Fire-eater

Photo

Sat, 23 Feb 2013 09:44:06 -0800

my chest is tight my knees are dizzy I have to ...

Sat, 12 Jan 2013 13:14:00 -0800

my chest is tight my knees are dizzy I have to blow

out air to cool the many me’s

you’ve created from all this heat

this must be what being turned on

finally feels like and

really

means let’s try. let’s never mind the

temptations swimming inside of us

if we/he uses

a condom or not

because I want you

I want to… to bring you out to me I want to

grow my tongue long

enough longer

than the nile

river to lick you

I want to cum

out crop -circles of twenty-four karat

surrender

(to our assured diamond life) there is no name for fabric woven

tightly, that would describe the texture of your organs

all I know is

I want in them.

And then: The way

you stand so

mean the syrupy

hate

that fills you up

all spry suspended

into

f-words and shaking fists

begging

to go

to stay

and then under protection of your arms and hair and then to sit with

your tummy on top to arch my face back

so our filth can fall

into our mouths

our nose every hole our eyes a vision I

wanted

a fever and got it

from a heart-attack at your sight on the porch that night that told

me to take you and your book home I wanted merely to temporarily

bend

myself like latex smelting strong and solid under

the small soft and round of your curves

But now it’s all grown,

and I want to watch your expressions change over days and

I want to

spin

my lips around

you

that I’m just

e x t e n s i o n

of your limbs, let me be your body

for a minute

so I can feel what it’s like so

beautiful to be

so ready

so willing so writhing to

show you what my

-Worship-

means

My Queen.

our nipples, our lips need to be on us like tough whispers

over our jawlines

and smelling necks

and now it’s on please I’ll be the baby that you know you only want

from me, please

give me the pacifier, I’ll be it if only so

I can suck on that part of your

d o m i n a n c e

you like it lead me deep er how ever

wherever you need

I absolve my ego here

dancing lying down like this

painting pictures of yes’s

with these orifices

while you whip my cream into the dreams

you’re hungry

for

I hope you eat

imaginative things

when I’m absent

but not forgotten you’ve rewired my brain ‘s pathways with a

graze I gaze at

you like a column

a contour you’ve

structured holding me up holding you

down

so you can fuck me harder into into your future

our heaven I

can now only see hell’s antiques from here in heaven’s

GRACE

with your name

on every piece like every piece of

my body that misses you when you’re with him like

right now I’m

dreaming of: pushing my penis’ pearls up into you jealously

but I must step back and this really must be how my magic turns

black for every ass

you tap is just my excuse but O’ holy night might

mind miner mine’s my

Mighty has to penitently

apologize for my prying into your Christmas present/past

because you sure aren’t mine and

because, anyway

I can’t keep your soul in here(touches chest)

so I shouldn’t try

choking, sequestered from the lungs

that have helped you survive and still serve you well in quick,

short breaths, I guess.

And I want to thank you for being patient with me. But breathe deep

with me long for me.

I need to take my hard nipples and red heart and

press them bloody up

against your tonsils past your tongue to your lungs so

maybe then you will

understand how much of me is yours

and

If you kill me after we’ve taken our breaths,

I will have lived just fine.

Goodnight.

Photo

Sat, 24 Sep 2011 15:55:07 -0700

downlo: A useful rape analogy

Sat, 17 Sep 2011 17:35:19 -0700

downlo:

A useful rape analogy

Photo

Tue, 16 Aug 2011 21:12:02 -0700

Photo

Thu, 11 Aug 2011 02:03:06 -0700

road-kill: Wow. Epic.

Thu, 11 Aug 2011 01:59:27 -0700

road-kill:

Wow. Epic.

unnaturalist: by Bailun

Sun, 10 Jul 2011 21:50:28 -0700

unnaturalist:

by Bailun

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 12:57:00 -0700

My name is Danny and I turn 34 today. I still don’t know who I am exactly. I’ve been...

My Dad, in 1984

Wed, 15 Dec 2010 14:18:00 -0800

I remember the presidential election between Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale. My Pop hated Mondale....

“Why bother?” is an apt question. Some say cynical,...

