The Great Way isn’t difficult
for those who are unattached to their preferences.
Let go of longing and aversion,
and everything will be perfectly clear.
When you cling to a hairbreadth of distinction,
heaven and earth are set apart.
If you want to realize the truth,
don’t be for or against.

The struggle between good and evil
is the primal disease of the mind…

August 22 2025 — Music Is the Personalized Science of My Mysticism

Philosophy’s rocket boosters shed,
and music has become the new method of inquiry
into the imaginal terrain of the cosmos.

Prose is at best the landed record of aspiration’s glimpse of true citizenry.
Poetry is music’s word-form,
semantic companion to experiential outpour.
Music is poetry’s liberation from grasp —
giving up the house for the whole,
Hurqalya’s citizenship test in ecstatic recital.

Where to begin?!
What is Rhythm? Time’s celebration of Space’s accommodation.
What is Melody? Personhood’s Enchanted Flesh.
What is Harmony? Unfathomable beauty of reverent salutation…

August 19 2025 — Dedication

I dedicate this work to my Maker,
and to those He made,
who helped make me.

Thank you for letting me be a person,
and for letting me be with others,
and know them in their spirits.
They are works of art — all of them.
Thank you for letting me love them.

July 29 2025 — Tales of Heartbreak

Tales of heartbreak piped through the hallways,
the roads are covered in mud,
restless engagements,
the smell of estrangement —
will I ever find you?

Keeping me searching
all through the daytime
and into the moon time;
rest comes only for a time.

Hopeless endeavor,
ever-flowing river,
courtesy armor,
insanity’s lace.

July 22 2025 — Solitude’s Angel Up Ahead

What appears real is just as soon a memory.
What is memory blurs with dream and becomes unreliable.
What is left is the yearn for repose — the need for nothingness.

Maligned by consciousnesses clinging to the whirlwind.
Pined by souls tired of ceaseless demands.

Waking life gives way to dreaming life, gives way to deep rest nothingness.
Oh sweet slumber, let me be free of myself!

Solitude’s Angel Up Ahead.

July 22 2025 — Dream of the Keyboards

Dreamt everyone from town was at an event where we all sat at keyboards to play music for an hour — hundreds lined up at a long table.
The show never went on; everyone dispersed into the building’s many floors.
Then a train / taxi driver picked me up and told me I’d left my wallet a week ago. I was pissed.

July 17 2025 — Artifacts of Grace

Worshipping at the altari of civilization,
relics and artifacts of attempt and occasional obtain,
of realization in the material realm,
of personalized spirit.

Worshipped not for inherited value,
because the true inheritance is my sacred imagination,
my own civilization of one…

Civilization is my bones,
chewing grass to turn into Godsong,
sunlight into beating heart,
sunset into watercolor promenade…

July 14 2025 — Composing the Veil Asunder

A reflection on mystical unveiling (kashf, tajalli):
the creative act as both composition and disclosure,
a tension between form (veil) and essence (truth).

The title evokes composition as revelation — a rupture of concealment.
Suggested subtitles, chapter structures, and conceptual frameworks follow.

July 12 2025 — Art Beyond Supply and Demand

Art beyond supply and demand.

Art beyond supply and demand is a rule of the economics of the heart.

In commerce, if you supply what is demanded, you are compensated,
And if you demand what is not supplied, you are dispensated.

This is appropriate for a wallet but not for a heart.

In art, the artist supplies what was never overtly demanded,
By the patron’s ego or libido,
But that which was always yearned for in their heart,
And which was unforeseeable, unimaginable, unknown by the yearner,
But which satisfies their unarticulated, mysterious, felt yearn.

Thus, the economics of the labor of art in this heart economy operates via the principal rule of fulfill and yearn.

Yearning is the heartened analogue of demand or desire.
Fulfillment is the hearted analogue of supply or seduce.

The economics of art and heart are an alternative register,
Within which one can act each day with Grace and Generosity.

This is an economy in which we all win, because there finally is an invisible hand guiding,
And there is no harm in increasing the monetary supply.

Not a market economy,
But a heart economy.
With Art as its central labor,
For the benefit of all who yearn.

