Riding the Light –

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  • 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.

  • Your Face

    Your Face

    Lately, faces have become familiarly iconic – as much as logos once were. Wasn’t it fascinating to see the VW logo & think it just so cool.

    Our vision has shifted & faces are so much more than emblematic. My face is like that to me – I am accustomed to seeing my face in one arrangement. Of course it changes, but the changes last a very long time usually, due to what I call good genes.

     The differences were not so obvious as they are now. Or not on the level the changes are hitting. My face is changing shape, elongating, really, due to dental work. Years of neglect & unavailable care have rendered my senior teeth every memory of Trident I ever experienced. So, some of the dental care could continue as a after-death experience if real repair were to be enacted but that’s another blog.

    I am quite happy not to be missing front teeth like some caricature of an old woman (and actually quite lucky.)

    For me, this type of change also involves a change of character – which part I have not figured out yet. What I know is that at times I now whistle a bit due to fewer teeth. I hope to be the only one hearing it. I force out the rest of the sentence & shut up.

    This benefits me so much as I now listen.

    This is leading overall to a different silence: a voluntary silence. By that I mean not one imposed by retreat or grief when less penetrates. I mean a chosen Silence that keeps my lips shut against the words battering the inside, which usually begin with, “I don’t have time for this!” I know now as soon as my mental ears hear this phrase, they are to send up flares to the cortex to cease & desist immediately or at least ASAP.

    I have decided consciously to become a milder, gentler me, this coming from a shift in cosmic frequencies, taking shape on my new face.

    I have come to age in an age when time has slipped its clock-bound boundary. While declaring myself ready for the New, I am hiding behind this ephemeral curtain of the past, holding it in front of me, this musty & disused veil. I yearn to sweep it away & grab onto the New chugging through like some petticoated heroine, parasol flying inside out. I don’t think it is a fear; I might think it more nostalgia holding me in place.

    It’s a testament to lack of hope & faith, no wonder my charity is sporadic at best. Guess what starts at home? Anybody?

    I sure wish you luck & love during your changes. I wish you what your heart will hold, of good cheer in good measure. From me to you for it always returns.

  • Hillsboro Jail

    Hillsboro Jail

    My Train of Thought

    There are many endings to that one

    • Got derailed?
    • Became destiny?
    • Switched tracks?
    • Got onto a siding?
    • Arrived?

    How can one explain insanity from sanity?

    Would not that be a marriage of opposites?

    There’s much labor in running a train from here.

    What’s legal might not be most convenient

    But long-term pays off from my station.

    There must be allowances for age

    Which arrives with us at a pivotal place

    That where it all started

      Once more figuring out how the body works

             Once more bringing senses “online,”

             Once more facing out to start all over again.

    2/7/2024       Carol Borsello

    WHY LOOK NOW?

    Upon someone paying attention long after hanging us out to dry

    except she doesn’t remember that part.

    You positioned yourself so far away.

    Was it blind trust?

    We asked for help.

    It was not forthcoming

    Tho your later [false] memory said it was there – it

              Must be us, we careless fools.

    It’s like playing Keep Away with the Truth.

    A CHANGE I NOTICED

    I am not silent,

    Tho I learn its value every day.

    It grows on me more largely

    That my thinking has little to do with that of others.

    I have less of a drive to ally with them now anyway.

    I wouldn’t agree with myself if it weren’t for ego.

    I feel like a unicorn, trotted out, patted on the horn

    Set to my own observations, my own secrets,

    Then set aside to think them.

    I only asked to serve

    Right?

    I didn’t figure on the intrigue & infringement

    And downright interference

    My radiant soul would run into…

    The reversals & revisions & uncomfortable revelations:

    Who I am against the backdrop of someone with

    Sucn a set of different Operating Instructions?

    QUESTION MARKS

    People seem surprised when I say I want my own way.

    I don’t understand that. This pragmatic worldview

    Should be everyone’s, IMHO, jus’ sayin’.

    I expand myself by asking. I want to move in & out of thinking

    In the Mosaic Present rather than past or future,

    I outpace these, but it’s just I’m on another path

    More timelessness appeals to me now.