Sun, 18 Apr 2010 17:30:00 -0700

“Why bother?” is an apt question. Some say cynical, but most of us may wonder about being bothered with many things in our lives. It’s also a riddle posed by writer and professor Michael Pollan, author of the books, The Omnivore’s Dilemna, and In Defense of Food. His editorial titled “Why Bother?” appeared in the first annual Green Issue of the New York Times commemorating Earth Day, and addresses recycling, the environment and sustainability. He asks why should we bother recycling when our consumption outweighs it? Why turn a light off if the coal plants are constantly blowing the tops off of mountains and burning more coal? Why should one bike to work if it doesn’t change the fuel companies’ bottom line?

Coming out swinging, Pollan clearly and succinctly articulates the global problem of climate change, and the need for radically reduced consumption. He unceremoniously expresses dissatisfaction with much of the current “green movement” culture and writing, and the environmental diagnoses in popular journalism on the subject. An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore’s book and now Oscar-winning film, is chosen by Pollan to be harped on specifically. He gives measured kudos to Gore for raising awareness to the issue, but he spits in derision at the film’s final prescription: that we change our light bulbs. Pollan mockingly retorts that changing one’s light bulbs is clearly not enough, in and of itself, to reverse our current trend.

In the opening of the piece, he correctly assesses that Gore only asks Americans to change our light bulbs because he believes that we Americans can only change our light bulbs. Pollan implores Americans, as the energy companies’ largest consumers and easiest to blame, to take more impact-producing and symbolically relevant steps to right the listing ship. So what will reverse our current trend?

The overall analysis coming out of the green movement over recent years has seemed to cease most of its thinking and is satisfied asking everyday folks to make costly efficiency upgrades to their homes, buy hybrids to carpool in, change their light bulbs, and even go vegetarian. The current Utne Reader and Mother Jones magazines are littered throughout the back pages with quack advertisements, hawking their commercial herbal supplements for your erectile dysfunction, while the mostly-insipid articles in the front chastise you for not drinking soymilk, or not voting Democratic, either of which may conclusively explain the limp dick. They seem to consistently fail to address the consumer-mentality relationship to corporatism, and therefore, relation to global dominance and dependence on the financial industry.

Michael Pollan investigated factory-farming and scrutinized agri-business for his previous books, and many prior articles and lectures. He is a trusted expert on the subject of genetic-modification of food, as well as a proponent of buy-local movements and of individuals engaging in permaculture. This is where he seems to break cleanly and strongly from the rest of the environmental movement at large. “For us to wait for legislation or technology to solve our problem of how we’re living our lives suggests we’re not really serious about changing”. He is insisting here that an “evolution” in our consumer habits will never be enough. He continues, “Indeed, to look to leaders and experts, to laws and money and grand schemes, to save us from our predicament represents precisely the sort of thinking — passive, delegated, dependent for solutions on specialists — that helped get us into this mess”. Displaying at least a somewhat-evolved sense of self-awareness, he acknowledges that he is also a specialist. One who, in his words, “sit(s) at a computer, thinking about climate change”. He also continues to pedal his best-selling books like a specialist, and charge exorbitant speaking fees at the universities that can afford it. But he does arrive at an obvious and very pragmatic answer with this article, a few-birds-with-one-stone response.

What is Pollan asking us to “bother” with this time? Growing some of our own food. And on he proceeds, to gently pitch himself a softball and make a great case for this no-brainer, knocking it out of the park.

The infrastructure we rely on for necessities such as heat, food, and water make our population dependent on large, abstract and faceless organizations that can gouge prices or withhold services at a whim. We are dependent on a number of levels, such as on our politicians to solve our domestic and international problems, on multi-national agri-business to feed an increasingly populous and unhealthy consumer base, or on our media for entertainment, to assure us that everything is fine, as long as we recycle. There’s only a million more examples. Have you ever unclogged your own sewer main, or changed your own oil in your car? Congratulations, you have opted out, finally free of the rampant consumer-mentality that plagues us, and gone D.I.Y. Good move. The bad news is that now the sewer is working and your shit is flowing into your children’s drinking water more rapidly and your combustion-engine, metal meat container now burns polluting, CO2-emitting fossil fuel at an increased rate, suffocating us all. And it’s termed more “efficient” while doing it. So off we go, peeling out on the pavement while we laugh at the irony. So while giggling, we ought to be compelled to take more steps, right?

