It would be a crime – albeit a misdemeanor – to be a half-block from the ocean with a new journal in hand, and not write by the sea.

The symmetrical punctuation of sea & sky over the ellipsis of brown dune grass is all needed for inspiration.

The bench can face either direction: the haze lids my thoughts.

Without the energy of walkers, the boardwalk is a meditation, the heat of its wood calming as a forest at midday.

I am studying prayer now. This requires a fresh frame of mind founded not in everyday thinking. Prayer is a lifelong study, a bursting, Oh My God! of inspiration. I have not learned enough & may never do so about connecting to Divinity, not in my mortal years.

I wade in the shallows of morning finding shells of life. Funny no one else has chosen this beautiful spiral one here, striped in pearl. It has always been mine to claim, pocket, protect & cherish.

In administering my days, my life has changed, dividing its own house over & over. I sit beside my perception of the nature of God, writing, & no one asks what I say. The artist nearby is constantly interrupted as people peer over her shoulder, catch her hovering glance.

Writers remain anonymous, uninterrupted, silent. I recognize myself as a shadowy thoughtform as church bells ring in the distance. The earth is incandescent with changing light; the sea shows green, blue, gray with the lengthening day. My pen nib worries the paper, a slippery future escapes before being set between the lines. That artist only paints, after all, the simplest rendering of 3D life. The writer lifts all the dimensions, putting bookmarks among them, finding lost punctuation, pearling words, simmering descriptions. She knits these together precociously, ferociously, furious & bleeding, she writes. Surfaces do not hold, seams burst apart, giants wake & roar, words soar, sour, separate all the layers & put them back together as they never were before.

She stares down a pixelating universe unraveling itself as quickly as it can. She writes it all; nothing is ever lost again.

My whole world is wrapped in a piece of tinfoil & napkin

that which i save from breakfast, a future sandwich

not properly wrapped but stock for a day when a piece of tinfoil

is more valuable than this awful styrofoam they litter me with.

My combatant streak rises: my warrior adjusts her helmet

charging in, clanging on the doors with a cheap metal fork

I assail the castle to no avail for no reason, a noise born of none hearing.

My voice laced with Jonah’s, bringing change to Nineveh.

As though I matter here … it is a recall to 3D, a solid time, footprints

appear where none were before.

My changes of heart bear Witness to All That Is

Changing, tugging on the Matroyoshka dolls which one by one

pop open to one another.

My largeness made small when I look & look & look.

When I write:

I place myself in the exact moment I’m writing about. I must summon up the situation, the character, the food, the dress, the custom the transport … think of the detail we amass with a breath.

I have lived or am living simultaneously in many diverse places. Having a rich reading history has fleshed out experiences I may have only thought about, if all they say about thoughts being fleshed out in reality.

It is interesting that my handwriting is indecipherable to so many (well, all). I myself cannot read items writ in haste & when writing, I usually am hurrying – a quick list thing – a captured thought which needs a couple of words to be made into a poem or maybe a chapter.

This morning, I found a slim paper with a name, a phone number, a cryptic “Call her if”

There are times “senior memory” is annoying but most of the time I can’t say much – the hole appeared & the info fell into it & I put something else on top of it. That’s how I see it.

To get to a memory, I sometimes move a lot of boxes. It’s always worth it. It’s worth having a memory. Keeping the memory useful by positioning it in the Present is a concept seeming outside of my time & comprehension. The present becomes almost elusively slippery when I try to recall a name I learned only moments before. I rely on writing it all down. With “In-the-moment” memory, problems rise when there’s so much interesting stuff is in the boxes as I look for it.

(The slip of paper was from a lady making a drawing entry who got her ticket later.)

Maybe this is what is happening with my taste & smell. Maybe I am tasting a memory & passing it off as the now. Maybe I am being detached from my senses for some cosmically spiritual reason I’ll discover when I get to it later in life. Or maybe I have to be out of that to understand it. Everything lately is cryptic.

I have more memories now than present recall. This is what they say happens to all in age; childhood resurfaces. Thing is, now there is wherewithal to indulge in those dreams. Not me, I maintain, but that wish for a Radio Flyer red wagon may have translated into, “I wish I had a canvas side folding wagon to carry all the…”

My heart is still in this moment. (Heart is the seat of long-term memory.) My heart is taking note of more going on around us, asserting itself. I guess it’s becoming more of a muscle now, in some growth phase like the rest of me. This growing is so different from any I’ve done before: perhaps it’s no wonder I am so different from who I was. If memory is selective – this box, not that – then no one can say how many slips of paper there are without elaboration or translation or relation.

Since I can’t hardly get to them without moving a bunch of stuff, I’ll just write more.

