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A jaguar appears on the patio
We walk together down a mountain
We take off our shoes to touch the ground barefoot.
Key in the door, unlocking home
We boil water, fry eggs, drink tea, and share a few words.
A jaguar appears on the patio and asks for meat, milk, and honey,
Not a pound of flesh, not skim, not NutraSweet,
Only the real thing, which is all we have to give.
- July 25, 2010
- Filed under: Love, Men and women
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Practical fairy tales: Moving swift as Mercury
One morning after she rose as a phoenix, the beautiful princess heard a song in her head, “Nowhere Man.” She knew that the man was Mr. Carrot. She closed her eyes and saw him in his faraway land. He was moving at an earthbound pace and his body had become boxier than when she knew it very personally, and within that box of chest through ribs a hardness had established itself, a hardness with very little sparkle.
“Making all his nowhere plans for nobody,” the Beatles sang inside her head. The beautiful princess cried, and she didn’t analyze why. She was just too tired, of inflating and deflating people, of believing in a fortunate or an adverse condition, a condition contingent to peace of mind.
A someone somewhere, a nobody nowhere. Mr. Carrot, he had been an entrancing place, rather like a magic forest through which she had passed.
Let him be wherever he is, she thought, and I will be here, moving swift as Mercury.”
Note: Mercury was the ancient Roman god of communication, the messenger god.
- July 20, 2010
- Filed under: Love, Men and women
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My lover is the obstacle and the remover of obstacles
My lover is the obstacle and the remover of obstacles.
He gives me a kiss and a scepter.
Understand, his lips do not touch my body. The kiss is given as valentines are.
What sounds like obstacle?
Icicle
Ventricle
Manacle
Miracle
- July 12, 2010
- Filed under: Love, Men and women
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Practical fairy tales: Residue, doo do doo
Once upon too many times a beautiful princess noticed that Mr. Carrot reappeared. She felt compelled to contact him. Or he called and emailed. Or in a dream they were making love and in a nightmare he was stuck in her lungs like acrid smoke and she woke up coughing.
The beautiful princess told her princess sisters, who knew her history with Mr. Carrot, about a recent reappearance, and they railed at him. “Asshole.” “Shithead.” “What a fucking jerk!” At another time, perhaps in another life, their anger and cursing would have provoked the beautiful princess’s own anger. Now, as she heard more than one of her princess friends suggest, “Turn that cad into a cadaver,” the beautiful princess felt amused by this ghost of good and bad times past.
Mr. Carrot was busy, overworked, and stressed. He had told that to the beautiful princess, and he was talky talky talky about his own obsessions, ocupado, señoritas, so self-absorbed that the beautiful princess’s words he heard only as worship of himself.
She could have thought that Mr. Carrot was habitually impervious to happiness, but pondering him was pointless for the beautiful princess and it harmed her. His ghost was a disturbance of the peace.
Pondering Mr. Carrot was projection. He was a residue. Residue arises from memory. The beautiful princess benefited from contrasting residue with reality.
The ghost combusted and the beautiful phoenix princess ascended, sporting the gold leather evening bag, an extra lift, that she inherited from her mother.
The ghost evaporated and the princess in her comfy tennis shoes pressed the pulse at her wrist then kissed it.
Residue dissolved when she sang “doo do doo,” like Lou Reed in “Take a Walk on the Wild Side.”
The beautiful princess heard herself singing, solo and in harmonies with myriad princesses. A new Hallelujah Chorus.
The beautiful princess’s friends gave up their railing and she and they took to wild-side walking, known to the wise as crystal-clear desiring. Limitless desire fed them love, and now they listened to handsome princes who bore its fruit, not from any labor but from love itself.
- July 8, 2010
- Filed under: Love, Men and women
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Committed
I hear the word committed and occasionally I think of institutionalized. What a funny thing this trick, logic, or truth of the mind does to committed relationships, which become crazy ones.
People commit crimes. A perpetrator may end up in custody of the law, imprisoned. Of course, people also commit–pledge–themselves to one another. What a leap of freedom! One definition of custody is “protective care,” and committed people consecrate their love for one another, freeing themselves into others’ custody. The protective care of love is immeasurably generous and gentle.
The more committed I am to myself, the freer I am.
The more committed I am to myself, the more committed I am to you.
