Tag: poetry

Love in a Blizzard

I had felt myself slowing down like the sap oozing from an old wounded pine with a thousand self inflicted cuts

Life had left its mark on me inside and out and stripped me down to naked red bare skin and had left some bone exposed

When she found me I was suffering from exposure like an old gold miner past his prime freezing in a blizzard fumbling with matches to make a fire

The howling snow had blasted away the sand and dirt that I had used to fill in the cracks in my broken soul and exposed a crying little boy underneath

I had destroyed my old childhood faith and had taken joy telling my family and friends to take their false religion and go to hell before heading into the wild mountains

My heart was raw and sore but open for the first time in my life like an open heart patient on the table fading away in the middle of a blizzard

The words that came from my mouth were honest but my mouth was dry and cracked from the cold and my head ached from a 40 year bender

My only friend left was my old lab with me in the storm who I barely knew and who was still afraid of my anger and wouldn’t come close to me in the storm

She found me there almost dead and led me to her warm cabin in the middle of the woods and she made me some tea and gave me some bread

34

The rich man feasted in his high hall,
Bright torches shining everywhere,
When a man too poor to own a lamp
Crept to the side to share in the glow.
Who would think they would drive him away,
Back again to his place in the dark?
“Will one more person detract from your light?
Strange, to begrudge me a leftover beam!”

—Cold Mountain

strange tides

moon shows

ocean slows

heart flows

mind blows

body glows

daimon knows

Prometheus

“Cover thy spacious heavens, Zeus,
With clouds of mist,
And like the boy who lops
The thistles’ heads,
Disport with oaks and mountain-peaks;
Yet thou must leave
My earth still standing;
My cottage, too, which was not raised by thee;
Leave me my hearth,
Whose kindly glow
By thee is envied.

I know nought poorer
Under the sun, than ye gods!
Ye nourish painfully,
With sacrifices
And votive prayers,
Your majesty;
Ye would e’en starve,
If children and beggars
Were not trusting fools.

While yet a child,
And ignorant of life,
I turned my wandering gaze
Up toward the sun, as if with him
There were an ear to hear my wailings,
A heart, like mine,
To feel compassion for distress.

Who helped me
Against the Titans’ insolence?
Who rescued me from certain death,
From slavery?
Didst thou not do all this thyself,
My sacred glowing heart?
And glowedst, young and good,
Deceived with grateful thanks
To yonder slumbering one?

I honour thee, and why?
Hast thou e’er lightened the sorrows
Of the heavy laden?
Hast thou e’er dried up the tears
Of the anguish-stricken?
Was I not fashioned to be a man
By omnipotent Time,
And by eternal Fate,
Masters of me and thee?

Didst thou e’er fancy
That life I should learn to hate,
And fly to deserts,
Because not all
My blossoming dreams grew ripe?

Here sit I, forming mortals
After my image;
A race resembling me,
To suffer, to weep,
To enjoy, to be glad,
And thee to scorn,
As I!”

—Goethe

62

“High, high from the summit of the peak,

Whatever way I look, no limit in sight!

No one knows I am sitting here alone.

A solitary moon shines in the cold spring.

Here in the spring—-this is not the moon.

The moon is where it always is—-in the sky above.

And though I sing this one little song,

In the song there is no Zen.”

—Cold Mountain 🏔 aka Hanshan

The Path of Love

One day a bird came and sat with me on the top of a mountain, it whispered in my ear and I could understand it

It told me, the birds have a secret and I will tell you if you give me some water

That seemed a good bargain and I offered it some water and it laughed at me, no no, living water is what I need

So I felt a poem rise in my heart and I sang it to the little bird and it was filled with love and it began to sing

This is what it sang

Anger is moving between human hearts the way love once did, we need your help to sing the song of love in the world

I’m going to teach you a new green language, the language of the birds, the language of love the gods taught us and we teach those who can hear it

You will love the world and help heal it and show others how to love and stop the anger rising in human hearts

You must seek the passageway to the green world and seek the help of the ancients

When you start to see symbols around you and strange movements, you may be close to it