July 10 2025 — Transformation Rises from Its Slumber

There is a time for everything,
Moments hanging on a string,
Patience’s virtue waits to sing,
Transformation’s bell to ring.

Plates shift before do sands,
Desert mirage shows its hand,
Trumpet fare from distant land,
On water rising inside man.

July 6 2025 — A Compass in the Dark

A compass in the dark,
Shoring up my faith in intent,
As guide and call to prayer,
A call to stop thought,
And begin resonating,
And remember again,
And again,
Six times per day,
What understanding feels like.

Mind as hundred-mile rings of Jupiter,
In eagle-eyed stillness,
Awoken to being,
Which manifests as eclipse
Of all motion,
Wildfire-scorched soil of Grace,
Thunder-clapped silence,
Prepared instrument of receive,
Slow-motion erupt
Of sonic-boom declaration,
Of the end of nonsense.

Flash purge of biographic insistence,
Blinding old eyes,
Inoculating new beginnings,
Scabbed insistence sloughing away,
Wet soft birth of steadfast joy,
Intent to share Wild Soup.

June 27 2025 — Oh, How Difficult to Say the Unsayable

Oh how difficult to say the unsayable!
Of course music is difficult,
When I use it to try to say something.
When I host it as its own being,
Of course music is easy.

Seeking, yearning, longing,
Is a great disposition,
But a terrible technique.

Preparing, training, honing,
Is most of the work.
The playing of music should be just that — play.

Adult and child,
Provider and enjoyer,
Don’t confuse the two.

June 27 2025 — Physical Objects Become Metaphor / Pilgrims of Spirit

Physical objects are created,
As assemblies of components,
Arranged in new relation,
And declared a thing.

The thing — its form, its purpose, its function, its relations —
Becomes new possibility of thought.
New metaphors for spiritual hermeneutic,
New analogies for rational foray.

So the physical object,
Which was born in imagination
And given flesh,
Becomes the food for expanded imagination,
Which opens the possibility of the birth of new objects.

This is the circle of life.
This is the portalic function of art,
Where descendants and ancestors are not in linear relation,
But beget one another in simultaneity.

Life imitates art.
Art intimates new life.
Creativity is drawing circles with a pen
Whose ink is pulled from a fountain of aether.

The artist is a shaman of sorts,
Who can diagnose and heal,
Not through stilted commentary on dead bones,
But only through expansion of consciousness.

The artist draws from invisible realms
To make visible the expansion,
Which portages the senses
Back unto the invisible,
To expand the house of invisible
With new guests.

The Artist is travel agent,
Who gets commission from the invisible,
By contributing to its spirited economy.
A fixer, a coyote, a smuggler,
Bringing new migrants
Seeking a better life,
For themselves and their families —
Courageous pilgrims,
Feeding only on hope and longing,
And faith that they were always residents of God’s country.
Exile, the precondition of return home.

May 8 2025 — Fragments of a Dream

Found a luxury vehicle that was simple — like a box car.
Driving my boss Scott, I was going to take a turn down a road.
He said, “That’s a Sufi Road, you know.”
(resisting that road) I said, “I know, I live on that road.”
I had to drive the long way round because he was in the car,
but that was my path.

April 27 2025 — Where Is My Iman?

Where is my Iman?
Where is my Grail?

March 27 2025 — Bliss Is Solitude

Bliss is solitude —
the environment for amazement at our nature.

When what we think is no more
and what we are is.

Fiery glow in the eye and blood at dusk.
Strength and certainty overlooking the prairie,
breathing in fresh spirit.

Where we dematerialize and become dream and story ourselves.

We become the living painting —
pastel sunset washing over the sun’s depart,
precursor to gray-black night cloud’s
wise pilgrimage across the sky prairie.

March 14 2025 — Symbols, Systems

A note is a point,
showing rhythm and pitch,
a symbol of duration and location.

A staff is five horizontal lines,
creating a plane for pitch and rhythm —
a symbol of height and time in two dimensions.

The pitch is assigned to an instrument,
giving personality and a body to its personhood.
Timbre is the voice of the body in the physical realm.