    I don’t recognize what passes for social justice

    I am unplugged. I feel acoustic to God

    The God of my being, no one else’s

    I am busy here, being that One Drop Poised

    Above An Infinite Ocean.

    MY BIONIC EYE

    Is what I call it.

    I open a book to the page where there is an error.

    In some arcane fashion I’ve yet to understand

    My eye finds “mistake.”

    Something rudimentary: any copy editor

    Would have been fired for publishing this

    Once upon That Time.

    GIFT SIMPLE

    It’s a gift, but less so when coupled with

    Spontaneity & a quirky POV,

    Not always palatable to outsiders.

    This is how I live my life

    My purview & my vision:

    To be me.

    I cannot be any Other.

    I won’t deny trying that –

    There were lots of personalities I wore before this one.

    All distilled to this me.

  • 2/3/24 – POCKETS

    2/3/24 – POCKETS

    2/3/24

    POCKETS

    (What hasss it got in its pocketsssss?  ~  Gollum)

    I enter the date like tossing an anchor. I wake at 4 AM give or take … but it’s the wakefulness that causes a bladder to yawn & stretch & there is no drifting back off after up & around. If I must re-enter this body, I will have at it then. I have never finished being a bit surprised by how this has turned out so far.

    What do you think when memories start to crowd around? When the pokes & nudges get serious & knowledge enters, un-entertained, how do you react? I guess when I am “here,” I’ll be me.

    My “stuff” has become mostly about aging & sorting out my chores. Task lists have become bucket lists. I am amused by this – tickled.

    I am of a heart now to sit/stay. I have done the year of discovery & passed the month of, “Gotta get some scenery drama here or ‘git on out.’ Something has shifted & settled again. I pay attention to the whys of things & answers come but I may have had a kind of hiss-fit at how things were. The seers tell me look behind & search all the pockets. The fuzz I find is familiar & I curl my fingers & re-live lives picking & choosing what I wish to include in this one which is so unutterably altered from the last.

    My friend is revisiting Truth or Consequences, NM & I am sharing a virtual re-visit. I have always blurred on how many times I lived there – it’s like the memory has been tampered with. When you live over or near a Vortex, you expect & allow for this. But my whole life is a kind of family mythology. No one thought enough to write a family history. So now I understand it was that no matter how ardently they lived their lives, theirs replicated mine. Anyway, I believe I lived in T/C three times, years apart, but I find the middle one won’t take shape.

    Memories? Dust Heat My first job in massage through a dear friend – the always & forever Ed. Growing knowledge “I can succeed at this!” So many geographies – I order a credit report when I can’t remember.

    My Hero’s Journey

    You get it. I see a progression of steps when I look back. A holographic spiral staircase. The glass walls rotating around my step-by-step lead into my prior lives. I ask at ACIM class, “Is THIS our life review?” This inclines me to lean more toward observation. I wonder, though, at where the emotion around this/these losses siphons. Either way, I incline to the phrase “life review” right about now. It comes up. I see current events against what, to me, is a vast backdrop. I hold the stair rail, staring.

    I do feel life is moving up & away somehow & a new floor level comes into view, so to speak. If I dare to live from my future, I can plan the present better. If we’re lucky, we realize at least one thing each day & mine today comes from a book where the protagonist has discovered all of his sports interviews reveal some kind of bodily injury like his when he suffered in isolation.

    Get it? I belong to several societies & not all of these are 3-dimensional. (You, too, my dear reader.)

    I find my wit sharpened at just the moment I am expected to be a diplomat. I am at the point where, when I see the reactions I bring about, I find Silence my best tool. I let people spin their own story. This is Observer. This is Recorder.

    My wit doesn’t stretch any distance when it shows up on my face. I sure hope that’s what people like about me! I’ve seen some surprised looks, y’know?

    My human reactions often derive from written words, Immersion into words, not personalities. I must realize when I look at personalities, I am reading programs. I must practice humanity to be one & in a time of such flux, I might need a camp.

    And who do I think I AM?

  • 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.

