Author: cborsello

Jersey Girl, born on the beach.

Listening Devices

It is my daily routine to open the computer & check favorites & newsy blogs. I saw the “update” button on the power screen, that tiny orange malevolency indicating such a highjack coming soon. I hit it last thing last night, hoping it would be over by morning.

But it wasn’t over, it just ran out the battery. I plug it in to 18% completed but “Still updating…don’t turn off your computer.”

I believe it’s true that Bill Gates introduced the idea of getting a “virus” & this requiring periodic “updates.” My best guess is some AI team in Nevada or Arizona, sitting in an underground room where (if they breathed) they could see their breath. I see their lighted silver fingers walking through my files. What will they do with poetry & prose, with editorial letters & preachy emails? Will they yodel to discover fiery youtubes about health & wealth & mankind’s skirting the lava plane of an active volcano? Will their tiny lights grow brighter? I’m still at the back of the threat line, yeh?

20%

I am rambling around the point of this blog but arrival is at hand.

20%

What, exactly, is happening to my computer? And how can I get to the point where I simply pluck information from the ethers as do so many of the folks I follow? If I can’t get the goods on creation from this vivid mountain air & this exceptional light, why do I hope to glean it from a machine?

The laptop is snuggled up to my leg like an indoor cat. I glance at it as I read my book. It is not an alive thing. It’s a package wrapped in brown paper, left on the peeling porch.

22%

This computer (embarrassingly code-named “mylove”) [which name seemed foolish even to me until I saw a friend had named hers “beloved.”] must be given over to the nerdy A.I. in training, the one still needing corrective lenses to connect to humans.

The person who said “Three’s a crowd” had that practical wisdom thing going. I am speaking here of a machine, essentially a toolkit / file unit. It’s a comm device. Why would I not be comfortable wondering if nascent Big Brother knows he has a crowd reading over his shoulder?

(Sitting in that large warehouse room in a form-fitted, chilled cubicle, its green eyeshade canted just so to filter my frontier light, bionic fingers fluttering along a narrow, inky tape of my efforts to stay informed…)

22% still.

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Indigo Child

I got here just as the world was shifting inter-dimensionally & surfed in on that new wave. I am called an Indigo Child. Except that I have renounced the child on occasions, I did a good job staying in touch with my core reality.

In the World of Exactly Today, I am a changer & a chronicler – even unwritten, this life will be indelible on my consciousness. The more so because I recognize it; familiarity being a trait of mine.

I came across the word this morning of “Reparenting”. I did not recognize it immediately, so it sank a little deeper when I did. When what I was reading caught up with my immediate perception of an Inner Child concept base. Specifically, mine.

“Here’s another area for reparenting. I need to provide for myself the missing experience of bondedness.  No sense waiting for the outside world to do it for me; I need to assume the adult side of me and reparent the wounded child.”   – Steve Beckow (www.goldenageofgaia.com)

The pattern of my childhood was that of the singleton & it has not discontinued. I have many ways of coping & promoting & being aware & reacting. These are as practiced as any Yoga or T’ai Chi regimen.

My Inner Child was such a solitaire that she is still sitting & walking in places alone. She came loose when I was free from other obligation. She is stirring now & peeking out between the blinds because she sees I’m not so busy as I was.

This is the Indigo Child. She leads armies on her empty paths. Her mind is quick & responsive, just likely not synced with your particular thoughts though she nods & listens. This child knows what it is to be overpowered emotionally. This emotional bullying was done regularly but who cares since it was only a pattern repeating, laying down a track that is there if I choose to follow it. Indigos do not stay on any track usually; they move from topic to topic, devoting the same attention span & vigor to each. They sample the steam table of life, seldom oriented to the salad bar. Indigos are unlimited though they get their toes stepped on. They never stay underfoot long enough for real damage.

Many cycles of time have passed on this assignment. The edges are wearing thin, I am seeing through what used to be solid. I’m going back to talk with Little Carol who brings me visions & will never leave the beach.

