djlegun

A runaway kleenex falls from my sleeve. It floats to the floor and I snatch it back. With a runaway nose, kleenex is home - never leave home without it.

Serves as a blotter for a cup of tea - kleenex held in the non-tea hand, pressed up against the bottom of the cup - drink it up with its two spoons of honey - funny I never tire of tea - it always suits me.

So the hearth fire glows on into this Friday night - no site of the full moon, but it is there - somewhere. Breathing with a stuffy nose that flows one minute and swells shut the next - what can I expect? Grandma Lalonde had it, Dad had it, I have it - post-nasal drip like a kitchen faucet needing fixed. Just hereditary, ergo kleenex necessary. Always. Everywhere.

There, I’ve whined. Took this flaw and made it mine. Own your foibles, save the trouble of someone else owning them. Say again your favorite song - sing along, loud and proud and free. Sing with me. See? Fun in the shape of a dance - little prance doesn’t matter how you look - be mistook as a geek - long as you seek the spirit - long as you hear it roiling in your blood - fresh as oxygen in the water - bubbles and fizz - the way it is in a glass of seltzer. What else is there? A jewel in your heart, glinting from the start of something new - including you and others waxing feathers for a long swim through the dream we are in.

You and you and you dodging through rings of fire - rising higher - higher and a dot in the sky - used to be a sun, but by and by became a rock- a stone shock dark place where hot light became gone - so now the moon shone its white cold light on the faces below who might not know everything of nothing.

That sound of the no thing pounds my temples in tempos of marching feet - and now the beat breaks off to silence complete in the dark of no sun or spark of light in the night - a tablet erased, and no thing placed in the void except no noise - no rack and stumble - no grumble in the darkness - no mess - no fault or shout or talk about what happened next.

Just me. Me in the night in the middle of the road, telling a story that aches to be told.
And retold.
And retold
And retold again - until I am old.
The end.

djl

March 1, 2012

You know when you close your eyes and kind of go into a big relax and let your eyes cross from inside your closed eyelids so that you can see your 'third eye' looking back at you like the all-knowing sublime 'eye' that oversees Sauron's castle in Lord Of The Rings, only with a round, loving pupil instead of the evil slit-pupil? Well, isn't it a big challenge to not get distracted by 'floaters' (those little black specs) and to not watch them like they are alive or something against the ruby curtain backdrop of closed eyelids, and then start mentally pushing the little blobs around like video game pawns just for the power of it? and then realize your Zen moment of clarity practice in 'third eye' awareness turned all ego on you......again? ~~ djl

Pretentionalities
Portentialities
Potentialities ~~~ Soliloquies of Juxtapositions by djl 2/28/12

Inspired by the book "365 Tao, Daily Meditations"
by Deng Ming-Dao

Contemplating the eating of a bubbling fresh blackberry pie:

"I and the pie are one."
"If I and the pie are one, I need not eat any of the pie. It is already with me."
"I and the pie are one; therefore, I may eat ALL of the pie, doesn't matter."
"If I eat the pie, clarify, regret, forgive, accept, dismiss, learn from, rise beyond, and disentangle, I neutralize emotion and ascend to the enlightened awareness that:
"I and the pie are one."

In the following pairs, the phrases in quotation marks are excerpts from the subject book:

Pie: Reading the book "365 Tao, Daily Meditations" will guide you through the infinite ways to bring Tao into your world.
Eye: You are already the "Source," and need not follow any doctrine or teacher; Tao is already in the world, in you.
You have only to see it through 'third eye' awareness.

Pie: Notice everything; that is why you are in this world: to experience through the awarenesses of 'life form' senses.
Eye: Notice the nothing, for that is the true essence from which we came and to which we return, once free of manifested form.

Pie: Our goal is to better ourselves in the way of Tao. There will always be people in the world better than yourself.
Eye: No one is better than anyone else.

Pie: "Profits of Tao are a special category, acknowledged experts in meditation, philosophy, medicine....." (page 225)
Eye: Labels identifying elements or entities are against Tao.

Pie: "The follower of Tao knows how to eliminate desire, accept personal shortcomings, and work toward a patient elimination of the mind's own hunger for outward satisfaction." (pg.229) djl interjected explicative: I 'want' to eliminate my hunger for satisfaction.
Eye: To 'want', is to be out of the unified field of Tao.

Pie: True masters have no polarity in their lives.
Eye: Nothing exists without its opposite.

Pie: "We can't be passive; we have to internalize information and place ourselves precisely in the flow."
Eye: Everything you need to know, you already know.