  • Decisions

    I have come to another crossroads. I recognize this one too. Of course, traveling the same roads for so long makes each crossroad uniquely memorable. I don’t remember much of my life, but my perceptions were not & still are not standard.

    I have given much to corporations (when these are called lifeless or soul-less, this takes no consideration of the people who occupy the space.) There has always been authority in my life – a know-so-much-better. Now I flirt with that & achieve it at times. Now that I’m at the Zen part of the mind – that step I climbed so hard to attain, struggled with really. Still struggling as that part says “judge not.” Usually right after the instantaneous response of “judgment accomplished.”

    My past surfaces unexpectedly, like finding a specific seashell on the beach, maybe the black & white one, looks like dipped-in-ink. And finding another right after. Understanding the Universe has no other desire than to please me & that desire serves both in Beauty. It is as much pleasure to give as to receive. I watch as Youniverse continuously offers me an opportunity to wish & watch & wait for fulfillment. Youniverse outdoes itself every day.

    I want to choose the resting phase. I want to be lazy, to get comfortable walking, to catch up, keep up effortlessly. I want that “effortless effort” mojo all over me. I want to be shown the way, led by the hand to life & lifted into it like a baby handed into a carriage.

    On the one hand, I have wanted to take up a leadership spot. On the other, I want to (wah-wah) have my own way, sit down, eat chips & think about going to the beach.

    I am of an age where I want to express & expose what I know. I don’t want to deal with any consequences or fallout. I like smooth sailing. I like routine. I don’t want to have to re-summon up the energy it takes to harness up every morning. I like to be able to set aside moments.

    I love what my job provides: my gorgeous view, my “catbird” seat, my memory tested daily. I love knowledge & will mop it up like a dry cloth absorbs water.

    I need to become Switzerland, difficult for me with my Mediterranean core. I need to step back three at times, immediately see the others’ reactions & honor them while holding mine in balance with them in that exact instant. For everyone, what is needed most is to hold the space where others can be themselves (until I can get my turn, of course. ) I am not permitted to create much of that space, or am I?

    With the right leadership, I can move forward into that Tunnel of Prayer once again. It is familiar but I feel I failed it once. I have more respect now as I see it for the intensity it is, for the formidable power of prayer in a time of heightened frequency. At one time I wanted prayer to define me while now I only want to define prayer for myself & others. I want to reach up a level to redefine myself & not have it be for how I might think others perceive me.

    How many Paths to Mastery have I declined? Is this true entropy or some programmed DNA (unnatural) to hold me back? Once I looked for “blocks” to have released & was told they will release when you are ready to love whatever it is they block.

    Am I there yet?

  • Church Kitchens

    Church Kitchens

    Church kitchens are a combination of dollar store half-price bins & yard sale Pfaltzgraf, quite the statement on remnants of a Lost Civilization. Roadside collectible shows go away – let’s just inspect the contents of church kitchens!

    We have eight million toothpicks, fourteen pepper shakers & ½ of a salter. We have a huge tub of ice cream (vanilla) with two scoopers, and no one eats ice cream in Florida during the chilly season.

    The refrigerators are full of inedible cupcakes with giant swirls of pure colorful cane sugar on top & a bite of pretend-it’s-your-grandma’s icing. However, it’s grandmom on Alzheimer’s.

    We have six tubs of butter. Oat butter (what?), plant butter (what?), Land O Lakes in three sizes, & vegetable butter (what?) Bet our ancestors never thought “progress” to include such – it was hard enough to get salt on the table in the “auld days.”

    We have a sea of bland silverware including three-tined forks & spoons with odd handles obviously the last of That Which Did Not Sell tables all over the flea markets. (“What’ll we do with this? I know! Give it to the Church!”)

    A recent Christmas party has left us with more to add to the collection. A forest of plasticware vies with a stack of disposable baking pans tucked for invisibility behind the coffee cups we don’t use. 99 wine glasses – & we do not serve wine at our church for any reason – fill two cabinets I dearly want to put something else into. But we have nowhere to put the wine glasses.