Making friends with her again gives me a companion in the house. For Indigo Children grow into Indigo Adults. Attitudes assumed early will out. I am a leader of a ghost army of me’s, crowding around for attention, but settling in once I choose.

If think of it poetically: I came here to be an immovable rock, a bulwark, a warrior for the incredible Lightness of Being. I am worn to a pebble on the beach. I shine in the knowledge that from all the abundance here, Mother God will exclaim over me & put me into her pocket. Later, she will place me among her treasures. How could she not? She will rub her thumb over all my flicks & imperfections & love me regardless.

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Minyan

We’re lucky to realize & recognize the reality now presenting itself for inspection. It is being made to look uninviting but inevitable.

The reality is that we are already past that doorway – what seems like such a transition is actually being done from 20-20 Hindsight.

For me to renew, or perhaps obtain, compassion & empathy with no attachments, I am here, now & naked. I feel like I’m moving forward but who can say for sure unless I say it first?

For some while the physical trauma of what I experienced has been assimilating within; I keep an eye on it. Ideas help it to reform me after infiltration. Pain & sheer goldurn inconvenience inform me now.

To find uniqueness in the matrix of how souls have overlapped each other (they were not keeping an eye on things) is to live in “threads” & “sound bites” – we live in underscores, not the fullest expression of life, but  our version, so it is in us, embodied,  We get snippets of stories where we get anything we’re not our own selves making up at this point. The individual took over the collective by a long shot…yet because it is defined by that, it still participates, telling itself it is individual.

This part ongoing now, this tsunami of undirected energy, is the part in the Biblical story where God says, “Go find Me ten good men.” We are looking carefully at what is ours to work with. But we have only ourselves to work upon, long-run. Was God saying Find me a Minyan; then we may pray? I can sure see that. At that time, & likely just in that location, there were too few able to pray in at the power to change the world; so that world as it was had to go. It was rendered, parsed up, mythologized with real bad weather & the knowledge of hard times ahead. It was given a name that would become a mark against mankind (“mainkind”). A skull & crossbones of a warning name.

Few roads are entirely straight. We seem to have meandered back there somehow. But we would find ten good persons within ten feet, did we have to seek today. The Universe seeks to extrapolate information from us; it is insatiable. What am I telling it? I seem to be getting a broader range of information incoming, but it is not on an intellectual level exclusively any more.

I need to keep an eye on my Prayer Quotient. I’m fairly sure it is ticking upward, so this is ideal. So, right now, all I can do is light it up for me. It’s up to others to seek their “what comes next.”

Remember, these are just writing exercises I have here. This is me, practicing scales. If you’re here,  you’re tuning up a bit by touching another psyche. We said in Unity no candle ever lost by lighting another.

My life improves in a step by step pattern. It is a newer dance designed about allowing more fragility. That which was broken has healed with new memory. Somehow, I now have my Minyan. Step by step allows the impertinence of the step just before to pass unnoticed. It is interesting to watch the pace of others from the places where, like any good Trailblazer,  I’ve stopped to look back.

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Returning to Prayer

So, a time or two ago, I was able to tune into prayer as being that tiny generating engine behind my energy. While I’ve been making my changes, it turns out so has Prayer. What I was told was a technology has become solid as such.

I’ve learned “What were you thinking?” is not a rhetorical question. With the thought police increasing every day, it can now be an accusation. But I feel a potential sifting through: Alchemically, a potentiation sifting through, taking root around me, binding me down while nourishing my wings.

I see a “Next Level” sign blinking overhead.

I see big flakes of me, psychic flakes, pulled off & scampering down the sidewalks of other places, more geographic places.

Every once in awhile, I think I am pedaling backwards; slack; no traction. Then I just arrive, because Spirit has already done all the arranging while I was sightseeing. On tour may mean “On To Our” or “onto our”.

The wind that pushed us steadily forward has turned into a gusty go at us, sidling in or full-frontal. We emerge again & again. We arrive at our truest selves repeatedly or our repeated selves more truly. Even (& perhaps most accurately), we get to the ones who started out compliant, but are now rattling the chains back at the gang. The closer we get to ourselves in the Silence draped upon us, the more Powerful we become.

