Riding the Light –

Category: Commentary

  • Telling Time By The Tides

    Telling Time By The Tides

    When all the clocks went away during lockdown, one of the pillars in my life gave way. First hours disappeared into the fissures this created, then I lost days and then weeks. Yesterday blended seamlessly with today which segued into tomorrow, each iteration essentially the same. Having lived for decades with it left Time a difficult habit to break.  

    I do not know about you, but I have always felt time as a second skin. It was a treat to take it off on Sundays which became the leisure day. Like bank drafts at midnight, it reappeared at 12 a.m. when the ticking resumed. I stepped right into march to it. At that time, it synced so well with my system. From syncing to forcible extraction I went.

    We all did what we had to do, right? I have no media to binge upon, but I fed well from the free book tables in town.

    I changed the energy flow in the apartment one room at a time, moving furniture, exchanging curtains among rooms. I wrote pens dry. I talked to myself quietly until masking, when I picked up volume.

    I named the cats frequenting my yard on an enviably purposeful schedule.

    Music sustained me, as did reorganizing files drawers, boxes, closets…you must understand these are not chores for me. There are bits of both past and future slipped in between all of it. It was time for me to check the notes & chuck what would never make reality hum for me. New emerged as each old slipped away.

    Journals filled. The constancy of doing dishes became my daily joust with universe.

    Of the dreams I found in storage, many had powdered to dust, having been moved too many times to contrasting environs.

    I learned to live less outwardly. it was not a matter of fear, but a kind of response to the energy. I showered by ten to get me off the computer, then deliberately dressed well so as not to have too many Pajama Days in a row.

    I missed Time. I missed the guise of being somewhere by nine to open by ten. I missed the candle-sized fires of being almost late & crowing to myself for being the first to arrive

    I carefully constructed Other Rituals: lunch became a production that extended all the way to dinner & once that was done, the day seemed ready to bed down.

    When Time got locked down, it pooled onto the floor, settling into a runnel of current that moved me to where I am now. It’s a different place altogether. I continue to change as Time flickers from pre to post to present.

    I am regrouping now in this different location. Oh, the outside hasn’t changed that much other than wearing my transition face; yet the interior landscape is thawing an Ice Age. A reality I had relied on before has emerged with the clarity I needed to notice it.

    I walk towards it. I became an Ordained Minister yesterday. I named my church Sanctuary. I stated my purposes of leading others to prayer of their choosing as the bridge to the next space. I pledged to be a Servant to Earth – to put my heart into that service. In a way, it was a wedding ceremony, a renewal for me, it gives me permission to wield my Free Will as holy.

    This is serious since Time could have taken me to so many places. This is where I let go of the decades of obedience to exercise newly-acquired skills.

    This is where I put the exclamation point for now.

  • My Sports Bras Have Quit The Game.

    My Sports Bras Have Quit The Game.

    I saw this sign & entered the store, putting my hands knuckles down on the counter, leaning in. I asked the store guy about the sign & he said, warily, “Yes?”

    I said, “What if you only have sinkers?”

  • disintigrating with Distinction

    disintigrating with Distinction

    I used to go out in the world in the morning, braced, like Rocky Balboa on the Philadelphia Museum of Art steps… Chest heaving, head dripping, I was beyond ready for my world.

    Too bad I didn’t have this exact attitude at those times in my life. It’d been a lot more fun. But it was pretty good, as it was. Looking over my shoulder didn’t get me any real perspective. There is a Spiritual Review going on here & I’m not sure I remember signing up for it, but like some seminar you do not attend & then receive 68 emails about from every teacher who welcomed your attendance… Intent is the better part of something, but I’m not thinking valor these days.

    Again, with Time. I have been dying to use this analogy somewhere & this blog is it: when I was once in Rome, I went to a set of famed hanging gardens. I was wearing cute little comfy flats (nothing to stop the skid.) I set foot upon the charmingly indented steps, slippery with only age, worn smooth meeting smooth shoes & somehow I skied down those steps & remained upright & whole & cute. It’s like my new job.