His feet in paper sandals
A friend of mine wears heavy, black boots, every day all year round as far as I can tell. I’ve imagined his feet in sandals and kissing each foot. A vision–him standing in paper sandals that I’ve covered with my kisses in a lipstick close to the color of my mouth. I think the opportunities for enactment have passed.
- June 16, 2010
- Filed under: Love, Men and women
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Practical fairy tales: Mr. Carrot
Once upon a time in this big wide world a beautiful princess, or 500,000 of them, fell in love (or just flat on the face). Fell, but not for the prince, who, as they knew and we know too, never exists, but for something close enough to that fantasy to cause great confusion: the man who didn’t love back but who promised to, promising so well that even beautiful princesses, who knew better but just couldn’t help themselves, continued in a state of disability to pick themselves up.
Then 1 princess said to another, “Your man keeps dangling the carrot.” And the second princess returned the favor to the first one, who said, straight-faced, just this: “Mr. Carrot.” Those 2 words loosened all the muscles that kept the princesses from smiling, all 500,000 (or more) of them.
And lickety-split, like a cottontail seen at sundown, the false luxury of a phantasm disappeared, freeing the minds and hearts of every beautiful princess who had ever lived, all of whom, dead for centuries or living just like you and me, down the street from one another or right across a rainbow, put on their red shoes, which waited, ready, always at the front door, to dance a princess to her favorite hangout for a special coffee drink or dessert, which, as you may have guessed, was anything but carrot cake.
NOTE TO THE READER ~ Princesses, while they perfectly thicken the plot of love, are simply a literary loveliness and convenience, as the author’s hope is that readers who may not be princesses, due to economics or to gender, sex, or some other self-identification, but who find themselves in the princesses’ plight, might likewise find their self-rescue in the embracing humor of their friends.
- June 9, 2010
- Filed under: Love, Men and women
- Comments 2
The efficiency of peace
Peace is efficient. Like the human digestive system, which operates most efficiently when chi is neither stagnant nor deficient, peace operates most efficiently when love is neither stagnant nor deficient. The free flow of chi creates an easy digestion, of food in the body so that it is nourished well and of love in the heart so that its openness welcomes peace.
We tend to think of efficiency not only as acting economically–no waste, only necessity–but also as mechanical rather than human. In other words, without consideration for kindness. However, love cannot exist without kindness, and peace and kindness walk hand in hand. We think of emotions and feelings as being attached to–desirous of–a person or an outcome. That’s romantic love, for example, but efficiency indicates non-attachment. A peaceful person can risk not wasting time, words, or energy. Such beautiful economy makes best use of the resource that is love. Such beautiful economy is effective–certainly for the “economist,” who remains loving, kind, and unattached.
In Buddhist terms, “skillful” might replace “efficient.” In more broadly spiritual terms, peace is artful.
Teaching and intimacy 1
“So you want us to be intimate.” Those words could have been a question, but a student in my performance art class had stated them. He knew more clearly than I had one of my intentions for the semester: in their performances and in our conversations about them, I wanted all of us to be open, generous, vulnerable, genuine, emotionally and intellectually truthful, and loving with one another–intimate. That diverges from the usual studio critique, which students and teachers often praise with the word tough.
I felt my classmates’ excitement underneath the nervousness of their quiet laughter, and I remember that I paused a few instants before responding because the acuteness of the student’s perception had taken me aback, and he had so sensitively articulated my own desire. I smiled and said, with tentativeness giving way entirely to delighted surprise, “Yes, I guess so. I want us to be intimate.”
Today’s calling
Here’s what’s important today:
Gunpowder green tea, brewed very strong, drunk plain
Pigeon pose, both upright and in a forward fold, in yoga class
Meditation
The taste and nourishment of dried apricots, Greek yogurt (the Fage brand, with its very thick creaminess, that I buy at Trader Joes’), tamari-roasted almonds, an avocado, olive oil, and lettuce
Letting a prose poem, composed of shorter prose poems, take shape in its own fashion, with no push from me, so that whatever results, whether written today or in a week, startles this author with its beauty
A phone conversation with my friend Shelley in Urbana, Illinois
Going to my friend Kat’s performance, a house concert
Picking up Kat’s nearly 100-year-old neighbor, to take her to the performance, along with my friend Frances
Nothing pressing. Life calling, and I wouldn’t name any of that life today a job or a lesson or a gesture of good will. Rather, I feel called to be with everyday intimacies that feel at once necessary and desired.