Compliant to Complaint is moving one single letter.

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Digital Alchemy

I believe this would work well as a name for massage therapy salon. My first practice was called “Angelhands” in my own mind, Then it wound up that I mostly worked for spas & so did not even need a name. Yet it lives on, emerging into this timeline every once in a while.

I remember how awkward massage therapy was for me in the beginning. Before my hands learned the language of the body outside the formal frame of school. Before I knew the patterns my hands twine into on the client’s body. I love the way it has evolved & continues to evolve.

After I broke my arm recently I thought I had retired from doing massage. It seems I cannot stay away & I am once more in the lotion.

If I had a business now, I’d call it Digital Alchemy. For years, a shamanic friend of mine kept me in touch with a familiar name: Merlin, yes, of Arthurian fame. Merlin urged me consistently to use alchemy. He implanted the word so I react to each mention or exposure. Years after he & I no longer shared spirit-time, he had me on watch for a word.

Recently, I got the rest of the story: I figured out the magic travels through my hands whatever format it comes through. The hands have it, aye.

My injury has added a subset of emotion to the soundtrack I follow when doing massage. I plan to keep the reverence going.

As I shift, everything else does too. I am watching small cities I have built crumble.

Right now, the sacred instant demands prayer. Totems appear; one came to me recently as another left to be a wild thing again after many years. We got away from each other at the end there. My bull elk probably got most of what I accomplished done for me – at least the heavy lifting part. Now another energetic force is needed.

I began seeing dragons, moved beyond lower earth to an energetic stream beyond (Behind? Below?) 3D. Now I understand this totem is here to help with healing in all stages of my current life. She is an embodiment of my fire element.

The woman I sold my massage items to I work again, using my own tools more than I did at home.

One beautiful client held my hands after her massage, blessing them to God.

Just like everywhere else in life, growth happens. Sometimes this takes place in spurts. I am getting a feel for what I am being called forth into: it is more healing work.

Feels good to have a dragon involved.

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Schwinn Twin

I’ve always been the bent spoke in the wheel at that violent angle proving vicious to lower limbs, Perhaps this is why I kept distance from others.

I guard my independence fiercely; it has a presence others may find bristling. But nothing is as it once was as I soften. Trouble is, I’ve already driven off hope of merging in polite society.

Expectations brown & fade, providing nutrients for a softer medium. I still hope to grow. I really tried to stay on the beaten path, but being born in wilderness outs too readily. Once I walked city streets, though, blending in.

Now I’m torn between returning to my roots & simply getting comfortable where I am.

Now I understand knowledge to be hollow, “can’t” to be a form of surrealism, certainty to flex, Life to be a wild & untameable event.

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Dear Time,

I’ve been trying to catch up to you for a longish stretch now. You got away from me a bit ago – what happened there? Was it in Nashville where we shared so many deadlines; where you became a steeplechase run at full gallop, full of fences & water hazards but where you mainly surfaced as Total Taskmaster?

Was that where I pushed back from the table, starving & sated both? Was it where I first perceived your importance & indifference (& impotence)? For surely at that time, you started to slip now having lost traction altogether.

(If Time were a racehorse, it was riding me with a brutal bit bruising my mouth. Foolish with faux power & authority, I was fooled into feeling in charge.)

Now you spin on your own axis. Now you wobble along scarcely missing other planets. I ride your edge but am no longer certain of my own boundaries. I have seen too much, heard too much; bled too much, lied too hard. I knew no better at the time.

Forgive me?

Can we be friends? Can we drop the Master/Slave relationship? I just can’t hold on that tightly anymore. Times have changed, hell, we both have. Boundaries & dynasties blur as I grasp for my place within these. I arrive to find I stand in the center of the Hall of Mirrors.

One by one my systems fail your tests. Words burrow under the surface when I try to speak them. Ideas change color or come so clear as to be invisible when I rely on them thinking these individualistic & whole.