    In my new job, I am required to track time once again after months of paying lip service to clocks & calendars & yet time is implied (get this done timely) instead of appointed (by 3 today.)

    After all, the lockdowns were my first time not tracking time & almost nuclear in effect on me. I have always accounted for my time. In return I asked a valuation for that, something with cost-of-living built in. This corporate structure has disappeared into a fluid connective made of cyber-interstitial tissue. That ‘We Are All Connected’ Coke’ commercial takes on a whole new dimension when cyber or meta is looped in to be employed as an end run. (By folks you thought were on your side.)

    Because time as I knew it lifelong – at the attention level it once demanded, is no more.

    We knew coming in it wasn’t going to be easy. When I’d get that lump in my throat in other times, I recognized it for Original Fear – my original sin. I used to say if I picked up every stone I tripped over, I’d soon be unable to even walk. Wisdom & optimism lurk in fortune cookies.

    I’m thinking now I got this. I’m thinking I’ve been doing it pretty well but nowhere else in this God’s Goddess-blessed world would be the place to emerge from whole except bearing truth or consequences equally cheerfully. Turns out life’s in Invitational. RSVP with love.

  • Ferals

    Ferals

    My Prayer for Ferals

    Is it forgiven if you pray it that? Even if you’re not always kind?

    We live now & then, like Ferals. It can be on any wavelength: emotional, spiritual, physical, pineal. (Pretty much you can count on physical to accompany any of them.) It’s all of the above getting through as best as can. After a point one forgets completely about, “’Scuse me,” after an unexpected burp. In fact, I welcome the burp so I can watch myself not react.

    Everywhere each of us has attuned to environment differently. In many cases, travel changes that. Reducing the ring to one key reduces it irrevocably. I, (who seemed so stunningly, daringly, original & intrepid …) such an Individual…

    I set out alone only to find I was one in a long line. I could choose how long I wanted that line to be.  (Not like now when choices are made for us), but in a time when a choice meant where you might spend years of your life.

    At times, we choose the longer line.

    As a years-younger woman, I wanted to believe I could live like a bird. I wanted my habitat to precede me. I wanted it waiting for me as part of my all-around landing. I was amazed others did not think thoughts like me!

    I grew up on the beach, as eternal & in-the-moment changeable as any element can be.

    I confess it now to be a knowing. I could live like a bird. I could sing for my supper. I had not tried to name it before, feeling it was enough. Once we got together, though, she’s cut miles off my route. All it took was an exchange of names. Then came the Winters of our Discontent, flowering in below-ground cellars. However we’ve had time to grow into each other & interesting years to do so,

    It gotten to be that whenever we come to a crossroads & check in, we both shrug & say “no matter.” (It never does if you’re plugged into at least the vista.)

    I have been so slow in my awakening, other worlds have invaded the one of my visions. I have gotten off here, at this particular timeline, this colossal universe named for food. I’ve stayed a long while. Maybe even over-stayed; up to you.

    In my campout days I woke to find the world around the tent had clarified – almost atomized – a face-full of Now. I made my marks on it, hot water & coffee, a poise upon the picnic bench all steam, aroma & a face-full of sunbeam.

    I learn late the lessons in of my “last hours of ancient sunlight.”* I am close to the Jump, but not saying yet, I don’t give a damn.

    I want someone laying a little Boddhisattva on me for a change.

    *–Thom Hartman: The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight

  • Solstice Emergent

    Solstice Emergent

    Ah, what the hell did I know? I could ‘move’ out to a narrow spectrum of music, mostly drums. I could ‘be still’ to a huge range more, the kind of music that puts me back together, finding new pieces to turn over in the sun. I only need to warm up a little bit these days. I have so much experience with that experience, yeh?