Once I let the world in, it takes over. I cannot accommodate the sky & the land, I can only move around in them, skirt the edges, fulfill mandates of general society, refill & drain the emotional coffers. What’s this mean?

I work from a perspective that attempts to be global but is pretty much local to me. I do not encompass the world except in my fluidity & my currency of words/thoughts. My opinions & ideas bring me some stability, but I constantly withdraw to reset the record – refresh the ledgers that seemed so forthright when I formulated them.

My morals are my own. My pleasures & fill-ups change. My addictions are the most satisfying so I return to them constantly, wriggle in them, drink them, smoke them, assimilate & accommodate them. In return, they complete me in the moment. The stutter-step occurs where time wrinkles up & forces me to believe in powers far above my pay grade. I can make decisions about many scenarios which change so quickly I dizzy out.

Everybody wants the exchange of energy which is money. My energy produces my abundance tho plenty just occurs during the course of the day. I buy & sell with the best of ‘em! I strike my bargains (what words!), I stake my claim (more force).Yet I encounter abundance requiring no investment from me.

This I do whenever I breathe. I don’t have to pay for my air yet. Sunshine is another freebee, as is moonlight. I move in these as they are personal…gifts of a Goodness Beyond Human Understanding like that elusive peace quoted in good books. All I can do is pass it on, bounce it out, offer it up after eliciting my take. But in the passage, I have magnified it & enhanced it immeasurably. First, these improved me  –  my mind, my health, my ability to choose.

I’m in the front lines when it comes to living. Doing it every day for three quarters of a century – a respectable time measurement in any system. As a Natural Observer, I see so much & only a very limited amount can be shared. I abrade many others’ belief systems; I seem to be in porcupine mode – don’t stroke the wrong way. But I try to lay them flat & keep reactions inside as the general populace cuts me off immediately. They will not honor that called conspiracy (which has proven out lately quite fully). They insist that nature hasn’t been tampered with, that so much my gut tells me is too unusual to be of lasting value is valid or holy while my ideas contrast outrageously.

I sit in the Waiting Room for Life noticing the dust on my tables. I sought out that which is amusing or helpful or instructive. I attended to the details in my orientation…

I haven’t fallen from Earth: I descended from heaven; one sandaled foot held above the other in that classic pose of a superhero landing. I shook the firmament passing through. I quit heaven to discover earth. It’s been worth every second & I anticipate part two – the Ascension.

Back atcha, Dude. Carry on.

Often cartoons have shown me a perspective so different it becomes a real moral lesson, like a famous Fable or best-seller flashing into the world, capturing fancy & highlighting a twist which drags some illogic out of the shadows. In doing so, it gently illuminates a belief system for for what it is & what it seems to be, stripping away falseness & opening the higher-mind’s eye for a moment. In that moment, we bring about some change of heart – enlightenment – & are changed in ways we forget almost right away. Or ways where that change becomes a change of direction completely, taking us to a new destination.
This is what humor does for me. It redirects thought. Rather like a good drug.

I have been advised by our teacher to study the Course in Miracles more intensively – to take it seriously as a serious study. 
For me, the Course makes a cartoon of my life! It starts with saying thoughts are meaningless, neither good nor bad since they are not reality. If we’re off (away from Heaven) playing (making unreality seem real) & so intent upon the game we ignore the gentle calls of Heaven to “Come home! Dinner! (true nourishment for this sliver of soul webbed in a bodysuit)” Often we starve or arrive at a place so famished we take whatever is offered – be it flesh, fowl or a fugue state in the weakness of hunger – as the idea this is what our Mother/Father wants for us. Of course it’s not true…but our pretense is SO real, so intense, so void of course. Then going Home is frightening, fitting this tininess into a corner of the firmament where it will seemingly become lost. 

Even though we are a drop in that ocean so talked about & we see individuality as the be-all, becoming again the Ocean is losing a self that we cherish, thinking it’s the only one we will ever have. 

The human mind (an oxymoron?) mostly reflects upon what “is” but poorly shadows the reflection. Even though we achieve great things, the only call is to love enough to share ourselves with everyone/everything/every.

We motor along a highway admiring the sights, taking in the World’s Biggest Ball of String, when the destination lies straight on. We meander & take a winding path back to Source because it entertains, because we have been convinced politics or habit, vice or volunteerism are all valid realities in which to settle awhile & enjoy life.

To a point this is what we are here to do. In this doing, we unwind that Biggest Ball of String to individual strands of color & depth so much involved in this we miss that we are knitting together Creation.

I believe soon will come a time when we reach the center of Great Undoing. We will hear the echo of a tiny laugh, almost a giggle. We will lift a hand & exit this universe for the glory of creation spinning it forth. We will grow from frenetic to kinetic, from possibility to pulsation, an emanation of Love so powerful it cannot help but make more of itself to love.

May it be So!