Of course growing more of our own food and buying local is more fuel efficient. A fleet of trucks was not sent in every direction for two-thousand miles so that you could have a kiwi in January. That succulent, fresh kiwi needed ethylene chambers to ripen them, and polluting chlorofluorocarbons were used to refrigerate them, all en route to the consumer, gross inefficiency and ecological ignorance and arrogance marking its path. One might ask what entitles someone in Alaska or Nova Scotia to a kiwi anyway, but Pollan doesn’t seem to be willing to take it that far. Clearly, if Mr. Pollan’s logic about localizing our food source is correct, then growing most of our own food is better yet, right?

He says, “Of course, what made this sort of specialization possible in the first place was cheap energy. Cheap fossil fuel allows us to pay distant others to process our food for us, to entertain us and to (try to) solve our problems, with the result that there is very little we know how to accomplish for ourselves.” He correctly asserts that the way in which we feed ourselves contributes to no less than a fifth of the world’s total carbon output. He also briefly focuses in on the problems of delegating representatives to go to far off places, only to be subjected to overwhelming commercial interests and phalanxes of highly-paid special-interest lobbyists. Of course they’ll sell out, he seems to say. Of course they’ll follow the money. With readers following hopefully, it seems that Mr. Pollan is going to satisfy our intellects as he goes on.

He states that buying locally also helps a sense of community re-develop in that part of our mind that is now firmly occupied by fast food, supermarkets, strip malls and outlet stores. He practically begs us to realize that sharing produce with your neighbors while drinking a beer you brewed yourself sounds satisfying in many ways. He is right, but not many people have the time away from our respective “specialties” to pull this off, and Mr. Pollan fails when the opportunity arises to give his readers permission to discard these “specialties”, much as Gore failed in his own cynical reasoning. That guy tells us to recycle, and this guy tells us to rip out our lawns and plant a garden as if we were changing a light bulb. The bare minimum, intellectually and energetically speaking.

Pollan whines, “even in the pages of The New York Times and The New Yorker, it seems the epithet “virtuous,” when applied to an act of personal environmental responsibility, may be used only ironically. Tell me: How did it come to pass that virtue—a quality that for most of history has generally been deemed, well, a virtue—became a mark of liberal softheadedness? How peculiar, that doing the right thing by the environment—buying the hybrid, eating like a locavore—should now set you up(to be ostracized)”. Poor Michael Pollan. Poor, rich, famous Michael Pollan.

We don’t need electric cars, we don’t need efficient light bulbs, and we don’t need to grow all of our own food. We have already been down the food road, at least, and it’s not a big deal. Food is preserved, becomes a commodity, as then does land, for which the purpose of intensive farming is realized, and so on. Hierarchy in some oppressive form will be soon to follow. Tribalism, agrarianism, feudalism, industrialism, nationalism and corporatism happen. It is tiring and frustrating that Pollan seems to see this, yet holds back, and decides to write about being made fun of for being “green”. Whether it is to identify with suburban readers or to keep from alienating his publisher makes no difference to the planet.

It is cynical on his part, not to take the argument as far as it needs to go, and it feels patronizing to assume that the people you are talking to, the people who cared enough about what you’re talking about to buy your book, are only capable of very little. Humanity is clearly at a crossroads and needs a radical and unmeasured approach to our situation. Protests of, “but our economy might fail”, should be of no consideration, no consequence and no excuse at all. In fact, as our “economy” drives on, parasitic and cancerous, it is the main thing that keeps in place two of the things that Pollan previously lists as problems: pollution and corporate domination of our energy and food. Among them needs to be included militarism, consumerism and the politicization of our human necessities. We need to ask ourselves why there is a “financial industry”, as industry, by definition, produces something. What does this financial industry produce? It may take a paradigm shift that could require a total forgetting to rid ourselves of the patriarchal and dominance-mindedness that undermines our best intentions and more, giving ourselves permission to take the largest satisfactions from the tiniest, most incomplete gestures, such as the changing of a light bulb, or the buying of a carbon offset.