Harmony is pitches together at once —
each person contributes to a greater being.
And so, a harmony is a being
which is the glory of pitch and timbre.

Pitches, aligned in melodies,
dance with harmonies in bursts of time
we measure in “measures.”

Bar lines between measures help the composer graph this free play.
Composers who understand free play themselves
take these bars lightly.

When analyzing a score or plotting a new one’s life,
a composer might number his measures (1, 2, 3, 4...)
and number his harmonies according to their position in a scale (I, II, III, IV, V, VI...).

Arabic numerals dashing forth from the Qalam of the Islamic Golden Age
cohabitate with Roman numerals etched in bold cobbled stone.

The Romans and the Arabs gave us these number symbols
to build our civilization.

Of course notes are called by letter too —
phonetic alphabetics from Phoenicians to Greeks,
pictograph marks who sacrificed their intelligibility as animals or trees
to become abstractions of human speech,
so that we may create our own world apart from them —
a world of symbols.

These systems of symbols themselves form a fine plane,
a realm of free play that symbolizes our own capacity for creation.

We combine them in intricate weave,
like any body —
our own body of systems,
or a car made of layers of systems.

Thus music written is a body,
which hosts its Spirit — which is Music.

March 12 2025 — Some Serendipities

Sometimes I realize later in the day,
or after half a week,
that I’ve been washed over
in a refrain of motifs —
that are serendipity.

This week it was the language and music
of The Lord of the Rings,
the Egyptian gods, and Sun Ra.

Past weeks held any number
of coincident recurrence.

All motifs are metaphor —
for creativity and vocation,
for mystery and curiosity.

When I am caught in my physical form,
I am too dense to realize the message.
When I let loose, I become the Serendipity.

I become a timely recurrence,
a message for others,
a side character in their charmed unfolding.

I watched this on a new colleague’s first day,
when problems arose perfectly contoured to her ability to assist.
The problem was glaringly not a problem —
but instead a wind-willed gift arriving on cue.

What conclusive meaning can I discern from these motifs?
Only that I am being guided and given
that which I need and which supports me.

February 6 2025 — Frankincense and Mirth

Dawn reveals an icy day,
Guiding all to slow or slip,
While tomorrow’s roads show the way,
To broken bread and comradeship.

A clock may not a compass be,
And winter sun can’t be my guide,
To know the place, the time, of tea,
And lunch’s sweet abide.

Hva segirðu gott?
What good sayeth you?
Of afternoon lunch,
I’m an Askur of stew!

January 28 2025 — White Bean Soliloquy

To Bean, or not to bean?
No question!

January 25 2025 — Inside–Outside

The outside of the house is gone,
But the inside remains.
Tsunami water everywhere,
And I look over the wall that keeps us safe.

Picked to read the long books,
And grow into something new,
Everyone has their own room,
Separated by walls of linen.

Music notes have entered my dreams,
Like Spanish and Portuguese —
A new branch of knowing,
The invisible conceived.

Written onto paper,
The invisible becomes flesh.
Silence descends into music,
Descends into notation,
So I can gain a grasp.

Markings written with compass blood,
To make compass bones.
What’s sought appears in magic swirl,
Direction makes itself known.

My saddest laments of love lost,
A threshold of the soul.
Outer dreams in chrysalis,
Birth inner dreams return.

Give us this day our daily bread,
So we may find heaven on earth.
And let our sins all be cast away,
So we to our play and wonderment
Can finally return.

January 23 2025 — Composer’s Prayer

My imagination,
The arc of a bow,
Up down up down up,
In strict staccato.

My instantiation,
Hark of all,
Everything around me,
Tremble, tremble.

Melody,
In sweet bespree,
When will thee,
In harmony,
Come to me resemble?

Angels sing,
Bell strings spin,
Fog dispersed,
Starshine burst,
Light my page,
With well-placed verse,
And noted grace assemble.

January 18 2025 — The Frustrating Glimpse of Infinity

The frustrating glimpse of infinity,
Around every bend and turn of page,
Or link or scroll,
Is an admit of defeat,
Carried in the yearn for knowing.