    We are victim to renters who feel each & every one they must bring a box of plastic forks as some esoteric ritual of entry. Um, suggestion: just put a buck in the kitchen basket instead. Yesterday I passed along the guilt to Goodwill, sending over a huge trash bag full of plasticware. It’s my sin, too, when these reach the ocean floor, but I’ve done it behind my own back, yeh? I don’t get to the ocean floor much, anyway.

    We have the empty ice bucket with the scratch-off label saying “Do NOT put this back empty!” on it. We had four bags of English Toffee Coffee (what?) which I surreptitiously trashed yesterday. I cannot believe anyone on earth wants English Toffee Coffee & the aliens are bringing plastic spoons when they land, so no need there. (These were donated by the fella who one day brought us the whipped cream.)

    We have four jars of CoffeeMate which I did not know was still even in production, except perhaps in some Iceland communities where they drink tea. We now have an entire 6’ shelf of unmatched, variously-sized napkins & a ministerial preference for uniformity in Sunday settings. We have four cans of whipped cream total for Sunday consumption.

    A Church Kitchen literally runs on sugar. Inedible cookies vie with the refrigerated “cupcakes.” Even the kids who come through ignore the sweets having been warned their heads will fall off if they eat this stuff. We do have one minister who raids the room every day for a treat; however, she’s switched to pretzels. We have no pretzels.

    We have a tubular package of hamburgers from last July 4th which I will also surreptitiously toss one day when the freezer burn on them pushes on the empty ice bucket. Mixed in with all this in the freezer are ice packs for emergencies, two first aid kits with no bandaids, a bottle of Manischewitz vying with four jars half-full of pickles for shelf space.

    It’s kind of like what you’d find after nuclear winter in a looted market. The Country Time Lemonade which our congregants avoid in favor of the Arnold Palmer mix seems to grow a can of the powdered chemical nightly. Don’t even ask about the dishwasher pods which were incidentally put on re-order with Amazon during Covid Closure.

    One shelf has nothing but cheap [plastic] containers in the hope someone will put a few of those burgers in for take-home.

    CONCLUSION: Try not to eat out of a church kitchen except on potluck day when you can see the provenance. I now have a secret which I’ll tell here, in utter confidence, to the entire world: Generally, on Sunday the two hotpots with regular coffee are consumed religiously while I throw out the decaf so carefully made earlier… I was refreshing the bin of coffee packets & noticed someone put decaf in the regular bin so everyone has been drinking decaf for the past month. Shhh! I’m not telling.

  • Christmas Day 2023 Sequence (Poems)

    Christmas Day 2023 Sequence (Poems)

    Let the wind in –

    Let it curl my hair & offer me that breath which is proof of life.

    Let there be a bit of woodsmoke on it to sing in my nostrils,

    Let my ego drop away

    Begone

    For just an eager minute.

    Let me turn into the next me, wrap that around

    My chill at growing

    My reluctance to leave the warm nest

    Where all I do to be fed is open my mouth & call.

    Isn’t the wind a wonder?

    I am emptying my head as fast as I can,

    Emptying it of this reality: these thoughts

    I am mounting motors I know not how to use: Dreams

    The hot-air balloons of flying away …

    I take no direction

    I simply take off

    Alongside the wind.

    = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

    I once taught these things,

    These rusted lessons I found in the damnedest place,

    But who wants to learn these?

    What matters is I took the topic & turned it into a way to serve others

    A knowledge of unremembered interest

    In a library class.

    That was a lifetime ago – that was in Maryland.

    That was jobs ago, a career moved behind me now.

    Half sticking out of the shadow bag, catching on things.

    I will teach again, for that is what I do; I have a lot to say

    That would interest some to know.

    Time occludes my life when it only occurs in one dimension.

    I grow in so many.

     = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

    Before I go under…I am worn the next day

    But I birthed the poem.

    = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

    Poems come on the edges of sleep, riding that tide I thought

    To lift me from the beach.

    I am removed, outside mine own reality.

    Just beyond that I thought truth to be.

    Only that thought washed up & curling in the glistening sand

    I must go look; I cannot let it wash to sea, it is mine

    I claim it: I own it: I remember it. Be warned:

    I fight for that which is mine & if you claim this errant thought,

    I will snatch it back.