What does Pollan have to say now? “Going personally green is a bet, nothing more or less, though it’s one we probably all should make, even if the odds of it paying off aren’t great. Sometimes you have to act as if acting will make a difference, even when you can’t prove that it will. That, after all, was precisely what happened in Communist Czechoslovakia and Poland, when a handful of individuals… resolved that they would simply conduct their lives ‘as if’ they lived in a free society. That improbable bet created a tiny space of liberty that help(ed) take down the whole of the Eastern bloc.” Nice work, Pollan. You have identified our malignant economy as something as, if not more, oppressive than totalitarian communism, but seem to suggest that to fix it, we rent ourselves Zip-cars to drive to your overpriced speaking engagements and plant some tomatoes to offset the inflated cost of your latest book.

He even has the audacity to take a morally superior stance over his readers, in reference to the garden, “At least in this one corner of your yard and life, you will have begun to heal the split between what you think and what you do, to commingle your identities as consumer and producer and citizen.”

I hope that once a year on or around Earth Day, as the streets of the nation are littered with millions of copies of the latest Green Issue of the New York Times, Pollan remembers that that is his litter. This is his garbage. I can’t believe that the keen intellect that wrote The Omnivore’s Dilemma and The Botany of Desire is now satisfied with this. That’s real cynicism.

One evening an old Tlingit Indian told his grandson about a...

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 13:40:00 -0800

One evening an old Tlingit Indian told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people. He said, ‘My son, the battle is between two ‘wolves’ inside us all. One is evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority and ego.

The other is good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.’

The grandson poked at the fire, thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather: ‘Which wolf will win?’

The old man simply replied, ‘The one you feed.’

In utero, I became bored with the scenery, no greenery, just...

Sat, 16 Jan 2010 17:08:00 -0800

In utero, I became bored with the scenery, no greenery, just womb in pitch-black, too hot and no thermostat. Startled, then annoyed when my host peed, I need freed and I’ve looked all over for something to read; even so, there’s no light switch, and don’t name me Mitch.
Inside, I pondered and plotted, my growing dissent with the food I’m allotted, unsure at times if I even got it.
I carefully calculated, then tried with abandon to stand in there, sick of being curled like a gourd, still bored, so I planned in there whether or not to grow a third hand, the final piece needed to be able to sit up or run or maybe I’m meant to stroll on my toes, there he goes…
Shit. I quit. Bumped my head, heavy as lead, frustrated by my failure to consider uterine diameter, already I think in iambic pentameter, with a fresh-sprouted finger I jam at her…
Still tortured and bored, repeated tugs at my umbilical cord — thick as leather, I want loose from this tether! I want to be out, to be actual, or just mutter about weather. I want “fun in the sun”, to be hurting with pain, disappointed it rained, or to have a man with a badge call me insane, and then to decide just to refrain.
Out there I can button a coat, forget to vote, eat and bloat, dig a moat around your circumference attending by cell phone a conference, a sub-committee on the relevance of subversive dish-washing techniques. Being born means “indentured servitude just for fun”. And guess what? I won.

To start a sentence with pretense, you color-code events, have...

