Riding the Light –

Category: Commentary

  • The Playlist

    The Playlist

    The local no-commercial classical station has pulled out its begging bowls & since I share monthly already, I need no advertising. So, I grab my big folder of CD’s, pull out a playlist of discs & pile them in a lineup.

    First up is Milo, a traveling drum genius who pulled his green bus into T or C for some while where I got to see him every weekend. His music was irresistible for me & I was compelled to dance. I bartered massages with him for his CD’s which didn’t live up to Milo Live.

    Next is Eric Clapton’s “From the Cradle,” a recent flea market acquisition. I thought, “why not?” as I’m a fan, but when music is overplayed like his was, I have limited listening capacity. Turned out to be old dig-in & sway blues. One great CD.

    A break with Snow Patrol’s “A Hundred Million Suns” – also an unexpected pleasure of upbeat, listenable rock.

    A CD of favorites by Josh Groban – a mash from the five CD’s I gave to my neighbor Randy.

    Last for tonight is Neil Young & Crazy Horse on “Ragged Glory.” And it might not last. Neil tends to get repetitive with music, the same riffs & lyrics repeated to yawn. But I’ll see what I can tolerate.

    Loveya

    Carol

  • Letter Up [hit Reply]

    Letter Up [hit Reply]

    This information is awakening. Thank you for putting it out here.

    I find it probable we are so ready for this change that there will be a recognition & a surfacing of love in an energetic force. Light has its own capacity to meet & vanquish darkness & I see much in the world which will simply no longer exist once its spectrum is gone. The other side, we might agree, is “going down,” There will be a lot more options opening once that one disappears (like an old radio that no longer picks up a station …)

    We arrived in this predicament / entanglement & helped in its recognition – the “re-thinking” of an old concept, good vs. evil. But this re-examination brings us to the edges of our humanity. All these centuries of evil & light has always paced it. Light is outpacing it now & I may be naive, yet I’ll tag along with light rather than its alternative.

    Darkness is a tech rapidly being outpaced by that of Light. The contracts are voided & now being voiced. Replaced.

    Those changes accompanied by science? Once it is grasped that the science has been so loaded against life, the scales will tip as trust turns inside out.

    Nothing about this is simple, but I believe much has been done to render it harmless because the changes in magnetics, in light frequency, in color spectra, will all have an effect on this physical body. There is so much change already in motion – either grab the safety strap or grab for the gold ring.

    Choose the outcome you wish to see because our faces have been forced into “theirs” too many times. We can’t achieve the new (never seen before by anyone near our generations) with present thinking. That’s a venerable given. Making the leap toward what we want is what humans usually do, after all.

    My best to you & keep your news coming!

  • Nineveh

    Nineveh

    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.

  • Heart Out of Body

    Heart Out of Body

    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.

  • Who Says?

    Who Says?

    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.

  • Lesson 4: A Course In Miracles

    Lesson 4: A Course In Miracles

    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!

  • LOTR

    LOTR

    Lord of the Rings

    I sat at the table in the library for some while before really taking in what was in front of me: a shrine to Lord of the Rings – complete with a fluffy Smaug. I gazed into the glass & was transported to the first time I was given The Hobbit. My high school boyfriend was going to Vietnam. In full uniform, head shaved & sheared, trim, muscular. We faced off in the bus terminal as he said something like, “You’ll enjoy this, I think.” But I don’t really remember his words.

    He handed me off to a book. He asked me not to write as he wanted a clear break from, what? Childhood? Atlantic City? High School? His life so far? No matter. I took the book & turned away, walking through the bus terminal to my own departure point.

    The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien. A series written to keep sons alive in war, awaiting the next chapter. I skirted the cliffhanger delays by reading every other one, thus following the tale for each character clearly. I was good for little else that season, save Frodo & Samwise, Gandalf & the Nine. I took on the series as substitute for my young man. I was eighteen, just finishing high school & headed to yet more education at St. Joseph’s School of Nursing in Patterson, NJ. It took four buses to get there from the beach. And although I was always good in school, at studies, I did not do well there; was walked to the door by Nurse Carlett in December & told to go home. I was unfit to be a nurse. It was a singular failure to one who had not failed scholarship before.

    I gazed at the library display, close to sixty years past my introduction to the topic. I had not read a book as encompassing as this in my early life: wizards, yes, but not balrogs & caves & dwarves & elvenfolk. Not big-footed hobbits & rings of power, an all-seeing Eye over fiery lands. I had no experience of characters nor presences such as these. My world snapped open. I would come to read the entire series three more times in my life: once aloud, creating all the voices. “What has it got in its pocketssss?”