And, Time, what have we wrought with the physical? Good grief! I so miss being beautiful, moving fluidly, the casual fearlessness. Hesitation becomes caution, caution a transparency of hesitation. Hey, I don’t mind mortality – I mean, we all die to the third dimension as we move into others. Perhaps I find that much-touted stance of Youth just plain boring now.

I like my wisdom. I enjoy filtering all you teach me through experience. I am certain of less & less. You, too, have lost certitude & lack surety.

Okay, this is how it is: I started this thinking to point out how far in the lead I am, or you are. But I now see we are so intertwined…walking together, neither leading, both leaning into each other.

I left at arrival & still search a destination only to find the walk is all there is.

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Pre-Post Covid

A long set of poems borne of lonely anger. Covid is not my illness, but it may have bested me – financially, figuratively & finally. Were I suicidal, I would already be dead of it. See my images as your own but don’t dwell here long. Love, Carol

THE DISEASE OF UNEASE

How can I not miss all that I miss?

A body so warm beside me

The wash of the sea

That salt-morning light

A family

So soon it all changes

Once again the more & the less

Will lead me a dance divine:

The motherless child

A fatherless girl

A sister-less life

A brother unknown –

The nights like this:

A season at end; another not begun

A time of silvered stars

The rime of the horizon

A single setting at table

A single serving.

I no longer complain or marvel

I am simply through it

Through with it

I long for a bosom

To weep upon

A tickle to laugh, a limerick rhyme?

I yearn for a life which will never be mine

My nights spent alone on the staircase of time

Not poems that wait till the last word to rhyme.

STEEL MIMICRY

Bold as brass, I steer forth upon my course

Unstayed by wind, by aching hands

By sullen feet

My eyes sore of missing faces

My heart salted by loneliness & faintly sour

Faulted by sinecure of sin

I have climbed over decades

Searching an easier path

Than this, uneven stone & shale.

I have bared my soul a thousand times

Only to redresss it, bringing it home

To sleep beneath my pillow.

NOTES

The music defines the moment

One key on a piano

Tapping against time

The days all lit. I gather change about me

Cashmere in comfort

I see my way clear to home

While night approaches

A feral cat, seeking succor

A black thing with green eyes

A pat upon its head

A sufferance for food.

A narrow bed

I am grateful to rest into

The universe hangs upon my wall

A purple swag of planets to behold

A memory I live at the center.

THE POST-COVID WORLD

A 50-50 chance

Of having a car

A place to live

Food to table

I am no soldier

Yet somehow signed up to march in this lockstep dream

Before the lemming rush

Before the bodies take, wingless, to air

I have my life lived already

Enough to spin in front of me

No matter the height from which I fall.

THE READING

I look to you, my divinations

The round cards before me

Shaping a Celtic Cross

You unfold a fervor of vision only

Dizzying with foresight

My place in the middle

Where spirals emerge

A past with a future

Equally in balance

The to & fro of tidal life

The iron in my blood magnetized

To what I cannot say

By what I will not do.

I am agreed to stand the middle

To straddle lies & truth

To make my unequal way.

I remember the solitude of perfection

Once the pattern

Now tilted all a-side.

HOME ALONE

Now defined by idleness

Not sanity.

I feed a neighborly cat

I water sixteen plants

No expectations left

In polite society

For such an isolate as me

A hermit in the cave of time

Lacking the charcoal to

Slash a day – one day

Upon the wall.

And in this heartless stripping away

A promise is uncovered

A fan of words to hold the heat of hell at bay.

KEENING

I know I am enough for heaven

To gather wings around me

To live in former gravity

My pockets full of sins, like rocks

Will wings be strong enough to carry me?

Is even God enough to forgive the unlived life?

“I AM INNOCENT!”

I supinate my palms

One arm crooked, trembling with effort

“You cannot accuse me!”

But my voice is lost in the courtroom’s

Bloody effulgence of noise

The judge looks away

Shifting papers for dates & times

My wrongdoings rendered evidence

Disappointed to find me

Still sequestered to life

Without parole.