Place and people
here in freedom
land to share --
among these new ones
and natives already here.

Had some moments
in their beginning
when what freedom was
seemed clear.

But first the native,
then each other, then
every single other
became the opposite of free.

The idea of this view of 'other'
invokes a living fear,
imagined fright with good reason,
which will grow and grow,
until no place or person
anywhere will peace know.

2/20/12
by djl

Weaving The New International Anthem

When it hurts,
all that is wanted
is to make it stop.
But we can't undo
by pulling this knot.
Only when a thread is found,
loosed from the snagged mess,
is there a posibility of
untangling the twist.

Once free, it begins
a new weave,
apart from the rest.
Just one, but then another
and thread by thread
the massive wad reduces.
Loose from the tangle,
each clear strand
adds to the harmony and pattern.
And the weave grows
in substance and beauty,
little tiny thread
by thread;
until one day the knarled knot
may be gone, and a tapestry
of beauty can carry on
across every-colored sea.

Let's not call it "The American Dream."
Let's not call it anything,
only see clearly what is being done.
And, if it's healthy, keep it breathing,
one by one by one by one.

2/21/12
by djl

Tapestry Threads:

Mikey Daisey's This American Life commentary about Foxconn, Apple's factory in China

Jose Carlos Meirelles, Brazil's Indian Affairs Dept.
http://www.uncontactedtribes.org

"The Real Avatar: Mine - Story of a Sacred Mountain" video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3YFGixp9Jw of this site; http://www.survivalinternational.org

Youtube video regarding the quest for Coltan* in the Congo (*mineral used in smart phones and laptops) "The Truth of the Apple ipad Behind Foxconn's Lies."

Thread: Each person who bcomes aware of the above threads
Thread: Of those who become aware, one who changes something by that awareness
Thread: Another one who changes something else by that awareness

Objects on night stand,
scattered personality,
some removed for sleeping,
go back on each morning.

Little thises and thats,
which here and there
help keep time,
lips unchapped,
let us see,
hear voices from an author's mind,
keep coffee mugs from leaving rings,
make hands smooth from rough.

But it is the photograph,
inside Noxema blue glass
frame, that sings
out hurts and happiness.

2/3/12
djl

Witnesses Of The Dissolution 1/23/12 by djl

1) Dissolution = dissolve

2) Disillusion = end of illusion

a) for a thing to be filled, it must need to be emptied.

b) for a thing to be true, the falseness needs to be ended


The state of being that our USA finds herself enduring is in a depleting, dissolving condition that is forward-moving. The forward direction is in acceleration towards an 'end point.'

Like water that must reach a specific temperature to boil, like a sneeze that must reach a specific degree of itch in order to discharge, or a cloud to acquire a specific amount of moisture saturation to produce rain, our civilization of human beings, not only Americans -- all people -- are accelerating towards a change point.

This is evident in our incessant obsession with speed; speed of action, speed of speech, speed of projected images on TV, speed of expecting things to happen, speed of anger rising when our expectations are not met fast enough.

The acceleration is exemplified by the observable increase in individual human unrest and collective human unrest. Counteracting our natural preference of unity we had before we divorced ourselves from nature, the nemeses appear in the forms of automated phone menus, self-service gas stations, self-check-out grocery stores, automobiles fizzing around with only one person inside, neighboring single-family homes of people who don't even know what the faces of those living a few houses away from them even look like, let alone what those persons' names are, or anything at all about those neighbors, and -- largest of all -- the blatant refusal of awareness that other life forms are essentially part of us.

Collective human respect for each other and earth's life forms appears to resemble those last drops of water in an evaporating well -- so scarce. The disconnect runs deep, and we are feeling that separation pain as though we are being fatally extracted from the fabric of social togetherness -- our roots being pulled out of the ground.

So, add to the malaise of individual disconnect, the extreme confusion caused by our social organizations of our collective body of people; i.e., government, social services, medical services, financial services, and the result is a complexification that renders us all perplexed, overwhelmed and extensively paralyzed. This degree of aggravation and loss of positive human potential and energy, is instigating the disturbance of the collective human condition. It is rising to the itch point of the sneeze that ends the irritation.

The megalomaniacal individuals and their power structures, ballooning under their own weight and crippling all below them, the Occupy Movement in the U.S., the violence of revolutions in nations around the world, look to me to be the human face, wrinkling deeply, eyes watering and squeezing shut for that colossal, eradicating sneeze.

Is it: 1) the cicada splitting its shell? 2) the butterfly emerging from the cocoon? or is it: 3) the self-induced annihilation of the most unharmonious, most evolved but least enlightened species on earth?