Learning is an obsession by encounter —
Of 6th-century Spanish saints
Trying to save their kingdoms from Barbary,
And 13th-century burning Persian poets
Whose love enchants to this day.

Before them, prophets even more legendary and large,
Whose influence is less possible to express in its greatness.

These distant cousins of ours could easily make us feel unimportant.
They have columnal titles like The Confessor, The Farmer, The Elder.
They have claims to fame such as “They standardized the period, comma, and colon,”
Or “They were the last scholar of the ancient world.”

How to compete with such grandeur?
Self-aggrandize?
Nicholas the Vital!
Or embrace the fullness of life?
Nicholas the Bearer...
Nicholas the Tragic...
Nicholas the Plain.

This impossible infinite encounter with frustration
Can become this taste of infinity through mortality.

Seek not to obtain the knowledge of all things,
But to rejoice in the perfect selection of partiality
For your service and edification.

Out of all things... THAT ONE!
As Denny says — that among myriads.

January 12 2025 — Serendipity’s Chalice

I stir Mind’s prior night fire,
Smoldering yet muddy,
With no plans for the day but to rest,
And to spread Celtic Spring blood-song,
Glen to Riven to Glen,
Amid midwinter hush.

I searched for a pen and pad,
Hoping for a plan,
And confronted with frustration’s sigh,
Setting out tea for an unknown guest,
I scurried about,
Amid midday rush.

I stopped at the library,
For no reason.
Thinking as I walked in,
That I had no earthly business there,
And I was entering without knowing why.

But knowing too that I find constant clues on display,
And that my P.O. box in the invisible realm is at this library,
I found my day’s bread,
Amid mid-height shelves.

A passage revealed sage advice,
With my Brother’s signature —
Serendipity’s Chalice — I drank.

I thought of God’s impossible Grace,
To make art of our lives.
While we make art from form,
He makes form.
While we arrange motifs on a page,
He brings us to the page,
Using Serendipity as motif.
Motif has an Angel.

“What you seek is seeking you.”
I sought riddance of my gird,
Through mystic flight,
Pen and pad and abandon.

I am building but must watch over my creation,
And build the home I seek,
From arrival’s lumber —
Not a mere house made of bone-dust.

A Chalice is a totem that delivers Abundance from Faith.
Its clan is Encouragement.
A Compass is a totem that reminds me to ignore all noise.
Its clan is Strength.
A Fossil is a totem that reveals patterns in the visible.
Its clan is Wisdom.
A Mirror is a totem that shows the Festination.
Its clan is Love.

Morning’s Celtic Blood-Song yip gives way,
To evening’s Full-Moon droning Flute,
And I, for a brief foray,
Overcome the World,
And am delivered into Space.

November 30 2024 — The Origin of Song

The heart is awoken,
By the clarion call of God’s bugle.
It beats like a drum,
Then resonates with its own frequency,
Which harmonizes with the spheres,
And is permitted free reign of melodic exploration,
And is on fire with its own song —
Song of itself!
A shooting star!

Cacophony’s mute,
Misery’s hush,
Breaking orbit,
The heart song transforms the listener,
To live life sung,
Speech elevated to song-prayer,
Rat race to rat symphony,
A song and dance of Spirit —
A melody ever upward!

A melody which pulls other melodies upward,
Burrowing linearity abandoned,
For verticality’s northern exactitude.
Dissonance shed like rocket boosters in transit,
Timbral ecstasy revealed,
Ecstatic silence engulfing this newfound symphony,
As its host and substance —
A song known, no longer heard,
Plentitude of bliss,
Rapturous stillness —
The Origin of Song.

October 23 2024 — From Rumination to Musination to Inspiration to Musication

Is rumination the Muses’ shame?
The opposite of their glory?
Is it their dullness — their lack of light?

Is it the mind turned inward, or just downward?
Or downward-inward?

So then is Muse upward-outward?
And Myth upward-inward?

Rumination is certainly untoward to the Self —
Difficult to guide, manage, or work with:
Marked by trouble or unhappiness.

And an opposite of charm —
The power or quality of giving delight or arousing admiration.

