August 29, 2020 - Road of Truth

The bird was clearly dying.  It was not a matter of if, but when, and it would be sooner rather than later.  I would not have stopped for so long had it not been for the commotion that brought me there in the first place.

I had been walking along my usual road and took a left turn along a path I seldom travel, and for a reason.  That is when I heard a woman’s voice in distress and a man talking soothingly to her in lower tones.  I came out into a larger part of the path, and the woman looked at me imploringly and pointed down at the bird.  She was crying hysterically, telling me that something was wrong with the bird, and that was certainly true.

These two were not from around here.  Their expensive clothes and equipment made that evident, although I do not think they realized it.  The dramatic scene was also a dead giveaway.  She kept telling me that we had to help the bird, that his wing was broken.  I went closer and looked at the bird.  His wing was definitely not broken.  He was walking about slowly and confusedly, and he was absolutely dying.

Because I know that look.  It is one I see often enough while I am out and about.  However, the two people before me were not used to it at all.  She seemed frustrated with me.

“Don’t you want to help??” she asked over loudly.

“This bird cannot be helped,” I said.

“WHY??”

“Because it’s dying.”

“Can’t we fix his wing?!” she shrieked.

“There’s nothing wrong with his wing.”

“Then what’s the problem??  I don’t get it!”

“He’s dying,” I said simply.

They both drew back quickly, as if I had struck them.  Up until that point, they thought perhaps there was something they could do (or better yet, get someone else to do).  But I know when things have gone too far, and this was definitely one of those times.

They eyed me warily, as if I had caused the problem to begin with.  They had never seen something like this up close and raw.  I deduced in a moment that their world was a world of representation but not authenticity.  They were the kind of people who received all of their information through a filter, whose lives were carefully planned out, who followed the formula given to them early in life by their keeper.

But I am not that person.  And as strange as they found me, I found them to be just as peculiar.  We sized one another up quickly.  I felt sorry for her because I believed her anguish was genuine, and they both seemed as if they truly wanted to help in some way.  The problem was that they could not help, and they could not accept that.

Their world is a world of symbols, of representations, but not of reality.  Their days are lived like scenes in a play, each year a new act, each decade a new part.  They are actors and actresses on a stage, complete with an audience that cheers or hisses at their success or failure in pretending to be who they are.  They have mastered the art of how to seem.  When confronted with this problem, they fell into their typical roles because reality is too harsh and has no stagehands.  No props.  No curtains or costumes or adoring fans.

I tried to smile, to let them know that this was normal and natural.  They smiled back nervously and then left quickly, whispering to each other down the path.  The bird hopped under a small bush, and I knew he would not come out again.  This is the way of things.  There is a price for everything in this world, and the price of life is death.  The arrangements are made at birth, and there is no way to opt out of the contract.  Attempting to do so merely brings the contract to an end quicker, and the debt is still collected anyway.

My own contract looms before me.  My greatest weakness in life has been my honesty, slinging the truth arrows of the Sagittarian, tipped with bitter drink at times.  But everything that I have done after my eyes were opened, I have done of my own accord.  There are no stagehands and no props.  There is no applause.

There is just me, weapon clearly showing at my hip.  No surprises.  No false moves.  No dishonesty.  And in return, I am given the freedom of the road, to live my life cleanly, to experience it fully, to face it with both eyes open.

When we shed our body at the end, will we realize belatedly that we loved it after all, with all of its imperfections?  Will that realization be our final, gut-wrenching heartbreak?  Or will we be like the bird on the path today?  Living honestly on the road, every moment experienced authentically and directly without props or symbols.  And now he no longer needs his wings, for he has become flight itself. 

To think that his whole life he was practicing to die.  Perhaps things are simpler than they appear.

 

August 18, 2020 - A Shift

The blackberries are ripe again.  It is a good time of year to be alive.  Such sweetness.  I pull them off the bushes one by one and eat them, still warm from the sun.  Organic before we were told what “organic” was.  Good for you before we were “educated” about them being an “antioxidant superfood.”  Just plain old berries that grow along the side of the road every year.  Or out in the meadows.  Or down by the river.  Or wherever a bird happened to drop a seed the year before.  Kissed by the sun, so they must be special.

They’re free but there’s still a price to pay, of course, as there always is for everything.  With blackberries, it’s the confounded thorns.  The large ones gash your skin, and you can avoid most of them if you pay attention.  But the small ones you can barely see are like fine little razors that tear tiny imperceptible cuts on your hands and forearms and legs.  You don’t notice it until you get into water later on and each tiny cut comes alive like an exquisitely tiny fire.  Ah, the price, you laugh to yourself, yes, the price.  But the fire is worth it.

There is no internet down by the river.  I laugh and joke with other berry pickers who bring small bowls and baskets with them.  We carry on about staking a claim on the best patch, but we end up calling one another over to partake when we find a good one.  I don’t know who they are.  Just people who like berries, I guess.  And no internet.

At one point I stop and look up at the top of the trees as the wind is rustling the leaves.  I am instantly transported in my mind to a moment when I was a child riding in the back seat of a car with my siblings, my parents in the front seat now and then telling us to keep it down to a dull roar.  We were always loud.  Something about the sunshine then looks the same as today, the Light catching in just that certain way.  We’ll be home soon, I thought, as I drank in every detail of my surroundings.  What will mother make for supper?

Then back to the river and now, and it occurs to me that I have glimpsed a bit of reality.  Somehow it has leaked again.  There was a realness I felt when I was younger that I don’t always feel now, but I search for it continually.  Longingly.  Because I know something is wrong.  My eyes tear over a bit, but I don’t want anyone to see.  So I keep picking berries, focusing intently on one bush away from the others so they won’t see the leak.  The fissure.  The crack in my soul.  The distant reality still glazing my eyes.

