate on the possibility that things aren’t as ritually pure as they seem. 

What is the benefit of such a world? I doubt it is the literal manifestation of an entrepreneur’s ideals, but with the origins of our nation there are the perpetuated frequencies of cruelty and unnecessary slaughter: history provides the view that from the initial patriotic practices of a developing nation our fathers perfected the art of heartlessness and cruelty: we are merely surviving the tradition as manifest destiny is still very much alive between the synthetic threads of our liberal quilt. It is a popular sport to believe in the personal pursuit of riches, power, and fame: an even more popular sport is to believe in the pursuit of these ends at any cost, no matter the lives wasted, the earth spoiled, the people sickened, the masses poisoned, the youths stunted, the animals rotted, the oceans scoured, the hearts hardened. We have been searching and striving and growing and expanding for so many years and now we stand as a crowd of defective and debilitated people with the bloody flesh of our earth companions rotting between the soured crevices of our cavernous teeth: what now? 

If it were possible that every human being alive within the borders of our country could witness the gross processes which fund our modern existence I think, I hope that every individual would weep at the disturbing loss of humanity, and would praise the liberating revelation as the source of all illness, disease, plague and misery becomes vividly apparent.

There are choices you can make and I hope you do. There are some who would rather soak in the shallow waters of commercialism, who could and would wield a wand and commit all of earth’s children to burn in the fiery eruption of the devil’s orgasm. I hope that we all do not become what every mainstream horror flick portends: infected and enraged beasts that pillage and plunder in search of just one more taste of blood. Then again, isn’t that what we have always been? Happy Columbus Day, Columbus without whom we wouldn’t have corn, the root of all that sustains us.

What a rude awakening to awake to the news of nature’s ‘fury’ as we scramble to make sense of senseless acts of slaughter. In the media aftermath nature is portrayed as a problem because of repeat global episodes of unpredictability occurring in patterns of infrequency. Nature becomes our enemy, our oppressor, an obstacle to overcome, a detriment to our efforts of survival. Man vs. Nature, a concept that implies a duality, a distinct separation stressed between all things ‘man’, and all things ‘nature’.

We challenge nature, use our methods of containment, manipulation, modification, and domination. Every interaction we have with nature is one colored by this impression of it: that we see it as some devilish force pushing opposite our motives that go unquestioned and assured.

And when any such thing happens as a violent rain, a swarm of hungry microbes, an earthquake, a drought, oceanic shock waves, flooding, species endangerment, beached whales, dead dolphins, heat spells, rising water levels, melting ice, or an increase in the intensity of storms and surges we think of it as a natural dilemma, and we hang our heads and clean our messes and continue on as we have in the past. We spray the crops with contaminants, we poison the water with the byproducts of modern invention, we deplete the world of resources for our own stubborn use, we dispose of our garbage in the habitats of world’s creatures, we build fences and bridges and causeways and entire city structures across the landscapes of living nature, we suck and feed and leech the life from our planet like a virus from its host, believing that we must survive in this manner or perish, and shall anything attempt to demonstrate otherwise, should some earthly event consume our achievements and swallow our neighbors we only unite in remorse and fight the force of nature armed with the strength of 2400 years of misguided science and fueled by the false presumption that she threw the first punch.

Man vs. Nature: what a silly idea to think of man as separate from nature, as operating under a different set of principles from the very thing which spawned him! But it has been done, and now it must be undone: we are in desperate need of a revolution of thought, and our perspective of our relationship to our environment must be deconstructed and reconstructed so as to conform to the design of planet earth.

The green revolution is a disgraceful attempt to remedy this fallacy of human consciousness, targeting the sympathetic tendencies of the average person by overwhelming him with images of dying polar pups and apocalyptic repercussions of stringent denial. It has become the marketable face of corporations and policy, the hot new item on the shelf, the ‘must have’ and the ‘can’t do without’. The mission of this so called period of ‘going green’ has not the best interest of nature at heart. Rather the greedy lechery of business CEO’s and their monetary objectives are all that stand to profit. Nature is the exploited means to their end, where emotion is employed to produce empathy and regret; we are told to feel sorry for nature, to wrap our arms around her, to love her and protect her, to cuddle her creations and feel remorse for all we have done by complying with economically devious plans: heal the world by buying this product and that car, engage a quick fix to appease our justified feelings of guilt and daunting selfishness.

But this isn’t a probable solution at all, indeed there is no solution to the problem of nature because the problem isn’t nature, its mankind. And our destructive habits are but a symbol of our lack of reciprocity between man and his home planet. What must change is our way of thought. Man vs. Nature must become Man for Nature, we must revisit our history to understand the origins of our perpetual mistakes, we must identify as creatures of this planet no different than the ones perishing on our behalf, we must remember that nature is exactly that, something bigger, more powerful, and more universally profound than we. It is not to be subjected to our will and superiority but to be respected and trusted to restore its own inherent balance and beauty. We must understand that we can only truly be a positive contributor to earth by refusing to harmfully interfere, and instead vow to perform those acts which are in accordance to the laws of nature apart from our own self righteousness and egoist beliefs. Where before we have treated the symptoms of nature as though it is diseased and thus in need of a prescription remedy we need to understand the entirety of it, and in doing so we begin to see just how damaging our modern existence has become, and just how exactly to rectify our behavior.

Use the energy efficient light bubs, recycle your plastics, till your soil, treat yourself to organics: but know that these efforts are of but minimal impact in the grand scheme of it all. Nature will be fine, she may be changing, but it is mankind who needs to adapt to this change, and not nature which needs to be fixed. You cannot put a Band-Aid on the wounds of the world, though you can refuse to accept the idea that you can. All we have are our tools of submission to the truth of our parasitical collectiveness. Where most see a disaster in the current trends of nature’s explosive occurrences I see a wild animal bucking the pests from her back.

And then of course there is also the idea born from the mistrust of the supremely wealthy and the politically powerful players in the monopolistic structure of our society, where the forces of nature are in fact the forces of man; they have been harnessed, learned in laboratories in the world’s finest universities and government basements, where the most disturbing scientific research is conducted and released upon the most politically insignificant, monetarily poor, essentially helpless and morally dispensable civilizations of the world.

That we have the knowledgeable capacity to mimic and instigate natural disasters is unquestionable. Also unquestionable is the motivating consequence of such an action: to promote mass fear of our environment in an overwhelming consciousness, and subsequently urge the reliance upon those in power for answers and support who then guide the common majority in the engagement of investments in the marketable products of big business in return for security and protection from such events.

What is questionable is the audaciousness of men on earth: could they really be accountable for the deaths of thousands of innocent people and the consequent destruction of entire hometowns?

That question is not for me to answer, only to ask. My angle is not to sell or bargain information but to encourage the individual to conduct his own inquiry into the realities of his reality. In either case, whether nature be truly in and of herself reacting to years of human neglect and abuse, then she shall have her way and win her wars, and all we need do is sit back and watch our creations crumble in awe of the virtues of universal balance, and perhaps in our societies there will be born that personal humility that has been lacking for centuries on the western front. If on the contrary, the dramatic materialization of nature’s vivid episodes are purely a systemic effect of the active weapons of mankind intended to illustrate a false state of dire global circumstances, then so be it as well: in either case, again and again, from here and onward through time, let there be a light-bulb moment in the mind of every man, where he realizes either the poisonous essence of his own insignificance at the mercy of nature’s reprise, or accepts the unsettling potentials of man’s poisonous essence when the rulers of the world wield their wands and create from it the last day of life on earth.