    Where I lived on the fringe is now so mainstream as to be borderline boring. My outer fringe life just arrived earlier than for some others. It’s now absorbed in the culture – from outer edges to inner circles. It’s a place to not necessarily return to. I am absorbed in continuing the life I have now while recognizing I didn’t even have to think about it before. Life did itself. It offered what it gave me without having to check the library free table all the time.

    Now, I have a kind of dollhouse life: each noise of is to be investigated. (“What’s running? Oh! The neighbor’s bathroom fan.”) Neighbors help turn that figure eight energy back towards me so I examine my actions – really my thoughts – far more closely.

    We have proven we can do parasitic. How about cooperative? I’m ready for cooperative. I remember the places where I ground someone into the dirt & remember even more that I was ground in as well, tho you’d never catch me admiring it. My innermost doesn’t stay inner for too long. Nurture takes longer by its nature.

    “You are exactly as you appear.” This sentence is from my astrological chart.

    The lard of it all, or perhaps now the silicone spray keeping delicate gears dancing might be self-interest. My generation grew up just under the ones that wanted absolutely NO dirty laundry hung “out there.” The first ‘someone else’s crying jag’ I endured on one social media giant on MY own page, assured me control was out the Microsoft window. That was years ago.

    I wander Twitter like a butterfly, alighting on a face I value a comment from. I’ve tied in a couple of Nature photography sites there, so along with ribbons of dire information or a tweet repeated 27 times, there are scenes of explosive beauty, pockets of other worlds peering out just behind the political one. The truest reality remains with mystery. Nature should never be second nature…it is Habitat. It is where we live. It needs to be acknowledged every moment.

    I do put the polished stones of my thinking here on the windowsill of the blog. On the B-roll, I guess, since I’m at the recording process more assiduously. But what is left in my imagination is the White Stone Ceremony held each January at Unity where we chose one single word to model our new year. (I began writing on both sides of the stones just to move things along.)  

    Although in slow-motion, this is a time of tail-spinning change. Whether I’m chasing mine or watching yours… And it’s all changing as it settles (life, I mean.) We have ideas after a year indoors, a time of push come to shove & it’s all happened at our front door with a big invisible hand pushing & shoving to keeping us inside.

    I kenneled up pretty well, considering.

  • Listening Devices

    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.

  • Digital Alchemy

    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.

  • This One’s For You, Lover

    This One’s For You, Lover

    So, I’m in & out of our relationship like playing “Go In & Out the Windows.” Each time I returned, it was more precarious, tentative, tenuous, & shorter than the last. Yes, just as it seemed I would settle into a routine, I bucked it off, backed out & wore out hinges closing the door.

    I believe that you love me. But this is not permitted as evidence anymore. And I know you tried hard, but I’m a Contrarian when it comes to love & cannot do sex by appointment as such. I’m still stupid enough to believe love is holding hands in the car, but we never even went anyplace.

    Being turned off in a relationship physically emerges from mental shutdown. We were dangerously abbreviated in conversation. You weren’t interested in looking into what I was talking about. I got boring in explaining my “out there” ideas every time. Research is so simple, conversation so elegant. But not happening on either level between us. After the first rush of teaching, it becomes tiresome to repeat instead of converse. And of course there is very little you can share about your life.

    That there was little interest disappointed me deeply. With so little in common, it’s no wonder I felt pushed to where I did not want to respond. Turning on to a person is mostly between the ears & not the legs at this point, tho it surely started out thataway!

    With no place to go, we wound up here.

  • Visions

    Visions

    Easter has been canceled for 2020

    A day of renewal, in renunciation of the Dark, the Light Lord’s return. The old is easily left behind in times such as these. Does it need to be remembered or renewed? The new seems possible in the rebirth of all.

    Last Easter I wrote a blog about my childhood holidays, about spirituality, family dinners, earthly ramifications of a returning Spring. All have been put into the polisher together to emerge free from rough edges.

    In this year’s blog, the Easter Bunny coughs lightly & dons a mask before putting eggs in the basket. These are seriously different circumstances. The immediate & draconian effects of lockdown on population, the economy, the children…oh & so much else… is unknown.