It robs our ability to charm:
To captivate, allure, fascinate, enchant, enthrall.
To control or achieve by or as if by magic.

Our charm, resultant gift of the Muses, implores us to delight the world.
Thus, we must make time to muse.

To “be absorbed in thought,”
To “gaze thoughtfully at,”
To daydream, to be in reverie.

These lowercase muses —
Instances or periods of reflection —
Become the soil for regaining lost charm.

This earthly charm becomes the seed of hope for the Muses,
A regained confidence in the magic of serendipity
And the possibility of life in technicolor.

Creating space for musing begets more space for possibility.
The muser acts as space-maker, not space-taker.

No longer victim to the downpressure of the day’s expectations,
The predawn muser fights back —
Reclaiming his rightful position as king of his own soul.

Pressure transmutes coal into diamonds.
Diamonds shine in acknowledgement of stary Brotherhood.
Transmission homeward of signal.
Music triumphant over noise.

October 4 2023 — Darkness and Depth

In books, film, and art,
Everywhere there is a confusion —
A conflation —
Of darkness and depth.
A bias against light.
From a culture so diverted and willful
That it forsakes the possibility of orientation at all.

Twin salesmen — the hubrist and the cynic —
Lay claims to truth in the negative.

The former knows his dogma is the only path
And wields fear of damnation:
“Stay on my path. Bow to me.”

The latter spits on everything
And promises not even abyss,
But only recursive denial.

Abandon your friends, your family,
Then the street urchins on the corner,
And finally yourself.

Until your hopes and dreams, your sincerity, your daimon,
Are sold for pennies on the dollar to the merchants of cool.

Until your life is actually lived as a palette
Of blue-green-gray loneliness in slow-motion dolly zoom.

But what about another way?
Where a lack of sight from lack of light implies not depth
But only blindness. Ignorance.
Something you can dispel with the flick of a switch.

Depth requires light anyhow.
We students of film know this.
We painters know this.
Yet we are so afraid to emit light.

Even our morality tales are belabored.
Good wins out, but only at the very end.
After hours of doubt.
Fair enough — but how about the sequel?

After the good wins,
And there is rejoicing,
And reconciliation,
And music!

Why wait any longer to direct our gaze toward shine?
To perpetuate no more a hesitation to soar,
And to bring audiences with!

But first we must shed the fear
Masked as cool, knowing, hip, wise irony.
Eirōneia — simulated ignorance —
Has become agnoia — ignorance itself.

What are we ignoring?
Our true selves.
Our lightness.
Our ability to dance.
Our enjoyment of it!

We are stubborn asses,
Stuck on the wall of the dance hall,
Chuffed at our mild misery,
While our uncool halves are doing the Charleston.

I give up who I think I am.
My persona is a cramp.
A vestigial trait.
An underdeveloped proto-eye
That cannot quite discern darkness from depth.

I’m trading in for a new model —
One that points northward,
And has an aperture larger than the Midnight Sun.

August 17 2024 — Go Higher

Don’t go deeper.
Go Higher.

Depth is fine, but we mistake it to be the only source of meaning.
Deep means not superficial.
Fine.
But depth means darkness.
Fine, but enough already.
Do we not have enough darkness, seriousness, weight?

Go higher.
Go lighter.
Light is the transmission of wisdom.
Homing Beacon.

I am a Homing Pigeon and Song Bird.
With ruffled wings,
and song burgeoning.
Hear my call.
See my flight.
Though it may be a silly sight.

Seriousness will not save you.
It will not protect you from attack.
It will not garner you respect.
Which you don’t want anyway.
You want freedom and vitality,
not control and responsibility.

Go higher.

August 17 2024 — I Do Not Believe in Thoughts or Feelings

I do not believe in thoughts or feelings.
I do not believe in fraughts or fleetings.
They’re nothing but frauds revealing,
Momentary puffs, life stealing.

Watching it all fade away.
Wondering my role to play.
Am I just a watcher here?
Is there truly nothing to be done or say?
Patiently abiding.
My will dying.
My story’s integrity dissolving.
Is this madness or just the beginning?