THE YOGINI & THE TWICE-BROKE ARM

The yoga chart behind the door

Bought in faith

The mounted visual aid

My self-improvement swear-in

Dust takes longer to gather there

My twice-broke arm cannot hold the rag

Let alone wield it true.

There was a time

I would have bulled through to be a Hero

To attempt a headstand on eternity

Now? Not even Happy Baby!

I am yet recovering from Shivasana.

IN POINT OF FACT

I have no refills

The pens run dry

Down to pencils

Yellow & thin

Reluctant to record my life

This is what is left of me:

A disembodied voice

A nursery rhyme unremembered

A fool to even care

The last to recall my name

Will end me once for all.

ONCE UPON MY TIME

I only wanted a chance to tell my story

To bare my breast, not beat upon it!

I only needed proof of life

Beyond my departure from it.

I guess coming in without a plan

Except to be here

Was a poor idea

An existential fly

In the non-existent ointment

After all.

GROWING

So this is what it means to age

A pick & choose among the words I’ve swept before me

Blossoms baked & dried in the sun of another’s regard.

I even forgive myself this confessional moment

This bedraggled accounting in want of smiles!

I forgive my independent ways

My chancy decisions

The long dusty distances ventured from home.

I forgive the litter of life

The loitering debts, the trespass of my passing

My feet remain unbound

My vision unhindered

My grim will, undeterred

To live my way

To live light & shadow

In all of it, the only me

The best I know to be.

CHURCHES

I remember when I prayed aloud with many

Rather than alone, on paper

Furtive, a dark morning becoming chill

Soft notes playing.

I remember gathering like minds together

Under a domed roof

“Be still & know”

Where I sit amidst a chorus of cactus

A muted hum accompanying all grace

Needing no permission to sing

(Now all subversive in song

Transmitting death on a holy note…)

I have lived in times when children were ripped

From my arms to die by the sword

I remember when I did not look down

Till the hand on my neck forced me

I knew these words, tho not how to write them

I knew these formulas, results never changing

But I have less to live for now

So I write them with impunity.

Come, cut off my hands

Dissect my heart’s four chambers

Brain me unsensible.

I am impervious to curses

A stalwart divinity of One.

I have lived a life seeking eight noble truths

You cannot harm the God in me

Nor divest the Goddess in every cell.

Come, do your bloody worst

I am a stringy old woman with bad teeth

The perfect victim

My findings will never be that for which you search.

My submission will ever be a taint upon your hands

I will not even hate you tho I’ve left love out of it.

Wherein I dwell – that innermost altar you’re seeking to augur out?

Still intact & whole as a Temple

I am barefoot for I stand on holy ground.

THE DOGS BEGIN TO BARK

Brought outside their bedroom dens

Urged from oval, braided rugs

Where their paws tapped a Braille of dreams

Packs & pacts forsworn

Rudely chained to guard posts

In the chill of Autumn mornings

Barking to fill the spaces you once held.

HABITUAL HUNGER

Humanity stripped from inhuman times

Truthsayers hoarse in accusation

The walls of communication

Lined in silk.

But truth wears sturdy shoes

Stands impervious to false victory.

You cannot have the morning!

You may live in the land of no clocks,

Yet all I hear is ticking.

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Writing Life

In the photo above, I am reassured of my worth…I wonder that I ever doubted it. This “now” is one where facts are proven not to be, where wishes lack the power of story, where no information can be trusted.

The separation is so powerful, we doubt we exist at times, let alone that others do alongside. We see them, we hear them, we know them. Then we query their place in our lives – even as we reach for their hand to hold, pinching slightly to prove this tenuous reality.

In Nashville, I raised morning glories from seed on my patio. I put long window boxes under the patio railing & planted them. They grew up the rails of the balcony & softened the view of the beautiful golf course the apartment bordered. I do not recall if they had a scent. I do recall their heartful intensity in growing, tiny tendrils climbing against gravity, waving about. Perhaps they had an inaudible chant: “What can I hang on to? Where am I going? When will I get there?” Despite these valid questions, they simply trusted their sole task & grew, putting out delicate flowers. Tho I echo my own cosmic questions, we reach out together, wrapping ourselves tightly around the best & only life available.