    On the other side of the world, war has always raged. My brother was sacrificed to the politicians by its gods. Names trickled back into town with shakes of heads, the young men I had sat next to in English & Religion, stiff in starched collars, stuffed into suit jackets now wrapped in flags for burial.

    And for what? Did we stop the flow of Communism? Did we do other than tear apart a watery country, laying waste to it with chemical fire & the blood of brothers? Did we dim the drama of war to a backdrop of peace? We reaped the whirlwind we spread as yet another teardown of culture & peacenik wishes. My generation fled to Canada or to cannabis to escape. After a lifetime of Gospel & Commandments, thou shalt not kill, we were handed unreliable weaponry & told to go forth & murder or die ourselves, for a questionable cause which was not ours, nor worthy.

    The War Machine ground through an America in destruction & woe. I heard nothing from that handsome young man until fifty years later when I though to take to social media to find him & I did: on a ranch in Montana, working with recovering soldiers & young men stripped of hope & sometimes limbs. The world tip-tilted & estranged itself from all that came before. And I?

    I held jobs, husbands, a baby, friends, thoughts, words…

    I still write, as I did then. I am victim & victor as are we all in emerging from war. I lost family & friends to Agent Orange sprayed so evenly over our troops too. The phrase, “Kill ‘em all & let God sort it out!” hummed a backdrop to music based on darkness.

    There was a part of me that boarded the ships to the Gray Lands where only those who clung to the past could go. There was another part that moved in & out of marriage & found parenthood the least of its desires. There were dreams squeezed for the love they contained for that’s where love has always lived for me.

    I left the last page unread for I did not want the books to end.

    There were more wars, more “operations” fated to bring no healing home.

    I cannot say still, what I want in life, except to make others laugh. I have shied from love, finding it a deceit & a disappointment of promises. I have outdone betrayal & lied to myself & others heartily in good cheer. I am tired of all of this, wanting only an affectionate cat to share my life. But this is another notch on the long stick stirring my future. My splintered life has held me to the long way back to a childhood of salt water & still bays where I paddled on my boyfriend’s surfboard before he opened a way out for us both. He took to sea while I found my land legs & learned to never look back.

  • Untitled post 3112

    Mortality has its own pace & runs when we expect it to creep, creeps when we wish it would overtake & immortalize us in release. It begins early & continues late, we yearn for time to sleep & energy to avoid that. And life intrudes, interrupts, interferes with just every single thing we set out to do.

    I am so good at blaming myself. Guilt is rarely comfortable & always unnecessary. I’m not a malicious person but I am territorial & almost scary in that. I have so much to be grateful about, yet find fault with myself for finding fault with others, especially when I don’t even know why.

    Oh, I know all the answers to why but each cancels the other out. None of this world is my fault, but I made the construct. I live in my life as though it is mine, with no reality of a substantial nature. Each cell has its own intelligence & brain: I get involved in the discussion to rarely discover a conclusion.

    I don’t even believe myself most of the time. I am not who I should be, but who I am. Scary thought, that. I am moving once again to another place with no assurance I will actually live there. Truly stepping into the unknown, with my bundle of sticks tied on my back in case I need fire.

    Strength I pray for. Health I cherish. Love frightens me as I’ll likely not meet its conditions. I haven’t made it before but try I must & love isn’t easy but the simple way is not appealing if I can complicate, concatenate, camouflage the issues. Reality dreams a dream I do not share yet & my circumstances hold me under, yearning to burst free.

    So one stroke at a time, I write my way to substance. Casting my life before me like a roll of dice searching the magic number, I walk on.

    Love,

    Carol

  • Perhaps An Original Thought Will Serve?

    Thinking of you this morning…wanted to write before you start the majority of your day.

    I am being amazed by how the yin/yang of continuity & new just rolls along & we never know which one will be on top & it doesn’t really matter, does it? Just the pleasure in the moment matters & the ability to balance whatever does roll into attention mode at any moment. I was going to get off early today – it’s my early day – but I am pretty sure moving our staff meeting will kibosh that; so I canceled an appointment I had. It is coming clear to me to have my poetry workshop at Unity rather than where I was planning, so not a big deal. 

    I am watching Joan Didion’s quote “the center will not hold” come into play yet again. Tho I say it’s a circle, I think life has become more of a kaleidoscope with flashing patterns changing on a constant basis, refitting themselves together in varied & captivating patterns. I cannot look away.