When your heart bubbles with love and verse, you may be close to it

When what you saw as ugly, seems strangely beautiful, you may be close to it

If you come close to death, you may be close to it

When you live breath to breath, you may be close to it

Am I dreaming I asked the bird, and it laughed, we are all dreaming this silly man, remember my song and sing it clear and true

You are close now, close as your breath

Empty Cup

Nothing compares to the song of love sung with all your heart

It brings down stone walls

It moves the birds from their perch

It makes holes in space

It stops evil in its tracks

This song of love is a healing balm

We who steal hearts know it well

We have been seduced ourselves by it

We move to its flow and we feel its movement through us

A feeling we rarely know in our small lives

To feel it flow through you, removes all doubt, all sadness and suffering

One would feel ashamed to bring their suffering before love

But love beckons, come

Bring it to me

Bring me your deep sadness and I will fill your cup

Pour yourself out again and I shall fill you up

And one day, the water will begin to flow and never stop

Golden

“I do not teach a definite Philosophy—I have no cocked and primed system—but I outline, suggest, hint—tell what I see—then each may make up the rest for himself. He who goes to my book expecting a cocked and primed philosophy, will depart utterly disappointed—and deserves to! I find anyhow that a great many of my readers credit my writings with things that do not attach to the writings themselves but to the persons that read them—things they supply, bring with them.

Epictetus says: “Do not let yourself be wrapt by phantasms”—and we must not: that is very profound: it often comes back to me.

Epictetus is the one of all my old cronies who has lasted to this day without cutting a diminished figure in my perspective. He belongs with the best—the best of the great teachers—is a universe in himself. He sets me free in a flood of light—of life, of vista.

My contention is for the whole man—the whole corpus not one member—not a leg, an arm, a belly alone, but the entire corpus, nothing left out of the account. I know it will be argued that the present is the time of specialization, but that don’t answer it.”

—Walt Whitman from “Walt Whitman Speaks”

There is a reason the elite of Rome sat at the feet of a crippled ex-slave to learn what a human being looks like.

He saw gold and I see it in Walt and I see it in others and I see it in myself and I love it.

Best Results

Don’t go off half cocked, before you are ready
Pack your powder, well
Cock the hammer, fully
Don’t aim, rest into position
Squeeze just enough, don’t pull
FIRE 🔥

You will hit something, the bullseye 🎯

8-28-21 Smelly News and Weather Report

“Life is not an accident.” —Morpheus 

Today’s Weather…

– The Northern California air is heavy with smoke today. It’s 82F with sun and haze. Today will be partly sunny, high of 100F, low of 64F. I’ve seen better days. But this one is fine.

In Smelly News…

– Northern California is burning 

🔥

 It is a cleansing fire. Dream homes have burned is all. Wood 🪵  fuel has burned is all. I burn, slow burn. Smell of smoke is in the air. 

– There is more corruption popping up everywhere now in our fallen politics, out of our delusional fear. Corruption abounds. Yet, as all that is temporary falls away, what we are, remains. Castoffs, a mote in God’s eye. This process of living has altered consciousness. 

– I work with electric self driving cars in the dream. I’m here to do the work and I’m doing it. I help train deep learning algorithms to recognize objects and respond. I move massive amounts of data around. Humans are very clever. My approach is a minimal one to support the work, just enough planning. What I am good it is making progress in chaos. Emotions overwhelm logic and reason. How would you program this? Do we want thinking machines with new emotions? If cars had emotion, would they be depressed? Kaizen, continuous improvement, is my way through this. Improve anything I touch and I do. I have a team now I have been building over last 4 months. This has been a new chapter in my own small life and I give joyfully and freely to my team and they respond with their best. AI needs conditioning and training. As do people. It takes practice to be good. To be great? It takes heart. Show me the algorithm for this. I dare you. Ironic while the world burns, I am doing my best work. 

“I know this because I just know, it is my purpose.” —The Keymaster

Today’s poetry…

“I dreamed a dream . . . but now that dream is gone from me.” 

—Daniel 2:3