    But you are busy with your own beaches & deserts & skies

    I leave  you to your tides, your errant ways, your tickets to ride.

     = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

    I am emptying the trap of dreams

    I am replacing the bald facts

    Laid on calendar & table

    With these ideas, this ephemera, this eponymous

    Rainfall, each drop begetting its own growth.

    The dreams clatter out on the counter:

    Some scuttle away on more than four legs

    Others land, heavy, solid, well-thought-out

    But no longer fitting, become animé to my

    Artfully drawn Reality.

    I mark their fall with crayon, the outline subject to rain-erasure

    But not my fault dreams change on the morning.

     = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

    It isn’t easy to talk about the future of Mankind

    We could go either way; any way; the other way

    That one the women are always whispering about:

    World Peace.

    Whoa, whoa, I know what you’re saying here

    You’re putting your hope in the backpack for the Warrior

    While your dream curls up in the basket of the Mother,

    Its full lips reaching, trembling with love.

    There is no other way:

    The fight for life begins when

    you put up your own.

     = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

  • Lament

    Lament

    Today I thought again how much I miss saying, “I love you.” I say it to nothing, to no one. Sometimes alone is all there is but who wants to go there … live there? I am an orphan by circumstance & alone b/c I can’t love myself enough to let others partake. It was not always like this but I opted for justification, not extension.

    I turn on the Radio Lottery to see what’s being sung to me. “Not a puppet on a string.” All those simple lyrics from a less fraught time now seem so appealing. I once felt every song I heard is God singing to me. I still feel that. It started with ‘If You’re Still Within the Sound of My Voice’ by Linda Rondstadt.

    I heard this one day & realized God was singing to me. That my life was music & there was always a song to tell my story. It was something in the song, something about a train calling from faraway that put the thought in mind. But to love you until I no longer have a will.

    I realize all that’s wanted from me is this love I have so much trouble giving & receiving. I tell people I’m really mean on the bottom, underneath the nice. People scoff. Do I know a truth they do not? Yes. I am less than worthy. I am unjustified.

    But I get things done, so I’m worthwhile.

  • Misfits, Anon.

    Misfits, Anon.

    Misfits, Anon.

    That would be me. That would be this Fool mincing along the edge of the precipice. When things are beginning, that is all one can see – that beginning leading to another & so on. There comes a time when I realize I am re-remembering things; I am repetitive? Am I then redundant?

    Does it matter when no one acknowledges the pull of the moon, too?

    I live as close to the ledge of make-believe as I can. Dreams come true. Tiny wishes are generously granted, often unprompted. I have one cause for Thanksgiving. I am investigating myself more in an effort to find out how & why I am here, I came to be, etc.

    I feel as though I’m in a playground after an extended spate of serious trekking. That over-the-Alps-Trail led to some plastic ballooned exaggerations of a slide or swing set. I have walked down an Alpine lane which led me to another ending, then? This happens & more than once in this life.

    Why do I look to history & not consult my own?

    It is trying out some things new, over which I breathe in twice before I tackle. I have always tackled writing it & feel practiced at this. I want to take a lead & share that which is helping me now. It’s a moue to that which has kept me sane in background, an arrow in my quiver to be deployed as useful.

    I need practice in, like “Where exactly is it I go?”

    I step in & out of lives like I recall playing “Go in & Out the Windows” or “Umbrella Steps.” The games I played were all about hurry up & wait. Early grooming? No wonder it can feel repetitive, dancing in the same footsteps. (Traveling this with someone who has witnessed it for you before is most helpful & I finally have Forever Friends, just none are local.) But I enjoy this reality as it works & grows in power & effect for me.

    Traveling holidays alone is a repeat of Times Before & made tolerable by these. Early angst loses steam in favor or just get some tinfoil turkey so long as there’s mashed. Who can get excited? Later I will break bread with others.

    Yet, the meaning of Thanksgiving has softened somehow as has its messages to individuals. It’s meant to be a time of looking at life – counting acorns if you will.