Something has changed in the world, and I know that you know this.  I know you feel it.  I know your eyes glaze over with tears and you try to hide them.  I know there’s a sunny day in your memory, when the leaves were blowing in the wind and rustling together and talking.  When the birds were singing and the insects were humming.  And life was slower.  And you were almost home, where the sheets were hanging on the clothesline, dry and ready to be taken in, the beds made and infused with the sweet scent of the outdoors.  To which you would fall asleep later on and wake up and do it all again the next day.

I have said it before and I will say it again:  Spend too much time looking at the black mirror, abounding with hypnotic pixels, and you will lose sight of the unpixelated real world.  Dots on a screen.  Words typed to someone who may not even be there, who may never have been there.  Ever.  “How beautiful you are and how pleasant, my love, with such delights!” said Solomon the wise.  What song might he have sung for the black mirror?

There is a knowing.  There is a great willing that can be heard if you listen closely.  Those of you who are awake know of what I speak.  You know the difference between the outdoors and face-to-face contact with people as compared to the pixels in the black mirror, however hypnotic they may be.  You see people fighting about things that don’t exist, about situations that are not real.  You see the created un-world.  Misshapen like a patched-together being in a Tolkien novel, groveling to the all-seeing eye in the mountain.

I would say just simply turn it off, simply go outside.  And while I think this is a good first step, I don’t think it is enough anymore.  The ties that bind are like the old Chinese finger traps we played with as children.  The more you pull, the tighter the snare becomes.  Something more is needed.

A shift.  A shift in consciousness.  There are two worlds now, and they are superimposed upon one another.  But slowly, ever so slowly, they are drifting apart.  It used to be easy to travel from one world to the other and back again.  It is not so easy now because they are drifting further and further apart.  Someday it will be impossible to travel between them, and I fear that day is coming soon.  Then we will be stuck in whatever world we were in when the parting became final, and never the twain shall meet.

There is a patch of berries down by the river, where the thorns mercilessly cut your hands and arms.  And the berries….they carry the Sun within them, who enters you as you consume them.  Upon which a thousand tiny points of Light stream out of you from every wound you have ever had.  It is good.  The pain of reality is a good thing, and the price is definitely worth it.

August 13, 2020 - Cold Seeds

The seeds are the key.  All around us now, the Earth works furiously and tirelessly to create the seeds that will become next year, without which there would be no next year.  I have pointed out many times that unlike man who plants in the springtime, Nature always plants in the Fall.  This year finds her doing the same thing she always does.  I bow in gratitude and thankfulness.

But there is something different.  There are new seeds, and they do not come from the Holy one.  They are ugly seeds, misshapen and swollen.  Crippled and putrid.  Bearing a terrible secret, a storage of unnatural and chaotic energy.  Forged in a sterile environment by a gloved hand and a masked face.  Pored over by greedy eyes and blackened hearts bent on disturbing the sublime balance, on plunging the world from order and beauty back into chaos and corruption.

The grotesque new seeds pulse with perverse energy that rips and tears and gnashes.  The snakes in the grass carry them and deposit them one by one.  The Lady instantly recognizes their foul nature, and all the seeds she creates also know the imposters for what they are.  But the people . . . the people do not.  They have become lost.  They cannot tell what is a bad seed and what is a good seed.  Those of reptilian nature who serve chaos, they count on this and, as Blake said, they “sunnèd it with smiles and with soft deceitful wiles.”

The Earth writhes and hacks the ugly seeds from her soil, but the reptiles replant them as quickly as they are expelled.  They pat the ground in a soothing lie, whispering promises of riches to the Earth, saying, “There, there my lovely.  Nourish and nurture and grow my grotesqueness, and you will be rewarded with wealth and ease.  It is just one seed.  Just one seed.  What harm can there be in just one seed?  In just one compromise?”  But the snakes lie.  They have always lied.  To no avail, though.  She is not fooled.  But the people . . . the people can be fooled.

Have a care, then, as you plow the furrows of your mind and the fields of your heart, readying as it were your soul-soil for new growth in this important season.  Be watchful for the reptile as he attempts constantly to deposit his ugly seed in your soul, which will suck out your very existence as it grows and consumes you.  Nightly as you intoxicate yourself against the blaring and jagged lies being hurled at you continually during the day, as you fall into a semi-trance to escape the pain of having to be constantly vigilant, watch for the snake as he whispers his own soft deceitful wiles.  “It is just one compromise . . .”

And expel him!  Regurgitate his ugly seeds filled with lies and hatred waiting to grow within you.  Heave out the constrictive snake, the wealthy boa, who would squelch your freedom.  Spit out the vile and twisted growth of imprisonment.  Give them no quarter.  Chase them to the far ends of the Earth and hack them to pieces.

Protect your mind from those who would enslave you.  Protect your heart from those who would siphon your goodness and kindness.  Protect your personality from the reptiles who would force you to conform and obey.  Do not accept their cold and twisted seeds of death.  Even one seed—just one—will eventually gnaw a hole through your innards, its twisted fruit slithering away after having consumed all you have to give.

Hang on to what you know is right.  Look to the natural world.  Look to the seasons as they roll on in perfect harmony and timing.  Fall in with their cadence.  Accept the goodness of abundance when it is here and the scarcity of the season of peaceful death when it comes.  Force nothing.  All brilliance and beauty and life will come back in its time to the Earth, to your heart, to your mind, and to your soul as it has always done from the beginning of time.   

And stand guard!  Always.  Should you find something, however infinitesimally small, that does not hold up to the Truth of the natural world—to the forest and the streams and the ocean and the animals—cut it out from you and burn it to oblivion.