My brother’s patience I am gaining.
His superpower never waning.
Always being while everyone else doing.
And they loved him all the more for his sustaining.

Is it enough of a life to wait my return?
Playing music, glad to learn.
Here for a time, then gone again.
Lifetime’s length illusion bends.

Peace be with all men.
That we learn to be again.
Strive less.
Care more.
Bear more.

Lighten others’ loads.
Quietly achieve your goals.
Be peaceable and calm and kind.
And let your mind its emptiness find.

August 9 2024 — The Shape of a Day

What is the shape of a day?
Is it forged by time or a sculpture of space?

No matter how many days go on,
Each day is different than the last.
Sheer curiosity keeps me going through the hard times —
Everything passes. Everything passes.

How much could one man endure?
Sometimes patience seems like loneliness stretched out.
If I can hold steady and pretend time doesn’t exist for long enough,
Can I wake up with my problem solved?

The one who made them themselves.
Questions perish too.
All things perish.

August 9 2024 — Something to Say

I’ve got something to say,
but now with words.

August 7 2024 — Summer Shadow

Life is amazing.
It is more elegant than any work of art,
Because it is the infinite work of art.

Serendipity is the proof.
Foreshadow is repetition of harmony,
Melody’s self-harken echo
In the overture of each day.

Clues abound —
Winks, nods,
Continuity of message,
Expressed bolder through each transformation.

The name of a piano piece played during an afternoon lesson
Becomes early dusk’s rare moment of your lover acknowledging her beauty.

Are these separate scenes?
Or pieces of scenes acknowledging each other’s self-sameness?
Or one long (eternal) scene,
Acknowledging itself?

Washing up after dinner,
Contemplating eternity’s lack of beginning or end,
Smiling and looking in the mirror
At the piece of the whole that is also the whole.

This is bliss.
Feeling life’s dream, but with patience and understanding and a sense of well-being.

What a secret joy we all have together.
Only achieved in slipstream.
Interstitial Bliss.
Summer Shadow.

June 19 2024 — Words Alight

The longest and lightest day of the year,
drawing near...

And your writing,
growing spheres.

Adding light unto light,
pouring even more light where light has begun to seep in.

Light to fill wounds and scab them with gold.
Light to turn tears into chandeliers.

Light to take hurt and give it peace.
Light to take longing and deliver it beams!

Your letters lit with fire — controlled burn.

To scorch a convolution of terms
woven in on themselves for centuries,
into impenetrable mire,
and dangled unendingly in front of scholars and fools alike,
in an eternal deferral of truth.

Living water shaped by sound and wind into truth-giving fire.

Leading upwards,
pointing homeward,
in elemental display of intellect’s warriorhood,
in proper service to the One True King.

June 10 2024 — Slipstream at Dusk

I am mad for the evening,
when everything is 3D,
and dusk delivers pastel jubilee —
unnoticed by rushing townsfolk,
but noticed by me!

I am quick joy spinning,
when I break the invisible fence of my yard,
and saunter in the cool of the evening,
like God in His garden —
which is my story too,
in microcosm.

I looked up from my poem and saw a cross beneath a moon.
It wasn’t even a moving sight,
just a nice placement of form.
God’s handiwork is sometimes just noble.

360 degrees.
I look to the left, then right.
Walk fifty paces, then look again.
What is this dimensionality
we recreate in VR and find so trippy?

When I am done with my day’s demands,
and everyone retreats to their houses,
I am free to see again —
to half-wake up and experiment
with my own personal parallax equipment.

What private joy these walks.

June 3 2024 — Infinity Work of Art

Simultaneously, the entire universe unfolds in scenes of breathtaking beauty.
The light of grace touches every scene.
The scenes are only there when observed,
and they can be observed from infinite angles.

This “infinity beauty × infinity consciousness”
is what my friend and mentor must mean
when he uses the word detonate.

The limit of the function —
the attempt to imagine infinite perspectives
breaks away like rocket boosters on a ship breaking orbit.

Floating in space becomes total submission,
abandonment of any last attempt to hold together body or mind.
Eclipse of mind.