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 03:01:00 -0800

To start a sentence with pretense, you color-code events, have revivals in tents, or protectionist basements and modify our rifles to trifle with a bargain for an eyeful of targets and swastikas, crosses and collateral losses, hands getting old, feet growing cold, this wasn’t at all like the fable that’s told, songs sung through flutes of willow wood carving, I’m starving, but this fills us non-factual, not actual, to really observe never tactful, come right this way to processions, obsessions, employ our osmosis to just the right doses, a mental sclerosis, your closest but I gained for us a fair notice and once in, we will sin, we bloat ourselves under blankets at banquets with tourniquet spankings and a fluorescent-bright mortgage to choke on, not joking or Dewey decimal smoking. This is for real.
I won’t steal. The other nine commandments are God’s Achilles’ heel, twist my ankle and trip, bust my lip, somersault out of this lie, watch me flip and release rubbing chains, carve a bone comb to brush out the mange, we’ll panhandle change from your subservient masters, their concubines acting strange and dominant like prominent tycoons who spent the month of lent in a plastic-bag tent that I leased for their rent, the cash to me went, subsequently then spent - mostly the nude bar, a new car, some brown tar, once thought I’d be farther than this, had aspirations to be Czar of Dispute and Debate, I realize I’m late, but where is my plate? Incessantly I think about you and know that I stink and there’s piss in the sink, nevertheless, my cheeks pink, my fur coat of mink and I suck in my cheeks while putting pen onto paper to trade for a drink.
We need funeral dirges, political purges and I will not wait one more second to hate as I wait for that conjured-up angst on your face to abate back to rusty car crawlings, amphetamine scrawlings, east coast I’m bawling, appalled and I’m stalling, enthralled as I watch your war-paint attack, so I, too, paint my face black out of rage, no I won’t take the stage since there’s no mage to mirror, and no sage speaks clear when defined by his fear and you won’t find a queer in here or in me a collaborator to sympathize with your bombastic reprise, bombing a franchise unwise.
Certainly we’ve witnessed a single-cell existence and I’m surprised that we bother to arise, it’d be a mistake to stay awake but we starve ourselves to fast in the badlands, Ishmael knocked down hard by Abraham’s backhand, that’s his curse as you notice Sarah digs through her purse to find payoffs and layoffs and a lozenge for my cough as I hack up my phlegm in Orthodox passion and you and I dive single file in uniform fashion to cash in your flashin’ partisan badges and sectarian gadgets.
I’ll stage it, a mutiny, a coup to cure this thought-pattern-flu. I rarely find crooks, but often girls with ornament books who will take my life while they’re stagnant with strife-
Sip the cure softly, awareness is costly, so keep counting the losses, as we hang from our crosses.
But if plucked as a sweet root, it renders all points moot, you scripture-fed whore’s son, tell me the kid won over your apparitions with petitions and frightening admissions to a full house it’s eights over aces I slap fucking faces to have Levitical orgasms and I adhere to God’s Law with glad spasms while steaming and stammering you’re hammering my patience all the way down and yesterday I saw you in town and I remember you being so sensuously viscous, so it was then that I gave my permission.
Today we shed skin, tomorrow bones from within.

Pretty Bow

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 21:33:00 -0800

Wish I’d recall the time and place Where I connect the phone to your pretty face Baby, you...

ravinss: :) My homie Ravi rocked this wedding photo. I had...

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 21:28:52 -0800

ravinss:

:)

My homie Ravi rocked this wedding photo. I had to re-post. So beautiful.

Long ago, the Earth was just a child wrapped in her royal cobalt...

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:47:00 -0800

Long ago, the Earth was just a child wrapped in her royal cobalt cloak. Some call it the ocean today, and the light of her Father the Sun reflected from her waters in radiant refractions throughout the entire Universe. In the vastness of space there was no other like her and as her blue pierced the darkness, one by one, the Stars of the night began to shine brighter in symbiotic celebration of her endless beauty. On the surface of her deep waters she captured each point of brilliance and she knew by their light that she was loved. This pleased her father, who shone brighter than any other on her, but while she knew she was loved, it was not enough. Something was missing.

As the years passed, she began to grow lonely. Her seas grew darker and more brooding and soon, even the light of her Father seemed to be losing its brilliance in her reflection. She would gaze at all the stars in the heavens and wonder which, if any, would ever come closer to her. They had always remained so far out of reach. Seeing this, Sun grew worried for his daughter.

“Darling, why have you grown so dark and sad? Do you not see that entire Universe rejoices in your being?”

“Papa,” she replied, “I see that the Stars shine so brightly for me. And I see that you shine brighter than them all. But father, why do they not come close to me? I am so lonely. Don’t they see the sorrow I keep deep down in my dark waters, or is it only the beauty they love, that they see on my surface?”