    What at first started as a “holiday” from routine became a forced time-out where our faces are hidden & we’re herded into lines & placed 6’ apart in order to stay alive. Now, with the problem tapering into an annually-returning possibility of death, these measures seem stupidly draconian.

    Roseanne Bar says this virus is tailored to wipe out the Baby Boomers. I am one, so I listened up. But I still don’t believe it will take me along on its morbid cross-country path. Even Death would be arrested if he stepped out of line! Undoubtedly, this is a wicked scourge upon the land.

    But I see it is as a coalition of fears. I am not sure why we fear death at all – not like you can put luggage racks on the hearse & drive to Bolivia to get away from it, yeh? But fear has compressed & compromised our vulnerability to naked exposures. We need to return to a quality of life unmarred by it.

    How many today sit with their bucket lists in hand, mourning? Or adding items frantically till ink runs dry in their pens. My Bucket List is right now: no obligations, no restrictions, no lack in my life.

    This present time revises my future. In planning that future so tenderly, I notice the sun shines right through it. It’s a glow of green on the horizon, growing in hope, faith, charity & knowing itself to be the most of these forevermore.

    I get subliminals now, a montage of the past- this is what I’ve perceived as the life flashing before my eyes. Rumor has it this happens with dying. Little but love lasts forever.

    I have known pirates who thought nothing of walking me to the edges of planks blindfolded & prodded by cutlass tips as though I might continue perambulating lazily on the water below. I look to the side & see Priest Lake in Nashville where I hiked. I do a massage & I’m in every spa room I’ve ever worked, with the northern light deepening to dusk. I walk a trail & am on the boardwalk in Ocean City, dolphins bobbing just beyond the waves.

    While fun, it’s quite startling to suddenly plug into the past this way. I’m tasting Ledo’s thin crust Pizza, sitting in a sticky booth. I’m sipping coffee in one of a million diners, the cup thicker than my thumbs & heavy to lift. I buy bagels & devour them on a bench, watching strangers, early for an appointment. I walk North Park with its fireworks displays, I stand in the uniform of theatre usher with a smile. I smell Fisher’s Fries. I see the white bones of an island rising from ocean as I cross a desert bridge.

    Where does this memory trip rise from? Are my cellular memories releasing, squeezing out my past to make room? In experiencing these, I am treated to the many places of my life where visions matter. I rub my eyes & look again.

  • Words to Write By

    Words to Write By

    Words need to be instantaneous as thought to be most effective. They insinuate themselves – one word can start someone off on their own [infinite] journey. There is a need for spiritually healing words, nouns, modifiers, verbs, etc.

    These were where the first loopholes were made. Language. Recall the difficulty of “un-seeing” something. What about “un-hearing?”  What words whispered into your various systemic extremities, traveling via the spiritual meridians, even energetically? What magnetized us to point this way?  (We need to teach protecting ourselves as well as promoting ourselves. But that’s a class for a later school…)

    Language itself needs to be rehabilitated.

    Some meanings need to be relegated as unnecessary, in that cyclical way that language has of hanging out for the next sound bite. Overall, a return to meaningfulness that makes sense might streamline some of the hyperbole.

    In our eager push to popularity, we use “programmisms” – sayings by clever TV characters so out there we love ‘em. I can’t give you many examples, but maybe a memory? How many jingles could my generation tap right into & singalong tho we haven’t used Ipana in over fifty years? That’s programming, and we never even knew it.

    The words have to be once again made over into a spiritual cast as we learn their power on psyche & the connections to self-mastery that we might reclaim & proclaim ours. Words serve as our way to assert being in the world & practicing that assertion whether timely or not.

    Refinement & awareness redirect language – sorely needed right now! The good things seem so clichéd while evil seems so creative. As the balance shifts, we know this happens because the language has changed. My mission & focus is to refine the written word to uphold us every one.

    With kind eyes,

    Carol