Is this peace, or ecstasy?
Represented perfectly — this hybrid state —
by the blooming flower spinning joyously in worship of Sun,
while appearing still to outside eyes.

Paxtasis.
A binding.
Joy-yoked to Source.

June 2 2024 — Fawn’s Orange Flower

It is a sun.
It is a whirling dervish.
It spins like a top at a rate we can only see as still.
Solar flare.
Burning up in ecstasy.

We rolled like logs
while orange flowers spun in place like whirling dervishes.
Who started this game of spinning?

An arboretum is a daycare for lost trees,
separated from their families.
A Chinese behemoth grows for one hundred years.
A ballet of rose bushes stands poised in a garden.

We wander the paths and off the paths.
Why do we visit? There are trees requiring no tickets.
We go because the fence demarcates permission to simply enjoy.

All life is on display.
Perhaps we should purchase tickets each morning.

May 21 2024 — The Gift of Sadness

The world swells and we feel small.
A person says a hurtful thing and we feel small.
Companies prey on our smallness
by making us worry about never having enough insurance.

None of these companies love us.
The people who say hurtful things are only themselves pain.
And if we adjust our view,
the world actually lives inside us.

The moon lives inside us.
The city streets live inside us.
The food we eat lives inside us.

Our consciousness is bigger than all the items in the world.
The world’s complexity is not overwhelming
because we can stand bigger than it,
simply by being still.

Even our deepest fears are smaller than us,
because we contain them.

They live in us. They live off us.
They have no life in and of themselves.
They need us.
Because we are big and made of Source.

We manifest life from our invisible side.
We hold power to create from nothing —
solutions, ideas, healing for others.

We are portals from which life springs.
We are beneficiaries of other portals,
but we are a portal too.

Sadness is our birthright.
Joy is our sadness’ flowering bud.
Gladness and peace are knowing our true nature —
stillness, spaciousness, consciousness.

The whole show is a gift.

May 2 2024 — Personhood in All Things

Sheet music maps the unique personhood of a musical piece.

Witnessing this imaged display of sounded uniqueness,
the written work becomes its own person —
a sibling, a parent, an offspring, a shadow, an echo, a foreshadow.

This music is not heard, but the eyes listen eagerly.
In this seeing, our imposed limits on music are transcended.

Music, in taking on sighted form,
gains sovereignty in a new sense kingdom.
We become benefactors through our own expansion.

This visual music is just as joyous and varied as its sonic twin.
A bar might look stolid and plain
or notes might reach across staves,
grabbing one another for a wild ride.

The variation is endless, and each new piece exalts!

In this way, every piece is its own person.
So too is every motif, phrase, rhythm, interval, and harmony.

The expression of each piece exposes genre as futile tool,
just as all categories made by man strain under scrutiny.

A person’s race or creed dissolves instantly
when we encounter their individuality.

A composition becomes a living being in our bearing witness.

This knowing brings me peace —
knowing music will accompany me until death.

Like each passing year,
music shows the glory of realms.
As I thumb across each new page,
I await in silent readiness its next reveal.

April 29 2024 — Serendipities of Yesterday

The Mona Lisa,
Jerry Seinfeld,
Tulips.

April 22 2024 — Poetry’s Balm

Poet is not a profession.
If you are doubly blessed, you permit yourself this grand medicine.
All the world’s pills can’t do the work of a poem.
All the poems of the world can’t do the work of a strong cool breeze,
chimes in the distance.
All the music in the world is nothing but raindance.
All the rain is applause.
Not every song is tears of sorrow —
some rain reminds poets where instruments come from.

Trees are different at night.
Done with their day’s work mining sunlight, pushing sap,
they don’t sleep but rest — holding second jobs housing birds in rainstorm,
spooking children outside windows.
Some become wood for houses, keeping men dry.
Some become instruments for poets.

April 21 2024 — Jazz Do Bops

Jazz do bops, and I don’t quite do bop,
but I am steady amidst fear’s lessening hold.

I know who I am — not fully, but more than before.
I must let go of all I hoped I’d be,
and become alive again as me.

Leaves fall from an autumn tree,
and it still stands strong as can be.
I can sing again if I change my tune,
and charge ahead with faithful swoon.