“My Daughter, my beautiful child, it makes my heart hurt to know that you are sad. Of course I see it in your waters and I hear it in your cry, but you must know that you are unique in every way. While you always move near me, we Stars cannot move at all. It was my destiny to create you so that we all may celebrate you. In this way the Universe is made perfect, and you are a part of that.”

“How can such sorrow be perfect? Surely this kind of sadness cannot be part of a plan,” and as she fell silent, her waters grew darker, and more tempestuous yet.

Unknown to Earth, or even to the Father Sun himself, there was one who had been silently moving toward her ever since the very moment he saw the first glimmer of her bright blue surface. He was as unique and as special as she in every way, but they were not the same. Where Earth reflected the brilliance of the Sun and the Stars, he did not shine at all. In fact, because he did not shine nor glimmer, the Universe, the Sun and the Stars, were completely unaware that he existed at all. And were it not for the pain of his loneliness, he may have very well forgotten he existed too.

In the time before Earth and her birth, he lived very much alone at the farthest edge of the Universe. Never did he know the comfort of another and the light of Stars never warmed his surface. He simply lived and moved about in the darkest places where no light could reach. It was this way for many thousands and thousands of years until she was born, and his gaze fixed upon her. He did not see the Stars as they began to shine even brighter, and he did not see the Sun burning proud for his daughter. The only thing he saw was her cerulean sapphire glimmer cutting through the fathomless, down-reaching darkness that was his home. Though he had not realized then, in one instant, just one glance that became a fixed gaze, she had changed all that he had ever known.

At once he began to race through the Universe toward her, drawn by a force unknown, compelled by her light that had touched him. He had no idea that the Universe was so deep, and so wide. Many years passed and he felt as if he had come no closer to her. And while he began to come close to many other beautiful stars, he would not stop for them. For there was nothing which could compare to the excitement he felt looking at her, even while she was still so very distant. Still determined, he silently pushed on until the day finally came that he found her, and for the first time in those many years of traveling the Universe and seeing so many of its wonders, he finally stopped and was still.

She was not a star at all. She was something else, something different and much like himself. He became so nervous in her presence that he remained perfectly still in her shadow, still unnoticed. At once he became aware of himself. He worried about the scars he bore from his years of searching. His surface was no longer smooth, but marked with craters and canyons which cut into him so deeply. Fear gripped him as he gazed upon her. He began to feel ugly in the shadow of her beauty and so he began to turn away. And as he did, something simply magnificent happened. She called out to him.

“Who is there?” she asked. “Please… are you there? I see your silhouette against the light of the Stars. Why do you hide from me?”

“I…I . .you are so beautiful,” he whispered to her. “I dare not reveal myself, something so ugly, to something as beautiful as you. I am not a Star, nor am I cloaked by a beautiful sea and the Universe does not seem to recognize me. Tell me, am I unknown to you, too?”

“Do not be afraid. You are not a Star, and you’re not of my Father. Who are you and where have you come from that you have freedom to move and draw near to me?”

“I do not know who I am. I have come from the deepest and darkest edge of the Universe where light does not reach. Where no light has ever reached until yours did. And I saw it… . I saw you.”

“My father has never mentioned anything such as you. How is it, that He who shines brighter than all others did not know of you?”

“I do not know. I only saw you.”

“And why have you come all this way? To gaze upon my beauty like the Stars above who shine for me?”

“No. I have not come to gaze, but rather to be near you. But I see now that you are indeed the most beautiful in all of the Universe and in your light I see that I am scarred, beaten, and worn. I will return to my darkness so that you don’t have to look at me. I am sorry.”

“All my life I have prayed for another, my dear traveler. All my life I have been so lonely. The Stars shine for me and my Father keeps me warm, but they do not come near to me. They cannot, so it seems. But you have drawn near to me. You have been scarred, beaten and worn down only to be close to me. Please, will you stay with me for a while?”

And so he agreed to stay, though he remained always in her shadow. Time passed and the two grew closer and closer with each moment. Her sea became brighter with movement and loneliness left them both. The Sun saw this one day and he was pleased.