The blossoms appear overnight. They open every morning. I’d like to think that I do too. Each midnight dream gathers love, deep & velvet, fragile, tentative & somehow secure.

In my stony New Mexico backyard, the morning glories I did not plant appear each September, resurrecting from dry brown wisps clinging to the cyclone fence. This September they showed up on the other side of the yard – I watered them gently, wondering if they would discover the laundry rack & as you see, indeed, they did.

I keep driving away life & from life. I cannot escape, but the thought I can draws me forth into the void. I am never out of touch with my divinity, but sometimes it is too remote to grasp. My bouquets at the wedding of life are clouds atop the mountains I scaled to marry stars.

Love,

Carol

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Random Poems

SHALL I

Shall I only grow tired of breathing my last

And breathe my first

Sucking in air never before tracing lungs

Wailing it out in objection to death

Shall I only toss a dark crust upon snow

With a prayer mighty enough to summon dragons

Beathing that air towards me on mighty pinions

Mouths ringed in flame, nostrils glowing

Shall I only then sail the lasso

Around a silken-sinewed neck

The rope blessed by saints, not slayers

As the beast rolls jeweled eyes to me

A sudden captive, noting my shivering newborn state

Shall we only fall in love that moment

The shocking recognition we are meant for each other!

The careful & tenuous reaching of flesh to flesh

And the song become a whisper

Shall I thus become truly dead upon this knowledge:

We are all kin! The newness breaking my back with joy

That I crack open, my long, leathered tail so long upcoiled

Unfurling ‘pon the cold – barbed of tip & gleaming

Shall I only reach once, the points uprising

From arms of coarsened scales

To end in claws of lengthened crystal

Shall I brush off all the bindings

Uncaring of the danger

As he winds his neck so gently about mine

Shall we leap as one from beyond gravity

Into clouds too thin to hold us

Yet they do.

DONE

“I’ve been there.” Says the brain

With a snap.

Then closes

Leaving only senses

Expansive in the brilliance

My eyes binocular, drinking the horizon

My nose awake to the synesthesia of color

My fingers in scintillant discovery of wind

My mouth agape to oceanic morning

MIRRORS

There is no hope but holiness

Should I wander in this desert

Seeking others

For there are none about but mirrors

So I therein seek my answers

TALENTLESS

I am no artist

No font of beauty

To emerge from sticks or paints

I cannot work with plywood

Building houses for the homeless

My arms afford a pen alone

And paper

There words pour out like landscapes

Over which come sudden stars.

TOGETHER

The front of me behind you

Pressed in, curled around

My crooked arms enfolding

All that’s left me of love & light

The bones within my fingers

Never to be straight again

But somehow cradling

The heart they tap

In silent rhythm.

ENDS

There are margins drawn of boundaries

Beyond the edges of my vision(s)

Etched upon the stony fences

Built so fiercely from my love

They do not stir upon windstuff

Nor give to seas approaching

No expansion – no contraction

Unrelenting as the hardness of a mother’s heart

To a death-cry as she births her child.

LOST

The cave of words, of wonder

Where the morning never reaches

To alight its crystal walls

Where the stars shine on the hour

As the minutes race the clockface

As the seconds all crescendo

In a click.

I have lived here, seems forever

In a solitaire of nightfall

I, unmade by darkness,

Untold in prayer,

Unwept of tears

A forever of suspense

Undone by breathing.

Soaking in the sun-filled silence

Backed with blessing borne & birthed

Do I call your prayers in answer to my own?

I have asked the wind for succor

I am prostrate on the morning

I ask only – my eyes tear-filled –

Take me home!

SPELLS

There is a dance I dare not do

For storms would rise, surround me

Tornadoes all around me

Waterspouts confound me

So I stand & I am still.

Yet I feel the mighty rhythm

As my toes begin to tapping

As my hands begin to clapping

As my happiness is happ’ning

All my souls with music fill.

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