The past is a photograph to a scene,
wiping the compass clean.
Why feed nightmare’s ugly face,
when joy awaits on new shore’s grace?

Just keep sailing and forget your blindness —
discover fresh what lies ahead.
Un poco más allá.

April 12 2024 — A Cloud Caravan Chaser Am I

Society is the monkey mind of humanity’s body.
A stroll under the stars is the peace of calming towards silence.
Thoughts draw us in with their false promise of reality.
Silence delivers reality’s judgeless embrace.

Space hosts us in its boundless cradle
and delivers us from solitary confinement.
Where the opaque apparent can rerun its fear matinee.

The Tao 16 says: contemplate the return amidst chaos’ swirl.
Spaciousness slows time enough to sip return’s wine.

The night sky is a postcard of homecoming.
A cloud caravan overhead shows the way.
I beg hitch on this night circus migration.
The clouds nod like elephant mothers.
There is room on the Freedom Express.

I wished for this five days prior
and was gifted it freely when I finally stepped out.
A cloud caravan chaser am I.

April 12 2024 — Qigong, Indonesia, Excel

Three words land like stones into a still pond.
Each makes its own ring expand and touch the other:
body, journey, practice.

April 4 2024 — They Is Us

I have three uncles on each side of my family.
They are all men who tried to live in their own way —
sometimes encouraging, sometimes unfortunate, sometimes near, sometimes distant.

They have all taught me more in their suffering and endurance
than in direct tuition.

Some have died. Many have been sick or horribly injured.
Some live but hide in shame or addiction.
They have all been.

As I thought about them — what is an Uncle? Why do Uncles exist? —
it hit me: I am an uncle.

Sometimes near, sometimes distant.
Sometimes wounded, always encouraging.

The job of an Uncle is not to be a hero,
but simply to have gone before.

I am in the middle now — no longer a child.
There was no event, just the realization that there are those who have gone before me,
and I have gone before now too.

I will soon take up my mantle in the stars and smile down.

March 28 2024 — Mastery and Maturity

Your potential to be anything dies when you decide to become something —
and is reborn as the potential to experience oneness as part of the whole.

Oldness is living each day as a narrowing.
Maturity is living fully and bigger through your chosen path — an expanding.

When you pick a vocation (or realize you’ve been picked), it can feel like mortality — the first death.
Work hard enough to gain facility and fluency, and you reach skilled-humanity:
the state where technical skill enables heartfelt gesture.

Beyond the minutiae of task you see again the infinite. This is the first rebirth.

You can make gifts for others — compositions, articles, poems —
turning skill into service.
You can let the passion of others orient your own, joining the chain of gifts.

Mastery becomes increased potential for expressiveness.
Maturity becomes orientation toward contribution.

February 21 2024 — Peace Dawns in the Heart of He Who Listens

First get weary.
Then writhe and judge.
Then get weary of judging.
Then get weary of fearing.
Then get quiet and watch.

Relax.
Relax again.
Relax again and again.

Stop trying to have a perfect life.
Relax at work.
Relax while buying coffee.
Relax when your random thoughts attack.

What is left when you have no opinions?
What is left when becoming a composer
doesn’t take away the feeling you’re not okay?

Become okay — then do what remains.

Peace dawns in the heart of he who is available.
Being His peace and mercy
to His creation
is my peace and mercy.

February 12 2024 — Samsara

I’ve woken up in villages in Vietnam,
trudged to work in my hometown,
been in Bolivian missionary churches,
roamed the streets homeless but for friends’ couches.

Diplomat, waiter, poet, pauper, king.

Dreamed in stone houses by creeks,
woke up on blue-grey mattresses,
hoping not to get fired.

So why the fits and starts?
Why the two-mindedness?
Why the fragmentation?

Maybe the cosmos itself is like this —
and I am day and night.

But can’t I smooth the bumps?
Why is there no compelling pull?

I miss my family.
I miss my friends.
I miss life.

Hopefully running will be the trimtab.

September 28 2025 — Neptune

September 2025 (approx.) — The Mind of Absolute Trust