“Daughter! Oh my! I see you are now more beautiful than ever! Tell me the joy of your heart.”

“Father! The Universe heard my prayers and sent to me someone who can draw near to me and comfort me when I am lonely!”

Sun was surprised and nearly worried, if not for the excitement and joy he saw in his beautiful daughter. “Who is this you speak of? Pray tell, who in the Universe can move so freely?”

The stranger replied nervously from behind Earth, “Hello. It’s me. It is me who came from the edge of the Universe where no light shines. It is me who traveled many many years to draw near to your daughter, the one whose brilliant light touched me first.”

When Sun heard the stranger’s voice he was humbled. There was nothing that Sun did not see in the Universe, for he had always shined brighter than any other thing. Until that moment, he believed there was nothing unrevealed or unknown to him. “How can this be? Come out from behind my daughter. Let me look upon you. Let me see what manner of being you are.”

“I will do as you ask, Creator Sun. But please, know that I am not a pleasant thing to look upon. I am pale from all the years of darkness and scarred from the many trials I have encountered on my journey here.” And so the stranger did as he was asked. For the first time in all of his life he was revealed and seen for what he truly was. He was pale, beaten, scarred and small. In fact, he saw himself in this light and was ashamed, but in that same moment the Earth was gazing upon him too.

“You are beautiful,” she cried out. “Please, open your eyes and look upon my surface! Look at your reflection! See how magnificent you truly are! You are not a Star, but still you shine on my waters so splendidly!”

And it was true. As he wiped his tears and looked down, he saw for the first time his own reflection and it was not hideous at all. In fact, all that he had thought was ugly and hideous had all but vanished in the brightest light of the Sun and then, made even more perfect in the reflections of her bluest churning blues.

“I will call you Moon,” said Sun. “And, for the love of my daughter, I will shine upon you the rest of your days. It is plain to see that you, Moon, make her happier than any other thing in the Universe.”

Moon then declared, “It was Love that lifted me out of the blackest places of the Universe. It was Love that allowed me to take on many years of hardship as I sought you out. And please, may it be Love that holds us together for the remainder of our days.”

So it came to be that Moon and Earth never parted. When Father Sun slumbered, Moon shone down brighter than any Star in the night sky. And every night Earth would gaze up at him and he would calm her waters, so when Moon also shone down on her he would always see and rejoice that it was her Love that made him majestic. It was Earth’s Love that made Moon radiate beauty. And it was the firey light of Creator Sun, and all of their Love for each other that made the Universe complete.

written(and dreamt) by Wm. Daniel Showalter after falling asleep under the full moons of September, October and November, 2009

It’s not that I don’t have anything to say…

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 02:34:00 -0800

It’s not that I don’t have anything to say…

The Grateful Dead - Ripple Friday morning music that has...

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 06:14:00 -0700

The Grateful Dead - Ripple

Friday morning music that has everything to do with everything

Toward the end of his life, the Buddha wordlessly gathered his...

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 06:06:00 -0700

Toward the end of his life, the Buddha wordlessly gathered his disciples at a quiet pond, heavily shaded by a banyan grove for instruction. The Buddha’s followers let their eyes adjust, and as they had done so many times before, sat in a small circle around him, and patiently waited for the teaching.

But the Bodhisattva had no words left for them. Eyes closed, he slowly, silently, dipped his sun-spotted hand into the algae, and enticed a lotus flower from the muck. He raised it in his open palm and opening his eyes, he held it silently before them, its roots dripping mud and murk.

The adherents were uncomfortable and confused. The Buddha deliberately displayed the lotus to each of them. In turn, the followers did their best to guess upon the meaning of the perceived parable of the floret: what it embodied, and how it worked into the body of the Buddha’s imparted instruction.

When at last the Buddha came to his follower Mahakasyapa, the pupil understood. Smiling, he began to laugh. The Buddha placed the lotus into Mahakasyapa’s open palm and began to speak.

“What can be said I have said to you,” smiled the Buddha, “and what cannot ever be said, I have given to Mahakashyapa, who shall in turn give it to you.”

The Flower Sermon, retold by Wm. Daniel Showalter