    Ideas keep expanding & diminishing. I look forward to sitting on the front porch of heaven, rocking & listening to the birds, but I know that’s not the way of it… I’ll get a few minutes there now & again. Just enough to catch the Divine Breath & plunge back into it once more. You know, once the fear of transition leaves, there’s nothing to be afraid of. We are in the midst of such a world change, nothing left to do but marvel, hold onto your hat & take no note if it flies off into the winds of change! Laughter is so important & provident – we are such ridiculous beings to be so serious! Our milestones are but pebbles in the paths of others & this is rightful indeed.

    I am noticing my bids for sympathy & knowing I must give them up; I must simply deal with what is happening as honestly as I can & if it happens, not use it for a bidding whine, but a strengthening. At times, I like the whine cuz it gets me that sympathy… I’ve been isolate enough to get comfortable here. Letting go is an art to perfect in a world where holding on seems the right action, yeh?

    I dreamed of walking through a walkway where people lived off it in rooms & if their doors were open, I walked into their rooms, begging pardon for not watching my way. People wanted to hear but refused to listen, pushing their problems & observations in front of mine. But of course what belonged to them would be more important! 

    I find myself saying, “Where’s my head?” I think Mom used to say that – or maybe it was (& more likely), “Where’s your head?” It has become a more layered saying since the 60’s & the recreational drug levels increasing. 

    This body keeps wanting to succumb to inertia & entropy. I wage a steady campaign against these, however, pushing hard when I must to keep from pulling a pillow over my head & shutting it out. I face it every time I walk out my bedroom door, come to think of it. 

    So for today, think about where’s your head? Let’s put it in line with our heart & allow it a catbird seat to see how it’s done.

    Love,

    C

  • Prayer & the CommonWoman

    Prayer & the CommonWoman

    Prayer is not necessarily a comfort zone. Prayer is where you go toe to toe with God. Human perceptions do not always apply here. How many have defined God to a perception? Is your God big enough to forgive that which you yourself cannot – atrocity, harm, pain, disability, disinformation? And if your God IS big enough, are you? Can you forgive a God Who forgives these?

    Does your God only dwell in that which you consider positive – the newest of life, the best of life, the “god-given” of life? It is among the largest of minds only where God dwells within the most life-denying. That’s my boundary: if it is a denial of life, there is no God there. But the definitions here slim into invisibility, boundaries slip & waver. Yes, the devils are here among us & hide behind brittle facades of good works while undoing these very efforts, binding them with red tape & a powerful taint of “you’re not good enough to succeed.”

    How do we overcome this? I love the thought of an unlimited God, but the boundaries I have set for myself rub up against that perception since I live in a limited body. God can fly, I can’t. God needs no physical food, I border on gluttony at times. God allows all I find distasteful or to be of an excess beyond reasonable, I bark & howl at the leash I’ve set upon my own neck by not enlarging my vision so. However, my “only human” status has encased my power-full, enormously loving, capable, miraculous being into a tiny membrane subject to gravity, to a need for energy replacement, to all to which God seems so much larger & more magnificent as to exempt Itself from.

    And still.

    I come up against / go up against myself in a brutal mirror when I pray. I admit to what I do not believe I am while knowing I am that. Somehow I balance it out to feeling better from prayer rather than finding myself lacking. I know this is because the confrontation that takes place makes me better for simply having walked up to it. It follows me out of the room whispering & guiding me into zones where I wish to remain since they seem to keep my “better side” more accessible to me & available to everyone else.

    Prayer tells me “nothing” is not. Prayer tells me demons can be cast out, the unlife seeming manifest all over can be diminished into nonexistence – which is from whence it springs anyway. Prayer is in-form-ing me to be a more successful, huger, force of energy which only creates a betterment of everything touched. Prayer flies me when I my feet are laced in gravity  boots, prayer shuts down my physical hunger for spiritual sustenance, prayer allows humanity to show off in all the ways I find too loud or too noisesome. Prayer tells me being an everyday heroine is my happy place & tells me this is not the hardest place in the world to live from.

    Prayer hurts, heals, has. Prayer is an energetic moving me forward when I just want to stay where I am in my own funk, fugue, fog, fear.

    Communication is the only function of humanity. Prayer is that with my God, so fiercely personal & inhumanly possible that this me barely tolerates being in meditation.

    Where do I go from here?