I hope the answer to the first and second questions is "yes," and the answer to the third question is "no," because human beings can be so very, very beautiful.

The End

I choose a cloud from the sky and call it a dozen names. I pull a root from the ground and eat it raw, then see the visions that, in the beginning, the very first human saw. I sleep the sleep that lies awake long into the dawn, replaying scenes from yesterday, especially what went wrong. That's when I discourse with myself the wisdom read in books -- the how-to, self-help guru type that seem such crystal balls to sooth our souls or have us feel like fools. I lay it down and look at it, a puzzle, a map, a playing card. The 'it' is life; and deciding what to do with it is hard. 3:30a.m. 1/8/12 by djl

When the moment becomes negative and over-inflates, it takes up all the space and fills it with tension, like way too much steam in a sauna, creating a kind of panicky suffocation. If the sauna exit is locked, there is a place right inside the mind, I call it "A Little Simple," which opens. The place takes up no space; in fact it neutralizes and voids the space. The "A Little Simple" is a tiny pop of fizz, a soundless, faceless, weightless energy particle. It is 'the third eye.' It is a focused awareness. If the stressed person can go to that place, the moment then becomes endurable. "A Little Simple" isn't the act of waiting, because waiting implies some expectation for something to 'happen' or 'stop happening.' Instead, it is a place you go without 'going.' Animals exhibit this when they accept that they have become prey. In Richard Wright's book, "Watership Down," it is called going 'tharn.'

Seems when we humans are overwhelmed to the nth degree, animals that we are, we naturally select a focus shift to 'small things.' The Great Diminishment. I think it is actually an expanding, not a diminishing -- expanding imperviousness by the degree of focus: total absorption into "A Little Simple". In the 1989 Bay Area earthquake, when the world deep-rumbled thunderous rocking motion in all directions and news achor persons were announcing that it was believed all bridges were down, I began removing cookie crumbs by hand from the floor beneath my toddler's snack table...because it was something with which I could cope; instead of the collapsed Cypress Structure and the end of life. I removed every tiny mini-crumb, while singing The Wheels On The Bus Go Round and Round. I found it to be an answer.

When I was doing grocery cashier work on Thanksgiving Day, I saw a menagerie of people coming to the store just for a magazine.....comments like "when it comes to Uncle Bruce, well...I just have to get out of the house." So the 'tharn' became Modern Mechanics, Dog Fancy, 101 Toothpick Art Ideas, Diet Tomorrow's Daily Almanac. Holidays can be saunas in some ways, but usually the exit door isn't exactly locked.


12/22/11
by djl

Saw this in Calaifornia June 2011

https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/--OpxkZNxUfk/TtxAdB4ieeI/AAAAAAAAAqo/zIx9s_VtYxc/s720/Tear%2BDrop%2BBicycle%2BTrailer%2BMan.jpg

Twas three weeks before Christmas
and all through the house
the coughing and choking
scared even the mouse.

The hacking and horking
the wheezing and snorting
and sneezing --- achoo!!
was coming from something
called The Terrible Flu.

All in the family
from Mom to Aunt Nell
were suddenly sick,
not one of them well.

Big brother Stevie and Grandpa
and little sister, Sue --
why even the dog and the cat
had the Flu.

It climbed up the staircase
with its cold, airy breath,
and rattled the door knobs
of the family at rest.

It snuck into lunches
as they were being made,
and shook itself silly
into the hot pink lemonade.

It chortled and cackled.
It croaked and coo-coo'd --
from front door to back door
crept The Terrible Flu.

No kleenex or cough drop,
no black tea or syrup
or cold cloth or song
could make the Flu stop
or make that Flu gone.

So awful the Flu was
this Christmas time, this year
no peace could be found for anyone
in this house right here.

Until.....a potion was mixed
in the kitchen one night
in hopes it could fix
that Flu bug all right.

Licorice of black root
leaf of green mint
powder of almond fruit
and pepper, just a hint,
topped off with molasses
and a smackeral of honey,
sipped slowly until glasses
and pet bowls were all empty.

Well, after one more
long, nasal-filled night,
with sniffing and blowing
and sneezing and wheezing
from throats sore and tight,
the next morning arrived
and what was there to hear
but quiet and calmness
and voices all clear.

No barking or hacking,
no horks and no whistle
from noses or anything
else that could bristle.

Faces once red
and splotchy and puffy
smiled in sweet comfort,
no longer all stuffy.

So hear now this story --
this recipe against Flu
and maybe The Terrible Flu
won't get you!

by djl
12/9/11